[ SECRET POST #2193 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2193 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.
[GunnerKrigg Court]


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02.
[The Avengers]


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03.
[French & Saunders]


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04.
[X-Men/Marvel Universe]


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05.
[Tron: Uprising]


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06.
[Kagaku Ninjatai Gatchaman]


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07.
[How I Met Your Mother]


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08.
[The X-Files/Fox Mulder]


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09.
[Homestuck]


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10.
[True Grit]


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11.
[Saya no Uta]


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12.
[The Silmarillion]


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13.
[Homestuck]


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14.
[Supernatural]


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 015 secrets from Secret Submission Post #313.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Believers

[(Anonymous)]

Sometimes I think it sounds really nice to be a believer. I'm not and most of the time I think the concept of gods or angels or anything is kind of creepy and weird (no offense please!) but sometimes I think about it and how much comfort people get from their gods and how they seem so happy to have that. And it just seems like it'd be nice to have that much faith and confidence in something.

Re: Believers

[(Anonymous)]

I feel the same :/

Re: Believers

[(Anonymous)]

Speaking as a "believer", this is kinda patronising. It's not always comforting - sometimes it's unsettling, sometimes it's challenging. Personally I find that belief is an interplay between faith, doubt and lived experience, and I find the stereotype of the happy-clappy, never-questioning believer really annoying.

Re: Believers

[(Anonymous)]

I am sorry to be coming off as patronising or insulting. I am speaking only of the believers that I know personally. I did not mean to imply that they are always happy. That is not what I meant at all.

Re: Believers

[(Anonymous)]

It is kind of patronizing, but it also reads as pretty accurate to me. I know far more happy-clappy believers than deep philosophical ones, and that's pretty much the nature of the game. A lot of people don't analyze why they believe things or what it means, for better or worse, and that's not just a religion thing. :/

Re: Believers

[childings.livejournal.com]

I don't think the anon above said anything about blind faith being nice, just belief

You can definitely believe strongly in something and still question that belief, in fact I would argue that you would HAVE to question your belief in anything in order to really believe in it, otherwise you don't really have any understanding of what it is you do believe (this goes for everything, not just religion/spirituality)

Re: Believers

[anonymouslyyours]

As a non-believer I think you're seriously undervaluing how comforting it can be just to believe in a higher power or even a greater purpose. Even when you aren't sure of specifics and whatnot that very basic belief in an "other" is something I struggled to try for even a taste of fir a very painfully long time. It's not necessarily that we think of believers as happy-go-lucky types who never have to worry or question it's just that we recognize how much just a vague sense of spirituality can comfort a person.

Re: Believers

[(Anonymous)]

I kind of vacillate. I think it'd be really valuable and cool to have a community built around faith. I think that kind of community is really valuable and good to have, and I think I'd be a lot happier with that kind of community, along with the discipline and the routine of the whole religious thing which I sometimes miss very much from my childhood - Sunday church, sermons, confession, communion - there's something about it that really does make sense to me, and I think there's also a lot of beauty in religion. (And I should say that I'm much more friendly to religion than a lot of atheists, so it's not like I'm hostile to the notion).

At the same time, though, I'm fairly happy with my beliefs about the world and my understanding of it and of my place in it, and I don't think I could in good faith or conscience believe otherwise. Maybe that'll change, but for now, I'm happy with what I believe about the world. And I don't want to will that I would believe otherwise to what I think is true simply because it would make me happier - I couldn't do that in good conscience either.

Re: Believers

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, for the most part I am completely at ease and happy with my views and understanding of the world. It's just now and then when I talk to religious friends and see the comfort they get from their faith, and as you pointed out the routine and community as well. Sometimes it seems that'd be nice. It's not something that I particularly want exactly. It's hard to explain. It's not something I want, but at the same time it's something I look at and think "that must be very comforting and nice."

Re: Believers

[childings.livejournal.com]

I think it's crazy endearing when people believe in something so obviously far-fetched it can't be real, like LDS people and their belief that Joseph Smith REALLY found the golden plates, and wasn't just a con man, etc (no offense to Mormons). Just those beliefs only though, don't get me wrong, the homophobic conservative wing of Mormonism is not endearing, just the basic tenants of the faith, the mythology if you will

Then I realize that I have some major cognitive dissonance going on because I do believe in a God (though not how most atheists would define God) and that's impossible to prove and similarly fantastic to a lot of people... but at the same time I don't believe the majority of shit in the Bible literally happened (some of it reads like Herodotus or something, in the sense that historically a lot of this shit probably did happen but just not in the way it's described, wars between the Hebrews and other Mesopotamian cultures and such)

Re: Believers

[childings.livejournal.com]

I want to also state that I don't feel comforted by my belief in God at all, in fact it sort of scares me and puts me ill at ease, the state of nature and the universe scares me in general (and that's pretty much the same thing to me). It might be because the unknown scares me, uncertainty scares me

Re: Believers

[anonymouslyyours]

I'm an all-or-nothing type so I would very much like to have a sense of divine purpose in life. Deep down I'd really love to be a completely goal-oriented, end justifies the means type of person. And that is scary.

Re: Believers

[(Anonymous)]

As someone who has gone from atheist geneticist to Christian youth worker between the ages of 22 and 26 I can honestly say:

1) Faith and trust is not easy

2) It is the greatest thing that can ever happen

So, OP, I see both sides, but I'd far rather love Jesus than not.

Re: Believers

[(Anonymous)]

gone from atheist geneticist to Christian youth worker

So, now that you believe in God you don't believe in genetics? Seems like odd phrasing.

Re: Believers

[biohazardgirl]

IA. I wish I could be religious too. I know a lot of insanely happy religious people, and some days I wish I could just be them :P

I also really like the rituals of religion- I grew up Catholic and I liked all the ritualistic stuff. If my roommates weren't such diehard Catholics that would jump to conclusions and pester me about religion if I went to church I would probably go to a latin mass every Sunday just because the rituals feel comforting to me.

Re: Believers

[unicornherds]

When I was in college I took a course on religions (anthropology/archaeology major, so it was an anthro course) and one of the projects was to choose one religion for course and study it. This meant going to services, observing rituals and practices, and placing yourself in the community. (With the community's permission and awareness, of course.) Best course ever. I am not a believer, but I am fascinated by religion. I love to observe and study and that course gave me the perfect creepy-free reason to observe and analyse and interview to my hearts content.

Re: Believers

[supermanda]

This is me, I like to sometimes believe I'm in a Final Fantasy world (mostly Spira) and shit is just crazy.

Yeah

Re: Believers

[kallanda_lee]

I just really don't like the idea of being...finite. And of the people I love being finite. I'd love the idea of an afterlife/reincarnation. But rationally, I just can't believe in that.

Re: Believers

[(Anonymous)]

Whenever someone I love dies, I get pretty sad that I don't have some sort of false comfort of seeing them again when I die.
:/
But I can't trick or fool myself into believing into it, so I have to accept that death is death and move on. Each time.

Re: Believers

[making_excuses]

I studied Religion in University because of quite similar questions. Didn't get any wiser though, but I do sometimes envy my friends who actually do believe in something. Mostly because I would like to believe the people I lost in my life are in Heaven (or similar) instead of what I think is the truth: you die, that's it.

Re: Believers

[pantswarrior]

You'd be surprised, actually. Sometimes I think it would be so much easier if I was an atheist, and the world we see was all I thought there was, and there was no afterlife. I'm not the only one; I know other Christians who admit to being terrified at the idea of living forever, even in heaven. Eternity is a scary concept.

But I've been given enough evidence that I am a believer, and I can't just turn that off because it would be more convenient and less scary to not believe in God.

Re: Believers

[inkdust]

Sometimes I envy the communities religion brings. I believe in certain things, very strongly actually, but I don't have a community where I can share my thoughts and feelings, and I'm not about to stumble across one. I envy people who can mention their faith casually because it's represented by a dominant community.

Re: Believers

[(Anonymous)]

I'll probably get flack for this, but who cares *shrugs*

I don't believe in a higher power or spirits or demons or magic. I see gods, demons, spirits, magic, etc, as simply human imagination and the side-effect of higher thought. Being a creature that ultimately dies and has the awareness of said fact sucks. It's scary, it's depressing, it's horrifying. There have been many nights that I have stayed in bedlooking off into space and thinking about how pointless this all is. My life doesn't matter, nothing on earth will matter, in the end the sun will become a red giant and destroy any trace of life. Poof, gone, as if we never existed in the first place.

I can definitely see why religion was created. It's an insanely comforting thought that you aren't going to disappear or that you matter. It makes life a hell of a lot easier to get through. Personally I just can't delude myself into believing because it's not true. We aren't special, we don't have a loving father/mother figure ready to whisk us away into a happy-fairy tale land forever and ever and ever. Wishful thinking doesn't change every living thing's fate, which is to die. Life is short, though, so I do not judge anyone forhat they need to cope with life. As long as they aren't using it as an excuse to hurt other people then it's fine. To be honest I sort of envy people who can believe.

/Yep

Re: Believers

[omorka]

Forgive me for saying this, but that's fuckin' weird.

I have precisely the same amount of faith and confidence in my gods as I do my close friends. I don't think my gods are infallible, and while they probably have a much better idea of the 'big picture' than I do, I don't think they're experts on living at a human scale - so I only find them comforting to the same degree that I find my relationships with other humans comforting.

And in a lot of ways, they're an incredible pain in the ass. They have rules and expectations, and they don't always make sense (see: not experts at living at a human scale). I really have no idea why people who don't have religious experiences bother with religion at all, except as a sort of social club. If I weren't already used to this, if I'd had a choice about it, I suspect I'd have chosen to not have to deal with it at all. Atheism seems so much easier, to me.

I probably ought to anon for this, since half of y'all are going to think I'm schizophrenic now, but whatever.

Re: Believers

[badass_tiger]

Fuck I'm not even going to try reading the other comments, but I'll say yeah, it's nice for me. I'm a Muslim and it's reassuring to me to know that I'll never be completely lost in any situation. The other day I was at a Muslim talk and the speaker was a Muslim convert, and he told us that those of us who were born into Islam will never know what it's like to not have that guide, and I just sat there feeling very sad.

But yeah, religion is very sweet to me.