My brother is a Taoist
He's also an overphilosophizing pretentious hypocritical fuck who's made me want to not go into philosophical discussions for a long time now. No, don't get me wrong, I love my brother but he's really way, way too immature for these things, and I think he's at risk of getting into a "picked up a book and read it about himself" situation far too often.
Before you get religious, you need to get informed. Blind faith leads nowhere. You have to experience the world and learn the world as deeply and sharply as possible, with good-willing guides at your side. Only then can you start philosophizing to any depth. The reverse, which is no better, is overexperimentation and overconfidence that leads to arrogant blindness to what things are actually like. You don't gain deep knowledge about anything by either trusting every word you hear, or trusting everything that's in your own head.
Myself, precisely these questions have been bothering me lately, and I've found a perfectly good way of dealing with them. I used to be somewhere in the "Agnostic" or "Deist" category, too, but I was never comfortable with that. There was too many wrong assumptions going on around me, and I certainly consider myself to be spiritually-developed and, essentially, religious. I've recently decided to become a Quaker. Seriously.
I've gone to church for a large part of my life - back in Russia, my dad worked for an American protestant church and eventually qualified as a pastor, and even preached for some time. Since then he has become disillusioned with organized religion, but he maintains a lot of the spirituality, and that has definitely influenced me. I've always considered myself a "true Christian", in the sense that I believe that through my contact with Christianity, I have picked out a gist of something that doesn't quite fit in with many of the influences on the Gospels, a philosophy that I believe came out of a historical Christ figure, who I believe existed. I took that and added many other influences, from Buddhist and even Muslim sources, to Greek philosophy, to a heavy doze of modern science and post-modern thinking, to rock musicians and abstract artists, and there we have it. I'm foremost a humanist, I believe in the sacredness of human life (along with its absurdity and insignificance - there's an irony for you!), the material need for goodwill and forgiveness, and the value of good work and clear conscience as a means for itself. I have a very clear concept of God, and it's nothing like the judaeo-christian God. People have often called me an Atheist, but I'm not even close to that. It's just that my God doesn't live in a church and doesn't answer to prayers, let alone hates gays and kills kittens to punish people for masturbation
I then went to a Catholic high school, and that honestly pushed me even more from all manner of normal denominations and creeds - I'd sit there at masses and wish the priest and everyone else would shut the fuck up and just listen for a second, if they wanted a real glimpse of God.
Well, basically that's what Quakers do.
So, I consider myself a recently-convinced Quaker, albeit having held Quaker beliefs for quite some time now. Among good features of Quakers - lack of creed, meaning that you don't have to espouse any given set of beliefs or scriptures, instead using what's out there as guide - but never before the Inner Light, which is the notion that God is present and available directly to any individual without mediation, special training or investment - besides attention; the belief in fundamental equality of all men and women (before god and before each other); the belief in always telling truth, before yourself first of all; the rejection of violence as a first resort or a good resort in anything, and the idea that harmony between people and peace can be accomplished through hard work by everyone involved. Basically, you make your own peace with God and you work with other people, for other people.
Otherwise I have a very critical view of scriptures or any dogma at all, I take issue with ideas of God as an intelligent being, life after death or reincarnation (although I do have my own ideas in regard to that), I don't believe in morals - but I do find a lot of what people ascribe to morality to be basically common-sense if you hold a humanist stance - you don't NOT kill or steal because God said "thou shalt not!", you don't do it because you know that if you want to uphold all the good things that the enlightened humanity had, gained or developed, and so ensure the progress and survival of the species, you don't do things that destroy other people or compromise the society. My most basic belief, perhaps, is that everything in the world comes with a price, and we have an obligation to pay our own tab. And while I don't believe in afterlife, I do believe that somehow, somewhere, if we don't pay and someone else has to pay for us - it will be counted, and it will come back to you or yours with interest, and worse - with the ill will and suffering of those who had to pay for us. I've had extremely sharp experiences of this personally that I don't want to get into.
I don't have any issue or discomfort with the natural unknowns, or with mortality (as my favorite singer Yuri Shevchuk eloquently put it, "I won't know how to live, if death suddenly becomes impossible..."). It's really not about that. It's not about how huge or awesome God is. It's about realizing the limits of your condition, and what you can accomplish within these. And in my view it's very little, but it's very important to do it. And I do mean DO it.
The Birds are using humanity in order to throw something terrifying at this green pig. And then what happens to us all later, that’s simply not important to them…
