when i was a kid it didn’t feel like much, just felt like i was satisfying the adults’ expectations.

Santa was more real, supported by evidence. I was scared of his magic powers. Also that fucker was holding my treats hostage.

Did you believe in Santa Claus?

There’s a warmth inside at “knowing” that you are doing the right thing and God is present and loves you. I was thinking about it earlier today and I actually think I was a little heartbroken when I realized it was a bunch of self-contradictory bullshit, and if the God of the Bible existed he would be a cruel and vile being unworthy of worship.

When I was in elementary school, I wanted to become a priest to spread the word and joy of god.

I also prayed to god to save me from abuse and loneliness. Nothing happened.

A self affirming delusional mind virus. Opium of the masses indeed.

Dealing with shit? ? ? Just off load it and stuff it inside your Jesus hole. Anyone not part of the delisional tribe is hellbound and the enemy! Bad thing you do or done to you - God’s Will! Are you poor? God’s will! Rich and powerful are there because God’s Will!

Growing up gay closeted it almost killed me. The internal guilt of not being able to feel attraction to women, but I was attracted to other guys. Not being able to express or grow socially. Denied knowing even what the hell is going on with me. Being raised Christian Refomed / Calvinist. Part of the Lord’s Army. Having to deal with the scammy give me money and god damn you sinners straight to hell weekly rituals. I have grown to despise “Amazing Grace”. We are not wretches you fuck wads. But it only takes a fart to get a forrest burning 🔥

Getting awarded for memorizing quotes of the Bible. Seeing the whole hypocracy of it all the non sense. Then the elders wave all that away (you only really need to pay attention to the gospels) the rest is old hat stuff. But being raised in the same shit Erik Prince was raised in is a hell of a trip knowing what is cooking and driving that noggin.

Affirming my gay self was a damn ton of bricks off my shoulder and I didn’t need my heart medication for reasons the docs couldn’t explain any more. Psychosymptomic of being in the closet. Dealing with the family fallout was brutal. But it didn’t screw with my heart.

Praying to God - asking Santa a present same thing. Though I do believe in a universal consciousness and I think we are a reflection of that universe trying to understand itself that’s my own thing and no longer part of any organized bruhaha. Been around the world. Seen the ruins. All the same story recycled over and over. Names and places change but it’s all pretty similar. And you think we’re getting tired of sequels and remakes already.

Religion has some parables and life lessons but its mainly used for control and delusional justifications of lazy thinking.

well I’m usually torn between my catholic upbringing, my personal paganist belief in a trickster god that created everything because they were bored and wanted to entertain themself, and finally atheistic existentialism.

I can’t really say I have any of the catholic guilt many people usually feel mostly because I don’t really give a shit and my own internal convictions of communist ideology give me the existential belief in my righteousness, in the catholic sense of that word.

How does that balance out with the fact that I’m also in a contradiction of religious apostacy and heresy? Fuck if I know, God can sort that out when I die.

Answering the question more directly, at least for me, it’s a sort of wriggling feeling of being watched that you experience at the very corners of the mind when little coincidences occur that make you question the nature of the mundanity of life. The most recent one for me was when I was attending a funeral mass - also the first mass I’ve attended in over a decade - the biblical story of the day was about forgiveness of others as you wish to be forgiven yourself, and the priest decided to tell the story about patients at the local hospital who had been estranged from members of their family over conflicts that can occur in families. Paraphrased, the story goes that he counseled them to take the first step and reach out, even if they were the ones to cause the conflict or if they were afraid they would be ignored, saying that regardless of what happens they will at least have the comfort and closure of knowing they tried. In the end, two sisters who spent most of their lives ignoring each other could make up in their twilight years, a husband could tell his separated wife he was sorry for his mistakes, and a dying father could see his son in the first time in decades to spend those final moments in reflection. Considering my very personal circumstances that I won’t discuss, such a particular and peculiarly specific series of coincidental events that pointedly needle at my rather deeply buried trauma, such a thing is disquieting enough to make me question things to say the least.

some dork ass bullshit

When I was younger: Like tracking a cloud through the sky, and using it as a bearing for navigation.

These past few years: Like when you’re jumping into a pool or lowering yourself down from a ledge, and your feet touch the bottom.

(I do not have quite the same religious beliefs as I did when I was a minor.)

For me, believing in god felt like you were living under an alternative world where only you and a few others saw the real picture. The rest of humanity were deluded. Not actively malicious, just mislead.

Becoming a communist kind of felt the same way. A lot of things that didn’t make sense before suddenly did now. In a way, I felt like I’d stepped into another alternative world with its own secret truths. However, there was just one small difference, when people challenge communism the theory is strong enough to be flexible. It can bend and shift to accommodate the needs of the specific people who use it. Socialism has no dogma, only class struggle.

God isn’t so flexible to challenge. Any doubt you have, any misgiving, must be snuffed out. You live in this alternative world, but trying to seek out its edges would only leave you more confused. If you share your doubts with your friends they’ll be angry, or dismissive, maybe even denounce you as a non-believer. In the end, you’re left either with the doubts festering in the back of your mind, or successfully gaslight yourself into believing they never existed at all.

As a more Hindu leaning theist. God is like the idea of infinity. They are everything and nothing. The source of all creation, so like if you imagine the universe in it’s entirety for eternity, then the multiverse, then like all the infinite universes that don’t exist and even beyond that who knows what else, behind it all is a something that is everlasting. It just is and it just does everything comes from it and everything is part of it including us. I guess I feel a sense of unity more than anything.

I’m in the same boat. My family went to church ever Sunday, it was a reasonable and progressive branch of Christianity that wasn’t bigoted or anything like that. I just never bought into it. I remember sitting in Sunday school and thinking “I don’t really believe this. How did Jesus multiply all those fish and loaves of bread?”

Yea I dunno. I think it’d be nice to believe in a higher power but I’m just missing that part of me that would make me a believer. But I think that ship had sailed in any event, the best I’ll do is agnostic

When I was a kid one day I prayed for a rocket ship and never got one. As an adult I have prayed desperately for other things that are genuinely beyond my control. I don’t really believe in anything though. Belief in a specific God with obscure rules where you can easily prove the lore was written by specific people, at different times, for different purposes, all of them seeking to justify their own existence and elevate themselves over others? I physically cringe at anyone who takes scripture seriously. If you need a middle man between you and God, I genuinely think that you are pathetic and intellectually lazy. But of course I won’t tell anyone this.

I don’t remember ever genuinely believing God or Santa, I don’t think my parents really cared to sell me on any of that. When I tried reading the Bible I got as far as the story of Babel before thinking “this God fellow is a petty loser, even if he’s real he doesn’t deserve worship”.

I think I believe in “god” the same way Einstein did. And also a lot of more mystical and esoteric cosmology makes a lot of sense to me… Like Alchemy (not like proto-chemistry, but like Hermes Trimagistus), Advaita Vedanta and Yoga, Kabbalah, Sufism, ancient Egyptian religion etc.

And I have this thing where if something repeats enough in history, in unrelated places at unrelated times, there must be some truth within it.

Anyways, I see god as “the ultimate reality”. As the base level of existence. As “being” without anything else. There is one “I”, and it’s god. Everything we see and experience, even “ourselves” is just a projection within god.

Also, I feel the rational mind has overtaken humanity in a pretty negative way. Everyone identifies as their mind nowadays, and are fully guided and controlled by it. Neglecting all the other senses.

In Ancient Greece, they “felt” their selves within their hearts. That’s where they believed their “minds” were. I wouldn’t call it the mind, but I understand what they meant.

You can understand something using your “rational mind” (or “brain mind”), or you can understand it more internally in your “core”. It feels different, and the knowledge is different. One feels more external and the other more internalised. And being guided by the “heart mind” (or “intuition”) is much more productive and healthy imo.

The “brain mind” is really just a result of millions of years of evolution, with basically just one goal: survival. It never evolved to understand truth or reality. It’s an amazing tool that can do incredible things. It can certainly assist on the path towards truth. But it can’t get there. It can’t see it.

Which is why if you read Einstein talk about how he got his ideas for relativity, he says they just came to him. The best ideas are not the ones produced by the brain. Truth is an inherent part of reality. If you allow yourself to be open to it, you will find it. But if you search for it with your brain, you will only be led astray.