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Wellness Wednesday for February 1, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I'm an atheist, with a protestant background, so I am not going to be much help in suggesting a religion for you. But I will observe that it seems you want two somewhat contradictory things: (1) a faith that affirms things you already believe and does not prescribe anything you don't believe in; (2) a faith that will provide you with moral certainty about right and wrong.

Somewhat cynically, I see this taking you in the direction of most religious believers, where you embrace a religion and adapt it to your beliefs rather than the other way around. Hence liberal Christians who are certain that Jesus was woke, and conservative Christians who are certain he was not. Or in the example I mentioned in the Brandon Sanderson thread, woke liberal Western Muslims who somehow find a queer-friendly pro-feminist message in the words of Mohammad.

If I were really going to seriously embrace a religion as the Word of God (or some other source of absolute truth), it seems to me I would have to accept everything it teaches, even if it conflicts with my personal intuitions. I would be very suspicious of a religion that purports to be a source of moral certainty and absolute truth that just happens to coincide with all my own beliefs.

If I were really going to seriously embrace a religion as the Word of God (or some other source of absolute truth), it seems to me I would have to accept everything it teaches, even if it conflicts with my personal intuitions.

Really this depends on the more foundational stuff it teaches, no? For instance Christianity puts a lot more stock in what Jesus taught than what your pastor teaches, and you could well decide your pastor is wrong on some point because Jesus said otherwise.

Of course, it becomes a bit circular if you decide that "trust what Jesus taught" is itself a principle taught by the pastor, which is why I mention foundational (or hierarchical) beliefs. "Listen to Jesus" is probably a more foundational principle to the denomination than the nature of the sacrament, or whatever it is that you disagree with your pastor about.

At a certain point you do have to bite the bullet and admit that Mohammad wasn't queer-friendly, or otherwise deny your own personal intuitions, but I think doing so is less "I need to conform with the religion I have decided is true" and more "I need to resolve internal contradictions in my own beliefs." The Quran is pretty clear that homosexuality and transsexuality are bad, so once those internal contradictions are resolved, you're either left with "Mohammad was not queer-friendly" or "the Quran isn't fully correct." I don't think those people that you mentioned have even tried to resolve those contradictions--their beliefs seem (to me, on the outside) to basically just be naked status-signaling.

The issue is really that it's simply impossible for a healthy person to embrace something as absolute truth. Doubt is a good, fundamental part of human cognition, and you can't just order your brain to never doubt something just because you like it, at least while remaining mentally healthy. Even if you've decided that a given church is for you, there will still be plenty of critical thinking involved regarding how to interpret their teachings, how to prioritize them, etc. and even allowing yourself to think critically in these ways means denying that that church is 100% absolute truth.