I'm fascinated by rituals. Especially rituals that have physical outcomes.

Praying, spells, sigils, etc anything to affect a metaphysical conception of probability or god.

This is how I understand most magic rituals to promise to help affect change. Say I want to become a successful author.

Nearly every magic or religious system (which I don't distinguish as different) promises that you can affect the probability of success so long as you devote yourself to your practice. Do the right rituals. AND, importantly, physically work towards that goal.

No system promises that you can simply wish to be a good author without you having to actually write. No, all serious systems promise that so long as you work on your writing and stay devoted to your system, then there is a chance that the cosmic controller of probability (god) will favor you.

Now this I think is a wonderful strategy for protecting the ego in that you now have two things to blame before you have to blame yourself.

"I must have performed the rituals wrong and displeased god"

"The gods don't want me to be an author yet"

"I'm a terrible author"

Now, I think there's an argument for both why this is good and bad.

Maybe you genuinely are deserving of whatever outcome you desire and it simply is out of your control that this didn't happen. Maybe you finally finish your magnum opus and your house burns down or your files were stored on an AWS US East server and you missed the submission deadline.

That I think is a moment where the ability to stoicly accept what happened and move on is good.

On the flip side there is the problem where god and ritual are shielding yourself from introspection. Maybe your AI generated in universe spin off of Sherlock Homes: Watson invents Anime series just genuinely isn't good. But it takes several rejections from publishers and a mountain of bad reviews on your self published amazon page to think "Maybe I've done the ritual wrong."

You're missing the problem because the layers of cope are too powerful. You have too many other thoughts before you even have to consider this probably is your fault.

To me, I think the bad ending is avoidable by simply constantly self reflecting. Being aware of myself and being aware of the sorta mental traps I can fall into.

Dogmatic religions I think lead to the bad ending here because its expected of X, Y, Z conditions are met then god will bless you. And then when you've tried nothing and you're all out of ideas, the world is impossible to survive and becomes scary.

You can also certainly get the good ending without a religion per se, but I'm really proposing the Milk Jug experiment in a different way. Does it matter if praying to the milk jug actually does anything if it makes me feel better ?

I've started reading Rene Descartes and I'm intrigued by his idea of "god".

Descartes is famous for his " I think there for I am." He doubted everything in life to such a degree that he believed the only thing he knew for sure was that when he was thinking then he existed. However, the second thing he deduced is that he knew this world he existed in, real or demonic deception, was imperfect by virtue of the fact that he can doubt it exists. So he knows he exists while thinking and has a conception of imperfections therefore perfection exists and the idea was given to him.

This perfection is god.

God is perfect in all ways. They are beyond deception because a perfect being wouldn't need to lie, their reason alone for you needing to believe something is enough.

And to me that's an interesting conception of god. Its a lot more sterile than the normal Christian stance that god is Love which has a emotionally textured connotation. It positions god as having feelings with which we can relate as opposed to Descartes perfection that is simply beyond our reasoning but also (conveniently) not malicious.

As an atheist, god as love makes more sense. God is the feeling of communal love that comes with a religion. People who care for each other for no reason other than because they're in the same community has always been beautiful to me. God as mislabeled inclusion and comradely behavior males perfect sense.

What is your god or gods like?

I've been reading a lot of esoteric belief systems and normal philosophy books trying to build my own religious practice.

To me the things that are important are

1. System of morals and values.

2. Rites and rituals that must be performed

3. Community engagement.

The first two are pretty obvious, but the community engagement is tricky for me in that its the most important and I have no intentions of spreading my religion.

To me its just a fun psychological game after all.

So to me, engagement means having something to relate to people or do with people.

In my case nature walks and meditation are important rituals to be dome regularly. So inviting people to come along or going to meditation classes creates a community engagement.

Is there anything else a religion needs outside of these things?

Which person in your religion, belonging to your religion, is most hated for his actions in history? Like, in Islamic history, Yazid is the most hated one character because he had a war with grandson of Prophet of Islam. What about your religion??

I attempted to kill myself when I was thirteen, and sometimes I’ve wondered if this is a place of punishment.

Be it from any religion

Every religion has like a slogan or something to offer to this world. They have a motto.

What is your religion motto??

Thing is that, I know it can't be proven by science as soul and spirit are something beyond like science can't answer that. I think that there is something called soul and spirit but I am very naive enough to understand what exactly are they. Those who believe, can you pls give me proofs like not scientific, but logical, metaphysical.

Hi there, I am always fascinated to hear the story of Jesus by Christians and Muslims. Thing is that, many persons like there are some denominations in Muslims that say that Jesus is dead.

I wanna know are there any historical evidences that Jesus is dead??

So I am an Atheist and I find a lot of joy in going through ritual motions. It is comforting and it does de-stress to sort of "pray" to an altar that I built. Logically it has no purpose other than to scare away proselytizers and be a neat conversation piece, but it is my favorite aspect of new age witch and pagan cultures.

Similarly, occult practices from those cultures and those found in things like Kabbalah or Chaos Magick are good for simple goal manifestation. I know in Chaos Magick, the idea is to set in motion the intention of whatever goal you have and that will increase the odds of it happening, but one must still work to achieve the goal. You cannot simply cast a spell for more money you must also be working towards a promotion. That idea paralleled with an idea in Atomic Habits for this kind of manifestation. It claimed that saying out loud daily what your goal was increased the chances of you actually doing the work to achieve the goal.

I wrote more about it at my blog, but I'm interested in what other people find interesting in other spaces.

"I will never again be gaslighted by an institution that sells out Jesus for political power."

The Solomon's temple in Jerusalem was a mistake... according to samaritan israelites, who follows 5 books of the old testament, and pray on Mt. Gerizim, 48km north of Jerusalem. THE place to worship God.

Most of the european christians probably know the term only from the story about the good samaritan. Today I've learned not only they are still a thing, practicing their barebones version of judaism, but in addition to israel and the west bank, some of them even live and practice their religion in brazil.

The so called new religious movements are a guilty pleasure of mine. Some of their followers often claim to be inspired specifically by Zoroastrianism.

But what is zoroastrianism? Apparently, it all started ~3000 years ago in the area currently known as iran, by the guy called Zarathustra. And although the number of active practitioners is rapidly declining, the ideas behind it affect us all to this day, as the christianity and islam seem to be highly inspired by the ideas behind zoroastrianism.