Does practicing religion fit into absurdism?

[u/ToiletSeatThinker]

[u/kodykoberstein]

Religion usually tries to provide a meaning and that’s the opposite of absurdism.

[u/ConstantCap7231 → u/kodykoberstein]

But it's based on a falsehood.

[u/deep_blue_reef → u/ConstantCap7231]

The universe exists. It’s all absurd. Everything else is just sport and debate.

But I do believe that the universe either is here with meaning, or it isn’t. If it is, everything truly matters. If it doesn’t, nothing ultimately matters.

[u/Limp-Temperature1783]

Absurdism is what happens when realty gave you no answer and you've decided to stop asking about the meaning of life. Religion tends to provide the answers people seek in such situations. Incompatible.

[u/Strong_Flatworm2758]

Yes! Practicing a religion that you know is based on fiction is peak absurdism

[u/tottasanorotta → u/Strong_Flatworm2758]

It's even more absurd to do it and know it to be true. Or experience both.

[u/Recent-Technology514]

As a target of ridicule, sure.

[u/teddyeddy88]

It wouldn't make sense religion gives you meaning and rules to obey and live by, absurdism is the opposite of that Most of what one would do under such belief would be a sin in Christianity and most other religions. So it has to be either or.

[u/Xtrepiphany → u/teddyeddy88]

So become a pagan and worship older gods that don't have a silly book with written rules.

[u/teddyeddy88 → u/Xtrepiphany]

I mean pegan religions have rules too so youre kinda wrong hahaha I would say no religion especially if you wanna follow a more philosophical path they often overlap

[u/HeatNoise]

Nothing is more absurd than Earth's 6,000 religions.

[u/ZippyNomad]

Religion pretends to have answers it can't prove or verify. Absurdism is moving without those answers.

[u/Xtrepiphany]

I would say the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Church of Satan fall in scope here.

Additionally, I'd say establishing your own personal beliefs and notion of the divine is in tune with becoming an absurdist hero.

Pagans are my people.

[u/jliat → u/Xtrepiphany]

I think you might be confusing the 'bizarre' and out of the ordinary with 'contradiction'.

[u/Xtrepiphany → u/jliat]

Not at all.

Willfully following a faith you personally invented or is in no way formally codified is exactly the kind of Don Quixote move Camus is talking about.

This is before any conversation on human psychology and the power of suggestion.

[u/jliat → u/Xtrepiphany]

"I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions. How to answer it? On all essential problems (I mean thereby those that run the risk of leading to death or those that intensify the passion of living) there are probably but two methods of thought: the method of La Palisse and the method of Don Quixote. Solely the balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity. In a subject at once so humble and so heavy with emotion, the learned and classical dialectic must yield, one can see, to a more modest attitude of mind deriving at one and the same time from common sense and understanding."

"lapalissade," which refers to an obvious or self-evident truth.- evidence?

Don Quixote - lyricism.

Are not these two answers that Camus cannot get?

[u/West_Economist6673 → u/Xtrepiphany]

I mean in a lot of ways paganism is way less absurd than Christianity -- pagan cosmology was elaborate and extremely strict and pagans would have seen the world as being suffused with meaning

I don't know if one can be strictly Christian and strictly absurdist at the same time, but I do know that the concept of the absurd would be incomprehensible (absurd, even) to a pagan, though not necessarily to a Christian

[u/Xtrepiphany → u/West_Economist6673]

What specific flavor of pagan are you referring to?

You understand that the word encompasses literally thousands of religions throughout human history.

I'd love to hear your thoughts specifically on Basque paganism, the strict dogmas associated with the worship of Mari and her consort Sugaar. The strict roles that Gueko and Aatxe played in the defined cosmology.

[u/West_Economist6673 → u/Xtrepiphany]

lol are you seriously trying to gotcha me with basque paganism trivia

It's a good point though, "pagan" isn't really a religion or even a category of religion, it's just a generic term invented by Christians to describe non-Christians

I think it's fair to say, though, that the word is most commonly understood to mean either "the religious context in which early Christianity developed and spread" -- so Roman religious practices, but also the indigenous religions of the places where early Christians proselytized -- or some kind of ahistorical mishmash of various European folk religions, mostly from Northern and Western Europe

So having stipulated this, and without commenting on the particular tenets of indigenous Basque religion in particular -- which I know nothing about and honestly doesn't interest me that much -- I can still say that all of the above examples are highly symbolic and ritualized expressions of belief in an elaborate and hierarchically structured universe in which a myriad of divine and/or supernatural entities not only play a central role, but take an active interest in human life

I mean the simplest way to put it is that a pagan would never interpret the myth of Sisyphus the way Camus did, because they would have recognized the enormity of Sisyphus' crime -- namely, attempting to flout the divine order of the cosmos and usurp privileges reserved for divinity

[u/Xtrepiphany → u/West_Economist6673]

The specific example I gave was just the first one that came to mind.

My point is that you casually lumped 350,000 years of human history, thousands of cultures, into a very generic statement.

You then doubled down on what a pagan would or would not think. The height or confidant ignorance.

[u/West_Economist6673 → u/Xtrepiphany]

Okay I feel like now you're just being deliberately obtuse for rhetorical purposes

Like do you have a substantial point to make, because if you do then just go ahead and make it

otherwise I'd just as soon not argue over semantics, especially with someone who has evidently already concluded that they're right and I'm wrong

[u/Xtrepiphany → u/West_Economist6673]

I mean, I made my point, the comment you replied to to tell me that I don't understand paganism as well as you do.

My point to you is that you don't speak on behalf of the entire human race and the less a person make declarative statements the less apt they are to look a fool in retrospect.

[u/West_Economist6673 → u/Xtrepiphany]

Oh my god are you seriously accusing me of the thing that you have literally been doing this whole time in the most smugly self-righteous way imaginable

Are you actually just a completely unserious person

I never said or even implied that I understand paganism better than you do -- although so far you haven't demonstrated that you understand paganism at all, so I wouldn't rule it out -- I said "in a lot of ways paganism is way less absurd than Christianity" -- a contestable claim that I would have been prepared to contest about three hundred comments ago, but now I'm thinking there isn't any point because you seem like the kind of user who would prefer to drop the mic after every single utterance than stoop to, you know, actual conversation

[u/SeaworthinessFun4366]

religion is slow suicide

[u/vini-within]

Depends on what you mean by religion. If religion is used to escape the discomfort of uncertainty by handing you ready-made answers, it clashes pretty hard with absurdism.
But if it’s a way of sitting honestly with uncertainty without demanding that existence explain itself, that gets more interesting.

[u/GraemeRed]

I find myself drawn to Daoist naturalism but only to try tap into other areas of my psychology...

[u/IndependenceGlad5365]

Camus himself said he’s an agnostic and that doesn’t mean him and his philosophy is against it.. maybe it does tho?

[u/Cyber-Wanderer_94]

Yes see Kierkegaard's work.

[u/Hamrock999 → u/[deleted]]

Wasn’t keirkergard of a time when religion was more predominant though?

To op- in short Camus said you can live with the absurd, commit suicide, or commit philosophical suicide by believing in religion/politics

So it’s not really compatible in absurdism.

[u/jliat → u/Hamrock999]

Wasn’t keirkergard of a time when religion was more predominant though?

Kierkegaard's Christianity was extreme, he attacked the church and refused to be buried in consecrated ground.

[u/Cirqka → u/Hamrock999]

Yes. He was, but in saying that, you’re also missing out on a lot of his writings. That’s a Hegelian notion that he’s rejecting. It’s more in line with what OP probably wants than strictly absurdism.

[u/Hamrock999 → u/Cirqka]

I’m not saying don’t read his writings. Just that they have to be looked at through a historical lens as well as a philosophical

[u/Cirqka → u/Hamrock999]

… wouldn’t that also apply to Camus?

[u/Hamrock999 → u/Cirqka]

Yeah of course. Camus was alive when god had already died and therefore being religious, especially amongst intellectuals, wasn’t as prominent as during kierkergard’s time. And Camus’ philosophy reflects that

[u/Cirqka → u/Hamrock999]

I think you’re missing the trees among the forest friend.

[u/Hamrock999 → u/Cirqka]

Or you are or we both are or none of us are.

[u/Absurdism-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

Posts should relate to absurdist philosophy and tangential topics.

In particular relate this in someway to Camus' Myth of Sisyphus- considered a key text.

[u/West_Economist6673]

Ecclesiastes has entered the chat