![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Morality without religion
Dec. 27th, 2025 10:06 pmIn our small local organization helping Ukrainian army there are many different people, but our leader, a very clever and energetic woman from Western Ukraine, seems to be rather rigid in terms of motivation and rules for our, I dare say, resistance against the global evil.
She likes to repeat three keystones of Ukrainian national idea - "Army, language, faith" (Армія, мова, віра).
While I'm very much for army and language, my relationship with faith is complicated, I stopped attending Orthodox church many years ago - and from the very start, I came there not to become indoctrinated, but to get some info about 'spiritual world', an area completely new for me at that time as a person from an atheistic family.
My parents, however, were not really hardcore atheists. They were indoctrinated soviet citizens, their high education was in the field of engineering and so, not really allowing them to understand complex matters such as evolution...no real knowledge of genetics convincing me the most because it was proclaimed a bourgeois science at their time, and too early for molecular biology to provide even more direct evidence.
I went to discover religion because their indoctrinated empty atheism seemed to me unconvincing and quite hypocritical.
It was an interesting experience which I'd prefer never to repeat.
My current point of view on religion is that brilliantly described by Prof. Neil deGrasse Tyson: religion satisfies the need of having emotional contact with the Universe, as an opposite to the intellectual contact provided by science.
I, actually, have a huge need for both types of contact and preferably without intermediares.
So, to the question of "faith" and whether I have a choice in my aspiration to avoid religion and still be a kind and decent person :) I talked to ChatGPT (it's naive but really helps me to collect and rationalize my thoughts), and the result is below.
( Read more... )
She likes to repeat three keystones of Ukrainian national idea - "Army, language, faith" (Армія, мова, віра).
While I'm very much for army and language, my relationship with faith is complicated, I stopped attending Orthodox church many years ago - and from the very start, I came there not to become indoctrinated, but to get some info about 'spiritual world', an area completely new for me at that time as a person from an atheistic family.
My parents, however, were not really hardcore atheists. They were indoctrinated soviet citizens, their high education was in the field of engineering and so, not really allowing them to understand complex matters such as evolution...no real knowledge of genetics convincing me the most because it was proclaimed a bourgeois science at their time, and too early for molecular biology to provide even more direct evidence.
I went to discover religion because their indoctrinated empty atheism seemed to me unconvincing and quite hypocritical.
It was an interesting experience which I'd prefer never to repeat.
My current point of view on religion is that brilliantly described by Prof. Neil deGrasse Tyson: religion satisfies the need of having emotional contact with the Universe, as an opposite to the intellectual contact provided by science.
I, actually, have a huge need for both types of contact and preferably without intermediares.
So, to the question of "faith" and whether I have a choice in my aspiration to avoid religion and still be a kind and decent person :) I talked to ChatGPT (it's naive but really helps me to collect and rationalize my thoughts), and the result is below.
( Read more... )
