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   tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Wednesday, 07-Aug-2024 21:46:42 JST tinydoctor

   I knew I didn't believe in #god when I was about 5 years old. I realized it all at once. I tried to tell my mother, but she didn't understand what I was saying. Even at 5, my ability to obscure meaning presaged my destiny as a poet. After that, I didn't think to mention it to anyone until my teens. It wasn't a subject that came up outside of Sunday School. Ironically for religious revanchists, US society was much more secular then. I don't think children were asked about god so much. #atheist

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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Wednesday, 07-Aug-2024 21:52:21 JST tinydoctor

     in reply to

     These days I call myself an afidelist rather than an atheist. I still don't believe in god. I don't believe in not-god. I don't believe in belief.

     #afidel #afidelism #atheism #talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten

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     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 09-Aug-2024 10:02:23 JST simsa03

     in reply to
     You mentioned this point a few times over the past years, and the more I think about it, the more I think there is something important in it, at least to me. "The mircacle of belief", if one would phrase it pompously, may be even more baffling than "the miracle of there being a god".
     
     To me, there being a deity is not that perplexing. As I don't believe in an afterlife, there is no need for me for an otherworldy transcendent god who, by His very existence, provides the "place" for the soul to persist after the death of her earthly body. Which only means that there is room for a god inside and immanent in the world, not apart or beyond from it.
     
     Even that atheists or agnostics may dispute but to me who believes in the existence of the soul beyond the Aristotelian threefold distiction, that is, as the carrier or instance of moral perception, the soul and her existence is not explained by or reducible to neurons and fluids. Thus, for that simply reason, there needs to be an external source for that "faculty", which is the immanent deity.
     
     Anyway, one may describ or state such ideas pretty easily (as shown), but the belief involved, that is a strange and miraculous aspect. Your afidelity or #afidelism sheds an interesting light on the question whether there can be a theology wthout belief. Lovely.
     
     #talkingtomyelflettingyoulisten
     #tentshow
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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 09-Aug-2024 21:39:41 JST tinydoctor

     in reply to

     Yes, I do repeat myself. Here is a 2009 post, in the last paragraph of which I describe the same moment at age 5. https://doctoromed.wordpress.com/2009/07/02/inordinate-fondness-for-beetles/#comments

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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 09-Aug-2024 22:16:47 JST tinydoctor

     in reply to

     I've always been inclined, whether I could articulate it or not, that belief is the "stone of stumbling and a rock of offense," that to stumble past the word, and to be disobedient to the *lex* is necessary to enter that inner room of immanence not apart or beyond. Be irreducible. Whether to neurons, fluids, or god. No explanation; to me as a poet and artist explanation is failure.

     #1Peter2