#This isn't me picking on catholics either. Me existing would be argued by some as decontexualizing COC aesthetics

[bijoumikhawal]

also RE: catholic aesthetics being stolen, I mentioned the universalism but Catholicism makes art the way it does as a propaganda tactic and a lot of that gilding and shit you see in churches was funded by ethnic cleansing and genocide so. I personally don't think it should just be bandied about as fun and pretty (I do think there's power in political art that engages with the abuses of the church). also if it ticks you off that might be the point lmao

[disloyalpunk]

Just out of curiosity, why did you imply that calling Shiro spiritual but not religious is something negative? For a long time, I've considered myself intensely faithful, but not religious. Is there a reason why that isn't a good way to describe it? (I'm genuinely curious, I promise. I didn't take offense to the comment, but it made me wonder if I should rethink my definitions.)

omg ok so I’m really excited about this question and i have a lot to say but i want to preface with that i have absolutely zero beef with “spiritual but not religious” as a personal identifier! i probably shouldn’t have phrased it so negatively without context but this is something i run into a lot in my academic work and that’s what drives my opinions lmao. but at the end of the day these things are very personal and often informed by a person’s particular experiences and perspective that I don’t want to intrude on, as either a fellow human being or a scholar of religion. it’s sort of like defining your sexuality--you have to pick what you personally feel most comfortable with.

with that being said

a reasonable person could probably consider me someone who is spiritual but not religious, in that i regularly take part in interfaith-oriented work and attend/lead groups with names like “women’s spirituality.” I was also raised like super Catholic so that’s always something that is a part of me and how I see the world, no matter how distanced I am from the Church. so on a personal level, i don’t really identify as anything (atheist, agnostic, spiritual, whatever) and I’m okay with being under the “spiritual but not religious” umbrella since it’s not entirely inaccurate.

but academically I don’t like how imprecise those words are. in academic context, they are just completely meaningless on their own; they carry a whole weight of assumptions and preconceptions that often have a moral point value attached, and even if you do define them, they become applicable in a certain way to a certain context. any academic (or even person at all, i would argue) who tells you they know how to define religion is selling you snake oil, because it’s been decades and literally no one agrees with each other on what exactly religion is. there is absolutely no consensus academically what religion is or how to define it, which is something you kind of just have to accept once you start trying to define it and inevitably can come up with counter examples to everything you say. 

some fun questions, from someone who was once an innocent undergrad and quickly had my naivete beaten out of me: what practices does religion involve? what organization is involved? what belief is involved? do you need to believe in a higher power? do you need a central text? are all our criteria based on a christian-centered worldview that’s preventing us from legitimizing other forms of religious belief? do you consider Confucianism to be a religion or not? does religion even exist in the way we’re trying to define it, or are we assuming that there must be something that is the same or similar about all religions, that there is one thing we can find that will prove that religion is a fixed object? 

spirituality is basically the same.

so what people do to combat this is put three pages at the beginning of their book that lays out exactly what they consider to be “religion” and how they’re analyzing it in order to apply it to the topic at hand (or how they’re NOT defining it, I still haven’t made my peace with this route). or academics will use the word “generally” as in “generally a religion ascribes power to a higher being,” which is important wording because sometimes we call something a religion that actually isn’t concerned with this at all.

all this is fine, for the purpose of a singular academic study, but it doesn’t actually help us define religion. so that’s why i don’t like using "spiritual but not religious”--it’s really got nothing to do with mine or your or anyone’s personal belief system and practice. usually what people mean by this phrase is they don’t like organized religion, which is fair and by god do I emphatically understand, but it assumes that all religion is “organized” in particular structures of authority and community. it also generally assumes “organized religion” is the same thing as or close to Christianity, and using Christianity as the basis for understanding and interacting with all religion(s) is at best simply misinformed and at worst, just yikes-worthy. 

but! like I said, this is also all very personal. so it’s hard to walk away saying that “spiritual but not religious” is a garbage phrase that no one should use because that’s not true! but I do think it’s important to interrogate our words and, as you said, rethink definitions or even recognize that two people’s different definitions can be true. so. not to say you need to rethink anything that’s not what I mean, but just that I love thinking about how unfixed and not static all these concepts are and that’s fun for me.

and I also wanted to add that, specifically in relation to Buddhist Shiro, I want to tread SO LIGHTLY around calling him spiritual and using that as his primary religious motivation. it’s very borderline in uncomfy orientalist territory and I in no way want to conflate Buddhism with spirituality or say that it’s an inherently good and spiritual religion or that you can find yourself if you just learn how to live freely like they do in the east (clearly this is sarcastic don’t come for me). all of that is garbage; Buddhism has both good and bad just like everything else in this world and Shiro just has some beliefs that are important to him but he doesn’t orient his life around religion.

anyway. I could talk about this for 6 years. i’m going to retroactively tag this post so it doesn’t end up in a tag where random people will find/see it.