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Originally Posted by roachboy
which is why i find it strange that there are atheists who co-operate with this by continuing to take christianity SO SERIOUSLY.
i dont know when i stopped caring about all this....at some point i realized that i didnt really. which is nice because you can see what there is that can be therapeutic about these rituals--funerals for example are nice simply because they give you a structure to walk through when your are greiving, and having a structure at that time can be useful. and if i am around a cathederal, i might go to mass for the theater of it, because it looks and sounds cool.
one advantage of this distance is that it lets you see just how strange christianity really is.
but if you live in a community dominated by it, this may not be the happiest place to land.
but it is interesting.
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roachboy, I came into this thread late, but I wanted to say that I really appreciated what you had to say here... that at some point, it's okay to really stop caring and stop being militant. I think I'm still in the anti-Christian stage (was evangelical for many a year, am now agnostic and not going anywhere else in a hurry), but not so much that I can't see the rituals for what they are... they really can be just works of art, or a form of entertainment, or soothing mechanisms... and there is nothing wrong with that. Why not enjoy them, as long as it is of your own free will to stop by and participate (e.g. not having a gun held to your head, as it can be in some countries).
Humans have been applying such tools to their life-course transitions and painful circumstances for thousands upon thousands of years; for that reason in itself, I cannot see to judge anyone for celebrating or grieving via a ritual (religious or otherwise), and I consider it a privilege when I am invited/allowed to participate. The range of human experience is too wide and beautiful for me to restrict myself to only practicing what I believe (or not practicing what I don't believe, which is even more narrow). I may be well on my way to atheism (or may just dwell permanently at agnosticism), but it is simply in my nature to want to experience and understand what other people do to get through life on their own terms. As long as their terms expect nothing from me, of course. Then I find it justifiable to be semi-militant...