>>1570493I don't have anything against religious beliefs, but I can't bring myself to hold them unambiguously. I suppose I'd define myself as a perennialist agnostic in that while personally I have trouble believing in a single or several supranatural beings I nonetheless have always found it fascinating that every single civilization in human history has at least on some level had an analogous concept. Whether you're talking about Christians in Europe, other Abrahamic faiths, the Dao in China, or even isolated tribal communities like those on Polynesian islands or the Amazon, there are (to my knowledge) no naturally atheistic communities.
Now a secular "rationalist" interpretation of this phenomenon would be that it is merely something in our brain chemistry that yearns for an all-powerful protector figure, but if that were the case then surely ONE society would have, despite this, developed into an atheistic framework. The only way we came to atheism as a concept was through immense scientific advancement furthering our understanding of the universe, chemistry, biology, and because we figured out the material we discarded theology as how we used to explain things "before we knew better".
But again, I don't know a supranatural deity exists, so I'm not religious. And I don't know a supranatural deity doesn't exist, so I'm not atheist. But I don't subscribe to the belief that simply having an understanding of the universe at an atomic level somehow automatically disproves any divine providence. Just because we understand concepts such as evolution, cellular mechanics, etc, doesn't "prove" they couldn't have been created by a supranatural deity. A lot of scientists want to find a natural, physical, material cause of the big bang, to "prove" that the world is purely material, but as of yet they have been unable to do so.
The saddest thing for me is knowing however long I live I will still not have come to a proper conclusion to these thoughts by the time I die.
