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Okay okay, you got me. I’ve got the daughter. I’ve got the life of secular morality with its manifest inability to speak to our moment. I want some flavor of this so badly. But it’s hard to apply that corrective in the absence of any organic connection to an actual tradition. Do I just take Pascal’s advice and fake it until it feels right? Because you’re right to point to a metaphysical deficit. But if you don’t take a faith’s code metaphysical claims seriously, how do you not feel like a fraud?

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Having been preoccupied by matters of spirituality for a while, the very limited wisdom I found is that God should always be a lived experience, not a belief. He can be found in the joy of creativity as well as in the chants of religion, but not in your thoughts.

So maybe drop the questions and try to feel the reality behind the words? Whatever path you may find yourself following. I'm studying Buddhism and meditation but it's mostly because I also come from a blank religious background and that appealed to me more than religion based on a personified God.

Good luck to you in any case.

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In the end it’s a very personal thing and for some the element of belief is essential.

I find Judaism to be ritual based faith. In a way the way Judaism is structured it takes into account one struggle with God and faith (Israel literally means that). I think one can find merit in those rituals, that survived and evolved over thousands of years even without truly believing in God.

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I agree with the others here who are saying "it needs to be personal", a lived experience.

My own path has included studying most major world religions, seeing them as being something like "emotional technologies." I ended up finding enough similarities and commonalities in these faiths that I new feel comfortable borrowing from them freely. I have my own self-constructed faith that follow. I lean heavily into the roman catholicism of my ancestors, but i see this primarily as a form of ancestor connnection. I swear a sikh kara, and I think regularly about karma, enlightenment, and various theologie's perspectives on where i am, and where the world is.

If you assume that there is some truth to all of this, and you pursue that truth as being important, i think you'll find that you grow so much along the way, you may end up in a place where you are comfortable saying that you don't really know these answers.

If my own personal religion has one central tenet, it's that each person needs to perform this search, on their own, and that the act of performing the search is probably more important than wherever it leads you. If you're still interested in the conclusions i've reached:

- I believe there is a solution to the is/ought problem that is totally commensurate with scientific materialism. See: https://apxhard.com/2020/11/27/a-moral-system-from-scientific-rationality/

- I believe "God" is an anthropomorphic interface to the good, as defined above

- I think we live in a simulation constructed of our own believe systems, and much of personal growth comes from consciously tinkering with your belief system in order to define 'yourself' in such a way that you act more effectively in the world. See: https://apxhard.com/2021/01/18/the-hypnotoad-pill/

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