I believe most religions started as good faith (no pun intended) attempts at roughly the same thing: contextualization of the metaphysical order of the universe.

Like the parable of the unseen elephant, God is a concept beyond true human perception, and every religion is like a man groping in darkness at one aspect of the bigger picture. When we approach the subject with a perspective informed by each of these outlooks, we develop a more diverse and comprehensive conceptualization of Order. Even better when we compare these outlooks to find overlap where most tend to agree.

My dad calls himself a BuJew Cath, which is Buddhist, Jewish and Catholic. “How does Jewish and Catholic work together?” you might ask. The answer is, it doesn’t. My dad is insane. He does it to prevent people from accusing him of being close-minded and so he can claim he’s a minority. It’s pretty sad.

Me personally, I follow my own even stranger belief system, which I haven’t defined fully and hopefully never will, because definitions turn into rules and rules are too binary and create impossibilities. I like to believe that anything and everything has already happened, is currently occuring and will do so constantly for all time. There’s a pseudo-solipsist angle as well, where my reality is created by me but others do the same, so as to allow for all believe systems independently. If two individuals have conflicting views, their own truths are true for each of them but not the other. Those with similar beliefs are then drawn to each other and those with dissimilar beliefs are repelled, like a type of magnetism. That’s the simple version.

Depends on the religion I guess. I don’t know how someone reconciles any of the abrahamic religions together if they’re dual one of those.

I used to be, kinda.

The short version is that I found being Buddhist and Taoist didn’t interfere with each other, abs complemented each other in some ways.

The long version is that once I rejected christianity as a wee lad (seriously, the process started when I was in kindergarten, and finished when I was around 11), I started looking for other things that provided those answers and purposes.

Along the way, I dabbled in all the non Abrahamic religions to some degree or another.

It took me until my late thirties to decide that I’d looked all I really wanted to, and that I didn’t believe in any of it. There was plenty of stuff I enjoyed, and there’s good ideas in all of them, but at any point that faith is necessary, religion and me just don’t match.

I’m not capable of blind faith at all, and no religion offers proof of anything.

At that point, and into my early forties, I kinda decided that it was easier to have a religion for conversation purposes than not, so I picked the ones that I had held onto the most of, and that was Buddhism for day to day living, and Taoism for the woowoo stuff.

Eventually though, I stopped giving a fuck about anyone that would be annoying enough about religion that I would need to have a religion to shut them the fuck up. Once you’re disabled, in constant pain, and discover that taking the time to deal with that kind of person in a gentle way wastes your time, energy, and stamina, why the fuck bother with anything more than “yeah, I don’t do religion. Peace out.”?

That’s not to say I don’t still make use of religious concepts. From my days dabbling in wicca, neopaganism, candomble, and other religions that have gods or spirits, I still use archetypes like that as a useful way to organize thoughts, and I’ve never bothered to get rid of the adjustment I made to my language around oaths like “dear gods” instead of “dear god”. You grow up in the bible belt, and you’re gong to pick up excalamatories like “sweet Jesus”, and it isn’t worth the hassle of dropping them entirely, so I just switched them.

And I do still use a lot of Buddhist practices around meditation, and as a loose way of structuring a code of ethics. The 8 fold path is good enough for that use, though it’s extremely rare I’m willing to go deep enough into a conversation to need to reference it for someone. That’s as in “well, if you look up the 8fold path, most of my beliefs about how a healthy society should structure itself, and individuals should try to behave, can be explained using that as a framework for discussion, even though I don’t hold to it exactly or in detail”.

Taoism though, I just think it’s a fun way of looking at the woowoo side of things. I don’t believe it, but I enjoy it.

But one truth I discovered along the way, long before I actually admitted it to myself, is that I’ve never believed in any of it. I just wished something would be worth believing in, that maybe there’s a spiritual side of existence, that there’s a reason for all the ugliness of life. I wanted one of them to be real, even though I rejected the concept of the world as it is having an underlying reason at the same time I rejected christianity.

All the rest of it, that was just me in denial, kind of grieving the loss of an invisible constant that would make life fair. It just took my body falling apart for me to realize I had stopped grieving that, and now had something more important to grieve over.

I consider myself an atheist but the faith I identify the most with is Haudenosaunee Long House traditions. I’d say I loosely follow that religion but it’s incredibly niche and regional and I now live on the west coast so I mostly just feel thankful for shit which is like 90% of the beliefs anyways - I’d consider myself agnostic because I have no genuine belief that the Creator nor his brother exist or that there are sky people, a strawberry road or an afterlife…

I actually consider myself an atheist because I was raised in Boston among rapey catholic priests and unless the metaphysical universe actually is a disinterested God like in the Long House tradition then, if God exists they’re a fucking asshole and can eat my ass. I find comfort in the universe being uncaring because if it does care the immense cruelty of the world means that God is a sadistic asshole.

But… yea, I’m most closely aligned with Long House traditions where the Creator made a bunch of sweet (rivers flowing both ways? Yes please) stuff, his evil brother fucked it all up and they’ve all fucked off somewhere and left just us, the plants and animals - praying is useless because nobody is home but you should appreciate the natural beauty of the world and thank the plants and animals for helping to give you life and shelter. I vibe with humbleness in the face of the universe.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

I practice both a radical form of progressive Christianity and agnosticism.

This is basically me.

how does that work? i can understand multi-faith like baha’ism that accepts other gods are just the representations of the real one or maybe islam which considers christianism and judaism are the “old versions” of it, but dual faith?

I guess I believe in quantum mechanics in the immediate nanoscopic realm and diffusive entropic dominance in the long-term gigantosphere. Hard to say which side Gravity will favor…

Dual seems rather limited. I mean unitarians and bahai combine more than two.

I know Lakota people who practice both traditional religion as well as Christianity

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