I have a soft spot for the topic of people who are dual faith. It’s weird, you know. If you’re an atheist, you get a thumbs up from me. If you’re religious with one faith, you get a raised eyebrow from me. And if you are dual faith, you get two thumbs up from me. It just feels like you’re more open-minded if you are more than one faith.
I like this topic. Pretty much wherever you go, people are practicing this kind of syncretic belief. This is why the “same” religion in two different countries has local flavor. More often than not, when a religion is expanding into new territory, it absorbs some of the preexisting local beliefs. Christmas is a good example within Christianity, with the Christmas tree.
Another example is Japan where they say “you’re born with Shinto, marry with Christianity and die with Buddhism”. Many places maintain animist beliefs alongside more recent religions. There are even communities in South Asia where people attend both Muslim mosques and Hindu temples!
they all think everyone else is wrong, how can someone truly be dual faith? lol
Most religions don’t explicitly say “you can’t believe anything else”, just small claims like “there is only one creator god” or “wear a hat in church” when others might say “don’t wear a hat”.
When Christianity took over Greece, the Greek gods became demonic entities and never completely went away.
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.
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.
In such an instance, I go by a rule. If someone is going to say they want their religion to be respected in some instances, they should follow it in all instances. For example, don’t ask a taxi client to take their dog out of the taxi due to you being a Muslim only for you to go home and eat pork which is anti-Islamic.
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.
A lot of Christians are Pagan. They either found a way to incorporate Pagan gods as angels or change the semantics up a little. This was common among the Irish, and the Aztecs actually ended up seeing the Christian god and saying “hey it’s one of our own” rather than the Christians modifying the Aztec beliefs.
Some Christians are Buddhist, either because they are Catholic and believe the Buddha was canonized under a slightly altered narrative or because they found an interpretation of the Buddhist teachings that don’t conflict with Christian ideas.
Also, some interpretations of Judaism are atheistic. Some readings of Genesis omit the interpretation that he made the universe, just the Earth (which a lot of Mormons use to claim God comes from a lineage of gods, something that oddly feels more satisfying than the traditional Christian view).
I was thinking they’d be the easiest to reconcile - Christianity is just Judaism with extra steps. Islam is very similar to Judaism even though no-one talks about it. Jesus exists in all three but they have different takes on him.
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.
Both Buddhism and Taoism have some really good aspects. I would say they are philosophies and not religions and probably not in the context of a “faith” for this post. (If someone else wants to consider Buddhism a religion, you go right ahead. I won’t argue but assume I silently disagree.)
I am absolutely atheist, but still having some guiding principles is still important. If a concept sounds good and seems like it has good intentions I’ll just add it to my collection, discarding any pointless rituals or “magic”.
Doing good things makes me feel good and I like feeling good. I say that it’s ok borrow from any ideology that has well intentioned principles.
I’ll add the disclaimer that the term “good” is subjective and I still had to learn what “good” means to me over the years. Buddhism and Taoism have always been aligned with the way I perceive life and are decent enough to extrapolate what the word “good” should mean.
Am I dual faith? No. If we ever get in a deep discussion about core ideals, there are going to be similar concepts I share with many religions, though.
I practice both a radical form of progressive Christianity and agnosticism.
Username checks out.
Well I meant more the “parts I like and don’t like.” But I suppose building a big-ass wooden boat would be fun.
I practice opposing radical beliefs to keep that tension taught af.
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?
Yes. Alright, suppose you were raised Shinto. Shinto doctrine has a limited range of what they claim and doesn’t call dibs on a whole lot regarding what to make an origin about. Then suppose you went to Australia and thought “I like the Dreamtime beliefs, I want to see if I believe in it”. Supposing the matters discussed by Australian mythology doesn’t intersect with the matters discussed in Shintoism, you can be both. It wouldn’t be like Judaism and Hinduism where, in one, there are declarations of being one god and one son of god, while in the other, there’s a whole ecosystem of gods and avatars.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_syncretism
Basically, people combine religions way more than they pretend to. Think about a holiday like Christmas/Yule. It’s allegedly a Christian holiday, but somehow there are elves, reindeer, evergreen trees, and gift giving involved.
Throughout history, religious conversion wasn’t really about personal belief. There have been political conversions where a leader has “converted” for an alliance or marriage, and therefore a whole kingdom is allegedly a new religion, even though the people are still doing what they always have.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianization_of_Kievan_Rus’
There have been crusades, Muslim conquests, and colonization forcing conversion at the end of a sword. People kept practicing their existing religions during all of these.
Eventually, public and private religions, religions of neighboring people, etc. blur together.
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.
According to that worldview, would the great peacemaker be seen more historically or more mythologically?
I think the great peacemaker is uncontroversially seen as a historical figure (sort of similar to Jesus was probably a dude) but while Jesus said really nice stuff they’re better known for miracle stuff… the great peacemaker does have some miracles like crossing a lake on a granite canoe but most of what he did was negotiating the peace to unite the confederacy. All that stuff he did is probably historically accurate with the miracles likely being embellishments over time.
Also the great peacemaker and the creator and their twin are distinct figures. It sounds like you understand that but I just wanted to clarify that.
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…
Considering the infinite gravity of black holes, probably both.
Dual seems rather limited. I mean unitarians and bahai combine more than two.
Bahais have the syncretism built in though. If you were to ask one “what else are you”, they’d say “I’m just a Baha’i, I can’t be anything else.”
I know Lakota people who practice both traditional religion as well as Christianity
I’ve noticed that’s a common one. And one of my favorites.
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