I am Ganesh, an Indian atheist and I don’t eat beef. It’s not like that I have a religious reason to do that, but after all those years seeing cows as peaceful animals and playing and growing up with them in a village, I doubt if I ever will be able to eat beef. I wasn’t raised very religious, I didn’t go to temple everyday and read Gita every evening unlike most muslims who are somewhat serious about their religion, my family has this watered down religion (which has it’s advantages).
But yeah, not eating beef is a moral issue I deal with. I mean, I don’t care that I don’t eat beef, but the fact that I eat pork and chicken but not beef seems to me to be weird. So, is there any religious practice that you guys follow to this day?
edit: I like religious music, religious temples (Churches, Gurudwara’s, Temples & Mosques in Iran), religious paintings and art sometimes. I know for a fact that the only art you could produce is those days was indeed religious and the greatest artists needed to make something religious to be funded, that we will never know what those artists would have produced in the absence of religion, but yeah, religious art is good nonetheless.
I still use common colloquialisms without paying much mind to them. “thank God, oh my god, Jesus christ” etc. Kinda hard to get rid of those, but it’s no biggie, really.
What I will say, is that while I do identify as an atheist in the sense of not believing in established religions or cults, I do consider that I am able to believe in more than what reality presents. I’ve always said I’m an agnostic atheist, but as of late, I’ve been feeling like it’s rather OK and even necessary to wonder about reality and existence a lot more than what science allows itself to. For example, if you take even a moment to ponder about what physics and the quantum realm means about reality, you’ll feel like something else is definitely going on, like we’re obviously not seeing the full picture and there’s a good chance we never will, and that the picture were missing is unparalleled in its majesty. To just think that we seem to be just a combination of countless fields fluctuating together to form reality, but at the end of the day you could just say we’re the expression of different waves going through different mediums juxtaposed on each other. A combination of planes crashing in on each other in a multidimensional membrane, a universe that could be just one possibility out of a mostly dead multiverse, where even our universe seems to be mostly dead, yet here we stand. It’s hard to wrap your mind around it, or even begin to grasp it all. Definitely makes you feel like there’s more to it than just chance, hell, chance sounds like an implausible explanation for all of this.
I think I mostly take issue with “matter of fact” stances, where people will claim things are a specific way because their faith or textbook says so. No. Just, experience life, question it, question your beliefs, but also question life itself, don’t settle for just “big bang and chance and meaninglessness” as science is just a tool, don’t settle for just “God willed it all and demands these things of us”, we’re not here for that long, let’s ponder on it all while we can, and enjoy the life that were lucky (or unlucky) to be able to experience for one moment in eternity of nothingness, or an eternity of eternities of different existences. Who knows what were doing here, where we go from here, where do we come from? It’s ok to acknowledge that the answer to those questions is “nobody on this earth knows, and maybe we’ll never know”. Let’s cope together, let’s smile together, let’s live and ponder together.