Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?

    > but a belief in God makes it easier to abide by values that matter to everyone else

What tends to happen if I look around the world is that instead of "everyone else" it's more like "what some religious version of a politician/dictator/tribal-committee/etc thinks is a value".

Take one example most "westeners" would probably agree is a bad version of this: the Taliban. Afghanistan is now ruled by the religious beliefs of an organization made up of people that have very strong beliefs and that - from what news we can get on it - do not hesitate to enforce with violence. I'm sure internally there's the 'regular' power struggles and social dynamics you will find in almost all of the rest of humankind to gain the upper hand. So what about _everyone else_ in Afghanistan that just wanted to live the lives they got accustomed to in the past ~20 years?

The Catholic church nowadays I suppose is more of a political organization but in its past it comes a lot closer to the above. Nevermind the hiding of sexual abuse by priests and shielding them from prosecution. To me it matters that these offenders get behind bars. Now. I think most of _everyone else_ feels the same.

I picked out two examples here but there's a ton of other examples and you can use any major or minor religion for this.

Don't get me wrong, I share a lot of beliefs about what one should or shouldn't do w/ Christianity and some other religions and law makers. I don't need to believe in a deity for that though. I don't mind if someone else does. Feel free, no problem. Just do not try to make me believe in the deity or use the deity as an argument. Or worse, use violence to make me comply with "believing" in it and practicing it.

Moreover, it is really a word semantic point. If someone says that their spiritualism is atheism, they are just using the word atheism for something other than "non-belief in gods", like "non-belief in gods, in combination with some other kinds of beliefs".

So, I am not tone deaf: I do hear that. Just let's use "atheism" right, too.

But note that someone identifying as an atheist, but with spiritual beliefs, might not be found to actually be an atheist, if their beliefs were examined by hard-line atheists. It is possible that a belief can have the trappings of being free from gods, but when you examine it critically, the entities in that belief can be identified as god-like after all.

Strawman examples:

"I believe everything has a purpose; but there is no such thing as god". Sorry, a purpose requires a being to articulate the purpose and set it into motion. If you mean inherent purpose (rather than a human interpretation which ascribes a non-inherent purpose) you have a god hidden in there.

Or "There is no such thing as god, but the world was clearly created". Oops again. Creation without a creator?

I think the problem of strongly asserting nonexistence is purely a puzzle of logic or language. We lack terminology and language for something that is, informally, in between strict existence and non-existence, such as things that are proposed without evidence but taken seriously. I've been thinking about this since reading about things like faster-than-light travel, and the singularity.

Then the question is whether it's useful to assign a third category, or just to combine it with one of the original two categories. My own feeling is that strong versus weak atheism is not a useful distinction.

Follow Dvaita Vedanta (Tattvavada). Part of Sanatan Dharma/Hinduism and one of the schools of Vedanta. The process of learning though spans the entire lifetime. It is not a simple set of scriptures that you read and understand. It has multiple layers and takes decades to get a grasp of. Sometimes even more. The works of Shri Madhvacharya have influenced and changed my perception of Universe (Jagat/Srushti), Life (Aatma) and my relationship with God (Brahman). I don't find anything else that satisfactorily explains the Srushti, Aatma and Brahman as well as Tattvavada does. I am a seeker so I am always learning. The more you travel down this path, the more you learn/discover. It is a never-ending process.

> Daily existential crisis due to my own mortality

I had this for a long time. The thing that cured it was that I remind myself every day how many days I should expect to live, how many of those days will be healthy enough to do anything, and what % of my remaining life and healthspan this year is.

Even though it would seem this makes things worse, my experience is that it is the opposite. It is like tossing some eggshells in coffee - the bitterness goes down and things get a hell of a lot clearer. A few months after I started doing this, I stopped waffling on decisions and decision paralysis went away.