What would you worship if you didn't believe in God?

[Magical Realist]

The Sun ofcourse! It not only keeps us from freezing in the chill zone of outer space, but it provides us with all the sustenance of all the life on our planet. Everything we eat ultimately comes from plants that derive all their nutrients from sunlight. We even absorb vitamin D from sunlight absorbed directly into our skin.

Every evening the sun graces us with a dazzling spectacle of vibrant inspiring sky colors. Without the warmth of the sun all water would be ice and undrinkable. There'd be no rain to water the ground. No rivers winding thru green valleys. No light to see anything but the twinkling stars. Even the moon would be all dark. And there wouldn't even be any plant-generated oxygen for us to breathe.

So if I ever felt the need to worship and grovel before something, which I rarely do, it would be this benevolent and radiant star that floats a crucial 93 million miles away from our planet. It might not hear our prayers or listen to our chants of praise, anymore than you hear the electrical micro static of your own skin cells. But it would imo still be a very worthy candidate for our ceaseless admiration and awe.

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[Syne]

Why do we even worship God? Personally, I've never understood why God would require or even want adoration. That would make God much more like an attention-seeking celebrity. If anything, worship is more about the unity of joining with others in the same activity. But compared to a lot of other group activities, it's probably one of the most uplifting.

[Magical Realist]

Part of being human and of loving and adoring some person is the verbal activity of flattering and praising that person and giving them things. We do it because it amplifies our sense of their greatness and beauty to us. If we didn't the love would just fade away over time. I see worship as the spiritual version of this activity. Theists make of God an object of love and adoration and express that thru song and ritual and prayerful commitment. It reinforces the feeling of God's realness and transcendence to we mere finite mortals. God by definition doesn't need it at all. But the sense of being united in a group consciousness wherein the experience of God is dramatically magnified and focused would I'm sure still be appreciated by him. Assuming ofcourse he possessed the ability to love and experience pleasure.

[C C]

The Sun ofcourse! It not only keeps us from freezing in the chill zone of outer space, but it provides us with all the sustenance of all the life on our planet. Everything we eat ultimately comes from plants that derive all their nutrients from sunlight. We even absorb vitamin D from sunlight absorbed directly into our skin.

Every evening the sun graces us with a dazzling spectacle of vibrant inspiring sky colors. Without the warmth of the sun all water would be ice and undrinkable. There'd be no rain to water the ground. No rivers winding thru green valleys. No light to see anything but the twinkling stars. Even the moon would be all dark. And there wouldn't even be any plant-generated oxygen for us to breathe.

So if I ever felt the need to worship and grovel before something, which I rarely do, it would be this benevolent and radiant star that floats a crucial 93 million miles away from our planet. It might not hear our prayers or listen to our chants of praise, anymore than you hear the electrical micro static of your own skin cells. But it would imo still be a very worthy candidate for our ceaseless admiration and awe.

Pretty difficult to top the sun, which is surely why it appears so universal in historical cultures. From Ancient Egypt (Ra) to indigenous America. Surprising that prayer was originally unknown. That would seem to be the whole point of personifying an object, so it could be communicated with. But maybe the sun wasn't given a humanoid avatar or counterpart.

Ancient religion: The Great Spirit of the Choctaw was referred to by various names [...] Hushtahli is from Hashi (sun) and Tahli (to complete an action). Hushtahli is believed to have originated as a Choctaw term without European influence; the Choctaw were believed to be Sun worshippers. Fire was the "most striking representation of the sun"; it was believed to have intelligence, and was considered to be in constant communication with the Sun.

Early Religion: Anthropologists theorize that the Mississippian ancestors of the Choctaw placed the Sun at the center of their cosmological system. Mid-eighteenth-century Choctaws did view the sun as a being endowed with life. Choctaw diplomats, for example, spoke only on sunny days. If the day of a conference were cloudy or rainy, Choctaws delayed the meeting, usually on the pretext that they needed more time to discuss particulars, until the sun returned. The Sun made sure that all talks were honest. The Sun as a symbol of great power and reverence is a major component of southeastern Indian cultures. — Greg O'Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830

The evil spirit, or Na-lusa-chi-to ("black being" or "big black one") or Impashilup ("soul eater" or "ghost eater"), sought to harm people. It may appear, as told in stories, in the form of a shadow person.

Prayers may have been introduced by missionaries; however, Choctaw prophets were known to address the Sun. Swanton writes, "an old Choctaw informed Wright that, before the arrival of the missionaries, they had no conception of prayer. However, he adds, 'I have indeed heard it asserted by some, that anciently their hopaii, or prophets, on some occasions were accustomed to address the sun ...'"

[Syne]

Depends on your own personal love language, if you are about gifts or words of affirmation. I doubt such things are universal. Seems a very cynical view of love to say that you have to make the person an object in order to remember you love them. That would seem like more of an obsession than love.

Granted, for many religious people, it likely is in the realm of obsession. And there likely is an emotional/endorphin response to having your beliefs affirmed in large groups, in person. I doubt that it has much to do with their sense of God's realness, as many believers pray, study, and worship on their own.

[Magical Realist]

Depends on your own personal love language, if you are about gifts or words of affirmation. I doubt such things are universal. Seems a very cynical view of love to say that you have to make the person an object in order to remember you love them. That would seem like more of an obsession than love.

True enough. I confess I had in mind at the time I posted this a romantic/sexual love, which can often become object-obsessed and inauthentic. Love taken in the larger sense of one's relatives and friends can persist quite easily without flattery and gifts. The entire omission of worship and adoration from spiritual practice would likely avert any tendency of us to make of God an object or "idol". We really only lavish and praise our own internal image of the Divine, a psychological projection laden with personal unconscious needs/complexes. The actual experience of the Divine, as being innately beyond imagery and conception, yet as intimate as our own breath, would be a truer level of spirituality. Paul Tillich surprisingly says that atheism is actually a higher faith in the "ultimate concern" we call God in that it doesn't settle for faith in literalized symbols and metaphors. The atheist goes beyond belief in the existence of God as just one more in a number of objective things. By not believing God "exists", he essentially encounters God as the Ground of Being itself.

[Syne]

Atheism is faith? 9_9
Just goes to show how even some atheists feel something is missing.

[Magical Realist]

Atheism is faith? 9_9
Just goes to show how even some atheists feel something is missing.

The experience of atheism is something that dawns on us over a period of time. If it happened suddenly, our whole worldview would collapse and we might have a mental breakdown (also called ontological shock.) We have to get used to our new godless reality, and there is a lot of disappointment and anger that happens along the way. That hardcore atheists are so militant and hostile says less about God and theists than it does about them. The sense that they've been abandoned for no fault of their own without anyone to morally guide them or tell them what to do. The stark realization that understanding it all doesn't come from some ready-made prefabricated belief system but must be worked for and discovered on its own now. Eventually they mellow out though, many re-emerging from their firey crucibles as New Age pantheists or Zen mystics or even scientistic physicalists who are content to just live understandlingly with the ambiguity.

[Yazata]

I've never felt any attraction or need to worship. Certainly not a personal deity modeled on a human being.

But I do sometimes (often, actually) feel a sense of transcendent awe that many (including me in some of my moods) might call 'religious'.

What elicits it? Not so much the gigantic scale of the universe that drew the reverent chant of "billions and billions..." from atheist astronomer Carl Sagan. While I respond to the universe's grand scale, it isn't really primary with me.

What speaks to me emotionally is the mystery of it all. Not just up in the heavens or in a particle collider at CERN, but right here, right now, in this very room: How little we really understand about our surroundings (and ourselves). Pick anything that you think is well understood and ask "What?" and "Why?" questions. Get an answer (typically from science) and repeat. It only takes a few iterations to reach the frontiers of human knowledge.

In the case of science, which is our civilization's big authority on everything - what are the laws of physics? They certainly aren't physical objects with mass and location. (So there goes crude materialism.) Where did the laws come from and why are what they seem to be and not something else? (It's natural theology's old source of cosmic order question, though for me it doesn't necessarily point to a theistic god.) How are the putative laws of physics known? How can a small set of observations confirm a universal law? (The problems of induction and underdetermination.)

A similar question is what is mathematics? What is it, what kind of reality/being do mathematical truths have? (Seemingly not physical, unless we take a very broad view of what 'physical' means.) What accounts for its seeming objective nature? How are mathematical truths known? (By intuition?) Why does physical reality seem to behave in accordance with mathematics?

Similar questions could be asked about causality, properties, universals, possibility/actuality, identity, change and no end of issues typically found in philosophical metaphysics textbooks. The whole philosophy of mind can-of-worms that CC is more familiar with than me.

And language... what is meaning? How does reference work? How does a sound or a squiggle of ink (different in each language) connect to a physical object over there whose name it supposedly is?

On and on... about literally everything!! In every place, at every moment (what are places and moments?) we are surrounded by things that seem familiar and unproblematic, that nevertheless we don't even begin to understand. I guess that the feeling of transcendent awe that I get from that realization is the sense of the unlimited (in the most literal sense of unbounded possibility space) potential of reality. It's why I'm attracted to Forteanism.

[Magical Realist]

And language... what is meaning? How does reference work? How does a sound or a squiggle of ink (different in each language) connect to a physical object over there whose name it supposedly is?

One of the things that draws me to the "language mysticism" of guys like Heidegger and Wittgenstein is the astonishing range of seemingly absolute truths and nontruths that language makes possible. Laws of physics. The Constitution. Shakespearean plays. Philosophical treatises. The axioms of logic. Sacred religious scriptures. The periodic table. Evolutionary theory. Genetics. Computer programs. Even the facts of the mundane world we rely on everyday. All are made of words, basically just grammatically structured representations of other things and concepts. How can this be? IOW how is it that Reality, whatever it fundamentally is, can be so precisely translated into the mouth sounds and glyphs of a recently evolved primate species? How indeed is it that all possible knowledge of reality can be accurately represented by our language? Can it be? It seems to me highly suspect that we always find only the things that we can articulate and define. Even the questions we ask and can ask are made possible thru language. As if we only find what we are predisposed by language to understand. Maybe science is ultimately the attempt to get beyond the languagable, the speakable, the propositional. Which opens it up to the possibility of the anomalous and ineffable and acausal. Anyway, so yes, language is a big mystery for me.

In every place, at every moment (what are places and moments?) we are surrounded by things that seem familiar and unproblematic, that nevertheless we don't even begin to understand. I guess that the feeling of transcendent awe that I get from that realization is the sense of the unlimited (in the most literal sense of unbounded possibility space) potential of reality. It's why I'm attracted to Forteanism.

Heisenburg said that on the way to finding the truth the very meaning of understanding may change over time. Usually we have just enough understanding of our environment and its operations to be able to live and thrive within it. Nobody really grasps WHY things are the way they are. We may roughly know how things happen in the crude and loose parliance of causation and probability, which is what science usually provides for us. But the why of being itself, it's fundamental essence as necessarily being this way and not another, remains wide open. As Wittgenstein put it, "The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is." That is, the transcendent or the spiritual. I too remain staunchly Fortean, though I sometimes need to reign in that rather "wild west" non-worldview for practical reasons. IMO it all comes down to the mysteries of language again as well as just information in general and the seemingly arbitrary yet nearly infinite sense-making nature of those representative systems.