There are lots of patterns in my own religious tradition that I find valuable, separate from the aspect of faith.

Some examples:

- setting aside the Sabbath as a day of rest. Different from the rest of the days of the week. A day for analysis of the direction of your life, recommitment to your values, and taking a break from the burden of everyday responsibilities and work and play.

- ministering to neighbors. Watching out for and serving those around you. Having someone close by who cares and is willing to help.

- tithing - dedicating a fixed, significant percentage of income to charity.

- fasting - abstaining from food and drink for a day, and giving the money that would have been spent (and more if able) to help those in need. This has social benefit as well as personal physical and spiritual/emotional benefit.

Tithing isn't charity. If it was, you could give your tithe to a street person.

Try going to your temple/etc and telling them that you gave already. You'll quickly learn that it's an in-group fee, not charity.

And yes, many people get a lot from mindfulness. Why do you feel that it's only appropriate on one day of the week?

And how do you get there without faith?

> Try going to your temple/etc and telling them that you gave already. You'll quickly learn that it's an in-group fee, not charity.

Not sure where you're getting this but that hasn't been my experience at all. From my upbringing in several Catholic churches you're expected to "tithe" as a general principle but no one follows up with you on your accounts. My family always set aside our tithing amounts each year, but we got to distribute it as we saw fit, some to the church, sure, but others to scholarships or charities that we wanted.

The practice of tithing comes from a tax that existed to support the church and clergy. Saving ten percent of your income and distributing it as you please isn't tithing in the traditional sense, only the portion given to the church is considered a tithe.

While I hesitate to get too pedantic about definitions, the way I tend to look at this is a little different.

Theist/atheist refer to belief or lack of belief in a deity or deities.

Gnostic/agnostic refer to one's conviction of knowledge that there is or isn't a deity or deities.

In my personal case, I don't claim to know for sure that there are no gods but I don't believe that there are so I'd call myself an agnostic atheist.

Others I've met say "I believe that there is a god and I know this to be true" so I'd call them gnostic theists.

Still others say with conviction that they know there just aren't any gods so they'd be gnostic atheists.

Again, I don't claim that this is the only way these terms can be used or are used in practice but it works for me.

I think that entire conversation has been spoiled by the organized abrahamic religions. More often than not when we say "religious" or "believe in god" we are referring to the concepts described by these religions in overly vague and at the same time overly specific terms. Do I believe that wine turns into Jesus blood, humans lived with dinosaurs, some guy talked to god who appeared as a burning bush or anything like that? Hell no! To me those stories are en par with fairy tales and all somewhere on the spectrum between opposing things we know as a fact and things that are so incredibly unlikely that they aren't any more worth thinking about than anything I might just make up or read in a sci-fi novel. In fact I think that it's scary that there are people who actually believe that those things are true. So in almost all conversations I will identify myself as a vehement atheist.

At the same time I have no idea if there aren't incredibly powerful beings somewhere that have the power to create whole universes that many would describe as gods. I also don't exclude the possibility that the universe is sentient or maybe even mankind or the entire earth is a sentient organism of some kind. Maybe the entire universe is a giant computer or simulation run by some more advanced beings. If those things were true they probably could be compared to religions believes. However, I have trouble calling myself agnostic. I think that that theoretically would make me agnostic. However, I have a hard time calling myself that because I am so repulsed by the naive fairy tales commonly associated with religion.

At the same time I also don't think it's worth devoting much effort to thinking about these things, since they are questions that tend to make no predictions that we can proof or disproof. I find it disturbing that society approves so much of asking childish questions like "where do we come from?", "where will we go?", etc. It's obviously just a mental rabbit hole and there are no real answers to these questions and anyone who claims to have answers to these is a liar or a fool. Unfortunately the big religions claim to have these answers. To me that makes any nuanced discussion about "religion" almost impossible with most people including myself, since I first and foremost want to distance myself from fairy tales.

Edit: Typo "there" -> "they" + clarification.

Let's say there is a God, or a higher being running a simulation, it would then be completely rational at that point to then think that they could do highly improbable things (it's their simulation after all). Furthermore, with the story of Jesus turning water into wine as an example: Jesus claimed to be God, so its completely rational for us to believe that he could do something so trivial. If he couldn't do something like that, well then it would be obvious he was just a man.