What’s frustrating is nobody tells you how to reverse a life of agnosticism bordering on atheism, and suddenly be catholic,Buddhist,etc

I don't think there's a simple answer on how to flip that light switch but I can share some ideas.

First, do you have religious people in your life whom you respect even if you don't share their faith. Ask them about it - you can literally say "I don't get it at all but I am curious, what's this like for you?" And just see what resonates.

Second, that is a question you can direct to a member of clergy. If you can't envision yourself walking into a house of worship, shoot an email and be like "I am faithless but curious. I am sure I am not the first one..."

Third, be really for hits and misses. Not every religious person can articulate it in a way that will make sense to you, and not every clergy person can speak to it effectively either (some people can only preach to the converted, to borrow a phrase.) But if you ping a few people, some of them may give you something that's a good thread to follow.

Fourth, I suggest starting with whatever faith your family was historically in. There's something cool about that.

Fifth, if really nothing else - shoot me a way to contact you and we can chat about my experience.

As someone who is formerly deeply Christian and left for intellectual/theological reasons. I miss the communal binding of organized worship. But reversing or getting back to that place requires either 1) letting go of intellectual integrity, or 2) finding a group who is similarly interested in dispassionate community organizing without supernatural theology.

The 1st has proven personally impossible. The 2nd seems very unlikely. All the attempts of secular church I have seen never pick up steam and trail off over time. Thus, the person who sees religious association as a broad good is left without a natural landing spot.

I love how you crystalized the point although I've reached a different conclusion.

This was actually my original "before" state - I assumed that religion was an illogical holdover and not something that I ( a logical / scientist ) person can internalize.

But over time, I connected with people who are very smart and very logical and whose faith is deepened by this (though to be clear, faith is still faith - even if you believe in the absence of a deity that's still a belief)

So I am very happy that I am at a place where I can grow my religious and faithful over time while being logically and internally consistent.

I appreciate that this is something that matters to you and perhaps something you could enjoy is to connect with someone whom you respect as an intellectual who is also religious, and see how they make sense of it.

But... HOW?

I don't know a single person who is an intellectual, scientifically minded, and openly religious. So I'm asking genuinely here on HN how you do it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Collins

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Plantinga

But you may well know people who are intellectual, scientifically minded and closeted religious. As this thread can attest, there is rampant discrimination against religious experience and thought in the science/tech community.

> So I'm asking genuinely here on HN how you do it.

I believe that most deep religious experiences are things that happen to you, not things that you actively plan for. But having said that, I believe that the key in general is humility. So many people in this thread (and others on HN) have displayed incredible arrogance that is an effective protective barrier from having a religious experience. This is very much their loss. We all end up humbled eventually though.

No matter how you feel about religion in the 21st century, we would not have a civilization were it not for religion. When you dig deep enough, you will generally find that the seed of the society came from a visionary mystic. Even Genghis Khan was a shaman as much as he was a warrior.

Empirical science is neither the beginning nor the end, though it is an extraordinarily powerful tool. The rules of empirical science are bounded in such a way that it is essentially impossible to talk scientifically about some of the most important aspects of being human. Funnily enough, scientists engage just as much as religious people in mysticism when they throw up their hands and describe consciousness as an "emergent" phenomenon.

Religious texts are deeply fascinating if you allow them to be. Think of them as founding civilizational documents like a constitution. All of us live in cultures that descend from these (relatively) ancient texts. You would not be here if it weren't for these past religious traditions. That doesn't mean that we should blindly follow religious leaders or accept everything that we read in these texts. But we should at least have some curiosity about how we got here and ask what relevant wisdom might still be there for us in these texts. That is a far more scientific approach than casually dismissing religion as nonsense.

And partly through his influence, today I am Christian and openly religious enough to write this comment. As to whether I'm intellectual and scientifically minded... I'd say so, though it seems a little vain to admit to being intellectual. :-)

I need to write in more depth about it. I'll give you a super short TLDR and I apologize if this is not sufficient to intellectually connect to.

Let me hit it from two angles:

First of all, you do know many such people. For example, Isaac Newton was deeply religious, as was Darwin (his faith was later shaken by the loss of a child), Georges Lemaître who theorized the Big Bang was a Catholic Priest, Edward Hubble who observed evidence of the Big Bang, was a devout Christian. People claim that not much is known about Einstein's religiosity, but it's interesting that he supported a fundraising effort to translate the Talmud into English for example.

So one angle is - you know the founding figures today's science and many/most of them saw no conflict between their science and religion. A quick response may be "well that's what people just believed back then" but - what is the understanding that we have that these scientists didn't, which gives us firm foundation to dismiss religion whey they themselves embraced it?

Second, let's go on a quick mental experiment. Let's accept for the moment that the universe is an accident, that all life is random and that the only reason humans are as we are, is because we evolved to outsmart our predators and prey. A logical implication of that is that we would have no reason to develop the intellect and senses that enable us to understand true reality - to grasp how the universe works. We evolved to just be smart enough to eat a cow rather than be eaten by a wolf.

If you accept that perception/intellectual limitation, the implication is that humans can't expect to assert anything about reality. Just because our instruments don't detect something or our eyes can't see something speaks nothing of the existence of that thing either way. Same as just because some creature didn't evolve sight, doesn't mean that the thing it could have seen if it had sight, doesn't exist - but that creature has no idea!

That takes us to a logical place: humans aren't equipped to objectively conclude anything about the universe. So if you assert lack of creation, lack of divinity - that's just what you chose to believe despite the fact that your tooling for perceiving these things is lacking. So it's faith either way.

I don't think I articulate the 2nd point well enough, it needs more. But let me know how it sounds, I'd appreciate the feedback.

I wouldn't say I'm a born-again-whatever - I usually describe myself as an optimistic spiritual agnostic - but I think a combination of broadening my horizons physically (geographically moving around) and mentally (actually paying attention in grad school to the liberal arts that I thumbed my nose at as an undergrad) and getting hit repeatedly with how little I/we actually know about anything has let me inch away from the cynical a(nti)religiosity and submit to something larger than me.

This has also given me a better appreciation of the books I (was supposed to have) read in high school; in hindsight, I don't think there's any way many students could draw much meaning from them without having their own life experiences.