In the morning, I think while drinking coffee. Then I really think in the shower. As a result I take long showers. Sometimes during the day, I'll sit back and think. While going to bed, I'll think some more.
Usually I think about problems to solve, reflect on my life so far, course adjustments, things to self improve.
One day I'll pick up a religion, but it seems like they all would require a lot of mental gymnastics to keep consistent with my mental explorations. Ultimately I think religions are useful as a tutorial on how to live a good life, but like tutorials, they don't always apply super well to your own particulars. So my parallel track is to think hard about the stuff I'm missing that a religion would provide. E.g meditative time, family matters, behaviours, habits.
But science moves so fast that a lot if religious habits are really out of date, so I have little hope to find a religion in the future. I wish there was a "Debian Sid" religion: not quite Gentoo uptodate but not too CentOS outofdate.
> One day I'll pick up a religion, but it seems like they all would require a lot of mental gymnastics to keep consistent with my mental explorations.
> I wish there was a "Debian Sid" religion
Convert to Discordianism! We make mental gymnastics an Olympic sport! You are not only allowed to, but expected, nay, mandated to believe everything and nothing you want. You can compile your beliefs against any platform, arch, Goddess, God, Dog, Amphibian, or cat manufacturer.
You might want to look at some of the more modern / postmodern branches of Christianity.
Some people who practice it sincerely don't think of the Bible as a literally true document that has no mistakes or inaccuracies, nor a rulebook that must be followed in every particular, but rather a series of subjective recountings of different people's encounters with God over the course of many centuries, strongly colored by their cultural context and identity.
I think most such practitioners still believe there's a historical core somewhere in the Gospels, particularly around Jesus' death and resurrection.
That's the impression I get from a near distance. I haven't super-closely at those versions myself (though it's on my todo list).
One site presenting something like this perspective is here:
> You might want to look at some of the more modern / postmodern branches of Christianity
> Some people who practice it sincerely don't think of the Bible as a literally true document that has no mistakes or inaccuracies,
That's not “modern and postmodern” Christianity, that's just OG Christianity. The view that, as doctrine, the Bible is entirely literal and without error in any sense (rather than often nonliteral and only without error in the doctrine it intends to teach) is a relatively novel view within Christianity predominantly held within a subset of Evangelical and Fundamentalist Protestantism.
> Name and cite a single Christian source from before 1600 which believes the Bible is a flawed text which contains errors.
As I said before, the traditional view is that the Bible is free of error, but that this refers to its intended moral message, not historical or scientific truth or any other alternative purpose one might apply to it.
Given that, you must be asking for not someone who sees it as containing error but instead factual inaccuracy, and for that, well, a good place to start is Origen of Alexandria (c. AD 184 – c. AD 253), who succinctly lays out both the traditional view of the purpose of scripture and the manner in which it encompasses and is unshaken by (and is even be served by) the presence of factual error in the Commentary on the Gospel of John, Book 10, Chapter 4, which opens:
“In the case I have supposed where the historians desire to teach us by an image what they have seen in their mind, their meaning would be found, if the four were wise, to exhibit no disagreement; and we must understand that with the four Evangelists it is not otherwise. They made full use for their purpose of things done by Jesus in the exercise of His wonderful and extraordinary power; they use in the same way His sayings, and in some places they tack on to their writing, with language apparently implying things of sense, things made manifest to them in a purely intellectual way. I do not condemn them if they even sometimes dealt freely with things which to the eye of history happened differently, and changed them so as to subserve the mystical aims they had in view; so as to speak of a thing which happened in a certain place, as if it had happened in another, or of what took place at a certain time, as if it had taken place at another time, and to introduce into what was spoken in a certain way some changes of their own. They proposed to speak the truth where it was possible both materially and spiritually, and where this was not possible it was their intention to prefer the spiritual to the material. The spiritual truth was often preserved, as one might say, in the material falsehood.”
Is “before the First Nicene Council” enough “before 1600” for you?
You can find a reasonably extensive set of passages from the pre-400AD famous Christians about how the genesis story is supposed to be interpreted allegorically and not literally on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegorical_interpretations_of...
Of course, they would not consider the allegory an "error" in the same way that modern fundamentalists would.
It is not a fringe belief/conspiracy theory that biblical literalism is a relatively new Christian tradition, but rather well accepted fact among religious historians.
My catholic school system taught the Bible was inspired by God and not to be taken necessarily literally. More of a series of parables to understand life better.
Similar here, you can also look into philosophy instead of religion.
I am quite fond of stoicism. Not that I follow it religiously or would even call myself a stoic, but I think it is one of the best 'tutorials how to live a good life' out there.
Usually I think about problems to solve, reflect on my life so far, course adjustments, things to self improve.
One day I'll pick up a religion, but it seems like they all would require a lot of mental gymnastics to keep consistent with my mental explorations. Ultimately I think religions are useful as a tutorial on how to live a good life, but like tutorials, they don't always apply super well to your own particulars. So my parallel track is to think hard about the stuff I'm missing that a religion would provide. E.g meditative time, family matters, behaviours, habits.
But science moves so fast that a lot if religious habits are really out of date, so I have little hope to find a religion in the future. I wish there was a "Debian Sid" religion: not quite Gentoo uptodate but not too CentOS outofdate.