Quote Originally Posted by mysteryofdungeon View Post
Thank you for your thorough, extensive thoughts on this.
Do you believe in god or the supernatural to any degree by the way? And/or are you spiritual?
I'm interested in pre-Christian Germanic heathenry, the occult, and folklore in general. I was raised Christian so that's my background, but my dad fancied himself a "scholarly" theologian and so never really pushed his faith on us and still doesn't seem to care at all that I don't share his faith. I was one of those annoying, hardcore, new-atheist types for awhile, but I came to realize I'm way too interested in woo woo spooky stuff for that. I don't hold any active beliefs in anything and I like to think I'm difficult to convince when it comes to the supernatural, but I'm not dismissive of it. I tend to think the most supernatural thing about our universe is our own minds though, and don't really care so much about what's real or not real in the outside world. I think people are prone to thinking of the supernatural as though it has to exist in a concrete way, but to me that kills the whole thing. Our mental realms are much more real than anything going on outside. They're the only space that we can truly be said to exist in in a meaningful way. To be a bit more illustrative, if someone tells me a ghost story I'll be very interested, but I probably won't interpret their story to mean that there was some ghostlike entity in the external world (I think I'd be forced to reject that idea in most cases due to a lack of evidence). I'll hear that story (knowing that there is little reason to think it happened in the external reality) and be more interested in their internal experience of it which I consider more valuable. I'd never say "it's all in your head" in a pejorative way, I mean. Everything is all in our heads after all, and I think anyone claiming otherwise is proposing that they have access to some kind of impossibly objective lens free of their own subjectivity and biases.

I don't know what reality is real for you. It's in all likelihood not the same one that's real for me. We can move around in the outside world of matter and space and have all kinds of interactions there, but ultimately that represents very little of our actual experience so I pay proportionately little attention to it.

I'm not sure if this answered your question very well or even at all. My beliefs (and I really hate calling them that; perspectives is a much better word) are difficult and time-consuming to articulate until the inspiration strikes me. Hopefully seeing me try was entertaining at least!