this is why i quite like humanists.uk, they recognized that our brains just really like religion and made a system that satisfies that while being fully transparent about what it is, and takes steps to avoid turning into a cult and doing harm.
no, we don’t think there’s a god, but that doesn’t mean everything religious has to be rejected, we can just take the good parts and do them just because people like doing them.
Those kinds of things cover a lot, in particular the community aspect and basic coming of age stuff, but they can’t really get into the layers that mystics access. I think one approach to do it well without tripping up is to talk to the ancestors while being, on reflection, perfectly aware that you’re talking to your own genome. “Ancestors” as in think of your parents, no, earlier, your grandparents, you met them, your great-grandparents, you’ve heard stories, your great-great-grandparents, nope haven’t heard stories but you know where they’re from, go as far as you need to not have any idea about who those individuals were, but still have a sense of ancestry. That’s where it is. And once you’ve managed to get laid using your six times great-grandparent’s rizz, when you can freely access it, feel free to identify those aspects as, say, Freyr and Freya. But not before, that’s idolatry.
