Lemmy has a strong atheism bias. You'd think as much as they cling to the "rationality" of it they'd realize that the stats literally show that religious people live longer. DIYing your own tight knit subcommunity that looks out for each other and have a shared set of traditions to mark both the passage of time and provide a structure for people cope with significant life events is a LOT harder than getting one off the shelf. Like it's super hard to even find the people who want to do that without accidentally starting a cult. Like I've thought about trying to find people to do regular group meditations and create holiday traditions with and then realized I'm literally describing either a cult or something that could easily become one.

And that's the other thing; most religions have some kind of regular meditation built in on how they relate to the world that usually focus on gratitude and prosocial behavior. Because it's a tradition that almost always predates modern psychology they don't always reliably meet those ends but the fact that they often do is a big part of why prayer of some kind is such an enduring tradition in most world religions.

People are so ready to dig on humans even a few centuries back for doing stuff like singing / chanting over an tincture / extract or other concentrated medicine they're making but how the fuck else were they supposed to time how long it takes for to brew a medicine with a narrow therapeutic range that needs to be exact? They didn't have fucking kitchen timers!

I'd be okay with those people having to find their meaning elsewhere if all the historical atrocities went away too