I am not clearly sortable into a religious group. My religious practice would most closely resemble "Hinduism" to an observer, but I avoid using that label because 1. it is not part of the culture I was born into and the history of white people with Religious Studies degrees writing about Hinduism is not at all pretty; 2. that label is fraught and subject to enough debate already; and 3. I have read a lot, but I have not yet studied enough scripture and commentary. I don't think it would be acceptable to go around calling myself a Hindu, but in terms of belief and behavior, I am generally in that universe.
I can't speak for all Hindus for the reasons above and more, but I am a radical pluralist. My practice acknowledges all faiths and non-faiths as not "equally valid" but instead complementary to one another -- equally useful. The Hegelian conflict between them tunes our "collective" and "individual" consciousness like tension balances the strings of a violin. I consider myself part of the Advaita Vedanta tradition, though I am influenced by Christian liberation theology, Zen, Alfred North Whitehead, Zhuangzi, and anarcho-individualism. Far more Stirner than Rand, but I admit that I am a mild Rand apologist.
Gave up atheism and became an agnostic in high school when I realized that people doing irrational things does not always mean bad stuff happens. This came to me because I decided it was ridiculous that my peers were complaining about having to study the material we were being taught while also standing quite willingly on the shoulders of those giants. What I missed was that it wasn't "willingly" after all; they just by-and-large could not see the bigger picture while I had uniquely intense problems with understanding the details.
By the time I graduated high school, I pretty much understood how religion could be useful for me personally -- I knew that it could offer structure, and a lens through which to analyze both the world and being itself -- but I had trouble matching that with any religious tradition. All the education in religion I'd really received was either philosophy explaining why religion was bad or a list of trivia facts from middle school social studies about "why Jains are sometimes vegetarian" (spoiler alert: what?) or "what Moslems [sic, per my textbook] think." I couldn't understand most of the scripture I tried to read other than the King James Bible which I enjoyed as a kid, so I tucked that away and continued my private readings in western philosophy. Big influences were Camus, Wittgenstein, and Gramsci.
In college I took a lot of LSD and had a lot of highly personal conversations about objectivity, mathematics, and egoism. Quite a few powerful experiences in and concerning "nature." I made some friends who shared my general outlook, but interestingly enough, every one of them was raised strictly Catholic. I was a History student, but I declared a minor, then a second major in Religious Studies in my sophomore year. Started going to temple and studying Ramakrishna, Aurobindo, and Vivekananda, while also rediscovering Christian thought through Anabaptism. Again, I was a History major in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania. It was hard to avoid and it's very interesting anyway.
I'm not going to discount the possibility that my later interest in Hinduism may have been prompted by a DK book about various deities and basic concepts which I checked out from my school library in second grade. Why they had that in specific, I don't know, but it was the only book on religion there that wasn't Christian and I was intrigued. I have no memory of any of the specific contents other than a very large image of Ganesha on the cover, but I remember reading it forwards and back and not wanting to return it. Super apropos and quite funny in the grand scheme of things that my first exposure to Hinduism was a Ganesha murti as a kid.
That's pretty much it.
Socialism and communism are used to avoid confronting the reality of human selfishness; they allow us to imagine ourselves as "naturally good" rather than just "naturally human."
I'm not really sure how "a powerful part of humanity is violently exploiting the rest" is somehow any implication that humans are "naturally" anything.
And religion-- the worst of them all-- is based in the fear of death, which is the ultimate fear of all people, and the eternity of nothingness and nonbeing that unavoidably and undeniably follows. Because religion is designed to avoid confronting humanity's greatest fear, it has proportionately required our greatest delusion. Religious people who feel the need to convert others subscribe to the majoritarian instinct that if they surround themselves with people who affirm their beliefs, they will feel more emboldened and righteous...
Doesn't seem like you're opposed to religion, here, because religion is by definition not "designed." You can make any argument you'd like about subconscious urge, but the institutions of humankind are what you are criticizing and they are not necessary for humans to continue using religion as vernacular philosophy, just as the majority of humankind has done for millennia. The "religion" you are upset about is a relatively new development in human history.
I have come to the conclusion that I simply cannot put up with belief systems that I consider to be willful self-delusions any longer.
Do you realize how self-contradictory this is?
