We live in an arguably dystopian world, often without community or purpose. Sacred Dissent is a philosophical and agnostic slash spiritual project created to gather together like-minded people to form a tight-knit community online, and perhaps one day in the real world as well.
Sacred Dissent aims to start several sub-projects and ventures that our members and followers find interesting or meaningful.
Our philosophy
The life philosophy of Sacred Dissent is realistically pessimistic, borrowing from Arthur Schopenhauer and stoicism, but also a bit of epicureanism. We don't think it's a contradiction to pursue moderate pleasure to cope with life, while also accepting suffering when it inevitably arrives. That's just the way of the world.
We agree with Schopenhauer in that human life is likely a mistake, but we are still stuck in this world. Thereby to combat boredom and purposelessness we also borrow from Friedrich Nietzsche, who suggested we should attempt to make our life a work of art. That is one reason why Sacred Dissent exists.
While, like Nietzsche suggests, some suffering can be used as fuel to achieve great things, Sacred Dissent is generally anti-suffering. We sympathize with concepts such as antinatalism, vegetarianism and the right to die. So although some suffering can be used, it and indeed life itself is ultimately unnecessary. The total elimination of suffering is unrealistic, but Sacredians should strive to alleviate suffering when reasonably possible, including their own.
Our spiritual beliefs
Spiritually Sacred Dissent is dystheistic or agnostic dystheistic, and aligns somewhat with Buddhism and Gnosticism without agreeing with their more specific spiritual teachings or solutions.
This basically means that some Sacredians believe there is a malevolent god, while others are agnostic but still believe that if there is a god, then he or it is likely at least partially malevolent.
Sacred Dissent proposes three possibilities regarding god. Either god is indifferent to our struggles and suffering, much like the god of deism, or god is at least partially malevolent and enjoys our suffering as well as the chaos and drama in the world, or god does not exist.
It is worth to note that if an indifferent god has the power to stop evil at no cost to himself, but watches it unfold without intervening, he is also evil. Perhaps not as bad as an openly malevolent god, but still evil nonetheless.