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Comment by suhastech | Hacker News Reader

This kind of thinking did happen to me when I tried to generate a consistent world view.

At this point, there are just too many contradictions, I'd rather forget and simply accept the absurd.

For example, being an atheist, I don't particularly believe in holidays myself. I do enjoy myself with my family even if it mean a few capitalists make a little more money during the season. On the whole, a meaningless event makes the whole world happy.

I'm of a fairly open religion (Hinduism). So, there aren't ardent rules you need to waste time with.

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I don't see the absurdity. You like having holidays because you find them fun. You're happy to go along with religious and/or relentlessly capitalistic holidays for the sake of expediency, because (as mentioned in the previous sentence) holidays are fun for you. There's not a single part of this that doesn't make sense.

I was referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism#cite_ref-6

Sorry, I am confused. You say you are atheist, and of a "fairly open religion". You probably mean that you grew up in that culture, right? Because, in my book, the set of atheists and the set of religious people (whatever the religion) have the empty set as intersection.

I'm not a religious person. Hinduism is supposedly not religion but a "way of life"[1]. I really don't want to get into to the specificity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinduism#cite_ref-Klostermaier_... [1]

If you assume it's a religion, try this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinduism (Ctrl/Cmd + F. "atheist")

By open I mean there is no rigid rule set or algorithm in my culture to obtain salvation or anything like that (going to temple is optional). You could simply say no. My parents didn't bother me after a while (My mum is an orthodox person). I do want to point out that being a "nasthik" (non-believer) is not encouraged, but ignored.

Off-topic note, by this token, Buddhism is even more in favor of atheism (at least more accepting, and several denominations are almost that without saying the word). It's a religion born out of Hinduism that tries to eliminate almost everything except acceptance, peace and meditation (that's an oversimplification, but it's rather accurate).

Err.. No. Buddhism is just a non-theistic religion. It's a religion without deities.

That's a roundabout way of saying it's agnostic. Which is very embracing of atheism, generally speaking.

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