I have a soft spot for the topic of people who are dual faith. It’s weird, you know. If you’re an atheist, you get a thumbs up from me. If you’re religious with one faith, you get a raised eyebrow from me. And if you are dual faith, you get two thumbs up from me. It just feels like you’re more open-minded if you are more than one faith.
I used to be, kinda.
The short version is that I found being Buddhist and Taoist didn’t interfere with each other, abs complemented each other in some ways.
The long version is that once I rejected christianity as a wee lad (seriously, the process started when I was in kindergarten, and finished when I was around 11), I started looking for other things that provided those answers and purposes.
Along the way, I dabbled in all the non Abrahamic religions to some degree or another.
It took me until my late thirties to decide that I’d looked all I really wanted to, and that I didn’t believe in any of it. There was plenty of stuff I enjoyed, and there’s good ideas in all of them, but at any point that faith is necessary, religion and me just don’t match.
I’m not capable of blind faith at all, and no religion offers proof of anything.
At that point, and into my early forties, I kinda decided that it was easier to have a religion for conversation purposes than not, so I picked the ones that I had held onto the most of, and that was Buddhism for day to day living, and Taoism for the woowoo stuff.
Eventually though, I stopped giving a fuck about anyone that would be annoying enough about religion that I would need to have a religion to shut them the fuck up. Once you’re disabled, in constant pain, and discover that taking the time to deal with that kind of person in a gentle way wastes your time, energy, and stamina, why the fuck bother with anything more than “yeah, I don’t do religion. Peace out.”?
That’s not to say I don’t still make use of religious concepts. From my days dabbling in wicca, neopaganism, candomble, and other religions that have gods or spirits, I still use archetypes like that as a useful way to organize thoughts, and I’ve never bothered to get rid of the adjustment I made to my language around oaths like “dear gods” instead of “dear god”. You grow up in the bible belt, and you’re gong to pick up excalamatories like “sweet Jesus”, and it isn’t worth the hassle of dropping them entirely, so I just switched them.
And I do still use a lot of Buddhist practices around meditation, and as a loose way of structuring a code of ethics. The 8 fold path is good enough for that use, though it’s extremely rare I’m willing to go deep enough into a conversation to need to reference it for someone. That’s as in “well, if you look up the 8fold path, most of my beliefs about how a healthy society should structure itself, and individuals should try to behave, can be explained using that as a framework for discussion, even though I don’t hold to it exactly or in detail”.
Taoism though, I just think it’s a fun way of looking at the woowoo side of things. I don’t believe it, but I enjoy it.
But one truth I discovered along the way, long before I actually admitted it to myself, is that I’ve never believed in any of it. I just wished something would be worth believing in, that maybe there’s a spiritual side of existence, that there’s a reason for all the ugliness of life. I wanted one of them to be real, even though I rejected the concept of the world as it is having an underlying reason at the same time I rejected christianity.
All the rest of it, that was just me in denial, kind of grieving the loss of an invisible constant that would make life fair. It just took my body falling apart for me to realize I had stopped grieving that, and now had something more important to grieve over.
Both Buddhism and Taoism have some really good aspects. I would say they are philosophies and not religions and probably not in the context of a “faith” for this post. (If someone else wants to consider Buddhism a religion, you go right ahead. I won’t argue but assume I silently disagree.)
I am absolutely atheist, but still having some guiding principles is still important. If a concept sounds good and seems like it has good intentions I’ll just add it to my collection, discarding any pointless rituals or “magic”.
Doing good things makes me feel good and I like feeling good. I say that it’s ok borrow from any ideology that has well intentioned principles.
I’ll add the disclaimer that the term “good” is subjective and I still had to learn what “good” means to me over the years. Buddhism and Taoism have always been aligned with the way I perceive life and are decent enough to extrapolate what the word “good” should mean.
Am I dual faith? No. If we ever get in a deep discussion about core ideals, there are going to be similar concepts I share with many religions, though.