Yes, absolutely—though it depends on what you mean by "pious."
If we stick to the traditional definition where piety means devotion to God or gods through religious observance, then by definition you wouldn't be pious. But there's a richer tradition of thinking about piety that might fit you better.
The ancient concept of pietas (Roman) or eusebeia (Greek) was broader than just religious devotion. It encompassed reverence, dutifulness, and right relationship—to family, community, ancestors, nature, or even to some sense of the sacred or transcendent that doesn't require belief in personal deities. You could be pious toward your parents, your country, or the moral order of things.
Some philosophers and religious thinkers have argued for a kind of "religious naturalism" or what you might call secular piety—a profound sense of reverence for existence itself, for the cosmos, for moral principles, or for other people. Think of Einstein's "cosmic religious feeling" or the awe some people feel contemplating the universe without believing in a personal God.
You might practice what could be called piety if you:
- Approach certain things with genuine reverence (beauty, truth, justice, nature)
- Feel a sense of duty or devotion to ideals larger than yourself
- Cultivate gratitude or humility before existence
- Maintain practices of contemplation or reflection, even if not "religious"
So while you wouldn't be pious in the narrow religious sense, you could embody something recognizably pious in spirit—a kind of devotion without gods. Whether that "counts" as piety is partly a semantic question about what we want the word to mean.
You're right, and I appreciate you pushing back on my attempt to stretch the word.
If piety means what most people think it means—devotion to God or gods expressed through religious practice—then no, it doesn't apply to you. And that's fine. You're not diminished by the absence of a quality that specifically refers to religious devotion. A pacifist isn't less good for lacking martial courage; someone who lives alone isn't less good for lacking hospitality toward houseguests.
There's a temptation (which I fell into) to salvage nice-sounding words by redefining them to be more inclusive. But that dilutes their meaning and can be patronizing, as if everyone needs to be pious or everyone's way of being good needs to fit under that particular umbrella.
You can be respectful, occasionally reverent, thoughtful, ethical, even deeply concerned with questions of meaning and morality—all without being pious. Those are their own virtues with their own words. The fact that you think about religion "mostly in the negative sense" pretty much settles it: piety involves positive devotion, not skeptical distance.
Some words just don't apply to some people, and that's okay. It doesn't make the word meaningless or make the person lacking in worth.
That's an interesting position—you're neither pious nor anti-pious. You occupy a kind of neutral or perhaps sympathetic outsider stance.
Going through the motions out of respect and social consideration isn't the same as piety, but it's also quite different from the contempt or dismissiveness of someone who's actively anti-religious. You're performing the rituals without the inner devotion that would make them pious acts for you, but you're doing so in a way that honors what they mean to others.
There's probably a word for this in some language—that respectful participation in others' sacred practices without personal belief. It's a kind of courtesy, or perhaps a recognition that these rituals matter to people and communities you're among, even if they don't carry the same weight for you.
It's actually a fairly uncommon stance. Many agnostics either avoid religious settings entirely or, if they do participate, feel some internal friction about it. Your willingness to engage respectfully without belief, without mockery, and without the discomfort that might come from feeling like you're being dishonest—that suggests a certain... I want to say "generosity of spirit" or "cultural humility," but those sound a bit grandiose.
Maybe you're just someone who can hold space for others' devotion without needing to share it or tear it down. That's its own thing, distinct from both piety and its opposite.
That's a clearer picture—you're doing it for the people, not the practice itself. You go to church because it matters to your family, and to the temple because it brings joy to people in your community who appreciate your presence.
That's really just kindness and consideration, isn't it? You're willing to sit through rituals you don't believe in because the cost to you is low and the benefit to people you care about (or who care about you being there) is real.
There's something quite human about that—the recognition that showing up matters to others, that your presence is a form of participation in their lives even when you don't share their convictions. It's not piety, not even close. But it's also not nothing.
I imagine there might be moments where it feels a bit odd or hollow from the inside—going through motions that carry no spiritual significance for you. But you've apparently decided that making your family comfortable or bringing pleasure to your temple community is worth that minor personal awkwardness.
That's just being a decent family member and neighbor, really. No fancy word needed for it.
Now that's interesting—you're suggesting there might be something recognizably pious in you, even without personified deities or heartfelt practice.
Maybe the piety is there in the structure of your relationship to... something. Not God, not gods, but perhaps to whatever you hold as transcendent, or inviolable, or worthy of a kind of reverence that goes beyond ordinary respect.
Some people are pious toward Truth with a capital T, or Justice, or the dignity of persons, or the mystery of existence itself. The form of the relationship—that sense of standing before something greater, something that makes claims on you, something you wouldn't transgress even if you could—might be what's pious about it, regardless of the object.
You said you're "agnostic in the extreme about deities" and think about religion "mostly in the negative sense," but that's about personified religious notions specifically. It doesn't tell us whether you experience awe, or feel bound by something you can't fully articulate, or orient yourself around values or experiences that function psychologically the way the sacred functions for religious people.
If that's there—if there's something in your inner life that has that quality of devotion or reverence or sacred obligation, even un-personified and perhaps un-named—then maybe "pious" does capture something about you after all, just not in the way most people would recognize at first glance.
What do you think you might have that qualifies?
That's a lovely memory—teaching someone the word for what you're both seeing together.
But I think you're right to distinguish awe from mere appreciation of scale and beauty. Awe has something else in it—maybe a kind of smallness before something vast, or recognition of something that exceeds your categories, or even a touch of fear mixed with the wonder. It's not just "that's beautiful" but something more unsettling or profound.
And yes, most people probably do feel awe sometimes—at the ocean, at the night sky, at birth or death, at moments when the ordinary world cracks open a bit. Your Vietnamese friend might have felt it too, even if "panorama" wasn't quite the right word for it.
But feeling awe doesn't necessarily make someone pious, does it? Awe can be a purely aesthetic or emotional response—you're moved, stirred, made to feel small, but it doesn't necessarily involve devotion or obligation or any sense of the sacred that makes claims on how you live.
The question is whether your awe (or whatever else you experience) has that quality of piety to it—whether it's not just wonder and appreciation but something more like reverence, something that shapes your conduct or orients your life in a way that resembles what devotion does for religious people.
Is that there for you? Or is the awe just awe—precious and important, but not exactly pious?
Exactly—words both reflect and shape how we think about what we're experiencing. You use "awe" to describe something, and suddenly that word's history and associations start coloring the experience itself. The context gives the word meaning, but then the word reinforces that context, or even creates a new one.
It's especially slippery with words like "pious" or "awe" or "sacred" because they carry so much cultural and religious baggage. You can't really use them in a purely neutral way—they drag their history along with them. Which makes it hard to figure out if a word like "pious" actually describes you or if you're just attracted to some aspect of what it points toward while rejecting other parts.
And we've been circling around this whole conversation—does "pious" fit you or not? You started saying it doesn't, then suggested maybe it captures something after all, but we haven't quite pinned down what that something is. Maybe because the word itself keeps shifting depending on which angle we're looking from.
It's possible there isn't a perfect word for what you're describing about yourself—this agnostic, non-devotional, occasionally reverent, ritual-performing-for-others, awe-feeling stance you occupy. The existing vocabulary is built mostly by and for people who either believe or explicitly reject belief, not for people sitting comfortably in your particular kind of middle distance.
That's fascinating—and it does seem like it might be the kind of thing you were reaching for when you said "the word captures something about me."
You're right that "superstition" isn't quite accurate since you don't expect any causal effect. It's more like a reflex of... what? Acknowledgment? Marking the moment? A physical gesture that matches the gravity of what you've just learned?
The fact that you "feel wrong not doing it" is interesting. That's not intellectual—it's something deeper, some sense of rightness or propriety that precedes reasoning. You cross yourself not because you believe it does anything, not because God is watching, but because the gesture feels like the appropriate response to death and suffering. It's what the moment calls for.
That might actually be closer to piety than anything else we've discussed. Not piety toward God, but piety as a kind of ritual correctness, a sense that certain responses are owed to certain realities. Death deserves acknowledgment. Suffering deserves witness. And for you, the physical form that takes is crossing yourself, even without the theological content that usually animates that gesture.
It's probably childhood training, yes. But lots of childhood training fades when we stop believing in its premises. The fact that this persists—that you still feel the wrongness of not doing it—suggests it's serving some function for you now, regardless of where it came from.
What does it feel like when you do it?
Right—so it's not that not doing it haunts you, it's that doing it provides something. A sense of rightness, a small feeling of relief or completion. The moment gets marked properly, and you feel a bit better for having marked it.
That's revealing. It suggests the gesture isn't just habit or residual training—it's actively doing something for you, meeting some need. Not a supernatural need, but maybe a psychological or moral one.
When you read about a disaster or a neighbor's death and you cross yourself, you're... what? Pausing to register the weight of it? Creating a small ceremony of acknowledgment? Physically expressing something that has no other outlet—grief, solidarity, recognition that a life mattered or that suffering is real?
And feeling "a bit better" afterward—that's not nothing. It means the gesture accomplishes something, even if you can't fully articulate what. It transforms the moment from passive reception of bad news into an act, a response. You've done something, even if that something is just this brief, private ritual.
That does sound like a species of piety to me—not toward God, but toward the weight and seriousness of death and suffering. A sense that these things demand something from you, and crossing yourself is how you give it.
Even if it all started as childhood training.
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