Asklemmy

Well, it's my opinion that religion/spirituality is nice, but unnecessary. It's a thing that can have benefits, sure. But it's also something that's got drawbacks. Since there can't be proof that any given one is correct, nor that it isn't tbh, it's essentially a matter of deciding if you want to hang your hat on one at all.

I get that you're seeking a sense of comfort, I didn't miss that part. But it may end up where you don't actually need it. See, you don't need a system to have individual beliefs about the afterlife.

We can freely believe that there is something more to us than flesh and bone. Call it a soul if you want, or call it anything else at all. But if you believe it exists, then believing that the soul leaving the body is going to free it of the worries and woes of life is just the natural follow-up belief. You can even phrase it in pseudoscientific terminology if that works for you, and it actually does for some people.

But, if you need religion for your own sake, I would definitely go looking into things like universal unitarian churches. They stay as dogma neutral as it gets, are almost always queer friendly (and by the basis of the official organization are supposed to be because they reject nobody).

Buddhism can be a fairly nice choice, but you do run into the difficulties of which branch is actually in your area, and they aren't all the same. Taoism can work because it's pretty damn generalized to begin with; but there's less "church" to it, where the community is a major part of things. Wicca and neopaganism are usually queer friendly, and a hell of a lot of fun,; though finding a group can be tricky since there's a hundred flavors available and they aren't all available everywhere since it's a small genre of religion compared to anything else.

My take though? You'd be best served by connecting with your local LGBTQ+ community first, and then exploring any religious/spirituality options as you go. Having that kind of directly personal community to be part of is way more in an impact in quality of life than a generic one like a church. But it does take more effort because there's no central "queer church" kind of thing where everyone is going to be there. It would be support groups, activist groups, queer specific hobby groups, and then you interact with that network to find queer friendly spaces in other areas of life if you don't find fulfillment in the LGBTQ community itself.

I don't think anyone out here can really know what you need. I sure can't promise that my suggestion is going to be right for you. All I can say is that for the LGBTQ people in my life, they generally find more peace through community first, religion as a secondary or tertiary goal. And that's usually most successful when they engage in queer spaces actively, being a part of supporting others.

But, shit, you ain't gotta decide any time soon. Just on lemmy, there's witchesvspatriarchy communities, Buddhism ones, and others. Run searches on whatever you want to look into, scroll through the communities that you find, see if the general vibe works for you and ask questions, engage with people. You get to "dabble" with low risk, and high rewards while you figure things out in meat space.

There's multiple "ask" communities. This one, there's !ask@lemm.ee, there's a no stupid questions community ( though I can't recall the instance offhand. It's probably .world, what with it being big). Most of them are going to be fairly reliable for getting general questions like this one answered, and some of them do well with specific questions as well, when you run across concepts to explore. But just searching "ask" will pull up some.

I think the core point is that there's a nigh infinite number of paths you can take to find what you need, you don't have worry much about just finding one. You can always just hop to a different one