What do you believe? (RELIGION THREAD. **NO BASHING**)

[Aksannyi]

Since we got into it a bit in the apocalypse-nope thread, I figured it might be interesting to see where people stand when it comes to religious belief/nonbelief.

THE RULES (to rule them all)

1. NO BASHING. You don't believe it, say that. You disagree, say that. You think it's stupid? DON'T SAY THAT.
2. Yeah, that one pretty much covers it. As this is a religion thread and those tend to be problematic in pretty much every corner of the internet, I think that's the one major thing to adhere to. I will say to TM or to any mod though that if this starts to spiral even a bit out of control, lock it, I won't be .

That said, religious belief varies a lot for everyone, and since I have always considered myself at least moderately spiritual, I thought this thread would be kind of interesting.



So to start, I was born/raised Catholic. To say that I don't really feel at home with the Catholic sect is an understatement, however. I've always felt that the church itself and the services are far too rigid. I've been to other churches where the services were a lot more laid back and I really enjoyed them. But that's not the only thing I dislike about Catholicism. Confession is the major thing I disagree strongly with. I don't think that I need a Priest to be my mediator for forgiveness between me and God. I feel like I should be able to pray privately, say my own personal apology, and that God will forgive me. And that doing a penance of ten rapidly spoken Hail Marys kind of just feels like lip service, to be honest.

I do not know if I fully believe that Christ is the son of God. We're all children of God, aren't we? Though I believe that there was something extremely powerful about him. I find it hard to suspend my disbelief about many of the things that were said/done by him that are written about in the Bible, though. I think that a lot of it is symbolic, and I still struggle to fully interpret everything I've learned about religion even after having gone to Catholic school from Kindergarten until 12th grade.

I differ from many Christians in that I believe strongly in spirituality. I've dabbled for many years in the Wiccan faith, which takes a much more balanced approach to a lot of things. I see divinity in all things and I feel that there are spirits and energies in this world that can be of great influence in our lives. I believe that God, as we see him, is actually a God and a Goddess, a yin and a yang, male and female, sun and moon. Everything in balance. I've always believed that finding my equilibrium results in the greatest peace. As such, I am often influenced by things that many Catholics would frown upon, such as chi energies (as in feng shui, which I spoke about a few weeks ago) and even some magicks, not what one would consider a "spell," necessarily, but I pray through meditation and I like to feel the world around me and believe that "God" is everywhere. This is a huge reason I don't often go to church - I don't feel as though I fit in there. Much of the Christian faith shuns belief in spiritual/pagan things that I do take meaning from. When people ask me my religion, I just say that I'm spiritual. There's no name for what I believe, and I'm not narcissistic enough to call it Juliaism.

Above all, I strive for balance. I believe there is some supreme being - or beings, as god and goddess are perhaps two beings, or maybe just one, I don't really know. I believe that there are spirits, and I believe that there are energies that flow through all things. I am not certain I believe in an afterlife. I feel like it's a great comfort to believe that there is something after all this earthly life, after all, what does it mean if there is nothing to strive for? However, I struggle to always believe that there is something after we die. I don't fear death, though, so I guess I must believe that there is something to this life and death cycle. I do not believe in rebirth/reincarnation, though, so this is our one shot.

It goes deeper than that and I'm sure a lot more could be written about this. But I don't think I need to write an entire book about my beliefs, if people have questions they are free to ask, and please, everyone, share.

[neighbortaru]

Re: What do you believe? (RELIGION THREAD. **NO BASHING**)

<- Atheist. Possibly pagan.

[Taskmage]

Re: What do you believe? (RELIGION THREAD. **NO BASHING**)

I am anti-theist in that I do not believe in an anthrocentric God who concerns himself with the minutiae of human existence or that any of the holy texts of the world's religions contain the Truth as handed down by God to man. It seems to me that there is no compelling reason to believe that such is true, and many reasons to object to such a theory. I'm not really interested in drilling down to specific arguments or debating anyone on the subject, just stating that from what I know and have heard, that scenario seems unlikely to me. I do believe, however, that the holy books are great repositories of wisdom, and much of value can be learned by examining their stories and values and contrasting them with our own thoughts. Stranger in a Strange Land is fiction, but I was able to learn a lot about myself in figuring out why I agreed and disagreed with certain characters and belief systems presented in the book. The great books have endured partially because they concern many central issues of human existence, and more perspectives on those things is always a good thing.

I do think that there probably is a God in that some omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent being inhabits the universe. I think if what we call consciousness can arise from the limited slice of existence we are made of it would be absurd to think that the immensity and complexity of the cosmos couldn't give rise to something similar though proportionally greater. I do not however believe in God as an entity that exists separately from creation, which was there before the beginning and will continue after the end. That's semantically impossible to me since I call the playing field in which everything exists the universe, so if God exists then He is in it by definition and so long as He exists then the universe hasn't met its boundary.

I am a monist, meaning that I believe everything that happens in the world, including human consciousness and inner experience is explainable by physical laws as opposed to some kind of transcendent, invisible property that inhabits certain objects that survives their destruction. I used to believe in such things, but as I learned more about the physical analogues of emotions and memories and personality in our nervous and endocrine systems, the construct of a soul became unnecessary to a model of how humans act the way they do and experience what they do, so I cut that belief away with Occam's Razor. That's not to say there isn't still much we don't understand or that things we would label as "magical" are impossible, after all much that we can do today would have seemed like sorcery to our great-grandparents, but I believe such things are discoverable and explainable, and that their explanations will lie in the physical world rather than a parallel spiritual one.

I believe that when we die, the only way we live on is in the consequences of our actions in life, the ideas we've introduced in the culture, and the memories of those who knew us. I think that a goal maximizing the positive influences of those three things is a more productive way to go through life than trying to maximize our chances of everlasting bliss. If I am wrong and somehow Heaven does exist as an eternal reward for the righteous, I'd like to think that my path would lead in that direction. As Marcus Aurelius said, "Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."

[Aksannyi]

Re: What do you believe? (RELIGION THREAD. **NO BASHING**)

As Marcus Aurelius said, "Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."

This is a very good quote. Thank you for posting that.

[Armando]

Re: What do you believe? (RELIGION THREAD. **NO BASHING**)

If there is a god and an afterlife I'd like to think there's more to it than going to heaven if you're been a decent person, hell if you've been wicked, and purgatory if you're been an asshole but you're not beyond redemption. Reincarnation seems like the most reasonable afterlife theory to me. You die, you're born again, probably under circumstances that'll make you atone for misdeeds in a past life and learn from past mistakes. I'm inclined to believe in the possibility of a god purely because science has yet to provide a complete explanation for the beginning of the universe, and if we evolved by pure chance I find it odd that (as far as we know) we're the only intelligent beings around.

But if there really is no god it's all the same to me. We don't need some divine being to give us purpose.

[Yellow Mage]

Re: What do you believe? (RELIGION THREAD. **NO BASHING**)

Funny that there's this thread now, since I was just discussing this last night with Armando.

I guess as a preface, I was raised Baptist, but only that specifically for a brief period of time (there was this whole thing about moving around the Southeast a lot that made sticking to specific churches a bit difficult, though at one point there was this really cool one in Charlotte that assembled early Sunday in a[n otherwise closed at that time] movie theater of all places, which was a mind-expanding experience in and of itself, but I digress). And really, it's darn-near impossible to keep track of all those denominations, so I would later go on to just say "Protestant" and leave it at that.

Oh, right, the preface. Two things that I was taught that I really held on to was to never abandon my faith (which is a teaching some might find objectionable, but this is going somewhere good), and (naturally) the so-called "golden rule" of "do unto others as you would have them do to you." Those two tenets interacting had what was probably an unfavorable reaction for my outlook on churches in general, for if my character is weak enough for me to not be loyal to my own faith, then what does that say about any other religious convert, even if they had converted to Christianity? The summary of this is that I find religious conversion in general to be disgusting and contemptible, with the only possible exception being if you found your new faith through your own reason and/or afflatus alone (and those cases tend to be few and far between).

The Christian faith provides mostly the framework, or perhaps foundation, of my own personal beliefs. However, what I've derived from it, what I can roughly state to be the core of my beliefs, is that God is a being of love first and foremost, and that everything follows from that in something of a logical sense (and I mean everything, so I reserve the right to edit this post later concerning my view of any subjects which I may have forgotten about). For instance, to know love is to know God, which would humorously explain why both are notoriously difficult from a strictly scientific and empirical perspective. (Side note, I've yet to find any reason to doubt Ray Bradbury when he noted in The Martian Chronicles that God has quite a sense of humor.)

----

On the recent (and therefore obvious) subject of the rapture and judgment, I first of all defer to the canon that mankind cannot know when such an event will occur, and that it will happen when we least expect it. Actually, to de-rail from that subject for a bit, I don't believe that man could possibly comprehend anything on the level of God. To try to hold God to human standards of thought in general is therefore silly to me. I'll elaborate if need be, but for now I'll just try to make the analogy that even mathematics starts looking wonky when you start bringing stuff to infinity.

On to judgment. Again, if you apply that God is love, the implications that follow are fairly obvious: that those who lead loving lives certainly have a place in Kingdom Come. This also reserves any Hell for only those who have lost their way enough to lead evil lives contrary to the purpose of love, through attempting to smother it and/or spreading hate. This does, of course, leave room for the likes of Hitler, bin Laden, and Fred Phelps. I feel the majority of people quite simply don't qualify for eternal damnation, even if they had adopted tasteless habits. Everyone's a sinner, after all, but to pull an analogy from canon, only a third of Heaven's angels actually defected against God.

Furthermore, I do not belive that "if you don't believe exactly the same things I do, you're screwed!". Different people are different, and you're going to pull the human fallacy of assuming that God hasn't accounted for this? Under those sets of beliefs, I don't think I'd see any of my friends in Heaven, which would really cheapen it something fierce. This has inspired a joke of "Post-apocalyptic party in Hell, who's with me?!," but I'm more inclined to think that my friends (just for example) would be accounted for somehow. All of them would be a much better fit in Heaven than in Hell, as far as I see; otherwise they wouldn't be my friends.

Moreover, on the subject of Hell itself, I believe it to be mostly a self-inflicted punishment, rather than something you accidentally stumble in to as is popularly believed. I mean, what else can you say about people who've lost their way so much that giving others hell-on-earth starts becoming their thing? Do unto others, after all . . .

tl;dr: No, you're not going to Hell. Not unless you really freaking deserve it anyway.

----

To touch on a few other subjects:

Spirituality . . . not to sound braggy or anything, but I'm probably one of the most spiritual people I know. And I don't even attend church. I mean, God and love is everywhere and all-powerful (verb tense intentional). My beliefs having high spirituality kind of follows from that, I suppose. Not sure how I can give more detail than that. I am fairly similar to Aks in this regard, though, in that I tend to adopt the spiritual beliefs of others from time to time, though I also tend to accompany it with a prayer to God to make any practices feel more sanctified under my beliefs. As far as I see, if it's done for love, it's done for God.

Concerning the "gender" of God . . . well, I'm one of those people who started looking at the so-called "gender binary" with a skeptical eye, and saw a system that's shaky at best, horribly flawed at worst. So, now that I've explained where I'm coming from, it then follows that God doesn't really have much of a gender. Occasionally I still use "God Himself," but mostly out of habit more than any serious gender beliefs (such as when atheists nevertheless use God's name in vain; probably even moreso in vain, come to think about it, considering it's, well, atheism).

Concerning the earthly life and "why are we here?" That I can never claim to know the answer to. I'm pretty sure that there has to be *something* worthwhile to be had here, and as far as I know, God wants us to make the most of it. So, Carpe Diem!

On the Bible, I always found it flawed to call it the "Word of God." More accurately, it really is more like "A Written Record of Mankind's Experiences with God." My two gil.

On SCIENCE! I think a Chemistry teacher I had in high school said it the best when she said that the more she learned about the world, the firmer her belief that it was God who created such a beautiful, intricate order of things. (And also the firmer her belief that said God was female, since she didn't think any male could possibly organize much more than a mess, but I digress. She was a pretty awesome, albeit rough teacher, all things considered.) Honestly, I have more beef with anti-intellectuals who think that God and science are mutually exclusive--they cause me to double facepalm and say "Just shut up already, you're making the rest of us look bad!"

On "how can evil co-exist with a loving God," I simply defer to the argument that it comes with the abuse of free will, and that God went with the least of all evils in this regard.

----

I know a lot of this post is "tl;dr" already, but as I mentioned earlier, I may add to it later if I feel the need for it. I can't see how I could possibly summarize most of it without going back to my core. So, in light of that . . .

tl;dr: God is love. No, seriously.

[Taskmage]

Re: What do you believe? (RELIGION THREAD. **NO BASHING**)

a[n otherwise closed at that time] movie theater

Still reading, just wanted to note that this nested parenthetical and split article make me wince and grin at the same time.

[Armando]

Re: What do you believe? (RELIGION THREAD. **NO BASHING**)

Grain?

[Taskmage]

Re: What do you believe? (RELIGION THREAD. **NO BASHING**)

/sigh and "make be wince" but neither one got highlighted by spellcheck, naturally.

[Ketaru]

Re: What do you believe? (RELIGION THREAD. **NO BASHING**)

I am a monist, meaning that I believe everything that happens in the world, including human consciousness and inner experience is explainable by physical laws as opposed to some kind of transcendent, invisible property that inhabits certain objects that survives their destruction. I used to believe in such things, but as I learned more about the physical analogues of emotions and memories and personality in our nervous and endocrine systems, the construct of a soul became unnecessary to a model of how humans act the way they do and experience what they do, so I cut that belief away with Occam's Razor. That's not to say there isn't still much we don't understand or that things we would label as "magical" are impossible, after all much that we can do today would have seemed like sorcery to our great-grandparents, but I believe such things are discoverable and explainable, and that their explanations will lie in the physical world rather than a parallel spiritual one.

That pretty much sums up my view of the world.

I was raised in a Buddhist family but went to school primarily with Christian peers. I don't think religious people are illogical because I think people who are religious use their religion as a frame to understand the world, else it would seem illogical to them. But that frame they use only makes the world seem illogical when I use it. I think every event that is thought to be a miracle has a scientific, logical rationale behind it. As many of you also know, there is also a personal characteristic of me that is very divisive when looked at from a religious angle. For that reason alone, many of the things religious people say about the issue don't seem to ring true to my life. And for that alone, I have very good reason to question the religion.

People are even taught to guard themselves from false prophets. But that so many religions in the world exist (some existing long before Christianity) only lends to the fact that nobody can really know. I mean, maybe the Ancient Greeks were right all along! This is probably the biggest reason it's difficult for me to accept religion.

There's a lot of weather related disasters making headlines as of late. Some may think this is all a test and a warning to our country to turn back to traditional roots. Alternatively, however, I could just easily say this is the product of man-made climate change. Some people talk about God's love and his test for us in this lifetime. But no loving God would do this. And nothing could convince me that such disasters are ultimately a good thing. Heck, we're finding out this universe is bigger than we know and, when you think about it, our problems don't amount to anything in the grand scheme of things. In a sort of twisted way, that's actually kind of comforting to know.

I know it seems like I'm picking on Christiniaty in this post, but the fact is it is the dominant religion in this country. A family friend tried to convert me to Christianity. I could've told her that I feel God's love every day and that I believe Christ died for my sins. But I would've been lying. She told my father, as he was dying from cancer, that if he does not accept God, he will go to hell. My dad worked 8 shifts every week and went years without a vacation. He worked over night and did his best for me and our family. He was loved by everybody we knew. That somebody like him could be spending the rest of eternity in hell isn't just not logical. It is just not right.

I go to work every day and feel that I make a positive impact on the people I serve. I go home after a hard day and look in the mirror and say to myself that I did my best and did not do anything to intentionally harm another person. To me, that ought to be all we ask of anybody.

NO BASHING. You don't believe it, say that. You disagree, say that. You think it's stupid? DON'T SAY THAT.

Honestly, I really doubt we'll see this on this forum. If you want to look for bashing and outright disrespect, you'd be better off on, say, Allakhazam.

[Malacite]

Re: What do you believe? (RELIGION THREAD. **NO BASHING**)

But.. but BASHING!!!



Nah but seriously though I'm agnostic. I don't believe in any religions because I view them as man-made explanations, most created thousands of years ago when man didn't know what a germ or an atom was (to paraphrase Bill Maher). And with no hard evidence that can be felt with any of my senses, well it's rather hard to believe. Besides that a lot of religions were either created from a mixing of traiditons from older religions, or have fundamental misunderstandings of their own faith (Christianity for example - Jews know more about it than Christians do.)


However, there are some things you just can't explain. Call it luck, chance, or whatever you like but it just feels at times as though there is some higher power at work. People too, are so radically different from one another that I'm not so sure that's only because of differences in our bio-chemical makeup - I do think there is such a thing as a soul, and consider myself to be fairly spiritual. I just have a more realistic grounding and prefer to put my faith more in science with most things.


But until science can explain with absolute, 100% certainty how the universe came to be (along with other mysteries of the universe) and provide definitive proof that there is no God etc. etc. then I'll remain agnostic. It just feels like the only logical middle-ground since neither "side" can wholly discredit the other.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: What do you believe? (RELIGION THREAD. **NO BASHING**)

I have my faith and that's pretty much that. I did initially get pulled in by what I thought was a fire-and-brimstone sermon, but I was just a stressed little boy looking to belong somewhere at the time. The preacher was not really the fire-and-brimstone type, I was just too young to look beyond the theatrics at his bigger point which was not "you're going to hell if you don't believe."

But as I grew up and learned from others and had various big problems thrown at me, I feel I came to an understanding of what God was really about through my friends in high school.

Over time I've found I don't like most churches I visit, particularly the ones that seem terribly concerned about getting people out of church in a timely fashion. I live down the street from the massive church I grew up with. Its nice for its track and fitness areas, but I don't visit for much else. My parents have tried to get me to go back, as has my sister, but a church running like a well-oiled machine just has felt fake to me ever since college.

There was a church that was just about the praise and worship and the sermon was really just a precursor to another praise and worship that happened to be called a "benediction." Sometimes we got out at 12 sometimes 2 or 3pm. It was the short of church that would make the old ladies at my old church mad because they didn't get out to go the K&W in a timely fashion.

Of course, this particular church was run by preacher that used to be in a rock band, so that might have had a lot to do with it. I liked it though.

I don't go around parading what I believe, I just approach others how I'd want to be treated and that's pretty much that. I'm not uncomfortable with people with different lives and viewpoints and don't lose sleep over those differences. I only have a problem when people start getting snotty or start imposing what other should believe about something.

We used to have this old coot of a preacher come to our college campus and it was all he'd ever do was tell people they were going to hell for any reason he could dream up. Guys with long hair, women wearing pants, people with beards. Kinda makes you wonder what he'd say to Jesus, considering he likely had long hair, didn't wear pants, but did wear a robe, and had a beard. At least, I'm just going by the mock-ups we have, mind you.

Best part of that was this timid young girl approaching him and saying "Sir, you make me embarrassed to be a Christian" There was an applause in the court for that.

Then there was the Atheist with a Bible pretty much countering everything the preacher said with scripture and showing the preacher to be a terrible Christian more than making a case for Atheism.

Best. Atheist. Ever. By the way.

All that aside, I do read up on other religions, deities and such, as it often has relevance to my hobbies. Religions have touched and formed lots of parts of our cultures, from music, art, theater and even math and science. I think its important to know something of them and foolish to pan it all as something we should do away with.

Mostly because if we didn't have it, we wouldn't really have that much.

[Ketaru]

Re: What do you believe? (RELIGION THREAD. **NO BASHING**)

I don't go around parading what I believe, I just approach others how I'd want to be treated and that's pretty much that. I'm not uncomfortable with people with different lives and viewpoints and don't lose sleep over those differences. I only have a problem when people start getting snotty or start imposing what other should believe about something.

That's really all there is to it. I think people can accept religion on their own terms. Some feel that it is God's calling to spread the word. But I think, in most cases, people who genuinely believe come to do so from a experience they had that they believe to have been spiritual in nature.

I don't think any amount of goading and encouragement from an outside source is going to make somebody believe more.

[Raydeus]

Re: What do you believe? (RELIGION THREAD. **NO BASHING**)

You will all be judged by Gary.

[Murphie]

Re: What do you believe? (RELIGION THREAD. **NO BASHING**)

Humanist.