this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I have no religion. I have no real spiritual belief. The little bit of "supernatural" I ""believe in"" is conjecture beyond the bounds of the universe, and are more like "ya I think this is my best answer for things" or "what if?" rather than an actual belief.

Within the bounds of the universe, I generally subscribe to scientific consensus, I'm not nearly smart enough to really argue against people who've spent their careers building upon the theories of those before them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Buddhism. Was raised Christian and my parents forced me to continue going to church even when things started to not make sense in early high school. Went from "You must go to church with us," to "You must go to church SOMEWHERE."

In college, I considered Islam, Taoism, and Buddhism but nothing stuck so I stayed with what was familiar. Finally came back to Buddhism a couple years ago and was like "Yep. This is it." To me, Christianity is a constant moving target that will never be reached in terms of what you're supposed to do and not to and it will generally always be your fault when bad things happen because reasons. It's something you have to carry with you your whole life.

When I first really started learning about Buddhism and learned that it's like a raft that you use to get yourself across the river and you out it down when you don't need it anymore, I was like YES PLEASE SOMETHING ATTAINABLE, EMPOWERING, AND MAKES SENSE.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I had been going to Sunday School for a year or so and frankly the whole religion thing didn't make any real sense to me in explaining the world around us, humanity, higher powers, or anything. It was a lot of 'trust us' with no substance. So, I told my mum that I didn't want to go to church anymore and she said 'ok' - and we never did again.

I was four (almost five) BTW. At no time in the subsequent 50-odd years have I ever had any doubts about my atheism.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm mostly atheist, bluntly, if a god, in whatever form you believe in one, exists, then either they don't care about humans at all, or will not help humans for any reason. To that end, my opinion is that whether or not a god exists, it doesn't matter, so I will proceed as though there is no God and make the best choices I can regardless.

I got to this point by making an objective examination of the available religions, which, almost all of them say that their God is the one true God, and all others are false; which obviously cannot be true. If all religions say that all other religions follow false gods then the majority of people/religions believe your God is a false one, which logically leads me to the conclusion that none of the gods exist, or at the very least it is impossible to know which is actually correct.

With no physical evidence for or against any religion, there's no tiebreaker... Therefore it is impossible to know, and without a way to isolate which may be correct, and effectively zero comment from God itself, then there is no correct decision, so I won't subscribe to any belief system that has no basis, beyond essentially a book of stories, to exist.

If God did exist, with all the false religion that exists (assuming one religion is correct), it would be logical to provide some way for humans to determine which one to follow beyond blind faith in a book of stores; this causes me to believe that if a god exists, they don't care what you believe, aka, there is no "correct" or "true" religion in God's eyes. But it's equally possible that no God exists at all.

All of this circles around the fact that, knowing whether God exists, and/or knowing what God wants you to believe, is impossible to know at best.

Therefore, QED, religion is inconsequential, belief in God is irrelevant, and believing in such things is, at best, superstition.

So instead, I behave the same or similar to an atheist. I'm more agnostic, but bluntly, I'd rather proceed in the same way as if I had no belief than allowing for the toxic mind virus of religion to be given any quarter. Frankly, religion has done, and continues to do so much evil in the world, that at this point humanity would do well to abolish religion. Societal progress and science especially has been set back years or decades, several times because of the influence from religion and it's followers; and society continues to be negatively impacted by religious zealots. IMO, it has no place in modern society, and hasn't had a place in society that serves any practical purpose for hundreds of years.

Religion is only holding us back at this point.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Wouldn't exactly say "Religion has done, and continues to do, so much evil in the world" because that's like saying if you leave your gun unsupervised, it (the gun itself) is going to go on a killing spree. The problem is people using religion as a cover to do attrocius things. It's always been people; some of us kinda suck, frankly. Religion itself isn't a problem, when one understands that no one religion has remained unaltered from whatever original message it started with (which, I'm not gonna pretend was perfect or anything, unless it was firmly "people ought to be kind and love one another regardless of their differences", but just saying, there wasn't originally a concept of Hell as a place of suffering and damnation in any of the Abrahamic Religions, not even Judaism as far as I remember--that came from outside beliefs and got added in later by people who NEEDED it to be that way for whatever reason).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Christian. I have been a non-practising Christian for all my life until my wife and I was through some personal events. And since have I been attending church regularly.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Was Secular Humanist atheist 1998-2013 until converting to moderate Sunni Hanafi Islam to date law abiding london pakistanis. I quit alcohol 2006 and was straight edge before so very against intoxication. racist parents repeatedly tried to force me into according to northwell south oaks "incest" arranged marriages with uneducated feminists I have nothing in common with as an engineer.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How did you cope with converting to be with someone? Recently I met someone with whom my values were profoundly different (I'm of an Atheistic religion and she was a fundamentalist Christian). This ultimately played a big part in why it didn't work in addition to other stuff, but I tried to distance myself with my religion to appease her (this also bothered her because she wanted me to change, but felt bad about wanting that).

It didn't feel right though and I failed to truly distance myself from it. My religion was not arbitrarily aquired, and was thus hard to disregard emotionally and cognitively

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Currently I'm non-religious, agnostic, and spiritual in some sense. I was raised Christian, but broke away in my early teen years, mostly due to rhetoric I was hearing from Sunday school and the Church back when I was forced to attend. It also didn't help that my folks are biblical literalists. I was ridiculed quite a lot by my family for being an atheist. I left atheism some years, I had closed myself off to any spiritual or religious, but I thought to myself that it didn't have to be that way.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Raised Catholic. Am now a Deistic Agnostic.

Dunno whether there's a higher power for sure, probably won't know until I'm in the ground.

But if there is (and I swing more in the "yes" catagory than "no"), I choose to believe he made us like an artist makes his paintings or a clockmaker his watches: complete, with some imperfections, and (mostly) has left us alone to do our own thing. And the best way to know the creator? Through his works, basically by looking at the world and its wonders.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Grew up evangelical. Now I’m not “religious” but am “Christ leaning.” Like, I appreciate the idea of Christ and hope that whatever higher being there might be has some Christlike qualities.

I don’t know. I doubt. I hope. I do shrooms. I’m confident there is more to existence than we know. I hope to leave a legacy of kindness. I like to learn and experience as much as I can. Love wins and transcends. I think enjoying the universe is method of worship. All that shit. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Also, when I was religious I was an amillenial partial preterist which pissed off a lot of bible thumpers in my region. Felt kind of punk to adopt those beliefs. That Left Behind shit is weird and never helped anyone.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

amillenial partial preterist

I have no idea what this means but I'm curious. Care to elaborate?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Nondualism. I looked in direct experience.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Born and raised Muslim, but I think I'm somewhere between that and agnostic now? As a kid I was raised to be extremely religious, then leaned heavily towards hard atheism as a teenager/young adult, but nowadays I just don't find myself thinking about religion or the presence of a higher being. I don't necessarily believe that it doesn't exist, but I don't necessarily believe it does either, if that makes sense.

It gets a little more complicated since my family and community is Arab, and our particular form of Arabic culture is very closely intertwined with the religion, it oftentimes feels like you can't have one without the other. It gets hard to pick and choose which parts of Islam I want to participate in (especially considering there's a lot in Islam that I don't agree with) and still consider myself a "good" Arab. Hell, at that point can I really even call myself a Muslim? Who knows. But in my eyes religiousness is a spectrum, and I move up and down that spectrum a lot, and I think I'm okay with that.

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