Religion Thread

With which religion do you identify?

  • Protestant Christianity

    Votes: 24 6.6%
  • Catholic Christianity

    Votes: 32 8.8%
  • Other Christianity

    Votes: 21 5.8%
  • Sunni Islam

    Votes: 39 10.7%
  • Shia Islam

    Votes: 2 0.5%
  • Other Islam

    Votes: 7 1.9%
  • Judaism

    Votes: 3 0.8%
  • Hinduism

    Votes: 2 0.5%
  • Jainism

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Sikhism

    Votes: 2 0.5%
  • Paganism

    Votes: 16 4.4%
  • Confucianism

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Shintoism

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Other Traditional Religion

    Votes: 1 0.3%
  • Pantheism

    Votes: 1 0.3%
  • Agnosticism

    Votes: 30 8.2%
  • Non-religious, but spirituality in some form.

    Votes: 17 4.7%
  • Atheism

    Votes: 119 32.7%
  • Other

    Votes: 10 2.7%
  • Taoism

    Votes: 1 0.3%
  • Buddhism

    Votes: 2 0.5%
  • Terrible at Werewolf

    Votes: 35 9.6%

  • Total voters
    364

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Mother tried to raise me a Catholic, father never cared. I never understood the point of religion - when I was 10 or 11 I asked my grandmother if the priest is actually believing what he is saying up there and if he's really praying when no one can hear him because, well, no one can hear him. Broke that poor woman's heart  :lol: - and since a got a good share of religious pricks who were pricks about being religious during my school years, I pretty much became an Agnostic the moment I actually started thinking about stuff like this. Let's say 14/15 something like that.
Over the years that changed towards Atheism.


There. Boring story and probably shared with a load of people on here.

-edit
Oh yeah, funnily enough, the first person who made me formulate an actual opinion on this matter was my religion teacher in 9th or 8th grade. Cool, open minded guy, helped me a lot with not losing all hope in humanity.
 
Oooh! We're doing personal religion time stories now?
Was raised in a non-religious family away from general society for most of my childhood. First home was a 40' catamaran my parents built, Tusitala, so my only real social contact outside the family was with the Yauchtie community, who tend to either be non-religious or alternatively religious. At around age eight due to my mothers deteriorating health we moved to a small rural 'town' called Miriwinni, essentially the equivalent of the U.S. deep south. My family was socially ostracized once it was discovered that we didn't attend church and although my father pulling some prominent church members drunken son out of the car he flipped into the river near our house stopped the outright verbal abuse at school my parents woodworking business still suffered from people avoiding working with my father under the assumption that he had "Abbo" blood in him.

After two years there my mum was finally diagnosed and we were forced to sell the house and move to a new town closer to hospitals and specialists. After town hopping through some rental properties we eventually ended up living in another small town far further south. It was here in my teenage years that I finally actually got exposed to religion in a meaningful way. In short, I fell in love with it.

I've always had a thing for fairy tales, I used to spend my sleepless nights as a child thinking them up, thinking on some mundane and everyday thing then creating a fanciful explanation for it. To this day I still keep notebooks around that I scribble stories into when I'm bored or needing to relax. And in religion I found the best fairy tales I'd ever read, I was fascinated by monotheistic religions in the same way that most people think of the old European polytheistic religions, it never crossed my mind to take them seriously, any more than I would stories about Zeus, Odin or Isis, but they were fascinating, a window into a past peoples minds and world. Between my lack of a religious upbringing, early scientific education and more than a little hostility to religious dogma based on prior experiences it never struck me as more than a flight of fancy.

However at the same time that I was falling into fascination with the tales and history of religion, I was also becoming more conscious of what role religion played in the world around me, the half learnt lessons of my childhood were getting hammered into reality with the perception of an older self. In time as my political views became more concrete I began to realize that although I found nothing wrong with people's personal beliefs, as much as I may disagree with them, that it was niave to think of them as nothing more than that. It became more and more obvious to me that not only did religious belief have a meaningful impact on the way the country and world that I lived in was run, but that it was in direct opposition to the things that I believed in.

I was raised to respect the disabled, believe in equality of gender and sexuality, to understand that a majority is not always fair and just, that numerical superiority does not make a person right, either factually or morally. Perhaps in a country where religion and religious groups played less of an active role in politics, or at least a less stringently conservative one, I would have ended up with a less hostile view towards organized religion, perhaps if I'd confronted less without a God I'd be more amicable to the claim that having religion is justified by it making the harder parts of life easier, perhaps if I'd heard one particular religions tales more than any others throughout my childhood I'd have been used to it enough not to question it seriously. But that's just not how things worked out.

TL;DR?
"Mum, teacher said that we should hate ******s because they're going to go to hell. What's a ******?"
"It's a mean word for a man who loves another man, like Simon."
"But I don't hate Simon."
 
I pretty much grew up as a "submarine christian", as my brother likes to call it; people who don't really care throughout the year but "resurface" for big evens like christmas and easter, as they please. so I was never much into strict faithfulness, it was just something of an aside. Around seventh grade people do the confirmation, and get some extra "classes" for it, where folks tell you how a service actually works and you gotta learn the declaration of faith and the lord's prayer by heart and what's the deal with the holy communion and whatnot. which I also just did because everyone did. after that I changed schools to a catholic one (not because it was christian, but because it offered a special class) which had a service every thursday, and that's the time when I acted the most christian that I ever had. Mainly I saw it as an interesting bit of culture and nice to be part of a community and have some spiritual support from it. and after school I just stopped caring again. :razz:
I hardly ever really cared for really believing much though, and there was never any discussion about science vs faith, for me it was clear that science explained the world and faith was mainly something made by humans for humans (like has been said, an explanation and vessel for stuff that wasn't understood and so on), same as with the bible.
[/wall of text]
 
Moss said:
Oooh! We're doing personal religion time stories now?
Was raised in a non-religious family away from general society for most of my childhood. First home was a 40' catamaran my parents built, Tusitala, so my only real social contact outside the family was with the Yauchtie community, who tend to either be non-religious or alternatively religious. At around age eight due to my mothers deteriorating health we moved to a small rural 'town' called Miriwinni, essentially the equivalent of the U.S. deep south. My family was socially ostracized once it was discovered that we didn't attend church and although my father pulling some prominent church members drunken son out of the car he flipped into the river near our house stopped the outright verbal abuse at school my parents woodworking business still suffered from people avoiding working with my father under the assumption that he had "Abbo" blood in him.

After two years there my mum was finally diagnosed and we were forced to sell the house and move to a new town closer to hospitals and specialists. After town hopping through some rental properties we eventually ended up living in another small town far further south. It was here in my teenage years that I finally actually got exposed to religion in a meaningful way. In short, I fell in love with it.

I've always had a thing for fairy tales, I used to spend my sleepless nights as a child thinking them up, thinking on some mundane and everyday thing then creating a fanciful explanation for it. To this day I still keep notebooks around that I scribble stories into when I'm bored or needing to relax. And in religion I found the best fairy tales I'd ever read, I was fascinated by monotheistic religions in the same way that most people think of the old European polytheistic religions, it never crossed my mind to take them seriously, any more than I would stories about Zeus, Odin or Isis, but they were fascinating, a window into a past peoples minds and world. Between my lack of a religious upbringing, early scientific education and more than a little hostility to religious dogma based on prior experiences it never struck me as more than a flight of fancy.

However at the same time that I was falling into fascination with the tales and history of religion, I was also becoming more conscious of what role religion played in the world around me, the half learnt lessons of my childhood were getting hammered into reality with the perception of an older self. In time as my political views became more concrete I began to realize that although I found nothing wrong with people's personal beliefs, as much as I may disagree with them, that it was niave to think of them as nothing more than that. It became more and more obvious to me that not only did religious belief have a meaningful impact on the way the country and world that I lived in was run, but that it was in direct opposition to the things that I believed in.

I was raised to respect the disabled, believe in equality of gender and sexuality, to understand that a majority is not always fair and just, that numerical superiority does not make a person right, either factually or morally. Perhaps in a country where religion and religious groups played less of an active role in politics, or at least a less stringently conservative one, I would have ended up with a less hostile view towards organized religion, perhaps if I'd confronted less without a God I'd be more amicable to the claim that having religion is justified by it making the harder parts of life easier, perhaps if I'd heard one particular religions tales more than any others throughout my childhood I'd have been used to it enough not to question it seriously. But that's just not how things worked out.

TL;DR?
"Mum, teacher said that we should hate ******s because they're going to go to hell. What's a ******?"
"It's a mean word for a man who loves another man, like Simon."
"But I don't hate Simon."
Pretty interesting =]
What is abbo blood anyway?
 
That is pretty awesome, should remember that one.

Kobrag said:
What is abbo blood anyway?
Derogative term for Aboriginal. Father's side of the family is half-Hungarian so he had curly hair and a broad nose. Being mistaken for any kind of ethnic minority in the deep north is bad enough, but there's no sin greater than being an "Abbo". Instant assumption that you're either lazy, a criminal or brain damaged from huffing petrol fumes. Lovely part of the country really.
 
Moss said:
That is pretty awesome, should remember that one.

Kobrag said:
What is abbo blood anyway?
Derogative term for Aboriginal. Father's side of the family is half-Hungarian so he had curly hair and a broad nose. Being mistaken for any kind of ethnic minority in the deep north is bad enough, but there's no sin greater than being an "Abbo". Instant assumption that you're either lazy, a criminal or brain damaged from huffing petrol fumes. Lovely part of the country really.
Why do the colonials have extreme stereotypes for racism?  Seriously.
It's like the UK planned to ship all the degenerates abroad. >.>
 
Master Unicorn said:
I feel like years from now science will be to the point that all religions seem silly like that.
It already does that.  :razz:

Also story; Raised by die-hard Muslim fanatics. Moved to the Netherlands. Mom mellowed out. I grew my own opinion on the matter.

Mom and sister are still religious. Sister not so much.
 
@ Ambalon - Pretty normal, I'd say. I was agnostic before I became agnostic-atheist.


Anyway, funny thing is, while most of my atheist friends were rebelling against religion and their parents, I was a dyed-in-the-wool kardecist, esoteric, and overall superstitious. I tore through spiritist books and acquired quite a lot of "knowledge" in that particular religion.

Then, when I turned 18, I started talking to one of my oldest friends, who is a very resolute atheist, about science, religion, everything. In the end, though he didn't "convert" me per se, he did spark in me a love of science and secular philosophy. In the end, my critical thinking started kicking in, and I started asking myself lots of questions, questions I did ask myself before, but was not entirely honest with myself about how I felt about them. I stopped going to the spiritist centre, and dropped the whole doctrine and dogma like a sack of bricks, but I was not quite ready to let go of the IDEA of god. That's the phase of my life I call my "agnostic" phase.

Finally, when I turned 19, I no longer believed in god, and broke it to my parents, who were pissed, but couldn't do ****, because they had always been liberal regarding my choices in life. Funny, half of my friends who were militant, rebellious atheists are now back in religion.

I can honestly say, becoming an atheist did change my life, and definitely for the better. I have a critical thinking I did not have before. I see things in a way I did not see before. I have a freedom I did not have before. No more useless guilt, no more pressure, no more feeling of worthlessness. It's great.

Some people are going to be pissed at me, but I've been to both sides, and religion, scratch that, belief per se, is a shackle that binds your mind. It makes you think in one direction, all the time. remember that game we all played as children, the one where you couldn't step in any line on the floor? Religion is like spending your whole life playing that game. Following a set of rules made to appease something that doesn't exist.
 
Wolfhead said:
@ Ambalon - Pretty normal, I'd say. I was agnostic before I became agnostic-atheist.
I was catholic, then agnostic atheist, then atheist, then agnostic theist, and now I really don't know if I'm a heathen or not. With an introspective look I think it's more of a wish to believe in something, though it faces logic and then... then I don't know.
 
Why is the idea of no god figure so scary? It's rather more fascinating how much more there to it than that.
 
Ambalon said:
I was catholic, then agnostic atheist, then atheist, then agnostic theist, and now I really don't know if I'm a heathen or not. With an introspective look I think it's more of a wish to believe in something, though it faces logic and then... then I don't know.
I know. There was a time where I couldn't bring myself to NOT believe in god, either.

With all due respect, and pardon me if I'm assuming, but I think it's less about what you do believe and more about what you want to believe.
 
Rams said:
Why is the idea of no god figure so scary? It's rather more fascinating how much more there to it than that.
Narcissism -> Thanatophobia

Wolfhead said:
With all due respect, and pardon me if I'm assuming, but I think it's less about what you do believe and more about what you want to believe.
Exactly. And that's why I'm religiously confused.
 
But if you're aware of that, then, um.. why are you fooling yourself?
 
Because the thought of the ending of my existence (and the uncertainty of what happens in the real world after) terrifies me.
 
Having certainty and grip over your life and your belief should overcome that fear.

Suppose it's a personal/human thing.
 
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