I was raised Roman Catholic, but am feeling much better now.
I’m an atheist because religion describes our reality about as well as Flat Earthers describe the shape of our planet.
Same boat but I have heavily leaned towards science. And I think that leaning hard that way has kinda pushed me into being agnostic more than atheist. Have you had similar thoughts?
My faith corroded as my critical thinking skills developed. I’d consider myself a strong atheist on the Dawkins scale.
I haven’t seen anything that would nudge me off of my position towards agnosticism.
Pastafarian. I’ve preferred alfredo to marinara ever since I was a kid and loved pirates. I just knew that my colander had a sacred use: as a hat!
Buddhism. I first learned about it when someone was discussing whether it’s a religion or a way of life. They specifically mentioned that it doesn’t necessarily prevent you from being Christian (which I was) at the same time.
3 years later and I disagree with that statement, to a certain extent. You could choose to ignore the “supernatural” parts of Buddhism and just learn from the lessons. But I think the more you learn, the more it just kinda makes sense.
For instance, buddhist believe in “re-incarnation” but there’s a lot of debate about what that is. I prefer death and rebirth. Which I interpret as: I’m a different person than I was 10 years ago. The old me died and was reborn as what I am now.
Other things that I like about it: it is encouraged that you have skeptisicm about what you learn. I’m fact, you shouldn’t just accept it because without questioning what your being told, you can not come to a true understanding and belief. The lessons all revolve around how to be a better person. How to achieve nirvana through your thoughts, actions, views, etc. Many of the principles were first introduced when buddha was alive 2500 years ago. Today, psychology studies have shown that many of them really do have long lasting, extremely beneficial effects. Think meditation and mindfulness (not necessarily invented by Buddhism, but popularized by it)
For me it really resonates. A lot of the things I care about are discussed. From mental health to treating life with respect to the environment to forgiveness. I also don’t find much hipocracy.
Dude, I came here to write the same as you but you were faster and definitely wrote WAY better then I’m capable to do.
You put why Buddhism resonates with me into such good terms.
I think that interpretation (dying and being reborn as a new “you”) in particular resonates with me on both a physical and spirit/soul level. While there are fundamental parts of us that remain for long periods of time, our bodies are constantly breaking down and rebuilding themselves on a cellular level, and on a more personal level, our minds are constantly growing, changing, evolving, and forgetting as we learn and experience new things. I’m still not entirely sure what death as an experience will be like, but looking at it this way (the current or future “me” ending and taking on some new form) makes the most sense right now.
Mental health and personal growth-wise, I also really like the focus it has not on worshipping a certain being or beings, but about learning, understanding, and trying to be a good person. It makes things feel more… reachable, if that makes sense. More down-to-earth.
Strong atheist. Not only I believe there are no Gods, I think religions are bad for humanity and society as a whole.
With you on this.
I don’t think religion causes war, but I definitely think it’s used as an excuse to do unthinkable things to living, breathing and feeling people en masse, not to mention the damage to the planet and it’s other inhabitants. Like you say religion is used to control people, people are willing to die for their religion, willing to turn on their children or vice versa.
Though I do get that for some people it brings them hope, allows them to be part of a community and other benefits. And even though it also fuels pure hatred, bigotry and racism and gives people personal allowances to commit atrocities. I wouldn’t hold any negative feelings to those that do choose to take part in religion. Providing the religion stops before the evil starts, nothing too extreme, ya know. There’s a line but hard to say where it’s drawn.
To add to this the absolute worst thing religion does is try to force itself on others. Wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it was just kept to itself. But nope. Like the saying; religion is like a penis, it’s fine to have one, it’s fine to be proud of it. But if you start waving it around outside and start trying to push it down my throat, we’re going to have a problem!
Apatheism.
“Because God said so” sounds like a terrible rationale for morality to me. For that reason I do not think the existence of God is relevant to my life.
Dudeism. Regarding what led me to identify with it, well, you know. A lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous, and uhh… lost my train of thought there.
It really ties the room together.
Raised mormon, did the mission thing, moroni’s promise was bullshit so I switched to general christianity, realized that it’s just another brand of bullshit. Currently agnostic/atheist/who cares.
IF there’s a god, he’s not a fucking primate with a sphincter- humans are so freaking narcissistic to think the “ultimate” being of all time is just like them.
IF there’s a god, why would he be omniscient/omnipresent? You created this post, do you actively control how it interacts with people’s minds?
IF there’s a god, and he’s the christian idea of a god, he’s evil. No loving being would send their “children” to a test (omniscient, knowing the future) knowingly sending them to a place where the result would be them suffering for eternity.
IF there’s a god, their existence doesn’t answer the question of where we came from, what came before god? If your answer to this question is “god just always was” you’re an idiot who missed the point.
Currently none, I consider myself agnostic. Grew up protestant christian, left the church last year due to not identifying with its beliefs (and to save church tax). I have a casual interest in Buddhism, but don’t plan on actually converting.
None. My family and basically everyone in my rural hometown were on the spectrum from “quite” to “extremely” protestant Christian. None of it was compatible with my brain, none of it ever made sense at all. I’ve been areligious as long as I can remember and here’s hoping I never get a brain tumor, because I’m pretty sure that’s the only way I will ever become religious.
However, I’m a big fan of people retaining their full agency and that includes leaving people to believe whatever they want. I’m not at all militant and outside of the fact that a large percentage of the world’s religious population would probably want me dead or, at minimum, thinks I’m incapable of having any sense of morality, or thinks that my children should be indoctrinated, etc. etc. Other than all that kind of stuff, I really do not care what they believe. Unitarian Universalists seem pretty cool though.
At minimum, thinks I’m incapable of having any sense morality, or thinks that my children should be indoctrinated
Man, do I hate that with such a burning passion…
Like, the amount of times I’ve had to sit someone down and go “I’m not a decent human being because The Bible showed me to be or because my local priest told me I’d burn in Hell if I wasn’t, I’m a decent human being because my ma raised me to be–because her mom raised her to be that way, and so on. She never threatened me with fire and brimstone nor told me it’s what Jesus would have wanted, just that people ought to be kind to one another. God didn’t teach me manners and how to be kind to others, she did.” is unreal. How it’s so hard for people to grasp is beyond me
Also, the indocternation of children without thier consent makes my blood boil. It’s cool if they believe in Christ, Allah, Brahma, or none of the above…but that should be thier own choice, not something chosen for them. “Come freely of your own will” and all that. Because if you’re forced to love something for fear of punishment, is it really love?
NULL
I am an atheist.
Being raised under Christianity and having actually read the Bible like a book (as in just front to back like a novel; but boring) is what led me to it.
Some sort of humanist atheism/existentialism? I guess…
As a teenager and young adult, I used to be very interested in cosmology and astrophysics, to the point I wanted to study it at uni. The vastness of the world and existence seemed like a beautiful enigma. I was also always interested in philosophy, which ended up more lasting than my interest in physics.
After growing older, the vastness of nature and existence seemed more and more haunting than beautiful. If there was something like a God, it had to be a mad idiot god. I actually kind of sympathised with Gnosticism and similar thoughts for a while, but I could not believe in a metaphysical, perfect entity waiting even further behind everything. I could not believe in some sort of salvation, that could just come to us by giving up on materiality. It seemed like an empty self-delusion. Similarly, I respect Buddhism a lot, and think there is a lot of good ideas within it, but it’s ultimate life-nonaffirming philosophies and focus on avoidance of suffering did not resonate with me.
Looking at the history of our planet, our universe, and humanity, it seemed clear to me, that existence just stumbles along. We are a “mistake” in a vastness of empty, dumb, boring clouds of hydrogen and dust, nuclear furnaces and holes in reality, devoid of meaning. Life felt more and more to me, like a great rebellion against a vast, seemingly all-encompassing nothingness. No aliens in sight either, that could relieve us of our burden. Just humanity, as the one lifeform so far known to us, that at least has the potential to not fall into the traps of self-annihilation and lifelessnes that permeates our past and present. Just humanity with the responsibility of getting our shit together or life eventually being just reincorporated into the vast, dumb nothing of the “idiot god”, so to speak.
All the mistakes of humans felt to me more and more like just extensions of the same stupidity that is also manifest in all of nature. And our struggle against it, feels like a sort of “sacred duty”. Those loaded words to illustrate, that I’d think of myself as actually having strong faith in a weird way, even though it is not rooted in the supernatural as such.
It’s also evident to me, this faith has at least partially persisted for me as an anchor for myself. I have not been suicidal ever since I felt that way, even though for most of my life I have been struggling with trauma and a variety of mental health disorders, and have been suicidal before. I could not think of that anymore, suffering seemed almost meaningless to me, now, and it feels better to endure it than to give in to the vast nothingness without a fight, without trying to create as much good as possible in this small contingent miracle that is life, that has been brought forth by so much struggle and so many seemingly impossible coincidences, chance and “mistakes”.
I have a big aversion against beliefs that put faith into higher powers, be it nature or God or some sort of transdimensional aliens or whatever. I try to analyse beliefs like that not with disdain, though, but as results of how we are caught in the world we are, in our circumstances, and how life itself has had to “trick” existence itself into allowing life to exist, by follwing its rules but also emergently transcending them, creating something new from it, that is more than the sum of its parts.
Politically and philosophically it lead me to Marxism and Hegel respectively. Marxism with it’s focus on changing our material foundations and dynamics, in order for us to be able to develop our humanity and be able to act more rational in the grand scheme lends itself well to it. Hegel, with looking at the development of ideas and humanity dialectically, developing something until it reaches the limit of its own contradictions also appealed to me.
Sorry for the wall of text, the question caught me in a somber mood and caused me to monologue.
Thanks for the awesome wall though.
I’m finding it really interesting reading other people’s journey with this stuff, and I relate to the pain that working through it creates
Reformed Christian. I was raised in a Christian family, and always believed in the basic concepts of God, heaven, hell, etc. But I mistakenly thought Christianity was about trying to be “good enough” for God until my mid teens. Around this time I realised that I couldn’t be perfect, which was super distressing for a time. But then I read Ephesians 2:8-9 which says:
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.
This was a big relief, as it meant that I didn’t need to rely on trying to be good enough for God. I just needed to accept God’s free gift of salvation. That’s the moment I would say I became a Christian.
Since then, I’ve had times where I’ve questioned it all, but I always come back to the resurrection of Jesus. I find the non-miraculous explanations of the resurrection account to be so implausible that it makes more sense to accept that it’s a historical fact. And if the resurrection’s true, then it makes sense to believe the rest of it as well.
I have had bad experiences with Christianity personally such that it has left a permanent bad taste in my mouth, but it makes me happy to see people like you, who have found genuine solace in some of its teachings.
This seems like faulty logic to me. What other things in your life do you affirmatively believe “by default” just because their counter-arguments seem implausible to you? Doesn’t it make more sense to not hold belief in something until you have evidence supporting that belief?
It’s not so much that I believe it ‘by default’. Rather, when I’ve examined the historical case for the resurrection, the arguments that it really happened seem stronger than the arguments that it was a hoax, or a mass hallucination, or that he fainted etc.
I’m sorry if this comes off as rude or blunt, but here goes:
I am not aware of any evidence that resurrection is possible, or indeed that anything that could be called “supernatural” is real. Don’t you need to establish that before you can claim that arguments for a flipping resurrection seem strong? What am I missing here?
Atheist.
No arguments that I’ve heard for the existence of a deity have met their burden of proof. For some of these deities (the Abrahamic god, gods of most eastern religions, Zeus, Xenu), I actively assert they do not exist, while for others (e.g. a deistic god) I can’t honestly claim they don’t exist due to the lack of falsifiable claims involved, but I still don’t believe claims that they do exist.
I’m a Christian. I was raised Episcopalian, and still attend Episcopal services, but I have been a Unitarian (not Universalist) for a while. After a lot of thought and prayer and Pascal’s wagering I settled on mostly following Church doctrine and the scripture but departing from them where I feel they don’t makes sense.
