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I am agnostic. My personal point of view is that if there some sort of all-powerful being(s) and they want something other than "don't be a jerk" out of me, I don't care enough to put effort into impress them.
I do love learning about other people's belief systems, though, as long as they don't try to prostelytize to me.
I used to be a pretty staunch atheist, but had an experience earlier in life that changed my perception. I spent months trying to find a scientific explanation for what I experienced, something within the realm of physics for it to make sense, but could not. Even today I try to debunk my own experience but I know that it happened and have somebody else who can confirm it as well. I can't ignore that evidence, but I also have no way to prove it to others so I make no effort to "convert" anybody to my way of thinking. Simply explain what happened and if you believe me cool, if not, also cool. We all have our own views.
I don't know the nature of the universe, I do know that we don't know a whole lot about the universe though. To me, the atheists that claim with certainty that there is nothing beyond the veil of our reality sound just as ignorant and stubborn as the orthodox priests of any major religion though. As a science minded person, you should always try to keep an open mind.
Today I would describe myself as a scientific pantheist, I guess, if we have to put labels on things. Which is to say that I believe that what we see as the universe is synonymous with what we think of as God. That science, mathematics, physics, etc are the languages in which "God" speaks to us.
No
I’m not religious but always thought of myself as very spiritual… which I think is just living on a deeper level. I feel like I have my own custom-made religion, and I can borrow here and there from different religions if I want to. I especially like Buddhism, but I’m sure every religion must have some nice things to say. But I prefer learning about life from science, especially psychology, it seems more accurate.
But lately I became accustomed with energy healing… and it’s making me wonder about life and my belief system. I started watching the Goop Lab on Netflix, which led to me wondering if there really are people with psychic powers, then I got curious about energy healing, tried it a few times and became convinced that no, it’s not just a placebo effect and it works from a distance. But it’s also not supported by science. It’s been boggling my mind for a few months… Then I start looking at what these people believe, these healers who practice energy healing. They all believe in an afterlife, in spirit guides, crystals, etc. I never believed in all that, I always looked to science for answers. So, do I believe in all this? I wouldn’t say that (yet), but it did make me wonder. My thinking was, if there really are people with psychic powers, wouldn’t they know more about life than I do? My thinking prior to this was more along the lines of I don’t know what happens after death. But I also thought, it seems like a cold, cruel world, so there probably isn’t anything after death. And you’re just alive for a while and then it’s over.
What’s interesting is that I started contemplating the way these energy healers and psychics make sense of the world, and I decided to sort of ‘try’ it. Because I like to learn about life and experiment. And, well, it does ‘feel’ better. Much, much better. I always thought, I don’t want to be delusional and I’m one to want to get in touch with reality. But now I’m kind of enjoying this new way of thinking mostly because it feels much better. It’s comforting, reassuring, it can really change how you feel about life and how you live it. So it’s been an interesting experiment.
Yep! I grew up nominally christian but actually pretty personally areligious, even with a long atheist phase, but in a pretty diverse religious upbringing both family and community-wise - mostly a mix of Unitarian Univeralism, Catholicism, and Judaism. I had a lot of anger at religion as a queer teenager from the south but thankfully ended up falling in with more positive ex-Christian interfaith groups and not the antitheist community, which led to a lot of open exploring down many different religious paths just to better understand and see what the fuss was all about, to where I am now, an animist polytheist with a pretty solitary practice. No pressure, just me and my own relationship with the world and the many kinds of persons, human and not, who inhabit it.
Yes, absolutely. Just not tied to any specific church or religion.
I used to be religious, became an atheist in my teens and now as an adult, I'm agnostic
I was born and raised Roman Catholic and attended Catholic schools up to college. I feel very disconnected from the religion because of how it upholds discriminatory views against gender minorities. There was also a lot of fear instilled in me when I was younger and I just grew out of it eventually. It didn't make sense that I would do good just because a higher being promised salvation when I die. There well also too many hypocrites around me who would go to church religiously but never practice the teachings from the priest.
I now try to make sense of life as I see it and I still practice spirituality through Tarot. It's brought me a lot of peace but I still struggle every now and then
I've found myself surrounded by a lot of spiritual people lately and I've used it as an excuse to try and get in touch with that side of myself. It's been a very interesting experience. There's a lot of it I still don't understand but a lot of it is just nice vibes? Like I don't ascribe any meaning to the moon or when I'm born or male and female sexual energies or being actually connected to the souls of anyone else but sometimes it's nice to recognize when things are just unexplainable by conventional means and to use a common language to recognize it. To speak in soft or uncertain terms as a way to acknowledge something you can't quite put your finger on, only to have it create a wonderful connecting conversation with another human is honestly kind of nice. And it makes approaching certain subjects a little bit more accessible because it's not rigorous and scientific but more human centered and amorphous.
i don’t have much to add, but just wanted to say i really like this comment. i think you captured my feelings towards spirituality as a non religious but curious person- there’s just soft nice feeling that can be hard to explain but definitely keeps me coming back to investigate more. being able to lighten up, and look at the world in a less rigorous, always science focused way is just nice.
No, I'm too gay lmao.
My "spirituality" is more just driven by my experiences with living, psychedelics, art, and science. Which is to say, I see myself as the atoms which comprise me, which will and actively are becoming other lifeforms (and viruses/prions) when my homeostasis is thrown off hard enough (cell death and the big death). I feel less like a "person" and more like a meat computer. Could be because I'm autistic and dissociate a lot from trauma/undiagnosed ADHD, but like, I do like the feeling of just "existing". I feel like one of countless experiences of the universe experiencing itself. I try to do what makes me happy, (art, gardening, video games, programming) which includes helping my community and surroundings to be healthy, happy, and free, as one person can manage to make it.
I can't always meet my own standards because I'm only one person. I still try to strive to do what I can.
Is anarchism a religion? Or is it faith in the inherent interconnectedness of nature? I think all creatures are better than we (human society) give them credit for. I don't feel anthropocentrism will get us anywhere. I believe we're more than the systems that control us (capitalist megamachine, fascism, racism, sexism, colonialism, ableism, speciesism, etc.). We, creatures of the earth, are no better or worse than anything or anyone else. And these specific bodies make us able to discuss and address inequality and injustice, and try to get as close to planetwide systemic homeostasis as possible. You are me are nature are gods are the universe. We'll meet again in a different context, as different creatures, as not quite the same set of atoms. But some of what comprises "us" (myself and anyone reading this) will be there, in the future, perhaps even in the same creature. I don't think there's an "afterlife" just a different ongoing thread of "life". I'm still terrified of dying of course, I'd like to keep this "system", this "body", alive as long as possible. But I'm a bit more ok with it than I used to be. And mourning my own death after being zooted out of my mind helped a bit.
TLDR "Ego death^TM^" to sound even more like a stereotypical stoner/psychedelics user lmao.
I grew up in a christian household. My larents even went to two seperat churches (one service on saturday, one of sunday). They were very uptight about what was acceptable and what was evil. For example pokemon, star wars, yu-gi-oh, dragonball and harry potter were all forbidden for me. In my teens i became an atheist and never went back. Even though i do not believe in anything super natural anymore, i came to enjoy talking about religion with people again eventually.
I was not raised religious and never went to Church. I had a period of time where I was interested in paganism and witchcraft, and I have sort of dabbled in getting back to that, but I think it is just not clicking for me right now.
I don't know if there is a divine being that exists and if it does, is it something humans can even comprehend? I do believe in luck and karma (or at least some basic form of 'you will harvest from the seeds you plant'). I don't seriously believe in a heaven and hell, but I do like to imagine my loved ones in a sort of heaven, just hanging out together happily.
I am not especially a fan of how religions have been used as a tool to oppress other people. I suspect the cruel people who use religion as their hammer would find anything other excuse to be terrible if they couldn't use religion though.
No.
I was expelled from Sunday school, I asked too many questions (faith is not about critical thinking).
Now it seems to me like faith/religion serves only one purpose - controling people. It doesn't matter on which historic period you look at it is always about politics and control.
No, not for me. My wife and I are both athiests, but she believes in spirits, some sort of afterlife where some are able to communicate with the living world (like mediums).
I'm very skeptical, and I'll reserve judgement until something can be proven.
I'm all for individual spirituality if it makes you happy and doesn't negatively influence your decision making process.
I have a problem when it makes people hurt others, or vote for those who would legislate hurting others.
No, but I used to be far more derisive of religion than I am now. My wife is Christian and speaks about how she finds God in the woods, the lakes, and the natural world around her, and I have come to view God less as a specific person or all-knowing entity and more as an embodied collection of feelings and thoughts that people have regarding justice, truth, and love. This helps me reconcile many kinds of spiritual beliefs with my own understanding of the universe as garnered by mathematical processes and the Earth as it is shaped by human hands.
Yes, kind of. However, I was raised Pentecostal and strictly conservative, and have lingering religious trauma that I'm working through. For a while (from my teens through my mid-twenties) I described myself as atheist. However, I got into witchcraft and the occult a few years ago as kind of a time-waster hobby, not really sincerely believing in it at first but just having fun with it, and that grew into learning about other religions and becoming genuinely curious about spirituality and religion. Now I'd describe myself as a Unitarian Universalist. I've still never been to a Unitarian Universalist church in-person because there's not one near me, but I attend online stuff occasionally and whole-heartedly love the way they do religion. And I feel welcomed there despite all of the things that would have gotten me dirty looks at any of the churches I grew up in. In terms of belief, I'd say I'm agnostic and I like to "put on" and "take off" beliefs (or "suspend disbelief"), which I got from doing chaos magic. I think magic and ritual helps me organize and make sense of my mind more than anything else... if anything, just having a meditation and journaling habit has helped my mental health, especially since i re-started those habits after starting my gender transition. And yeah, it also maybe helps with everything else gestures to the world at large...
And yeah, I just realized this is the most I've talked about my spirituality to anyone since going down this road. One of my big things is that my spirituality is a very personal thing and I keep it mostly to myself. Nothing against people who proselytize (I've come to understand and forgive people who sincerely believe they're saving my life by "ministering" to me, like some of my older relatives who genuinely care about me and who are probably happy to hear me say "yeah, I'm kind of getting into a church now") but I don't feel compelled to tell people about my shit because I definitely have no answers. That's my whole thing, I have no answers. I'm just kind of reading everything and trying everything, for no purpose other than to just understand people and myself a little better. And maybe it works for me, but I also know folks who definitely don't want or need religion and that is 1000% okay, and I hope I don't disturb them. So I only really speak of my stuff when people ask.
I am, very much, not religious. My father is Catholic, my mother doesn't go into her spirituality but it's not Christian. So I was taught about different things and given the choice to believe in what makes sense to me. If there's one way to describe what feels to me like what I imagine faith to be like to someone who's religious it would be the messages of hope and of passion for discovery and learning that Carl Sagan showed. The Pale Blue Dot speech is a sermon. It inspires me to be a better person and to try and be the change in the world that I want to see. But ultimately science doesn't know everything and at some point even with it you must make assumptions and have "faith" in the process.
As far as divinity goes, I've always struggled to believe. I just don't see the extraordinary evidence that would be required for me to say "Oh, that makes a divinity-free universe impossible". And by the same token it is impossible to prove that the universe was not crafted by some all powerful being last Thursday with all our billions of years of history baked in for us to pour through. So I figure, I'll find out on my last day and until then I'll just focus on being as good a person as I can be.
No. I am a person who bases beliefs on logic and reason. There is no logic or reason for religion or spirituality. I see it as a delusion based in the hopes and fears of a person, instead of reality that can be measured and quantified.
I don't begrudge others having such religious or spiritualistic beliefs, as long as it is kept within oneself. My main issues for religionists:
Sadly, I will die and decompose back to the universe with millions (or billions) of people who still want (and succeed in doing so) to make laws based on their specific religious ideals and brainwash children into it.
It literally hurts my entire being that religion has brainwashed billions of people. Generation after generation. It's sad that one brainwashed family indoctrinates their children. IMO: religion is a scourge on humanity. So many deaths in the name of one religion over another. Countless amounts of $$ stolen from those that gave cash/equivalent or slave labor.
What's more sad than religion based on thousands of years?
Seeing the insanity of cult behavior for following clearly ridiculous people like Donald Trump. The power of social media with misinformation, blatant propagada, etc....in addition to actual live news programs pushing the same inane, disgusting and pathetic shit is flabbergasting.
It may sound twisted....however, COVID, had the potential to unionize and solidify entire populations to join forces against a common enemy. I'm still in awe and disbelief as to how divided people became against the truth of science.
You know what the COVID episode demonstrated with 100% certainty?
Humanity will be extinct far sooner than people could possibly imagine from the apocalyptic level of damage caused be climate change. I truly wish people the best they can manage in the nearest future.