What is your faith/religion?

[email protected]

Who is responsible for birth defects?

Biology, genetics and environmental causes. And poor judgment from the parents. So, it depends.

For natural disaster?

I guess... physics, primordially? Followed by stuborness, shortsightness and stupidity of humans?

For sickness?

Virus, bacteria, exposure, malnourishment, and others?

These things aren't choices [...]

A good part is outside our capability to act upon, I will gladly grant you that. But there are parts where we can in fact influence the outcome.

[...] and we aren't responsible for them, [...]

The moment any individual realizes something shoul not be in such a way, that individual can take responsibility to avoid or mitigate it.

[...] they happen because god created a cruel world for us to suffer and die in. God created the dumpster and threw us in.

At best, reality is indeferent to what happens to an individual, a species, a planet, a star system or even a galaxy.

We have been setting our course in reality from the moment we achieved sentience and consciousness. We find things cruel, unfair, whatever, because they do not favour us.
We're owed nothing for existing. We take a debt towards each other in helping exist in such reality.

There are no gods nor higher powers to shift blame here. We're here, now, and we have to deal with it. We can choose to try to make this world better for others or allow it to follow its own devises or even actively make it worse.

Individual agency. The stage is set: write and enact your own play.

[email protected]

Biology, genetics and environmental causes.

And... who made those?

I guess… physics, primordially?

And who made that!?

We’re owed nothing for existing.

We are, actually. We didn't ask to exist. It was forced onto us by a cruel god that thought it would be neat to make humans.

If we think back to the dumpster baby, god created a child and threw them in a dumpster. For fun. It doesn't get to wash its hands and say "I don't owe them anything, it's up to them to survive." It's still responsible for creation and it is derelict in its duty.

[email protected]

Eh. I could care less about downvotes and I understand that the idea of practicing Christianity for reasons beyond personal faith in it is going to be controversial to Christians and atheists alike. If someone made a chill Atheist/agnostic "church" where there was singing and discussions on moral philosophy, and a community of people devoted to helping each other and their community I'd probably be doing that but as it stands religion is the only game in town for such things and I think that it's good to do something like this. Plus I don't know, it's kind of cool to be a part of rituals people have been doing for thousands of years.

[email protected]

My true faith is: don't be an asshole and be a decent, rational and empathetic human being.

Everything else I may or may not believe does not matter, it's decoration.

[email protected]

Raised non-denominational Christian to Agnostic to Gnostic-curious.

[email protected]

We are, actually. We didn't ask to exist. It was forced onto us by a cruel god that thought it would be neat to make humans.

We aren't owed nothing.

I'm going to take a hit and say I made a poor job at explaining myself and clarify that, for the creed I mentioned, the creator entity did not made humans. What the creator entity did was set off the unfolding of reality as we perceive it: the Universe. Humans contained within it are off shoots of causality.

There was never a direct nor directed intention to create humanity, thus, nothing is owed to it.

The premise is that anything to exist is better than nothing. If the Universe was to be populated with barren rocks and flaming balls of matter - which is, mostly - without humanity to perceive it that creation mythos was already fullfilled.

If we think back to the dumpster baby, god created a child and threw them in a dumpster. For fun. It doesn't get to wash its hands and say "I don't owe them anything, it's up to them to survive." It's still responsible for creation and it is derelict in its duty.

That premise is the premise of the christian, islamic, jewish, and all other self appointed omnipotent creating entities. Those entities claim to have created humanity, in their image, to ocuppy a world they devised for that specific purpose. A world created in such a way that, nonetheless, humans make use of their own agency to tamper and distort.

I'm not a believer but that is the short and dirty version of those myths: the world was perfect, until humans decided they weren't completely happy with it. Which leads us back to pointing fingers at the creator, for making a poor job.

This is a circular discussion.

[email protected]

Satanist.

Raised Mormon, was a Mormon missionary. Had a nervous breakdown, and religious leaders said that I must be sinning, and needed to pray more, read my scriptures more, and repent. But... What sin? And how was I supposed to pray/study more when I had already dedicated two years of my life to preaching? E.g., there's 24 hours in the day, and I'm already spending multiple hours doing that stuff, so where am I supposed to fit that in?

That was the first crack in the foundation. Took a while, but once you realize that religious leaders are just men (and yes, it's always men in the Mormon church), and that despite their claims they don't have any prophetic powers, then you start questioning a lit of things, like how you can even know truth. (Spoiler: you can't know truth without some kind of objective evidence, and all religions' truth claims are based on subjective evidence and "see?, it says so, right here in my book!")

Atheist is a label that says what you don't believe. Satanist is a label that says what I do believe. So I eventually settled on Satanist.

[email protected]

Maybe this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_atheism

? Offline

Zen Buddhist. I grew up Christian, realized I was believing out of obligation rather than genuine conviction, but also I'm pan and Christians have made it very clear that's not okay with them.

I was areligious for awhile. Which I use because I am still an atheist; I don't see much evidence for gods, but that isn't important to Buddhism.

I appreciate the Buddha's teachings and find them incredibly helpful. I'm calmer, more focused, and over all, happier for my practice. It gives me a spiritual outlet that doesn't make me feel "dirty" the way Christianity did.

There are aspects to Buddhism that I have to take on faith even though I am otherwise a skeptical individual. But ultimately, those things don't change how I would have had to live my life. And I believe that a true practitioner needs a balance of logic anf faith: too much logic, and you kill your faith. Too much faith and you wind up in a cult. You need enough logic to stay grounded, and enough faith to believe. But you have to acknowledge that you can rarely prove the things you take on faith and because of that, there will always be non-belivers, and that has to be okay.

[email protected]

It's more complicated than that since I do believe God exists but in a way that is incomprehensible to humans, and, according to all evidence, doesn't "intervene" with the universe. I say "intervene" because God, as classically described, is simultaneously incapable of intervening and incapable of not intervening. If we define God as "an omnipotent being"(which, for the record, I do not), then He is necessarily also all knowing and exists outside of the limitations of time and space. Such a being would be perfectly optimized as well, and so it would be impossible for anything to occur without its express permission and cause. Therefore, under classical theism, it seems impossible for God to say, answer prayers, because this would imply that He could possibly change His mind or that what was happening wasn't already what He wants to begin with.

? Offline

I learned recently that there is such a thing as nontheist Quakers.

[email protected]

I guess at this point I should consider myself a buddhist.

I was raised in a Christian household in the us midwest but never felt drawn to it or any form of sprituality, over the years Buddhism in its many forms kept creeping up on me enough times and explaining things in such elegant ways that I eventually looked into Tibetan Buddhism more closely and realized that once you understand how the symbolism of it all works in terms of connecting the words of practices to actually useful life tips then it becomes a great benefit to yourself and others.

As simply as possible, I chose this route because it is like becoming a scientist of experiences and all the practices we do are things that prove what we experience just as a scientist forms a postulate, a Buddhist forms a practice that leads to some form of awareness.

[email protected]

I believe in myself. I believe in everyone else too, until they give me a reason not to.

I believe every particle/atom/point within my reality has a connection equivalent to what one might call a 'soul' and it exists outside of dimensional reality, the dimensions being represented by a line (1d), a plane (2d), a field (3d) and the function of time (4d). Currently for me this puts these connections in the 5th dimension. I use the term "philote" as a label for each connection. That term is borrowed from the Ender books.

Life as we know it is made up of many atoms, formed into molecules, cells, organs and so on. At the core, each atom having its own connected philote, an organism is a community of philotes working together to stay connected and keep the organism going. The organism they represent is in a way, their religion. I believe in the philotes representing my human body. They believe in me.

When I die, my atoms with scatter. Some philotes will be swept away in the atmosphere, some will become the rotting and disintegrating organs of my body. Unless I'm cremated or destroyed in some other way similar, some parts of my body will remain connected. The philotes that make up my bones will remain connected to each other, as the philotes of my skin and blood etc. spread and become new things.

If I meet someone and have an affinity to them, I believe that some of my philotes and some of their philotes were once part of the same organism. They belonged to the same philotic 'church' of that organism. They recognize each other. They like each other. Thus I like the other person and they like me, even if we can't explain why ourselves. It is like magnetism, our philotes know each other and know they have similar goals and will work together. Since philotes exist outside of time, this affinity may be caused by something which has not occurred yet. Perhaps the other person and I die and many of our philotes become a new entity sometime in the future. A new church or religion of philotes.

If I meet someone and do not like them and cannot explain why, I believe that my philotes and their philotes are of opposing goals. Their philotic church does not agree with my philotic church. The philotes are repelled from each other, like how a magnet will repel. We go our separate ways. Perhaps their philotes were once part of an organism and my philotes were once part of the blade which killed their organism. Perhaps one day some of my philotes are part of an organism that is consumed by their organism. Some philotic clusters do not like an event. They accept it but will repel future or past encounters with philotes of the opposing mass. They do not believe in them. Their church is not the same. They do not like the outcome. There could be many reasons. Your beliefs still exist within my beliefs, even if yours do not include mine.

The big bang. The heat death of the universe. The big suck. No, the big suck is not referring to an adult video or a powerful vacuum or my ex. It's the opposite of the expansion of the universe. The big bang exploded. It spreads all atoms out. An atom and its philote no longer want to spread out. They want to return. They flip. They become dark matter or dark energy. They change direction in the 4th dimension. They contract instead of expanding. Other philotes agree and flip. Eventually, the universe stops expanding and contracts. The philotes reunite. They become a singularity. All existance in one point. That is too much for one point. It explodes. The big bang happens again. This never ends. This is happening an infinite number of times right now. Dark matter and dark energy are not measurable because they do not exist anymore at that point in time. From the perspective of a flipped philote, our existance is the dark matter. The flipping happens in all directions in 4 dimensions. It can be backwards on a line, diagonally on a plane, it can loop in a field and go sideways in time.

The big bang, the heat death of the universe and the big suck I represent like this:
∞=|¿√∞²?|=∞
Reality is equal to the question of the absolute value of the square root of infinity squared. A pointless math formula. A story that unfolds and returns.

[email protected]

Grew up atheist, went through a semi serious pagan phase, got certified as a shaman, went back to atheism. Will still throw in the odd ritual, but more with the expectation that it will affect the way I think about a problem rather than the ritual doing anything on its own.

So like if you have a job interview you can either raw dog it and show your lack of confidence or.preform a ritual and gain some confidence which will count in your favour during the interview.h

Is the ritual doing any direct alterations? No, but it's still useful.

[email protected]

In their mind it's not a simple difference of opinion, it's the fate of your eternal soul forever. They can't understand how someone could reject infinite happiness in heaven for pure unending suffering in hell.

And even worse than that, you are (directly or not) saying they are wrong, that they are fools for believing in fairy tales, and not just about any old subject, but about the most important thing in the universe - it's whole purpose.

That's quite a hard thing for a lot of people to accept unfortunately, and some don't take it well at all. I do feel like I was lucky that my parents didn't take it as harshly as some do.
Probably helps that I'm still cis and straight, and grew up in a left-wing area, so it's not like I'm the only atheist they knew.

[email protected]

Apathetic since forever.

[email protected]

You should see this video: https://youtu.be/n2kZ0lRW9Ls

[email protected]

Antitheist

[email protected]

That premise is the premise of the christian, islamic, jewish, and all other self appointed omnipotent creating entities.

Well, yeah, those are the gods I hate. I used the term "almighty" as a shorthand for "god that created literally everything." They created everything including non-physical concepts like good and evil. You're basically just describing a Big Bang with a personality, which isn't really in the category of gods I hate. That god just made cool stars and rocks and stuff, it didn't really make everything. Rather, the rocks spontaneously came to life and started suffering without input.

[email protected]

Discordian

agnos.is Forums

What is your faith/religion?