Religious beliefs?

[Anima]

Since I don't know which sub board this falls under, I'll put it here for now.

I don't know if it is a good idea to ask this, but I wonder: Does anybody have a religious belief? Christian? Bhuddist? Shinto? Wiccan? Etc...?

Now, I want to keep discussion clean. I don't want any flames such as "BUT MINE IS BETTER THAN YOURS BRAH" or any of that crap, but rather, keep ourselves open minded, and see other's point of views on *ahem* spiritual beliefs.

Now then. *Prepares herself for a barrage of any oncoming attack* And if this at least SOME activity in a positive way, I'll share my beliefs as well.

[purifierunit20xx]

Since I don't really know what I believe in, I consider myself an agnostic. My family has never been super religious with me, so maybe that's why I grew up to be agnostic.

[Mikéy]

I've pretty much grown up with the firm belief that there's a God and a Jesus stuck in me like a needle in a pincushion.

The only church I (have) to go to anymore is Baptist, whatever that means. They gave me a bible when I graduated. Maybe I should read further than the book of Genesis... :17:

[Anima]

Only a few responses, but a good start.

I myself is more in the category of Agnostic Christian. I do believe in god, but not entirely sure if it's the same god from like, Christian, Judaism, Mythology, etc beliefs...

Though like Mikey, I grew up in a Christian family household, first Baptist, then Lutheran. Yet after a while we distanced ourselves from religion when mum and dad got into more scientific stuff (mostly when they went into anthropology).

Though I still somewhat have a slight grip on the Christian beliefs, finding that following the guide of the Ten Commandments have kept me from loosing my sanity.

[purifierunit20xx]

Aug 10, 2011 23:13:27 GMT -5 Anima said:

Though I still somewhat have a slight grip on the Christian beliefs, finding that following the guide of the Ten Commandments have kept me from loosing my sanity.

Yeah, I do find myself trying to follow at least a few of the commandments sometimes to try to keep myself in check.

Anyways, Another thing about religion and I! When it comes to religion, I usually just like to research them. Seeing what other people believe just fascinates me!

[Dashe]

Sure, yeah, as long as it's light discussion we might as well keep it in GD.

I think everyone has some kind of religious belief, even if that belief is undecided. For instance, I religiously believe that religious beliefs should be something that you should be able to decide upon for yourself. But most people do have principles that they follow, regardless of whether they were received through religion or through something else, like spaghetti westerns or superhero comics.

I do not believe in any sort of higher power, though. I haven't since I found out about the tooth fairy and Santa Claus not being real. My mom was a strict Catholic while I was growing up, and had me going to CCD on Saturday mornings, which sucked since I fundamentally didn't believe anything they were teaching from about second grade onward, and was pretty vocal about it. The priest actually had to intervene and tell my mom to withdraw me from the program and ease up, which is saying quite a bit.

My mom wound up easing up on her own after she showed my dad the door, and now she hardly goes to church at all. I'm pretty sure that for her, religion was a coping mechanism for marrying Mr. Wrong.

Back at school I had a knack for attracting nice, polite Christian girls from the south with double-names and steady boyfriends that they were planning to marry, with whom they would move to a cozy cottage on the hillside where they would have a bunch of kids and a dog. It was pretty funny, because I'd tell them this and they'd wonder how I knew their life's goals without them telling me first. Upon parting ways, this newly-networked group of stepford smilers bestowed me with a copy of the bible in exchange for the extra Stephen King novels that didn't fit in the truck to Guido Village. I haven't made it past Genesis either. The begetting chapter is just too boring.

I liked Prince of Egypt, though. Hans Zimmer's score is the best part.

[Anima]

Aug 11, 2011 0:22:46 GMT -5 Dashe said:

I liked Prince of Egypt, though. Hans Zimmer's score is the best part.

That was my favorite film. A loose retelling of the journey to the Promised Land, with a little historical overtone.

I thought the music was good as well. I thought the one with the Egyptian gods was catchy.

[Edich]

My mom is a super avid Christian. Like, owns 3 different copies of the Bible, a copy of the Apocrypha, some copies in Hebrew, a Hebrew to English Dictionary, and some other materials I might not know about levels of avid Christian.

All of it's been thoroughly read, multiple times, for the past 22 years of her life. I've seen all the bookmarks and footnotes scribbled throughout the books. I know it's true.

She doesn't go to church, though. She's actually fairly against the idea and didn't send me or my brother to church either. She's a very firm believer in people finding their own way through self-revelation.

That always stuck with me. The last part, not the Christian belief(the morals, though, most definitely).

I used to pray to God every night, but when I was 9 years old, I made my last prayer to him. To this day I find it incredibly weird that I did, but it was interesting. It wasn't anything spiteful or sacrilegious, it was just me affirming a self-made mission to Him.

For a long time growing up, I started really disliking the idea that my actions could be blamed on things like the Devil or God. So that was my self-made mission that I prayed to God about. That I didn't want the crutches or the safety net anymore, I wanted to fight it out on my own, and prove I could hold a high level of moral integrity and compassion without a belief system. I wasn't going to pray for help anymore, and I'm weak if I do. If I needed help, I had a loving family on Earth to turn to. Basically, I wanted my accomplishments and my mistakes to be on me, and me alone.

Well, that's what it means to me now, anyway. All it really amounted to me when I was 9 was me inarticulately trying to assert some kind of "all grown up" kind of independence and willpower, and I wanted Him to watch me do it, make sure he saw. I was still a Christian after that, after all. That whole "I won't pray for help anymore, and I'm weak if I do" part was almost word for word what I said back then, though. Must've been reading a lot of heroic adventure epics at the time.

Anyway, years down the line I became a pretty avid researcher of religion and mythology myself. I loved reading about all the different parts of the world's point-of-view and culture, and as a writer, they were a great source of inspiration. I still like to read up from time to time, though I honestly don't care about making comparisons or debating them anymore. They're just wells of inspiration and some sound advice.

Of course, soon I started noticing many many similarities in each religion, especially in core beliefs. Even if some did stress certain values more than others. Eventually, I reached somewhat of an epiphany about it.

If my mom; a very devout and scholarly Christain, had chosen any other religion to follow and maintained that same individualistic, non-traditionalist, "self-revelation" mentor approach she always had in her nature, and I made that same choice at 9 yrs. old as it is in my nature; I honestly don't believe that I'd have turned out much different.

It was a belief system vs. me and my mother's personalities, and our personalities already proved to win in that fight. The only reason I'm not Christian now like her is because I've always had more skepticism and curiosity and less willingness to believe than her.

It was actually kind of a happy epiphany, despite that it essentially meant I didn't have much faith in Christianity anymore. Because I've always been more people-oriented and this proved to me that all humans seemed to care about and respect the same things in life and in each other. Maybe Carl Jung was onto something.

And that's the story of how I became an Agnostic.

Pretty lengthy and personal, but I didn't know how else to word it. I didn't want to give the standard, "broadened horizons beyond initial religion, apply logic." Since it's not that to me. It's always been a struggle against my determination I asserted when I was a kid.

So, yea, I basically have the moral beliefs of any Christian, my parents made sure of that and I thank them for it. But I stress different values over others by comparison. Mainly because, as Dashe said, a lot of my morals came more from straight-up fiction(like comics and spaghetti westerns). Which isn't a bad thing, I think a lot of us here have learned some good life lessons from the game series we're all here to gush over.

I sometimes find myself idly theorizing over what kind of cosmic entity could have created the universe from time to time, but that's really the extent of my current spiritual life.

[TronBonne]

I do have some religious beliefs.

My grandmother was religious, but as a child I never went to church except on the extremely rare occasions when we would go for Easter, Christmas, etc. It wasn’t until my dad bribed me with 20 bucks that I started to go to church on a regular basis during high school. I believe in some sort of God – most likely because it was just something that was instilled upon me from a young age by my grandmother, so even now I do consider myself a Christian, but I do not agree with all of its teachings.

I did stop going a few years ago, because I believe that if you go to church, you should mean it. And while I meant it, and was following it to the best of my ability, a certain family member clearly was not, and I felt it would be hypocritical to go to church with someone who was breaking one of the Ten Commandments I felt strongly about.

Besides that, I follow all the values I’ve taken out of things like Pokemon and Mega Man Legends. I practically worship those two things anyway.

[Fatman X. Jones]

I'll share my two cents on my stance.

I've been a military brat for most of my life. I was raised with discipline techniques others may not have experienced, and that has shaped my life. I learned how to treat people right, with respect, and while I have not lived up to that ideal I find that my experience is just as normal as anyone who has been raised in a religious upbringing. What shapes a person, I believe, is not belief in higher beings, but belief in morals and values. Still, my religious values are as follows:

- I'll start off by admitting that I believe there may be forces in the universe that are omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. There very well may be a being that could reasonably be interpreted as 'God' by some people of faith. In fact, there may just be multiple beings with these powers, whom we can classify as 'Gods' in the plural sense. However, I will say that while I believe they may exist, I have no reason myself to believe in them. I have drawn from my life experiences as a reasonable substitute for religious values, and thus have been able to shape myself into a hopefully upstanding individual.

- I shall go on to say that I am open to all but a few faiths and religious affiliations, and show them equal goodwill. Those I show disdain for--i.e, Scientology--I disreguard as peacefully as possible, not showing them goodwill but not treating them like shit. However people wish to live their lives, I'm happy for them. However, a vital part of this noninterference policy of mine is "equalized tolerance", or to be more precise, "don't try and sway me and I won't try and sway you". I live, and I let live, and I have no intent to force my opinions or beliefs upon others. To do so would be an upright amount of idiocy only reserved for politicians, masochists, and Glenn Beck.

That's pretty much my stance on the whole religion thing.

[adrian2040n]

I've been a Christian Catholic man since I was born. And I never really doubted about Lord God Jesus Christ himself. In fact, I believe in him more as time passes.

At first it was just simple faith. I did go to church (Even on my own.) every Sunday. I sometimes even think that God is helping me whenever something so beneficial and rare happens to me, something that wouldn't normally happen. (And these things happened so often people thought I was extremely lucky.)

At some point, my inner self was unleashed after a traumatic experience I'm not willing to discuss. I started to become obsessed with research. I just couldn't stop researching about everything and anything. And that's when I started to see everything with logic. In fact, I could use some logic to actually explain my beliefs.

First of all, let's have a look at this world. It's a world that's completely organized. It has an excellent ecosystem for us to live in. The elements of the world even happened to fit into the periodic table by following two patterns that work at the same time when applied horizontally and vertically. The human body as a system works completely. Every part works with the others in unison, including with the food we eat. The planet falls to the sun in a pattern perfect enough to never be nearer the sun.

I could go on and on about the points above. The logical part is that the chances for something like that to be created due to a random explosion are so low, that is a lot more possible than a creator that knew what he was doing did it.

It also showed me that some people, even though they say they are Catholic, still fall to temptation. People are not perfect and they do things that they deny in their head. For example, my whole family is religious. Or that's what they say, because they steal by buying piracy, even though I've told them millions of time that piracy is stealing and that stealing is against the 10 Commandments. People just wants thing to go their way and say either that God will forgive them or that God is good and he will let them go to heaven anyway.

My family is wrong. I follow the 10 Commandments fully because I know that's the way to go to heaven. Lord God Jesus Christ may be perfectly good, but he also applies justice perfectly. It is true that a lot of people have go to heaven because they regretted their sins and confessed, but that's because they truly meant it. If you confess something without meaning it, you're not out of sin. In fact, you would sin even more.

Some people even say it's unfair, but it's truly fair. You actually have to regret your sin to the point that if you ever found yourself in the same situation, you would not do it again. And if "freely" they could back in time to change things, they would. Even if they killed a person, they can be forgiven if they TRULY regret it. That's a true change of heart. You can't also trick God. He is perfect and He knows when you are lying.

So basically, going to heaven is more difficult than people think it is. Of course, an innocent being that sins without knowing it's a sin isn't doing anything bad, because they didn't do any evil deed knowingly. (Unless of course that you told that person that they sinned and they still don't regret their actions.)

So... That's basically my take in it. Follow the 10 Commandments and avoid sinning. If I found out I sinned somehow, I always (so far) have regretted it and confessed. As long as I do this until I die, I shall go to heaven when I die for eternal life.

P.S. Killing yourself is a sin. Also, not caring about your health is a sin because it is like if you were killing yourself. The reason to do this: Killing a human body is a sin, regardless of who it is.

P.S.2. Do try and sway me if you want. Like I said, I'm a man of Logic and I can change my mind if someone with better Logic outsmarts me. So far only very few have done it, but almost none when it comes to the religious stand point.

[Loken]

I would say I'm a Christian, I've read the old and new testament(The latter twice), and I have some firm beliefs. Mostly in the teachings of Jesus, which I think alot of 'Christians' forget about, the not judging people, forgiving people, charity, that kind of thing.
I really do not like church though, it's a place where these ideas are forced upon you, and that is certainly not the way to enlighten people. I know alot of people who are atheists because of how they were alienated in church, and that's a sign that you are doing something wrong.
As for Creation, I believe what many 19th century scientist believed. The idea that all of nature, including evolution, are gods tools to do the work that he does.
I could go on but I would just be rambling. (not like I already am)

[HoboBob]

Nope, I'm an Atheist. But not like the "Grr! I hate everything! Weeeed! Hardcore indie music! Grrrr!" kind. Nope, just someone that has enough faith in himself, logic, and his friends to know that he doesn't need a god to lean on or turn to.

[Rockman Striker]

It's interesting that after all this time we start sharing our beliefs now isn't? I guess all needed is someone to break the ice.

Anyway, now you will start hating me because I belong to the most hateful "religion" of all: Jehovah's witnesses. (I quoted religion because this is an Organization, if you read any of our magazines there's the word "organization" and "religion" is only used because it fits in the description of what people call a religion.)
I believe in Jehovah god, the creator of all the universe and everything we see (and what we don't see too) and his son JesusChrist. They aren't part of a triple god who is his father, son and spirit at the same time, (the saint spirit is His power which He use to create and make anything he needs and wants)
I also know that there is an evil spirit: Satan, he have a legion of servants called demons, they are imprisoned in this world, there why all the suffering the humanity faces everyday. They are everywhere, it's safe to say that they are in or outside our houses watching over us to discover our weakpoints and attack us where it would hurt us much, just to take us away from god Satan and the demons WERE NOT created by Jehovah, they were loyal angels in the past, but they then chose to disobey god and became their enemies.

We don't believe in heaven or hell because of this: If you're a bad person, you'll go to hell when you die, where you'll be punished all the eternity by the devil, if Satan punish you for your sins, then he is the good guy, while god is the villain because he sends you to that torment. Who of you is evil enough to put the hand of your son in the fire just because he disobeyed you? We know god is love, then why he would punish his sons all the eternity?
We believe that Jesus is governing in the sky (or heaven) and that we are living in the last days of this "world" (Nothing to do with 2012, nobody except Jehovah knows when the end will come) the world will not be destroyed, but the people, the human governments and Satan and his demons who consciously disobey Jehovah will be eliminated* in the Armaggedon -God's war against the human governments and demons- and the survivors will live finally in peace and perfection in this world, now turned into a paradise as the beginning, ruled by the God's Kingdom which king will be Jesus. That's why we every morning come and knock to your door, to let you know that now is the time to read and study your bible and get closer with Jehovah God and his son Jesus Christ, to know what you have to do to be one of the survivors. We may interrupt your dreams, breakfast or make you angry, but it doesn't hurt to hear at least once what we have to tell you.

*Jehovah has many reasons to put an end to this evil people, the main reason is to prove at Satan that He have the right to rule His creations, that's why we live this way, Satan felt that he would rule the world better than Jehovah (that's why he tricked Adam and Eve to turn against god) and God gave him enough time to prove his theory, Satan rules the world now and look how happy we are... He will bring an end to our sufferings soon.

That's my beliefs: "Thank you for reading!"

As Anima said, this is just a peaceful chat, no offense to your beliefs in any comment I made.

[Loken]

That's very interesting Striker. Everytime the old ladies come by and leave us a magazine I read it but I never really learn too much about their religion from those. Usually when I think of churches and religious media I assume that it will be quite bigoted, but I don't really get that from the Jehovah's witnesses' magazines, they are fairly respectful of other religions and that impressed me.