Your faith timeline. (user search)
       |           

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?
June 08, 2024, 06:38:54 PM
News: Election Simulator 2.0 Released. Senate/Gubernatorial maps, proportional electoral votes, and more - Read more

  Talk Elections
  General Discussion
  Religion & Philosophy (Moderator: Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.)
  Your faith timeline. (search mode)
Pages: [1]
Author Topic: Your faith timeline.  (Read 11690 times)
Hope For A New Era
EastOfEden
YaBB God
*****
Posts: 4,719


« on: October 25, 2021, 06:59:58 AM »

Age 0-10 (2001-2011): Generic Protestant Christian. My immediate family was (and continues to be) ostensibly United Methodist, but never really took denominationalness seriously. (My extended family, mostly located in Virginia, does take it seriously). The religious members of my close] family attend a nondenominational church these days and have for years.

Age 11-13 (2012-2014): A doubter for sure, but still officially a believer. I'm not totally sure where the doubt came from, but it was probably a combination of the sudden realization** that every religion believes itself to be "the one true religion" (I guess somehow before this I thought that non-Christians knew that they followed a "fake religion" and were okay with it somehow?**) and the fact that I was attending a religious school at the time and hated it with a passion. I also went through two periods in 2012 and 2013 of obsessive thoughts about death (a product of my OCD, which is a product of my autoimmune thing in which my immune system sometimes just decides that the basal ganglia in my brain is made of strep bacteria), so I guess "the nature of life, the universe, and everything" is something that was on my mind a lot for these few years.

**Maybe this is an autism thing? Theory of mind and all that. It's possible that if I had been born neurotypical I would have come to this realization a lot earlier.

Age 14-15 (2015-2016): An atheist in denial. Even when your environment is not and has never been remotely fanatical, religious programming runs deep, and I was scared of what admitting my non-Christianity, even to myself, would mean.

Age 16-17 (2017-2018): I definitely called myself "atheist" here. This was definitely when I was "loudest" about my religious position, though I was still almost silent about it to most people. My identification with the label was strongest here probably because of a combination of politics (see: 2017-2018) and the people I was spending time with at the time (including, probably most consequentially, a short-lived romantic relationship in 2018 with a very loud-and-proud atheist).

Age 18-20 (2019-2021): Dropped the label "atheist" in favor of "nonreligious." This was because  "atheist" specifically means someone who explicitly rejects any and all belief in any kind of deity/supreme being/supernatural/etc, which is in itself a belief. I do not hold this belief, because it's not possible to know this for a fact, and anyone who claims to know it for a fact is acting on faith alone, committing the same "sin" (for lack of a better word) as the religious people they criticize.
I simply have no belief. Really, I try to ignore religion as much as possible.

To add to the above, I don't think there will ever be an answer to the religion question. Really, I think that, regardless of whether divinity exists or not, the true nature of the universe is probably beyond human comprehension, and that it is very arrogant of us as a species to ever assume otherwise.
Logged
Pages: [1]  
Jump to:  


Login with username, password and session length

Terms of Service - DMCA Agent and Policy - Privacy Policy and Cookies

Powered by SMF 1.1.21 | SMF © 2015, Simple Machines

Page created in 0.024 seconds with 11 queries.