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Author Topic: Your faith timeline.  (Read 11116 times)
afleitch
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« on: March 16, 2020, 08:17:49 AM »

I've seen this on Twitter so thought it might be fun.

0: Born and baptized Catholic.
4: Annoyed at missing 'Pob' on TV for Mass.
5: Starts Catholic school.
6: Starts singing at Mass.
7: First Confession and First Communion. Doesn't 'get it'. Response; 'Just get it.' Communion money spent on replacing ruined borrowed suit trousers.
8: Precocious reader so now also reads at Mass.
9: Frequent head bobber after Communion. Wins Knights of St Columba nativity scene art prize. Legit only trophy ever won.
10: Anatomically correct crucifixion scene not as popular.
11: Finds 'Centurion no. 2' on station of cross kinda hot.
12: Starts Jesuit college.
13: Sings in Latin.
14: Starts pushing back in theology class. Still gets A.
15: Attends confession for last time in life. rip sweet anglexxx
16: Walks out of mass during bishops statement on homosexuality during Section 28 debate. Comes out.
17: Attends immersive abbey retreat. Realises that the faithless can act faithful to preach to the faithless presenting as faithful.
18: x-rated
19: Begins eight year internship as Atlas resident progressive Christian apologist.
21: Attends Quaker Meeting House periodically.
24: Attends mass for last time.
26: Cathartic loss of faith in front of street pastor.
27: Begins internship as resident Atlas atheist apologist.
28: Therapy. Recovering Catholic. Gets married.
30: Studies the Stoics.
32: Studies Humanism.
34: Studies Islam.
35: Understands the emotional trauma of being born into a faith that he couldn't tangibly engage with, so relied on aestheticism to maintain the community and family ritual despite that also being jarring to his information desiring aspergic brain. Yet it was also helpful in facilitating self expression. Realised he was ironically 'queerer' as a Catholic aesthete but the crumbling self defense of his actual non belief to himself and others could not be sustained and ultimately lead to it's stuttering and cathartic rejection. This led to him accidentally 'gatekeeping' his own sexuality and sanitising it as a Buttigiegesque public banality. With brain locking down the experience/knowledge of age 0-26 as 'complete' then vaccuuming up other opposing or contrary theological view points leading to the self realisation that this is all so f-cking boring and western and saccharine and I just want some colour and what did I do to that lispy queered fabulous f-cking socialist first out the closet singing opinionated teenager. Welcome back.

End scene.

Trans rights.

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RINO Tom
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« Reply #1 on: March 16, 2020, 12:03:31 PM »

There isn't really a period that is anything other than "Christian - Protestant (ELCA Lutheran)," so I will instead give nuanced explanations:

Birth to ~12: Believe whatever your parents say, go to Sunday school, don't really see why this wouldn't be the way it is, etc.
~13 to ~16: Religion just not very important ... literally gave it no thought, in an affirmative or critical way.
~17 to ~18: Kind of started to gain a cultural attachment to the faith as I became more interested in my ethnic background.
~19 to ~22 (College): Really started to delve into it philosophically and became interested in the various more "liberal" interpretations of Christianity, interpretations which I was attracted to and did not feel cheapened the "truth" of it at all.
~22 to Present: Became comfortable with my "idiosyncratic" take on Mainline Protestantism and really started to appreciate it ... encounters with militant secularists and (much more so) Evangelicals and fundamentalists made me truly appreciate where I stand and entrenched even more of a pride/belief in it, though my denomination and specific topical beliefs certainly lend themselves to a more "private" and less "evangelical" (lowercase E) daily life of belief.

This is not a take on anyone else's experience, rather an anecdotal sharing of my own: I firmly believe that the fact I have never had an "intense" religious experience (like parents making you go to church, pastors/priests/ministers being overly political, having Biblical literalism preached as the only way, etc.) informed my beliefs in (what I consider) a very positive way.  Some of the least religious (I would say "anti-religious") people I know grew up in families that shoved it down their throats, and some of the people most "open" to the idea of a higher power or "God" of some sort kind of were allowed to take that spiritual journey of exploration on their own.  Again, totally anecdotal, but it's informed how I'll raise my kids, for sure.
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Nathan
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« Reply #2 on: March 16, 2020, 02:30:13 PM »
« Edited: March 16, 2020, 02:35:20 PM by Many many too many stop and frisks »

0: Born and baptized in a Vermont federated congregation in a church building that's now a dance studio.
5: Watches Bertolucci's Little Buddha at way too young an age and becomes intensely interested in Buddhism. Starts reading sanitized Western texts on Buddhism; precocious reader, reads these texts at about a middle school level.
8: Moves from Vermont to a suburb in South Jersey. Immediately becomes intensely interested in Modern Paganism after no longer having immediate access to woods, fields, etc.
11: Reads some R.C. Zaehner book and begins attending Unitarian Universalist church with mother. Starts to believe in one god.
13: Becomes serious Anglophile after reading James Herriot's vet books. Starts going to Christmas and Easter services at local ultra-High Church Episcopalian parish.
14: Has mystical experience at Christmas Eve service. Takes communion for the first time.
16: Stops going to UU church and becomes semi-regular casual Episcopalian churchgoer.
17: Starts regularly attending a strongly left-liberal college parish. Somewhere around this point, realizes mild gender dysphoria.
19: Confirmed in Episcopal Church. Develops vague interest in becoming an ordained minister. Gender dysphoria intensifies.
21: Graduates college. Accepted into divinity school, albeit not on an ordination track due to several preexisting priests' and ministers' advice not to. Comes out as trans.
22: Starts divinity school. For about a year, dates a woman from a much more conservative faith background. Relationship is extremely physically undemonstrative. Gender dysphoria begins to lessen.
23: Watches Little Buddha again and somehow gets less out of it. Develops strong comparative theology focus in divinity school. Stops self-identifying as trans. At the time, attributes this to some sort of theological crisis; later realizes that it was in fact part of a natural psychological evolution with little specifically religious content. Gets dragged over it on Atlas Forum, including by OP of this thread. Girlfriend comes out as a lesbian and relationship ends. At divinity school, develops even more High Church theological opinions, eventually trending towards markedly theologically conservative forms of Roman Catholicism.
24: Received into Catholic Church via eyebrow-raisingly conservative RCIA process. Nasty falling-out with conservative/trad friends over their increasingly bigoted and MAGA-bot political opinions about six months later. Receives master's degree in theology.
25: Integrates into faith community of (normal, sane) center-right-to-center-left young adult Catholics among grad students at undergrad alma mater. Beginning of chronic low-level crisis of faith over abuse scandals. Visits Assisi and Rome.
26: Crisis of faith over abuse scandals continues, but still committed to Catholicism. Stops caring about theology of sexuality almost entirely. Realizes own bisexuality, actually starts acting more "queer" in everyday life than when trans Episcopalian. Goes on a few dates, including one with a much older man (the rest are with a woman my own age); none of them go well. Still not sexually active and with no plans to become sexually active in the immediate future.
27: Huh
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afleitch
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« Reply #3 on: March 16, 2020, 03:14:16 PM »

Gets dragged over it on Atlas Forum, including by OP of this thread.

I am profusely sorry for the way I treated you. It was truly less the gender identity and more of the adoption of distinct hetero sexual terminology that I thought you were making that made me actually fear the worst. I was not kind and I reacted rather than asked you about it or talked to you. It's a low moment for me, as I genuinely don't like making people upset or uncomfortable.


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Nathan
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« Reply #4 on: March 16, 2020, 03:16:19 PM »

Gets dragged over it on Atlas Forum, including by OP of this thread.

I am profusely sorry for the way I treated you. It was truly less the gender identity and more of the adoption of distinct hetero sexual terminology that I thought you were making that made me actually fear the worst. I was not kind and I reacted rather than asked you about it or talked to you. It's a low moment for me, as I genuinely don't like making people upset or uncomfortable.

I accept your apology. You've been nothing but kind to me more recently, and that means a lot to me.
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afleitch
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« Reply #5 on: March 16, 2020, 03:37:07 PM »

Thank you.
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John Dule
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« Reply #6 on: March 16, 2020, 03:37:07 PM »

1-5: I'm not sure how I viewed religion at this point. At the very least, I was aware of the concept of God and who he supposedly is. I watched a lot of Veggie Tales but didn't get the religious themes from it because I didn't know anything about the Bible. I had a really hyperactive imagination as a kid and I'd constantly make up stories; some of them were about God and heaven and where people exist before they're born. However, I just saw these stories as something fun to entertain myself with and did not actually believe what I was saying. If I made up a story involving God, it would not be fundamentally different from how I'd make up stories about Star Wars or Pokemon characters.

5-7: Started asking my parents if God actually exists. My mom was raised in a religious household but was not sure how to answer my questions. To this day she says that she didn't realize how bogus Christianity was until she had to explain it to a kid. This was probably around the time I realized that Santa wasn't real either, so I pretty much just lumped the two together. I didn't really take religion seriously at this point, and I didn't understand that people actually believed in it. I thought they just did it for fun, like how I make up stories for myself.

7-10: Had more conversations about religion, mostly with my mom. She had never been particularly religious, but she stopped being an agnostic at this point and came to the realization that there's no reason to believe that God exists. Sometime around this age we stopped bothering with Christmas trees and started coming up with our own holiday traditions to celebrate the new year. I didn't mind so long as I still got presents. Today my mom is even more anti-theist than I am, which is saying a lot.

10-15: Started talking to my dad about his experiences in Catholic school. He told me about how the nuns would physically abuse students (spanking, hitting their knuckles with rulers) and how they tried to indoctrinate young, vulnerable people with their psychopathic delusions. Learned about the pedophile scandals within the church. At this point I would start to get a little angry whenever I read anything about religion. Whenever I saw religious themes in the Sunday comics or on TV, I'd start to view the person pushing those beliefs as pathetic. I assumed that they were extremely insecure in their beliefs, and so rather than keep those beliefs private, they felt the need to get everyone else in on their delusion so they'd doubt themselves a little less. This is how I still see people who discuss their beliefs in public-- they are plagued by crippling doubt in the back of their mind, and in order to stamp that suspicion down, they distract themselves by evangelizing as loudly and stupidly as possible.

15-18: Read the Bible for the first time, which was a brutal experience for me. The God portrayed in that book reminded me of the worst teachers I'd had as a kid-- people who would order me to do things "Because I said so" rather than explaining to me why I should do them. Aside from being a long-winded justification for authoritarianism, the book was just f**king boring. I began to assume (hope?) that most Christians hadn't actually read the thing, because it pained me to imagine that someone could accept anything in it at face value. Also around this time, I started looking into Islam and Judaism and became more critical of them. I realized that I was focusing most of my anger on Christianity just because it was the most prominent religion in America, but I came to the conclusion that Islam was far worse. I read Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations and was impressed by his prescience, especially in comparison to his contemporaries like Fukuyama. I began to view Islam (and religion in general) as the direct threat to Western liberal values that it is.

18-20: Started to study psychology and crowd mentalities in my spare time and in college. Began to realize that almost all religious people are either indoctrinated from birth or brought into the cult at a vulnerable time in their lives. In both of these methods, the cult members take advantage of their prey's fragile emotional state (whether the person is a child or just emotionally unstable), as well as their willingness to believe what others tell them. Read Descartes/Aquinas and their "proofs" of God; found them unconvincing (as most philosophical scholars also do). Read Gustave le Bon's The Crowd and Freud's Group Psychology, both of which I consider foundational to my views on religion today. I also read Ayn Rand at this time, though she didn't really give me many new ideas and mostly just affirmed what I felt I already knew about religion and economics. My favorite philosopher that I read during this time was Hobbes, who (although ostensibly religious) constructed his entire philosophy of law and morality in a secular fashion, which I instantly fell in love with.

20-present: Read the "natural law" doctrines of Plato, Aquinas, Cicero, and Ockham, each of which was less convincing than the last. At this point, I have begun to see connections between all of the philosophies and belief systems that I find antithetical to my worldview-- religion, natural law, socialism, authoritarianism, cults of personality, majoritarianism, communitarianism, etc. I now see them all as methods that people use to avoid making choices and to avoid confronting inconvenient truths about the real world. These ideologies serve as intermediaries between the individual and reality so that they never have to come to terms with facts that are as painful as they are obvious. Authoritarianism is based in the nostalgic wish for a father figure to take care of you; it is designed to avoid confronting the reality that you are ultimately the only one responsible for your life and your choices. Majoritiarianism is the same, though it claims legitimacy through group consensus (as if something is more intrinsically right just because more people agree on it). Socialism and communism are used to avoid confronting the reality of human selfishness; they allow us to imagine ourselves as "naturally good" rather than just "naturally human." And religion-- the worst of them all-- is based in the fear of death, which is the ultimate fear of all people, and the eternity of nothingness and nonbeing that unavoidably and undeniably follows. Because religion is designed to avoid confronting humanity's greatest fear, it has proportionately required our greatest delusion. Religious people who feel the need to convert others subscribe to the majoritarian instinct that if they surround themselves with people who affirm their beliefs, they will feel more emboldened and righteous. If everyone else agrees with them, they will be able to quell their self-doubt and put the fear of death even further from their minds. Reality is a scary place, and harsh truths are difficult to confront-- but after delving into the twisted logic that people use to placate themselves, from the most famous philosophers to average people on internet forums, I have come to the conclusion that I simply cannot put up with belief systems that I consider to be willful self-delusions any longer.
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DC Al Fine
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« Reply #7 on: March 16, 2020, 03:39:17 PM »

0: Baptized Presbyterian

/fin
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Antonio the Sixth
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« Reply #8 on: March 16, 2020, 04:57:35 PM »

0: Baptized Catholic
0-10: Occasional Mass attendance, occasional Sunday School, at least one retreat
8: First communion
9-12: Burgeoning interest in politics, history and philosophy leading to increasingly left-wing conclusion, growing awareness of the Church's reactionary role throughout modern history and rationalist critiques of faith. Also, puberty.
12-13: Becomes agnostic.
14-17: Attends a very conservative Catholic high school while in the midst of one of the most right-wing presidencies in France. Anticlericalism intensifies.
19-20: Emotional interaction with others reaches a new degree. Highs and lows ensue.
20: Begins regular correspondence with Nathan that goes on to this day.
22: Major crisis in moral self-image. Growing interest in moral philosophy leads to rediscovering Christian ethical principles.
25: Begins quasi-weekly Mass attendance.
26: Begins occasional prayer.
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Mr. Smith
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« Reply #9 on: March 16, 2020, 07:05:53 PM »

0: Born and blessed
8: Baptized Mormon
9-11: Start questioning the existence of God and despising church, but go through the motions anyway.
12-18: Receive "Lower Priesthood" with some reluctance, but the experiences during those years, good and bad convince me of a God. There are patches of doubt with certain elements, especially as I go through a Catholic school, then read up on other philosophies through high school, and of course the Prop. 8 thing was no walk in the park...but all of it made a certain sense that simple secular/humanist ideologies simply failed at...not that the other religious faiths seemed to answer the questions any better mind you.
18-23: Received "Higher Priesthood" and generally became more conservative, partially in reaction to the less savory elements of socialism/liberalism and internet libertarianism, partially because everything seemed to be working out.
23-24: S&^t hit the fan in bad ways, so I generally went inactive out of spite rather than unbelief...but somehow that made everything worse.
24-Present:  Flickering between activity and inactivity.
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Nathan
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« Reply #10 on: March 16, 2020, 07:47:40 PM »


That's reality's problem.
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True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)
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« Reply #11 on: March 16, 2020, 08:47:43 PM »

All ages approximate.
0 - Baptized in the UCC.

5 - Family moved, no UCC church nearby, family went to UMC church.

7 - Really, really into this little tract covering the Sermon on the Mount.

8 - Read an anthology of Mark Twain short stories, including "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" and "The War Prayer".

10 - Compared churches based on their facilities, not their theology.

12 - Confirmed in the UMC.

15 - Really got into rituals to the point of creating my own.

20 - Turned off by ritual. Still religious, just not attending anywhere.

40 - Started getting serious about defining my beliefs so I could describe and defend them to others.

47 - Joined a UUA church as closest to what I am of what's available in area; doing Sunday school and Bible study with Lutherans.

50 - Church got new pastor who didn't inspire me like the old one did.

52 - Finally joined the ELCA church I did Bible study with after a divisive turn by my old UUA church made me question why I still went there. (To be clear, while I didn't agree with the choice of direction because I doubted the capability of the church to implement the policy [and also doubted that their chosen method was the best way to achieve the stated end], the reason I left had much more to do with how those who didn't agree with the decision were treated than the decision itself.)

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John Dule
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« Reply #12 on: March 16, 2020, 11:23:28 PM »


I thought you Christians were supposed to accept the things you cannot change.
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Nathan
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« Reply #13 on: March 16, 2020, 11:47:22 PM »


Don't get me started on Niebuhr.
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Just Passion Through
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« Reply #14 on: March 17, 2020, 02:50:05 AM »
« Edited: March 17, 2020, 03:12:18 AM by Senator Scott🤡🌏 »

0-1ish: Mom is Catholic, Dad is Protestant but non-practicing and was an atheist for most of the time I'd known him.  He agreed to baptizing any children they have in the Catholic Church in exchange for being married in the church, but the priest that married them (whom they both suspected was closeted) basically told my parents to do what they thought was right.  My mom originally intended on having me baptized in the Catholic Church, but she did not like the priest in town, and ended up baptizing me herself, with my grandfather directing her over the phone.  I was eventually christened in the UCC, but we never went to church because she didn't like the pastor there either.

1-15: Raised Catholic (by my mom) in all but name, but I still never attended church.  Like my mom, my beliefs on social teachings were always on the liberal side.  I started seriously evaluating my belief on affirmation of 'queer' people with Christianity around 2012, researched the "clobber passages", and became more interested in Scripture and liberation theology.  I read the Bible in its entirety during my sophomore and junior years of high school.

15-20: Researched a variety of churches and traditions including Lutheranism and Methodism.  Briefly identified with the ELCA Lutherans and BRTD-ite evangelicalism.  By the time I was 17 I decided I wanted to be a minister.  After my dad got sick and was clinically dead for six hours during heart surgery, he started believing in God for the first time.  Went back to the UCC church I'd been christened in after my dad died in a household accident and was an active member until I left for college.

20-21: I moved to NC to attend my UCC-affiliated college on a full scholarship with the intent of becoming a minister.  Began looking into Anglicanism, specifically Ango-Catholicism, and identified more with their traditions.  The lack of emphasis on the Sacraments within the UCC moved me toward the Episcopal Church, though before I left college I still wasn't sure whether leaving the UCC was the right move for me.

At this time, I realized that capitalism was fundamentally incompatible with the Christian worldview, though I was and am still reluctant to embrace socialism wholesale.  My views on sin were shaped from reading Walter Rauschenbusch, the father of the Social Gospel movement who criticized the church for focusing on repentance for personal sins but not social sins.

21-24: After I left college to care for my mother, I became a victim of stalking and had my identity, along with almost everything we ever owned, stolen.  As a result, I became jaded and decided that the ordination tract probably wasn't for me, but I still wanted to be involved in the theology field.  Attended my first Episcopal service with my mom in 2018 and decided I was a full-fledged Anglican, but eventually parted ways with the church for reasons I'd rather not get into.

I also started getting heavily into Albert Camus and absurdism, which on its face is incompatible with Christianity (Camus was, after all, an atheist) but is also IMO the best and most logical way to approach the 'wrongness' inherent to the world and to human nature.  It's no coincidence that I started embracing absurdism when I started to develop suicidal ideations and really question the value of living at all.  Given the choice between suicide and a cup of coffee, I picked the latter (though I did attempt suicide for the first time mid-last year).

24-25: As of late, I've been inactive in the church community due to poverty and legal problems.  I devote my spiritual activity to private worship, specifically meditation, novenas, Centering Prayer, the Rosary, and occasional online services which really are no substitute for public worship.  Considering attending an online school when I'm in a better living situation to finish my theology degree - possibly Saint Leo University.  But I'm in a very precarious and transitional stage of my life right now, so I'm delaying involvement in any church for now.  Hoping that changes once my mom and I are relocated in a more livable apartment and we're in better financial standing.
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Former President tack50
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« Reply #15 on: March 17, 2020, 04:40:59 AM »

0: Born into a nominally Catholic, yet in practice non-religious family (I have never seen my parents regularly go to church in my life). I was not baptized.

1-11: Never thought about religion at all, other than asking why I didn't do the first communion ritual some of my friends did, being glad I didn't have extra religious classes after school or enjoying the "Alternative to religion" subject in school instead of the "Religion" subject (which is harder and requires a minimum of study instead of literally doing nothing)

12-13: Brief existencial crisis that lasted all of 2 hours. I also started asking my parents relatively uncomfortable questions about religion which they answered as well as they could.

14-19: My "religious phase" ended. I never had the urge to research online about those existencial or religious questions for some reason and literally never thought about religion.

20-21: Very similar as before. However reading on uselectionatlas DOT com SLASH forum and in particular this board I did have to question myself a bit more; so I have just naturally developed an additional stance to my general deliberate ignorance on religion which is "Some questions are best left unanswered". Then again this is just an evolution of my earlier philosophy of "Ignorant people are happier people; the truth hurts".
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dead0man
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« Reply #16 on: March 17, 2020, 06:15:37 AM »

born on a Saturday, was at my S.Baptist church the following Sunday morning and went at least 3 times a week until I was almost 21.

Got "saved" at 9ish, 'cause it seemed like the thing to do and the time to do it.  I never 100% bought in though.  Maybe as high as 93%, but never the full thing.  My secular friends seemed to be having more fun, and the older we got the more fun they had.  Oh, they try and make church fun, games and such and that works great on children, but if they ain't bought in by 14 or so, the fun and games of the secular world are way more alluring.

By the time I was done with HS I was through, I kept going occasionally to keep mom off my ass, but knew this wasn't for me.  I saw a lot of hypocrisy.....but I've since learned that Christians aren't particularly special in that field.  Every group is full of hypocrites.  Yes, even yours.  I'm still fascinated by some aspects of Christianity, I just don't think I'm the type of person that needs religion in their life for whatever reason.  On the other hand, sometimes I "feel" like I'm still a Christian, I'm just living a part of my life I will look back on with regret when I, at some point in the future, accept Jesus back into my life.
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Kleine Scheiße
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« Reply #17 on: March 17, 2020, 10:29:01 AM »
« Edited: October 16, 2020, 08:40:31 PM by Only a fool would take anything said here as fact. »

I am not clearly sortable into a religious group. My religious practice would most closely resemble "Hinduism" to an observer, but I avoid using that label because 1. it is not part of the culture I was born into and the history of white people with Religious Studies degrees writing about Hinduism is not at all pretty; 2. that label is fraught and subject to enough debate already; and 3. I have read a lot, but I have not yet studied enough scripture and commentary. I don't think it would be acceptable to go around calling myself a Hindu, but in terms of belief and behavior, I am generally in that universe.

I can't speak for all Hindus for the reasons above and more, but I am a radical pluralist. My practice acknowledges all faiths and non-faiths as not "equally valid" but instead complementary to one another -- equally useful. The Hegelian conflict between them tunes our "collective" and "individual" consciousness like tension balances the strings of a violin. I consider myself part of the Advaita Vedanta tradition, though I am influenced by Christian liberation theology, Zen, Alfred North Whitehead, Zhuangzi, and anarcho-individualism. Far more Stirner than Rand, but I admit that I am a mild Rand apologist.

Gave up atheism and became an agnostic in high school when I realized that people doing irrational things does not always mean bad stuff happens. This came to me because I decided it was ridiculous that my peers were complaining about having to study the material we were being taught while also standing quite willingly on the shoulders of those giants. What I missed was that it wasn't "willingly" after all; they just by-and-large could not see the bigger picture while I had uniquely intense problems with understanding the details.

By the time I graduated high school, I pretty much understood how religion could be useful for me personally -- I knew that it could offer structure, and a lens through which to analyze both the world and being itself -- but I had trouble matching that with any religious tradition. All the education in religion I'd really received was either philosophy explaining why religion was bad or a list of trivia facts from middle school social studies about "why Jains are sometimes vegetarian" (spoiler alert: what?) or "what Moslems [sic, per my textbook] think." I couldn't understand most of the scripture I tried to read other than the King James Bible which I enjoyed as a kid, so I tucked that away and continued my private readings in western philosophy. Big influences were Camus, Wittgenstein, and Gramsci.

In college I took a lot of LSD and had a lot of highly personal conversations about objectivity, mathematics, and egoism. Quite a few powerful experiences in and concerning "nature." I made some friends who shared my general outlook, but interestingly enough, every one of them was raised strictly Catholic. I was a History student, but I declared a minor, then a second major in Religious Studies in my sophomore year. Started going to temple and studying Ramakrishna, Aurobindo, and Vivekananda, while also rediscovering Christian thought through Anabaptism. Again, I was a History major in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania. It was hard to avoid and it's very interesting anyway.

I'm not going to discount the possibility that my later interest in Hinduism may have been prompted by a DK book about various deities and basic concepts which I checked out from my school library in second grade. Why they had that in specific, I don't know, but it was the only book on religion there that wasn't Christian and I was intrigued. I have no memory of any of the specific contents other than a very large image of Ganesha on the cover, but I remember reading it forwards and back and not wanting to return it. Super apropos and quite funny in the grand scheme of things that my first exposure to Hinduism was a Ganesha murti as a kid.

That's pretty much it.

Socialism and communism are used to avoid confronting the reality of human selfishness; they allow us to imagine ourselves as "naturally good" rather than just "naturally human."

I'm not really sure how "a powerful part of humanity is violently exploiting the rest" is somehow any implication that humans are "naturally" anything.

And religion-- the worst of them all-- is based in the fear of death, which is the ultimate fear of all people, and the eternity of nothingness and nonbeing that unavoidably and undeniably follows. Because religion is designed to avoid confronting humanity's greatest fear, it has proportionately required our greatest delusion. Religious people who feel the need to convert others subscribe to the majoritarian instinct that if they surround themselves with people who affirm their beliefs, they will feel more emboldened and righteous...

Doesn't seem like you're opposed to religion, here, because religion is by definition not "designed." You can make any argument you'd like about subconscious urge, but the institutions of humankind are what you are criticizing and they are not necessary for humans to continue using religion as vernacular philosophy, just as the majority of humankind has done for millennia. The "religion" you are upset about is a relatively new development in human history.

I have come to the conclusion that I simply cannot put up with belief systems that I consider to be willful self-delusions any longer.

Do you realize how self-contradictory this is?
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Mr. Smith
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« Reply #18 on: March 17, 2020, 10:51:40 AM »


And it can't be changed that it's reality's problem that it's scary, it is up to reality to change itself.
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« Reply #19 on: March 17, 2020, 11:10:23 AM »

I began to view Islam (and religion in general) as the direct threat to Western liberal values that it is

Also, what does this bumper sticker actually mean? I've seen it on a number of Nazis' cars around town, but in my experience everyone who seems to have it is usually so drunk they can't explain it for me when I ask.
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dead0man
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« Reply #20 on: March 17, 2020, 11:31:31 AM »

I began to view Islam (and religion in general) as the direct threat to Western liberal values that it is

Also, what does this bumper sticker actually mean? I've seen it on a number of Nazis' cars around town, but in my experience everyone who seems to have it is usually so drunk they can't explain it for me when I ask.
you have a number of Nazis driving around?  And they are usually drunk?  The east coast sucks more and more every day.  I've driven all over the middle of the country for the last forty some odd years and I've never seen a Nazi driving.  I did see a pick up truck at a rural AL gas station with a pro-KKK bumper sticker once in the mid 90s and there was a small group of skin heads that we'd see occasionally at metal shows in StL in the early 90s, but we never saw them do any actual "skin head" type stuff and they never wore any swastikas or anything...I don't even think they did the red armband thing, but it's been a long time.

Have you considered moving to a less drunk driving Nazi filled part of the country?
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PeteHam
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« Reply #21 on: March 17, 2020, 11:38:32 AM »

I began to view Islam (and religion in general) as the direct threat to Western liberal values that it is

Also, what does this bumper sticker actually mean? I've seen it on a number of Nazis' cars around town, but in my experience everyone who seems to have it is usually so drunk they can't explain it for me when I ask.
you have a number of Nazis driving around?  And they are usually drunk?  The east coast sucks more and more every day.  I've driven all over the middle of the country for the last forty some odd years and I've never seen a Nazi driving.  I did see a pick up truck at a rural AL gas station with a pro-KKK bumper sticker once in the mid 90s and there was a small group of skin heads that we'd see occasionally at metal shows in StL in the early 90s, but we never saw them do any actual "skin head" type stuff and they never wore any swastikas or anything...I don't even think they did the red armband thing, but it's been a long time.

Have you considered moving to a less drunk driving Nazi filled part of the country?

The funny part is that you think I'm actually kidding. I have indeed seen many swastikas casually worn in public to no reaction, although people don't do it as openly as they did as recently as 2015. Obviously you never saw them every day, but monthly was accurate at one time surprisingly not that long ago.

I have spent a lot of time in parts of the country where public bigotry is different than that, yeah, and I would be interested in living elsewhere once possible (relatively soon, likely).
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afleitch
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« Reply #22 on: March 17, 2020, 12:52:36 PM »

I began to view Islam (and religion in general) as the direct threat to Western liberal values that it is.

I tend to think the opposite; I think Islam could become extremely complimentary to western liberalism if it is allowed to engage better with the society that it functions in. There is internal and cultural pressures within in the faith and the community but also reactionary 'othering' from other western religious and secular communities. To an extent, Islam in America is becoming it's own movement (and is offering hope to British communities) and it's extremely welcoming.
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Associate Justice PiT
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« Reply #23 on: March 17, 2020, 01:48:26 PM »

     From the time I was old enough to understand religion, I was atheist (or perhaps apatheist is a better term). I generally held to philosophical materialism at that stage, lacking a sense of the divine or the mystical as a real thing.

     Roughly a year ago, I converted to the Eastern Orthodox Church. A friend of mine who had repented and turned his life around invited me to a Divine Liturgy at his church. I experienced the presence of God, and was inspired to repent myself. Coronavirus permitting, I will be baptized within the next month.
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Statilius the Epicurean
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« Reply #24 on: March 17, 2020, 09:49:19 PM »
« Edited: March 17, 2020, 09:55:45 PM by Statilius the Epicurean »

Being raised by sort of New Atheist-ish parents I never even thought of religion outside of the prayers, hymns and church visits we did in school which always felt a bit confusing and pointless. Then around the age of 14 I was briefly interested in Buddhism because I found the secular, therapeutic side nice and the idea of reincarnation was fun to think about. That's about it for me as far as 'faith' goes. Never found the grand metaphysical claims central to religious faith personally compelling, nor have I ever felt like I've been missing anything in a 'spiritual' sense.
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