Summary of your religious beliefs

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

Religion: Christianity
Denomination: Episcopalian (formerly UCC)

Why do you follow this religion (or lack thereof)?: I'm a cradle Christian, so it's always been part of who I am. Although I didn't feel particularly strongly about my faith until early 2012 or so, and didn't start attending church regularly until 2013.

God: God is fundamentally incomprehensible to the finite mind, but it is possible (and sufficient) to acknowledge God as the One who creates and orders creation, and indeed logic itself.

Afterlife: This is definitely something I'm less confident about speaking on, and this is a subject that I prefer to be secondary to all other Christian teachings. Obsession with one's own fate puts God and the fate of others second, which to me is contrary to Christian teachings. I an agnostic on Hell and view it as more as a state of mind which we've all experienced. I lean toward a quasi-universalist position and the existence of Limbo, and reject the notion of eternal suffering in favor of annihilationism.

Prayer: I try to pray every night. I pray novenas (nine-day prayers to saints) once a month. I'm progressively trying to incorporate more prayer in my life, including silent prayer before meals and the usage of Anglican rosary beads.

Worship: I attend weekly online services and do not intend on returning to in-person church until after the pandemic dies down.

Ghosts, spirits, angels, and demons: I have both seen and felt the physical touch of spirits, but that stopped after I left my hometown. I grew up in Connecticut, which is pretty much America's capital for hauntings and ghost sightings.

One True Path: Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. All Christians are saved. There is also a path to followers of other faiths and no faith at all, and while religions may be similar in values they are not all the same and it is impossible to reconcile Christianity and Hinduism in the same way it is impossible to reconcile my Anglo-Catholic/Arminian beliefs with Calvinism.

Spiritual objects: Same view as PiT.

Religious law: Religion is pretty pointless unless it holds some moral code to conduct oneself by in addition to belief. Fasting has never been part of my religious life. I believe that sin should be avoided, but more emphasis should be placed on fulfilling God's grace.

Spreading the word: I believe that it's very important to spread the word but it is increasingly difficult to do so now that, thanks in large part to globalization and mass media, the Word has more or less already been spread. With the aid of the Holy Spirit I successfully guided my best friend to Christ.

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

God: Brahman is all, in every sense, and is manifest in infinite, innumerable faces and things. I could be called a panentheist. All is and are manifestation of Brahman. I believe in the divinity of Jesus, Muhammad, Gautama Buddha, Krishna, Zoroaster, the Talmudic prophets, etc., and look on them as either avatars or holy teachers; an exhaustive list would not be possible. Some seem to believe that advaita vedanta is atheism by another name, or that it rejects worship as illusory or only of symbolic importance. This is inaccurate. Dualism and nondualism are complementary and not contradictory. Vivekananda: "[a]ll of religion is contained in the vedanta, that is, in the three stages of the vedanta philosophy, the dvaita, vishishtadvaita and advaita; one comes after the other. These are the three stages of spiritual growth in man. Each one is necessary." I practice jnana yoga but believe that bhakti is also absolutely necessary. Others could or could not find other practices more useful.

I do have a question: how do you reconcile Jesus' claim to be the only begotten Son of God to be true along with competing religions' claims that Jesus was a mere rabbi with no authoritative claim to any special relationship with God (or Brahman)?

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

Why do you follow this religion? I was baptized Episcopal. My parents were of different denomination (Dad was Presbyterian, Mom was Catholic) and so they "met in the middle" denominationally speaking.

I just came across this post as it was showed to me by Battista; it is crazy in that my parents were literally in the same situation, even though my dad was essentially an atheist, despite being baptized Presbyterian, until his NDE during heart surgery. I'll never forget the day he walked into my room and started crying (something he did on rare occasions) and told me "I believe in God now." I cried with him.

One Protestant and one Catholic make one Anglican. It's a proven fact!

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

My dad was technically Presbyterian and my mum Catholic. The Church would only marry them if they both promised that their children were Catholic, which we were, though none of the four of us profess any faith today.

The same rule applied for me, but the priest who married them (whom both my parents strongly suspected was gay, and he eventually left the priesthood) basically said "You know where the Church stands on this, but you do what you think is right for your kids."*

Ultimately I was baptized in a UCC church, because my mom didn't like any of the priests in our town. And she performed a baptism on me with my grandfather's help.

*This is sort of why I cringe at BRTD's Catholic-bashing. American Catholic churches are a good deal more progressive than your average Evangelical church, especially if you live in a liberal state.