and if you atheist/switched faiths, why did you do it and what faith did you choose?
im in a curious mood today :>
I am a Muslim, so Islam.
Wow, you are like the only Muslim here lol, are you from the west?
No evidence for God, that’s why I’m an atheist.
I’m an atheist. I grew up super religious and had a falling out with my church due to their “if someone believes different than our denomination they are going to hell” mindset. After that I found out that most other denominations are like that except for mormons but they are worse in other ways. Then I did more and more research that sort of caused what belief I had left to fall apart and now its kind of like Santa Claus, once you figure out its your parents putting presents under the tree theres no believing in Santa anymore
I am an atheist and ordained dudeist priest. Because it aligns with my values.
Taoism is a practice that doesn’t rely on or reject a higher power. It gives meaning to day to day life and the writers I’ve read who practice it have a very practical view on the world.
As for religion, I fall into agnosticism. I certainly don’t have any hard evidence that there is a higher power, but at the same time, with how insanely complex, terrifying, beautiful, loving, and hurtful the world can feel, I can’t help but feel that there’s something beyond what’s in front of us at play. It may not be a theist’s idea of God, but something else entirely.
From very young age i never felt i needed to believe in anything, spirituality felt like a part i was missing. my parents took me to church but i never liked the god depicted there and i found the crucified man figurine scary. When they told me that god loves me and that if i didn’t love him back i would go to hell it all soured for me. That portrayal of love didn’t make sense in my mind.
I don’t feel atheist either, religion feels very political to me, and atheism seems more apolitical than an active oposition. Where i live catholicism has a lot of power and it’s tentacles wrap around government agencies and institutions. There are weird cults close to where i live that are offshoots of catholicism ; These cults have international power and they have deep histories of corruption and abuse. I feel something has to be done about this but where i live there is very little oposition or regulation for religious institutions.
I was raised in an atheist/agnostic household. nobody ever came out and said we were atheist or agnostic, but no one went to religious services Weekly or on holidays. There was never talk of prayer or worship or god.
Both my parents came from different religious backgrounds. One parent is Jewish. The other is Christian, though I would argue that their parents were atheist/agnostic as well.
We celebrated the holidays that involved presents so Christmas, Hanukkah and Easter. I didn’t really learn any of their religious symbolism behind these holidays until I was much older and it wasn’t through my parents. Part of it was cultural, osmosis, and part of it was curiosity about these religions when I figured out what they were.
We lived in a pretty big Jewish community or so it wasn’t uncommon to get invited over for Passover dinner at someone’s house.
I went to Synagogue with Jewish friends and church with Christian friends. My friend’s mother holiday taught classes at their synagogue so I do remember going and learning about Judaism and the holidays there but I didn’t last very long. I didn’t really enjoy it, I remember not wanting to go back in after our little recess/break and watching fiddler on the roof.
When I was curious about Christianity and wanted to know why my friends went to Sunday school or church on the weekends, my mother took me to a Unitarian church. We didn’t attend for very long and I don’t remember being particularly interested or involved in any of the activities they were doing for the kids.
Now I would say, I am firmly an atheist.
Atheist. Raised atheist but it doesn’t effect my viewpoint, I’d be atheist either way at this point in life
Im a romuvis :3
Used to be an atheist before ig
What is that? 🤔
Romuva is lithuanian paganism :3… kind of obscure everywhere outside the country
Man it’s been a while since I’ve come across a pagan reconstructionist in the wilds of social media. Cheers!
I hadn’t heard of Romuva before, but I used to know a bunch back in the day; Celts, Hellenists, Kemetics, etc.
Baltic pagans are definitely rarer to encounter online than the others :3… these days I feel like I mostly meet hellenists and wicca with a sprinkle of germanic pagans
At least there’s a lot of holidays to attend in person tho haha x3
Yeah, true that. Hell, reconstructionists in general are pretty rare, much less finding the rare thing within a group of rare things. ;) Also I’ve always been a lil uneasy around German pagans, unfortunately there’s a strong undercurrent of white nationalism that has co-opted/corrupted some of it and it’s hard to tell them apart at a glance.
Though Wiccans aren’t reconstructionists in the usual sense; they’re not rediscovering/recreating something that once was so much as syncretizing something new out of the pieces of a bunch of pre-Christian/indigenous practices.
Yeah the germanic thing is quite unfortunate… the main symbol for romuva also catches the religion a fair share of drama tho x3
Atheist.
As far as I see, there are 2 basic possible states for being(s) with regards to divinity: either they’re omnipotent or they’re not omnipotent. (Partial omnipotence may perhaps be great power, but it is still non-omnipotence by definition.)
The Stone Paradox demonstrates that full omnipotence cannot happen; and any being, however powerful, that does not have full omnipotence is inherently no different than me or you and thus has no right to be considered a god.
and if you switched faiths, why did you do it and what faith did you choose?
Well, I used to be a Christian, but only by virtue of being raised as one. As I grew older, I grew out of Christianity. It makes no sense to me from the perspective of the scientific method or Occam’s Razor. Also, my very traditional Christian family did not exactly live up to the Christ-like ideals of love and tolerance, so that definitely put me off it, I can tell you that much.
As I got older, I tried other religions: Islam, Zen Buddhism, Earth paganism, various other forms of paganism. They were excellent experiences that taught me the value of different faiths but they were, in the end, not for me. I like the rock that the scientific method provides, and I like how it teaches and encourages critical thinking ability. With science, I don’t need to take some reverend’s word for it that a magical sky-daddy is watching me masturbate while my great-great-grandmother judges me from past the celestial gates. I can be confident to know that it’s far more likely they’re dead in the ground, disintegrating back into the earth from whence they came.
The ancestors part always brings a smile to my face.
- they were young, once, hence, they had sex, masturbated, etc.
You being alive is proof enough of the later. No room for judgement there: they’ve been there, done that.
- the entire “cult of the ancestors” starts on the present.
If the person paying respect to past figures is concerned over such petty parts of life, that person is concerned over the wrong things.
- you will, theoretically, become an ancestor one day.
Will you be bothered over petty things or be concerned with your descendants living well and happy, like you wanted, tried and wished for others?
I do enjoy the notion of teverence towards the ancestors. It’s like having a personal roster from which to choose and say “not doing what they did” or “they had worst and made it”. Or a personal fan club.
The short version: It’s complicated.
The long version: I fell out of Christianity at age 17 because I had hard questions no one wanted to answer, so they asked me to either stop asking or stop coming to church. I spent years and years reading everything I could get my hands on about religion in general and many major world religions in specific, didn’t find anything I could agree with or that seemed true to me as-is, and ultimately decided to cobble together my own beliefs from the useful bits I found in others. So now I have a highly syncretic mix of components from many religions (plus some I cooked up myself) that feels right to me. It centers around the idea that divinity is a kind of all-encompassing infinite ur-consciousness/hive-mind of which we are all a part, that the world is an illusion that creates a divide between us (which is why we feel like individuals), but also within us (between mind/thought/idea and feeling/emotion/experience), and enlightenment comes from learning how to heal those rifts and not just realizing or understanding but knowing in your bones that we are one. In short: the truth is love, love is the union of self and other, of mind (intellect) and heart (wisdom), of order/stasis/death and chaos/energy/life, into the unified psyche of one all-pervading ur-consciousness.
Building your own belief system is not a path I recommend for most because it requires a commitment to intense introspection in order to develop self-awareness and a deep willingness or even desire to have your understanding and beliefs challenged and updated with new perspectives and information. But for me anyway it beats being an atheist (I was one for many years, despite my fascination with religion), though I’m not here to convert anyone. This seems true to me, and that’s enough.
Atheist. Religion is an explanation of the world that’s made the fuck up. I think people make shit up to explain reality because accepting uncertainty is difficult, but that doesn’t make it ok. The world around you exists, just like it is. There is no special place you get to go if you follow the right set of rules .
Antitheist.
If there is some kind of almighty God that created and rules everything then it must be the most evil being to ever exist and we must destroy it. It created evil, it created suffering, it created loss, it created death, and for what? Fun?
This is also me. If there’s an afterlife, I’m spending it beating “god’s” ass.
I’m curious why you would define your belief in terms of opposition to one deity in specific when human history is littered with gods, many of whom were huge assholes. How do you feel about, say, Zeus or Mithras or Ahura Mazda? 'Fuck all of ‘em’ is a position I can understand, but ‘Fuck this one in specific and the rest are fine’ just seems a little odd, ya know?
I think more broadly you could say I’m anti-demiurge, I guess I don’t particularly hate the other gods but they’re just jumped up elementals/spirits. Like, whatever, some guy demands to be worshipped in exchange for boons or to bestow curses or whatever. I think he’s an asshole for lording his cool lightning powers over us, but I don’t think he needs to be destroyed for it per se.
I once read about an african creed that states the original creator of reality created it because it found something existing was better than only void - in the sense of absolute nothing - existing, and thus set what we perceived as reality into building itself and let it to its own devise, to never again interfere or meddle with it, to then disappear.
It’s a convoluted way to state: deal with your own mess; I just set the stage, you write and act your own play.
It’s a good way to deny people of the easy cop out.
Imagine you intentionally become pregnant, give birth to a child, and then throw them in a dumpster. That’s the god you described.
Except multiply that by billions of lives.
If such happens it is entirely on the responsability and choice of who did. No cop out, no resorting to a scripture to excuse actions, no easy forgiveness.
I think you misunderstood - God is the one throwing the baby in a dumpster.
You got my atention. Explain your point of view, please.
Who is responsible for birth defects? For natural disaster? For sickness? These things aren’t choices and we aren’t responsible for them, they happen because god created a cruel world for us to suffer and die in. God created the dumpster and threw us in.
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.
It was wrong then - nothing existing is far preferable to this world with all its suffering
Tell me you are a broken human being without saying it.
I’m honestly sad for knowing you take life to such regard but there is more to reality and life than our own small sliver of experience and understanding.
Baptized catholic by my parents, did all the ritual things all my youth until i was 16. Then i was old enough to try to understand it, got exposed to other schools of thought, and it all collapsed like a house of cards.
I am now fully atheist, and I find religion ridiculous, like fairy tales for adults, based on nothing. Organized religions are also usually structures of power for men. This can all go.
My spirituality would be:
We are made of star-stuff. Temporary piles of molecules which work together and stop after a while, to recombine into something new. I don’t need to be remembered, I don’t need to leave my mark. Just try to do no harm, any maybe help others along the way, while on this ball of rock and water, tumbling into the immensely empty void.
Nihilist, insofar that even if there is a god (about as likely as me actually being a secret agent for moon people) why would it matter? While nihilism is not a religious belief I think it fits the prompt.
I made a poop the other day, I’m its creator, I don’t care about it, I don’t control its destiny beyond the flush.
I’m an optimistic nihilist, nothing matters and that’s kinda neato. Existence happens, how fascinating is that? It’s absolutely meaningless just like everything in the universe, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the ride.
Diving into nihilism and existentialism was really an eye-opener for me. It kind of made me stop hating myself and other people and even stop being an atheist. If nothing means anything I get to decide what matters, I get to create my own meaning. So I did.