Religious survey

LOL Karma - ur mix sounds divine :p

I identify largely as wiccan with a pantheistic view :D essentially I believe that every living thing is connected... and that every inanimate object can be connected... it's just up to us to be open enough to resonate with the beings around us :D
 


We are both

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Christians
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Mainstream Religion

To the guy in Southwest Mo: The first thing you need to do is realize that Christianity in the Main was instituted to control people. It is supposed to be a religion of Love and Peace yet has spent the past 2000 years spreading hate and war.

Find God for yourself. The divine spark will show you how if you stop trying to follow convention. Start with Religions that don't tell you it's wrong to love more than one person, a person of the same sex, etc.

Good Luck!

:)
 
I identify myself as Christopagan or a Christian Mystic. I was raised in a non-denominational Christian church during the charismatic movement. I am a Christian first but practice less of what we'd consider "traditional" Christianity. I've recently started getting involved with the local UU church. I left my current church after my pastor retired and passed away to cancer. His replacement is a money grubber who spent months showing us televangelists on the big screen in the chapel asking us to tithe more.
 
I can relate to Mystic Christianity, Brigid. I see early gnostic Christianity as a continuation of myths from "pagan" Greek, Babylonian and Egyptian religions' archetypes. (Judaism grew out of Persian, Babylonian and Egyptian religions, after all. Christianity was born out of a further uneasy phase of syncretism with Greek culture's religious memes.) I took the screenname Magdlyn after Mary Magdalene, who I see as the Christ's liaison between being brought to flesh for the healing/feeding of the world, and his return to the uncreated Great Parent matrix god. This originator is known as "Father" in the canonical Bible. Yahweh is called Ialdabaoth by 4th century gnostics, who saw him as a lesser god who actually formed our physical earth, albeit in an imperfect union with Sophia (who manifests as both Marys in Christian writings).

I prefer Paul's authentic epistles in the canonical Bible, as they present the more spiritual and psychological Christ, instead of the synoptic Gospels, which transform it into a more literal being. John, however, is again more mystic. Then you see reactionary literalist hierarchical Gospels like 2 Peter and Jude. And so it goes...
 
To the guy in Southwest Mo: The first thing you need to do is realize that Christianity in the Main was instituted to control people. It is supposed to be a religion of Love and Peace yet has spent the past 2000 years spreading hate and war.

Find God for yourself. The divine spark will show you how if you stop trying to follow convention. Start with Religions that don't tell you it's wrong to love more than one person, a person of the same sex, etc.

Good Luck!

:)


Hi

I belong to an American Baptist church. They are the more liberal minded branch and some locations even have a gay social group in them. I say that if religion fills a void in a persons life than go for it. However, I think religion has been used by many as a tool of control and hate far to long. I feel it should be used to teach love not hate. Just my two cents worth. :)
 
2 Pence -

I'm an anthropologist by choice, education, training and trade. With this background, I discovered very early that religions borrow significantly and liberally from each other. Historically, there are no hard and fast rules in any religion. They all change beliefs and canons as often as they change their political, social, geographic, human and commodity-based resource interests.

Religions exist for the specific purpose of exclusion by 'divine' decree. Once a group is excluded, either as 'outsiders' or 'non-believers', they become the socially-, politically-, economically- and religiously-sanctioned targets of discrimination, theft and murder. Oddly enough, I have moral and ethical issues with discrimination, theft and murder ...

I admire people of faith: those who live by the highest tenants of religious and humanist philosophy and behavior, however they choose to express it or celebrate it.

Personally, I prefer an all-inclusive philosophy that is self-actualized, politically agnostic, scientifically sound on a quantum level and declines to barter for souls it already owns: I'm Taoist.
 
I have always associated myself as a christian that view has changed slightly over the years cause just in general I don't agree with everything the bible teaches.
but I have come to associate myself as a liberal christian....I attend a unity church here in my home town and plan on continuing going one when I go to st.louis for school too.
 
I admire people of faith: those who live by the highest tenants of religious and humanist philosophy and behavior, however they choose to express it or celebrate it.
I am curious as to what you mean by this. Do you mean you admire people who have faith in a humanist religion?

The reason I ask this is because I heard someone recently talk about the virtue of belief and faith. However, Fred Phelps (of the God Hates Fags fame) has a lot of belief and faith, yet most people would not consider him a good person. So I started to wonder about why people see value in belief or faith itself.
 
I'm a polyamorous Christian and that ain't no oxymoron!

I am a Christian because I fit the true definition: I believe in the good news that Jesus is the Christ Who paid my sin debt in full and purchased my eternal life. I believe Jesus is my rightful Lord, and I earnestly listen for His voice to obey His commands. Loving God with all my heart, soul and strength, and my neighbor as myself requires far more than mere rules-keeping according to the New Testament Ethic!

Only recently did I begin to understand that the Apostle Paul was his whole life a Pharisee in Recovery and that some of what he wrote in his epistles to the gentile churches he founded reflected his human experiences as a Pharisee much more than inspiration by the Holy Spirit. In other words, that great Apostle was undergoing the process of progressive sanctification just as all of us believers must do. Of course my new understanding earns me branding as a heretic; but my faith in My Lord and Savior is not shaken!
 
I am curious as to what you mean by this. Do you mean you admire people who have faith in a humanist religion?

"Humanist religion" is an oxymoron.

The reason I ask this is because I heard someone recently talk about the virtue of belief and faith. However, Fred Phelps (of the God Hates Fags fame) has a lot of belief and faith, yet most people would not consider him a good person. So I started to wonder about why people see value in belief or faith itself.

Antigone did say "highest tenants [sic= tenets]." As Hillel the great early rabbi said, in summing up the Jewish Bible in the first century, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary; go and learn. —Talmud, Shabbat 31a, the "Great Principle"

There is evidence of this rule in ancient Egyptian religion from 2000 BCE. Apparently Confucius was the first one to call it the "golden" rule. IMO, we don't need a god or godman to tell us to follow this rule. It's something any sane person in any culture can see the sense of.

Fred Phelps and his hateful family are not sane.
 
Value of faith

Belief in something bigger than yourself is what keeps you going on a lonely winter night or worse. That some people are hateful and claim their hate as faith is unfortunate.

In the concentration camps the ones who survived were not the biggest strongest ones, nor yet the ones who followed every rule punctiliously, but rather those who had faith in something greater than themselves or something good still existing. See Frankl's Mans Search for Meaning.

Whether you want to call that something, ethics, God, faith, spirituality - we are wired for it as humans and it helps us.
 
"Humanist religion" is an oxymoron.
In most cases, I would agree. However, a deist could easily fall into that category.
IMO, we don't need a god or godman to tell us to follow this rule. It's something any sane person in any culture can see the sense of.
I agree. However, when I look at Fred Phelps, I can see that he really believes in the angry deity of the Old Testament who does kill people for petty things like working on Saturday or touching the ark. So the Westboro Baptist Church seems to follow the logic of their belief very well.

So I worry that religion doesn't help push people toward the golden rule, but can lead people away from it.

Athena said:
In the concentration camps the ones who survived were not the biggest strongest ones, nor yet the ones who followed every rule punctiliously, but rather those who had faith in something greater than themselves or something good still existing. See Frankl's Mans Search for Meaning.
I find the whole religious aspect of WW II to show some of the worst stuff that religion has to offer. You have the Nazis quoting the New Testament to show that the Jews had a blood debt for killing Jesus and thus justified the horrible things done to the Jews. And that stuff was added to the Bible so that the Christians could distance themselves from the Jews. They made the Jews the villains so Pilate could be seen as sympathetic. This makes Jesus less of an insurgent and legitimizes the religion better with the Roman government.

So what looks to be a two thousand year old distortion results in millions of Jews being killed by people who have strong belief in something higher than themselves.

I am not saying that is not a higher belief worthy of respect. What I don't like is belief without analysis. Faith without some reason or evidence. I see it leading to bad places when rationality and doubt are not part of the picture.

Blah. I hate it when I get preachy. I think I am just irritated because this woman I know is bound to a religion that is causing her large amounts of unhappiness and she can't see a way out of it.
 
THe nazi regime used anything they could to vilify the Jews. Hitler needed an "enemy" to unite his people against, and was willing to go to any lengths to do so. The fact that many jewish families had a great deal of wealth that the cash-starpped german government could then justify seizing didn't help their chances.

It was less honest "hateful religion" (to paraphrase) and far more a brilliant, amoral, powerhungry bastard using any means at his disposal, including the convienience of religion, to achieve his aims. The fact that the Vatican did nothing to stand up to him also didn't help anything... but as a pagan, I would exhort people to please not confuse "hateful faith" IE Westboro, with what Hitler, Himmler, and the rest of the Nazi upper-end pulled before and during WW2. That had nothing to do with their faith, and everything to do with a desperate people (and the German populace was DESPERATE, just look at their situation in the 1920s and 30s) being manipulated by a small group of brilliant but evil men, who used any and every tool at their disposal without the slightest hesitation to manipulate said desperate populace.
 
Back on topic, I'm secular humanist/atheist.

I was raised Baptist - sort of - as my mother didn't actively impart her beliefs to us... but it was part of the air we breathed. I went from a read the Bible everyday Baptist, to a Universalist, to a non-believer.

Dominos that fell were:
(1) as a young person having trouble with the fact that King James changed the Bible. How can it be literal word of God if some random king changed it? Lived a long time believing it's divinely inspired alleghory but not literal or historical in any sense.
(2) as an adult, reconsidered the idea of a literal hell. Started out with the thought that the idea of hell was distance from God. And, then dropped the idea all together.
(3) The Pope pisses me off. Plain and simple. I have particular huge moral issues with the Vatican's stand on condoms and HIV prevention in Africa.
(4) Intelligent Design/Creationism's assault on science has been such a huge irritant. Arguing against it, along with a general trend of anti-intellectualism and anti-science that prevades so much of dominant society, has pushed me to challenge my own support for religion in general.

Eventually, I just looked at the mental gymnastics I was going through trying to maintain a faith. I realized that it was one of many "security blankets" that I was clinging to provide comfort instead of dealing with reality. One of those moments of clarity that seem fundamental.

I simply let go.
 
I am a practicing druid, and solitary wiccan priestess. I am happy that my faith allows polyamory, however I have yet to discover it.
 
I would consider myself agnostic because the idea of an all powerful creator makes sense, but I just can't believe in the big 3 religions, they all seem too fictitious. I am interested in learning more about Buddhism.

Also, I don't think poly and christianity are mutually exclusive. I recently decided to read the Bible cover to cover and even though I am only 1/2 way through Genesis there are at least two references to poly relationships in the bible.

Lamech married two women, one named Adah and the other Zillah.

-Genesis 4:19

Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; so she said to Abram, “The LORD has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.”

-Genesis 16:1-2

Obviously I have a lot left to read, but I would say that you are just following in Abraham's (at the time called Abram) footsteps.
 
Also, I don't think poly and christianity are mutually exclusive. I recently decided to read the Bible cover to cover and even though I am only 1/2 way through Genesis there are at least two references to poly relationships in the bible.
I am actually reading the Bible from cover to cover also (I am reading for fun, not because I believe any of it).

For the most part, the Old Testament is accepting of one man and many women. There are a few rules like not marrying a mother and daughter. Or a king should not have way too many wives. However, it is not accepting of a woman with several husbands.

For the most mainstream Christianity, it has sought to recast this to say that polygamy was not what God really wanted to happen. He wanted one woman and one man to join to become one flesh. (However, "one flesh" just means sex, not marriage.)

I think the simplest way for a Christian to be poly is to ignore most of the Old Testament and go with the New Testament idea that everything boils down to love for neighbor and love for God.
 
I'm a mormon. It's not the reason i'm on the cusp of polyamory, though i do credit mormonism with introducing me to the idea a few years ago. Nor do i believe that 'plural marriage' is the only way to attain exaltation/apotheosis, though my faith has enriched my understanding of family and love.
 
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