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  • 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?

  • 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.

  • Zen Buddhist. I grew up Christian, realized I was believing out of obligation rather than genuine conviction, but also I'm pan and Christians have made it very clear that's not okay with them.

    I was areligious for awhile. Which I use because I am still an atheist; I don't see much evidence for gods, but that isn't important to Buddhism.

    I appreciate the Buddha's teachings and find them incredibly helpful. I'm calmer, more focused, and over all, happier for my practice. It gives me a spiritual outlet that doesn't make me feel "dirty" the way Christianity did.

    There are aspects to Buddhism that I have to take on faith even though I am otherwise a skeptical individual. But ultimately, those things don't change how I would have had to live my life. And I believe that a true practitioner needs a balance of logic anf faith: too much logic, and you kill your faith. Too much faith and you wind up in a cult. You need enough logic to stay grounded, and enough faith to believe. But you have to acknowledge that you can rarely prove the things you take on faith and because of that, there will always be non-belivers, and that has to be okay.

  • I was raised protestant Christian.

    I would say what I believe now is heavily influenced by that, but also heavily influenced by how clearly the focus that evangelical Christians put on the idea “God needs to be feared more than They need to be followed” has fucked up so much of the world. Fearing someone at the cost of spreading their message is nonsensical, idiotic, hypocritical, and toxic to human society.

    According to the Bible, Jesus Christ rarely answered direct questions with direct answers; most of the time his answers came in the form of a story or a parable explaining one possible answer to the question given one possible context, implying that humans are encouraged to use their judgment to figure out how best to approach a situation. Imagine that. An all-powerful creator who granted intelligence like Their own to Their creation and actually wanting that intelligence to be exercised.

    One of the most notable instances where Jesus answered a direct question with a direct answer is Mark 12:28-31:

    “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

    “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

    In no uncertain terms, love is the most important commandment. Furthermore, Jesus equates loving your neighbor to loving God in Matthew chapter 25. It’s not evangelism, it’s not religious authoritarianism. It’s not indoctrination. It’s love.

    I believe this world was created by an omniscient Creator who wanted humanity to use the intelligence granted to us to freely develop a society centered around love.

  • 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, 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.

    My parents basically refused to explain anything about religion to me, even when I was curious just to understand what was being referenced.

    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 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.

  • Im a romuvis :3

    Used to be an atheist before ig

    • What is that? 🤔

    • 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

  • Atheist. Raised atheist but it doesn’t effect my viewpoint, I’d be atheist either way at this point in life

  • Raised non-denominational Christian to Agnostic to Gnostic-curious.

  • born in islamic nation (turkey), family didn't really do anything to teach religion (except trying to teach Arabic), I got more and more estranged from islam as I did my own independent research using online sources of the Qur'an

    I don't think I can be considered a Muslim anymore, I don't follow what is written down as a must, this actually makes me eligible to hell, and it is all so ridiculous for me now.

    I've talked with a lot of people, self proclaimed Muslims but their beliefs are far more deist than anything else, but they still call themselves Muslims but with their own additional beliefs.

    Another note, I haven't read hadiths, only the Qur'an. The Qur'an is very short and anyone here could read it, it's the absolute words of god so it is essential to follow if you're a Muslim.

  • I guess at this point I should consider myself a buddhist.

    I was raised in a Christian household in the us midwest but never felt drawn to it or any form of sprituality, over the years Buddhism in its many forms kept creeping up on me enough times and explaining things in such elegant ways that I eventually looked into Tibetan Buddhism more closely and realized that once you understand how the symbolism of it all works in terms of connecting the words of practices to actually useful life tips then it becomes a great benefit to yourself and others.

    As simply as possible, I chose this route because it is like becoming a scientist of experiences and all the practices we do are things that prove what we experience just as a scientist forms a postulate, a Buddhist forms a practice that leads to some form of awareness.

  • Discordian!

    More serious answer: I never had one to begin with. Why start now? All it seems to do is sow division.

  • 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.

    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.

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