Thread: What's Your Take on Religion Lately?

I'm a Catholic Christian by birth and researched ancient astronomy, different religions, psychology and philosophy, various sciences including human behavior all my life and came to believe that yes there is a supreme being around that created mankind, there is a God and He's not the only one, there is a Pantheon of God's and these Gods battled each other like the Indian, Egyptian and Summerian texts recorded until there was only one true God and I believe in Him, The God of Israel and He is the One who's giving me the strength to live.

The basic principles of religion to me is good because it fosters righteousness to humans, what I don't agree and believe in are useless and ill conceived traditions and religious leaders who perverted the religious dogmas to suit their own agendas.

Humans are gifted to know what is good and what is evil, we are intelligent beings and having said that we should always observe the basic laws of our religions, which is pretty plain and simple to understand because I believe that these laws was not made by man but by God.

Those religious teachings and traditions made by man are too ceremonial and at times complicated that's why I don't believe in it. Simply put, I believe in the 10 Commandments and the Old Testament of the Bible, I believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and his teachings. But I don't believe in the church and their church leaders, most of them doesn't even do what they preach, I think of the church as a bureaucratic body that doesn't walk the talk.

I am a Bible Baptist Christian. We believe in salvation through personal faith in Jesus Christ. Baptists do not believe in proxy faith, where a priest or any other person mediates between the individual and God. Every individual must come to the time in life when he or she receives Jesus Christ as personal Savior. We acknowledge the sufficiency of Scripture. God's Word clearly declares, "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works" (2 Tim. 3:16-17). Baptists believe that the Bible is free of error and is the only source of God's truth. Any view that can't be tied to scripture is based on human traditions and is not God's teaching.

Baptism: Some Christians perform Baptism on infants while we Baptists must be fully immersed in the water. This is usually done by lowering a person backwards into the water to imitate the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus.

While I was raised in the household of a Protestant minister, I am an atheist in the barebones sense. I do not believe in a God, physical or metaphysical, or an afterlife, physical or metaphysical, or a soul. I think that mankind is an individual with free will and infinite capacity to develop himself however he desires.

However, despite my many grievances with religion and my criticisms thereof, I am not entirely dismissive of religious philosophy. I have great admiration for the works of art created or sponsored by the Catholic Church, for one. There is something to be said about the almost agonizing beauty of the Sistine Chapel frescoes or Michelangelo's Pieta. In addition, some of my favorite composers wrote Masses: Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, etc. And were it not for Christianity, the works of Plato and Aristotle and many other Classical voices might have been lost to history.

I respect your religion for me any religion which teaches goodness and believes in God is a good religion. But when it comes to written texts like the Bible which was heavily edited and was assembled from different books, well I believe in the old testament more than the new one. Genesis up to the time of Noah was an edited and summarized version of the Summerian creation story called "Enuma Elisha", it was dug up this century in Nineveh , which is now Southern Iraq.

The good. It gives some something to grasp and help them through hard times in life.
The bad. It gives some a sense of entitlement/power and need to force down others throats. Instigators seeking out confrontation.
For me its honestly not something I care to practice or believe, but I do respect it for helping my family, friends, and others find some peace, comfort, and community.

Don't know how I missed this, I need to thank Kokiri for reviving all these older threads so they come across my desk, lol.
My family and I are Lutheran. My sister just started going to college so for the next few years she will likely be the least religious person in our family but I'm sure she will come back to it once she falls apart, haha. Somehow I never thought too deeply about religion (or other people's faith or lack thereof). Rather generic christian beliefs always felt correct to me and I'm comfortable to not do any further soul searching. I'm also stubborn as a goat so I probably couldn't change at this point even if I wanted to. I'm pretty much your bargain bin Christian who goes to church 4-5 times per year and uses it as a general guiding principle. Then again, I've seen a ghost and a UFO as a child which is perhaps why I'm so open to the idea of an all-powerful creator. I know for a fact (you don't need to believe me, I know what I saw was real) that there is more out there beyond what we can see on a day to day basis. An entire realm of things going on behind the scenes.

I thnk you've already read my rather… firm take on religion, but since many seem to do it, i'll also give my religious origins.

I was born in a wanna-be catholic family that got me baptised soon after birth. Then they pushed me into catechism.
Those people never prayed or even thougt one bit about religion or morality, but for some reason they wanted me to.
But then, after the fourth time i ended up napping at christ-mass (yes, the one after which it's named in English), they dropped it.
Also, even though i was the most curious and concerned about religion in my catechism class (i was around 6 and 7 back then) i was already spotting a hell (lol) of a lot of contradictions, hyprocisy and nonsense in the bible. Ultimately, at the end of my catechism class, my curiousity had turned into scepticism.
Even then i already considered my baptim null because i couldn't give my clear-minded approbation.

The major turn was when i got diagnosed with the genetic disease responsible for my handicap (i was 9).
It finished ruining the already fragile foundations of my faith. Back then i wasn't mature enough to sort things out so i put religion on standby.
But then, as my love for History, my family issues, and my understanding of the world grew, i ended up thinking there is no existing deity, and going full anti-religious (the priest-eater behavior as we call it ). My hatred towards religion has calmed down a bit thanks to a (short ) romance with an extremist protestant girl (jeovah they're called).

In the end my position is the same as in my previous post. But i just wanted to tell where i come from so that you understand a bit better my ideas and don't just get the priest-eater image. But to quote myself because in the end, my position remains the same :

"Before being an instrument of mass domination, i think it is first and foremost the most efficient weapon humans ever created.
In both cases i think it should be eradicated for the sake of greater good. But don't take me wrong : i hate religions, not religious people.
Even though i kind of look down on them i do not feel the need to kill them."