What's your religious experience?

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Re: What's your religious experience?

Postby Cordslash » Mon Mar 09, 2015 9:59 pm

You know Pumpkin I'm very very glad that you've found something to believe in, that you're excited about it and that it gives you solace.
I'm not at all religious myself but midnight mass is fantastic. The rituals are just so appealing.

Good luck to you, and may you find peace and happiness:)
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Re: What's your religious experience?

Postby Matt the Czar » Thu Mar 12, 2015 8:18 pm

I wasraised Catholic, but my strong belief in science and empiricism makes me a Diest who believes in the Trinity.
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Re: What's your religious experience?

Postby NathanLoiselle » Thu Mar 12, 2015 9:04 pm

Why it's 54. Thank you for asking.
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Re: What's your religious experience?

Postby SandTea » Tue Mar 17, 2015 4:11 pm

I view religion like having a foot fetish. I do not get it but don't mind others doing it. I think maybe some wires are crossed (not in a bad way just weird to me) in the brains of the foot fetishist (or me?) and i just cant understand. As long as you're not asking me to suck toes or watch you eat toe web lint or always droning on about the metallic sour cream taste of toes while we hang out we're cool and it's awesome that people are diverse.

I had a friend who once revealed she didn't believe in dinosaurs. I didn't stop being friends with her for it.

EDIT: Plus as a teacup I an obligated to believe in Russell's cosmic teapot.
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Re: What's your religious experience?

Postby NoodleFox » Tue Mar 17, 2015 6:34 pm

Might as well share since I think it's messed up.

I was raised as Catholic, but it was never a strict upbringing, as in we went to church on Sundays and the holy days (like Easter and Xmas eve) said grace during holiday meals-stuff like that. My brother and I were placed in an afterschool chruch class (sort of like Sunday school, but not on Sundays) around first grade. It was super boring, as I was a kid who liked to climb trees and be a kid, but both parents worked and I kind of understood that I couldn't be home alone at that point.

Cut to seventh year of school (I was...12?) and I was sitting in the classroom (which was separated by these weird textured solid blinds) not paying attention and drawing dragons (because dragons are awesome) in the workbooks they gave us every year. The teacher, who was also one at the junior high school I went to, saw what I was doing and discreetly flipped out.
Since dragons are depicted as an avatar of Satan (like I knew that at the time), she concluded that I was oppressed/possessed by a demon and demanded my parents that I'd see a priest.

Thankfully, being of sound mind, decided they had to or they'd be reduced to a modern day witch hunt by that crazy bat, but reiterated that I did nothing wrong and they would handle everything. So the three of us went one day after school and the head priest laid hands on me. It was fucking surreal, awkward and frightening.
I remember my parents meeting with the priest and the teacher before that and I have no idea what they talked about, but I knew they were just as angry as I was. Immediately the next day, they pulled me out of the program and decided that I was old enough to stay home until both got back from work.

So being persecuted by the church really jaded me and here I am today as an agnostic. Yeah weird, right? You'd think one would go atheist after that...
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Re: What's your religious experience?

Postby Learned Nand » Tue Mar 17, 2015 9:24 pm

NoodleFox wrote:So being persecuted by the church really jaded me and here I am today as an agnostic. Yeah weird, right? You'd think one would go atheist after that...

The two are not mutually exclusive.
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Re: What's your religious experience?

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Tue Mar 17, 2015 9:38 pm

I really don't get those "watch paint dry for Jesus" types.
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Re: What's your religious experience?

Postby Tuli » Thu Mar 19, 2015 2:53 pm

My experience is different than most here because I've never been religious. My immediate family has always been very lukewarm towards religion. The only really religious one was my grandma, and her attempts at proselytizing just turned me off religion even more. She tried to make me read the catechism when I was like 10, so imagine how that went... Also grandma was probably the reason I was even baptized as a baby.

In my late teens, I had some interest in learning about different religions. So I bought a textbook on world religions that covered all the big ones. I found myself more sympathetic to Buddhism and the like than I did to the monotheistic religions. They were intriguing from a philosophical viewpoint and that's how I like to approach religion. Now I feel that in everyday practice, all religions tend to get more dogmatic and ritualistic, and that's where they lose me. It's just impossible for me to 100% believe or accept something that's intrinsically unknowable.

Learning about all the wildly different religions also made me realize that it all amounts to different people's attempts to explain the world around them. So how can any religion claim to be more right than all others? That kind of presumption is what I find most repulsive. I think all religions can be equally as valid ways of looking at the world. And I think some people need religion to give them comfort and purpose, and that's great if they find it. And others, like myself, just don't have the capacity for that kind of faith. I think it's a difference in how the mind works, and one is not definitely better than the other.

By the way, Estonia is one of the least religious countries in the world, with less than 20% professing a belief in any god. So being agnostic or atheist is the usual here. I know a girl who's now going to Lutheran confirmation class out of general interest and she says a lot of her friends and acquaintances act pretty judgmental when they hear about it. Like 'why are you wasting time with that', 'it's all brainwashing', 'haha, are you going to become a missionary', et cetera. It's like they are threatened even by the prospect of her exploring religion... I find that pretty stupid, too. Wish we could all just respect each others beliefs.

Also, I love visiting old religious sites. They are masterpieces of architecture and I think there's a special kind of ambiance. I haven't been to Germany or France yet but the Gothic cathedrals are the number one reason I want to go. If anyone asks what good has religion ever done for the world, religious art is gonna be my first answer. :P
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Re: What's your religious experience?

Postby Phighter » Tue Jul 21, 2015 3:48 am

Okay, here we go.

I was raised Catholic and brought to church every Sunday when I was little, and I even had CCD where I learned and received the sacraments. In the fifth grade, I was supposed to receive confirmation, but that week I had the worst illness of my life (a strep throat that was so severe, we thought it was appendicitis). So I missed getting confirmed, and my religious life gets interesting from there.

My church-life dropped off a bit after that, even though I thought to myself that I would go back and get confirmed, I never have. When your parents stop forcing you to go to church, praying before going to bed works just fine. After all, the world has baseball and sometimes football on Sundays, church has tons of old people and crying babies. The entertainment aspect of literally everything else compared to an hour of church is only magnified when there's no one there your age. It's like finding out at work/college that nobody is into the show you're watching. The show is still the show, but having no one to bond with over it kind of sucks.

Two years ago, my father passed away from an eight-month battle with stage-four lung cancer. During that time, I leaned very heavily towards either atheism or agnosticism. You hear in church a lot growing up, "God has a plan for you", but I thought that if God's plans were to take a loving family man who loved the hell out of his two sons, was a devout Catholic, and all-around a pretty decent person, then God was seriously messed up. The quote from Bruce Almighty stuck out to me a lot during this time period - I don't remember it exactly but it goes something like, "God is a kid on anthill with a magnifying glass and I'm an ant. And he's sitting there, just burning my feelers and enjoying it."

The emotional effects of being your father's caretaker are quite huge, as you watch a man that you love go down a path that I will tell you just flat out sucks - it's watching everything you love about them slowly disappear over time, replaced by a human being that you would never hang out with if you had just met them instead of loving them your entire life, and you find yourself faced with absolutely crippling social responsibility that, for me as a high-schooler, was doable, but absolutely life-sucking. When my father finally passed, I entered a state of grief-related depression. God wouldn't have made my father and I suffer like this -- not the God I learned about, the loving and caring one. Someone religious during this timeperiod made the mistake of saying "God has a path" again, and I cut off of religion. I prayed to my Dad to watch over me.

Fast-forward to my time in college, which is now. I go to a Jesuit university, and Jesuits are a different type of Catholic and I was not thrilled about going to a Jesuit university at all (I went for many other reasons). Sitting through the opening masses reminded me of everything I hated about church - the hopeful optimism, things like that. I was strongly encouraged by many to give church a try again, but it wasn't happening for me.

Funnily enough, my love of singing comes into play here. Or more importantly, my lack of singing ability. I suck at singing, and when I got to college, I auditioned for two acapella groups, still thinking that I could sing plenty well. I can't. I did not get into either group, and I asked what I could do to improve - they told me that the Chapel Choir could always use more members, and had people of varying skill types. Since I do theatre and need to get better at singing, I figured dedicating an hour Tuesday and two hours Sunday wasn't so bad, so I went to Chapel Choir rehearsal for the first time.

Rehearsal was kind of weird, because there were a lot of people (maybe like, thirty) and they were all around my age singing, and they were happy as shit about singing all this God praise and what not. I took it as kind of crappy vocal lessons, but when you're around happy people, even if your view of life is on the more negative side, I think it starts to rub off on you a little bit. They were going on a retreat the third week I was in the group to prepare for the big mass of the year, and as a new member, I was more than welcome to join the retreat. Seeing the excuse to get away from the university for a few days (being at a new place alone is scary), I took it.

I was not a big fan of how religious the retreat was, and especially not of going to the evening mass. But there was something really interesting about that evening mass that changed my perspective. My peers read the first and second reading, my choir director read the gospel and talked about what it meant to her, as a person of regular faith. There were no priests during this mass. She talked about how she had went through abuse, how she was a lesbian, and all of these things, and she was still close to God and God liked her as who she was and she liked God.

We then gathered up in a circle and shut our eyes. There was this really simple exercise, we all held hands, and we'd all stand there and anyone who felt inclined to speak, spoke. We prayed for those people, as after they were done, we said "pray for us". At first, fairly-standard, if not cliched, things people said. "For families struggling", "for the veterans", "for kids dying in Africa", basically stuff that didn't relate to me. Then a girl, one of the less-popular of the group (she is a major ass-kisser), said "for those battling with depression to find strength". That hit me in a weird spot - here she is in front of thirty people, WHO KNOW HER, and she just admitted to that like it was no big deal, she was so comfortable. And I think it had that effect on others in the group, because some other things started to come out - people praying for different family members, etc.

Then this one guy (whose birthday is coincidentally today) spoke up. Now this guy, we called him Jolly Joe, because he was the happiest of all these weird Jesuit choir people, and his laugh is so infectious that if you hear it, you will laugh too, regardless of any way you feel. He's the definition of happy, and it was his constant prodding during rehearsal (he's a bass, and he was a senior, so he was the leader of the bass section who sat next to me and gave me a lot of advice during my time in Chapel Choir this year), that got me to go on retreat in first place. There was something wrong in Joe's voice as he spoke up.

"For my mother, who has breast cancer."

What an emotional thing - and surely nothing any of us really knew. "Pray for us", and we kept going for another couple of minutes. I stood there dumbfounded as people contributed their emotions, really putting themselves out there - like why the hell would you do that in front of people you see every day? This is college for crying out loud, this is madness - and it kind of, I guess washed over me. These people didn't care what others thought. They wanted the spiritual support of their brethren, and the support of God. They believed. That was the magical word that popped in my head and has shaped my belief.

I had to give a much-shorter statement of this for a religious class I took, and I think the best way to describe my religious thoughts now is that God is support. God is not going to fix your shit for you. God is not going to cure your cancer, find your lost cat, help your sports team win the game, or anything like that. That's not God's job, and if it was God's job, God would be one really busy guy and how the hell do you answer all those requests, y'know? Not just deciding who of the millions of prayers for cancer cures gets served first, but what if both sports teams pray to God? I really hope He isn't playing favorites hahahaha.

No, God is a support figure. God is that friend that you call at 2 in the morning, when you've had too much to drink and are feeling extremely low, and God is that person you talk to, and He doesn't answer or talk back -- just sits there and listens, and you just talk, and you cry, and you talk, and you cry even more, but at the end of it, you just have this feeling that at least - at least you're not completely alone. Someone is there for you. They're not going to tell you what to do - all of that's your call. But at least when you are feeling the shittiest of shitty, and you feel like you don't really have anywhere else to go, God is there so you have a shoulder to cry on and someone to talk to. God will not fix your shitty situation, but He will at least make you feel like you're not alone, like you've got someone. And that's a humongous thing in this world.
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Re: What's your religious experience?

Postby Malfeasinator » Tue Jul 21, 2015 4:45 am

Pros to "GOD":

- imaginary friend nobody's going to call you out on
- surrogate Dad who can kick your friends' Dads' asses
- makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, like when you come out of the cold snow and have a cup of hot cocoa
- seems to help certain kinds of addicts turn their lives around

Cons to "GOD":

- probably not real
- prayers don't actually work
- dude keeps asking for 10% of your pay
- constant guilt tripper and mellow harsher
- if he is real, watches you masturbate probably
- prone to anger and displays of violence (see: Old Testament)
- dude totally drowned all the world's puppies one time, except for a couple of them, from what I heard
- Knows everything, can do anything, yet still lets suffering go on for billions of people
- makes people wonder if he could make a rock so big even he couldn't lift it
- makes people wonder if he knows his next thought
- willing to push reset button on the entire universe just to redeem one lonely insignificant planet? What's the deal with that?
- gave us dominion over space birds in Genesis, but NASA hasn't found any yet
- has a gambling problem
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Re: What's your religious experience?

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Tue Jul 21, 2015 5:07 am

God is also a food.
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Re: What's your religious experience?

Postby Matt the Czar » Tue Jul 21, 2015 10:12 pm

Tuli wrote:By the way, Estonia is one of the least religious countries in the world, with less than 20% professing a belief in any god. So being agnostic or atheist is the usual here. I know a girl who's now going to Lutheran confirmation class out of general interest and she says a lot of her friends and acquaintances act pretty judgmental when they hear about it. Like 'why are you wasting time with that', 'it's all brainwashing', 'haha, are you going to become a missionary', et cetera. It's like they are threatened even by the prospect of her exploring religion... I find that pretty stupid, too. Wish we could all just respect each others beliefs.


By any chance did this have a bit of an effect on your nation?

Image


Also, I love visiting old religious sites. They are masterpieces of architecture and I think there's a special kind of ambiance. I haven't been to Germany or France yet but the Gothic cathedrals are the number one reason I want to go. If anyone asks what good has religion ever done for the world, religious art is gonna be my first answer. :P


I'd have to agree. Mozart's Dies Irae is one of the greatest peices of music in the world. And look at this:

Image

Dies Irae - The Day of Wrath.
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Re: What's your religious experience?

Postby Anglerphobe » Tue Jul 21, 2015 10:43 pm

I was born a snake handler, and I'll die a snake handler.
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Re: What's your religious experience?

Postby Phighter » Wed Jul 22, 2015 5:21 am

Matt the Czar wrote:
Tuli wrote:By the way, Estonia is one of the least religious countries in the world, with less than 20% professing a belief in any god. So being agnostic or atheist is the usual here. I know a girl who's now going to Lutheran confirmation class out of general interest and she says a lot of her friends and acquaintances act pretty judgmental when they hear about it. Like 'why are you wasting time with that', 'it's all brainwashing', 'haha, are you going to become a missionary', et cetera. It's like they are threatened even by the prospect of her exploring religion... I find that pretty stupid, too. Wish we could all just respect each others beliefs.


By any chance did this have a bit of an effect on your nation?

Image


Also, I love visiting old religious sites. They are masterpieces of architecture and I think there's a special kind of ambiance. I haven't been to Germany or France yet but the Gothic cathedrals are the number one reason I want to go. If anyone asks what good has religion ever done for the world, religious art is gonna be my first answer. :P


I'd have to agree. Mozart's Dies Irae is one of the greatest peices of music in the world. And look at this:

Image

Dies Irae - The Day of Wrath.


I thought Dies Irae was Verdi?
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Re: What's your religious experience?

Postby LaChaise » Wed Jul 22, 2015 8:46 am

It's originally a Gregorian chant. The oldest recorded version is from the end of the 15th century, but I think it's estimated to be from the 13th.

It was then used by Mozart (incomplete), Berlioz, Stravinsky and Verdi, among others. I'm only familiar with the Mozart and Stravinsky versions, but I'd say the Mozart one is the most well-known.

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