I feel like I change my faith about as often as I change clothes.
I grew up religious. I always felt God's presence. Etc. I got annoyed when teachers couldn't answer my questions of "why" beyond "It's in the Bible." At least tell me where in the Bible, guys. But I guess the truth is they didn't know themselves and didn't want to say that, I don't know that I can fault them for that. I asked a lot of "why" questions as a kid, about everything.
I felt God's presence so I didn't really feel like it made sense for there to be nothing, but Catholicism seemed stupid if no one could answer "why" questions, so I looked elsewhere. Spoilered for rambliness:
Which is kind of funny since I spent a lot of time in the library reading about everything but Catholicism, and it turns out there is a huge body of work on the "why's" in Catholicism and enough debate that I would've been very satisfied to read it forever, but I honestly preferred looking for something new. I was a Wiccan for awhile. That really spoke to me because I always felt my best and my most connected to the world when I was in nature. I still do, and have a few feelings that may be considered silly there. So of course other things appealed to me in that vein too. Buddhism seemed very attractive, but I never called myself a Buddhist. Hinduism also seemed attractive, but I realized I didn't really believe in it. I just wanted to. I was agnostic for a long, long time.
Every now and then I'd go back to being Catholic for a little while. I probably always will. It's harder since I stopped feeling God's presence because now I can say well that's probably all in my head anyway. After my grandmother died, and I'd been on TCS awhile and had almost no religious friends left in my life, someone at her funeral told me that I'd see her in heaven one day. First off, even when I was religious, I was under no illusions that I'd end up in heaven, I'm not a good person and I will probably always choose not to be. Secondly it struck me that I won't because there is no heaven. We die. And that's it. It had been creeping up on me, but there it was. It was the first time I was ever truly an atheist, I think. And it was very distressing because with it came the knowledge that there is no objective morality; there is only what we make of it. And that is what tore me apart. Losing the certainty that morality is objective just crushed me. I'm not ruling out that without a god there can still be an objective morality (though I couldn't find it), just there absolutely is with God as I knew God. It was very painful to lose that.
That feeling of presence came back about a year ago. It was very faint, but there. Since then, I've been actively kind of...just...forcing myself to be religious. I'm happier when I believe in God. I'm happier believing that there is definitely an objective morality to be discovered. Catholicism suits my needs for philosophy, reason, order, and ritual, and the only thing I need to do is pretend that it makes sense that I am consuming the flesh of my God every Sunday in the form of crackers.
So I don't know how to answer the poll. Please add an option for, "I've lost my faith and it sucked and then I found it again (maybe) but it's extremely fragile and if I think too hard about it I might lose it again."
For now I'll go with computer simulation because I'm pretty sure that's the closest to how I feel.
I was born and raised in a pretty religious Catholic family, and attending Mass weekly with my parents involved in the church. I went to Catholic school from kindergarten through 7th grade,then switched to public school until I went to a Catholic college for my bachelor's degree. I was in the local church choir for about 10 years, and still attend church semi-regularly.
Overall, I would net my religious influence as a positive. I like the idea that there is a purpose and a reason to existence, and that the general idea behind that purpose is to be good to each other. I enjoy the sense of community I feel at church. And, admittedly, I like the idea that somewhere out there, my mother and other relatives are all okay. Maybe that's not a good reason or a logical reason, but it gives me comfort.
The emphasis on charity work in Catholicism is astounding and admirable: when my mother was diagnosed with cancer, her church friends sent meals and went to chemo with her. She was in a church support group for cancer patients that gave her a great outlet. When she died, I joined a church bereavement support group that also helped me greatly. Nuns cared for and befriended both of my grandmothers when they were ill, and priests sat with them and prayed with them when they were ill. I've been on the other side, too, as a volunteer, and generally seen a good, decent portrait of people who like to help and like to do good without any high-and-mightily self-righteousness mitigating it. Most people who help really do seem to just want to help.
That being said, I'm not unaware or in denial of how it's been a negative influence. We had one priest arrested in the parking lot of our Catholic school (as far as I know, he did not molest anyone at the school, but he did molest the son of a friend), and then the church's youth pastor was arrested it was discovered he was having sex with two youth group members (the victims' families sued the church and won). In college, one of the priests was arrested for sending nudes of himself to what he thought was a teenager in an online sting. The whole pattern is horrifying and while I don't know who knew what in these particular cases, but the way the church hid what was happening was disgusting.
There's other, smaller, reasons that I know also detract from the good. I admit, being raised in a Catholic family with strict parents and no older siblings to talk to, I grew up pretty screwed up about sex and still catch myself stuck in that trap of thinking "SEX IS WRONG, WANTING SEX IS WRONG, YOU ARE SHAMEFUL". And I've seen strictness about the rules of Catholicism really wreck people -- one of the worst wedding stories I have involved the groom's family refusing to attend his wedding because it wasn't in a Catholic church. (My grandfather refused to attend one aunt's wedding for the same reason.) The general attitudes of Catholics seems to be growing more liberal (at least in the US) but it's still a big problem.
So my feelings are: generally, I consider it a positive influence, but I'm not blind to the bad side of it.
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"I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not."
Encyclopedia Dramatica wrote:Reallifegirl: Is supposedly a girl in real life, but we all know that's false. Gets highest comment roughly 75% of the time, and has never had a single red-thumbed comment. Ever.
JamishT wrote:I couldn't select an option in the poll. I grew up in a somewhat fundie/charismatic church, and while I've become much less fundamentalist, I still believe in God, Jesus, the Trinity, salvation by faith, and stuff like that. So I guess I have kept my faith, but I don't examine it or talk about it very much anymore. I haven't attended church in over two years, and if I'm around people it's at work or improv, so there's no in depth discussion of faith, theology, and so forth in my life anymore. So really, I don't know how to answer the question.
I could have written this almost word-for-word (check out the other thread for more details). I still consider my faith to be a core component of who I am, but It doesn't consume my life, and I don't have the guilt.
My beliefs on social issues have greatly altered my faith. I couldn't continue to believe in the things I used to when the evidence to the contrary was staring me right in the face. The cognitive dissonance forced me to reevaluate my faith.
In way, I've lost faith, but what I've kept is stronger than ever, and I am glad for it.
I am technically a Catholic, but only very technically - my dad's family are Catholic, but all kind of stopped going to church after my grandfather died as he was the only really religious one. I still ultimately would describe myself as at the very least Christian if not specifically Catholic, but ultimately I just don't think about it much. What I am still left with from this upbringing - my dad's family all being, as well as Catholic, classical musicians - is an appreciation for Catholicism's impact on culture, particularly the music: One famous example being And the Glory of the Lord from Handel's Messiah:
And one of my current favourite pieces, Ay que me abraso ay by the Mexican composer Juan García de Zéspedes:
Raised Catholic until I was about 16. Mom was Baptist and I think dad was Lutheran, they converted before I was born. The good priest I had as a child left and we went through some badduns. The alcoholic (seriously, like 30 boxes of wine, each holding about 5 gallons, were in his garage) and the one with the mental breakdown. Either we missed the kiddy fiddlers or I just wasn't attractive enough. After that, my parents stopped making me go. I went to a Christian church with all of my skater friends. I got really deeply into it for about a year and a half. Oh baby, I was saved. And I gave a sermon on senior sunday (even though I was a junior in high school), and I had thoughts about being a preacher myself, but then things changed. I got a job at a newspaper and had to work late on Saturday nights (sometimes until 2 am). I stopped going. I could have kept going. Hell, I could have gotten up for the 10:30 service without a problem. I just didn't want to. This was about the same time I lost my virginity. My parents were hardcore Catholics. During lent we went every wednesday and every friday, as well as weekend services. My dad's mom didn't go often, even though her church was literally less than a block away. She always told the story of how, when I was younger, I asked why she didn't have to go and I did. I haven't been into a church or chapel for anything other than weddings in at least 24 years. I have no belief anymore. I don't feel a bit put off by this. The only thing I miss at all is the midnight mass at Christmas. And since I don't really even celebrate it anymore, I'm not really missing it a lot. It meant more as a kid. I will die and there will be nothing. I'm not afraid.
I feel pretty great about no longer believing in the supernatural. I feel truly free.
There are no angels or devils on my shoulder, and my head, my inner world, belongs to me.
There are no beings secretly watching me masturbate, unless it's the NSA and I didn't put tape on my laptop's camera.
I don't have to struggle with wondering why an all-knowing and all-caring and all-powerful God lets people suffer.
It sucks that souls don't exist, sure, but then the afterlife might have been some kind of Guillermo Del Toro horror movie of being hunted down by alien creatures who are used to the new rules and irregular physics of an aspect of the universe that we only briefly glimpse in dreams, the afterlife equivalent of spawn campers, eagerly awaiting a fresh crop of newly dead emerging from their shells, all of whom are trying to escape the more mature and experienced monsters of a realm we didn't know existed until now, barely hanging on to survival while struggling to figure out how it all works, being almost certainly doomed, unless through sheer numbers and luck we stick around long enough to change and become monsters ourselves, abandoning everything we once were in life.
Anyway atheism is pretty great, is what I'm saying.
I have faith in my fellow human beings. Overall, they haven't disappointed me, though of course, being human beings, they sometimes do. I still believe that when given a choice between kindness and cruelty, most people will be kind, and those who aren't are more likely to be apathetic rather than cruel.
Faith in God? It doesn't matter. Whether there's a God or not is immaterial to me, because whoever or whatever It is, I'm going to do what I do and live how I live. I believe that happiness comes from treating others well and earning good will from others, and God doesn't figure in.
Granted, yes, I am a Deist, which means I think it's more likely that there is a divinity than that there isn't. It's just that my moral compass doesn't point at some supernatural being as its true north, since that supernatural being, if It exists, most likely fucked off billions of years ago.
And yeah, since you're asking, I feel pretty okay about it. I feel pretty okay about everyone else's faith or lack thereof as well, provided they keep being good to each other. When someone's faith or lack thereof drives the person to be an asshole, I feel pretty crappy because it's a blow to my own faith in mankind.
I've never had any faith and I don't care. I mean, it seems like a nice thing to have but I lack the need for answers, I have no spirituality basically. What's the meaning of life? Why are we here? I don't know, to make memories with other people? What does it matter?
Well I'm Catholic, filled with faith in the Lord and believe my life is better because of it. If not this life than the life after (unless I forgot to repent for something and that gives me a one way ticket to the abyss, the second death), but at the moment I'd say this life is going pretty great at the moment.
(kind of off topic, but involves my religious activities)
DoglovingJim wrote:I woke up yesterday with nothing to do and then remembered how much I missed having a cross (as I lost my previous one). So with a scrap piece of metal, a broken clothes peg and a piece of string I spent the whole day making a new one. Once done I heated that thing up with the fire in my stove and when it became real hot I dipped it into holy water, which I thought was awesome because of the sizzle it made as it touched the holy-water.
My life is particularly great since I found the original one I made, and instead of hoarding it I passed it down to another Christian.
P1070474 - Copy.JPG (760.16 KiB) Viewed 4319 times
So now that cross can still be worn around the neck of someone with faith and have its history increased beyond its days from being hand-made and worn by me, perhaps one day when that person grows old she too can pass it down once more.
Anyway back to topic. My faith certainly made me a stronger person, but it's up to those who know me to determine if it has made me a good one.
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Edgar Cabrera wrote:HOLY SHIT GUYS, IT'S DOGLOVINGJIM!!! HE'S HERE!!!
skoobadive wrote:It's the legendary DoglovingJim! Ohboy, this must be the greatest day of my life!
Cracked.com wrote:Initially, his interest in animals was "primarily a sexual attraction," but as he grew older, he also "developed the emotional attraction." We guess we could call what Jim does ... dog-lovin'
Kate wrote:First off, even when I was religious, I was under no illusions that I'd end up in heaven, I'm not a good person and I will probably always choose not to be.
It worries me that you still say things like these, because I think you know better now if you didn't before, and there's literally dozens of people on this very forum, myself included, that can say their lives have been improved for having you in them. If heaven was a real thing, they'd be lucky and happy to have you.
I thumbed your post for all the other stuff.
First, I would compel anyone who's curious about this sort of thing to check out Marcuse's thread on religious experiences. It's not a debate thread, and I think that opens the door for further explorations into each of our inner journeys without having to defend your point of view on an already divisive and personal matter.
FaceTheCitizen wrote:My loss of faith wasn't caused by anything, really. Most people say it was caused because God ignored their pleas, or because a family member died, or because people in their faith were being assholes, but for me, it just happened.
I think this is just a stereotype which was probably true at some point about the outspoken atheists, and that the actual majority of atheists chose to remain closeted because they didn't have a reason to stir up the waters. But based on my own experience and observations, even though most of us go through an angry atheist phase, I think the majority of atheists arrive to that conclusion through self reflection rather than some external influence such as a personal tragedy, and even when that's the case, it's not like people throw their beliefs out the window just like that no matter how horrific the experience. I think it's more likely they already harbored some serious doubts they just refused to acknowledge, and going through a horrible thing they realized they could no longer draw comfort from something they didn't buy anymore. Of course that's not a rule, and I don't mean to belittle people who rejected their faith based on a traumatic event or any other factors I'm not considering. Like I said, this is all based on people I've encountered and talked to (mostly online) for the past decade or so.
In case it wasn't clear for those who are not familiar, yes, I am an atheist, an apostate and infidel. But that's okay, given that when honestly questioned most people would admit to being heretics, since it's very rare even for the most zealous to agree with every single one out of the thousands, often contradictory things that their religions teach. I just went a couple steps further and rejected the concept wholesale.
I've told bits and pieces of this story through the years, and if you're curious enough you can dig up those posts to get more details, but to briefly recap I will say I was raised Catholic, in a very Catholic family, in a very Catholic country. I read the Bible in its entirety by the time I was 7 (first in the form of children's stories, and then I moved on to the real thing) so I became familiar with all the "plot holes" very early on, almost as early as I learned not to ask questions about it. I was never too big on the concept of faith, however, but I more or less accepted things as truth because my parents and all the people I relied on did, because I assumed they must have had a better understanding of things I was too young or ignorant to fully comprehend. That all changed when my mother signed me up for Catholic school in an effort to solidify my indoctrination, which backfired spectacularly once I got a closer look at these moral authorities and realized they were as flawed as the rest of us. That was also the start of my problems with authority in general, but I guess that's a story for another time.
So I lost my faith (so to speak) in religious institutions in general, as well as the Catholic church in particular and the people running it. Not because I witnessed anything horrifying, thankfully, but because they failed to meet the (admittedly impossible to meet) higher standards which I ascribed to the representatives of G-O-D on earth. And if the "official" church of Jesus Christ founded by St. Peter couldn't do it, I doubted I would find answers in any of the other branches of Christianity. But I still held on to the idea that somehow, some part of it had to be legit. This was the last remnant of my faith, but also the hardest one to get rid off.
My whole deconversion was a very gradual process which took years, as well as the ensuing journey from disbelief to becoming comfortable with my atheism to the point of using the label. I still haven't come out to my parents, even though I have no qualms about discussing subjects critical of Catholicism, Christianity and religion in general in front of them. Everyone else in my family either knows or suspects something's up, but I still go to church rather than arguing with my parents or older relatives, so they believe what they want to believe, which is not too different to their general approach to religion. Most of my family, at least on the younger side, are nominally Catholics, and they do things like going to church on Easter and Christmas, but for the most part they don't care either way. And the ones who still are fervent believers are, coincidentally, the same ones who also believe in shamans, alternative medicine and similar pseudoscience. Other than them, I don't know if the people I know really have much use for faith, other than every time there is a funeral in the family, or when they can't find their keys or something. But I think overall I'm better off without it, because I am free of the mindset that tells me I have no control over my own destiny, or that I can't question some things just because someone at a higher rank finds it inconvenient.
To quote Christopher Hitchens (*tips his fedora*) "It's called faith because it's not knowledge".
That said, if religion works for you in a positive way, go for it, more power to you, etc. I will still remain antitheist, because I think that religions are harmful and divisive, and while it's true there are positive aspects to it, all the good that they do can also be achieved in secular ways, whereas there are many downsides which are exclusive to religion. Which is not to say that I think religious people are inferior in any way or that I'm going to shove atheism down anyone's throats anytime soon, because that would be the sort of collectivism I am firmly opposed to and I would rather have an open discussion about the pros and cons of it, as long as the other person wants to talk about it.
I still have faith in humanity, and I realize I'm using a slightly different definition of faith, but I thought I'd bring it up anyway if it counts for something.
FaceTheCitizen wrote:To me, though, religion isn't a big a deal. I think one's faith, or one's lack thereof, is a personal matter. I'll be friends with you if you're Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, etc. IDGAF.
I never heard of Idgafs before, what do they follow?
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Edgar Cabrera wrote:HOLY SHIT GUYS, IT'S DOGLOVINGJIM!!! HE'S HERE!!!
skoobadive wrote:It's the legendary DoglovingJim! Ohboy, this must be the greatest day of my life!
Cracked.com wrote:Initially, his interest in animals was "primarily a sexual attraction," but as he grew older, he also "developed the emotional attraction." We guess we could call what Jim does ... dog-lovin'
FaceTheCitizen wrote:To me, though, religion isn't a big a deal. I think one's faith, or one's lack thereof, is a personal matter. I'll be friends with you if you're Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, etc. IDGAF.
I never heard of Idgafs before, what do they follow?
Have you met our lord and savior Apathy? No, don't praise him, he doesn't care. The only way to honor Him is to stay home and watch Netflix.
I originally selected the "I lost my faith and feel my life is better without it." option, but then I realised that I never really had faith, and that was part of the problem. I was raised a Catholic, but I never really believed, at least not since I was a very small child. I just went through years of feeling like a bad person because I couldn't unquestioningly accept either the existence of God, or the rightness of the Church's teachings.
I think my life is better now that I follow my conscience, instead of some seemingly arbitrary rules made up by people who I suspect to be fairly self-serving. But that's not quite the same thing as losing one's faith.
Sometimes I think it would be nice to always feel like somebody/something was looking out for us, and we'll all be reunited with our loved ones some day and the rest of it. I don't think I'll ever know, because it's in my nature to question everything.
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You say "New World Order" "communist echo chamber" like it's a bad thing.
does belief in the God Emperor of Mankind and regular purging of the MUTANT, XENOS AND HERETIC count?
saying no may result in purging
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Supreme Commander of the Imperial Royal Cracked Army (also The Comments Section Militia), currently commanding the retake of the Troll Mines of 4chan in World Internet War 1, direct superior to Major. General Obvious, General Ignorance and General Knowledge.