Atheist, but i find the myth of Lucifer interesting. A being who had feelings of becoming more than what he was. Then confronting his creator to declare he is more, and will not yield.
Asklemmy
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
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.
Grew up in a very religious home, in a very religious country (orthodox christian). I don't think I ever truly "believed", but I didn't want to upset my family, so I got married in church and baptized my kids. I am an atheist, and don't practice any religion now.
Im a romuvis :3
Used to be an atheist before ig
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
Yeah, true that. Hell, reconstructionists in general are pretty rare, much less finding the rare thing within a group of rare things. ;) Also I've always been a lil uneasy around German pagans, unfortunately there's a strong undercurrent of white nationalism that has co-opted/corrupted some of it and it's hard to tell them apart at a glance.
Though Wiccans aren't reconstructionists in the usual sense; they're not rediscovering/recreating something that once was so much as syncretizing something new out of the pieces of a bunch of pre-Christian/indigenous practices.
Yeah the germanic thing is quite unfortunate.. the main symbol for romuva also catches the religion a fair share of drama tho x3
Atheist, I never was interested in spirituality as I believe religions are population control tools.
However, I recently got the chance to meet Sikh peoples, and I understand they define themselves more as warriors than group of religious people. I just fell in love with what they are, what they represent.
Atheist, universalist Unitarian. Other people's theism is just at the bottom of my priorities these days lol. UUs seem like nice people
Discordian
Atheist. Raised atheist but it doesn’t effect my viewpoint, I’d be atheist either way at this point in life
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.
My mom let me figure it out for myself. I wanted to go to mass with grandma so she let me.
I quickly figured out the nonsensical nature of what I was seeing. When I found out I had to do a bunch of extra shit before I could get in line for Jeezits, I lost all remaining interest.
Been an atheist since. Probably was around age 12.
Atheist
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.
Agnostic Satanist. It's basically the same as humanism but also triggers religious fundamentalists.
I also read the bible extensively and have a bible app on my phone with bookmarks to tell people how Jesus was most likely gay and so on. Most religious people didn't even read their own damn texts haha
Raised non-denominational Christian to Agnostic to Gnostic-curious.
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.
The ancestors part always brings a smile to my face.
- they were young, once, hence, they had sex, masturbated, etc.
You being alive is proof enough of the later. No room for judgement there: they've been there, done that.
- the entire "cult of the ancestors" starts on the present.
If the person paying respect to past figures is concerned over such petty parts of life, that person is concerned over the wrong things.
- you will, theoretically, become an ancestor one day.
Will you be bothered over petty things or be concerned with your descendants living well and happy, like you wanted, tried and wished for others?
I do enjoy the notion of teverence towards the ancestors. It's like having a personal roster from which to choose and say "not doing what they did" or "they had worst and made it". Or a personal fan club.
Laic
I don't care about religion or beliefs. It's irrelevant to me in my day to day life.
I have a personal code of ethic, developed through personal experience and reading several philosophy proposals, taking from each what I find useful and discarding the rest.
Was raised roman-catholic but got disillusioned pretty quickly. I was fairly religious in elementary school but by the time I was 14, I was agnostic/atheist.
Partially because my parents aren’t religious (my mum is from the GDR, so she didn’t grow up with religion and my dad seceded from church before I was even born) and even my grandma, who was the religious one (albeit never very strongly, compared to American catholics. More a „goes to church on religious holidays“ type of person), drifted away from church quite a bit after all the child-rapist priest shit that was uncovered at the time.
By now (mid 20s) I’d probably consider myself agnostic. Can’t prove there is no higher power but also, if there is, we wouldn’t know what religion – if any – is right anyways. It’s probably not christianity though.