AudioAtomica wrote:
I searched and didn't find anything, so sorry if this or something close to this has been posted before.
I've seen alot of different opinions on alot of things on this forum recently, and I'm curious as to what faith you all follow.
In which religion do you place your faith?
Why?
If you don't place your faith in a religion, why not?
For how long have you been apart of your current religion?
Do you go to worship?
What do you do to worship? (Pray, pilgrimage etc)
I've always had a thing for going to books stores for a Bukowski or something and ended up walking out with 6-7 books on various religions. I never felt I fit right with any of them, even though I understand being of a certain religion doesn't bind you to any of their beliefs perse, but I felt my connection with God should be more than half-assed. And I've recently come across The BaHa'i Faith (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%C3%A1%27%C3%AD_Faith ). I'm currently looking for a local place of worship for the BaHa'i Faith, so I can consult people of that faith to learn more about it. I also plan on becoming a Freemason, because I hear and read this and that, from conspiracies of world domination, to secret societies, to anti-christianism etc. I so I'm going to find out for myself I guess.
Even though I'm not in a religion, I still have my morals, and Faith in God, and mankind. I've never worshiped, as in on my knees, praying, but I feel (through my own personal faith) being a positive and productive person far beyond reaches that of trying to reach God directly by praying. And in that sense, I worship damn near 24/7
I'm an atheist. I've been baptized and confirmed a Catholic against my will, which may be the cause of my dislike of Catholicism. I do not dislike Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, etc. people, just the religions they come from. In some way, they, especially Christianity, are all corrupt. Ever since I was introduced to religion (around age 5), I found it boring because it didn't interest me. I didn't care much whether I was the creation of a God or anything else; I was just a five-year-old kid. As I grew older and began to participate more in local religious activities (community services and such), I began to see direct contradictions from the Bible to the average Christian lifestyle. I was taught in my Sunday religious classes that Jesus gave up all worldly possessions (like Buddha says to do) and told his followers to do the same. When I asked why the Church was always asking for money if Jesus lived a poor lifestyle, I was told to worry less about such matters (I was only 8 or 9 at the time).
Between my First Communion and my Confirmation, I began to dislike everything about Church, mostly because of its boredom. I could find infinitely numerous other activities that I could waste away an hour with. It seemed like a waste of time to me to listen to an old man preach unfamiliar text to a large audience of mostly old people, to pay a few dollars every Sunday to help "build more Churches" (even when I was in my pre-teen years, I knew that a Church would cost much more than a few dollars to build, and that our donation was minimal in supporting the cause), and to leave the ceremony by ingesting a piece of old, flat bread with the cross embedded in it. It was monotony every week. Eventually, my parents realized that going to Church every Sunday was not helping to convert me and my twin sister to Catholicism. So we got enrolled in another Religious Education program to prepare us to be Confirmed. I was disgusted at the idea of lying to a man in a funny hat that I believed in a God that supposedly created everything I saw before me. One of the things my Religious Education teacher would stress is how God said his creation of humanity was "very good" in comparison to his creation of all other natural elements. Although I was too shy to ask at the time, I wondered how such perfect creatures such as humans could cause all this war, famine, and chaos if they were so perfectly designed by a divine force. It gave me a comical view of God.
In my 9th grade school year, I took a biology honors course as a doubting Christian. I was fascinated by evolution and the evidence behind it. It was because of that class that I began to fully explore the voids of my knowledge of Christianity. My final dissociation with Christianity came this year in my AP World History class. We explored the mysteries of religion, not so much their validity, but how and why they spread to the regions they did. When I learned that none of the dates that Catholicism preached were authentic (such as how Christmas was actually the Roman Winter Solstice, where they would all get drunk and party), it showed me that the religion itself was potentially falsified, just like those dates.
I've been a proud atheist for about a year now. In answer to your other questions, no, I do not worship any superior being.
AudioAtomica wrote:
God doesn't control AIDS, Hunger War, Hatred. We have freewill. We control those things. God just put us here, and now we can do whatever, but we still have the responsibility to keep those thigns from happening.
Being a positive or negative person effects not only how others treat you, but how you inevitably feel about yourself, and how you treat yourself. Being positive inevtiable leads to great, positive things.
So let me show you an analogy.
If I asked you what created the universe, you'd say God.
If I asked you what created the Earth, you'd say God.
If I asked you what created humanity, you'd say God.
But if I asked you what created AIDS or influenza or TB, you'd say humanity.
Seems to me like you're proud to stand up and say your God created all the good things, but he didn't create any of the bad things. And through the transitive property (a=b, and b=c, so a=c), I could say that God
did create AIDS and influenza because even if humanity created it (which we would have had no way to do), it would mean God created it because God, according to you, created humanity.
PS: The beginnings of AIDS have nothing to do with free will. Contracting AIDS may involve free will, but free will played no role in the creation of the virus.
Let me ask a question to all the believers in Christ. I believe there is a passage in the Book of Matthew that says something like, "It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God." If this is true, then why do private Christian schools cost thousands of dollars when public education is free? Seems like quite a paradox because if the families enrolled at these Christian schools were true followers of Christ, they would not have the money to enroll at such an institution. This is an example of the main problem of most religions: hypocrisy. What ever happened to "practice what you preach?"