What is your religious affiliation?

Post Reply New Topic

Practicing kabbalist, student of Rosicrucian philosophy, and alchemical dabbler - none of which is properly a 'religion'. Still not sure if I'm pantheist, panentheist, deist, or atheist in the broader scheme though or in the end math whether any of those labels would properly level with truth. Perhaps on that level I might say non-physicalist agnostic with sympathy for thinkers like Spinoza, Bertrand Russell, etc..

I'm a Jain and an atheist.

Jainism is unique amongst other religions in that there is no Creator God. We believe the universe has always been, and will always be, existing.

Jains follow the teachings of Mahavir, so in essence, Jainism is probably closer to a belief system than a religion. What makes it resemble typical religions is there are festivals, idols, services, temples, etc.

I grew up in a secular household, later developed agnostic-atheist beliefs, then it later manifested into spiritual beliefs after a few instances of me literally losing my mind for no reason, encountering an actual ~7 foot tall shadow figure (was at my uncle's house, he lives across from an Anglican church, and next to a graveyard), and from many accounts of people at psych wards that I've been to. What I do believe, is that spiritualism unites all beliefs into one.

I am a Spinoza atheist, rejecting any attempt by people to define a god. I do have spiritual beliefs though and believe that all life is connected. I grew up in a dysfunctional Unitarian family .

Atheist. My parents didn't make religion a huge priority in raising me, so I don't officially follow one.

My opinion towards most religions tends to be neutral, but it becomes more polarized for Christianity. I'm a mix of in favor of it and against it, but not really neutral.

I was babtised into the Catholic faith and was forced to go through Confirmation at age 11. By that time, however, I already didn't believe any more but my parents made me go through with it because, "What will people say if you don't???" Both my parents weren't really religious either, but my mom was very much concerned with appearances.

I love mythologies though and I tried being a solitary Wicca for a while but found out soon that believing in a divine being just wasn't for me. Too many contradictions.

Now I'm an atheist.

I believe in gods, but I also believe that all gods are demons, and thus inimical to humanity.

I sometimes get a sense that a lot of this is like a panpsychism-based episode of Black Mirror or where you can't tell whether you're dealing with an egregore, a macro-entity within the human race (think ant colony as one organism, deities perhaps something similar but more condensed and self aware than an egregore), and you never know when it could perhaps be nihilistic or degenerate hackers from some point in the future intruding/jacking with people's lives for entertainment when they aren't edging in a corner somewhere.

I've often heard it suggested that a lot of these entities are at least mildly vampiric, ie. worship, attention, emotion, etc. is food and hence they do far more to provoke emotion all the while keeping us in the dark.

I favor Charles Stross' take, which might be a bit tongue-in-cheek.

Sharp.

I'm taking a quick intermission from Jason Reza Jiorjani's 'Prometheus and Atlas', I think he helps expand on the narrative side of what Donald Hoffman is saying in his 'The Case Against Reality', ie. that this is all a social network of conscious agents, Jason would apparently argue that there are two massive daemon's guiding technological progress (ie. the book title) and their influence is a crystalization/calcification of the known universe through measurement. Can't remember which scientist was getting covered with Matt on PBS (their Youtube science channel) but he brought up a guy who talked about 'Quantum Darwinism', ie. the idea that Shrodinger's Cat doesn't happen because entanglement creates vast causal networks - that seems to be perhaps a similar concept at play.

I don't really worry about 'God' because.... I'm pretty sure Spinoza was on top of it and said superorganism is probably going to hug bomb most of us when we die because that's how it brushes the dirt off of its own substance. What gets me is the realization that all of nature, likely 'as above so below' meaning the so-called nonphysical as well, is red-in-tooth-and-nail Darwinian natural selection (ie. back to Hoffman where conscious agents are fighting each other for resources and to make it into the next generation and any complex organism seeking truth will be destroyed by an organism of equal complexity who sees none of the truth and is only tunes to fitness payouts). Very much Thomas Hobbes's universe and it could quite likely be that no civilization ever makes it past being a stage 0 civilization precisely because power dynamics will always force either extinction or such hard resets that it's like starting over from scratch perhaps until one's star burns out or until the alphas of some civilization are brilliant enough to glass the whole planet thus snuffing out further evolution.