What is your religious position?

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EnglishLulu
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08 Dec 2008, 12:18 pm

z0rp wrote:

ToadOfSteel wrote:

AspieAtheistAlly wrote:

Khan_Sama wrote:

I follow the Qur'an, the Qur'an alone, and nothing but the Qur'an.

Peace.

these two statements are contradictory.

Facepalm does not apply here, at all. Khan_Sama said he follows the Qu'ran then said "Peace." at the end of the post. AspieAtheistAlly made a valid point in his post by saying Peace and the Qu'ran contradict each other.

AspieAtheistAlly made an ignorant point, and so did you, because the religion, Islam, is an Arabic word, the root of which is the three letters S L M, and that the root of 'peace', in Arabic, salam.

It's like saying that peace and the Bible contradict one another and Christianity is a warmongering, hateful religion.

Look up on wikipedia crusades and jihad and tell me the difference.

In both cases, they're supposed to be more 'defensive' types of war, protecting the religious adherents and defending their respective faiths.

But the fundamentals of both religions, the teachings in the Qu'ran and Bible are to practice religious tolerance, love one's fellow man, practice forgiveness and compassion, give charity, help the needy, and so on. Even the other day, I was listening to George Bush speak, and he was going on about warmongers and people who fight in the name of religion and all kinds of bollocks, and I was thinking, seriously, dude, do you ever look in the mirror, do you ever actually listen to what you're reading and saying? Because CNN actually quoted George Bush as using the word "crusade," he's as much an 'off-tolerance-and-compassion-message' warmongering religious nutter as any jihadist.

z0rp
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08 Dec 2008, 1:35 pm

EnglishLulu wrote:

z0rp wrote:

ToadOfSteel wrote:

AspieAtheistAlly wrote:

Khan_Sama wrote:

I follow the Qur'an, the Qur'an alone, and nothing but the Qur'an.

Peace.

these two statements are contradictory.

The term Islam as we know it today stands for the religion, which generally is a disgrace. Your argument is like saying if I said "Gay people generally aren't happy" (Which I don't really know nor care whether they are or not) and you calling it a contradictory statement because the term used to stand for happy or cheerful.

makuranososhi
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08 Dec 2008, 2:35 pm

LuckyBunny wrote:

Mine has plenty of history. Beginning life as Christian, I realised at 10 that all of the times I'd laughed at the religion were actually an indication I didn't belong.

So I began to see myself as an Atheist. At 23, I began exploring religion, and read a few books. That's when I discovered Buddhism, and liked it, so I became Buddhist. Theravada, to be more accurate.

However, it was not long before I became a regular on Yahoo! Answers, and settled into the Religion and Spirituality board on there. My mind was blown open to the sheer diversity of world religions, and with that I quickly made some close friends out of the almost 200 fans of my posts.

All of the agreements with my own opinions had their effect on me also. With my newly opened mind, I could see that I didn't fit Buddhism so much as it being a tiny part of my religious position. There were so many more, some more closely matching me, some just complimenting others.

By mid April 2008, at the age of 24, my religious self-description was lengthy.
Atheist/agnostic Pantheist Theravadin Buddhist, with heavy Pagan and Wiccan leanings.

This was too much, so I decided to give myself a clear, single definition. I stripped it all down, and fitted my various beliefs together, working out what goes well and where incompatible beliefs can still coexist. By the time I'd finished, I had my very own religion.

But still it wasn't over. Unsatisfied with a certain 'closedness' I added in a potential for others, no matter their beliefs, to find mine a comfortable religion to either befriend or become.

Pikanism was born!!

In many references on Yahoo! Answers, I have often described it, to praise from many sides. Some have compared it to Eclectic Wicca, given that the second of 3 'Life Lights' echoes something on the CUEW website. Also Taoism has been hinted. For the most part, it has been accepted and welcomed on Y!A.

((((hugs))))

~Loving Light~

Great post. Raised in an Episcopalian family with Mormon roots, I discarded religion at the age of five. It made no sense to me - sure, there were some good guidelines for getting along and helping others, but it was a lot of pomp for little production. Immersed myself in Greek, Roman and Norse mythology, as well as the folklore and tales of the Inuit and Tlingit peoples of Alaska. As I grew older, the philosophic aspects of Taoism took on a greater role in my views, as well as aspects of other Eastern belief systems. Now in my thirties, my beliefs do not fall into a single category... Surprisingly, I've found that Robert Heinlein was an excellent thinker in regards to religion; 'The Book of Job' and 'Stranger in a Strange Land' both had a tremendous impact in providing some loose framework and perspective for me.

M.

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So long, and thanks for all the fish!

Bobby1933
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08 Dec 2008, 7:00 pm

I am probably the 3rd oldest poster on this thread--I'll probably never see 158 or even 148. In my time I have occupied about 95% of the positions I have seen posted here (including the "missionary."

I have stopped calling myself an agnostic because I owe too much to the mystics of the aboriginal, Hindu, Kabbalah, Taoist, Buddhist, Christian and Sufi traditions who have enriched my thought and my life with wisdom that they claim to have received from another dimension of reality, more real than the material world that I can experience with my senses.

Even physicists suspect that beyond the event horizon, beyond the cloud of unknowing, beyond the God's of the great and small religions, there is a reality that is somehow the source of this one we know. I don't know what it is; I call it great. Sometimes I call it Tao, sometimes Brahman, sometimes the "pure light of the void,", sometimes the "Godhead" or the God beyond God. Mostly I just recognize my total ignorance of and total dependence on whatever she/he/it is.

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slowmutant
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08 Dec 2008, 10:10 pm

Bobby1933 wrote:

Science can penetrate this cloud of unknowing, can it not? This pure light of the void?

Bobby1933
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08 Dec 2008, 11:24 pm

Science penetrate the event horizon? I don't know, so far it has not. What was "before" the "big bang?" What travels faster than the speed of light? What if what travels faster than the speed of light is something/one at rest? This would (to me) be illogical and incomprehensible; but has anyone come up with a better "theory of everything." What would an eleven dimension reality look and feel like? What if the Universe is only 14 billion years old while the oldest stars we know of are 15 to 17 billion years old. What if an "object" could dematerialize andinstantly be reconstituted in some other "place." What if two "objects" could "occupy" the same "space" at the "same" "time." Physicists are no longer as certain as they were at one time that the assumptions upon which Newtonian or even Einsteinian physics depend are universally valid. I'll probably be dead before they get it figured out. In the meantime the reality imagined by mystics (and they don't claim to know what it is) is a more satisfying hypothesis than others I know of. I am open to suggestions, but I don't think that science, as I understand it, has the answer.

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slowmutant
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09 Dec 2008, 12:24 am

Bobby1933 wrote:

That last was a bit of sarcasm on my part. The cloud of unknowing, the pure light of the void, they are very aptly named.

countzarroff
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