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ryan93
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18 May 2009, 11:35 am

Anyone here have any unusual religious beliefs? Something which doesn't fit into any mainstream religion? Even religious beliefs unique to you? If you do, why do you believe this?



protest_the_hero
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18 May 2009, 12:34 pm

I'm an atheist. It's not too unusual, but it's non-traditional in my country.



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18 May 2009, 12:57 pm

I'm agnostic, but I never lie. I sorta worship knowledge, or at least that's the thing that I hold in the highest regard, and lying is the antithesis of knowledge, obscuring it.


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normally_impaired
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18 May 2009, 1:06 pm

on the 6th second of the 6th minute of the 6th hour of the 6th day of the 6th month, I attend a gathering behind the supermarket where we feast on the blood of goats while standing around an altar in the center of a pentogram with candles at each point. Upon saying the sacred chant "Aalo, guambuck, neosephay messmemeth" the great Satan rises from the depths of the Sewage treatment plant out back and gives us unimaginable power.

That what you're looking for?

Actually, I'm an Atheist, I don't follow ANY religion as personally I see all religion as nothing but a way to make people feel unnecessary guilt and sadness all the while teaching them to feel inferior as well as keeping society as a whole back from progress.



protest_the_hero
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18 May 2009, 1:11 pm

normally_impaired wrote:
Actually, I'm an Atheist, I don't follow ANY religion as personally I see all religion as nothing but a way to make people feel unnecessary guilt and sadness all the while teaching them to feel inferior as well as keeping society as a whole back from progress.
I'd say it can make people happy sometimes too. my friend tells me she's only not depressed because "God is there for me". I wish I could have faith like that.



ThatRedHairedGrrl
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18 May 2009, 1:20 pm

normally_impaired, I hope you've been careful to hex the CCTV cameras before you start.

This is what I wrote here on the subject of my spirtual beliefs a while back. It hasn't changed substantially:

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If pressed, I say I'm an urban pagan mystic Gnostic Unitarian Universalist Zen tantrapunk. :wink:

I believe, very strongly, that all faiths, at their core, are coming from the same place of connection. (Connection to what? All-embracing, infinitely loving Reality. Oneness. You can call it 'God' if you like; the names really do not matter.) Even a fairly casual look at the mystics of the different faiths will reveal the truth of this, and anyone who can't see it is concentrating on the outer trappings. Those things do vary, because people differ in the ways they relate to Spirit. Provided we all play nicely together, that's perfectly OK. It's when people say their way is the 'only true way', and start enforcing it on other people, that all the trouble starts...


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normally_impaired
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18 May 2009, 1:37 pm

I simply stated my opinion, you can either agree or disagree, that's up to you. I see religion as a way of limiting the thought process. People who try to explain things by saying "God did it" are basically admitting that they have no idea what they're talking about but still want to seem like they do understand. Likewise people who say "God saved me" are not giving credit where it's due.

Here's an example, someone was once trying to convince me to believe in their god, and they told me a story about how they were in a bad car accident, and that the ONLY thing that saved them was God. Yes, it was ONLY God, not the Samaritan who called 911 on their cell phone, not the fire department who came with the Jaws of Life, not the paramedics who carefully got you out of the car and to the hospital, and not the surgeons who performed open heart surgery to save your life, none of them matter, it's only God, right?

People who believe that God helps them get over tragedies in their life are basically dehumanizing themselves by saying that they are not strong enough to handle something and need God. I as an Atheist, who doesn't believe in a god, sees these people as getting themselves through the tragedy, but taking no credit for it. Most of the things that people ask God for, things like courage, strength, knowledge, etc. are things that our brains are already fully capable of handling, it's just that rather than trying to harness the full power of their brains, religious people believe that that power is somewhere outside them and that they need to ask for it.

Doesn't the bible somewhere say "God helps those who help themselves"? Wouldn't this mean that even if there was a god, that people should still strive for independence anyway?



Greensmith
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18 May 2009, 5:57 pm

My current religious beliefs are pretty boring (atheist), but when I was eleven years old I started a cult. It centered around a man named Xalabur Babyface who was half echidna and half human, and was born on Leap Year on an ice floe in the Antarctic hundreds and hundreds of years ago. I actually got all my friends to sign up. Most of our religious rituals concerned shouting things in dark bathrooms and eating candy.



Sand
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19 May 2009, 2:27 am

There are some unrecognized religious practices that strike me as rather peculiar. With the rise of the industrial age it became necessary for people who needed people to do rather unnatural things to carry on their business such as sitting all day in front of a sewing machine or digging themselves into deep dangerous holes to get minerals or exposing themselves to dangerous situations and substances that any sane animal would studiously avoid. This is known as the worship of hard work and although a few benefit from this by gaining enough wealth to remove themselves from the worst effects, the overwhelming bulk of humans so involved end up broken physically and intellectually with very little joy as the result. Human animals are not designed for such miserable self destruction but their strange religion of hard and unrewarding work seems to be very general today.



phil777
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19 May 2009, 2:29 am

You forgot to toss economism in the mix Sand. :p (Yes i know, it's fast-forward to post-modern age but meh)



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19 May 2009, 1:08 pm

Greensmith wrote:
My current religious beliefs are pretty boring (atheist), but when I was eleven years old I started a cult. It centered around a man named Xalabur Babyface who was half echidna and half human, and was born on Leap Year on an ice floe in the Antarctic hundreds and hundreds of years ago. I actually got all my friends to sign up. Most of our religious rituals concerned shouting things in dark bathrooms and eating candy.


Cool! I have some respect for anyone who tries to start their own religion. (A grudging respect, in the case of L. Ron Hubbard, because people take him way too seriously.) It takes imagination, humor and a big dose of chutzpah.

I knew a guy once who started a cult in which he claimed that
a) God is everything.
b) One may therefore worship anything in the universe as a manifestation of God.
c) One worships any manifestation of God correctly by acknowledging its true meaning and purpose.
d) Beer, being part of the universe, is a manifestation of God.
e) The meaning and purpose of beer is for people to drink it.
f) Therefore, one may worship God by drinking beer.

His cult was very, very popular with a lot of students I knew.


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19 May 2009, 1:32 pm

ThatRedHairedGrrl wrote:
Greensmith wrote:
My current religious beliefs are pretty boring (atheist), but when I was eleven years old I started a cult. It centered around a man named Xalabur Babyface who was half echidna and half human, and was born on Leap Year on an ice floe in the Antarctic hundreds and hundreds of years ago. I actually got all my friends to sign up. Most of our religious rituals concerned shouting things in dark bathrooms and eating candy.


Cool! I have some respect for anyone who tries to start their own religion. (A grudging respect, in the case of L. Ron Hubbard, because people take him way too seriously.) It takes imagination, humor and a big dose of chutzpah.

I knew a guy once who started a cult in which he claimed that
a) God is everything.
b) One may therefore worship anything in the universe as a manifestation of God.
c) One worships any manifestation of God correctly by acknowledging its true meaning and purpose.
d) Beer, being part of the universe, is a manifestation of God.
e) The meaning and purpose of beer is for people to drink it.
f) Therefore, one may worship God by drinking beer.

His cult was very, very popular with a lot of students I knew.


Sounds like a form of light hearted pragmatism (Bacchus, anyone?). Worshiping God gets you nothing from God, but it does gain you whatever it is that humans get from religious exercise - typically (in my perspective) a sense of ever-present, supporting community and an acceptable irrationality that can be used to cope with things that you else wise wouldn't understand or be able to bear. Being Ignostic (I often call myself an Atheist around evangelicals - give them an inch and they take a mile - and call myself Agnostic around those who know what Ignostic means) I have little problems with the first but a lot with the first. My religion isn't very popular where I live.

I am a philosophical Taoist. I practice Tai Chi as a form of meditation and introspection. It is very effective at combating anxiety and mitigating Crohn's flare ups. I believe in self defining contradictions [ie, the common black-white duality in most religions is a single, inseparable concept in Taoism] and in 5 virtues: Faith, Patience, Perseverance, Respect, & Humility. The Faith aspect does not have to be in anything specific, it simply means I must have faith in something.

Im not 100% sold on all aspects of Taoism. Like reincarnation - I see how it works well within that world view, I am just not convinced that it is real.



ryan93
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19 May 2009, 5:10 pm

Quote:
My current religious beliefs are pretty boring (atheist), but when I was eleven years old I started a cult. It centered around a man named Xalabur Babyface who was half echidna and half human, and was born on Leap Year on an ice floe in the Antarctic hundreds and hundreds of years ago. I actually got all my friends to sign up. Most of our religious rituals concerned shouting things in dark bathrooms and eating candy.


That's...badass :lol:

I might sound like a crackpot, but here's my theory on the "afterlife", with a little scant anecdotal evidence. I don't necessarily"believe" it, per say, but lets just say I think it's the most likely religious concept, after atheism.

----------------------------------------

1, I believe life is a bad thing. I can't say for sure yet, because I'm not finished mine, but thanks to my Asperger's I have excellent long term memory, and can remember things from a very young age. One of my first and strongest thoughts was "oh s**t not again". I can't say why it was that, but it was, and this leads me to believe in some sort of re-incarnation. At a young age (1-2 perhaps?) I decided I would kill myself as soon as I had the bodily and mental ability to do so. Instead of killing myself, I got sucked into the intense pleasure of learning (which at a young age is x1000 times more interesting) and never did. However, I never connected with people because I seen developing relationships as ultimately painful and pointless, and if I focused on interests I could provide myself with an easy path through life, by never "attatching" to anything. This part is absolutely true, I remember it crystal clear, and I consider myself lucky to be able to trace the cause of my AS.

2, I think I've had previous lives, I don't remember them but I remember...remembering things when I was a kid about another family I think I had previously, and that how I was aware I would soon loose those memories, as I will with these ones. I'm not sure how to escape the "cycle", and I think those lives were completely without consequence, my idea of a "soul" is simple being conscious, nothing to do with personality (which would then be altered and warped after a few "lives").

3, I have no idea if there is a god or not.

4, It seems likely that this could be what happens, as frankly life is cruel, so death must be the same. Sunbathing in heaven for all eternity with 50 virgins and a vending machine is to good to believe.

---------------------------------------

any ideas about my musings? I consider them...hypothesis, not fact, so I'm not totally nuts. Frankly this seems more likely and less insane than any major religion to me :lol:



Greensmith
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19 May 2009, 5:35 pm

Quote:
I might sound like a crackpot, but here's my theory on the "afterlife", with a little scant anecdotal evidence. I don't necessarily"believe" it, per say, but lets just say I think it's the most likely religious concept, after atheism.

Your religious belief sounds pretty similar to Buddhism, actually. They believe that life is suffering and that we keep getting reincarnated until we get it right. Then we don't have to do it anymore. Maybe autists are people who are close to the end, and this is just the "ultimate challenge" or something.



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19 May 2009, 6:49 pm

would you count the belief that religion is a teribble idea and has caused most of the problems in the world?


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Saspie
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19 May 2009, 7:03 pm

I am an atheist. In my family this is very unusual as they are either Catholic (on my dad's side) or Pentecostal (my mother's side). Has anybody seen Jesus Camp? That was my childhood :cry: