Forums / Discussion / Serious Debate

Because the last one was closed I may as well start this one up again.

I suppose I'm a deist. I believe some kinda all-powerful being created the universe. I also like to believe that humanity's intelligence was created by this being. That's pretty much it. I used to be Christian because my parents were, but the more I thought about it the less sense it made to me, and while I seriously hope that a life after death exists, I'm still working on figuring out the logic behind that. (spoiler: I'll never figure it out)

Christian.

Diest. Kinda Eastern leanings though, since I believe that most all the religions have consistencies within them that would help find the ultimate truth.

Not having one. Feel free to argue with me about it! (If you want this thread to end up like that one religion thread that is.)

Stimulating questions:

-How do you have free will if God has already planned your entire life out and knows everything you ever will do?

-How do you have free will to choose if you're going to heaven or hell? To me, that sounds like someone's holding a gun to your head and asking you to agree with them or get shot. It's either paradise or burn forever. Not really much choice in my eyes.

-How come you dismiss other religions so easily as "false", particularly the ancient and mostly dead Nordic and Greek religions, while you accept yours? What makes you believe in yours? (Legit question with no aggression, what makes you believe what you do? Did you choose later in life? Was it your upbringing?)

I'm a born muslim. I just do what I have to do (such is sholat), right now i'm fasting and i'm fucking hungry. If you asked me my opinion about terrorism, I say they are all stupid or mislead (this my opinion). And about evolution, I think it's make sense (I can't say I fully believe in it, since it's not 100% fully confirmed).

I'm of the please-everyone-just-shut-up-and-get-along faith.

Well I'm a Jehovah Witness.

Pretty cool to see all the variations of people-type things on KYM

i worship potatoes.

(Muslim BTW and no, i'm not gonna blow up your house)

I myself am agnostic, but I descend from a long line of Russian-Jewish rabbis. My maternal grandparents were catholic and my father and paternal grandparents are non-practicing Mormons.

i am a atheist, i became one after doing research on world religions.

Spiritual Christian.

I agree with Rukario about how there's some nice variation here. Most of the other threads I've seem on this are 99% Christian.

Well it's still morning in America

I'm a Catholic but i don't go always to church i'm sure the big guy in the sky would'nt mind.

Pastafarian.

Still agnostic thiest

Im also a muslim and in ramadan you are not supposed to curse.

Quick tip: you are playing a dangerous game when you fast outside in a hot country or worse excercising and fasting.

Gonna completely ruin your chances of using your preemptive counter arguments by answering these myself~

1. If god has indeed written everything out in advanced it wouldn't matter anyways. It's not like his will actually conflicts with the persons. Think of the omnipotent god as a play writer; Yeah, he loves heroic tales but he also loves blood and murder just as much. Otherwise he wouldn't allow it.

Whether or not he does or doesn't have the power to dictate your will, you shouldn't let it bother you. Because ultimately it's already a factor.

2. You will not get to experience Heaven or Hell in a literal sense. Heaven and Hell are states of the mind.

Death is a Return to What You Where. If there is something after death, it's probably gonna be pretty good. Otherwise it's once again best not to fret over it. You where space dust beforehand and you are gonna be space dust in just a bit.

In Short:

And take the theory in infinite probability into account. If the universe is as infinite as they say, just by sheer chance one day your (or at least most of) your atoms will re-arrange some day and allow you to live again. So cheer up!

3. Kinda useless to ask me that one. As I said earlier, they all hold a bit of the truth. Doesn't matter if a god or multiple gods are involved or not. All depictions of god are just theatrics and we can only hope to discern the collective meaning behind them.

Even though I look a bit jewish, I'm an atheist.

I went into a lot more detail in the previous religion thread (and maybe even the one before that), so I'll keep it brief this time.

I'm an atheist. I don't think there's any shame in admitting that. While the likes of Richard Dawkins and /r/atheism seem to enjoy creating ane impression of atheists being militant, hateful people, I try not to be so petty about it. I went to a very religious school, spent years thinking about it, and in the end I just couldn't rationalise it to myself. In the absence of reliable evidence for or against the existence of a deity, I personally think the default stance should be disbelief. I'm technically also agnostic, since I'm aware that I can't know for certain, but until proven otherwise I'll be living my life under the assumption that there is no god, no heaven, no hell, and not even such thing as a soul. Might sound kinda miserable, but it's really not that bad. Just requires a different way of looking at things.

When I type that, I'm already allowed to eat (or whatever it call in English)

Christian.

I was once atheist, but after a couple of highly unlikely coincidences at crucial times in my life and talking to a couple of Christians I respect a lot in my mother and great aunt, I legitimately felt that there is a deity and that Jesus was onto something.

At the same time, I'm also an agnostic in that I don't claim that there's proof that a god exists. My own reasons are personal and can technically be attributed to happenstance, but when the circumstances are a certain way, people will believe anything.

On a side note, I didn't "become" an atheist. I just stopped believing that a god existed, which made me atheist. I had no pride in it. Some people find that freeing, but I just found it damning, if you will. Even if it wasn't real, I never could think of a greater purpose than serving an eternal being that would always be around and conscious to appreciate it.

I think I stopped believing, in part, because I felt dumb for believing in a distant being who requires full obedience to rules that tend to oppress innocent groups of people and even existing as a human meant that you were fundamentally set as hellbound by default. So I have to balance believing what I think is core to the faith making the religion into something it isn't.

Er…I mean, I'm a Christian.

Atho here, but I think that God doesn't really looks like us, but it's like a infinite chain of complex math equations that complies with the laws of physics. It does not have subjective feelings, but objective calculations that direct us and the world.

I myself am strongly agnostic, but am open to others and respect their ideas and opinions of spiritualism and religion.

Still an old-world Christian who believes in science
Still can't decide whether or not Macro-evolution is a scientific truth or science fiction.

My mind is so fucked up I don't even know what my religion is.
The line between headcanon and religion has ben destroyed.

I don't mean to turn this into some sort of horrible 'science vs religion' debate, but speaking on behalf of the scientists, macroevolution has been accepted as good science by the vast, vast majority of evolutionary biologists. Believe me, many have tried to disprove it, and all attempts have failed. The only difference between microevolution and macroevolution is the time scales involved – the process is exactly the same – so there's no reason to suppose that one is good science and the other is false.

From the Wikipedia article on macroevolution, under the 'Misuse' section:

Evolutionary theory (including macroevolutionary change) remains the dominant scientific paradigm for explaining the origins of Earth's biodiversity. Its occurrence is not disputed within the scientific community. While details of macroevolution are continuously studied by the scientific community, the overall theory behind macroevolution (i.e. common descent) has been overwhelmingly consistent with empirical data.

Well get to it, son! We have infidels to kill!

(Also I'm a Muslim so don't call me a bigot guys.)

I myself am a non-denominational Christian, but my mom comes from a large Mormon family and my dad from a small Baptist family I believe. That's created a bit of turmoil in the past, which is precisely why I'm non-denominational. It's really quite pathetic the infighting there is between denominations. You'd like to think that Christians would be unified because they share the same general faith, but a few doctrinal differences and all of a sudden it's like a war.

@Soundwave & Algernon

Believe me, there are quite a few Christians (myself included) who believe in both, and that God's creation of the universe was simply His guiding of factors such as macroevolution along. Genesis is practically swamped in metaphor as it is (why would an omnipotent God need seven different periods to create the universe when He could have created it in an instant? What's up with the forbidden fruit thing? It's a metaphor) so it's not much of a stretch.

Also, does anyone know if polls can be added to threads here? I'm sure a lot of us would be interested to see those statistics.

I'm a Deist, but I was raised as an Eastern Orthodox Christian.

inb4 Super Robo Jesus

Buddhism.

Not a devout Buddhist, but I believe and respect the basic ideas and traditions of it. My family used to all go to a monestry to pray for my mother's good health, but cancer is not easy. That's the reason I was away a month back.

Since I'm Chinese, it's actually a mix of Buddhism, Chinese folk religion, and Taosim. At least a mix of them, among other Chinese religions. I always enjoyed all the tradional holidays and food. China is complicated, with so many people there are so many beliefs.

Basically the ideas are of family, respect, and peace, of which I value highly.

I wish I knew more about my religion, and when I'm older I wish to study at least more of it.

My mother taught me a sutra of the Medicine Buddha before she passed away,
藥師琉璃光如來

@Science Spider: I don't believe in free will.

Verbose wrote:

I legitimately felt that there is a deity and that Jesus was onto something.

He was onto something.
Nailed onto something in fact.

I'm Muslim.

Here, let this billboard explain!

Since when are you a billboard?

Atheist.

Raised atheist. Which makes seeing the fedora-wearers all the more infuriating.

Firstly, it depends on the christian theology. Some do believe life is planned out, other don't. Most people priests and preachers I have known know it more as that we have more free will, and god knows all possible outcomes and gives us unlimited choices.

Secondly, free will is the choice to either give yourself onto god's will or deny it entirely. That gun metaphor is like saying "Believe in me and be given grape harps or I will smite you with meteors".

Thirdly, theology of most polytheistic religions isn't meant to be particularly realistic, has very open and unofficial lore, and no organized base for the religion to stand on. Norse and Greek Mythology, and especially druidic theology for that matter, is very cautionary and mostly revolves around mysticism and tales, not a base for good worship or open for twisting.

My choice of my christianity was mostly through parents and my youth group, but I was cynical for a time when I was younger. My church camp helped me push into Christianity, but I eventually settled down as a Nazarene through a church much closer to home. I have considered more then once becoming Orthodox because of their church's history and being decedents of the original church, but my protestant beliefs pull me more closer to Baptists. I find Islam's theology iffy when it comes to their founder, and my belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ does not make me a jew, and other my study of faith has led me to mostly stay Nazarene.
_________________

So obviously, I am Christian myself and live by the bible's teachings and have studied biblical lore for some time here and there.

I identify as Jewish but in regards to whether or not there is a higher power… I don't think about it all that much. It never really seemed like something I needed to worry about all that much because it never really affected me in any way. Turns out there's a school of thought for this. It's the appropriately named Apatheism.

That said, I actually do eat as strictly kosher as possible. As a result, I've never understood everyone's love of bacon and cheeseburgers.

I feel the need to address this.

A lot of people think infidel means enemy when that is just not true. It just means non-believer.

Atheist, however, I practice Qigong and meditation, which has its roots in Ch'an/Zen Buddhism and Taoism.

In my earlier years, I was a Roman Catholic. But for about 4-5 years now, I've been an Atheist, and I really don't see that changing at all. To me, everything has a natural explanation. In other words, I don't believe in anything supernatural or spiritual either. I have a very scientific, evidence-based worldview. Faith in my opinion is just personal dishonesty. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Christian

Not a Christian but the 3rd point is the one that irritates me. I feel that I can believe polytheistic religions much more then monotheistic ones. I can also see how that other religions that have these tales could merely use them as stories that have more to do with the moral (just like say Christianity and such cases of the parting the red sea, getting two of each animal on a boat etc).

I would also like to correct me previous post as it was a joke. However for me I would simply describe myself as an atheist. My first reason is that I rarely think about the origin of man and the afterlife. My second reason is that I do not like the concept of most deities in religions. For example I think that should some interpretations of God or Allah be real I would reject them because of how they treat those they have created.

@Natsuru and Cale

Well, since Cale doesn't believe in free will and Natsuru believes in more Eastern religions, my points don't really apply to you guys. Those points were chosen to argue with the way a majority of people view Abrahamic religions, but since you two have a different perception than the usual, I'd have to think up some different points for you guys.

@Chickenhound

Well, again, the first point depends on your individual beliefs. The Bible shows that God plans things out and gives free will at the same time, but some such as yourself choose to believe in one which makes that question not apply to you, only to the people who hypocritically believe in both at the same time.

As for the third, yeah, they were more unorganized and meant more for entertainment (Ex: The Odyssey, Hercules, Perseus, etc). I never really thought of it that way. You sure have got me there! Point for you! However, what about other modern religions? What makes Islam, Buddhism, etc. fake and yours real?

(Looks like this is starting again! Well, I bet it's going to be a whole lot nicer this time. :)

One more point for y'all: If many of you pick and choose which parts of the Bible, the Quran, the Torah, or whatever because it suits you better, (Ex: Deny Noah's Ark but believe in Jesus and the Ten Commandments) and label the rest as "metaphorical", what gives you the right to do that? How do you know what God intended to be real and what to be simply stories? If you just dismiss parts of the Bible as "written by ancient, uneducated people", or "fables", what's to say the entire book isn't just written by ancient, uneducated people and isn't just one giant collection of fables? How do you just choose what's right or wrong as a mortal who knows little of God's intentions?

Also, for those of you who believe in Adam and Eve, how the hell did they populate the Earth without incest? There were only two male children, so how did they populate without screwing mommy? How did humans even become what they are today if they were so inbred? Scientifically, a species needs at least 50 different, unrelated creatures to propagate without screwing up their genes.

Christian – The "Adam and Eve" story + Evolution.

I'm an agnostic atheist. I do not personally believe in a deity (atheist), and I do not believe that it is currently possible to prove that there is or is not a higher power (agnostic).

My parents are Baptists.

Pretty much a fundamentalist Christian (although very liberal outside of my religious beliefs), and I think I'll take a stab at these.

I don't believe that free will and predestination contradict each other. The real problem is that the way we see our lives unfolding and the way God sees our lives unfolding is different. Since God isn't contained by time and space, he already knows what decisions we will freely make. If I were to flip a coin, it's free to come up heads or tails, right? Would it be possible for you to know what the result of the flip would be before I flipped it, and yet it would still be free? Sure. I have to write this post one letter at a time, but you're free to read it however you want. So if I tell you I'm going to flip a coin at the end of this post, you can skip to the last paragraph and see the result now, even though I won't know until I'm done typing. Go ahead and look. Was that coin toss not free?

You have free choice about choosing Heaven or Hell because that's the whole point of the two places. God has prepared a place for you to spend eternity with him, but if you'd rather not, he's prepared a place for that. I think the concept of torture in Hell is too overstated by popular culture; I think the Bible suggests that Hell is simply a place without God, which due to that fact will be fairly unpleasant.

I don't dismiss other religions easily at all. I've studied a lot of the world's religions, but I know precious little about Islam. I plan on reading the Quran someday, and until I do, I will remain neutral concerning Islam. On other religions, it depends on how much I know and how I feel about what I know. I have a great deal of respect for Buddhism, for example, and would respect a follower of the noble eightfold path, although I reject its core atheism. (I was raised Jewish, but found as an adult that everything I thought I knew about the New Testament was wrong, so I converted to Christianity.)

The coin came up heads. How about that?