I wanna know about what you people believe in and I want to know why you believe in it. Spirituality and religion fascinate me. I can't find a path I'd like to follow due to my own spiritual skepticism, but I'd like to hear stories from all of you about your followings, your beliefs, and your rituals.
I am the same as you, I consider myself very spiritual but I am not fixed on one certain kind. I would probably never join a religion but I love and respect all religions I have learned about. There is definately a lot of wisdom and insights to be shared. I guess that's my main fascination.
Same here. I love learning about the history of religion and the ways everything came about. I have talked to many people of different religious backgrounds, and it astonishes me how wise and devoted they can be when it comes to their beliefs.
i believe there are all sorts of neat fun friendly invisible things, and that every organized belief gets it wrong. i don't know HOW wrong they get it. i don't believe anyone can. but when they start coming up with names and descriptions, and they sound so totally unlike my own experiences, which they do, i just have to say whoah, this just isn't right, or at least no where near accurate. but i don't beleive because of that there has to not be anything, because that really isn't my experience either. i wouldn't say one's further from then the other either.
I'm the same way, lovelyxmalia. I wasn't raised under one religion so when I was around 12 I started to find one I liked and adhere to it. I jumped between intensively studying pagan traditions because it was furthest from what I had grown up hearing about most and was looking to kind of rebel. After that I studied Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Even Sikhism after that, Jainism, then onto Buddhism and Hinduism. After acquiring and reading a bookshelf's worth of books I finally decided I couldn't pick one to follow. So now I'm just objective. I also kind of feel like I'm too skeptical after seeing so many similarities in seemingly different religions and yet wars have happened over the minor differences. I mainly just believe that there's some higher power to the universe we play such a small role in but it probably isn't like religions say it is. I believe in the possibility of fate, reincarnation, and karma. I try to be a good person and also try not to take things too seriously and enjoy myself while I'm here. Despite my choice not to follow any one religion, I still love reading new things about people's beliefs and traditions.
Possibly Spirituality or even Religion are not good labels for it but I am a Buddhist. It is rational, and individual assessment of the ideas is encouraged. There is no 'God' as such which makes it more of a psychological system than a religion.
i believe there are invisible things which love us i believe they are completely innocent of any desire to be worshiped i believe there are invisible things which have no idea we exist i believe the harm we see in this world is not caused by invisible things, but by human thoughtlessness, aggressiveness, prejudice of all kinds and intentional ignorance, and that these are motivated by religious teachings, nationalism, and ideological fanatacism. i believe the true self has nothing to do with the accident of birth that it has nothing to do with the shape or appearance, of whatever life form it may come to occupy. i do not, for example, believe that my soul is shaped like a cat, NOR a human, but rather, that a soul has no shape nor physical form, what so ever at all. do i believe in eternity? i don't claim to know. i only see no reason to assume death to be any more eternal then life and many reasons to believe i have personally lived several lifetimes, in as many physical forms on as many different worlds, before having been born into this one, and that had my fetus been destroyed i would simply have been born into a different one, to different parents, and possibly on a different world then this one. i thus do not believe there is any spiritual link between parents and their offspring, but rather that they only provide the physical life form, that "their" child's spirit comes to occupy. why do orphaned children wish they had parents? because childhood is like any insecurity of being in a new and unfamiliar place, and the 'anything would be better then what we find wrong with where we are' phenomena, which motivates creation of and changes in ideology. this is the same real reason that draws people to religions belief, and may even be partially responsible for their creation and existence. one thing i do not believe, is that any force or person, visible or invisible, is inherently harmful. harm, again, is a thing that people do, mostly through ignorance and sometimes intentional ignorance. this is not to say it does not exist. but rather that it can be avoided being caused. love is not all you need to avoid causing harm, but it IS better then intentionally causing it. it is also not an excuse for deliberate ignorance, which it does not make up for in any way.
I don't really know what I believe. I do believe in God, but not like most Christian religions. And I'm not sure what will happen after we die. It doesn't say anywhere in the Bible that if you're good you go to heaven when you die. It sounds to me like we are supposed to make the world heaven by being like Jesus. I think we are all God's sons and daughters, not just Jesus. And that would mean that we are all part of God, but I still think part of God is separate from people. I think reincarnation is possible, but I don't believe that it is definitely what happens. Ask me in a year and I'll probably give a different answer, my beliefs are always changing because of experience, research about different religions, and different ideas about life.
The true nature of existence is too complex for us as simple humans to really comprehend. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the point of life, and that journey lead me to many new places and lots of experience with new cultures and different world views and religions. One of the first things that struck me as I started to piece things together was how every religion and spiritual journey is essentially looking for the same thing. My understanding of God is as a greater consciousness. Every particle and being draws consciousness from this greater consciousness, so we are all essentially the same entity, we all and everything are God made manifest in physical reality, in order for God to experience the splendor and joy of life and love. When we are born, we take a little bit of God-consciousness with us to be who we are in life, and when we die, we return to that source and if we want, we can choose to go through life again. And so on, for what is close enough to infinity. I am an atheist.
I'm on the same track as a lot of you posters. My parents were never religious, we went to church briefly but fell out of it because of the politics and corrupt leaders. I spent my pre-teens studying Wicca and Witchcraft. I still believe that everything in nature has it's own soul. I believe anything with a purpose (pencil, cell phone, tv, everything) has a soul as well. If it has a purpose, it has to fulfill that purpose. I believe in standard karma. What you put out you get back 3 fold. There is a higher power, that does not care how we live as long as we are kind and caring. I also believe it is possible that "evil" is actually accepted by this higher power. Similar to the idea of Yin-Yang, the balance of good and evil! I live my life in the "middle of the road". All things in moderation, balanced!
I was raised Christian. I'm not Christian anymore, but I enjoy reading the words printed in red in the bible. I ignore most of the black text, especially in the old testament. Psalms offers some words of wisdom, however. I'm really curious about Hinduism. Its a neat religion. I would consider myself spiritual, but I don't have a strict set of beliefs. I believe in interconnectedness. I believe in the earth because it gives us life. I think its nothing short of amazing that life sprang from inanimate materials, and I think there is something profound behind that but I can't begin to define it. I believe in universal love. Mostly I believe in treating all creatures with respect and being pure of mind and spirit.
i believe there are all sorts of neat, fun, invisible things, which are neither physical nor imaginary, and about whom no one, including myself, knows anything. (although i do believe there is something resembling a bond of love between myself and several of them) i am even willing to believe there may be one, who is "bigger" then anything else, gives great hugs, and picks some poor bastard to be channelled by, once every thousand years, give or take a few hundred. i do not believe they are hierarchal, infallible, nor have the slightest desire to be worshipped. nor that there is any force, more harmful nor destructive, in all of existence, then the aggressiveness of thoughtlessness and of gratuitous pseudo-conventionality. and that the latter, is entirely our own doing, and has nothing to do what so ever, with any unseen thing, at all. i do not believe any unseen thing wishes us any particular harm. though i do believe the vast majority of them, have no more idea of our existence then we have of theirs. i also believe more things in this life, are the combined statistical result, of our individual prioriities, policies, and choices, then the influence, if any, of unseen or unknown things of any kind. no, they do not have to have anything to do with anything in order to exist. they are simply something that is always there and wishing us well, even if there is little, if anything, they can actually do about it. also, other then those which are the inspiritment of some species, there is no thing any of them would look like if they weren't invisible, other then perhapse some sort of minor distortion in mid air. there are of course also those who ARE the inspiritment of individual species, who have been the friends and guides of indiginous cultures for as long as there have been human people. as for ritual, i think it is a nice thing to do, to create a space: "alter" or "tokanoma", and set out a cup of water and other nice things for them to munch on the essence of, for them in it. i don't think of this as worship though. just a nice thing to do, like you would for any everyday sort of friend.
