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I am atheist but I do enjoy religious spaces. There's a stillness that I like, gives you the opportunity to just be in the moment. You don't get many spaces like that for atheist folk (libraries are the closest I can think of). I sing a lot of choral music so often find myself in churches. I like the structure of a service and the ceremonial aspect, I just don't believe in the content itself.

Absolutely not.

Not really.

I like witchy stuff but only if its considerable to placebos. A rose quartz bracelet, for example, might not be scientifically going to attract love and good fortune---but its cute and makes me happy, so who knows, THAT might help.

If I had to choose a religion though, I'd probably go with one of those polytheist religions because ever since I was a kid and first went to a church camp, I decided that a singular "God" scares the shit out of me. I basically considered "God" too overpowered and decided that wasn't for me.

No. It took me a lot of hard effort to get here with my upbringing. I think parts of it are fine and for the most part regular people practice in ways that aren't harmful to others, but (at least in the US), the entire structure of it is deeply harmful and results in good, decent folk taking actions or supporting others who do real harm.

Not even a little bit. I'm still in awe of the universe, aware of my own insignificance, and terrified yet resigned to my eventual death though!

No, but I also recognize that I may be wrong. To be honest, arrogant atheists bother me even more than arrogant theists.

To me, the whole point is that any answer is impossible to prove. Trying to definitively, factually state that no kind of higher power exists is irrational, and thoroughly undermines any claim of logic or reason. The stubborn, uncompromising kind of atheist frequently describes themselves as a logical, rational person, so I expect them to see this problem.

Every religious community organisation that I have had first hand personal experience with has been involved in a myriad of verified claims of abuse Including: sexual, financial, and elder. My confidence in these institutions is now nonexistent. And I find myself misidentifying with them completely. I think I am now de facto apathetically agnostic.

Hell yeah! I'm Hindu and I love it.

I loved mythology as a child and devoured every myth from every culture I could get my hands on. Later this evolved into exploration of religion. I've read religious books of many religions - Hindu epics and scriptures, Buddhist scriptures, Jain scriptures, Quran, Bible, Guru Granth Sahib, and the Avesta - I enjoyed them all, and my parents encouraged this exploration.

I ultimately came back to Hinduism because a lot of the stuff in it made sense and resonated with me, and let me adopt a mindset that works well for letting me process and ascribe meaning to the various experiences and phenomenon of life.

Hinduism is a collection of hundreds of belief-systems - a lot of which are uber chill, some literally cult-like, some polticised and weaponised for oppression, and some that are intense but harmless. You can choose what makes sense to you - I personally follow a pretty chill belief system, but it also makes me seem not serious about it.

Oooh and it is fun in the community - festivals, temples, ceremonies, and various cultural events -there are so many of these, and each of them very fun depending on the people involved in the celebration.

Nuh uh. "Losing My Religion" by R.E.M. still feels surreal and sad for my heart.

I was raised particularly southern, like three denomination deep Protestant, (that only existed because some people argued if you should speak in tongues in church or if that would be "distracting from the lawd".) And my family participated in the activities so I was forced to attend EVERY SUNDAY AND WEDNESDAY NIGHT until I was 18.

I don't have a lot of good things to say about it. After I realized I only tried to follow it cause of where I was born (and what measure of truth is that?) I started to address each moral question as it came and settle it myself based off of morality I could stomach.

A lack of belief is easy when I've seen nothing to believe, in fact I used to feel alone in it. Eventually I realized I cannot fake it, and what reason would there be, what diety would accept it?

It's complicated. I am not religious, and have considered myself to be an atheist for most of my life so far. I also have strong negative feelings towards most mainstream religions, because of their long-standing hate towards people like me and my loved ones. I also grew up in a Presbyterian church and honestly, fuck everything about calvinist-derived theology.

But, it is hard to shake some amount of magical thinking. And honestly, if it brings joy, and isn't harming people around you, why not? So lately I've been leaning into it a bit, in a vaguely neopagan direction. I definitely don't take any of it literally, but if a sprinkle of it helps keep me from descending into despondency, I will shrug and go with it. It isn't rational, but I am a human, not a robot.

I have also considered finding a local unitarian universalist church or something along those lines. Somewhere that is chill with me as I am. The last few years have been isolating and I think I need more community in my life to thrive.

I'm spiritual and I guess some would say religious, though I just call it witchy. I was raised by strict parents as an evangelical Christian (Southern Baptist), but that made less and less sense as I grew older and learned more about the world around me.

I found my way to witchcraft, and working with and in nature made way more sense to me. I'm eclectic, and not very into ceremonial magic, but I do believe magic is real, and I believe we all have different paths to take in life. I currently worship Persephone, Hestia, and Loki, and I try to honor other deities where applicable. I'm studying everything I can, and love hearing about other people's experiences.

I'm quite drawn to the ritual aspects of religion but there's another part of me finds it all hopelessly silly.

Yes, I'm Christian. I am also queer and staunchly opposed to American bible fascism. An unfortunate number of people seem to believe that these traits can't coexist in one person without hypocrisy or denial.

Myself, I enjoy how my religious beliefs and my queer identity support and bolster one another. 😁

Religions have been perverted into a system of manipulation and control of the masses. Granules of truth in each one keep people coming back, but in the end they are like a virus in human consciousness that is designed to control us. I really believe each person can only find real truth by turning inward and deeply exploring their own consciousness.

Agnostic atheist here. If you twisted my arm to choose something I'd make a religion out of this story [http://galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html]("The Egg")

Other than that, I don't have any reason to believe its anything other than nothing, non-existence after we die.

In any organised sense, no, not really. Beyond that, maybe?

But no more than feeling a sense of belonging within the universe which we are a part of and connection with other parts of that universe, be they human, animal, plant or other.

If there is something else out there or on a higher plane of existence than us, I don't believe it is within the grasp of any human to understand it, let alone write down it's wants and desires in regards to the way we should live out lives.

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer... sets up power point

My history with religion/spirituality is all over the place.

Those of the more religious bent in my family were/are Baptists. My single working mother never made religion a super big focus for me and sis. She let us discover that part of ourselves on our own. I had issues with Southern Baptists early on as a child when one pastor pressured me about getting baptized. I kinda just ran from organized religion after that.

As I grew up, I had explored Catholicism. What I discovered was I really was drawn to the divine feminine. I was aaalll about some Mary. I flirted with Wicca, Norse Paganism, Pagan Paganism, and finally settled in as an agnostic. "Nobody knows ANYTHING", I figured.

Then, about a year and a half ago, a fella I followed on instagram was streaming his DJ program on Twitch. One of the tunes he spun was Ganesh is Fresh by MC Yogi. It was a bangin' tune! Then I remembered a Hindu mantra I had heard in a new age book store when I was a teen. It left such an impression on me that it just kind of stayed in the back of my mind. I took a chance, and looked it up on YouTube. Sure enough! There it was! Then I looked up the meaning: "A mantra of purification and seeking the oneness of God in all things"

I just sat there listening to my mantra with "new ears". Then I said "Okay. I'm on board. Let's do this." I embraced Hinduism, and honestly couldn't be happier. As I read and researched more about it, it really fit with my outlook on life, the universe, and everything. It's a seeking path that doesn't have rigid dogma. It acknowledges change, and encourages exploration and questioning. I've had to learn to drop a lot of the Western Abrahamic thinking that came along with American culture, which seemed small and kinda dark in comparison.

These days I find chanting, meditation, and kirtan to be great sources of comfort in a world gone higgledy-piggledy. I do my best to make my corner of the universe as kind and welcoming as I can. I refuse to hate, and don't wish ill on others. There's just better ways to spend my energy.

I hate religion. I hate ""spirituality"" (what does that even mean?). It makes my skin crawl. I hate that people willfully delude themselves into believing things that they clearly know to not be true, on some level, and then argue wholeheartedly for their actual truthfulness. It's the most idiotic, nonsensical practice I can imagine someone engaging in. Just look at all the people in this thread searching for one that "speaks to them as if they can just pick the nature of reality out for themselves. How in the world can people do that and not make themselves crazy with cognitive dissonance?

BUT. What I do understand is that people are searching for structure, community and a sense of reverence towards... something. There have been attempts at replicating that experience sans-nonsense, but every time it's tried it's mostly ridiculed and laughed at by the sort of jackass atheists who can't even empathize with that longing. It's sad.

I'm apatheistic when it comes to if there is a god and/or gods and I actively dislike all organised religion. Religion has no place in modern society and causes so much suffering. It's time has been and gone.

No, I am an atheist and do not believe in anything super natural.

im pretty neutral on it maybe theres a god maybe there isnt doesnt make a difference me people can believe what they want as long as its not actively harming them or others

I have a complicated relationship with religion. I was raised in a very hardline and honestly kind of culty ‘born again’ environment so I have a deep-rooted distaste for conservative Christianity, but I also don’t really love the fairly shallow ‘atheism, monism, logical positivism, and physicalism’ that’s taken as the default for most people these days. I’m open-minded to spirituality but I’m cautious about taking a leap of faith directly into oncoming traffic.

My parents and grandparents were but my generation (all my siblings & cousins) don't follow the church much if at all

Nope, my parents are atheists and my siblings and I were raised as same. Never went to churches or had a bible at home etc.

Yes, very much. I think it would be impossible for me not to be religious. If I wasn't Anglican I'd be Buddhist or Baháʼí.

I'm a Christian. I'm in a weird state where i'm trying to figure out where my faith sits and trying to find a new congregation I am comfortable with, since there's so much bad stuff coming from Christians nowadays.

No. I was raised in a secular household, and honestly, I haven't seen anything that makes me think there's a supernatural at all.

@alyaza I was quite religious when I was very young. My parents were not too religious, but my grandma, where I would spend a huge part of my childhood, was. She never asked me to keep a lent or an advent (I don't know what it's called in English, but on the Orthodox side we have various periods of the year when we basically become vegan 😀)) We call that post - religiously it's mainly about food, but not only. You're supposed to clean yourself up in a way), but I would occasionally go to church with her, and I got the habit of crossing myself whenever I would pass next to a church (both walking or when taking the public transit).

Later when I grew up, I would find some awesome friends that gradually got me less religious, to a point where I would simply become agnostic - which was pretty much the same to this day 😁

I grew up as a Seventh-day Adventist, but lost my faith and left the church/religion in 2012 (was born in 1989)

No, I'm too gay lmao.

My "spirituality" is more just driven by my experiences with living, psychedelics, art, and science. Which is to say, I see myself as the atoms which comprise me, which will and actively are becoming other lifeforms (and viruses/prions) when my homeostasis is thrown off hard enough (cell death and the big death). I feel less like a "person" and more like a meat computer. Could be because I'm autistic and dissociate a lot from trauma/undiagnosed ADHD, but like, I do like the feeling of just "existing". I feel like one of countless experiences of the universe experiencing itself. I try to do what makes me happy, (art, gardening, video games, programming) which includes helping my community and surroundings to be healthy, happy, and free, as one person can manage to make it.

I can't always meet my own standards because I'm only one person. I still try to strive to do what I can.

Is anarchism a religion? Or is it faith in the inherent interconnectedness of nature? I think all creatures are better than we (human society) give them credit for. I don't feel anthropocentrism will get us anywhere. I believe we're more than the systems that control us (capitalist megamachine, fascism, racism, sexism, colonialism, ableism, speciesism, etc.). We, creatures of the earth, are no better or worse than anything or anyone else. And these specific bodies make us able to discuss and address inequality and injustice, and try to get as close to planetwide systemic homeostasis as possible. You are me are nature are gods are the universe. We'll meet again in a different context, as different creatures, as not quite the same set of atoms. But some of what comprises "us" (myself and anyone reading this) will be there, in the future, perhaps even in the same creature. I don't think there's an "afterlife" just a different ongoing thread of "life". I'm still terrified of dying of course, I'd like to keep this "system", this "body", alive as long as possible. But I'm a bit more ok with it than I used to be. And mourning my own death after being zooted out of my mind helped a bit.

TLDR "Ego death^TM^" to sound even more like a stereotypical stoner/psychedelics user lmao.

It literally hurts my brain the religion has brainwashed billions of people. Generation after generation. It's sad that one brainwashed family indoctrinates their children. IMO: religion is a scourge on humanity. So many deaths in the name of one religion over another. Countless amounts of $$ stolen from those that gave cash/equivalent or slave labor.

What's more sad than religion based on thousands of years?

Seeing the insanity of cult behavior for following clearly ridiculous people like Donald Trump. The power of social media with misinformation, blatant propagada, etc....in addition to actual live news programs pushing the same inane, disgusting and pathetic shit is flabbergasting.

It may sound twisted....however, COVID, had the potential to unionize and solidify entire populations to join forces against a common enemy. I'm still in awe and disbelief as to how divided people became against the truth of science.

You know what that COVID episode demonstrated with 100% certainty?

Humanity will be extinct far sooner than people could possibly imagine from the apocalyptic level of damage caused be climate change. I truly wish people the best they can manage in the nearest future.

I’m not religious but always thought of myself as very spiritual… which I think is just living on a deeper level. I feel like I have my own custom-made religion, and I can borrow here and there from different religions if I want to. I especially like Buddhism, but I’m sure every religion must have some nice things to say. But I prefer learning about life from science, especially psychology, it seems more accurate.

But lately I became accustomed with energy healing… and it’s making me wonder about life and my belief system. I started watching the Goop Lab on Netflix, which led to me wondering if there really are people with psychic powers, then I got curious about energy healing, tried it a few times and became convinced that no, it’s not just a placebo effect and it works from a distance. But it’s also not supported by science. It’s been boggling my mind for a few months… Then I start looking at what these people believe, these healers who practice energy healing. They all believe in an afterlife, in spirit guides, crystals, etc. I never believed in all that, I always looked to science for answers. So, do I believe in all this? I wouldn’t say that (yet), but it did make me wonder. My thinking was, if there really are people with psychic powers, wouldn’t they know more about life than I do? My thinking prior to this was more along the lines of I don’t know what happens after death. But I also thought, it seems like a cold, cruel world, so there probably isn’t anything after death. And you’re just alive for a while and then it’s over.

What’s interesting is that I started contemplating the way these energy healers and psychics make sense of the world, and I decided to sort of ‘try’ it. Because I like to learn about life and experiment. And, well, it does ‘feel’ better. Much, much better. I always thought, I don’t want to be delusional and I’m one to want to get in touch with reality. But now I’m kind of enjoying this new way of thinking mostly because it feels much better. It’s comforting, reassuring, it can really change how you feel about life and how you live it. So it’s been an interesting experiment.

Then I’ve also been meditating for a long time, and now synchronicities happen much more often, they barely ever happened when I was younger. I also feel like more often I get ‘lucky’ or it seems like my intuition leads me in the right way. This also makes me wonder what that is, how does this happen?

If by 'spiritual' is meant to be belief in something that is outside of our current understanding of scientific knowledge, then yes.

Obviously, the scientific fields of inquiry do not have answers to all of humanity's questions.

So, that would be the sense that I am 'spiritual'...there are things going on in the immense universe that are outside (or unknown) our collective scientific understanding.

I mean, I have beliefs, just not religious ones. The only religions that I could ever vibe with were Wicca and Discordianism, and in time I realized that was because the only forces that I could ever accept having power over me are nature and chaos.

I've found myself surrounded by a lot of spiritual people lately and I've used it as an excuse to try and get in touch with that side of myself. It's been a very interesting experience. There's a lot of it I still don't understand but a lot of it is just nice vibes? Like I don't ascribe any meaning to the moon or when I'm born or male and female sexual energies or being actually connected to the souls of anyone else but sometimes it's nice to recognize when things are just unexplainable by conventional means and to use a common language to recognize it. To speak in soft or uncertain terms as a way to acknowledge something you can't quite put your finger on, only to have it create a wonderful connecting conversation with another human is honestly kind of nice. And it makes approaching certain subjects a little bit more accessible because it's not rigorous and scientific but more human centered and amorphous.

Yes, kind of. However, I was raised Pentecostal and strictly conservative, and have lingering religious trauma that I'm working through. For a while (from my teens through my mid-twenties) I described myself as atheist. However, I got into witchcraft and the occult a few years ago as kind of a time-waster hobby, not really sincerely believing in it at first but just having fun with it, and that grew into learning about other religions and becoming genuinely curious about spirituality and religion. Now I'd describe myself as a Unitarian Universalist. I've still never been to a Unitarian Universalist church in-person because there's not one near me, but I attend online stuff occasionally and whole-heartedly love the way they do religion. And I feel welcomed there despite all of the things that would have gotten me dirty looks at any of the churches I grew up in. In terms of belief, I'd say I'm agnostic and I like to "put on" and "take off" beliefs (or "suspend disbelief"), which I got from doing chaos magic. I think magic and ritual helps me organize and make sense of my mind more than anything else... if anything, just having a meditation and journaling habit has helped my mental health, especially since i re-started those habits after starting my gender transition. And yeah, it also maybe helps with everything else gestures to the world at large...

And yeah, I just realized this is the most I've talked about my spirituality to anyone since going down this road. One of my big things is that my spirituality is a very personal thing and I keep it mostly to myself. Nothing against people who proselytize (I've come to understand and forgive people who sincerely believe they're saving my life by "ministering" to me, like some of my older relatives who genuinely care about me and who are probably happy to hear me say "yeah, I'm kind of getting into a church now") but I don't feel compelled to tell people about my shit because I definitely have no answers. That's my whole thing, I have no answers. I'm just kind of reading everything and trying everything, for no purpose other than to just understand people and myself a little better. And maybe it works for me, but I also know folks who definitely don't want or need religion and that is 1000% okay, and I hope I don't disturb them. So I only really speak of my stuff when people ask.

I grew up in a christian household. My larents even went to two seperat churches (one service on saturday, one of sunday). They were very uptight about what was acceptable and what was evil. For example pokemon, star wars, yu-gi-oh, dragonball and harry potter were all forbidden for me. In my teens i became an atheist and never went back. Even though i do not believe in anything super natural anymore, i came to enjoy talking about religion with people again eventually.

I just don’t like having someone tell me how I should think and that’s why I was never interested in religion. :D Also seeing how religions make people behave really turned me away from them.