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Yes, absolutely. Just not tied to any specific church or religion.

was raised catholic, then kinda fell out at 14ish, now im more catholic than ive ever been

Not at all. First of all... Religion isn't a huge thing in my country - or at least not in the area I grew up in - so we never went to church or anything (although my parents went through the motions with the baptisms and such). I did get some catechism and stuff like that, but it was like... "more school".

Later on, religion just never clicked. I was into mythology, so I always got stuck at "Why would THIS god be real and not all of those? They were there before."

I was born and raised Roman Catholic and attended Catholic schools up to college. I feel very disconnected from the religion because of how it upholds discriminatory views against gender minorities. There was also a lot of fear instilled in me when I was younger and I just grew out of it eventually. It didn't make sense that I would do good just because a higher being promised salvation when I die. There well also too many hypocrites around me who would go to church religiously but never practice the teachings from the priest.

I now try to make sense of life as I see it and I still practice spirituality through Tarot. It's brought me a lot of peace but I still struggle every now and then

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 don't, I'm an atheist. I grew up in a very strict christian household (my dad took away my yugioh cards and my Harry Potter books for being "demonic" lmao) kinda turned me off to religion.

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.

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.

I used to be a pretty staunch atheist, but had an experience earlier in life that changed my perception. I spent months trying to find a scientific explanation for what I experienced, something within the realm of physics for it to make sense, but could not. Even today I try to debunk my own experience but I know that it happened and have somebody else who can confirm it as well. I can't ignore that evidence, but I also have no way to prove it to others so I make no effort to "convert" anybody to my way of thinking. Simply explain what happened and if you believe me cool, if not, also cool. We all have our own views.

I don't know the nature of the universe, I do know that we don't know a whole lot about the universe though. To me, the atheists that claim with certainty that there is nothing beyond the veil of our reality sound just as ignorant and stubborn as the orthodox priests of any major religion though. As a science minded person, you should always try to keep an open mind.

Today I would describe myself as a scientific pantheist, I guess, if we have to put labels on things. Which is to say that I believe that what we see as the universe is synonymous with what we think of as God. That science, mathematics, physics, etc are the languages in which "God" speaks to us.

I used to be religious, became an atheist in my teens and now as an adult, I'm agnostic

No. I am a person who bases beliefs on logic and reason. There is no logic or reason for religion or spirituality. I see it as a delusion based in the hopes and fears of a person, instead of reality that can be measured and quantified.

I don't begrudge others having such religious or spiritualistic beliefs, as long as it is kept within oneself. My main issues for religionists:

• Don't legislate it
• Don't have it in schools
• Don't indoctrinate children
• Keep it strictly personal.

Sadly, I will die and decompose back to the universe with millions (or billions) of people who still want (and succeed in doing so) to make laws based on their specific religious ideals and brainwash children into it.

Yep! I grew up nominally christian but actually pretty personally areligious, even with a long atheist phase, but in a pretty diverse religious upbringing both family and community-wise - mostly a mix of Unitarian Univeralism, Catholicism, and Judaism. I had a lot of anger at religion as a queer teenager from the US south but thankfully ended up falling in with more positive ex-Christian interfaith groups and not the antitheist community, which led to a lot of open exploring down many different religious paths just to better understand and see what the fuss was all about, to where I am now, an animist polytheist with a pretty solitary practice. No pressure, just me and my own relationship with the world and the many kinds of persons, human and not, who inhabit it.

I am agnostic. My personal point of view is that if there some sort of all-powerful being(s) and they want something other than "don't be a jerk" out of me, I don't care enough to put effort into impress them.

I do love learning about other people's belief systems, though, as long as they don't try to prostelytize to me.

Absolutely not. Raised in a strictly Catholic household and 12 years of Catholic education but a) none of the religious education sank in* and b) my personal experience turned me off to religion-as-an-institution entirely.

Footnote*: Religion class was typically my worst grade in school, except for 8th grade where the teacher gave me an A despite low scores on most of the tests. When I asked her why she thought I deserved an A, she said that she gave grades based on our ability to grasp the material and she thought I was doing as well as I could. I cried -- not because this meant I was doing well, but because I was given something I knew I didn't earn and I didn't even want an A in a subject I fundamentally disagreed with.

I am, very much, not religious. My father is Catholic, my mother doesn't go into her spirituality but it's not Christian. So I was taught about different things and given the choice to believe in what makes sense to me. If there's one way to describe what feels to me like what I imagine faith to be like to someone who's religious it would be the messages of hope and of passion for discovery and learning that Carl Sagan showed. The Pale Blue Dot speech is a sermon. It inspires me to be a better person and to try and be the change in the world that I want to see. But ultimately science doesn't know everything and at some point even with it you must make assumptions and have "faith" in the process.

As far as divinity goes, I've always struggled to believe. I just don't see the extraordinary evidence that would be required for me to say "Oh, that makes a divinity-free universe impossible". And by the same token it is impossible to prove that the universe was not crafted by some all powerful being last Thursday with all our billions of years of history baked in for us to pour through. So I figure, I'll find out on my last day and until then I'll just focus on being as good a person as I can be.

No, but I used to be far more derisive of religion than I am now. My wife is Christian and speaks about how she finds God in the woods, the lakes, and the natural world around her, and I have come to view God less as a specific person or all-knowing entity and more as an embodied collection of feelings and thoughts that people have regarding justice, truth, and love. This helps me reconcile many kinds of spiritual beliefs with my own understanding of the universe as garnered by mathematical processes and the Earth as it is shaped by human hands.

No

Hmm. On the one hand very much no, in the sense that I am a scientist, and I believe in the scientific method, and I think society should deal with facts and evidence when agreeing how to manage itself.

But on the other hand, individually, I am a creature of emotion and I feel connected to the universe, and I believe everything ebbs and flows in connection with everything else.

I don't feel the need for my scientist brain to hold that emotional part of myself to account or ransom, though. I don't need to know how it works or why it might be because it just is what it is.

No.

I was expelled from Sunday school, I asked too many questions (faith is not about critical thinking).

Now it seems to me like faith/religion serves only one purpose - controling people. It doesn't matter on which historic period you look at it is always about politics and control.