Poll: Are you religious?

[Parago Doyle]

I think that all religion has value, but mostly for the fact that at the core of all religion it's all pretty much the same thing.
My personal belief is that there is a God, but he really doesn't care about you on an individual scale. He just sort of sits back and waits to see what happens.

 

[Kilroy17]

You know you can be theistic without being religious, right.

My mum is. She's not agnostic, she firmly believes there is a God. But she also doesn't 100% agree with any religion.
She thinks some of them get some things right. But most of them focus on the wrong things. Or worse, abuse the parts that serve them best and ignore everything else. If she were to describe herself, she would probably say she was more spiritual than religious or some hippy crap like that.

I'm mostly agnostic in that I don't actually give a shit, I think there are more important things to be concerned with. But I just figured I should point that out.

Very good point, I didn't consider that point of view on it. What I mean by my question is do you believe in a supernatural or divine power, to phrase it better.

 

[Ham_authority95]

Not in particular. I've done the whole Christian praying thing, but it didn't really help me get any friends or lead me to my goals. My family isn't religious, either.

Everything I've learned in life so far points to "Why wait for a supernatural force to help me when I can help myself?"

The most religious I've gotten was in a car accident a couple of weeks ago, but that's only because the other guy was a hardcore christian. It went away the next day.

 

[dfphetteplace]

I'll just leave this here.

That is the greatest. Thank you for sharing that.

 

[Brandon237]

No, I am an agnostic atheist. An atheist would be 100% sure and not open to any other possibility.
...
...
I am 99.95% sure.
Take that as you will.

And again with the phallic polls! What is this?!

 

[Uszi]

Well let me use an example: I have an intangable, invisible, undetectable box which creates all gravity in the universe (also its purple!). Do you ask me to prove it or belive me untill somone else shows I am incorrect? That is how the claims of religion seem to me.

All hail to Invisible Purple Box!

The Invisible Purple Box appeared before me, and said that it required me to sacrifice my family member on an altar to prove my loyalty. But as I raised the dagger for the sacrifice, the Purple Box intervened, and said that because I would have done it, that was good enough! [http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+22&version=NIV]

So great is the Invisible Purple Box!

 

[Alon Shechter]

I love religion, and I love all the gods out there.
I just hate the fan club.

 

[crudus]

I am an atheist through and through. I actively hate religion, but I don't do anything about it until evangelists tell me I am going to hell or what have you.

Speaking as an agnostic, an atheistic worldview doesn't prevent any of the shit that atheists seem to think only religion causes. Stalin, Mao... those names ring a bell?

They also had/have extreme hybris and maybe even Megalomania(or the non-clinical equivalent of a god complex). I am also not sure what you are trying to get at. I have never heard people say "if there was no religion, people wouldn't war/die/create a hierarchy/genocide/etc".

 

[beepyou34]

I'm atheist. That's not an option, so I can't vote.

 

[Baralak]

I'd say I'm pretty religious, yeah. I'm Buddhist.

 

[Magikarp]

Yeah, I'm a Christian. Not a great one, but a Christian nonetheless.

 

[mrwoo6]

I'm seeing a common trend I don't like among fellow atheist. The idea that SCIENCE! disproves all ideas or concepts of a "A god" or an higher entity, so to speak, and quite frankly, it does not. It only disproves all forms of religion we humans have managed to come up with. (God, Thor etc)

You can still quite logically belive in the existence of "A god" but also belive fully in all forms of science and still be a perfectly logical thinking human. In relative terms we humans know absolutely jack shit about anything. Just as much as theres no evidence for "A god" theres the same ammount against "A god". There is however plenty against the chirsten God.

 

[GwydeanRunix]

I used to be agnostic, however I was recently saved and I am now Christian.

 

[Casual Shinji]

There are too many fantastic and meaningful stories born from religious views for me not to be.

 

[darkman80723]

As the great man said "religion is BS", obviously good bs....but bs none the less.

 

[zelda2fanboy]

Nope. Every religion that's ever been presented to me I've found to be completely insane. I've never heard any idea coming out of religion that brought me any comfort. If I can choose to not believe something incredibly stressful and worrisome, why would I? You know that terrifying notion that you or someone you love might go to Hell? I don't have that anymore. Worried you'll be reincarnated and have to live life over again? Not me. Concerned at the prospect of living FOREVER in boring luxury? I'm not. I'm going to die and never ever exist, talk, or think again and it feels good to think that, too.

That and the idea of believing an incredibly crazy idea just because someone else told you to with no evidence whatsoever seems a little damaging to society. But that's not really for to say because there's no way of knowing. It's just a guess. I'm not proclaiming it to be fact like many of the devout.

 

[Uszi]

Religiously.

Oh, that joke was terrible.

It's this thread just inviting people to annoy each other with their hard-heads?

Yes:

http://youtu.be/wCto7tQF1rE?t=2m15s

 

[k-ossuburb]

Wait, why is agnosticism a third option? Surely it's covered by "No"?

Because it means that even though you are not religious you are open to the idea that there may be something to it you just can't prove or disprove it.

Agnostic is not a 3rd option. Either you believe or you don't. An agnostic is just unsure why they feel the way they do.

Although you're right about it not being a third option, it's got nothing to do with uncertainty. Agnosticism refers to knowledge, you can be a gnostic atheist (I know God isn't real and I don't believe in Him) or an agnostic atheist (I don't know that God is real, but don't believe in Him) and you can also be a gnostic theist and an agnostic theist.

Most atheists will be in the agnostic atheist category, because they can't really prove a negative (you cannot prove that something does not exist) and most atheists are honest enough to admit that there is no real way of proving or disproving something like a god the same way that there's no way to disprove invisible pink unicorns or the celestial teapot, but since the evidence is lacking, it's just more logical to assume that there is no such thing until it can be proven to be real.

It's also completely possible to be an atheist creationist, you don't have to believe in any kind of god to believe that the universe was created by something.

I'll use my Booism example, which basically states that the universe was created by a giant space hamster named Boo after a celestial binge on his favourite food; quark-gluon plasma. Boo sneezed and the plasma formed the proto-universe. At which point he buggered off to another dimension to sleep. He's still monitoring us with miniature giant space hamsters, which are exactly the same size and shape as regular hamsters, except they can communicate with Boo through inter-dimensional super-strings.

OT: I'm an atheist and I don't really have a religion, but if anyone asks, I'll tell them I'm a Booist because it amuses me.

 

[Xooiid]

Indeed I am, Lutheran here and proud to be one. I also find it fun that for some reason the internet seems to have no idea what a Lutheran is, even if they could recite the life of Martin Luther like it was the Hungry Caterpillar.

I've tried to be an atheist, just doesn't sit right with me. A mix of personal experiences and an outlook on the world makes me simply unable to accept that a world this beautiful and with so much potential is as pointless and mundane as people like Richard Dawkins (whom I do not consider to be the average atheist, mind you.) would insist on me believing.

I'm not a fan of heavy-handed preaching on either side, but with atheists it bothers me more. When religious people are trying to convert you at least they have the motivation (in most cases) of wanting you to have eternal joy/peace/etc. When an atheist does it, it feels to me like their sole goal is to suck all the magic out of the world for you.

Really? Let me quote Carl Sagan:

"It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works ? that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it."

Pointlessness and mundanity aren't something held back by the world. They are something put into the world by the observer. If you see the world as pointless without a unseeable, unprovable, unspeakably hypocritical father figure, than that is fine with me.

But this small, weird little world in this massive, weird universe of ours is an incredible place full of beauty and purpose. Just because I don't believe in the supernatural doesn't take that beauty or amazement away.

Looking at the world around me, I don't see it as pointless and mundane.

Or, as Dawkins put it:

Matter flows from place to place, and momentarily comes together to be you. Some people find that thought disturbing. I find the reality thrilling.

 

[HT_Black]

Yes, yes I am. Proud of it.