Which religion are you?

That's a pretty offensive statement, Daseti, please try to tone that down in the future.

No religion is "wrong" nor is any religion "right." It's also not "random," it is based on the beliefs of a culture and you should respect that. No one is going to call your religion "random."

 

Daseti, maybe it's because we're killing all the animals and such, therefor all those souls are being reincarnated as humans.

 

What many probably don't know is that religion is the precursor to science. Religion was the first way humans tried to describe the reason that things in nature happen, just like how calculus and chemistry do now. The Gods of different religions were used to describe the change in seasons, disease, and the creation of all being. Religion was mainly the way humans would describe their existence and reasoning for living.

Interesting idea, good counter for Daseti's argument

 

ANYway, while we're on the subject, I just pretty much signed away two years of my life to my church.

 

I'm a Pastafarian

 

Ah a believer in the flying spagehti monster?

 

@ LordKerwyn: Yes! Lamén to that! lol

lol, a hot topic! I'm atheist.

I believe the first religions came from early civilizations practices, such as sheep herding and agriculture. Hell is underground because it's where the seeds go to be reborn. Christian hell came from other religion's beliefs, like Hades who had big horns and was the king of underworld and such.

Odin and Zeus were strong because they were fed goat's milk when babies. Jesus is the Shepperd of men. Sheep domestication has high stakes for being the transition method from nomadic to sedentary human culture, thus allowing agriculture to be developed, and civilizations to be established.

Egyptian religion came from their experience and daily living. Seth and Osiris' story is probably the source for Cain and Abel's tale in the beginning of the Bible, as Jews were Egyptian slaves for the longest time. Jews have even incorporated egyptian plagues into their own "arsenal".

The references to enemies of God being killed by Samson, the laws carved in stone by God, religion has always repeated itself in different areas. Afrodite in example appears in some Asian myths. Dragons appear both in chinese culture and european, two very distant places, showing how myths travel. The Sphinx from Oedipus' myth and the Egyptian Sphinx, virtually unrelated, but is it really?

Rituals always come before myths, and rituals are born from survival knowledge passed through generations, without proper explanation. Alcohol and other drugs are sacred, as they are universal medicines and in early civilization they were the only resource. Thus, Jesus made water into wine and it was a miracle, even tho he made a drug. Wine also represented his blood. In other religions drugs are also used for religious purposes.

Through time, the real reason why rituals were performed was forgotten and myths were created to explain the rituals. Thus, religion is born. Without a ritual to bring into the material world the divine entity, there is no religion. Buddhism doesn't bring God into material realm, thus it's not a religion. Eating the body of Christ and expelling the devil from the body are examples of these practices. Vodu does it by becoming a zombie, and bringing the entity within your body, manifesting it into the material realm through you.

However, the roman empire saw in Christians a good way of controlling population, and after the decay of the roman empire, emperor Constantino picked some ancient books of his choice together and called it a Bible, giving birth to the most published book of all times. The powers that be then used Christianism to extent their territories and try to rule the world, fighting Muslims and trying to take over Jerusalem. The crusades eventually ended with no success, but till this day there are senseless conflicts derived from it between west and east, and even tho we couldn't care less it invades our lives.

Just my two cents.

 

dude say RAmen like the rest of us belivers lol

 

Dang! I'm such a blasphemer! -_- Anyway, the invisible pink unicorn of space said I don't have to worry, as long as my apetite is the same, the initial letter will be too!

 

Joneangle, I thought it quite amusing that in your list of philosophers and scientists and such, you included Martin Luther King, who was a reverend I wasn't sure if you mentioned Aristotle either, but he also believed in God, his perception of God though was the Unmoved Mover. It's pretty intense, so sorry for people who want to know more detail about it.


I personally don't see why there has to be confliction between science and religion. At its heart, they're both looking for the same thing...truth. The reason why there is such a confliction between the two is because close-minded people on BOTH sides decided their way is true and nothing else. And partially politics as well.

Take evolution for example. No where does Darwin deny the existence of God or saying "Hah! I just disproved that God can create people!" He was merely giving an alternate view of the beginnings of life. I myself DO believe in evolution, but to an extent. By that I mean that I think that humans really are different from the other beings on the planet and that we're not just monkeys that can walk upright. Maybe we did come from a monkey, I don't care, I just believe that we have something that sets us apart from the other organisms besides walking on two feet and being able to make a computer.

Another example I have, I believe that stuff like Genesis, Cain and Abel, and Noah's Ark are metaphorical. When you look at it deep enough, those stories have a lot of symbolism and are very poetic. I prefer to look at the lessons they teach, like how in Cain and Abel when Cain says "Am I my brother's keeper?" the answer is yes you are your brothers keeper, and we should look after our brother man.

Another thing I would like to point out is that in the years of the Islamic Empire, nobody saw a contradiction between their religion and scientific advances, and it turns out that the Muslims during the Golden Age of Islam were almost as innovative in their ideas and concepts as the ancient Greeks, you just don't hear about them as much because of our own Western Civilization.

I personally think that both things work great together....its just people on both sides don't see it as that way and they try their hardest in everything they do to try to separate it FURTHER. I do agree on Joneangle's saying though that neither Science nor Religion should cloud your inner reasoning or your better judgment.

 

Yes, us Christians don't believe that humans are reincarnated.
We go to heaven if we were Christians on Earth, believing Jesus Christ is and was our savior.
We go to hell if we didn't believe Jesus.

And I thought Hinduism AND Buddhism believes in reincarnation?
Right...or wrong?

 

More or less yeah TerranGod, Buddhists do believe in reincarnation. It all really comes down to karma though.

If I do believe in an afterlife, reincarnation appeals to me, not because I'm afraid of death, but partly because I do believe that the stuff you do does have backlash. I have many other reasons as well, but I won't go into detail.

 

I still prefer the Christian teaching of heaven/hell, but if they are wrong, this belief would be a great alternative to how life is after you die, rather than just disappearing from existence like atheist believe.

Reincarnation has always struck me as interesting and a great idea on how life recycles itself.

There is something I'm uncertain of though. Many people believe Earth is where purgatory exists and that is why the are ghosts. I'm not sure if this is true, but it makes a good story

 

How can atheism be a religion? A religion is a set of common beliefs and practices generally held by a group of people, often codified as prayer, ritual, and religious law. Religion also encompasses ancestral or cultural traditions, writings, history, and mythology, as well as personal faith and mystic experience. The term "religion" refers to both the personal practices related to communal faith and to group rituals and communication stemming from shared conviction. That's what a religion is, and you can't say that atheism has prayers, or rituals.. or even religious laws... there are no traditions in atheism, no writings, no mythologic elements whatsoever. There's also no faith involved in atheism, and most of the time, there are no atheism group.. I believe an atheism group would just be some atheist friends hanging together.

Atheism is far from being a religion, it's a philosophic point of view. Of course it's metaphysical, just like the religions, but even if it is, not everything classifed under metaphysic can be labelled as a "religion". Beside that, dogmas are found in most of the religions (if not all of them, but, I'm not an expert in religion so I won't affirm that every religions has dogmas) and there's no dogma at all in atheism.

and yeah, I'm an atheist, which is not a religion.

 

Atheism is the absence of a religion, who said it was a religion?

JBL, you didn't strike me as an atheist, I'm surprised. I don't think atheist are bad or need to be converted, but I don't agree with their ideas in religion. But besides that, I have no quarrel with them.

 

athiest IS a religion

they believe in science

agnostic is no religion

 

@ Itsmyship , I mentioned those great men as people who challenged the current state of religion from the inside. They are all people who had strong religious convictions and yet stepped forward from their "hood" and made significant advances in the name of humanity, whether through philosophical channels or scientific ones.

I was not suggesting that they were not devout people. To the contrary, I was giving examples of people who despite the shroud of religion made advances contrary to their beliefs.

 

@ Joneangle- Ahhhh, I see where you're going at now. I wasn't sure if you were going with that or not, considering that you mentioned Galileo, and although he was a devout Catholic, they usually associate with him more his trouble with the Church But yea, I agree with what you said. If religion helps advance a person and maybe even in turn help advance society, I don't see any need to see it as a negative thing.

Eh, I a good amount of my friends are agnostic/atheist and quite frankly, it's all cool with me. Doesn't matter what you are, if you're a good person and you're not doing anything to negatively influence other people, its all good.

 

First page, the guy thinks atheism is a religion... lol

I don't believe in religions.

TerranGod:

Science is not a religion.
Believing in science is not a religion.
you can believe in god or w/e and still believe in science.

Atheism is NOT a religion, go get your dictionairy, atheism has nothing to do with science anyway.

 

well, i believe that athiesm is a religion

believing in nothing is agnostic