Since this seems to be a recurring theme here at PTT, I thought I would ask, but the idea is that you give a little history about your attendance (or lack thereof) and not relive the dark experience you had on the back of the church bus.

I started off Baptist but fell off during the preteen and teen years. Recommitted my life to Christ and joined mom in the Church of God. I had some issues with some of their teachings (didn't add up scripturally), so I ended up in a good, independent Bible church (that pastor currently holds Masters in Theology and Bio-ethics). I eventually discovered Reformed Theology and the Presbyterian Church of America. Currently I'm attending another Bible church. I still hold to Reformed teachings, but I haven't given up my belief in the Spirit (or at least the concepts) as presented by the CoG.

What that means is I believe in Gods grace, His sovereign choices and the gifts of the Spirit.

Baptist, Baptist, Christian, Mormon, Christian Scientist, Mormon, Baptist, Buddist, Scientologist, Athiest.

Total playing time... 28yrs.

I have never steped a foot inside a chuch

I gave my life to christ in the fall of 2000 and I am now a southern baptist.

Methodist, Atheist. A blinding light came to me aged 7, at Sunday School, and a voice said "this is bollocks".

A great and funny man called Peter Ustinov died this week:

Catholic through baptism at infancy. Strayed now and then from the church, but always come back. I go to mass, but I don't always swallow everything they say (obviously). I like the bible studies they hold occasionally, but I haven't gone to one since I've been activated for the last year and a half. I explored the Mormon religion, but there were too many things I couldn't agree with, so I never joined. Through it all, though, I was never an Atheist! Heck of a guilt-trip during those times when I knew there is a God, but I wasn't following the path.

-BombJames Bomb

Atheist. Never baptised, christened or anything like that. Don't and never have seen anything in religion which has given me any reason to actually even want to believe in it. That said, I have respect for those who do. I have been to many religious ceremonies of different religions, both mainstream and the more bizarre smaller religions either out of curiosity or as a guest at some occasion or other (eg Weddings, bar mitzvah's etc).

Must admit I love the old churches and particularly cathedrals, but this is purely from an architectural and stone masonry craftsmenship perspective.

@Gnomie: Yes, sad news about Peter Ustinov. Did you ever read his book entitled "The old man and Mr Smith"? Very amusing read.

-Z-

Methodist, Atheist. The Sunday school teacher asked my parents to take me to the main service at 7 because I asked questions they couldn't answer (or didn't want to). Like -z- religion never clicked for me. I even went to services until I was 18 to try to understand the sermons.

I respect the recognition that man must live by principles, but reject religion's main principle, altruism.

@-z- Gno, I haven't read anything of his at all, but just ordered The Old Man and Mr Smith so we shall see. Here's another one:

Presbyterian, athiest, diest....baptized at birth (wish I would have had a choice)....born to a presbyterian household....knew it was all BS at 10....figured out the problem of evil at 12 and argued with the minister who was full of shit....was forced to be confirmed at 13...have since 14 (10 yrs) never set foot inside a church except for weddings.....i never will unless I have a bomb....athiesm sat well til I got educated in college...moved to diesm since then....

LOL Bolo. No-one can accuse you of not speaking your mind eh? Ten bucks says that bomb you mentioned was actually a land mine and you just stepped on it. :)

I'm curious though, Are you angry about religion or just using shock-humor for effect??

Can you define Diest?

Thanks B.

Katherine

Last edited: Sunday, April 04, 2004 at 2:18:03 AM

Diesm-The belief, based solely on reason, in a God who created the universe and then abandoned it, assuming no control over life, exerting no influence on natural phenomena, and giving no supernatural revelation.

Threatening to blow up a church? Lol, scary! :P

Just make sure its quick and powerful. Im not afraid of death, I just dont dont wanna have a painful death. Or something like... Being buried alive. I wouldnt like that either.

It's Deism - from De us, Latin for a god, and ism , German for "the damn philosophers have been at it again".

He he gnomie....

Technically, I guess I belong in the Agnostic camp. There may be a God, there may not be. No one knows, but lots of folks have opinions on the matter. Since they're just as likely as I am to be right (and with just a teensy bit of ego thrown in - more likely to be wrong), I let the matter lie. I don't like to be preached at, but I don't mind discussions. The problem is that discussions always come down to their core: "I believe this is true, but can't prove it. I think you should believe this too."

I rarely go to church, usually only for special occasions, as it makes me feel like a hypocrite - which I try to avoid as much as possible. But my in-laws are religious folk, so when we visit I usually wind up going along once (not usually around for more than one week to go to church twice).

Edit: Please note that Atheism falls into the same camp as all other religions for me. The belief that there is no God is just as much a matter of faith as the belief that there is one.

Last edited: Sunday, April 04, 2004 at 2:08:33 PM

I disagree - Atheism is the lack of any belief in gods. This does not make it the same as a belief.

TMO and Gnomie,

Interesting point, is Atheism another belief? Hmmm. I have to agree with TMO. Atheism does not indicate a lack of a belief system, just the opposite, it means that I believe there is no god.

OK some dictionaries define it as denial of gods, others as a lack of belief in gods - see this for example. But I much prefer the latter definition, as a brilliant defence against people who tell me Atheism is just another belief, because frankly I wish they wouldn't.

Agnostics are a just a bunch of bet-hedging fence-sitters, and I wouldn't be surprised to see any of them hanging around the goal ready for a sneaky score in case manna falls from heaven.

Joking XD

Gassy.

Lutheran

@ gnomie...lol...good posts and thanks for my stupid spelling corrections

@bak....thanks for the definition....yep thats it folks

@ TG....the bomb thing is a running joke some of my friends have said about me in jest....i live in a small town dominated by a church and throughout high school I was an outcast because I did not belong to the church...i gave speeches and papers about athiesm as much as I could just to piss people off...then while I was away at college the bible thumpers put up a new branch of the church the size of a warehouse right across the street from my house...joke was that if u ever saw me in there RUN.....tis fun driving down the street with the windows down blasting death metal on sun morning....gets me a lot of stares:)....somebody asked me to turn it down and I told him to ask god to do it for me.......lol......to answer your question TG I am angry that too many stupid people are letting religous BS run their lives...i am friends with many theists but I dont like to associate with theists who are intolerant of non-believers or that try to sell me the 2000 year old BS story....im just not in the market for buying these days

Deism is a self-serving BS story itself really.....basically athiesm with the comfort of having a creator.....allows all 3 proofs for creation to exist and most of the athiest proofs to exist(im not explaining these...spent a semester in college learning them)....basically someone started it all but we dont know who what when where why how etc....but it was started.....and that it sure as hell wasnt anybody mentioned in any of ur sacred books....someone started it all and might be out there but isnt gonna give a shit if I blow up a church...:) naa I wont go that far......lol

Lack of a belief is itself a belief...need more to constitute a religion....cant compare structured theism to athiesm in the house of religion....

@Bolo - Lack of hunger is itself hunger. Lack of an idea is itself an idea. Lack of money is itself money. Lack of an education is itself an education. Lack of love is itself love. Lack of a belief is itself a belief. I would have trouble with all of these, unless you were arguing from some very deeply Zen point of view. Apart from that I'm with you 100% though!

No offence to all you Deists out there, but what's the point? What did your god do - light the blue touch paper and run away? We're back in Eddie territory again - always stand well back from the Big Bang.

Gnomie it works like this for we deists.......everything is in motion.....we on earth, earth around sun, solar system around the galaxy, galaxies around each other in the universe.....something had to start the motion.....philosophy calls it the prime mover.....we deists believe that god or whoever or whatever u wanna call it was the prime mover and thats it!!! Did nothing more after that....every other religion is made up and is self serving man made bullshit...thats diesm in a nutshell.....laters

@Gnomie - I did not say Atheism was a religion. I said it was a belief - Atheism is the belief that there is no God (or gods). Atheists have just as much proof for their belief as the various religions do for theirs - ie "I believe this is true, but cannot prove it." We Agnostics are the folk who can't make up our minds what to believe. XD No matter which one of you is correct, we're pretty much left in the lurch. Which is actually one of my main reasons for NOT believing in any of the main religions. For the most part they're elitist and exclusionary, "Only WE will get into Heaven. All others will go to Hell, etc." I figure that if there is a God (or gods), they're not that narrow minded.

Forgive the minor rant, folks. I just went and saw The Passion last night and am feeling rather disgusted with the human animal today.

I hated religion, never went to church unless it was for a event. I guess you could have called me a Deuist philosifer, since I was creating my own moral and ethics code, which a lot of religions do. I really hated that churches would force thier ideas down peoples throught and they would ahve to blindly accept it as truth without much supporting evidance. It took the Catolic church until 1870 to make Mary the mother of jesus a type of christ, to the ponit she was equal to her son because of the virgin birth. Silly, pointless and totally ignoring any facts.

Anywaz, fairly warped and bias veiwpoint until I started talking/emailing/IMing with this girl via the internet, she was from canada and her father was a Babtist minister. It was nice because we were abel to DISCUSS our belifs without hurting eachother. We were good freinds nad that helped alot. THen finally a year after we started chatting she decided to travel 1000 miles and across an internatioal border to visit me. I thought she was in love with me, she came to witness for me. Finally after a long talk, she told me she didn't love me, and couldn't love me since I was not religious. And then a huge weight came upon me and I realised how worthless my life was up to that point. Everything I had done ment NOTHING. The only way for it to mean somehting would be to belive. I was converted, I dont know exactly how it happened, but I do belive in miricles, and something Divine had to have happened.

The next day, we decided to go to church that sunday, we open up the phone book and look for a church in my area "Hey, that church has a good name" it was amission church did not have a building yet, and was holding the services in a Grade school gym. It was the first time I ever went to a church FOR the church, and to listen. Afterwords I talked ot the people there told them my story, and started taking Confirmation classes. Later that day I asked my canadian freind if all my sins were forgiven, every single one, and she said "Yes" I felt like a happy school boy and stuck my head out the window to whoop for joy.

It was a remarkable growth in faith that impressed the church members, and I was later babtised, and confirmed into the church as a member, and later I was elected onto the steering commitee, as one of the church leaders.

6 years of blessings so far. Thanks be to God

In general, my opinion is, if it makes you happy, and doesn't hurt anyone else, then go for it.

Congratulations Van.

I'm an fence sitter on the belief-that's-not-a-belief side, or, in other words, I'm an agnostic on the atheist side. I believe that it is impossible to tell whether or not there is a God, or Gods, or flaming demons of hell and heck, or whatever. I also believe/think that with today's knowledge of science and our world, coupled with the knowledge of all the horrible things in the world, it seems highly unlikely to me that there is a God. I myself cannot accept that there is an active and compassionate God around, because there are too many absolutely horrible lives and things now, yesterday, and tomorrow. What good is a God if so much is still unfair? And if God can't make things fair, then what does God do anyways and who does make things fair? Does nobody make things fair? Are things never fair? That would seem unfair, but that just fits right in. Kinda makes sense in a painful way.

Annnyway, I don't think that you can tell for sure if there's a God (etc.), not at least until you kick the bucket, but I feel strongly inclined to believe that there isn't one. That's just me.

Okay, I'm falling alseep here, or I would type more.

Goodnight, hope you all make it to heaven or at least to the atheist equivilant of a happy afterlife. Wherever that may be.

Asterisk

I absolutely love lesbians. Was that the question?

@ *

From your last post u are a classic athiest......just FYI.....u mentioned many good reasons to denounce god...there are many more u will discover as u get older....

I just got a link to this page from somewhere else to work, so I do not know where it is, or how old )(_:

I have been a chrisitan all my life. Maybe for a year, I did not doubt the doctrin, but I doubted my belief in it. I finally figured out that I was OK, and have lived in the grace of God ever since. I live in a college town, and go to a VERY SMALL church with mostly college kids. It is ON FIRE!! (_: THe Paster is in his thirties, loves God, and is umm, sorta crazy. He always spends time durring the sevice talking about the college football team! Anyway, It is always nicer going to a small non-denominational church, then a big denominational one, I have found.

@Van, Those churches meeting in schools really rock, ehh? My mom, in the 70s, whent to a church meeting in a house, it is now one of the biggest churches in the USA. She says she liked it more small (-:

I was roman catholic all the way up until I was 18. Did it all... Sunday school all grades, mass every sunday including all religeous holidays, and an altar server from like 8 to 18. Knew the mass backwards and forwards at the end and was the trainer for any new altar servers. But alas when I started asking the hard questions and there were no answers I too became disallusioned and began to feel like a hypocrit. So I left the church. Came to terms with my guilt when I studied creation myths in college. For myself, I beleive that its in human beings nature to need answers to explain life around them and when no answers are readily apparent, they turm to religeous myth. Its comforting I guess. Given time science will explain most of our questions. The rest of the unanswered questions are best left to introspection and scocialogical consideration. In the end I respect individaul spirituality because as it was once said in song..."whatever gets you true". Doing my best to hide my bitterness. Lol

Do you remeber when bobby was being bullied by some little first grade punk, and he was all "im too afeared to fight" and the punk was all "oh, yeah? Take this" and bobby was all "waaaa"? And den mike was all, "bobby you did the right thing" thinking wat would jesus do? And then thinking, boy this kid is HOT...and bobby was all "thanks dad" then he was thinking..."this guy gives me the creeps" but the next day, the first grade punk is all up in little cindy's business, teasing her, and bobby is all "cut the crap you pudgey pile of pigshit" and the punk was all "you and who's army" and bobby was all "watch this" and den SMACK right in the face then a swift kick to the nuts, and down goes the punk. And then cindy peed on his prostate body....do you remember dat?

Man, I loved that episode.

Stinky

Um, maybe I'm roman catholic...or I could be a jew...nobody ever really explained wat I am...i love christmas, and easter, so....but then again I love halloween...

I was catholic till the age of 13. Then I started to loose faith slowly until about a yaer ago. Not saying I'm athiest, just don't really know about the whole thing anymore. Definitely don't believe there's any jesus. But the god part is still qustionable.

Dude, jesus was real...god however, was always questionable

Catholic. And I've many experiences but they always ended up being in the church basement with Father Murphy. Wait! That son of a...

Still am a Catholic and think religions of all types in general are a good idea. Notice that I didn't say belief. People don't kill others over ideas, only beliefs.

I like to say I'm into syncretism. I think it's a beautiful word defining just about everyone's position in regard to religion and spirituality:

Syn·cre·tism

[Greek sunkrtismos, union, from sunkrtizein, to unite (in the manner of the Cretan cities)

1. Reconciliation or fusion of differing systems of belief, as in philosophy or religion, especially when success is partial or the result is heterogeneous.

Basically it means taking a bit from every sacred knowledge system, reconciling it and making it our own.

Thus I'm interested into

Gnosticism,

Shamanism,

Entheogenics.

Philosophy,

Theology,

Minor and Major Greek Mysteries.

Psychology

Deism

Anthropology and

World religions

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Tell me, have you done some very serious studies of the world religions? As to me, I think it a necessity to embrace the many sacred path the heavenly God offers us! %)

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I read the gospels many a times, they are 4 amazing little books about a very noble hero. I quite like the gospels and Christ story. It's very beautiful and inspiring.

I surfed through the old testament and delight in some parts, while others leave me lukewarm.

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Currently re-reading Homer's The Odyssey. I love the old Greek Gods. Such a lyrical way to express the magic of life! So venerable!

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The Bhagavad-Gita is an awesome book. The whole Vedic and Hindu cosmogony is a most profound system. I would learn to learn sanskrit later in life.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is mind expanding, A very old and venerable text. Everyone should read it.

I would also like to read the Talmud and the Torah. The Jewish cabbala intrigues me, and I'd like to learn more about it. Suggestions anyone?

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I recently started doing meditation (a kundalini yoga one). Finally! So now I'm learning some mantras. Very interesting... Ever heard of siddhis? My girlfriend is a kundalini yoga / tantra teacher. Who's into yoga here?

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I like when Christ says in the gospels: 'I did not come to judge, but to save'

Easier to judge then to love.

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Get this next one folks: I FINALLY ORDERED THE SACRED BOOK OF THE MUSLIMS: THE QUR'AN! from Amazon.com at like $4!! I'm quite excited about it. It's about time I check this out. For we hear much about it in the Western world, yet here is a quiz:

how many people have you met in your life that read the qur'an?

My personal answer is: none. What's yours? I bet it's ZERO, unless you have a friend who's muslim. Or perhaps you are muslim yourself? Millions abide by the rules of this book, yet no one reads it.

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Ok all take care, may the gods bless your way! B)

Yes, Ice Punk there were prophesies about the first coming of Jesus and consequently there were dozens of them claiming to be "the one".

Wow Hugo. Very impressive. I'm not well read on all religions but I know a pretty damn good joke about each one. Does that count? Lol

Rogue: yes it does XD

I think god is imperfect, unlike every other religion, or else how would he even allow the devil to exist?

I was born into a Quaker family. Grew up as a Quaker and I am still a Quaker today.

What's a Quaker?

Quakers have no set creed or dogma that means we do not have any declared statements which you have to believe to be a Quaker. There are, however, some commonly held views which unite us. One accepted view is that there is that of God (or the spirit or divine) in all people and that each human being is of unique worth. This shared belief leads Quakers to value all people and to oppose anything that harms or threatens them. Quakers believe that each person can reach God directly and independently through silent worship. Quakers are committed to service, social justice and simplicity.

I attend Quaker service or "meeting" fairly regularly. This consists of about 150+ people who gather at a meeting house and sit in silence. IF someone feels so moved, they will stand and say a few words... Sometimes it's a simple message or experience that someone had during the week other times someone proposes a question, there are usually several minutes between each person's speaking. All unplanned. Sometimes noone speaks and you are simply in a room full of silence.

Absent or kept to a minimum is music, no responsive reading, no scripture reading, no announcements, and no professional speaking.

"The lack of a creed or clear description of Quaker beliefs has sometimes led to the misconception that Quakers, also called Friends do not have beliefs or that one can believe anything and be a Friend. Most Quakers take the absence of a creed as an invitation and encouragement to exercise an extra measure of personal responsibility for the understanding and articulation of Quaker faith. Rather than rely on priests or professional theologians, each believer is encouraged to take seriously the personal disciplines associated with spiritual growth. Out of lives of reflection, prayer, faithfulness, and service flow the statements of belief, both in word and in deed."

There is no spoon.

Sniper

Im catholic from birth and want to stay one (even though my name throws you off[dier was my sponsor company's name and my name was it's slogan]) and ice punk, your post was uncalled 4

@Ice Punk:

He allowedf the devil to exist, because he does not mess with free will. Satan started out as the angel lucifer (light,) but got greedy and said he was better than God. Taking other angels (demons) with him, he was kicked out. God did not make him change his mind, because he does not change free will, just like he can't MAKE YOU believe in him.

Little ideaologies like that won't get you anywhere, especially when you don't know the background.

Last edited: Sunday, May 23, 2004 at 3:57:41 PM

Well thanks 4 the lecture, punk! [no insult intended]

@master TMO "I believe this is true, but can't prove it. I think you should believe this too." (going back a while to april 4)

If one could pove it, they would call it science, not faith.