What religion or non are you?

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I have a belief in Religious Humanism, but am a member of the Unitarian Universalist church.

I'm Christian, but Episcopalian because women and gays can be ordained as clergy, and even as bishops.

Guess


PaganMom

Rational Pantheist. I accept the Universe as it is including demonstrable processes like evolution. However I am not a materialist based on the existence of evidence that indicates consciousness is something transcendent of space and time. Learn about the experimental and statistical research by Dean Radin especially.

As a working theory about the universe I conclude that some sort of fractal consciousness exists as a primordial reality and the personal is a holographic reflection of the primordial consciousness. Also time and space seem to be aspects of this computational system of modulated duality we call physical reality. So death is the extent of finite experiences of consciousness but consciousness like energy cannot be created or destroyed. As far as anything that can be called 'God' if personal experience is associated with a physical body then the physical body to the primordial consciousness would be the universe as a whole.

I guess I am with 'no religion'. I have nothing against religion, as I understand that it is a means through which people find that essential 'hope' or 'faith' - an element of our lives as intergral as food, water, love, pleasure and pain. I respect that each religion has one or more Gods, each a symbol to allow people t envision more than what material reality reveals. I look at the notion of a 'god' on Pantheist principles - he/she represents a non-existent dream world that operates for the same reason that we are able to dream. Whether it be Greek gods with amazing powers to turn the tide or lift 100 tonnes, or the omnipresent Jesus Christ who can turn water into wine and live a pure life free from any evil, each allows us to dream up a scenario or situation that assumes we or someone among us knows how to break physical laws and they provide us with the 'hope' that we would be able to do the same if we live our lives according to doctrines dictated by researchers and teachers of these religious constructs.

What I dislike about religion is the existence of its institutionalised forms: The church and other superpowers have an uncanny ability to make people so ignorant to believe that their god is the only one that exists, and that he/she will listen only to the prayers of those who belong to that particular institution. To use a content-distant but ideologically-relevant example, McDonald's enjoys a huge sales dominance among the fast-food industry, but does that mean McDonald's it is necessarily better fast-food restaraunt than the less prevalent Subway, KFC, Taco Bill or Nando's? While Christianity is the religion of a huge 32% of the world's population, does that imply that is necessarily a more 'true' or 'real' religion than Judaism, Hinduism or Buddhism? No, it is a religion simply more accessible and advertised. No single one is the onlyreligion, and this seems to be forgotten by their respective devout adherents.

I'm an atheist. Since there is some disagreement on the definition of that term, I'll clarify what it means for me.

I'm convinced that there is no god. My atheism is not "just another faith", as some would try to assert. I see no credible evidence that there is a divine being. I don't know why the universe exists, but I don't see why there should have to be a supernatural explanation for it. As for why humans exist, the theory of evolution explains that quite logically and scientifically (beautifully and elegantly, even), with no need for supernatural factors.

At heart, I'm a "fundamentalist atheist", as the comedian Jimmy Carr put it. But I restrain myself from saying the kind of things he described: "You believe what?!" "That doesn't sound very likely!"

Having said all that, I am honestly willing to be convinced that there is a god, but only in the same way that I'm convinced of anything else: by logic and evidence. I don't think there is anything that can't be explained (eventually) without the supernatural, but my mind is not closed to the idea. If it were, that would indeed be "faith".

To DeaconBlues: you are correct about god's existence being nonfalsifiable. But as Richard Dawkins points out, the fact that we can't absolutely prove or disprove the existence of god doesn't mean that we can't talk about the *probability* that a particular god exists and acts in the ways that he is described as acting.