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Do you follow a religion?
yes 25%  25%  [ 25 ]
no 75%  75%  [ 76 ]
Total votes : 101

SteelMaiden
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12 May 2007, 2:15 pm

I am Greek Orthodox, and I follow God, but not in an Orthodox manner. I don't go to church.
I just need somebody to talk to when I am having bad days.
Ever since I left hospital, I have believed in God.
But I am not blind.


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Sopho
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12 May 2007, 6:11 pm

But why do you need to believe in a god to have someone to talk to?
You can talk to yourself or imaginary friends. That's what I do.



granny777
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12 May 2007, 8:28 pm

I think anyone who thinks as much as me could never find religion anything more than an age-old excuse used to control people. It has absolutely no relevance in a scientific age. Quite the opposite, I think it is very harmful as it lets you get away with not thinking.



Sopho
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12 May 2007, 8:30 pm

granny777 wrote:
I think anyone who thinks as much as me could never find religion anything more than an age-old excuse used to control people. It has absolutely no relevance in a scientific age. Quite the opposite, I think it is very harmful as it lets you get away with not thinking.

That is very true.



ghostgurl
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12 May 2007, 8:39 pm

No, I don't follow any religion.


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Metal_Man
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12 May 2007, 8:40 pm

Sopho wrote:
granny777 wrote:
I think anyone who thinks as much as me could never find religion anything more than an age-old excuse used to control people. It has absolutely no relevance in a scientific age. Quite the opposite, I think it is very harmful as it lets you get away with not thinking.

That is very true.


Ditto


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Racer_J
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12 May 2007, 8:48 pm

I have a hard time believing in any religion, other than the moral values you learn.

If you can imagine the chaos (super-intense gravity) held in a marble-sized sphere that held ALL of the matter in the UNIVERSE today, then you can imagine the resulting explosion when the pressure becomes too much. (big bang theory)

And from what I've learned in geology class, the universe could have gone through more than one of these cycles; eventually, all of the matter comes back together to create another big bang, similar to how the continents on earth started as one (pangea) and slowly spread apart, only to come back together again...scientists say this has happened several times, and the earth is currently in the process of "spreading apart" at the moment. (as opposed to joining back together)


I posted this a couple days ago on a dumb quotes thread, in response to someone who said "to be happy in life, you have to be willing to believe one or two big lies..."

"
I don't know if it's an aspie part of me but I always seem to want to know the hard facts of things, which doesn't quite match up with the ol' bible.

I do believe something made this universe... that's it. In my mind, that "something" wasn't a human-type being (the bible says people are created in the image of God). I don't believe a bunch of stuff that was written thousands of years ago with no proof... the other day in the newspaper I happened to glance at the spiritual page, and somebody asked for proof that there is life after death. The guy had proof!! ! "The lord died and then rose again from the dead, returning from the dead and ascending into heaven to give us eternal life!! !" Not quite the proof I was seeking. I don't recall the creation of billions of solar systems in our universe being mentioned in the Book. How can people call Islam crazy (it is pretty extreme, like many others) when our religion (referring to christianity) was also just sortof "made up" a couple thousand years ago?

Not to be a diabolical as*hole (really, I'm not), because I have always been a christian in "principle" but have trouble believing something that a large part of the world assumes is true because of the bible. The average schmo wasn't very bright back then, even less so than today if i'm not mistaken (to be taken with a grain of sarcasm). Sometimes it seems the bible is really just a reason to scare people in to holding morals, but no scare tactics should be required, although I guess they are... sometimes I hate people as a whole.

Please don't start a huge argument over this, just in case somebody wanted to, because I'm not trying to start any fights or anything... just really want an answer to the "are we supposed to believe lies?" stuff... Maybe in 20 years I'll believe the stories just so that I can be consoled like everyone else does when they grow up.
"



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12 May 2007, 9:44 pm

From experience, most Christians tend to discriminate against Aspies as being demon posessed or influenced by the devil. They see us as unnatural and therefore as an unworldly evil. This applies to people with autism, tourette syndrom, etc.


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scrulie
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13 May 2007, 2:57 am

I was preyed on ( :lol: ) by an evangelical church when I was having a nervous breakdown at age 20. I got well and truly sucked in, for a while. But I came to my senses eventually when my circumstances improved.


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iceb
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13 May 2007, 3:53 am

I am very distrustful of any organized religion although I try to have respect for those who follow a faith.

If anything I'm a bit Gaiaist and have no problem with polytheism this winds up monotheists but if god is a despotic dictator I'm against Him or Her.



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13 May 2007, 5:51 am

KimJ wrote:
But Subgenii do. And some courts find it dangerous enough to use it against parents in custody battles.

I've read about the Mary Madgalen case, and it is truly sad to think that this closed-mindedness should even be tolerated here. Of course, this country is only "land of the free" for some people. In some parts of the country that would mean upstanding Christians only.



coolstertothecore
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13 May 2007, 6:12 am

I have no doubt in my mind that there is no God.

Just as I have no doubt in my mind that there isn't a magical unicorn living on the dark side of the moon. Maybe I should have doubts as I don't have proof that either don't exist, but then i would have to doubt everything about everything and where's the fun in that?

There's something about people talking/writing about Jesus and God that makes me feel uneasy. I think it's the way it is said with such conviction.

I am angry that every school in England is supposed to have a daily act of broadly Christian worship when there is nobody to worship. Worship is a negative word in my head that supposes dominance and subordinance.



paulsinnerchild
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13 May 2007, 9:07 am

I have a theory that most people to not drop established religions because of too many social inhibitions . Me being autistic do not have that problem.



SteelMaiden
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13 May 2007, 11:49 am

Sopho wrote:
But why do you need to believe in a god to have someone to talk to?
You can talk to yourself or imaginary friends. That's what I do.


It just keeps me secure - gives me less surprises.


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DeaconBlues
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13 May 2007, 12:10 pm

Interesting, that so many people who pride themselves on "out-fo-the-box thinking" and their ability to shun preconceptions, still cling to the preconception that any belief in God/Jehohvah/Yahweh/Allah/<insert name here> must necessarily conform to some monolithic dogmatic structure.

I have a faith, but very few Organized Religions would recognize it, as I don't think He twiddles with the basic structure of His creation nearly so often as they want me to think. (I also believe that if there is a Hell, it's only until you figure out how to escape - right there, I've just become a heretic in every major Christian and Islamic denomination!)

As for the Big Bang - the monobloc didn't contain "all the matter of the universe", because matter didn't exist yet. Until around four second after the Bang, conditions were too chaotic for any laws of physics to exist - any attempt to mathematically describe the conditions that must have pertained runs into a singularity (such as being forced to divide by zero). After the universe cooled enough, matter could differentiate from energy, but until that point, it really was all the same thing. (Still is, but to our crude senses, they look different.)

Evidence for the Bang isn't just the observation that "everything's flying away from us" - there's also the 2.7 degree Kelvin background radiation of the universe, present whichever way you look. There are certain other observations pertaining to redshift. There's enough evidence that even Sir Fred Hoyle was forced to abandon his Steady-State Universe back in the '70s.

Cosmologists are still arguing over whether the universe is open, closed, or flat in fourspace. If it's closed, that means that there's enough mass in the Universe to eventually reverse the expansion, drawing everything back together into a Big Crunch; if it's open, there isn't enough mass to ever stop the expansion, and everything will continue to fly apart until eventually even the protons decay; if it's flat, then there's just enough mass to stop the expansion, but not quite enough to start a contraction, and eventually everything will just come to a stop. (Then there's the question of the "missing mass" - there doesn't seem to be enough mass in the universe to account for the current rate of slowing. Is there hidden "dark matter"? If so, what is its nature?)

I guess I came to my peculiar faith based on the idea that nobody's going to create a universe this wonderful, and this complex, and then spend all His time fretting about whether a bunch of bald monkeys on one of His lesser planets, located around an utterly average star two-thirds of the way out from the core of a completely unremarkable galaxy, are giving Him sufficient strokes...

(There's more to it than that, but that would be another thread altogether, probably located in a different forum.) :)


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13 May 2007, 2:26 pm

Racer_J wrote:
the other day in the newspaper I happened to glance at the spiritual page, and somebody asked for proof that there is life after death. The guy had proof!! ! "The lord died and then rose again from the dead, returning from the dead and ascending into heaven to give us eternal life!! !" Not quite the proof I was seeking.


Don't you just love that kind of reasoning? That's just like when Christians try to answer our skepticism about The Bible's authenticity as being divinely inspired with a quote from the very book in question. :lol: "The Bible is God's word, because it says it is!"

youtube was having an open discussion called "God Wars." Participants were supposed to send in a two minute tape explaining why they do or do not believe in God. One person sent in a two minute tape of a pair of hands holding up The Bible and pointing to certain scriptures with the background music playing, "Jesus Is Just Alright." Now, that took some deep thinking!

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Sometimes it seems the bible is really just a reason to scare people in to holding morals, but no scare tactics should be required, although I guess they are... sometimes I hate people as a whole.


Absolutely! I find it very telling of humans, in general, that they need to be bullied into behaving. Doesn't anyone have their own moral compass?!? I know what I believe to be right and wrong and, surprisingly, my bar is probably set higher than most Christians. I don't mean to sound self righteous, because I definitely have my faults; but I resent Christians who think that I couldn't possibly be a good person, unless I go to church. If there, actually, is a judgement day, wouldn't "God" be more likely to look positively on those people who were able to be good people, because they believed it to be the right thing to do -- not because some religion told them they would burn if they didn't do what they said???