Religious Beliefs
OnTheEdge
Posts: 1,300
Just curious, alot of people on the train seem to bash religion. Do this many people not believe in god, or heaven, or hell?
I was brought up catholic, and still consider myself so. As a child I was baptised and attended CCD class every weak. Although I don't attend church anymore, nor do I completely devote my life towards preaching the word of god, I still believe in god and heaven. And at times I still pray. Just wondering where other peoples views are on heaven and hell.
I was brought up catholic, and still consider myself so. As a child I was baptised and attended CCD class every weak. Although I don't attend church anymore, nor do I completely devote my life towards preaching the word of god, I still believe in god and heaven. And at times I still pray. Just wondering where other peoples views are on heaven and hell.
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I was raised Catholic, baptized, confirmed, was an alter boy for ten years, blah blah etc. I don't believe in the rhetoric anymore. I'm not sure about heaven or hell or god, but I'm not going to go with a definite yes or no. I'm probably closer to being agnostic than anything else.
I don't hate religion at all. I understand why people would want it in their lives, it's just not for me.
What I HATE are people from one religion who hate others from other religions. Christians hating Catholics, Catholics hating Muslims, Muslims hating Jews, etc. If you look at the scripture and the foundations, it's all the same fucking thing. It's like someone from North Dakota hating someone from South Dakota. If you could put a face to the word ignorant, it's anyone who falls into those descriptions. I have no time for anyone like that. It makes me more mad than I could ever describe on these boards!
Hallelujah! Holy shit! Where's the Tylenol?
Sometimes I wonder, does everyone deserve forgiveness? It's my understanding that when Jesus was being lashed with whips made of thorns he asked god to forgive them.
Another habit says its long overdue
Another habit like an unwanted friend
I'm so happy with my righteous self
Allah didn't tell them to crash planes into buildings. Planes weren't around when Muhammad died in 632.
My understanding is that there are around 77 different secs of Islam in the world today. The people who crashed the planes into the Twin towers were fucked up, brainwashed, self-righteous bastards that thought they were worshiping Allah.
In Alexandria after 680 or so, after Islam had expanded out of the Arabian Peninsula, there were Jews, Catholics, and Muslims living in the city, but it was ruled by Muslims. Under Koranic law, the Jews and the Catholics' right to worship their own religions were preserved because they were "people of the book", meaning that they all worshiped the same god. Allah, God, and Yahweh are all the same entity. This notion is still practiced and accepted in most secs of Islam today.
I've studied Islam quite thoroughly and I don't expect everyone to know as much about Islam as I do, but please, please please please please do not think that every sec of Islam condones terrorism, because they most certainly do not.
Side note: all the worlds major religions share the same core values.
If you take a look at the history books you'll dicover that it's not only Muslims that have committed atrocities down the ages.
To provide just one example: over one hundred million native Americans were slaughtered by Christians.
http://freetruth.50webs.org/A4a.htm
"The [Catholic] Spaniards in Mexico and Peru used to baptize Indian infants and then immediately dash their brains out; by this means they secured that these infants went to heaven."
-- Bertrand Russell
In the 15th century and onwards, Christians discovered new lands full of unbelievers, and they did to the Africians and to the American Indians exactly what they did to the European unbeliever, but there was one difference. Christian artwork had depicted Satan and his demons as black. Not suprisingly Christians decided that Africans and Indians were a lot closer to Satan than white skinned Europeans, and they (Christians) acted accordingly to protect themselves from the "pollution" of contact with dark skinned people.
Christian civilization, by virtue of its exclusivist heresy and monotheism, became the self-justifying destroyer of all non-Christian culture.
By 1570 the Inquisition had established independent tribunals in Peru and the city of Mexico for the purpose of "freeing the land, which has become contaminated by Jews and heretics." Natives who did not convert to Christianity were burned like any other heretic. The Inquisition spread as far as Goa, India, where in the late 16th and early 17th centuries it took no less than 3,800 lives.
In the first few decades since 1492, it was thought that Indians did not have souls because they were "animals" in human form. Therefore, it was believed they could be hunted down like animals, which they were. It was only in 1530 CE that the Pope declared that the Indians were human. Having established their humanity, it was decided that they must be inducted into Christianity. As the Indians were unwilling, this was accomplished by force. Though the change in their status from animal to human might appear to be an improvement, in reality, little changed in their plight.
Unfortunately for the Indians, with the arrival of Christians would come the intolerance for their indigenous ways of life:
The Indian chief Hatuey fled with his people but was captured and burned alive. As "they were tying him to the stake a Franciscan friar urged him to take Jesus to his heart so that his soul might go to heaven, rather than descend into hell. Hatuey replied that if heaven was where the Christians went, he would rather go to hell."
What happened to his people was described by an eyewitness:
"The Spaniards found pleasure in inventing all kinds of odd cruelties ... They built a long gibbet, long enough for the toes to touch the ground to prevent strangling, and hanged thirteen [natives] at a time in honor of Christ Our Saviour and the twelve Apostles... then, straw was wrapped around their torn bodies and they were burned alive." [SH72]
-- American Holocaust, by D.Stannard
When Columbus landed in America in 1492, he mistook it for India and called the native inhabitants "Indians." It was his avowed aim to "convert the heathen Indians to our Holy Faith" that warranted the enslaving and exporting of thousands of Native Americans. That such treatment resulted in complete genocide did not matter as much as that these natives had been given the opportunity of everlasting life through their exposure to Christianity. The same sort of thinking also gave Westerners license to rape women.
-- The Dark Side of Christian History, by Helen Ellerbe
A total of maybe more than 150 million Indians (of both Americas) were destroyed in the period of 1500 to 1900, as an average two thirds by smallpox and other epidemics, that leaves some 50 million killed directly by violence, bad treatment and slavery.
In many countries, such as Brazil, and Guatemala, this continues even today.
On his first voyage he [Christopher Columbus] described the natives as follows:
"The people of this island and of all other islands which I have found and seen, ... all go naked, ... they ... are so artless and free with all they possess, that no one would believe it without having seen it. Of anything they have, if you ask them for it, they never say no; rather they invite the person to share it, and show as much love as if they were giving their hearts..."
-- Christopher Columbus
In return, Columbus and his men would teach them the Christian way - Columbus read to them in Spanish from the Requerimiento:
'I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of Their Highnesses. We shall take you and your wives and children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them...'-- Christopher Columbus [devout Christian] to Native Americans, 1492
At virtually every landing on Columbus' second voyage his troops went ashore and killed indiscriminately whatever animals and birds and natives they encountered, "looting and destroying all they found," as Columbus' son Fernando put it.
As one eyewitness recalls:
"Once the Indians were in the woods, the next step was to form squadrons and pursue them, and whenever the Spaniards found them, they pitilessly slaughtered everyone like sheep in the corral. ... So they would cut an Indian's hands and leave them dangling by a shred of skin and they would send him on saying 'Go now, spread the news to your chiefs.'...
Some Christians encounter an Indian woman, who was carrying in her arms a child at suck; and since the dog they had with them was hungry, they tore the child from the mother's arms and flung it still living to the dog, who proceeded to devour it before the mother's eyes..."
On one occasion in Cuba they "began to rip open their bellies, to cut and kill those lambs - men, women, children, and old folk, all of whom were seated, off guard, and frightened."
After all, the Indians were only infidels, "naturally lazy and vicious, ... idolatrous, libidinous, and commit sodomy."
In less than a decade after Columbus' first landing the native population of the island of Hispaniola - thousands and thousands of people - had dropped by a third to a half. Before the next century ended, the population of Cuba and many other Caribbean islands had been virtually exterminated.
i have no religious beleifs.
i was christened. had my first holy communion and my confirmation and promptly came out as an atheist. i was 11.
i do not believe in any God... therefore i do not believe in satan. nor heaven.. nor hell. i have never wavered in my conviction. and i will be the atheist in the foxhole.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
how can you believe in heaven and not hell?
if, when you die, you dont go to heaven , where do you think you go?
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
Like Einstein said, put hold your hand on a hot stove and it feels like forever. Talk to a pretty girl for an hour and it feels like seconds.
When you sleep, 8 hrs seems to disappear.. When you die, infiniti goes by. There is no time for an after life, because time is all relative. Why would anyone want to sit in heaven for infiniti, when they can make the best of what is going on now? Your consciousness will echo forever when you die.
That's my understanding, and I'm sticking with it.
And if there were some after life where you dream forever, there would be no heaven and hell because there would be no good and evil. Good and evil are human, physical traits. You can't kill, steal from something that doesn't have any physical properties. Think about it. Its retarded to make up a spirital world and then add good and evil to it. Unless you are trying to control and create fear in people.
I think you may want to rephrase your question to include Spirituality, as it's different from being Religious. I consider myself Spiritual, but not relating to any specific religion. I was raised strict Catholic, questioned the existence of God the last 10 years, but have swung back around to believing. I'm in no way religious and never will confine myself to a man-made religion again.
It seems unlikely that anything will happen when I die... but science doesn't negate the idea of a creator. Science has no idea how life started... or how the universe came into existence. Evolution only tells us the story after life came into existence and the Big Bang only tells us what happened after the universe began.
Anyone who tells me they "know" what happens is full of shit or trying to sell me something. If you "believe" it that's fine and doesn't assume that factul evidence supports your idea. Just don't proselytize your beliefs upon me, whether they be theist or atheist (believing that nothing happens is still a belief).
When people ask me what happens after you die, I tell them the same thing that happened before you were born.
Then one day I grew up.
I don't need the threat of some magic land of lava and pain called "hell" to keep me in line. The idea that you're constantly being watched by God and being judged... it's just a way to keep people scared. To control them.
Yet if you followed what science and the bulk of the stories of near-death experiences have shown, you'd be likely to change your tune. It stops being religious and starts being a study of what actually happens.
Only man and their organized religions that they've created, believe the idea that we're being judged and punished. If that's what you believe, fine, but that way of thinking is right out of the religion books. Of course the religious leaders want to keep you scared...otherwise they wouldn't be leaders.
But I think the "religion bashing" you speak of is oftentimes misinterpreted as a critique of religion when really it's frequently just a critique of people trying to impose their religious beliefs on others.
Thumbs up.
Maybe, maybe not. There are an infinite amount of explanations for "the white light". Maybe its an afterlife, maybe its your brain shutting down and neurons are firing in your visual cortex...who knows?
"With our thoughts we make the world"
if god really loves us all why is there so much suffering in the world?
why can't priests get married? the ones i interacted with seemed like they would be good husbands and fathers..
why does church get to tell me who and what i should vote for and not have to pay taxes?
why is it a sin if i want to shag my girlfriend in the hotel on prom night?
why are we supposed to be against using condoms when aids is killing hundreds of thousands of people in africa?
and a few others....
for some reason people did not like that....
i am not anti religion, i am anti dogma, and i do not need to be converted to anything or be anything other than who i am.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Hear hear!!!!!
Another habit says its long overdue
Another habit like an unwanted friend
I'm so happy with my righteous self
The 'afterlife' is more real than the ground beneath your feet. But perhaps we should then call it 'hereafter',
I typed a few posts in this forum regarding consciousness, as it relates to everything, problems we have, every question we have, the nature of everything. The reality.
The problem, we have too much ego. Too much trash, too many lies.
Like you say, time is relative, to our conscious mind, so it (time as we know it) exists for people who have not raised or stayed above the level of conscious mind needed for it to collapse. Also, it's time and space.
Exactly!!!, but...who are you?
One moment we are happy, the next moment, so angry. What is that? Who are we? When we find that out, we find the truth. Or at least, get closer to it.
So true!
No one knows for sure. But the white light has been documented.
Quite a bit of belief in that post,
If you can prove something, then belief is not really all that necessary. It becomes a fact, as it's been proven, but if a fact has not been proven yet, is it still a fact? Of course. Because what is, is.
This is what I find troubling. Refusal to contemplate one's beliefs, swearing that your mind will never change. As they say "“A closed mind is like a closed book; just a block of wood”.
If we don't ever change our outlook in life, we don't evolve.