What are your thoughts on the concept of having faith in a Higher Power but choosing to distance oneself from established religious doctrines?
Hey, so I believe in a higher power but I’m not on board with any particular religion. Anyone else think it’s cool to just fly solo as a good human, no religion attached?
Christian church is made of people. And people are sinful and evil.
Religion doesn’t come from what other people tell you is truth, but from your experience. What experience have you lead you to believe in higher power?
I have experienced Luck so good and so significant in my life that I can only exlain it by intervention of higher power. But maybe you didn’t experienced something like that, and I can understand that.
Religion comes from within, and not from external sources.
I mostly agree but I would argue that spirituality comes from within, while religion comes from external sources. Religion is just other people’s packaged version of spirituality/faith.
I very much doubt you’ll find anyone here who discourages you from stepping away from organized religion.
I’m a former Christian pastor on a hiatus from church life, but in no way done with being a Christian in my private life.
I believe the Bible boils religion down to three basic life roles for every individual person to follow: priest, steward, and keeper.
As a priest, every person is meant to determine how they ought best to live.
As steward they are to take care of the world around them in accordance with their beliefs.
As their “brother’s keeper” they should work to ensure everyone else is free from coercion to believe and live how they think is best.
When people function in all three roles they are revealing the “image of God”.
Live your best life and help others do the same to the best of your ability. Or, as James the brother of Jesus, said, true religion is this: “to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”
There is significant propability by just beeing here that you were hurt in the past and you didn’t heal properly. First step before acknowledging the pain is to go to a safe place, where there are no toxic people and where your basic needs are met. Hurt people are like magnet for toxic people, and hurt people are comforted by familiarity of toxicity.
According to my perspective, having autonomy is core to being human and most religious structures actively work to squash autonomy and force conformity. I think that is harmful for everyone.
For me, it’s taken time to even recognize how hurt I was and I’m still going through a healing process.
I grew up as a Lutheran Christian in a small, conservative town—and attended Sunday School/summer Bible camp for many years—but became an agnostic after I began questioning things at 16 years old. About a month after that, I became an atheist. I’ve been one since… so almost 14 years.
Unfortunately, I was afraid to tell my parents, so I still went to church with my family almost every Sunday until I left at 18. I was also still effectively forced to be anacolyte/perform piano/sing in the choir/attend most other church activities. Fucking painful.
I still haven’t told my parents, though, and probably never will; it’d cause more pain than anything else, sadly.
I wonder how many other people at the mosque secretly think the same as you? If you have children, do you think they will be less constrained than you? In which case, there is some hope that the next generation will escape the strictures of organised religion.
I think you’re describing agnostic beliefs, believing there might be a god but not conforming to any religion and basically otherwise being an atheist.
(Not too be confused with Gnostic beliefs, which was a branch of Christianity)
So in other words non-denominational? My denomination is so specific yet unspecifically connected to anything that you approximately described me as well. Without a doubt this can be said to be one of the driving forces of what we all talked about here. Jesus himself said the expression of love did not matter, it’s the love that counts.
In my experience, at least in the US, non-denominational when associated with an institution generally means “Christian” but not affiliated with a sect. They’re (typically) still quite Christian, and the phrase can be and is applied to churches ranging from the ones flying Pride flags and declaring that they’re open to everyone to ones like Westboro - some of the most radical Christian churches are non-denominational because their views are too conservative for even the more conservative right wing religions.
The phrase itself is an organizational status and does not indicate what kinds of beliefs a person has. It’s not unlike someone describing themselves as “politically independent.” You don’t know if they’re Greenpeace types, libertarians, or far right of the republicans.
Edit: The usual term in the US for what I think you’re describing is “Spiritual, but not religious.” That’s the way it’s usually written in census and survey forms.
If that’s what that is, what term would you use for someone whose conclusions are more unspecific than even can be categorized under the “Christian” umbrella?
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