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?
I have a different perspective—I don’t believe that God intervenes in anything. If there is a God/Gods, I think they simply created the universe and set everything in motion.
In my experience, this usually fills in for something that people need to be true.
I’m not religious, but I’ve noticed religion can (successfully) act as a mental buffer to help people through hard times. To keep them from simply clocking themselves out during the lowest of lows.
Whether someone else likes that idea or not because it’s “lies” doesn’t really matter if it’s a technique for pure animal survival that works for some members of a species.
Personally, I’ve seen a lot of damage done to perfectly good people done via religious institutions, so I’d prefer if a formalized network of mental health services that was affordable and accessible existed. But, again, my preferences for the type of system that performs a function aren’t going to erase what happens in real life with real people faced with survival problems on the ground.
That’s a good take. It offers hope in times of desperation. A mental health solution would be better, but I’m told constantly that there’s a waiting list of 2 years, even though my GP is trying his very best to get me into a program, sometimes a higher power is all we have.
That said, f*ck all the religious rules. Live your life and hang on, even if you have to believe in a unicorn.
Sorry, I don’t know of any good resources off the top of my head
Agnostic Theist
Or
Agnostic Atheist
Are what the majority of people are.
Agnostic makes the most sense because there is no “proof” a God or gods exists or doesn’t exist.
If I walk up to a Theist or Atheist and ask for “proof,” neither side will have any.
When you ask a Gnostic Theist that practices Christianity (but could be any religion). They will say that the Bible is “proof” and that they know that to be the truth. They claim to have the knowledge that their belief is correct.
A Gnostic Atheist doesn’t really exist. Because they would have to believe in some knowledge that is “proof” for their belief that no God or gods could ever exist. There is no knowledge out there that proves that.
It becomes a semantic battle of what do you call the God or gods and that “Anything is possible”
So you can assume anyone that calls themselves Atheist is an Agnostic Atheist.
As an example, no Atheist is going to lay down their life to die on a hill that no God or gods has ever existed. They believe that no God or gods existed, but they realize that the knowledge to prove it doesn’t exist yet.
A Gnostic Theist will die on the hill for what they believe because they truly believe that they have the knowledge to prove it.
Plato has a lot of good stuff to read up about religion
But unless you want to pick a religion and roll with it on faith, agnostic is what it is.
It’s nice to hope for a nice God or gods. That would make you Agnostic Theist.
But if you feel like a God or gods don’t exist then you’d just be Agnostic Atheist.
But to become religious, you’d have to read about all the different ones and see what speaks to you and decide yourself if you want to buy in or not.
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.
Yes. Had religion shoved down my throat as a kid. Learned early on being a religious believer meant nothing, people are shitty no matter what.
Had to decide who I wanted to be, what rules to live by. Realized I don’t enjoy hurting people, try to learn from mistakes, random acts of kindness, to always try for the evolved, educated non violent option. That’s enough for me. If there’s a god who has a problem with that, oh well.
It’s cool. I come from a religious background that I questioned all the time, even when my family focused only on teaching us the wholesome beautiful stuff, it’s still hard to be on board with the rest or how other people interpret it.
So I’ve decided to quit. It’s still hard, but I do still believe in a higher power. All the rest… I don’t think God cares about head scarves or sex or alcohol,… Just live your life the way you want to and you’ll be okay.
This is kind of where I’m at in life at 40. I grew up in the Christian church but as an adult, I see so much hate, intolerance, oppression and exploitation. I’m a lover of science to my core and I also believe in a higher power. I just choose to keep that mostly to myself in my day-to-day life.
Same, 44, but Muslim background :) I don’t know why but your view makes me so happy, like I’m not the only one… Let’s just live our lives in peace and I agree. We have to figure out who we are and what we stand for as a ‘human’ without interference, so keeping that to ourselves (offline) makes it easier in this timeline. Let’s figure it out first and then we can go from there.
When I turned forty, I decided Jesus fasting for forty days and nights was just an allegory for how you don’t really find out who you really are until you’re over the hill! ;-)
I’m a strong atheist, which means I have a positive belief that no gods exist, just for the record. The way I would put it is that I have never heard of nor have been able to come up with a god concept that I believe is an actual being.
I prefer to use the term “god concept” rather than god to make it clear that we’re talking about a specific idea of a god rather than an actual being. So Odin is a god concept, as is Minerva. Multiple god concepts exist in the bible, including the original regional father-deity El, El’s wife Ashera, their children including Yahweh, and so on. When the Israelites started to move from polytheism to henotheism (many gods exist but you should only worship one), and then to “monotheism” (in scare quotes because there are enough different god concepts as well as divine beings who would be counted as gods in any other pantheon).
In any case, I don’t think having a god concept which you believe refers to an actual being in itself is an indication of anything, good or bad. In my opinion, there’s a feedback loop between the disposition of people and their religions. The problems come in when the religions around the god concepts become extreme. The Amish have a fairly strong god concept, and while I’m not Amish (thank god), I don’t think they do harm unless you think of their actions within their community. 90% of UUs are great people. Sponoza’s Watchmaker would suggest we have to study ourselves to discover what constitutes good. And so on.
So I’d say that your belief is absolutely fine, but you also might be interested in the neurophysiological, social, and anthropological bases of humans so often having god concepts.
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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