Did you ever believe?

[fr0d0]

So why did you want to get there and see her if not for your own benefit Cake?

The man wanted to say goodbye ... that's sentiment not benefit.

Sentiment is still a personal need. It's not unselfish.

[Cinjin]

So why did you want to get there and see her if not for your own benefit Cake?

The man wanted to say goodbye ... that's sentiment not benefit.

Sentiment is still a personal need. It's not unselfish.

I would have to disagree with you yet again.

I find nothing selfish about the human need to say a final goodbye.

[Foxtrot Uniform]

I was pretty brainwashed by being forced to go to catholic services every sunday along with the dreadful vacation bible school every summer. My religious belief was solid as can be until a friend showed me the light of what I actually believed in.

[Justtristo]

I was either a deist or theist when I was younger and investigated various religions. Things happened in my life which changed that mindset.

[JohnDG]

When you live on the streets as a kid you can't help but hope he's real. Thus was my problem at a young age, but I chose not to wait for somebody to save me.

[Kayenneh]

Oh yes, I did believe. Definetely in a God, and somewhat in Jesus, but not the way my church taught me to believe. I was quite active too, I was a "Big Sister" (I don't know what it's called in other countries, but it is a person who helps the priests during Confirmation and Children's camps etc.) for a few years. I was a regular at our parish' café/club for teenagers that we had every Friday evening. I prayed too, and oddly enough I always got what I prayed for. Well, I still get what I want/need, so I just guess I'm lucky and had nothing to do with my prayer. The first thing that gave me doubts was the story about Eve and the tree of knowledge. I was quite young when I started to ask why God considered a sin to know about things. After that I started to question more and more things, and eventually it lead me to understand that I actually am an atheist.

[Ubermensch]

I believed hard when I was young. I even read through the bible in primary school, which was incidentally a catholic school. I went to church every sunday until I was around 11 and went to sunday school until I was about seven. My school had church every afternoon on fridays. I lost my faith when I was about 14 and I have never looked back.

[Anomalocaris]

I had a strong satisfaction in science since i can remember, and always felt that in comparison to science religion was extremely immature, unconvincing and awkward contrivance concocted by people who lacked a diligent willingness to do honest work to find out, and absent that, a becoming willingness to not make shit up in order to pretend to know. I always felt religion was garbage, and Christianity and Islam to be unusuallly vile even for it's kind.

I've since had some very close relationships with people who subscribe to different religions, ranging from pentacostalism to buddhism for different reasons. I have in each of those relationships grown to feel religion had in someways made them intellectually, morally or socially handicapped, and limited them to less than they could have been. In some cases the person that remained was still an extremely fine individual, but in others what was left was a sad shell of what had been. The governing factor behind how much religion damage a person is not so much the religion itself, but how clearheaded a person is about what he wanted from his religion.

Even in people whose commitment to their religion is most guarded, and who are most clearheaded about exactly what they wanted in return from their religion, I can see a gradual erosion of skepticism and the slow but incremental embracing of some of the more mindless tenants unbecoming an educated person. In cases where the individual made an open ended commitment to embrace whatever her religion is said to teach, and expects enlightenment, divine revelation, or, heaven forbid, so to speak, a relationship with god, the result is invariably and rather quickly a walking intellectual mummy that is pitious and sickening to behold.

[Arcturus]

I was raised catholic, but lost my faith since 9, presumably from the critical thinking that was inevitably brought about from my interest in science. I became an outspoken atheist at 15.

[Angrboda]

In a word, yes. However my belief was somewhat different. From early childhood, I have been possessed off and on with a complex set of paranoid delusions. So during my childhood, I literally viewed reality through two separate lenses, the mundane world and mundane beliefs and acts measured to keep me hidden, and a view steeped richly in delusion and paranoia, possessed of secrets, just sure if I were revealed I would be tortured and killed. As such, when I believed, I had two beliefs, a mundane ordinary relationship with God and the world, and one in which my relationship with God was likewise disturbed. (I didn't actually see beyond my delusions until I was 21.)

Regardless, by early adolescence I had abandoned any outer faith. In high school during a class in Asian studies, my teacher read some verses from the Tao Te Ching. I asked to look at it some and he offered to loan it to me. I read it cover to cover in one night -- bells going off like the bell tower at Notre Dame. Excepting one period of 12-13 years in which I was largely non-practicing, during which I meditated on a stumbling block in my belief, I have been a follower of the Tao. (The problem in question is a question simliar to that of theodicy in Theism.)

"Give up sainthood, renounce wisdom,
and it will be a hundred times better for everyone."
-- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Ch. 19 (Feng/English)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-smMyAnJUc