Ernya.com

I think religion and science attempts to answer two separate questions, the why and how respectively.

I'm a Christian and I believe in love that Jesus wanted to promote in the world so I do as Jesus do with a benevolent God without the fear and terror a lot of other Christians use to scare people. I live my life trying to understand people and simply be kind and sincere without wanting anything back.

I'm not uber religious though, even if it shapes my lifestyle on a day to day basis and how I interact with the world. I think a lot of the Bible is flawed and contradicts the core aspect of Jesus promoting love, tolerance and understanding. My partner is a Muslim and I accept that religion as well as many others.

Though I agree with you that some things are outside the realm of human understanding, thus inconceivable to us and both religion and the scientific method was made by humans and have their flaws.

So, what are your beliefs, and why do you have them? Are they very significant in your life, or are they just ther

Uhm. I guess I'm an Orthodox Jew. My father is Jewish, but my mom tends to swing back and forth between Orthodox Jewish and some... kind of form of Christianity I think? We believe that Jesus existed, but we believe that he was just a good prophet, and even if he was the son of God, that he was still just a prophet.

I guess I believe these things because my parents kind of instilled the ideas in my head since I was a kid. I kind of believe in scientific theories, but it all depends, I guess... I believe in creation, but I believe that God could have created the single celled orgasm that multiplied. Or, he created multiple single celled orgasms that multiplied int different things.

I strongly believe in most of what the Bible says. Thing is, we only read the first five books, so. Most of it is outdated and can't really be applied to our time and date now. Obviously, we don't have servants, and we can't boss them around or nail their earlobes to our front door. I believe very strongly in my religious beliefs. But personally, I don't see why it matters how we were created. I just think it matters what we do with ourselves since we're here.

I don't have any sort of religion and would be considered an atheist. My feelings are derived from my assessments of all evidence (or lack thereof) given to me during my lifetime and are not a choice, but a natural conclusion which could not be helped despite my fighting it for years. I was raised in a religious environment; everyone I knew was Christian. However, once I started questioning the beliefs with which I had been raised, I eventually came to realize that I could not agree with them because I had no reason to do so. I feel the same way about all things religious, spiritual, and otherwise supernatural. I believe that there is a rational and scientific explanation for everything, regardless of whether said explanation has yet been fully discovered. I will agree with theories which have sufficient evidence that appeals to my sense of logic, but I generally view and study life with a degree of skepticism. I have always prized objectivity, but I feel that my religious upbringing clouded much of my judgment during my childhood and into my teenage years. However, I do acknowledge that it is entirely possible to be both scientific and religious. I simply am not because I am not the sort of person who can or will do and believe things without plenty of reason. I do not accept "it's so vast and complicated" as a valid reason for believing that "it" must have a divine source.

Aside from clearing my "vision" and allowing me to look at things for what they are as opposed to stopping and wondering if "god" would want me to think a certain way, my views have not had much overall impact on my life. The second biggest change has been in how I am perceived by my family and others who knew me during my time spent as a Christian. Many of them feel that I have made the wrong decision and would not accept that it is no more a decision for me than waking up in the morning. I only chose to look at the evidence and to learn what the world had to offer. This is my reaction to those things. When my family members first realized that my beliefs no longer matched theirs, we had a fight. There was crying and yelling and a lot of negativity. I got a good look at just how misguided and misinformed they were. Now they don't bring up the topic of religion as much and at least do not try to argue with me about it, but they will still occasionally ask me if I've changed my mind or given the subject any more thought. I always just tell them "No." In truth, I have considered the idea from many angles and often get the feeling that I know more about their religion and its teachings than they do. I stopped really considering long ago that there might be a god or a heaven, but I still find fascination in learning about these concepts and how others approach them.

Ultimately, I think the reason that I stopped believing (or at least what got the ball rolling) was that I got to know my religion too well. Some people claim to have left their faith(s) as a result of actions done by other people or because they fell on hard times and didn't feel that god was helping them. I have always understood those things to be essentially irrelevant to my religious beliefs. When I say I got to know my religion, I mean that I studied what it meant and how it started to the best of my ability. I learned about the people and the time from which it sprang, I learned about humans in general and how they tend to think. I thought about how these things were all connected and how religion in general came to be. It started with a single question not about the nature of religion itself, but about how exactly "god" expected me to follow the one I'd been given. It ended with the realization on my part that I'd only ever believed what I'd been told about such things because it had always been presented to me as fact; I had not been given a choice--and that I had held onto it for so long because it had offered me a sense of security. I no longer feel that I need that security. I am content with a "meaningless" existence as defined by certain religious individuals. I am happy to learn what I can about the world around me. I can no longer take shelter in the promise of a loving god or an afterlife, and I have found that my life has more meaning to me now than it ever did.

I am a Christian and yes, my beliefs are very significant in my life.
They are because it was trough them that i didn't end my life and it was trough them that i met my fiancé.

I was raised to be a critical thinker. As such, I have turned out to be atheist. The major influences in my life are also atheist, and many of my friends are either atheist or agnostic.

I am from the United States, and I have noticed that the religious people here are not actually religious. I heard a podcast a few days ago that called what Americans think is god "Amerigod" because the deity most often referenced in the US does not correlate with the god(s) of any religious scripture. My first exposure to religion was in school with the Pledge of Allegiance. I eventually came to assume that God was the sky, and was enthralled when someone actually told me what they thought God was. I researched this and read many religious scriptures. I could not figure out what they were talking about. In these books, any god-like figure was malevolent and jealous, if not downright disturbing. Of course I denied the gods of these scriptures, just as most people deny Zeus and Athena. I may not agree with religion, but I will defend to the death the right for other people to have one. I try not to interfere with other peoples' religions because it is a general waste of my time. =)

I would prefer to focus on life. We have these wonderful trees filtering our air. We have a world of medicine that we have discovered and a world left to discover. I love science and always have, so to you I will say that gravity is also only a theory. I plan to live as long as possible to the best of my ability.

I'm an atheist, albeit an agnostic one. Simply put, I don't BELIEVE there is a god or gods, but because I have no way of knowing for sure, I'm open to the possibility that I could be wrong. In general, I am open to all the experiences life can offer me. I also find a certain comfort in knowing that I am accountable only to myself and don't have to worry about appeasing a mystical being. I am a good person because I choose to be a good person, not out of fear or any sense of obligation.

There is an incredible bias against nonbelievers in the US. I've found that while Christians love to complain about how they're made fun of for their beliefs, the truth is that they're not actually being marginalized the way nonbelievers often are. :/ Believing is much more socially acceptable here than not believing.