None apply, never had religion.
I didn’t answer the poll because my immediate family was never very religious, so I can’t say I ever had a religious “belief.” I recall as a child we’d attend one church for a while, then another, and I went along with it because what else are you going to do as a child? But then one week, Dad just decided to sleep in on Sundays without comment, and it was thus evermore. I was just glad to get out of that weekly shtick, so I wasn’t about to ask why. Growing up outside of religion and looking at it objectively allowed me to see what a stinkhole any organized religion is, and that holds just as true for Buddhism as practised in Thailand. I can’t see a monk here without wanting to slap the bastard up the side of his head and tell him to get a real job.
Russian Orthodox Catholic - Original Ritualist (what the history books call an “Old Believer”) to ELCA-Lutheran.
I was raised Jewish, but not aggressively so. We’d go to temple on high holy days, I got bar mitzvah-ed, etc., but it was never a big part of our lives. I can remember from a very early age having doubts – I have a very vivid memory at a very young age asking my Hebrew school teacher some difficult questions (well, difficult for someone so young) that probably made it pretty clear what path I was heading down. I was a Hebrew school drop-out… after the bar mitzvah, I just stopped going. I discussed it with my parents, who weren’t particularly thrilled about my decision, but to their credit, the respected it. I think they knew that I hadn’t decided to stop going because I wanted to play outside during that time, but that it just didn’t have any meaning to me, and an extra year of it wasn’t likely to make it start.
Honestly, I don’t think I actually thought of myself as an atheist until much later in life, probably college or even after, but really only because I never put too much thought into it. Religion, or lack thereof, has never played an important role in my life. But still, you could say I was Jewish as a child (I do remember praying occasionally as a small child, so I had some belief at some point), and have no religion now.
I put that I had changed religion from one to another. It was the best, most accurate working, I think, but a decently close second would have been “I embrace more a syncretic approach to religion, blending aspects of multiple paths”.
I was raised Christian (substrand: Protestant, Methodist). Believed/assumed it to be true and accurate in the fashion that children accept truths as young children, without understanding much of it. Grew older, understood and accepted chunks of it, other parts remained unclear and as an older child ceased to ‘believe’ the non-understood parts but still sort of expected to eventually understand and believe. Attained my own understandings which upended and refuted large portions of those non-understood religious claims. Found descriptives in other religious frameworks for describing my dissents and cobbled together language and imagery and whatnot that represents what I do understand & believe, thus an original belief gave way to the syncretic kind of thing.
Yeah, there should have been a ‘no, never’ option. I’ve always been indifferent to the whole notion.
I was raised as a Hindu, and believed pretty much what my parents told me to believe until I was about 7. Then I skinned my knee on the playground one day, said, “fuck!”, and was not instantly struck down.
I gave God/the gods about thirty seconds longer to smite me, and then wrote the whole religion thing off as ludicrous.
I was raised Roman Catholic: I went to Catholic grade school, high school, and college, and practiced pretty seriously until shortly after college (I was a lector in my church and at school, helped my mom teach CCD, etc.). My change to agnosticism was very slow and gradual, and somewhat painful. I talked with priests and read many books. I also went through a difficult period of uncertainty about whether my “problem” was with Catholicism or with god, and ultimately decided it was the latter. I can’t stand the term “recovering Catholic”: there are many things about Catholicism that I miss, and even now I sometimes defend/explain the Church to others. I considered myself fully agnostic by the time I was 30: I am now about to turn 39, and have expanded my religious definition of myself to be “an agnostic who believes in faith.” I don’t believe that the truth about god is knowable, but I believe that faith exists and that some/many people have it (and that those who go around demanding an explanation of how any believer can know there’s a god are completely missing the point). I respect people of faith, I’m just not one of them.
I tend to think that more people stop at the “become atheist or agnostic” part (not just because I did).
That would count under the “I was a member of one religion, changed to another, then embraced something else entirely” option, for these non-scientific purposes.
If you’ve always been indifferent, then you’ve never had a shift, therefore this poll does not apply.
Hmm, I would argue that atheism is indeed a faith, if not a religious belief. Atheism involves being completely certain of an unprovable assertion–that there is no God. Agnosticism is the empirical position.
Anyway–I was raised without religion myself and haven’t ever felt the need to dabble in one. My husband, on the other hand, was born and raised in a charismatic Evangelical household, went to Bible college, did missionary work abroad, and dropped it all–becoming an atheist–when on 9/11 his church used the tragedy for jingoism/fundraising/racial hatred. He considers himself to be of a Christian mindset and to act with Christian values, but he abhors formal practice, church politics, small-mindedness, etc.
Sort of like Anne Rice.
What is the empirical position vis-a-vis the existence of a giant omniscient jelly doughnut?
Religion - I’m holding a brick
Atheism - I’m not holding a brick
What self proclaimed agnostics say atheism is - The object I am holding is the absence of a brick.
I was raised Anglican. About 6-8 years ago, I shifted heavily away from Anglicanism, but can’t really identify exactly what denomination I was closest to since I didn’t really fit into any of them, but I still held many of the basics shared by most/all denominations. Since then, specifically over the year or two, I’ve straight up dropped some of the common grounds that most Christians believe and have adopted some concepts from other beliefs, most notably Deism, but also some that, while not specifically from Judaism or Buddhism, are much more closely related to them than Christians.
In all of this, I do still consider myself a Christian, as I do still consider myself a follower of Christ, but I do think my beliefs, as they stand now, are farther away from the ones with which I was raised than if I had converted to another Abrahamic faith. In either case, probably not a full on “conversion”, and it involves some other concepts, so I voted for the sixth option.
Raised Christian, but abandoned it at the age of 15 after realizing that I really didn’t believe in the whole “Jesus is the son of God” business. I didn’t have anything else in mind when I actively left Christianity and nothing else has captured my interest, so I am currently an atheist and expect to be one for the rest of my life.
Sure, but that’s in the poll.
Not to go into another ad nauseum semantic argument, but the vast majority of atheists are also agnostics, and it’s arguable that agnostics are generally atheists. Bottom line - find me an atheist who proclaims with 100% certainty to know that there are no critters in the whole universe who could be termed “god,” and I will agree that this person is functioning on faith to a certain degree. I will also be quite flabbergasted.
It is different when the subject matter is not concrete like a brick though.
Religion: I ascribe to a theological concept
Atheism: I do not ascribe to any theological concepts
What some of us who are critics of atheism say atheism says: The concepts I ascribe to in my mind are not theological
What virtually no one says atheism says: I don’t have any concepts in my head
As you can see, there are definitional issues. In order to state that the concepts one entertains in one’s head are not theological, one must have a notion of what theological IS, that one’s concepts are NOT. Unlike “brick”, it’s not self-explanatory.
In order for people to “not believe in God”, there has to be a prior “conversation”, implicit or otherwise, in which someone other than the nonbeliever explicates the word ‘God’ and the nonbeliever says “I harbor no such belief” or “I believe in no such thing”. It’s a “defined in reaction to” sort of construct. A world utterly devoid of theists could hardly have atheists in it.
So is what you said: as tumbleddown mentioned, it’s the “I was a member of one religion, changed to another, then embraced something else entirely” option.
And that’s my point right there. I don’t think (someone tell me if I’m wrong though) Christians would say with a straight face “Ah! If you don’t believe in a giant omniscient jelly donut, then your religious belief or faith is that omniscient jelly donuts don’t exist,” would they? No. So why is lack of a belief in their mythology a religious belief? How is a lack of a thing still that thing? The answer, of course, is it isn’t.
The challenge I think theists (not just Christians) have is they can’t conceive of someone not having some sort of religious faith, so they place people who have no faith in a box and label it something that makes sense to them, which is why not believing in some kind of omniscient being is a religion, while not believing in talking kites is not. “Of course atheism is a religion. What else would it be?” …which just brings to mind my annoyance whenever I see a prompt for religion on a form and ‘atheist’ is one of the options in the list.
I think sometimes it’s also a pretty funny *tu quoque *argument. In certain debate situations, it seems the “Atheists have faith too!” implies “You are just as irrational as we are!”
Anyway, I think I had another slight shift yesterday. I attended a Zen Buddhist group, and I must admit it is not. for. me. Constant bowing? Singing? Pledging not to harm sentient beings such as minerals?! If I’m a Buddhist, I think I’m a sect of one.