Just curious... What is your religion?

[Dsylexic]

"Christian" Transcendentalist with many Buddhist and Wiccan beliefs.

Transcendental would mean the Maharshi school of meditation,right or is that Sri chinmoy -looking at the word Nirvikalpa(samadhi)

 

[ExPatPaki]

good to meet you fellow RPLover across the border.

good to meet you as well, but I'm actually not across the border, I live in America. I didn't realize you were actually in India. My family is from the Lucknow, UP area.

 

[JohnGalt1225]

After a brief lapse where I decided to try Catholicism again, I am back to being what I am most comfortable being: a Germanic Heathen. I believe in following the traditional ways of my ancestors, and to me the heathen world view is very conducive to small government and liberty. It's very sad that trash like neo-nazis and skinheads have tried to co-opt traditional European folkways for themselves and tried to taint my way of life.

 

[bunklocoempire]

In retrospect... I think I am more of a junkist.

You're in good company.

 

[Austrian Econ Disciple]

Exactly. Most atheists I know, including myself are "soft" atheists as you describe. We beleive that there is no reason to believe in any of the definitions of deities that currently exist, or have ever existed. They are all based on blind superstition. There are also "hard" atheists who say there is absolutely no possibility of any definition of a deity being true.

Would you say that a Deist's reasoned belief in God, which we can use St. Anselm's definition, is based on superstition and not reason and logic? Religion seeks to answer the why, to our existence, and from which it sprang. Perhaps it is a strained misunderstanding based on vague definitions, but I consider myself pretty irreligious, by use of my faculties of reason and logic subscribe that there must exist/have existed that which we call God for our existence. The Universe is perfect in it's laws and nature. This we can say then the Natural Laws are God, and thus, God exists.

Of course a lot of people reject ontological argumentation, reason, and logic, but I think if we agreed on the given definitions most people would agree to the eventuality that God exists.

I think a lot of people do not know Deists exist and hence just blindly fall into the Atheist category. If it was more exposed I think it would have a much larger following. Then again, a lot of people call Deists atheists because we do not believe in revelations, miracles, divinity, violations of Natural Law, or all of the regular characteristics most people associate with so-called 'God' ie; deification, personification, interventionism, mysticism, prophets, etc.

Surely there must be a bridge between belief in a 'God' based on faith and all the usual religious characteristics, and belief in God based on reason, logic, and a priorism.

 

[WilliamC]

I have decided to make mathematics my religion of choice, just so I can play too.

I guess I'll call myself a Pythagoreanist.

Well, then I'd have to follow some pretty silly rules, like but who doesn't when it comes to religion?

Lets' see, what are some of these rules...

(1) To abstain from beans, ok I can do this, can't be flatulant while contemmplating calculus...

(2) Not to pick up what has fallen, well I suppose I can train a dog to fetch things for me, or just get a nearby non-pythagorean to do so, 'Hey buddy, I dropped my pencil, can you get that for me? No problem.

(3) Not to touch a white cock. Well now, here is a big problem. I mean big. I really don't have much desire to touch any color cock, but I do have to clean myself. BIG problem, but hey, I need a girlfriend or two, so maybe I can get around this one too...

(4) Not to stir the fire with iron. Hummm, I dunno, I really like my poker and playing with fire, but I suppose I could make sure to use a brass poker, so ok....

(5) Do not look in a mirror beside a light. Well in my bathroom the light is on the ceiling and the mirror is on the wall, so I guess I'm covered.

Hey, this religion thing can be fun!

On a slightly more serious note, there is something to be said for the statement god = mathematics.

See http://www.thestar.com/News/article/297564

Which math-phobic among us has not beseeched God for help with another colon-clenching algebra or calculus exam? Had we heeded the words of the German mathematician Leopold Kronecker, perhaps we would have realized we've been talking to the wrong person: "God made the integers; all else is the work of man."

Pythagoras, who gave us his eponymous theorem on right-angled triangles, headed a cult of number worshippers who believed God was a mathematician. "All is number," they would intone.

The 17th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza echoed the Platonic idea that mathematical law and the harmony of nature are aspects of the divine. Spinoza, too, posited that God's activities in the universe were simply a description of mathematical and physical laws. For that and other heretical views, he was excommunicated by Amsterdam's Jewish community.

German mathematician Georg Cantor's work on infinity and numbers beyond infinity (the mystical "transfinite") was denounced by theologians who saw it as a challenge to God's infiniteness. Cantor's obsession with mathematical infinity and God's transcendence eventually landed him in an insane asylum.

For the Hindu math genius Ramanujan, an uneducated clerk from Madras who wowed early 20th-century Cambridge, an equation "had no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God." Though an agnostic, the prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos imagined a heavenly book in which God has inscribed the most elegant and yet unknown mathematical proofs.

And famously, Albert Einstein said God "does not play dice" with the universe.

What is it with God and mathematics? Even as science and religion have quarrelled for centuries and are only recently exploring ways to kiss and make up, mathematicians have been saying for millennia that no truer expression of the divine can be found than in an ethereally beautiful equation, formula or proof.

Witness, for example, such transcendent numbers as phi (not to be confused with pi), often called the Divine Proportion or the Golden Ratio. At 1.618, it describes the spirals of seashells, pine cones and symmetries found throughout nature. Other mysterious constants like alpha (one-137th) and gamma (0.5772...) pop up in enough odd places to suggest to some that they are an expression of the underlying beauty of mathematics, and to others that someone or something planned it that way.

But does that translate into actual belief?

The New York Times reported recently that mathematicians believe in God at a rate 2 1/2 times that of biologists, quoting a survey of the National Academy of Sciences. Admittedly, that's not saying much: Only 14.6 per cent of mathematicians embraced the God hypothesis, versus 5.5 per cent of biologists (versus some 80 per cent of Canadians who believe in a supreme being).

Count John Allen Paulos among the non-believers. A mathematician who teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia and who has popularized his subject in bestselling books such as Innumeracy and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, Paulos's latest offering is a slim but explosive volume whose title is self-explanatory: Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up (Hill & Wang).

This newest addition to the neo-atheist field crowded by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and others emboldened by the recent transformation of non-belief from a 97-pound weakling into a he-man, Paulos thankfully employs little math, preferring to see things, as he tells us, in the stark light of "logic and probability."

Deploying "a lightly heretical touch," he dissects a playlist of "golden oldies" that includes the first-cause argument (sometimes tweaked as the cosmological argument, which hinges on the Big Bang), the argument for intelligent design, the ontological argument (crudely, that if we can conceive of God, then God exists), the argument from the anthropic principle (that the universe is "fine-tuned" to allow us to exist), the moral universality argument, and others.

The famous Pascal's wager – that it's in our self-interest to believe in God because we lose nothing in case He does exist – is upended as logically flawed, based on what statisticians call Type I and Type II errors.

Lord knows Paulos isn't the first mathematician to proclaim his lack of religious faith. Cambridge's famous wunderkind G.H. Hardy loudly and proudly adjudged God to be his enemy. To Erdos, God, if He existed, was "the supreme fascist."

Even as Paulos works to refute the classical arguments for God's existence, he does something too few of his mindset do: Chide non-believers for unsportsmanlike conduct.

"It's repellent for atheists or agnostics," he admonishes, "to personally and aggressively question others' faith or pejoratively label it as benighted flapdoodle or something worse. Those who do are rightfully seen as arrogant and overbearing."

That doesn't prevent him from doffing the gloves. The ontological argument is "logical abracadabra.'' The design, or teleological argument, is a "creationist Ponzi scheme'' that "quickly leads to metaphysical bankruptcy.''

Much of theology is "a kind of verbal magic show.'' A claim that a holy book is inerrant because the book itself says so is another logical black hole.

However, math, specifically something called Ramsey theory, which studies the conditions under which order must appear, can account for the illusion of divine order arising from chaos.

Paulos provides a nice counterpoint to theoretical physicist Stephen Unwin's 2003 book The Probability of God, which calculated the likelihood of God's existence at 67 per cent, and to Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne's use of a probability formula known as Bayes' theorem to put the odds of Christ's resurrection at 97 per cent.

Those and other efforts remind one of the story, perhaps apocryphal, of Catherine the Great's request of the German mathematical giant Leonhard Euler to confront atheist French philosopher Denis Diderot with evidence of God. The visiting Euler agreed, and at the meeting, strode forward to proclaim to the innumerate Frenchman: "Sir, (a+bn)/n = x, hence God exists. Reply!"

Diderot was said to be so dumbfounded, he immediately returned to Paris.

To Paulos, the tale is a great example of "how easily nonsense proffered in an earnest and profound manner can browbeat someone into acquiescence."

His arguments notwithstanding, Paulos concedes that there's "no way to conclusively disprove the existence of God."

The reason, he notes, is a consequence of basic logic, but not one "from which theists can take much heart."

As for the problem of good and evil, he defers to fellow atheist, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg: "With or without religion, good people will do good, and evil people will do evil. But for good people to do evil, that takes religion."

Or as Paulos might say, no mathematician has ever deliberately flown planes into buildings.

 

[Dsylexic]

good to meet you as well, but I'm actually not across the border, I live in America. I didn't realize you were actually in India. My family is from the Lucknow, UP area.

i lived in the US for some years but relocated back to the motherland -thanks to the insipid economy out there!

 

[TheLibertarianNationalist]

Romance pagan. Syncretized with Celtic & Greek gods/goddesses. With a Deistic outlook on the Divine.

 

[BrittanySligar]

atheists FTW!

 

[JohnGalt1225]

why do only the incarcerated get special discounts? And why do you have to pay to join that religion?


Why is Scientology listed? It is not a religion, but a money-making clt

The Odinic Rite is NOT Odinism, it's simply an organization where some Odinists choose to network with other Odinists. Odinism (also sometimes called Germanic Heathenism, Asatru, Norse Paganism, or just Paganism or Heathenism) is a very decentralized and loosely organized religion. It's the native folk religion of the European continent. It's pantheon includes Odin, Thor, Frey, Frigga, Tyr, Freya, and Loki to name some of the more famous gods and goddesses. It's most famous for being the "religion of the vikings." It's a very independent minded religion and unlike the "big three" monotheistic Abrahamic religions it's highly non-dogmatic.

There are no "churches" so to say or places of "worship" and there is no hierarchy leading Heathenism. There are a few national organizations dedicated to connecting fellow Asatruar together such as the Odinic Rite, The Asatru Alliance, The Asatru Folk Assembly, and The Troth to name a few.

 

[TheLibertarianNationalist]

Romance pagan. Syncretized with Celtic & Greek gods/goddesses. With a Deistic outlook on the Divine.

I wish to update my post by saying I have adopted Stoicism as a religious philosophy but will still continue being a pagan, worshiping the same Deities.

The Odinic Rite is NOT Odinism, it's simply an organization where some Odinists choose to network with other Odinists. Odinism (also sometimes called Germanic Heathenism, Asatru, Norse Paganism, or just Paganism or Heathenism) is a very decentralized and loosely organized religion. It's the native folk religion of the European continent. It's pantheon includes Odin, Thor, Frey, Frigga, Tyr, Freya, and Loki to name some of the more famous gods and goddesses. It's most famous for being the "religion of the vikings." It's a very independent minded religion and unlike the "big three" monotheistic Abrahamic religions it's highly non-dogmatic.

There are no "churches" so to say or places of "worship" and there is no hierarchy leading Heathenism. There are a few national organizations dedicated to connecting fellow Asatruar together such as the Odinic Rite, The Asatru Alliance, The Asatru Folk Assembly, and The Troth to name a few.

Do you have a folkish view of Asatru? Personally, I reject the Folkish view on the grounds that our ancestors didn't have a problem exporting and importing various Gods to ethnically alien people. Then again, I'm not of Asatru, but of a related Indo-European religion.

 

[JohnGalt1225]

I wish to update my post by saying I have adopted Stoicism as a religious philosophy but will still continue being a pagan, worshiping the same Deities.



Do you have a folkish view of Asatru? Personally, I reject the Folkish view on the grounds that our ancestors didn't have a problem exporting and importing various Gods to ethnically alien people. Then again, I'm not of Asatru, but of a related Indo-European religion.

Well I guess it depends on how you define "folkish." I just think it'd be kind of silly for someone of non-European ancestry to want to follow the Asatru path. To me it's like a non-Native American practicing Native American spirituality or a non-Japanese person becoming Shinto. I guess there's nothing inherently wrong with it, people are free to do what they want after all, but it just seems kind of silly. It makes more sense to me for people to look into their own ancestry and the ways of their own ancestors. But like I said, people are free to do what they want and each Asatru organization is free to admit who they want. I'm more of a solitary practitioner so to me it doesn't matter.

I'm actually more of an atheist in my theological outlook but I practice Asatru for a connection to my ancestors and a comprehensive way of and outlook on life.

 

[bolil]

Agnostic... left it out of the pole though... Really feeling persecuted right now.

 

[phill4paul]

Mine.

 

[I<3Liberty]

Bump. There are 666 voters! Ah! Someone needs to vote now!

Superstition aside, it's interesting how many fall under 'other.'

I'm a protestant christian. More specifically, a member of the United Methodist church.

 

[TER]

Bump. There are 666 voters! Ah! Someone needs to vote now!

Superstition aside, it's interesting how many fall under 'other.'

I'm a protestant christian. More specifically, a member of the United Methodist church.

I just vote to help out, even though the only option I could pick was Other.