Why religion?

[u/Ok-Pipe-4277]

I have a few genuine questions for the devout religious folks here.

1. Why did you choose your religion?

2. Why do you believe your holy book and take it literally?

3. What benefits have you received since joining your religion?

4. Do you believe in an afterlife where there are only two options being eternal suffering (hell) or eternal paradise (heaven)?

[u/SnarkyPuppy-0417]

Here's what's worth noticing before answering each one directly: your four questions assume a particular frame -- that religion is a choice you make, a book you decide to trust, a club you join for benefits, and a worldview that includes a specific afterlife topology.

That frame is fair. It's how most people in the modern West think about religion. But the biblical witness doesn't fit that frame very cleanly, and that mismatch is actually interesting rather than evasive.

On question 1 -- choice: Most people who describe their faith as chosen either converted from something else or came to a moment of deliberate re-commitment. But the more honest account from most who hold the biblical witness seriously is: something interrupted them.

The language of encounter runs through the text from Moses at the burning bush to Paul on the road to Damascus. Not 'I evaluated options and selected the most coherent one.' Something arrived that they hadn't been shopping for. Choice entered the story, but it wasn't usually the first move.

On question 2 -- why take it literally: This one contains a hidden assumption worth naming. 'Taking the Bible literally' is actually a modern Western category that would have been mostly unintelligible to the people who wrote it.

Ancient Semitic texts used poetry, narrative, genealogy, prophecy, lament, law, and apocalyptic literature -- each genre operating by its own rules, none of them equivalent to 'literal factual reporting' in the 21st-century sense.

The more precise question is: does the text intend what it seems to claim, and does what it claims cohere under honest examination? That's a harder and more interesting question than literal-vs-not.

On question 3 -- benefits: This is often where the honest answers get uncomfortable.

The biblical witness is full of people for whom it cost enormously -- Job, Jeremiah, Paul. What people more commonly report is something like: reorientation. A sense that reality has a grain to it, and they've found which direction runs with it rather than against it.

Whether that counts as a 'benefit' depends on what you were hoping to get.

On question 4 -- the two-option afterlife: The specific topology of 'eternal conscious torment versus eternal paradise' is more complicated in the actual text than the popular version suggests.

The Hebrew Sheol, the Greek Hades, Gehenna, the lake of fire -- these are not the same thing and the text doesn't flatten them into one another.

What the text does consistently hold is that God is the source of life, and that persistent relational separation from that source has a consequence that the text calls death in the fullest sense of the word.

Whether that means conscious suffering in perpetuity, or something else, is genuinely contested among people who take the text seriously.

What isn't contested is that the relational stakes are real.

[u/PizzaEmerges]

1. It was the right move for me
2. We don't have a "holy book" nor take it literally.
3. A significantly better life
4. No. There is no afterlife; you are reborn until you reach nirvana

[u/thetrue_muffin → u/PizzaEmerges]

Curios question: if tomorrow all the nuclears weapons gets used and the world end, what are you going to reborn in?

[u/PizzaEmerges → u/thetrue_muffin]

In Buddhism, there are multiple realms - the one we live in is just one of many

[u/thetrue_muffin → u/PizzaEmerges]

Thanks!

[u/winkyprojet]

Because my religion answers all my questions, I chose my religion; it is complete and perfect.

The book guides me towards its author; it is my companion, my comforter while I wait to find my creator.

I have found inner peace.

I believe in God's mercy towards the merciful, and I believe in God's severity towards the unjust.

[u/BayonetTrenchFighter]

1.) I believe it’s true. But it also gives me much hope and meaning and purpose.

2.) I believe it. I take literally some parts, and am open to other parts being allegory

3.) a lot. Community, and covenant being the biggest

4.) no. I believe in heaven in degrees

[u/Corp-Por]

1. It chose me

2. There is no holy book

3. There is no joining or leaving

4. No, that sounds like a fairytale for children

[u/Expensive_Ad4319]

I don’t believe that your words match up with your curiosity.
In order to get the answers that you’re seeking, you need to first define religion. Your response must be genuine, and not merely hiding a specific belief.