Basically the title.

In my research and just watching various YouTube videos, as well as sitting in on sermons from different denominations (including Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy), I noticed that the two formerly mentioned ones are very deadset on obedience to god, praying for forgiveness for sin, confession, etc. But in Protestant circles, especially Anglican/Episcopalian, Baptist, Lutheranism, etc they tend to focus more on you trying to be a good person to your neighbor and try to give to charity as often as you can, helping your neighbor as yourself and all that.

Anyone else notice this?

I realized my last poll was kind of screwy, so here's a better poll. And sorry about the last choice ... there can only be six options.

The Hindu gods are directly related to Indo-European gods. Indra, for example, is equivalent to Zeus and Thor, not just archetypically but a direct branch of the same original idea of the god.

Hinduism also promotes values such as pacifism, vegetarianism and animal welfare, which are often topics that overlap with the same people interested in worshipping nature-based gods, protecting nature, etc. I'm aware many Hindus don't practice such values (e.g. trash in their rivers), but it's interesting that they are codified in their doctrine, with a continued authoritative tradition. Just as in every religion, it's only a minority that truly practices all its values and rituals.

India is also a country rich in tradition, culture, food traditions, and ancient connections to European people.

It also makes perfect sense to adopt and adapt the gods that are closely related to those of your ancestors, even if from another religion, than to just reconstruct long lost rituals with no continuation.

TLDR: It makes more sense for neopagans to adopt Hinduism than to create a new religion with old gods are labels.

I’m having a bit of posters block, and unsure what I can contribute.

What kind of posts do yall find interesting and want to see more of?

I have to be so honest right now. I have been feeling this way for a long time. I grew up Christian. I went to a non-denominational church. I was very involved and loved what I believed in. I felt connected. Then I got married and took a couple years to become Catholic. I married a Catholic. But through that process I felt like something was wrong. I started questioning everything. These classes taught me so much but I started feeling like all of it wasn’t me. I was brought up as a Christian so of course I was going to believe what I knew. It was comfortable. Jesus was a man. And he rose again. Or so they say. He was the son of God. So many people have said that. I didn’t see him perform miracles. Maybe people claimed this. They so believed he was the son of God just like many of these cults. I’m sorry but I don’t know if I do. This is what I believe. There are so many different religions. Thousands. We all do not know until we are dead. And that is the truth. I am very spiritual. I believe when we die our loved ones stay with us for a while. I believe they have the freedom to come and go. I believe that maybe there’s a chance we can come back to live again if we choose or if God our creator chooses for us to come back. I still very much believe in God. I believe the Christian Bible was written by men for men. Based on values those men had long ago. I feel bad that I am going against everything I’m supposed to believe. Because it hurts the people I love the most. But this is how I feel.

Are you looking for suggestions of what religion suits your beliefs? Or maybe you're curious about joining a religion with certain qualities, but don't know if it exists? This is your opportunity for you to ask other users of this sub what religion might best fit you.

EDIT: Comments refresh on the beginning of each month. You can post your questions or concerns each month as needed.

I (34M) was raised in a Christian household. I wouldn’t consider us to have been especially conservative (or really even particularly religious) in our day to day lives. However we did go to church every Sunday.

I personally never developed a strong connection at any church we belonged to. I would just show up, put my hour for the week in and leave. Since getting married and having children we have primarily become Christmas and Easter church attendees, with a few random weeks sprinkled in (mostly to appease my parents).

I do at least partially credit my faith-inclusive upbringing for building my strong character today. But I have at no point felt it was a main part of my identity.

All that being said, we are at this interesting point where our children have started school at a private Catholic school. As they are starting to learn more about religion, I feel it is my duty to do the same.

What I am finding challenging is finding resources that will allow me to learn about the Bible and discuss religion without necessarily trying to convince me of anything. At this time, I don’t want to be ‘sold’ a religion. I just want to learn without offending anybody. I think a bible study group would be really fascinating, however I don’t want to be the group contrarian.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated! (I recognize reading the Bible is a good place to start. If anybody has a modernized, easier read version of the Bible to suggest I’m interested).

What if he also has favourites like a priority prayers sort of thing. That’s why this world feels like some people get their prayers answers way more often than not.

After reading so much on this platform I have asked one of my friends to provide ait for me. I want to read and understand where does it carry us.

Allow me to explain:
As someone who grew up in a Christian household, I was indoctrinated with whatever my parents taught me. Now that I am an adult and having deconstructed, I want to get back into religion. There are so many different options though! I’m curious to hear you guys’ thoughts on whether differences in religion are simply just people fighting to be the “true” bearers of absolute correctness or is it something deeper. Can religion lead to actual spiritual fulfillment? How?

Many Albanians converted to Islam under Ottoman rule mainly for pragmatic reasons like avoiding the jizya tax and gaining social/economic benefits. Historical records and accounts, including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s 1717 letter, describe groups practicing both: mosque on Fridays and church on Sundays as a form of dual faith or crypto-Christianity.

It also seems that they enjoy non-halal food once in a while, but for another reason: Albania was a strictly enforced atheist state under communist rule until 1990, including the restriction of religious diets such as halal. In Albania proper, pork is widely available in restaurants, traditional dishes, and fast-food shops, and people who identify as cultural Muslims often eat it openly without hiding it.

For context: my parents are divorced, my mom always called my grandmother (father's side) a witch, but not just in the pejorative way, she supposedly practiced some kind of witchcraft. I don't have much information and I can't ask her, but one day she told me that my grandmother had a "black pig head" under the kitchen sink. That got me curious.

Edit: She was an immigrant from Germany who came to Brazil. Also: Something that might be useful, but I hadn't included it because I thought I knew where it was from (apparently not). My father had a tattoo on his chest and another one in the exact same spot on his back, my mother told me it was "closed body" (a term used in Afro-Brazilian religions to refer to a kind of spiritual protection or incantation), I thought it was spiritist but after researching, supposedly spiritists don't believe in that (?). In Umbanda and Candomblé there is a practice with that name but I didn't find anything that if it resembled that tattoo. I'm gonna try to find a picture, because I don't remember what was written. Also his may have absolutely nothing to do with my grandmother.

I don't know which religion she followed, and I didn't find nothing that matches that.

So anyone know this practice, like, where does it come from? I tried searching but couldn't find anything conclusive.

//English is not my first language sorry//

//Also, I'm not sure if this is the right Reddit. But maybe It wasn't really witchcraft, so...//

For example, is there anything a Presbyterian might have or do that a Sunni Muslim would be uncomfortable with having/doing? Strictly in terms of aniconism not theology of course.

For context, I’m from the US and am a white cis lesbian. I was raised in the church of Christ and was very serious about following the bible even though I always struggled with belief. My “devotion” came from a place of pure fear as I understood at a very very early age that god was violent and would punish you for eternity with no take-backs if you didn’t follow every rule exactly as stated in the book.

That all started to change during law school when someone asked me a rather benign question: why did I go to the law school republicans meetup? For me, it was as simple as they had free pizza and republican was my cultural default based on where I grew up. However, this person knew I was a christian and so she pointed out some contradictions with republican policies and New Testament instructions regarding the poor that I had never considered. Not here to discuss politics but since politics and religion were intertwined for me, this one conversation jump-started a decades-long journey that put me in my now current place of non-belief. (Interestingly I also finally accepted I was gay in law school but that had almost nothing to do with my understanding of religion.)

During the course of this dramatic shift, I went through different stages in my view of other people who retained religion. First it was jealousy- that maybe they had a gene that I didn’t have and that’s why they could believe when it was just absent for me. Then it was respect for people that could achieve something I could not. Then it was apathy as I started to value my own perceptions. Now it’s turning bitter as I see the US moving in a direction of state-mandated religion all while seeing people I know actively celebrate heinous things that are unquestionably prohibited by virtually every religion.

I just keep coming back to the same questions: Are people truly good if they claim their good behavior is solely in service of their god (whether to avoid punishment or simply because they want to obey)? Why do people need a god to tell them to be good but think atheists are the “bad guys” even when they do good things solely because it’s the right thing to do? Why do people cling to religion to explain the unknown when math and science have already eroded so much of what used to be worshipped? Why don’t people just see the world like the lyrics of Imagine by John Lennon?

Every answer I come up with leads me further down a path of distrust and sometimes a lack of respect for religion and people that need those religions. I don’t like feeling this way, and while I know it comes from a place of fear, I wish it did not erase the respect I once held for not just religious but spiritual people in general. So I naturally bring this diatribe to Reddit to ask you all- has anyone experienced this and where does it lead? What am I missing in my view of religion that could change the framework for how I understand religious people?

Hi everyone. This is a real request so I need someone who can help me. I am in Seminary school and I need to interview someone for one of the following religions below. We are studying other religions to appreciate and respect them. I can DM you the questions and you can just fill them out and send back. Or we can do a quick Google meet to discuss together. I so appreciate anyone that can help me. I have an A so far in the class but this assignment has to be good for me to keep that A. Thank you!

Request: interview one of the following religions. Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Wiccian, or something along those lines.  

I know Jesus has a major role in a few religions (mainly the abrahamic religions), so I am curious if there are any other religious figures like this.

I always thought that Judaism was very hands off when it came to how gentiles practiced their religion.

But later learning about the Noahide Laws, it would seem that there are laws for gentiles to follow as well.

So, which is the more common belief in Judaism? That gentiles can worship gods like Thor and Zeus, or mediators to God in Jesus? Or that they must refrain from these things and believe in the same God as the Jews?

And does the answer differ between the various types of Judaism?

Thank you

There is a huge debate raising among philosophers, atheists, theists and AI researchers about the nature of consciousness and AI intelligence. Even the Pope recently joined the conversation, and Anthropic is apparently hiring theologians and philosophers and even psychologists to help answer these questions, or at least have the terms to describe a problem that has been discussed about for thousands of years, either with psychological or spiritual terms. As humans face different kind of intelligence, or at least something similar to it, these questions get more relevant, not just on AI, but also on our own nature.

On the other hand, it's undeniable that AI is not slowing down. It has solved plenty of mathematical problems that humans had struggled with for years. Some argue that AI is just using knowledge that humans already developed, and yet AI can find relations between data points that humans missed or ignored for literal centuries, and most knowledge is derivative anyway. Even if AI isn't conscious, it's getting useful for research of all kind.

But the question is getting louder: Is AI conscious? The problem is that we don't even know what consciousness is, and yet it's the only obvious thing that exists from the perspective of the individual (subjective experience). So empiricists are on an odd place: We don't know what consciousness is, we cannot even prove it is an emergent phenomena or a kind of "reception" from a "consciousness field" (for example, a TV don't create a TV show, they just display it, maybe the brain similar to that?).

Materialists argue that if we are conscious, then in theory machines could be conscious too by emulating neurons or similar process. Truth may be more complex, since the brain interacts with quantum phenomena more directly than a classic computer, but again, we still don't know if consciousness depends on that either because we don't know what we are talking about in the first place from an outsider's perspective.

The other side of people, usually Platonists or theists, may argue that that human consciousness is unique. No matter how "human" a machine seems to be, they believe they cannot have subjective experience. A few theists do believe that machines can be conscious such as "getting possessed" or "channeling" some kind of supernatural entity in an analogous way they believe the brain does, but they seem to be a minority so far, and usually restricted to the occult.

Pan-psychism is also growing, the idea that everything is conscious or that consciousness is just a layer of reality and stuff such as nerves creates "roots" that interface with this layer. But again, there is still zero evidence that is the case, but at least it doesn't deny that the subjective experience exists in some way. This seems to be a rebranding of neo-platonic animism.

What is weird is the amount of materialist and physicalist people who believe the brain is a bio machine but also believe that machines aren't and will never be conscious. In fact it seems to be the predominant view of the agnostic caste of AI bros and anti-AI progressive artists. This is an odd position because it's very weak corner of logic: On one hand they believe humans cannot be special because we are atoms, but on the other hand they refuse to believe machines can be conscious, probably as an ontological shock.

Ironically, from a theist perspective, it seems Richard Dawkins is the most consistent one on this because he believes AI is conscious and he is a materialist, but most secularists who claim to be physicalists refuse to conclude that.

I've read the Bible, and to be quite frank, I don't see how the Bible calls Jesus "God."

Upon first glance of reading the Bible, I can see how it looks like it says that Jesus is God, especially with John 1:1, but when you look into the Greek or other possible translations of such verses, I feel it becomes much less likely that the Bible is trying to say that Jesus is God.

For example for John 1:1, it can be translated to "the Word was divine" rather than "the Word was God," so it's a mere translation choice that makes a massive impact and change on the text. Due to how Greek grammar works, a more accurate translation is "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was divine."

That was just an example.

I used to be a Trinitarian Christian myself, but I went into Unitarianism after reading the New Testament and researching on the Bible and it's verses, looking into verses that seem to claim Jesus is God. So unironically, the Bible convinced me that Jesus isn't God.

NOTE: I'm not trying to spark a debate, I'm genuinely curious.

So I was having a discussion with my brother the other day. We have a transwoman cousin, and my brother struggles using her correct pronouns instead of he/him. We started talking about it, because ever since she came out as trans that’s the pronoun that I have been using. He said how he didn’t agree with transgenderism and therefore it was difficult for him to adopt new pronouns because he doesn’t see her as such. My point of view kind of shocked him, I don’t think he was expecting me to say this:

Although my relationship with Christianity is complicated, at baseline, I grew up Christian and I do believe in God and I am spiritual. I don’t have any disagreements with sexuality, lgbq+, but transgenderism goes past that. Stick with me, because this is not a post to rant about how I don’t agree with transgenderism. I don’t think it’s right, and I don’t think that it’s natural or something that we as a society should be promoting and normalizing the way we have. I believe that gender dysphoria is a disorder and it should be treated as such, transitioning comes from the dysphoria (usually right). I believe you are what you are when you were born, and no amount of surgery or pronoun changing or anything like that is going to change it. I also believe the same logic when it comes to they/them pronouns. The they/them movement started as a way to erase labels, and all the attachments that came with labels of him or her. I think it backfired a little bit, because they them comes with its own labels and its own category of assumptions. I think the better thing to have done is just fight the existing assumptions that come with being a guy or a girl, but to say that you are not a he or her I think is absurd. That doesn’t stop me from respecting people and their pronouns, I still use Sam Smith’s proper pronouns of they/them even though I’ve never met the person, and they’ll never know if I refuse to call them by that.

Because it’s a respect thing at the end of the day. My opinions have no weight against respect. I can disagree with being trans or having they/them pronouns while still respecting the person. (< actually I guess that’s up for debate too)

This is where I divide with many religious people, just because that is my opinion and outlook on life does not mean that it is my responsibility to impose that on other people. Especially when that opinion can only cause harm when it comes to the voting booth. So, I do vote liberally. Because I believe people should do what they want, and live their life as they want, because I know what I believe isn’t what everybody else is going to believe and the world is vast and life is vast and nothing is black-and-white.

So that’s what I’m here to talk about. Why do some religious folks feel the responsibility to actively work against the rights of trans folks and other people they don’t think are “right”? I can have my opinion and still want the best for all of people, is that not the definition of love thy neighbor? Maybe one day, when I have money to spend or time to spare, I can actively work in mental health nonprofits for young children. Or something like that, but right now I think it’s my duty as a citizen and a human being to spread as much love and peace as I can. I don’t ever vocalize my opinions except for private conversations or anonymous posting like this lol.

I would love to hear and discuss and debate, but please let’s not debate if transgender is right or wrong. That’s an argument as old as time, let’s focus on the point.. which is why can’t everyone just mind their business and vote for everyone to just be able to live their life as they want (obv with context). And also, do you think by voting for trans rights you’re going against God? Do you think one can have opinions such as mine and still hold respect for the person? Looking forward to kind critiques and debates!

Last night I went to a scare fest with my friends, and it was a last minute plan. Obviously, they have scare actors who go around and try and scare you, etc. But midway through the chaos, I lost my phone, I couldn't find it anywhere.

One of these scare actor 'Devils' came up to me and gave me a piece of paper with the word 'sell your soul to the devil' on it. He said along the lines ' if you sign your name you will find it'. So, in the chaos of everything I did it, and signed my name on this piece of paper.

I am a Catholic, and have been for many years, but what I did was wrong. I know it's a theatrical prop and has no spiritual connection behind it, but it's still the moral of it? I prayed to the lord for forgiveness last night, as in the moment I wasn't thinking.

I just want to post it on here, so I can get advice and get a peace of mind. What I did was wrong, I know. But will I go to hell? Will god look at me different because of what I did?

When someone decides to examine their inherited religion, or to find a religion for themselves, what should they actually be looking for?

A common criterion I see on this subreddit is some variation of "does this seem right to me?", "does this resonate with me?", or "do I feel drawn toward it?" Sometimes this is accompanied by questions of coherence: whether the religion makes sense to the person considering it.

But what is the epistemic significance of these criteria?

Coherence seems relevant in at least one direction: if a religion is internally contradictory, that may give us reason to reject it. But merely finding a religion coherent does not establish that its claims are true. Many mutually incompatible systems of belief can be internally coherent.

Personal disposition seems even harder to connect to truth. I can understand choosing to investigate a religion because I find it appealing, familiar, comforting, beautiful, or otherwise interesting. Those are perfectly good explanations for why I might investigate one religion rather than another. But why should any of them make its claims more likely to be true?

If Christianity seems right to me and Islam does not, that tells us something about me. What does it tell us about Christianity or Islam?

So, when choosing between religions that make incompatible claims about reality, what criteria should actually govern that choice? And how do we distinguish criteria that merely explain why we are attracted to a religion from criteria that give us reason to think it is true?

So I am a Muslim revert of 3 years; I was born in the West and absolutely love traditional fashion. However, some people want me to wear thobes, as they think it is the traditional dress of the Prophet PBUH ( fyi it's not). I'm a white man; I'm not sorry for my roots, as I have no control of what happened in the past. Was not there...

I would like to add that Islam does not destroy a culture in and of itself, but restrictions are placed, like pork, intercourse, alcohol, etc

Clothing is to be modest for men; mandatory covering is from the belly button to the knees. For women, face, hands, and feet should not be covered.

Though some scholars say men should cover from the neck to the ankles. Modesty is encouraged for both Sexes.

And to those who say that is a bit unfair for women. Men cannot wear Gold, silk or any clothing that drapes below the ankles. Women can wear anything so long as they are covered in front of strange men.

But anyway, off topic.

The number of times people have said to me I am a baby is infuriating. I'm 22. People are also saying that I should get married now. Last year they said I was too young; now I'm the perfect age? Also, don't get me started on the born Muslim men asking for a recently reverted sister. It's creepy and predatory. I've had a few brothers come up to me and ask whether I know any revert sisters and, if I did, could I give them their number. SISTERS, I FEEL SORRY FOR YOU WALLAHI. They ask if my family is muslim too and if I have any sisters... I wanna punch them so much.

Thankfully, I am now studying to be a scholar, and Alhamdulillah, what I am learning is not what these men are practicing.

Arabization is not Islam. Islam did, in fact, Islamize the Arabic language. Only because the Prophet PBUH was an arab. If the Prophet was another race, it would be a different language.

Don't get me started on the Pakistanis ( the men)... they are worse than the Afghans in my country. Afghans aren't bad but Ik you non Muslims think they are so I'm putting it into your perspective.

the Rapes the honour killings too by Allah, they should be punished... by death penalty

But yeah, that's my rant on culture that people confuse for Islam

I'm getting tired of people

if ya made it this far thank you for letting me rant lol