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No, I'm too gay lmao.

My "spirituality" is more just driven by my experiences with living, psychedelics, art, and science. Which is to say, I see myself as the atoms which comprise me, which will and actively are becoming other lifeforms (and viruses/prions) when my homeostasis is thrown off hard enough (cell death and the big death). I feel less like a "person" and more like a meat computer. Could be because I'm autistic and dissociate a lot from trauma/undiagnosed ADHD, but like, I do like the feeling of just "existing". I feel like one of countless experiences of the universe experiencing itself. I try to do what makes me happy, (art, gardening, video games, programming) which includes helping my community and surroundings to be healthy, happy, and free, as one person can manage to make it.

I can't always meet my own standards because I'm only one person. I still try to strive to do what I can.

Is anarchism a religion? Or is it faith in the inherent interconnectedness of nature? I think all creatures are better than we (human society) give them credit for. I don't feel anthropocentrism will get us anywhere. I believe we're more than the systems that control us (capitalist megamachine, fascism, racism, sexism, colonialism, ableism, speciesism, etc.). We, creatures of the earth, are no better or worse than anything or anyone else. And these specific bodies make us able to discuss and address inequality and injustice, and try to get as close to planetwide systemic homeostasis as possible. You are me are nature are gods are the universe. We'll meet again in a different context, as different creatures, as not quite the same set of atoms. But some of what comprises "us" (myself and anyone reading this) will be there, in the future, perhaps even in the same creature. I don't think there's an "afterlife" just a different ongoing thread of "life". I'm still terrified of dying of course, I'd like to keep this "system", this "body", alive as long as possible. But I'm a bit more ok with it than I used to be. And mourning my own death after being zooted out of my mind helped a bit.

TLDR "Ego death^TM^" to sound even more like a stereotypical stoner/psychedelics user lmao.

I just don’t like having someone tell me how I should think and that’s why I was never interested in religion. :D Also seeing how religions make people behave really turned me away from them.

I've found myself surrounded by a lot of spiritual people lately and I've used it as an excuse to try and get in touch with that side of myself. It's been a very interesting experience. There's a lot of it I still don't understand but a lot of it is just nice vibes? Like I don't ascribe any meaning to the moon or when I'm born or male and female sexual energies or being actually connected to the souls of anyone else but sometimes it's nice to recognize when things are just unexplainable by conventional means and to use a common language to recognize it. To speak in soft or uncertain terms as a way to acknowledge something you can't quite put your finger on, only to have it create a wonderful connecting conversation with another human is honestly kind of nice. And it makes approaching certain subjects a little bit more accessible because it's not rigorous and scientific but more human centered and amorphous.

was raised catholic, then kinda fell out at 14ish, now im more catholic than ive ever been

Yes, absolutely. Just not tied to any specific church or religion.

I was not raised religious and never went to Church. I had a period of time where I was interested in paganism and witchcraft, and I have sort of dabbled in getting back to that, but I think it is just not clicking for me right now.

I don't know if there is a divine being that exists and if it does, is it something humans can even comprehend? I do believe in luck and karma (or at least some basic form of 'you will harvest from the seeds you plant'). I don't seriously believe in a heaven and hell, but I do like to imagine my loved ones in a sort of heaven, just hanging out together happily.

I am not especially a fan of how religions have been used as a tool to oppress other people. I suspect the cruel people who use religion as their hammer would find anything other excuse to be terrible if they couldn't use religion though.

No.

I was expelled from Sunday school, I asked too many questions (faith is not about critical thinking).

Now it seems to me like faith/religion serves only one purpose - controling people. It doesn't matter on which historic period you look at it is always about politics and control.

I grew up as a Seventh-day Adventist, but lost my faith and left the church/religion in 2012 (was born in 1989)

I'm a Christian. I'm in a weird state where i'm trying to figure out where my faith sits and trying to find a new congregation I am comfortable with, since there's so much bad stuff coming from Christians nowadays.

I don't, I'm an atheist. I grew up in a very strict christian household (my dad took away my yugioh cards and my Harry Potter books for being "demonic" lmao) kinda turned me off to religion.

Hmm. On the one hand very much no, in the sense that I am a scientist, and I believe in the scientific method, and I think society should deal with facts and evidence when agreeing how to manage itself.

But on the other hand, individually, I am a creature of emotion and I feel connected to the universe, and I believe everything ebbs and flows in connection with everything else.

I don't feel the need for my scientist brain to hold that emotional part of myself to account or ransom, though. I don't need to know how it works or why it might be because it just is what it is.

No

No, but I used to be far more derisive of religion than I am now. My wife is Christian and speaks about how she finds God in the woods, the lakes, and the natural world around her, and I have come to view God less as a specific person or all-knowing entity and more as an embodied collection of feelings and thoughts that people have regarding justice, truth, and love. This helps me reconcile many kinds of spiritual beliefs with my own understanding of the universe as garnered by mathematical processes and the Earth as it is shaped by human hands.

Yes, but...it's complicated.

Baptized Christian in infancy. Not raised churchgoing. Had several direct contacts with God in my early twenties...but I was on acid at the time. Gradually developed a keen awareness that the universe is much larger than me, and that there are things out there I can't explain, and that I do still feel a divine presence at times.

These days I consider myself a Christian, but with the caveat that it's simply the faith that's most embedded in my cultural upbringing. I'm not convinced that it's necessarily better than any other way of relating to the spiritual world, but it's the one that works for me. Not churchgoing at the moment due to living in a very conservative area and not being able to find a congregation that I feel good about, but that will likely change with an upcoming move.

I am a Unitarian Universalist atheist. I have volunteered at church and go to church fairly regularly. I don't believe in some power greater than us. I don't believe we go anywhere after we die. More personally, I don't think there is any special purpose to our existence.

No. I am a person who bases beliefs on logic and reason. There is no logic or reason for religion or spirituality. I see it as a delusion based in the hopes and fears of a person, instead of reality that can be measured and quantified.

I don't begrudge others having such religious or spiritualistic beliefs, as long as it is kept within oneself. My main issues for religionists:

• Don't legislate it
• Don't have it in schools
• Don't indoctrinate children
• Keep it strictly personal.

Sadly, I will die and decompose back to the universe with millions (or billions) of people who still want (and succeed in doing so) to make laws based on their specific religious ideals and brainwash children into it.

Yes, kind of. However, I was raised Pentecostal and strictly conservative, and have lingering religious trauma that I'm working through. For a while (from my teens through my mid-twenties) I described myself as atheist. However, I got into witchcraft and the occult a few years ago as kind of a time-waster hobby, not really sincerely believing in it at first but just having fun with it, and that grew into learning about other religions and becoming genuinely curious about spirituality and religion. Now I'd describe myself as a Unitarian Universalist. I've still never been to a Unitarian Universalist church in-person because there's not one near me, but I attend online stuff occasionally and whole-heartedly love the way they do religion. And I feel welcomed there despite all of the things that would have gotten me dirty looks at any of the churches I grew up in. In terms of belief, I'd say I'm agnostic and I like to "put on" and "take off" beliefs (or "suspend disbelief"), which I got from doing chaos magic. I think magic and ritual helps me organize and make sense of my mind more than anything else... if anything, just having a meditation and journaling habit has helped my mental health, especially since i re-started those habits after starting my gender transition. And yeah, it also maybe helps with everything else gestures to the world at large...

And yeah, I just realized this is the most I've talked about my spirituality to anyone since going down this road. One of my big things is that my spirituality is a very personal thing and I keep it mostly to myself. Nothing against people who proselytize (I've come to understand and forgive people who sincerely believe they're saving my life by "ministering" to me, like some of my older relatives who genuinely care about me and who are probably happy to hear me say "yeah, I'm kind of getting into a church now") but I don't feel compelled to tell people about my shit because I definitely have no answers. That's my whole thing, I have no answers. I'm just kind of reading everything and trying everything, for no purpose other than to just understand people and myself a little better. And maybe it works for me, but I also know folks who definitely don't want or need religion and that is 1000% okay, and I hope I don't disturb them. So I only really speak of my stuff when people ask.

I am, very much, not religious. My father is Catholic, my mother doesn't go into her spirituality but it's not Christian. So I was taught about different things and given the choice to believe in what makes sense to me. If there's one way to describe what feels to me like what I imagine faith to be like to someone who's religious it would be the messages of hope and of passion for discovery and learning that Carl Sagan showed. The Pale Blue Dot speech is a sermon. It inspires me to be a better person and to try and be the change in the world that I want to see. But ultimately science doesn't know everything and at some point even with it you must make assumptions and have "faith" in the process.

As far as divinity goes, I've always struggled to believe. I just don't see the extraordinary evidence that would be required for me to say "Oh, that makes a divinity-free universe impossible". And by the same token it is impossible to prove that the universe was not crafted by some all powerful being last Thursday with all our billions of years of history baked in for us to pour through. So I figure, I'll find out on my last day and until then I'll just focus on being as good a person as I can be.

Yep! I grew up nominally christian but actually pretty personally areligious, even with a long atheist phase, but in a pretty diverse religious upbringing both family and community-wise - mostly a mix of Unitarian Univeralism, Catholicism, and Judaism. I had a lot of anger at religion as a queer teenager from the US south but thankfully ended up falling in with more positive ex-Christian interfaith groups and not the antitheist community, which led to a lot of open exploring down many different religious paths just to better understand and see what the fuss was all about, to where I am now, an animist polytheist with a pretty solitary practice. No pressure, just me and my own relationship with the world and the many kinds of persons, human and not, who inhabit it.

Absolutely not. Raised in a strictly Catholic household and 12 years of Catholic education but a) none of the religious education sank in* and b) my personal experience turned me off to religion-as-an-institution entirely.

Footnote*: Religion class was typically my worst grade in school, except for 8th grade where the teacher gave me an A despite low scores on most of the tests. When I asked her why she thought I deserved an A, she said that she gave grades based on our ability to grasp the material and she thought I was doing as well as I could. I cried -- not because this meant I was doing well, but because I was given something I knew I didn't earn and I didn't even want an A in a subject I fundamentally disagreed with.