not religious at all, have no issues with it if it helps someone be a better person/more true to themselves (i've got friends of many religions), but it's not for me. A lot of people have trauma and shitty family associations from religious circles and it really saddens me. I think any organized religion that leans towards 'repress your feelings and don't talk about them' not only is very harmful but usually leads to those feelings boiling to the point someone leaves, or ends up hurting themselves and others. I'm sorry all that happened to you.

(March 22, 2021, 7:26 pm)alexgraves I think any organized religion that leans towards 'repress your feelings and don't talk about them' not only is very harmful but usually leads to those feelings boiling to the point someone leaves, or ends up hurting themselves and others.

Yeah that's pretty much all of them. Kinda goes hand-in-hand with piety. Unfortunate.

I’m an Agnostic Atheist. I don’t believe any particular deity, or multiple, exist at all, yet I have no proof. I can’t simply say that I “know” that gods don’t exist, but I can faithfully say that I don’t believe any exist. And if they do, it’s a “whatever” for me. I’m more worried about what’s going on during my life than what happens after I die, for me as an individual. I only hope that I can leave the world a better place than when I found it, to some degree.

Deist or agnostic. Don’t think too much about it.

The only feelings you all should repress are the ones that make you be a shitty person to other people. Repress them however you want, religion, philosophy, doesn’t matter. Getting off to pregnant women is like, the most innocuous thing. Please nobody feel ashamed about it.

Go on /d/ on 4chan where people get off to girls getting (harmlessly) flattened by large objects or getting transformed into inanimate food items. Humans get turned on by weird shit and it’s all good so long as you don’t hurt people

I’m a deist and my view is religions try to paint a picture against our more primal instincts, and nudge us away from them but the problem is the more you try to suppress something the more it tends to come out in really vile ways some of the most highest figures in these religions we see scandals after scandals , it never seems to get old . Be proud your not doing anything scandalous or as corrupt as those in religious circles, that saddens me to hear about your family but I also believe it’s generational life should not be viewed with shame it should be viewed as beautiful and fleeting

(March 22, 2021, 8:05 pm)Akhenaten

(March 22, 2021, 7:26 pm)alexgraves I think any organized religion that leans towards 'repress your feelings and don't talk about them' not only is very harmful but usually leads to those feelings boiling to the point someone leaves, or ends up hurting themselves and others.

Yeah that's pretty much all of them. Kinda goes hand-in-hand with piety. Unfortunate.

To be fair, I have met some very open and emotionally supportive religious people who are far from suppressive. They seem more the exception than the rule though.

I was born and raised in a Mormon family, and my biggest issue with Christianity is how opened ended it can seem at times. Everybody goes off and does their own thing because the Bible (or other sacred/holy texts) can be interpreted in several different ways, and people use it to exploit and hurt others. My family doesn't seem to understand my problem with this: if there are rules, you should be following them, end of story. There should be none of this open interpretation because then it creates different ideas within the same organized religion, and can misrepresent the religion as a whole. As far as I know, I've only seen this problem from Christian religions. Another big problem I've seen is repression of sexuality, and this goes for any religion that does this. Sex is human nature, and trying to control something as instinctual as that is gonna create some problems. I know for me it led to a porn addiction (which I would say that I'm over now), and just a taboo feeling of experiencing attraction. Only this past summer did I come to terms with the fact that sex and masturbation are just normal things, and that I shouldn't feel any shame or guilt for wanting to do them. But it can get worse than that, it can lead to people being perverts, or even flat out rapists because their whole life no one has told them what to do with these feelings besides repress them and now they don't know what to do.

Sorry for the rant, been holding onto that for awhile. I am no longer associated with Mormonism btw as if it wasn't obvious since I'm part of an online forum where people discuss their shared interest in pregnant women lol

I'm an agnostic raised in a Christian yet non-church going family (my mother is a former Baptist born and raised in CA, and my father is from France who is mildly Catholic). I learned to be tolerant of others' religious beliefs as long they don't beat you with them, because I also have relatives who are Jewish, Muslim, Mormon, my maternal (part) Osage/Cherokee side which has spiritualism or syncretism, and even Celtic-Germanic paganism. I strongly believe in the separation of church and state, no declaration of a state church or religion, and no religion or church should be prohibited (or all faith, official state atheism is comparable to a theocracy), just don't plant ones' religious beliefs into law. Human nature and common sense outlawed murder, theft, sexual abuse and corruption because by instinct we don't want to be victims of horrible things, not because a cosmic deity told us not to. And in America, we have a strong presence of Judeo-Christian (esp. Evangelical) fundamentalism in our (most states) governments, but then again, my home state California seems to be the least religious or most secular sociopolitical culture.

IMO The worst are the people who try to convert you. I had court in a town next to one of the largest Hasidic settlements outside of Israel. After court I'm in the WAWA, the guy who was called after me comes upto me and starts talking about converting as my destiny, explaining to me that my driving while suspended ticket getting dismissed was a sign of God's plan and that he was to take me on the next phase. I explained to him that because I work with lawyers some of whom are city prosecutors or city judges, I can't always appear where I get the ticket, and if God really loved me he would have had the one court send my paperwork back to the other court so my license wouldn't have been suspended and I wouldn't have had to spend a day at the DMV getting restored and another in that court even though I didn't get the ticket in that court

(April 1, 2021, 3:33 pm)alexnj IMO The worst are the people who try to convert you.  I had court in a town next to one of the largest Hasidic settlements outside of Israel.  After court I'm in the WAWA, the guy who was called after me comes upto me and starts talking about converting as my destiny, explaining to me that my driving while suspended ticket getting dismissed was a sign of God's plan and that he was to take me on the next phase.  I explained to him that because I work with lawyers some of whom are city prosecutors or city judges, I can't always appear where I get the ticket, and if God really loved me he would have had the one court send my paperwork back to the other court so my license wouldn't have been suspended and I wouldn't have had to spend a day at the DMV getting restored and another in that court even though I didn't get the ticket in that court

I know some people from my denomination who are guilty of doing that too, and it makes me want to take the book that they follow and throw it at them. Like, saying any form of divine intervention to explain how most things happen actually urks me the most. Because its that line of thinking that gets people either more upset or asking more questions that will lead to being more upset.

Like something I try to tell other Christians who've said something happens because it's "God's will," I try to remind them that shit happens, and shit happens all the time. And explaining it away by slapping the God sticker on it is only going to make the deity they're worshipping look bad.