Leap of Faith: A Spiritual Invitation

[author_by_night]

In today's world, sharing your beliefs is taboo. If you do share them, you are judged, you are told not to share them so loudly, and there are hateful people who actually do horrible things to people of different faiths than themselves.

A few years ago, I did a Livejournal Invitation wherein people shared their beliefs. The purpose was to express your beliefs - whether Christianity, Islam, Taoism, or even Atheism - without fear of condemnation, without fear of judgement. I learned so much about my flisters, and about faiths I knew little about or had never heard of at all. I am going to open the invitation once more.

Say anything, anything at all. And your beliefs do not even have to be specific to a religion - if you believe in reincarnation, if you believe in ghosts, if you believe in parallel universes... those may not necessarily be tied to a religion, (although they may be), but they are still beliefs, and I'd like to hear about them. 

One warning, however - I will state that this is not a debate. We are not here to condemn other beliefs - only to express our own.

Comments

[sixth-light.livejournal.com]

Atheist. My parents both are, I guess, but it was more that religion just wasn't really touched on - they let me attend a few church services of varying denominations with friends, but nothing about it attracted me at all. Then when I was fourteen or so I started reading a lot of Sagan, and the logic of his explanations, especially for supernatural phenomena, and the way he set out the criteria for proving stuff - it just all made so much sense to me. I gradually got more atheistic as I got older, mostly through discussions with religious friends who believed in things like Creationism - the older I got, the more ridiculous I found the whole thing.

I understand that faith is something a lot of people rely on to help them, and I respect it as part of their lives, but I have no tolerance left any more for the intrusion of religion into public life (especially in the realms of reproductive health and science education). I see it as a personal thing, not as something that should lead one to try and dictate how other people live.