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

[dreamer-marie.livejournal.com]

Oh, boy, beliefs...That's a though one!
I was raised a Catholic, and as a child I was pretty devout. As I grew up, though, I had stints of doubt, and I realised that I was incapable of faith, so I stopped being a Catholic. For a very long time, I felt really guilty about that, and I wondered if my life was incomplete without spirituality. A few months ago, I decided that my life had been OK without it, and I stopped worrying. So I went from devout Catholic, to agnostic, to atheist, because even if there is an entity that set the Universe in motion, it's irrelevant. Like Laplace said, I don't need it as a hypothesis.
I know there are many people who take something positive from religion, which is why I don't want to be lumped together with people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Michel Onfray. People are people, and religion was built as an image of mankind, with all wonderful things and horrific things and everything in between. If people decide to kill someone in the name of religion, it is because they chose the scripture to justify it and if they want to help the poor, the sick and the orphans in the name of religion, that they chose the scripture that justifies it. I think religion serves more a role of validation for whatever you want to do and a role of guidance or rule.
That said, there is one thing I do believe in very strongly, and that's karma: if you do something good or bad, one way or another you're going to pay for it, whether through punishment or your conscience making you very uncomfortable.
Oh, and the Monster of Loch Ness. I don't care what people say, it exists, and that's all I want to hear about it :-)