Welcome to Gaia! ::

I was raised in a Seventh Day Adventist home, but I was never religious till I started defending the religious. Of course, the religion that takes the most bashing is Christianity, since most people are quite familiar with it, and while I wasn't particularly religious, I just saw no reason for people to bash Christianity, Christians, and actually any of the other major religions of the world. I quite often had to research the Bible, to answer many of the anti-religious, and as I read more into it, I realized it really was a message of love. After reading bits on other religions, I discovered that the religions had much the same commands for it's practitioners. So I became a Christian, and while many of the beliefs I was taught while I was young stay with me, I have deviated from some of them. In short, I would rather identify with the Salvation Army, who are there doing the work that needs to be done.

Recently, after reading books that eventually lead me to Daniel Goleman's books, I became interested in Buddhist meditations, as all results of advanced meditators have been nothing short of amazing, and convincing, and I am now looking into Secular Buddhism. The meditations are a tried and true method of increasing happiness, and the beneficial emotions of compassion, gratitude, and calmness. These are emotions taught in Christianity, but it just says that these are the emotions one should take on. The Buddhists have a method for actually taking them on, and in everyday life, understanding that these are good emotions is easy, but actually practicing them is not easy, as this understanding easily gets lost in the day to day bombardment of stimuli, worries, frustrations, schedules, and other distractions. I like the idea of spending time solely for the practice of these emotions, and having come to an understanding that meditation is just training the brain to make stronger, easier to access nuero-pathways to the positive emotions, don't find that it conflicts at all with my beliefs as a Christian.

That was longer than I had intended.

Unitarian Universalist.

I guess you could call me a Gnostic Roman Catholic Mystic. I read the NAB Bible with Deuteronomicals, but I also include most of the Gnostic Gospels and other Gnostic texts in the Cannon. I say mystic, because I've retained a lot of beliefs and practices from my studies of Hinduism and Buddhism (such as meditation, Reincarnation theory, etc).

I'm technically nothing, yet, but I'm planning to become a Roman Catholic. After years of not knowing what faith most fit what I believed, I think I've finally found it, and I'm thinking of joining the RCIA, or Rite of Christian Initiation as Adults, later this year, and hopefully being Baptized and Confirmed by next Easter.

i am a pagan/wiccan. i'm still looking form exact beliefs though. my views on religion however are different than many people i know.

i think that people who need someone to help them and guide them down the right path need a religion.

people who just want to be considerred good people should just follow basic human manners. say please and thank you and excuse me and bless you. they should hold the door open for people who are totally capable of doing it themselves. if we just treat eachother with respect then what does it matter what our religion is?


just somethin' i've been mulling over in my head.

Actually, you didn't misspell anything in that statement. ^_^

Pause to consider the irony...

Has anyone ever noticed that whenever someone says they've misspelled things, they've usually spelled everything right, and the people who always seem arrogant and absolutely NEVER correct themselves make tons of mistakes?