CAPTAIN CAVEMAN

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Guybrush

Religious poll threads merged, old poll reopened!

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Something Completely Different

duga

This poll is way better than the one that was here before. I went with self defined...I was raised a Catholic but after I went to mass one day as a child and the priest said chewing gum in church was a mortal sin, I kind of started thinking the whole thing was bull****. I'm constantly meditating on and changing my spiritual beliefs but the one constant is that I believe in reincarnation.

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Confusion will be my epitaph...

RVCA

Cool, but there's a technical issue with the poll. "Don't believe in deities" and "believing there aren't deities" are two very different things, the first being a form of agnosticism and the second being atheism, therefore there isn't really an "atheist" option on the poll. But maybe I'm just nitpicking

@duga: how do you justify believing in reincarnation? not trying to attack you, just curious

edit: and I know this is a poll, but shouldn't it be in the Philosophy/Religion subforum?

duga

There are a lot of things that have influence my belief in reincarnation. A lot of them can easily be passed off as unprovable, but the biggest thing that really got me to consider it a personal belief was the fact that there have been many studies done on it. There have been many cases where small children recollect events of a past life. I read one study where a child not only gave the circumstances of his death, but names of family members and even where he lived. The scientists studying the case tracked his old family down and confirmed all the details the child gave, and he was born halfway around the world. That is one of many cases, but they are never publicized at all because of the religious implications such studies have. I encourage everyone to look up some of these studies if they are interested.

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Confusion will be my epitaph...

Goblin Tears

I share this belief...it seems a lot more logical than the go to hell/heaven horse-pucky the church feeds to the public. I don't believe humans are re-incarnated as other animals though. The universal laws of karma also appeal to me, though I'm not a Buddhist.

RVCA

Well, if my limited understanding of reincarnation is correct, it is very similar to the "hell/heaven horse-pucky" that Christianity is known for. Don't you get a "better reincarnation" of sorts if you behaved well in your prior life? And on the flipside, if you were a bad person in your prior life, you get a ****ty reincarnation? To me, that's a very similar "carrot in front of the horse" type thing to get people to adhere to some kind of moral code put forth by a faith.

Or am I way off

duga

^

I can't pretend to be able to define what specifically happens with reincarnation (I don't believe we can come back as animals), but I believe it happens in some capacity. Religions have turned it into nothing more than the heaven/hell crap, but reincarnation in itself is very logical.

I just want to point out Christians believed in reincarnation when it was first spreading.

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Confusion will be my epitaph...

Goblin Tears

You are right in your thinking in relation to Buddhist re-incarnation...my belief itself is more self-defined. I'm more inclined to believe the soul itself chooses what life to lead in its various incarnations, for the sake of spiritual development. But this is an intuitive belief I have that a lot of people don't seem to share.

I honestly think that the reason the church removed reincarnation from its belief system was because they wanted to control the masses with terror. And the prospect of having multiple lives was significantly less initimidating than the prospect of original sin and its beloved consequence, eternal damnation.

noise

staunch atheist here.

though i do feel i understand and even appreciate the role religion has (had) to play in human society. but i'm talking only of early, personal religions, not so much the dogmatic, institutionalized monstrosities that dominate today.

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