As a follow on from Just George's thread, here are some more questions about your religious beliefs.
1. Have you a sacred language or languages? Which, and can you post some of your favourite phrases (even if the language is your own)?
2. Have you taken from another religion or used some wisdom from theirs as a basis for something within your own? (This is about personal practice, so Christians saying 'we adapted this from Judaism' doesn't count, for example).
3. Is your religion very academic or more about the purely spiritual side? Do you study academic texts to help you in your faith practice?
4. Has your faith ever caused you to struggle in life, whether morally or being a minority, having a chequered religious history etc.?
5. What are some religious practices you dislike and don't do?
1. Silence.
2. I can't think of too many religions that don't offer something useful or beneficial, and to me the best of the lot seem to be universal, like the Golden Rule; or the concept of No Mind in Zen; the active self-awareness of Buddhism; the whole idea of surrendering yourself to something greater than yourself, summed up as Submission in Islam, the concept of Atman in Hinduism. I see all of these concepts reflected or expressed in different ways across all of the major world religions, and probably some of the more obscure ones too. I think in their purest forms all of these religions can be distilled into Mysticism.
Judiasm: possibly odd personal factoid: far as I know I'm not Jewish (although I may be. I'll explain below*) but I practice the Sabbath. Sundown Friday to sundown Saturday I won't work ( moderator work doesn't count) or work out, I try to keep my travel to a minimum, and if I can remember I try to avoid arguing with anybody (debating in RF counts there.)
I also almost never eat pork (but that's mostly because I have a hard time justifying eating something that's more intelligent and more well-mannered than most of my relatives), or shellfish (but that's mostly because I just don't think it's healthy to eat a bottom feeder), and I think the Jewish idea of God, I Am, is closest to my own and I interpret it this way: "You don't need to know what I am, you just need to know
that I am". When it comes to God, I think that's about as much as we'll ever be able to wrap our heads around anyway.
*My mother was an orphan. She didn't know anything for certain about her father, but she knew that her mother's family, a family of doctors, had immigrated from Germany in 1935.
My mother's foster family raised her as a strict Catholic: 14 years of Catholic School, the whole bit, so if she had been Jewish, it's possible, if not likely that she would have kept it to herself. My mother passed away when I was 23, long before it ever occurred to me to ask.
*Edit: cool coincidence: the Catholic school that my mother attended for both grammar and high School was named Saint Benedict's in Chicago. This thread is, I think, the first time I'd ever mentioned her Catholic upbringing in the 14 years that I've been here, and just now I noticed this:
Feast of St. Benedict 2021
3. I don't consider myself a member of any religion. If my spiritual beliefs amounted to a religion, I guess you'd have to call it Pot-Luckism.
RF is the only place I read anything religion related these days.
4. I was raised Catholic, the Guilt-by-Reason-of-Existence variety. It has and probably still does make it difficult for me to just relax and enjoy myself sometimes.
5. I don't go to church, I don't engage in repetitive prayer as in "Say a zillion Hail Mary's . . ", although there's one short prayer that I try to say everyday, just to be on the safe side.
I also almost never burn people at the stake (anymore)*.
*Unless Site Feedback counts.
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