We all are subjected to the spiritual or religious beliefs of those adults we encounter in our childhood. Most often these influences come from our parent(s). Having been raised in particular religious or spiritual beliefs, have you continued with those beliefs or have they changed? Can you explain the choices you have made?
My parents were not pushy in regards to anything. They taught me to believe what I wished and were more than willing to allow my exploration. I don’t believe in the Western God but rather that of an immense source of life. I believe we all have access to this flow or Dao. This is my experience with life and it is also why I am pursuing my studies with the Eastern systems.
But my beliefs are my own and I accept that.
I will have to make a monster post about my beliefs…i’m actually trying to write a book, because i’m not sure if the belief system exists yet. but i’ll give a sneak preview when i have time.
I believe there is a God. He is all good and all powerful. He is full of love and mercy. God is love.
I believe that when all men die they go to heaven and a have a direct experience of God.
A direct experience of God surpasses in goodness anything a man is used to experiencing while a mortal on earth. It is a bright white light where man understands the order and heirarchy of the universe. It is brilliant and blissful. It is beyond anything we can imagine. Actually, it is ineffable.
I believe a man can have a direct experience of God before death also, but it is a very rare occurence and occurs in degrees. I believe there are only two ways for this to happen. First and foremost by God’s grace. And more rare still may a man lead himself to God by living a moral and disciplined life. I believe men such as Jesus, Siddhartha Gautama(Buddha), and Paul have had a direct experience of God.
My views of a direct experience of God are influenced by Dr. Richard M. Bucke’s concept of Cosmic Consciousness.
He described the experience as such:
“Like a flash there is presented to his consciousness a clear conception (a vision) in outline of the meaning and drift of the universe…He sees and knows that the cosmos…is in fact…in very truth a living presence. He sees that instead of men being, as it were, patches of life scattered through an infinite sea of non-living substance, they are in reality specks of relative death in an infinite ocean of life. He sees that the life which is in man is as immortal as God is; that the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love, and that the happiness of every individual is in the long run absolutely certain.”
“The person who passes through this experience will learn in the few minutes, or even moments, of its continuance more than in months or years of study, and he will learn much that no study every taught or can teach. Especially does he obtain such a conception of the whole…Along with moral elevation and intellectual illumination comes what must be called, for want of a better term, a sense of immortality.”
God is personal, all knowing, all loving, all powerful, omnipresent and extremely important.
Thank you, HB. I don’t know you, but I understand you. I am off to find Dr. Richard M. Bucke’s concept of Cosmic Consciousness. Thank you for understanding me - whoever you are. 
I believe I once thought about writing this question, because I thought it was worth typing, but now I think of it, nah.
my mom wasn’t really religious and my dad was logical to a fault. so my beliefs are my own. my belief in god is probablly closer to a neutral over soul that we are all part of, than a single definative entity.
I’m not shure about the after life but I beleive there is one, though I’m not shure what it is.
As for us I beleive in acending to a higher state of being through personal development, What that is however I cannot say.
As for good and evil I dont beleive in either, because to me they are all just people who live and breathe as I do.
I understand that with every choice comes both posative and negative conciquences native to that choice, and so their are some choices I won’t make because the negative outweighs the posative, or the results are nill.
My signature as of this writing shows the irony of my being Agnostic.
More today, I believe there’s an important psychological advantage in believing a specific sort of religious structure- a false dichotomy. Being insepid. I’m convinced that a great deal of my failures are involved in my abandonment of religious principals.
If I could, I would possibly convince myself to believe the age-old legend pertaining to Yggdrasil, and the choir of the heavenly spheres. That the sky had different layers which were different states of being. And that one tree holds together the world and holds up the heavens. That if you find the roots you could theoretically climb the branches to the spheres.
It ties to the success of our tree-climbing ancestors, the importance of ecology, and the reward of exploring the heavens. I could be content to know that this may not be the way things actually are, but that it’s the best rendition for my fragile mind to conceive. In ambition to find the “roots” I might take up Earth Sciences. And I would consider “if we reach the greater spheres, and achieve different states of being, we might be able to perceive the more complex things.” I would admire the frontier of space.
The pursuit of real truth, I think, generally guides the rickety human psyche into a turnoff which convinces her that everything is too fragile, and people are too cruel, and there’s little reward in life or death. My feeling of religious brainwashing leaves me isolated. The scientiffic theories, showing how the universe may yet be quite amazing, staves off my depression. I envy a sense of direction and meaning in many people I consider ignorant.
If it were not for mentions of “eternal torment,” I probably would have been heavily Christian today. So I still tend to believe what makes me feel better.
I believe that I feel nausiated and my head hurts, because of the salamanders, but the pleasure was so powerful, I’d do it again, even if the pain here and now is this strong.
I believe th… th…
…
Be careful Dan. The toxins in the slime can kill you. 
What do I believe and why?
I believe that some part of the mind survives the death of the body. How much I don’t know. It is self evident that the body does not survive.
The sense of hearing does not survive; it is only an aspect of the body which can only hear a very small part of the spectrum anyway. We do not, therefore, hear the ‘heavenly choir’ which is just a fantasy of man’s limited imagination.
The sense of touch does not survive, another aspect of the body. Therefore there is no hell-fire. No carbon to burn! Again man’s restricted imagination.
The sense of sight does not survive. Same reason. And we can only see a minute part of the whole spectrum anyway.
Same for taste and smell.
So what does survive? Well, if the mind is only the brain that can’t survive either. So, to survive, the mind must be greater than the brain. I suspect that the brain, to some degree, is merely the organ which connects the mind to the body.
So where the hell is the mind? Well, current scientific theories say that over 90% of the universe is missing. I have a great admiration for science and it seems to have an excellent concept of how the 5+% that we know about works. For the other 90+% it has invented ‘dark matter’. It knows where this is and can measure it. Unfortunately it doesn’t have the slightest idea what it might be.
There would appear to be plenty of space for the mind to exist.
String theory currently has eleven dimensions of which we know about three. Again plenty of space for the mind to reside. Remember, this is only a model and a language to try and assist us to visualise something which is totally beyond our comprehension.
I will introduce another model to try and visualise my current ideas. The octopus. This creature has ganglia, small brains if you will, to control each tentacle. I visualise a scenario where this little brain thinks it is THE brain. It may be the equivalent of OUR brain. There is so much more to the overall brain than it can ever visualise itself.
On occasion this little brain gets a trace of a communication from the greater brain. It says ‘I have someone looking after me’ or ‘An angel came to me’ or even ‘I have been spoken to by God’. Even this ‘main’ brain is so far beyond the ganglia’s imagination that it never occurs to it that the ocean may be teaming with octopuses. (octopi?)
So what do I believe? I believe that some part of the mind survives the death of the body in a fashion completely beyond my comprehension. It will here (not that it’s a place) be re-merged with that from whence it came. All its (my?) faults will here be plain to see. It will not be judged, more analysed.
What I do not believe is that there is any truth whatever in what the bible thumpers, koran thumpers or, indeed, any other manuscript thumpers have to say. They, and I, can only, at most, have the slightest inkling of where the truth may lie.
My family is filled with religion, Ministers,preachers, priests, missionaries, the devout on down to foxhole believers.
We were taught to question. Ooops, overkill, my folks forgot to put a harness on me or they couldn’t get one. My sibs are harnessed. My sibs are followers. I can not.
I have no religious beliefs. I have universal beliefs. I have beliefs that we are much more than we think we are. I believe in myself and my own power that I have. I believe there is a higher intelligent being or more than one out there that humans believe is omnipotent but, they/it still is just a being like us. I think this being has a vested interest in us.
I believe that our energy and the universal energy will carry us to greater places. Evolution will occur in our minds not just our bodies.
I believe in greater possibilities than a nirvanic afterlife or hellish one. We create our own space and time. we give of ourselves and receive from others. We are growing constantly. Our wars are petty compared to the horrors out in the universe. Our beauty is mundane compared to what is out in the universe. I believe in many things, I believe in us.
Do you want the distilled version, or the unabridged version?
I think it’s best to start out like one of those movies that start out at the end and work your way back… like memento, or the TV series lost, where as the series goes on you learn more about how and why the character acts the way they do.
Currently, I believe there is some sort of underlying creator of the universe, but that all religion is sort of an anthropogenic versions of that creator. If anything God is probably an ugly rat creature like in South Park. EDIT-ADDITION: Another part of my current belief is that it’s important to hold on to some level of your child like innocence.
Since my parents and their parents (all the way back to the “prophet”) were mormons, I can’t pin these beliefs on them… but I can thank freak coincidences that happened for my ability to break free from the same belief as my parents.
One of these freak coincidences was having a questioning mind from birth. When I was about three years old, I started asking my parents all sort of scientific questions about the origins of the universe and why is the sky blue, etc. Their religious answers and deistic answers never completely satisfied my curiosity. They bought me “little learner” books, that helped shape my mind in the authors image.
But, I wouldn’t realize just how wierd and strange mormon practices were till I left the church, and read comparisons to freemasonry. I was only able to leave the church, after leaving my parents house. It seemed a disgrace upon them to leave the church while under their roof… a lack of respect, that every parent deserves unless they are monsters. It was around this time that I cult hopped. I went jumped from the oven to the frying pan, so to speak. Christianity, while being less controlling of your destiny and free thought than mormonism, still exerted an unpleasant force upon my will, that made me leave christianity after ‘being born again’ it was like a seven month span.
After that I experimented with atheism, it was like a schoolgirl getting drunk and experimenting with lesbianism. I knew it didn’t feel right, but I wanted to try denying god anyways. And I was right… I couldn’t be a full fledged atheist either. It made me feel much more… “vehement.” I also always felt as an atheist that I was repressing some great truth. now, the atheists out in the crowd at this point will say, that is because of my upbringing… but, if it is merely because of my upbringing, why don’t I think god is man, and man will become god? Why don’t I believe the entire mormon mythology?
I think it’s like Voltaire stated; “Moral law is an absolute, there is only one morality, like there is only one geometry.” Thusly, god is the force behind that absolute IMO, he hints what is moral and right… but we need to have our minds opened to what is moral and right.
Well, I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman’s back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.
“I believe” … (best Ron White impersonation voice)
That if life gives you lemons, you should make lemondade. Then find someone who’s life has given them Vodka, and have a party.
In essence, I believe in the irrational, unpredictable, obfuscating and irresponsive.
Why?
Open your eyes and looke around, it fits, doesn’t it?
What do I believe and why.
That I am here on earth experiencing life.
That God gave me this gift of life, and that the greatest gift I can give God is to serve others.
That God is just, and everyone will be compensated for their deeds.
That there is no absolute right or absolute wrong.
That I am human and not a saint, I get mad and make mistakes.
Go away, dammit. That was more than sweet.
I believe in myself. I believe that Jack Daniels can make me Aretha Franklin. I believe that every stupid job and every embarrassing experience has built who I am. I believe if you have no pain, you have no gain… I believe in indulgences and doing the unexpected. I believe that you don’t have to be jaded no matter how old or jaded you are now. I believe you can love and be loved when you least expect it. I believe that when you love yourself, you have a better chance of finding it. I believe in the Golden Rule and in sweet charity. I believe in Robin Hood, good pasta and even better wine. I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days, but I stole that one.
I guess no one recognizes it, but it’s from Bull Durham, the scene where Crash is talking to Susan Sarandan’s character. I haven’t seen it in awhile, actually had to Google it to get the entire speech.