Yep. That’s me.
Oops! Wait a minute. You’re a different pookie. Sorry 
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I belong to a Baptist church and there is no liturgy.
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I’ve often thought that the rebellious spirit of the Protestant reformation was ingrained into me to the point where of course I was going to rethink everything the school taught. We went into that history in detail (at least for our age groups), athough not far enough to reveal Luther’s antisemitism. That I found on my own and it, combined with the idea of hell (and thinking of what that would mean to a few relatives, not to mention how it conflicts so openly with the covenant), had me openly questioning by 6th grade, and invited to leave by 8th. I was able to justify a sort of deism for years, but the bible makes little sense to me, and finding no doctrinal basis for the belief I couldn’t justify it to myself. My thinking was that I might as well believe in unicorns or dragons. That said, part of me feels that if I had been raised strictly Jewish or Catholic I probably would have stuck with it simply out of tradition.
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I just found this thread so I’ll hop in.
I’m Muslim. Not as practicing mostly secular honestly. Do me a favor and don’t start bashing me with islamaphobic material. Gets kind of annoying.
I was mostly raised in a semi practicing family. Parents are divorced so my pops the one I live with never really raised me to be a better Muslim.no way trying to bash my dad but he was mostly focused on raising me to become successful in life. So more so focused on my actual school work like math and sciences. Whereas my mother was more better of raising me as a Muslim. For example year round my sibling go to Islamic school on the weekends to practice reading the Quran. It’s a common thing for Somali youth in America actually. A lot actually take weekend courses at a local mosque just practicing reading the Quran.
Even though I’m not really as religious I do respect some of the values of it. I don’t really “sin” as much as others who I consider more religious than me. A good instance for this is I’m not that guy who is posting a vid on instagram of me getting twerked on and a video another day chilling at the mosque reading a high chapter in the Quran.
I’m more so like pray maybe like a few times a week, attend the mosque every Friday for Friday prayer and ultimately try to get rid of this terrorist image people think of when it comes to Islam
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I’m a Somali American born in Texas. So it gets annoying seeing the only thing mentioned about Muslims a lot on media mostly terrorism.
Since I was a kid I have always aspired to work in a career That is either helping or protecting others. like military, law enforcement, and health. Just to help get rid of this terrorist image people have of Muslims.
For military and the health field I was thinking of working in medicine . And search and rescue position for the military . I still have that in mind.
For law enforcement I was considering working in a law enforcement agency here for awhile in the states and after I had some experience here in the states I would go to Somalia and start working with the the criminal investigation division. The Alshabab(terrorist group in Somalia) are like roaches man. We all hate them and it seems like they aren’t leaving. Someone needs to get rid of them
I was thinking Somalia would be a good place to work for other Somalis like myself who live in western countries that have/had an interest in law enforcement work. US western educated Somalis might be able to put up a fight against the terrorist group.
Side note: i have been asking my dad a lot about Somalia lately. Mostly about his life their and etc before the civil war happened. I recently found out his uncle was a criminal investigator for the government of Somalia. Found that pretty awesome.
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This x 100
What’s also frustrating, is that many so-called new-atheists who proclaim to love science, also makes this mistake. They conflate the objective reality outside of us (how reality is, regardless of how we perceive it, or feel about it*) with the human effort to grasp this reality (science).
What Zeb here is stumbling over, is the ironic nature of science, that on one hand it is an effort to grasp reality, but on the other, it is based on the idea that we can never be 100% shure if we grasped it. Further this contradiction, helps to advance our understanding of reality, because the new generation has the right and duty to question the former generations scientific explanations.
*The “I am that I am” from the bible is in my view similar to the conception that reality is the way it is, regardless if it corresponds to our understanding of it.
PS. I’m no scientist, but this is at least how I understand it. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
Skipping ahead to report vaguely Judaeo-Christian here. I strongly believe in intelligent design, and tend to imagine a parental, but uninvolved, force. So as I want my children to be good and moral and happy and well, I assume God wants that for me.
I have difficulty with doctrine.
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This is basically me as well. Most of my extended family is Catholic and that’s a source of, we’ll call it, frustration to say the least.
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The Lewiston Maine Police would probably love to hear from you, as would a number of other LE agencies here in Maine.
I’ve been watching North Woods Law on animal planet recently, that seems like a decent gig.
They definitely get a lot of interesting jobs to do. A few days ago they helped find the asshole who killed a 62 year old Somerset County deputy.
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I had heard about that. I didn’t realize it was them. I’m glad they got that scumbag.
I’m pretty sure every agency in the state plus some feds were involved in the manhunt.
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I bet, in that situation.
Why?
Because I live in such an exquisitely ordered ecosystem, I simply can’t imagine that random happenstance accounts for it. I feel an analogy would be to taking a bunch of stuff out of my pantry, throwing it all approximately in the direction of the oven, and somehow coming out with a frosted, decorated wedding cake.
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I am a Muslim, seems to be because I was born into a Muslim family. I have enjoyed learning about other religions and given them a lot of thought, but never really considered them for me personally. The idea of being a slave of God seems accurate to me, even if depressing to you.
What if you had a billion attempts at making the cake, and every time you tried you got to learn from your previous mistakes and carry your successes into the future?
The idea of “random happenstance” is wildly overblown and (in my opinion) misunderstood when talking about these kinds of things. There is an orderly process happening that happens to make use of “random occurrences” as they pop up. Randomness is not the bedrock of the process, its a small piece of it. And even then its not really “random”, it is slight variances in the already established process.
Instead of your cake analogy lets use poker. Lets say you wanted to make the best poker hand and were randomly given 5 cards. You now get to select which ones to keep and get to draw again… over and over and over again, until you decide to keep the hand and play it. What might that poker hand look like to you after say, even 5 redraws? 10 redraws? This analogy has flaws and doesnt perfectly illustrate the process of evolution, but its much closer than the cake.
What intelligently designed the thing that intelligently designed the universe?
An idea of the single Creator of the universe also makes more sense using the Bing Bang. What’s more likely - someone laboriously hammering away designing everything from sub-atomic particles to every multi cell living organisms or someone setting up the initial equations and then clicking “run simulation” and ending up with millions and millions of intelligent species among which there’s an aggressive breed of intelligent primates?