Talk religious to me...

[colliemommie]

So, flist, what is your religious state? What do you self-identify as? Are you part of an organized religion? If so, what sect? Do you consider yourself devout? How often do you attend serivces? Hw often do you pray/meditate/otherwise practice at home? If you are not part of an organized religion, do you consider yourself a religious/spiritual person? Why is my return button not working? Any religousy thoughts you want to share? How do you feel about original sin / mysticism / intercession of saints / the resurrection of the body / life everlasting? Manifestoes welcome! *Disclaimer: I will not try to argue anyone out of any beliefs, convert anyone to anything, be disrespectful or make fun. I will probably ask questions, but I majored in Religious Studies in school and I'm fascinated by all traditions, so it's coming from a place of genuine interest. Anyone who can explain vicarious salvation to me in a way that makes sense gets all the internet cookies in the world!

Comments

[coendou.livejournal.com]

I consider myself to be a monotheist but not Christian. My husband is Lutheran, and we go to services most Sundays and he wants to raise our kids Lutheran at least through confirmation. He likes Missouri Synod, but once we settle down somewhere and actually join (well, he joins) a congregation for real, I want it to be ELCA or some other denomination that allows women pastors and isn't crawling with creationists. The creationism thing confuses him, too - he swears that it wasn't like that in the church he grew up in and that as far as he knowa, no serious Lutheran theologist would take Genesis literally, but for some reason we keep running into Missouri Synod pastors who are creationists, and the church we go to now had a youth retreat at the Creation Museum. When we lived in Ann Arbor, one church we tried a couple of times but never went back after the sermon hit on anti-evolution crap not once but both times. IDK, I really thought that stuff was all evangelicals, but I guess not.

Anyhow, that was a bit of a digression. I guess that counts as "religiousy thoughts I wanted to share."

[colliemommie.livejournal.com]

So if you are a non-Christian monotheist do you lean more towards the Judaic or Islamic models? Or are you a non-Abrahamic monotheist?

[coendou.livejournal.com]

I just believe there's a god. *shrug*

[colliemommie.livejournal.com]

All Protestant sects have this vein of literalism that can pop up in the oddest places sometimes. For religious groups that had so much of their formation during the Enlightenment, it's often surprising to me the things that individual groups will insist on taking literally. Mostly it's the inconsistency between sometimes insisting that things are literal and other times insisting just as vehemently that it's metaphorical. I mean Lutherans don't take it literally when Jesus said "this is my body" and "this is my blood" (They all are consubstantiationists, not transubstantiationists) but some of them will go to bat for creationism?

[coendou.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I really don't get it. It's not like Jesus (who is supposedly God himself) didn't talk in parables all the time. That's kind of his thing. But when it comes to the old testament, oh no, it's word-for-word exactly what actually happened. (And let's not get into the fact that even if the Bible is divinely inspired, it was written down by, translated by, and its books chosen by fallible men who could have introduced all kinds of their own errors and biases in the space between God's mouth and their pen. I can't possibly take it as anything more than a general approximation of God's word at best.)