My Religious Beliefs

"All thinking men are atheists."
-- Ernest Hemingway

A Personality quiz about your religious and spiritual beliefs

http://www.beliefnet.com/Entertainment/Quizzes/BeliefOMatic.aspx

Your Results

The top score on the list below represents the faith that Belief-O-Matic, in its less than infinite wisdom, thinks most closely matches your beliefs. However, even a score of 100% does not mean that your views are all shared by this faith, or vice versa.

Belief-O-Matic then lists another 26 faiths in order of how much they have in common with your professed beliefs. The higher a faith appears on this list, the more closely it aligns with your thinking.

How did the Belief-O-Matic do? Discuss your results on our message boards.

1.	Secular Humanism (100%)
2.	Unitarian Universalism (96%)
3.	Theravada Buddhism (80%)
4.	Liberal Quakers (78%)
5.	Nontheist (78%)
6.	Neo-Pagan (65%)
7.	Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (60%)
8.	Taoism (60%)
9.	Mahayana Buddhism (46%)
10.	New Age (46%)
11.	Orthodox Quaker (37%)
12.	Reform Judaism (37%)
13.	Sikhism (34%)
14.	Jainism (33%)
15.	Baha'i Faith (24%)
16.	Scientology (24%)
17.	Hinduism (22%)
18.	New Thought (21%)
19.	Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (18%)
20.	Seventh Day Adventist (17%)
21.	Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (15%)
22.	Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (13%)
23.	Eastern Orthodox (10%)
24.	Islam (10%)
25.	Orthodox Judaism (10%)
26.	Roman Catholic (10%)
27.	Jehovah's Witness (6%)

I don't subscribe to a religion or to any set of established beliefs. Religious ideas are enunciated as dogmatic teachings rather than as the product of experience or of argument and proof. I strive to accept and reject only those ideas which I myself found to be probably true or false based on my critical evaluation of evidence. This is surely a huge burden in living life, but I see no other way to live my life righteously but to doubt everything. I am greatly disturbed at the thought of abandoning my mental faculties as a tool of the re-establishment of beliefs based on the perpetual re-evaluation of new information.

“Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”
-- Henry Louis Mencken

“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”
-- Richard Dawkins

"I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed. I think this search does not lead to a complacent satisfaction that we know the answer, not an arrogant sense that the answer is before us and we need only to do one more experiment to find out. It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it [as religion does] but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us."
-- Carl Sagan, final words in the last lecture presented in the book The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

Religion is not concerned with truth. People believe in religion not because it is rational, but because religious faith is respectable and brings certain tangible benefits. In other words, religious people claim that religion is "true" despite its irrationality (they still deny that its irrational) and they made up their mind to not doubt it due to the various benefits that their belief brings (the life is made easier to bear due to the belief of eternal life, that there is someone who cares about them, being a part of a presumably supportive community of other religious people, etc.). Religious people find support for their beliefs in fallacious arguments, with the irrationality of the arguments being positively correlated to the strength of the belief.

The Bible is not a moral guide, for the reason that it does not provide sound justification for its claims. However, there are some parts from which everybody can learn something good. It is for this reason that I attend church (The Tierrasanta Seventh-Day Adventist Church)--even to this day. And it is for this reason that Thomas Jefferson created The Jefferson Bible, or The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, by leaving out the supernatural and the inconsistencies from the New Testament.

Thomas Paine, an avid advocate of reason and freethinking, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, similarly to Jefferson, rephrased the main doctrine of the Bible in his own secular terms:

"I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy."
-- Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

"He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God."
-- The Bible, Micah 6:8

Religion, with some of its instruction being very good, teaches many other things, some of which are harmful, and an otherwise good-natured person who has vowed to follow the good moral values of Religion also feels obligated to follow these harmful doctrines.

"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion."
-- Steven Weinberg, Nobel Laureate in physics

"If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities."
-- Voltaire

Religious doctrine is the wrong means of arriving at morality, because doctrines are not based on reason and therefore can establish anything as moral. Religion has it backwards--it asserts that "an action is moral because God says it's moral", whereas a reasoned response (assuming God exists) would be "God says that an action is moral because that action is moral", and yet an even more rational response (without assumptions) would say "morality is regardless of God."

"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed."
-- Albert Einstein

"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise."
-- James Madison

Therefore, what makes a person virtuous is not a blind belief in the morality of certain actions, but a reasoned belief in what is moral. It is not what one believes, but how one arrived at those beliefs that makes a man virtuous or otherwise. A person that believes, based on creed, that good things are moral is not virtuous, because that same person might believe that evil things are moral based on the same creed. Thus, a person who bases his or her moral values any dogma can not be a virtuous person. In contrast, only a person that comes up with what is moral based on deliberation and reason himself or herself can become a virtuous person. What is virtue? It is the knowing of what are virtuous actions and performing these actions.

"Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretenses to both."
-- William Hazlitt

"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines."
-- Bertrand Russell

"Religion is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions."
-- Albert Einstein

"Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. [...] If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity."
-- Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (1939)

"Religion is an illusion, and it derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses."
-- Sigmund Freud

"[Religious ideas] are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes. As we already know, the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protection—for protection through love—which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one"
-- Sigmund Freud

Faith brings an array of benefits, such as a belief in a purpose and the immortality of the soul, a like-minded community, meditation, the comfort that the assurance of eternal life brings, including the cessation of the need to challenge oneself. By following any creed, no matter how good, he sets up a false pretense that he is wise and virtuous when he is neither.