Skyla asked the extremely personal question: What constitutes as your religion and what beliefs do you have that are unique to other religions of the world?
Like Skyla, I like to think of myself as someone that does not share a religion with any particular group. I call myself a Christian simply for my belief in Jesus as the Son of God and I call myself a Protestant because I despise church and you can't really be too Catholic without it. Other than that I can't say that I have had too much in common with any Christians that I've talked with. I don't buy the creation story, but I do believe in intelligent design of some sort. I absolutely believe in evolution and scientific fact holds more weight in my mind than religious text of any sort. I don't take every word of the Bible as fact, I actually take very little of it as fact. Most of the time when I talk with other Christians about their beliefs I wonder if we have read the same Bible or not. I think that God loves you even if you're a gay black Buddhist. Hatred is in no way part of my personal Christianity and I think my Jesus would be ashamed of most Christians today. As my best friend loves to say, "Jesus loves the people you hate." My belief in "hell" is something that I'm still cultivating. I can't seem to bring myself to say that people like Hitler (to bring him up yet again) are sipping tea with Jesus, so there must be a hell. At the same time, I refuse to believe that good people like Gandhi were cast into the lake of fire simply because they weren't Christian. My mother, an agnostic of sorts, believes that everyone goes to heaven, but that they're not the same people as they were on earth. She thinks heaven in like earth in the sense that there is a structured society that's something like reincarnation to the Hindu's. The people who lived the best lives that they could are rewarded and those that weren't so good are their "servants" of sorts. I like to imagine Hitler serving my mom (the agnostic) and Jesus (the Jew) milk and cookies. Perhaps my mom has it right, or maybe Skyla does. I suppose that I find comfort that crappy people will be getting theirs however Jesus sees fit (again, the Hitler image). I believe that we must all have some purpose for living, be it big or small. I believe in both destiny and free will. To me, God sounds like "Fix You" and tastes like mint chocolate chip ice cream. God is the Costa Del Sol in June. It's getting caught in the hail after you've gotten a B on the paper you worked your ass off on and being able to laugh about it all. My God isn't about rules and regulations, but figuring it all out as you go along. Life isn't some multiple choice test and eternity isn't pass or fail. God's a beautiful gray area. There has to be more to it than "right" and "wrong" or "sinner" and "saint." I think there's "human" and "God" and that we're more connected than we can ever hope to understand.
My question is: For those of you who don't believe in God or heaven, what do you think happens when we die? Do you believe we have souls?
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