What are your thoughts on the concept of having faith in a Higher Power but choosing to distance oneself from established religious doctrines?

Anyone else think it’s cool to just fly solo as a good human, no religion attached?

Religion does not have a monopoly on morality, despite what many preach. Be kind, and believe what you want.

I'm an evangelist's kid. I grew up surrounded by religion. When I got to my 30s I started reevaluating matters of faith. Now in my 60s I consider that journey complete. On "good" days I'm agnostic, on "bad" days an atheist.

I know many awesome people of faith. I know many hideous people of faith. I know many awesome nonbelievers, I know meant hideous nonbelievers.

Be a decent human being and very few people will care what you believe.

Sounds kinda like deists. Most of the founding fathers were, plus a lot of enlightenment thinkers. So you're in good company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism

I would say it’s cooler to be a good person for the sake of it rather than being a good person because you fear hell or desire some sort of reward (eternity in heaven).

I very much doubt you'll find anyone here who discourages you from stepping away from organized religion.

I'm a former Christian pastor on a hiatus from church life, but in no way done with being a Christian in my private life.

I believe the Bible boils religion down to three basic life roles for every individual person to follow: priest, steward, and keeper.

1. As a priest, every person is meant to determine how they ought best to live.
2. As steward they are to take care of the world around them in accordance with their beliefs.
3. As their "brother's keeper" they should work to ensure everyone else is free from coercion to believe and live how they think is best.

When people function in all three roles they are revealing the "image of God".

Live your best life and help others do the same to the best of your ability. Or, as James the brother of Jesus, said, true religion is this: "to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."

My thoughts are that your question is not so much about belief as about tribe. Since you seem to care about your group identity, why not support a sports team instead? It creates fewer problems than religion.

Whatever floats your boat, mate. Having a religion is not a bad thing per se. It's only bad if you try to use it to control other peoples' lives.

Independent religious beliefs outside the confines of religious establishments tend to be healthier, and you're then free of the corruption and manipulation that inherently permeates all religions, due to our inherently flawed human nature.

Religious establishments are very much human inventions. Even if claims within religious canons are true, the religion and texts are all interpretations by deeply flawed human beings, and the rituals practiced were invented by them.

Religion can be used to manipulate and control, and there are individuals who will exploit it for their own self-interests within every religion.

Other than the supportive community that follows some religious institutions, I wholeheartedly believe that people are better off inwardly reflecting on their beliefs, rather than being told what to believe by deeply flawed and easily corruptible authority figures.

Their beliefs are no more demonstratably true than your personal spiritual beliefs.

I'm personally an atheist, but I'm not an anti-theist, and I am a huge advocate of specifically what you're asking about. People should reflect on and develop their own independent spiritual beliefs.

I don't see anything wrong with having faith in a higher power. Plenty of higher powers exist. Like the sun, quasars, super massive black holes, etc.

What you are describing sounds like Deism, which is a philosophy that most of the framers of the US Constitution shared

join us, or not

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apatheism

Well let me ask you this: how specifically would it not be okay?

Organized religion is corruptible to the point of uselessness.

A higher power without religion

Yeah, that sounds fine to me. I think the movie Dogma spells that position out pretty well: organized beliefs lead to all kinds of messy stuff, it's better to just have ideas.

And personally I think humans seem to be wired to want religion. I think it stems from how we're social creatures and we just desperately want to be part of something. And some of the most pervading religions have been the ones that include a father figure in their belief structure; I don't think that's a coincidence either, I think nearly everyone wants someone to follow, someone to tell them what to do, and parents don't last forever.

All that is to say, religion or at least spirituality seems to be something people naturally yearn for. And given that, there's no shame in feeling that yearning.

I feel pretty neutral about it. It seems like a pretty harmless approach to faith.

That's basically agnosticism. And it's pretty common among intellectuals, historically speaking at least

I’m a strong atheist, which means I have a positive belief that no gods exist, just for the record. The way I would put it is that I have never heard of nor have been able to come up with a god concept that I believe is an actual being.

I prefer to use the term “god concept” rather than god to make it clear that we’re talking about a specific idea of a god rather than an actual being. So Odin is a god concept, as is Minerva. Multiple god concepts exist in the bible, including the original regional father-deity El, El’s wife Ashera, their children including Yahweh, and so on. When the Israelites started to move from polytheism to henotheism (many gods exist but you should only worship one), and then to “monotheism” (in scare quotes because there are enough different god concepts as well as divine beings who would be counted as gods in any other pantheon).

In any case, I don’t think having a god concept which you believe refers to an actual being in itself is an indication of anything, good or bad. In my opinion, there’s a feedback loop between the disposition of people and their religions. The problems come in when the religions around the god concepts become extreme. The Amish have a fairly strong god concept, and while I’m not Amish (thank god), I don’t think they do harm unless you think of their actions within their community. 90% of UUs are great people. Sponoza’s Watchmaker would suggest we have to study ourselves to discover what constitutes good. And so on.

So I’d say that your belief is absolutely fine, but you also might be interested in the neurophysiological, social, and anthropological bases of humans so often having god concepts.

Yes. Had religion shoved down my throat as a kid. Learned early on being a religious believer meant nothing, people are shitty no matter what.

Had to decide who I wanted to be, what rules to live by. Realized I don't enjoy hurting people, try to learn from mistakes, random acts of kindness, to always try for the evolved, educated non violent option. That's enough for me. If there's a god who has a problem with that, oh well.

Christian church is made of people. And people are sinful and evil.

Religion doesn't come from what other people tell you is truth, but from your experience. What experience have you lead you to believe in higher power?

I have experienced Luck so good and so significant in my life that I can only exlain it by intervention of higher power. But maybe you didn't experienced something like that, and I can understand that.

Religion comes from within, and not from external sources.

It's cool. I come from a religious background that I questioned all the time, even when my family focused only on teaching us the wholesome beautiful stuff, it's still hard to be on board with the rest or how other people interpret it.

So I've decided to quit. It's still hard, but I do still believe in a higher power. All the rest... I don't think God cares about head scarves or sex or alcohol,... Just live your life the way you want to and you'll be okay.

So in other words non-denominational? My denomination is so specific yet unspecifically connected to anything that you approximately described me as well. Without a doubt this can be said to be one of the driving forces of what we all talked about here. Jesus himself said the expression of love did not matter, it's the love that counts.

Many people follow that path.

What purpose does the belief part cover?

In my experience, this usually fills in for something that people need to be true.

Yep yep yep! You're doin great. Keep it up hu-man

I think you're describing agnostic beliefs, believing there might be a god but not conforming to any religion and basically otherwise being an atheist.

(Not too be confused with Gnostic beliefs, which was a branch of Christianity)

Because I've been playing the audiobook of Eiji Yoshikawa's Musashi for my wife, here's a line from Musashi's Dokkōdō, the "way of walking alone":

Respect Buddha and the gods without counting on their help.

Sound like .

You might as well abide. Or not.

I don't generally believe in a "higher power", despite having religious parents, I never really understood it... I just don't get how people can genuinely believe that there is a higher power that is somehow watching over everyone. That's not to say tat religion is a bad thing. It's not, in fact most non-radicalized religions have genuinely good teachings, be it Christianity, Buddhism or Islam (and others, again I'm not too into this stuff, these are just the religions I can speak semi-confidently about), they all fundamentally teach the same basic things, don't be an asshole, live modestly, help others, etc... (yes I do know it's MUCH more complicated than that).

That's the way I ultimately see the "higher power", as a way to get people to be good members of society by making them believe that there is a higher power that will bless them if they are.

I grew up as a Lutheran Christian in a small, conservative town—and attended Sunday School/summer Bible camp for many years—but became an agnostic after I began questioning things at 16 years old. About a month after that, I became an atheist. I've been one since... so almost 14 years.

Unfortunately, I was afraid to tell my parents, so I still went to church with my family almost every Sunday until I left at 18. I was also still effectively forced to be anacolyte/perform piano/sing in the choir/attend most other church activities. Fucking painful.

I still haven't told my parents, though, and probably never will; it'd cause more pain than anything else, sadly.

There is no reason why anyone has to make the same mistakes I made. There is no god. Just skip to the last step and save yourself so much agony.

just fly solo as a good human

The older you get, the more serious you want to take it. Being true to yourself etc.

But the more serious you take it, the harder it gets. In the end, I'm afraid it's not doable.

I don't see much difference. You're still choosing to believe in a fairy tale, you just don't like the current available stories.