What causes people consider themselves religious or non religious ???
 

What causes people consider themselves religious or non religious ???

Is there any common denominator that you can think of that makes one human
believe they are religious, and another think they are non religous ?

Can one believe there is a god, but not be religious ?

Can one be spiritual without believing in religion, or god ?

Are you polytheistic, monotheistic, atheistic, or something else ?

Yes, clearly a person can think there's a god and not be religious.--Epicurus A person can also be religious and not think there's a god.--many Buddhists

I have no clear idea what 'spiritual' means. Near as I can tell, it seems to mean, "I believe everything a religious person does but I don't belong to a religious institution." Kind of like saying I eat, but I don't go to restaurants. It's just individiualist personal capitalist religion. Religion without institutions is pretty worthless.

How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash?....The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.

-[Kurt Vonnegut Jr., quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt, by James A. Haught, Prometheus Books, 1996]

Define religious

Didn't we just have this recently?

When I am sitting on the thrown, I am ultimately religious. :cool:

yeahhhhh...I know we sometimes have similar threads on here, but this one would be almost an exact duplicate

darn, I missed it, anyone have a link, or the title to the thread ?

All you need to do is come up with a sound definition of religion, God, spirituality and you should be set. See the problem?

I read some where that atheists are more informed and interested in relegion than people that call them self religious.

I suspect we are more informed and interested in many things.

I disagree. I consider myself religious, or spiritual. I pray regularly, and yet eschewed doctrinaire christianity a long time ago. In my view, the institutions are the problem. Their dogma and social controls interfere with real communication with the divine. Particularly among christianity and islam, the insistence that there is only one path to god is absurd. I would never presume to tell a devout muslim or christian that he was on the wrong path, and I strongly resent being told by their proselytizers that I am.

I think Kerry was implying that a religious institution is a granfalloon.

In answer to the original question, it seems to me that since the vast majority of the human race ascribes to a belief in some form of higher power, creative force, god, whatever you want to call it, there must be an innate need in mankind to seek a connection to that creative force. I don't have any truck with atheists. More power to them, but they are a small minority in a species that is by and large spiritual in one sense or another. It's impossible to name a culture in human history that is or was dogmatically atheist from it's earliest foundations.