What's your favorite religion beside your own?

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I voted Jewish because I’m ethnically Jewish. But in all honesty, I’m totally addicted to comparative religious studies and I have gone through various phases of interest. I enjoyed learning about the various fundamental anabaptist type religions, especially the Amish and Mennonites, the newer faiths like the early Mormons (lots of cool, strange beliefs there and the whole polygamy thing), Christian Science, Church of Religious Science… and the Seventh Day Adventists (especially their tie in to sanitariums and new age health treatments).

I remember my Egyptian phase - that was a lot of fun.

I’d like to know more about Islam and Hinduism. And Zoroastrianism is really fun to study.

And even though we don’t have much information, I’ve always been intrigued by the really ancient pagan faiths of every civilization.
 
followingtheway said:
And no this thread nothing to do with converting…
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Well for me there is only one religion.👍 The one and only true religion there is!
The Church that Christ himself founded.🙂 There is no other favorite religion for me! 👍
That’s my answer for this thread…

Matthew
 
Lokabrenna said:
I’ve played a video game series (Shin Megami Tensei) where you can do something like that. I don’t think a lot of Catholics would like it very much though, so best to leave it to us godless folk. 😃

My vote will have to be for Thor, though, since he is a part of the pantheon I worship. It’s a loyalty thing.
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Ah, Shin Megami Tensei. I admit I got a chuckle when I read about (never played it, yet) a character named Louis Cyphre. But hey, at least it’s more subtle than something like Dr. Acula. 😃

Just a personal thought (I hope I’m not being offensive here): is it just me, or are Greco-Roman, Egyptian and Norse gods too popular, at least for Western people? I mean, there are modern attempts to reinstitute their worship, but I have yet to see large-scale reconstructions of less well-known ‘pagainisms’ from other cultures. 🤷
 
Hastrman said:
That fight would go to the Navajo Hero Twins. The older brother’s name is He Kills Hostile Gods. The younger brother, boringly, is Child of the Water.
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Of course, mere gods would not hold a candle to the buddhas! 😃
 
patrick457 said:
Ah, Shin Megami Tensei. I admit I got a chuckle when I read about (never played it, yet) a character named Louis Cyphre. But hey, at least it’s more subtle than something like Dr. Acula. 😃

Just a personal thought (I hope I’m not being offensive here): is it just me, or are Greco-Roman, Egyptian and Norse gods too popular, at least for Western people? I mean, there are modern attempts to reinstitute their worship, but I have yet to see large-scale reconstructions of less well-known ‘pagainisms’ from other cultures. 🤷
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Unfortunately, the first two SMT games were never released in North America (and it doesn’t look like they ever will be) but Louis Cyphre is a recurring character in the main series and sometimes makes an appearance elsewhere (my favourite incarnation thus far is the one in Devil Summoner 2). His personality varies from game to game as well, sometimes he’s more of an uber-bad, other times he’s a little more helpful, he always has his own agenda, though.

As far as more “popular” gods, there are Celtic reconstructionists, but I think most people are exposed to Celtic-y things through Wicca, which tends to be heavily Celtophilic these days (so many people have Cerridwen and Cerrnunnos as their God and Goddess, it seems) with varying degrees of accuracy, so I don’t think the CRs get as much press as they should. Most paganisms simply don’t have the numbers to do any large scale things, although I have heard of attempts to reconstruct Mesoamerican (particularly Aztec) religions (sans human sacrifice), Canaanite religion, and Sumero-Akkadian religion, among others.
 
I selected Judaism. I consider it an antecedent to my own religion. 😃
 
AnAtheist said:
Oh, a mixture of Xenon and Oxygen is quite nice to breathe, as you can dive and swim in it at the same time.

To answer the OP: The Norse gods are by far the most worthy of worship. Followed by the Roman-Greek ones.
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I don’t know if I’d say the Norse gods are worthy of worship, but they’d be good to party with. 👍
 
Contarini said:
Agreed. I answered the original question more in terms of “what religion would I belong to if I weren’t a Christian.”
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To answer the question that way, if I weren’t a Christian, I think I’d be what I was just before becoming a Christian: an eclectic mostly Eastern deist/pantheist, with Taoism, Zen, Vedanta and Natural Law (Locke’s version) in the mix.
 
Catholicism. Since I’m not Catholic I can legitimately say that 🙂

I find the level of scholarship to be extraordinary and the rich history to be absorbing and fascinating. I suspect the same may be true in the Eastern Orthodox traditions, but I don’t speak Greek so it’s inaccessible to me.

If I had a second choice, probably the Sikh faith. I work with several Sikhs and they are universally people who put a high premium of personal integrity and their families. I’m sure like all faiths there are some bad Sikhs but the ones I know are beautiful people.

Judaism is also very attractive, but for me personally, only Orthodox Judaism. Once you get away from the original core beliefs of a faith, it becomes a very slippery slope and I’ve never been able to understand the attraction of Reform/Conservative Judaism.
 
Judaism. (Surprise!)

I’ve long supposed if I weren’t a Christian I would be an Orthodox Jew (ditto AmericanMuslim, for some reason it seems more attractive than the Conservative-Reform-Re-constructionist movements.)

After Judaism, Islam. I couldn’t imagine myself a Muslim, though, simply because it comes from a different Abrahamic tradition – I don’t think I could relate to it.

Then, the Druze religion.

Then Zoroastrianism.
 
AmericanMuslim said:
If I had a second choice, probably the Sikh faith. I work with several Sikhs and they are universally people who put a high premium of personal integrity and their families. I’m sure like all faiths there are some bad Sikhs but the ones I know are beautiful people.
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That is my experience of Sikhs as well. Very impressive people. Cheerful, honest and hard working.

rossum
 
Hinduism. I like that they are free to worship God as the Supreme Mother as well as father. They also pray on a rosary of sorts, called a mala. I also like their emphasis on meditation and believe that Catholics could benefit from it as well.
 
Mennonites. I lived near them in central Virginia as a kid. They made the best apple butter. Sometimes I feel really ready to chuck the TV, computer and all that and go make chairs or something.
 
For me it would have to be Judaism.

I began reading about the Moshiach (Messiah) in Jewish thought at the kind request of a Jewish friend of mine who I was debating at the time. Now I’m simply looking for God, and wondering if God is to be found in Torah. I’m certainly finding it difficult to accept some of what is taught in Christian thinking about Jesus as being the fufillment of the Messianic prophecies of the Tanakh.
 
I voted Taoism, even though it’s teachings can be accepted by any person of any faith as a philosophy. Much of the religion part is just plain Chinese folk religion. As a Catholic, I accept the teachings of Taoism as true and very necessary in this swiftly changing world. Heck, I’d publish the Bible with this in the appendix!
 
For me, it’s Catholicism! I don’t want this to come across like some suck-up, patronizing reply, because I mean it sincerely (but it does seem somehow wrong that the faith hosting this site doesn’t even appear in the graph :D).

In college I was a music major. If you study the history of classical music in all of Europe and Russia, you absolutely have to understand something of the traditions and faith of the Catholic Church, because so many of the most amazingly beautiful, complex, and inspiring musical compositions ever written were done so to accompany the different aspects of worship in the Church. Here’s a Mormon boy who at one time could pray the Rosary because he had to learn of the music associated with it (and I rather regret that I’ve since forgotten it all). And of course many of the greatest musical geniuses in history – from Machaut and Josquin to Beethoven and Berlioz – composed music to accompany the Mass. The Lutherans might claim Bach, but his religious compositions are definitely undergirded by Catholic worship forms.

And how do you describe the ethereal beauty of Gregorian Chant?

So then think it through – if this music is so deeply, spiritually moving in and of itself, what does that say about the worshipful texts that inspired the music in the first place? To me it says plenty – plenty that is good, ennobling, and uplifting.

And another danged thing while I’m on this rant (and hope my fellow Mormons listen up). When we LDS talk about apostasy we need to quit coming across as though all the lights went out in 100 A.D. and didn’t come on again until 1820. For pity sake, some of deepest thinking, greatest theological minds in human history come from this period. And with what religion were many (if not most) of them associated? Well, that would be the Catholic religion. Thomas Aquinas, Luis de Molina, Sir Thomas More, Origen, that light-weight (NOT!) St. Augustine of Hippo – the list is longer than a bad LDS Sunday School lesson!

If you love and can respect history, tradition, artistic excellence (both visual and aural), great thinkers, and much else that is “virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy,” ya gotta love Catholicism. So mark at least one ‘X’ in that box for me!
 
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