I created another thread because i couldnt fit all the religions in the other thread (as you can only have 6 answers to the poll).

Come on poeple! I want to see religous debates in this thread!

I am an atheist. I don't beleive in religious superstition.

(Why am I getting a feeling of deja vu?)

Atheism is not really a religion... but that.

ATHEOS, bring on the drinks.

I'm a protestant Christian :)

I used to be a Jehovah's Witness until I started reading the Bible in depth. Now I'm just non-religious.

You know, I never understood what kind of religion that was. Do they use the Bible? IS it some form of Christianity?

Yeah it's basically Christianity for "purists" if such a thing exists, though their beliefs are just as warped to me. JWs (I'm not writin that shit everytime) use a version of the Bible that they revised from the American Standard version called the "New World Translation" and take most of the text literally. They also believe that Satan was cast down from heaven on October 1, 1914.

There are a lot of other weird things that seemed odd to me (Death is just non-existence, only 144,000 christians will go to Heaven, no blood transfusions, etc) so I started reading the Bible myself (You're not allowed to study the Bible independantly, but my family never practiced that).

I used to be a JW too, it's a wierd messed up system of beliefs, and as an organization it's a high control group. It's literalist christianity that is today loosely based off of the bizzare and insane ramblings of a Pastor Russel who insisted that by means of astrology, numerology and measuring pyramids in egypt, we could discern that the rapture would occur in 1914.

Obviously it didn't, and he died shortly there after, and a con man by the name of rutherford took the religion over, and milked it for his own profit for decades. He made predictions like 'the great men of old (abraham, isaac, moses) would return in 1925 and they will need a large mansion in southern california to live in while they rule over us, so make your donations now. The mansion was built, and he named it "Bath sarim" and lived in it, you know just until the great old ones returned. Lots of people left the religion in his early days because he went through the great depression with pent houses and mansions around the world and multiple luxury cars while telling people to donate money to god's work.

After his Death, nathan Knorr took over and it took a sharp turn towards becoming a high control group. Both Russel and rutherford insisted that practices like disfellowshipping and excommunication were both unbiblical, pharisaical, and destructive to the integrity of a group. Knorr disagreed and made it so that if you didn't follow his rules, you would be actively shunned by all members of the religion, and apostacy was eventually defined as anything that disagreed with the leaderships teachings.

They all believe they follow the bible, but the truth of the matter is they follow a small group of men in new york who make up whatever they want, quote a scripture that is tangentially related, and then demand you obey it or your family, friends, and everyone else in the religion will shunn you. Any biblical teaching they hold to be true, they would throw in a fire tomorrow and call it the teaching of the devil and apostacy if the next "Watchtower" magazine told them to believe something else. It's a bizarre group and I don't miss it in the slightest.

Nice people though, never confuse the people for the organization. The people are nice folk that unfortunately are being taken advantage of. The watchtower is a billion dollar publishing and real estate corporation that tells it's members that the end is always nigh so donate your money to us now, and "higher education" just fosters "independent thinking" (which according to the watchtower is bad thing), so just continue working as janitors and window washers until armaggedon gets here. Oh well, that phase of my life is over. I marked atheist, even though that's not a religion, I had to click something to see the results.