Tell me about your religion and why you choose it

Im a satanist and I landed on that conclusion because I dont like to believe there is a god that has my life planned. I believe I have control over everything that happens to me, therefore making me my own god. I think everyone has their own power to control their life. 

Im a satanist and I landed on that conclusion because I dont like to believe there is a god that has my life planned. I believe I have control over everything that happens to me, therefore making me my own god. I think everyone has their own power to control their life. 

I am a Atheist because I never believed in any kind of higher Power. Even tho I was raised in Christianity, things like praying felt more like a chore to do like brushing your teeth. 

I'm a Baptist, but for half of my life (most of my young life) I was an Atheist.

I came to the conclusion that I had never actually looked into any of the claims made that formed my beliefs when I was younger, so I set out trying to discover what I could - and at every turn I found that it reinforced the belief that God created the Earth, Man, and everything we see - and that Jesus Christ was not only real, but that he did die on that cross (for our sins) and did rise again three days later.

For much of my life I was parroting what people who posed themselves as "smart" said - because I was afraid to be seen as "not smart" because people around me would berate me as such. I didn't have "religious trauma" in the way I hear a lot of people saying - rather I had "anti-religious trauma" - from an older sibling who was an open nihilist, who thought he got all the answers when he was 14 and never looked any farther.

Even still, I don't like the term "Religion" - as "Religion" denotes organization, hierarchy, and institutions here on Earth - as opposed to the one true hierarchy that I see - there is God, he is above us, and there is us.

I settled on being a Baptist because I understand, and I believe it is made VERY CLEAR in the scripture that we are NOT SAVED BY ACTIONS - but that our debts were paid in full by one man 2000 years ago, on a cross. This is the real reason why so many kids are taught John 3:16 - because it encapsulates the entirety of Protestantism very well.

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever shall believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

And this isn't even going into things like Physical Evidence for the gospel, key locations and artifacts that have been unearthed (look into the Sodom and Gomorrah sulfer bulbs), other accounts and descriptions that recount and verify the stories within the Bible (such as non-Christian Roman accounts), the psychological evidence of Jesus' disciples being killed and dying for their beliefs when they could've easily just denounced him and lived (they saw him work miracles and they knew they would live forever in Heaven if they believed in him), and the repeated attempts at "debunking" various events that fall flat time after time (such as the attempted "debunking" of the Shroud of Turin - which effectively acts as a "photograph" of Jesus Christ - by NASA (yeah you read that right, NASA tried to debunk it and they had to cherry pick data just to get it to make sense - they dated one repair stitch in the fabric that was put there in the 1500's that everyone knew about and then claimed it was a piece of art from that time period, while the rest of the fabric was clearly 2000 years old, and bleached in such a way that didn't exist during those times - look into it, the enemies of Christ are everywhere and in high places).

all this trouble with religion began when i was about 12 years old. i found the book “cosmic consciousness” by richard beck, which inspired me to search for the essence of the universe. and then i felt the presence of something in the entire environment, it was a god whom i called “absolute” according to beliefs from the eastern part of eurasia. i never finished reading the book because i wanted to look for all the answers myself, using the book as a direction to the right path. from that time on, i invented my own religion without a name or anything else defining my beliefs as a phenomenon, because i believed that “truth has no name.” i counted the days of brahma according to the cosmic calendar and built systems about HOW it could work. God was my interlocutor, not a friend, not a teacher, but God. to be honest, in the end i was so fed up with it that i just joined orthodoxy because it was easier. i already found so many answers to questions that i soon no longer needed it at all. despite this, my views are not connected with the general rules of orthodoxy, but i believe that it can work in any way because the task of religion, in my opinion, is to make a person happy. or happiER.

I don't consider myself to have a specific religion, but I do believe there is at least one god out there (there could be multiple), that heaven, hell, and purgatory exist (or at least some places similar to it), and that reincarnation is a thing. I also do pray, but not to any specific god.

I mainly chose a more open-minded outlook on these things because I don't think humans can really have much, if any, concrete proof of which religion is "correct." Heck, all religions may be correct in a way!

I want to be open-minded but also hopeful about what might happen to me and my loved ones when we die or face hardships in our lives.