It literally hurts my entire being that religion has brainwashed billions of people. Generation after generation. It's sad that one brainwashed family indoctrinates their children. IMO: religion is a scourge on humanity. So many deaths in the name of one religion over another. Countless amounts of $$ stolen from those that gave cash/equivalent or slave labor.

What's more sad than religion based on thousands of years?

Seeing the insanity of cult behavior for following clearly ridiculous people like Donald Trump. The power of social media with misinformation, blatant propagada, etc....in addition to actual live news programs pushing the same inane, disgusting and pathetic shit is flabbergasting.

It may sound twisted....however, COVID, had the potential to unionize and solidify entire populations to join forces against a common enemy. I'm still in awe and disbelief as to how divided people became against the truth of science.

You know what the COVID episode demonstrated with 100% certainty?

Humanity will be extinct far sooner than people could possibly imagine from the apocalyptic level of damage caused be climate change. I truly wish people the best they can manage in the nearest future.

I used to be religious, became an atheist in my teens and now as an adult, I'm agnostic

No, but I used to be far more derisive of religion than I am now. My wife is Christian and speaks about how she finds God in the woods, the lakes, and the natural world around her, and I have come to view God less as a specific person or all-knowing entity and more as an embodied collection of feelings and thoughts that people have regarding justice, truth, and love. This helps me reconcile many kinds of spiritual beliefs with my own understanding of the universe as garnered by mathematical processes and the Earth as it is shaped by human hands.

Yes, but...it's complicated.

Baptized Christian in infancy. Not raised churchgoing. Had several direct contacts with God in my early twenties...but I was on acid at the time. Gradually developed a keen awareness that the universe is much larger than me, and that there are things out there I can't explain, and that I do still feel a divine presence at times.

These days I consider myself a Christian, but with the caveat that it's simply the faith that's most embedded in my cultural upbringing. I'm not convinced that it's necessarily better than any other way of relating to the spiritual world, but it's the one that works for me. Not churchgoing at the moment due to living in a very conservative area and not being able to find a congregation that I feel good about, but that will likely change with an upcoming move.

I am, very much, not religious. My father is Catholic, my mother doesn't go into her spirituality but it's not Christian. So I was taught about different things and given the choice to believe in what makes sense to me. If there's one way to describe what feels to me like what I imagine faith to be like to someone who's religious it would be the messages of hope and of passion for discovery and learning that Carl Sagan showed. The Pale Blue Dot speech is a sermon. It inspires me to be a better person and to try and be the change in the world that I want to see. But ultimately science doesn't know everything and at some point even with it you must make assumptions and have "faith" in the process.

As far as divinity goes, I've always struggled to believe. I just don't see the extraordinary evidence that would be required for me to say "Oh, that makes a divinity-free universe impossible". And by the same token it is impossible to prove that the universe was not crafted by some all powerful being last Thursday with all our billions of years of history baked in for us to pour through. So I figure, I'll find out on my last day and until then I'll just focus on being as good a person as I can be.

Yep! I grew up nominally christian but actually pretty personally areligious, even with a long atheist phase, but in a pretty diverse religious upbringing both family and community-wise - mostly a mix of Unitarian Univeralism, Catholicism, and Judaism. I had a lot of anger at religion as a queer teenager from the US south but thankfully ended up falling in with more positive ex-Christian interfaith groups and not the antitheist community, which led to a lot of open exploring down many different religious paths just to better understand and see what the fuss was all about, to where I am now, an animist polytheist with a pretty solitary practice. No pressure, just me and my own relationship with the world and the many kinds of persons, human and not, who inhabit it.