Sam Harris

I've never been the first to post a message in a forum. I consider myself honored to be considered to speak here. Thanks very much, Mr. Harris.

A political movement based on reason? That's a tough one. This would usher in a new age of enlightenment, about 200 years since the last one. Given the present state of our culture, that would be a tough sell.

I'm happy enough just to be among those who've read End of Faith and derive personal meaning from it. I don't feel so isolated.

Anyway, thanks again, Mr. Harris. I hope you have a great winter break, if indeed you are taking one. 

We may already have a political movement under way.  It probably includes liberalism and secular humanism as well as realism.  In any case, those of us that agree with those “isms” should very carefully avoid using confrontational terms such as Atheism and grotesqueries such as Brights.  To declare oneself an Atheist is to dignify an absurdity.

I identify myself as liberal, secular, raised religious but as I matured I found I really didn’t believe much that made up my religion.  There is an interesting test on Beliefnet.com that really helps one identify your positions concerning spirituality or organized religion. 

I don’t know how much I can contribute to this forum but find it highly interesting and plan to monitor it at the least.

I went to that website and did the “What’s Your Spiritual Type” quiz. I scored 27 within a scale of 25 to 100, making me a hardcore skeptic. 

Let the epithets issue….

Strange, because I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in treating those around me well, taking care of the environment, and some quiet time for peaceful reflection.  Thought I would be classified as gnostic, but it said I was spiritual but turned off by organized religion. Interesting test, though.

I scored:

50 - 59

Spiritual Straddler – One foot in traditional religion, one foot in free-form spirituality.

Some of the questions I had to chose which was the nearest to how I actually feel, although several actually did not have an answer that was anywhere close to what I feel.

[quote author=“josephdphillips”]I went to that website and did the “What’s Your Spiritual Type” quiz.

“That” website?

Byron

Apparantly the moderator saw fit to delete the message that noted the web site.

it is http://beliefnet.com/

I scored a 45,

Dogma destroys spirituality

Too many questions offered me no reasonably representative answer. It gives faith the standard free pass, and fails to allow for accepting unknowns.

The results say I’m a “spiritual dabbler” (32), but the fact that it separates that from being a hard core skeptic says a lot to me. It seems to me the test says more about the author than taking it did about me. Of course being grossly misunderstood on a regular basis seems to be one of the vagaries of holding iconoclastic ideas about religion and spirituality.

Byron

I also am a dabbler (32), which I would never have considered myself to be.  I feel nothing spiritual, have no sense of God, and wish humanity would get on with life.  Many of the questions offered, as ScepticX pointed out, no good alternative.