Do you feel badly about yourself if you disagree with a tenet of your religion?

1. Religion is a persons choice.

2. Birth control is a persons choice.

3. Sex before marriage is the current trend and no one can change it.

4. Homosexuality is a personal choice and thats okay with me.

5. And, we have several clergy women in my city.

As you can see, freedom still rings in America.

Yes, because I still (privately) consider myself a Christian (along with a Spiritualist). I can’t tell most other Christians that I’m a Christian because a good deal of them don’t agree with my views on the afterlife, the Bible and the issue of faith vs works. To me there are three things that get me in trouble with most Christians, the biggest being that I don’t believe the burden of a person’s sins can ever be placed upon another’s shoulders and that we are all responsible for our own salvation. There are quite a few other views where mine is different from orthodox teachings.

The way I feel about religion is kind of complicated and difficult to condense. I disagree with way too many points of doctrine with the church/religion of my childhood. On the other hand, I believe having something concrete on which to base one’s code of conduct is a good starting point. I always got stuck on the “why?”.
Religions are basically (HAH! different thread!) various interpretations of the same thing. So Church of Christ doesn’t accompany singing with instruments. Pentecostals in backwoods Kentucky handle snakes. Some Baptists believe that once saved = always saved.
All are based on the same book, with different bits highlighted. Meh.
Gay sex, not a problem. But many Christians don’t understand that Jesus himself never said anything against that. And, as I understand it, the actual word or phrase used in the original text of the Old Testament meant not man to man but adult on child, which I think most of us can agree that that is indeed an abomination. So, Westboro knuckleheads got that one wrong on yet another level.
Casual sex; I don’t engage. Not because the bible tells me so, but for my own reasons. But the Biblical idea of not engaging before marriage seems sound to me. For reasons which I have no intention of debating.
Decisions I make now are sometimes in compliance with my Pentecostal upbringing, and sometimes not. But they are made through my own reasoning process. Sometimes I even think about it when I’ve done something that my childhood church would agree with. But lord, how might they shudder at my thought process! ;-)

No I do not feel guilt, anger, or denial. I believe that an unquestioned faith is not a faith worth having. I do not agree with every single thing my faith says. There are a couple of things I disagree with entirely. It is not enough to make me disavow my faith and if it had been, I wouldn’t have signed up for it to begin with. I figure that some day, maybe not in this world, I will find out that the issue was man’s misinterpretation of the word of God.

Personally I do not believe in the concept of the beer volcano. I think the real after life is an eternal Italian restaurant.

My mom is firmly Catholic, not changing her religion anytime soon, yet she is pro-gay marriage and pro-birth control. She understands why they are against these things, but she absolutely does not agree with them. And as far as I know, it doesn’t negatively affect her faith.

Heavens no. I would question anyone who claimed they agreed with everything in which their denomination believed.

Not at all. My religion encourages questioning. I would be doing myself a dis-serviced if I didn’t think about religion and pose questions.

No. I thought speaking in tongues was ridikkerous. Some of my Christian friends acted like I was gonna go to hell for thinking that way, but I didn’t believe that, either.

No, because religions evolve, and it’s all believers who are shaping their religion’s future. I’m a follower of Martin Luther who supports the priesthood of all believers. So a religion is what we make of it, not what someone orders us to think. In case of Christianity it’s about how we interpret the Bible. And there are a million possibilities. And the context changes every year. Be fertile and multiply has different meanings depending on whether 100 million or 7 billion people populate the Earth. We won’t be able to multiply anymore without environmental sanity and limiting overpopulation. So in order to remain fertile and be able to multiply we need birth control.

I stopped believing in Judaism when I was 12 or 13. But I might still identify myself as a Jew in a cultural sense if there wasn’t so much about the Torah that I found morally abhorrent.

@Qingu – You should read Rabbi Michael Lerner’s book ‘Embracing Israel/Palestine’ offering a quite different understanding of Judaism and the Torah that most likely you won’t find morally abhorrent.

“In the Torah, you will sometimes hear the voice of God as the voice of pain, cruelty, power over, domination, and sometimes you will hear the voice of love as love, kindness and generosity. Emancipatory Judaism is an attempt to reclaim the voice of love that’s there in the tradition, but that has been obscured and replaced as God is seen more and more as power, the force of power, domination, control, and our testimony to this God is the power of the state of Israel. Lerner describes his vision of an emancipatory Judaism, a Judaism that he believes has the capacity to heal Jewish post-traumatic stress after the defining tragedy of the Holocaust.”

http://www.jewishindependent.ca/Archives/Mar12/archives12Mar09-02.html