Sectarianism

[Solar]

In this day and age, it's very hard to simply say "I'm a Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jew, Sikh, Buddhist, etc etc." without having to clarify which sect, denomination or school of thought you follow and that's without delving into our own extremely personalized views on several regarding our faith or lack thereof (even secular folk, while not necessarily having "sects", have different schools of thought regarding the nature skepticism and theism).

So the purpose of this thread is to discuss why do you choose the sect you do? Do you prefer to be 'non-denominational'? If so, again, why? How do you view other sects within the religion you practice and sectarianism as whole within it? And so on.

Have at it.

 

[Hidden]

This used to bother me a lot; I saw it as a "missing the forest for the trees" syndrome.

Now it still bothers me, but in quite the opposite way. I dislike when people paint a religion as something monolithic, either to attack it or to promote it, but above all to 'explain' it. When someone says, "The Bible/Quran/Torah/etc has an answer to this," it bothers me, because more often than not the sacred book in question has more than one answer to this; and even if it does not, the religious body built around it almost certainly does. Willfully ignoring that fact seems to me a way of monopolizing religion.

To answer the question of the thread--mysticism is the 'sect' (multiple sects, in multiple religions) that I feel moves the farthest away from that tendency to 'monopolize' religion, and so that is where I feel most comfortable. Solar linked me to a wonderful essay recently (/a year ago), The Tao of Islam. It was probably partially in response to my repeated links to another essay, Is God a Taoist?. Obviously I'm interested in Taoism. But moreso, I'm interested in how mystical thinkers reevaluate their own religions--the essay Solar linked is from a Sufi website, Smullyan's essay touches upon Buddhist and Christian mystical thinking, and my first introduction to Taoism was through the writings of Thomas Merton, a Catholic monk and mystic.

 

[Taylor]

Despite the bump here, I'm going to go on with the discussion.

Though this isn't really totally applicable, I'm apathetic agnostic, which is obviously a denomination of agnosticism, which is then a denomination of irreligion. They're not "sects", but they're certain systems of thought within an overall system of thought, so it's somewhat applicable?

As a child I was a practicing Christian. I went to Sunday school every week and my mom definitely encouraged a Christian lifestyle. My father is atheist and as I got older he would often encourage me to think about other options. So growing up I started to stray from Christianity and looked into other avenues. It ended up with me realizing that I really had no faith in any sort of higher identity like a God, but I also didn't want to rule out the possibility that one could certainly exist. So for a long time I just sort of said, "I don't know," when approached with the idea of religion, higher powers, origins of the universe, etc. I still actively took time to discuss with other about possibilities, and for years I did a lot of metaphysical research. But as time went on the "I don't know" mentality kind of turned into an "I don't really care" mentality.

I'm never going to be able to give people an answer on higher powers or creationism or whatever. I don't know if God started the universe or if that was the Big Bang. And I probably never will. And frankly, I don't have it in me to put faith in any one idea because after doing all the research I did, I feel like I'd just be locking myself into something very specific. I don't want to alienate possibilities. But at the same time, I don't care to pursue them. Frankly, I don't care what the answers are because I'm more concerned with living here and now. When I die, maybe I'll see what happens.


But that's why I'm apathetic agnostic instead of just agnostic or any other form of irreligious.