Test Your Religious Beliefs
Posted on February 18, 2007
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This is one of my favorite online tests. I don’t always get the same result but I always get similar results.
Beliefnet.com’s Belief-O-Matic asks 20 questions, sometimes with some subtle choices, and you can mark each answer you give as being important or unimportant to you on a scale of 1-3. From your answers they rank you according to the percentage they think you match a number of religious groups. This is my latest result:
- Liberal Quakers (100%)
- Unitarian Universalism (99%)
- Secular Humanism (85%)
- Neo-Pagan (82%)
- Theravada Buddhism (82%)
- Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (81%)
- Mahayana Buddhism (76%)
- New Age (76%)
- Taoism (75%)
- Orthodox Quaker (67%)
- Reform Judaism (62%)
- Jainism (59%)
- Nontheist (57%)
- New Thought (54%)
- Scientology (53%)
- Bahá’í Faith (50%)
- Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (45%)
- Hinduism (42%)
- Sikhism (39%)
- Seventh Day Adventist (34%)
- Islam (29%)
- Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (29%)
- Orthodox Judaism (29%)
- Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (28%)
- Jehovah’s Witness (17%)
- Eastern Orthodox (16%)
- Roman Catholic (16%)
No test is perfect and there is one question, where you can mark multiple broad answers, that shifts my results dramatically. My first try at the test ranked me as 100% secular humanist.
Where this test fails most is that it does not, and perhaps can not, take into account all of the quirky ways we construct our belief systems. I am in this strange place where I do not have a strong or particular belief in a deity, but believe we should behave morally and respectfully toward others. This is not my quirk.
Some days I call it my “Do no harm” religion, because as a humanist, vegetarian, and environmentalist, who believes that Western consumerism (especially in the U.S.) is the root of many ills, I can feel reasonably good about myself to the extent I am true to those principles. Without much effort, however, one begins to realize that none of us can actually do NO harm — squashing bugs is a ready example, but there are much more consequential ones that pop up with some regularity — so then it begins to look like many religions, where there is an unattainable ideal that one is always working (more or less) toward.
My quirkiness comes in when I acknowledge that while I am nearly atheist, or deist or strictly humanist, I believe in the power of corporate ritual. I don’t mean IBM or Wal-Mart corporate, I mean the body, a body of people, or a congregation. And this is hard. Wal-Mart actually has big “C” Corporate rituals, celebrating the company and perhaps ideals like customer service. But I’m talking about finding in the absence of a belief in a benevolent god-consciousness, ritual that is meaningful and rewarding just the same.
Sometimes I can almost do it in the Episcopal church, especially in a very liberal one. In such a situation, I can participate in a Christian ritual, familiar to me from my childhood in the Methodist church, and with a tradition that goes back to the formation of the early church. When I can free myself of Christian dogma, be mindful in a roomful of similarly mindful or prayerful people, there are universal truths to be found and beauty and maybe something mystical as well. When the setting and practice are right one can believe s/he experiences the Holy.
A liberal church is necessary for my own practice of faith, because if I’m in a more traditional (read conservative) congregation, where others believe I must believe exactly as they do (dogma) then I begin to feel out of place. That disconnect with others in the congregation creates loneliness rather than connectedness for me, and then the same words and music that move me to transcendence, move me to listen to their literal meanings and become distracted from any presence of the Holy.
I’m always interested in the Quakers, my BeliefNet match, and have generally known for years that they were a potential religious home. I’ve attended interfaith and charity functions in the local Friends Meeting House in Washington D.C. but have never gone to one of their regular meetings. I always believe that I need to attend with someone familiar with their ways, but suspect I could be quite at home there quickly. Whether their practice of silence could affect me as deeply as the words and music I was raised with is unknown. I suspect it might be better, as the words of the creeds and hymns can be pretty distracting outside the much broader context.
I like this test because it points me to the Quakers, where I’ve not been, as well as to the Unitarians, an occasional church home. I think that it could be useful to others, especially those who practice faith in a dogmatic tradition who might, in honesty, believe differently. I hope it will serve as a catalyst, as it suggests for me, for people to explore other faith traditions. I suspect most of us benefit from such mind-expanding adventures.
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