I was brought up a catholic, like all the good, white, middle-class Parisians. I was baptised and did my communion.
Then, when I was 14-15, I saw the light. I couldn't understand why if the Church people "talked to God", they had always gotten everything wrong over the last 2000 years. So, I stoped believing in "The Church".
Then, a bit later, I thought it didn't make any sense that "our" religion was right, and, say Islam, or Judaism, was "wrong". It just looked like brands competiting for a market share. And then there were all the **** rules (like not eating meat on Friday, or having to go to a designed building to talk to God...). Surely, I thought, He has more pressing concerns.
None of it made any real sense, or felt pure, or true. It just felt like an organised scam, where everyone either knew it was ******** but went along anyway, for the symbolism, or people were just compeltely stupid and really thought the World was created in 6 days, and took all those Bible stories seriously, and not for the metaphors that they are. So, to me, it felt like people were either hypocrits (those who knew it was lies), or idiots (those who believed in the Bible literally).
So, that was it for me and organised religion.
Today, I can't look at the world and think that it all came about "by chance", by luck, or by pure randomness. It's just too damn complex and intricate to be purely the lucky and random result of chemical reactions. When you think about the fact that the world is one giant eco-system, where all its components interact with each other to produce what we see today, and when you know that the world had, roughly, one chance in billions to turn out to be the planet it is, I just can't believe it's all random.
The other thing that makes me a non-atheist, is that Big Bang. Surely, if there was *nothing* before, and if there is no "creating force", then the Big Bang wouldn't have happened. Nothing comes out of nothing. Or, to put it another way, I find the theory that says that there was *nothing*, and then a huge explosion, and then all this interraction, and then the world as we know it, and that all this happened "on its own", I find this theory just as unlikely as the Christian/Muslim/Judaism one.
So, all this to say, I don't know. I believe in a "creative force", that some people call God. I think it should just be called "Life". I don't think it's sentient, I don't think it cares about us as individuals, I don't think you can "talk" to it, but at the same time, i feel it's what we are. "God", for me, is the cumulation of everything that exists in the universe. The universe is "god", we are all parts of this thing. So, we can't talk directly to "it", but we are "it".
Because of that, i quite believe in some form of Karma (though obviously not as direct as "my name is Earl" Karma, but I do think that all actions have reactions and consequences, which will affect us all one day, one way or another. And this, in a way, is Karma.
I also believe in some form of reincarnation. Not the straightforward one, but imagine that there is, somewhere, a giant pot. This pot is fileld with "Life". When a new entity is born, a little bit of that Life is taken from the pot and put into the entity. When you die, "Life" goes back in the pot. It's an imagery, obviously, but I do think that there is something common in all life, and that some people look like animals so much that they must have been one someday, or at least part of them were.
And, finally, I believe in cycles. And spirals. In everything. I think the Buddhist are spot on in that respect.
If I was forced, at gunpoint, to choose a religion, I would be Buddhist. But I really don't like organised religion, and Buddhists have plenty of rules that seem silly to me. Also, I don't think you should need a "certificate" to believe in something.
So yeah, I guess I have my own religion. I'm a Redphoenixxxian. Or a Redphoenixxxist.