Off-Topic Tuesday Are you the Religion you think you are?

Welcome to Off-Topic Tuesday where I take a little break from all this talk of diet, exercise and dress size to talk about anything else that comes to mind.

First a disclaimer... I am not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination but I am fascinated by the devotion that others have. I was raised Jewish but my family isn't devout either. Like many American Jews, the concepts surrounding Judaism are often more cultural than spiritual. My husband is Protestant, my mother-in-law was a missionary in Africa, and my best friends are Catholic.

With that said, I obviously am surrounded by a variety of religions and the pomp and circumstance that goes with them.

So a few times a year, the concept of religion comes to the front of my brain. typically when all the big holidays converge. Easter/Passover, Hanukkah/Christmas and at Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year).

A few weeks ago (around Rosh Hashanah), a friend of mine sent me an email wishing me L'shanah Tovah, the typical greeting at the new year which means "a good year" but is a shortened version of L'shanah tovah tikatev v'taihatem", which means "May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year." (Don't be impressed that I knew that..I had to look it up for accuracy on jewfaq.org...how pathetic is that?) Anyway, because gmail always has those content relevant links surrounding emails, on this one, there was a link to Beliefnet.

And here's my question. Do we believe what we believe because it is what we were born into or because it is truly what we believe? In other words, are you the religion you think you are?

Beliefnet has a handy quiz to help you figure it out. So in my quest for higher meaning, I took the quiz to see if perhaps they would match me up with a religion or set of beliefs that I didn't realize were the ones I really held true. The quiz covers your concepts of God, afterlife, prayer, confession but also covers those topics that make some people squirm like divorce, abortion and homosexuality.

Twenty questions later, the results ranked my beliefs by percentage against 26 different faiths.

And after all that... it seems that what I believe matched 100% with Reform Judaism, the Religion and sect I was born into. Followed by, of all things: Liberal Quaker at 91% (I kid you not) and Unitarian Universalism at 86%.

OK, so the quiz is obviously a little skewed since I didn't answer those questions skewed around Jesus in any way that might have mistaken me for Christian. I guess that's where I lost the 9 percentage points on the Liberal Quaker scale. But it was an interesting exercise and it gave me the opportunity to not only explore my own faith (such as it is) but others as well.

If you don't have the opportunity to learn about other faiths in your every day life, I encourage you to do so on Beliefnet. I think the world might be a better place if we all understood each other a little better.

Thanks for tuning in to Off-Topic Tuesday. Now back to your regularly scheduled blogging.