Share your religious experience

[Pendragon]

First: This is for sharing how you came to believe as you do. There comes a point in everyone's life when they make a decision about faith. This is what I want to see here.

Second: No arguing on this thread. Disagreements and questions should be directed to the individual on Private Messaging.

Third: Share experience, don't preach.

Now, my story.

I was raised a Christian in an extremely strict sect by a domineering and frankly fanatical mother. In our church TV was taboo. Movies and sporting advents likewise. The women did not cut their hair, wear pants or makeup. Drinking and smoking were forbidden. Men had to keep their hair short and facial hair was frowned upon. The more radical churches also forbade Christmas, Easter, and Halloween.

Church was three times a week, twice on Sunday and on Wednesday night. Unsatisfied with this, people, including my mother, chased tent revivals which were popular in the late 60's early 70's. I was often in church every night. I went through a lot at school since we didn't believe in wearing gym shorts, and were forbidden to play sports. Dating was a problem as well, as we were not to date outside of church people, and were expected to not even kiss or hold hands.

Shouting and speaking in tongues was common, as was casting out devils, and prayer for the sick. I have witnessed too much to down these practices, but I want you to get a clear picture.

Of course, I rebelled. I took up smoking, drinking, and took drugs. I did my share of "heavy petting" with girls, including the pastor's daughter who was as much a rebel as I. I was very foul mouthed and constantly in trouble.

Then right before my 19th birthday, my future wife and I were saved in a revival meeting. By age 20 I was a minister, fully ordained by age 24. I became an evangelist, preaching anywhere I could get an invitation. My ministry for the next ten years was much like I had been taught, but I wasn't afraid to publicly come out against some of the harsh regulations, teach more mercy than policy. I preached in my home state of Virginia, in North Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Arkansas' I had tentative invitations to Connecticut, Georgia, and Texas.

Then when I turned 34 the genetic bomb I inherited from my parents went off with serious problems. My bipolar/depression/borderline personality disorder was one of the worst my doctors had ever seen. They also said they were only surprised that it happened at age 34, as most people with my severity of illness rarely get through their twenties before disaster strikes. I landed in the mental hospital four times in one six month period.

At first I had support. They visited me in the hospital, I received a great number of invitations to speak, they prayed with me and for me constantly. But after the third trip, they became rather cold towards me. I visited a church where I had often preached one Sunday morning to find that I and my illness were the topic of the sermon. Why I didn't just walk out I will never know.

Back at my home church where I served as Assistant Pastor, things grew even worse. I had a face-off with the pastor over a decision he was making. I swore then that I would tell no one what really passed between us, and although he has been in the grave for a dozen years I keep my word.

I was excommunicated. The other churches I preached for, while many said they disagreed with my excommunication, shunned me as well. My illness got so bad that I was placed on full disability without question. But I couldn't quit.

I preached in homes to whoever came. I stressed the importance of choice over rigid rules. I urged people to seek the will of God for themselves. My wife still doesn't cut her hair or wear pants. But this is because it is her Preference, not a church rule. My daughter and daughter-in-law both wear pants and cut their hair. I don't toss them into hell as I was taught to do. There are things the Bible directly condemns, these I preach; others are enforced by different sects of religion, without Bible confirmation, these I ignore.

We have TV, go to movies, my children had wonderful Christmases, Easter egg hunts, and dressed up for Halloween. In school they were less prosecuted for church rules. They made their own choices.

Now, I still preach every Sunday my illness allows. The congregation has gotten smaller as many have moved to other towns or chose to quit. But I still stand.

I went from a radical Evangelical hellfire-breathing preacher to one who, still believing in heaven to gain and hell to shun, drops rules not in the Bible, preach tolerance, and seek to encourage my small congregation to make the right choices, I don't beat rules into them.

St. Matthew 23 has became my guideline.

Now you have heard my reasons for believing as I do. I am now non-denominational, I would still preach in any church that would have me. But my eyes have been opened to the fact that being too strict and omitting justice, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and uplifting my brother or sister in Christ would be the height of hypocrisy. Live a simple, humble Christian life, read the Bible daily and pray daily, attend church when you are physically able.

Matthew 22:
[35] Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying,
[36] Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
[37] Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
[38] This is the first and great commandment.
[39] And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
[40] On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Now God richly bless you.

Remember, any questions or comments concerning this post, PM me.

Pen

[Denizen]

I came to believe as I do at a young age. My mother was religious, and I went to a Church of England school which would encourage prayer, and regular visits to church. However, my father was an avowed atheist, and often expressed disapproval that I was effectively being indoctrinated by Christian dogma.

As I matured into a teenager, I lost all interest in religion. I had concluded that I did not believe in God, but my arguments for not doing so were naturally immature, and based on a misunderstanding of philosophical argument and religious scripture. As I got older, I developed a taste for philosophy, and spent almost all of my spare time learning about almost every discipline of philosophy. Naturally, I also became intrigued with science; namely physics. By 17 I was certain no God existed. I had deduced that no formal argument can be used to show it is rational to assume a creator, which is a belief I still maintain today.

I'm not, nor will I ever be, militant with my atheism. Though I disagree with religious morality (particularly ecclesiastical morality, though this downfall is not peculiar to Christianity), I recognise that many find solace and comfort in a belief in God. This is not something which I would like to take away from any man.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Wow, what a life story Pendragon. Thank you for sharing.

I was not raised in a religious family--that isn't to say I was raised in an atheist one, either. We never went to church, never read the bible, etc. I was allowed to choose my own path. So, my journey was pretty simple. I got to look at religion from the outside, and chose in high school that religion wasn't for me. Even when I was in daycare, they'd take us to this church where a nun would read/tell us Bible stories. That I was bored to death notwithstanding, even at that young age I thought the stories were BS. Out of a fear of no life after death, I clung to that vague idea of "something more" being out there, that this couldn't all be coincidence. I don't really believe that anymore, but I still hope. At one point I flirted with becoming a Buddhist, as it seemed the only reasonable religion out there, but it didn't work.

[Desolation]

I was raised in a sort of complicated religious environment.

My dad was, is, and always has been an atheist. He was raised as a Catholic, though. Anyone who has been raised Catholic knows just how difficult it is to shake the faith, so there was always some Catholic imagery around. He was also profoundly impacted by Buddhism, though he wasn't entirely Buddhist.

My mother is a lot more complicated. She was also raised Catholic and had abandoned the faith...But, she had a lot of demons to battle, which lead her through several religions when I was a kid. This included Catholicism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Buddhism. So, I did go to churches, even if they weren't exactly consistent.

One of the most influential moments of my religious development came when I was 9. All the kids in my class were talking about heaven and hell while we were in the lunch-line. While they were talking, I had a thought, and being that I was 9 it seemed like no one else had ever had the thought before. So, I asked, "How do you know that heaven and hell are real? No one's ever been there, dead people can't come back to life and tell us about them." I got beat up. When I told my dad about it, he shared his views with me (he was careful not to do so before, because he wanted me to come to my own conclusions and make my own decisions) and reassured me that I wasn't alone.

I didn't think about it too much until years later. Other people believed, I didn't...It didn't seem like a big deal. It still doesn't seem like a big deal to me, really. But, over the years, having learned more about the various religions, and about science and all that, atheism has become a valued part of my personality. I'm not militant, I'm not bitter, I'm not judgmental, I'm just a proud nonbeliever.

[YesNo]

I agree with Mutatis-Mutandis, Pendragon: that is an amazing life story. I hope things work out for you.

In my case, I suspect that I am a "panentheist" without any specific commitment to a name for this God: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panentheism

I have had a shared death experience upon the death of an aunt decades ago when I was a graduate student studying mathematics. The conversation I had with her didn't knock as much sense into me as it probably should have at the time, but I never forgot it.

The Iraq war with those fabricated weapons of mass destruction charges turned me off to Christianity. My annoyance quickly spread to all Judeo-Christo-Islamic religions. My focus was on religious groups supporting lies even when they knew they were lies. I didn't like atheists either. They didn't seem to act any better than religious people and they didn't have any ethical basis for superiority to theists. To be fair, I was no better ethically than any of them, but when one is annoyed one is rarely fair.

Finding by accident a few years ago Raymond Moody's Life After Life changed most of that. It brought some clarity to what I experienced with my aunt years before and I sort of made a peace with Judeo-Christo-Islamic religions. Although I haven't made any real peace with atheism, I realize we all make mistakes and continue to do so. Deepak Chopra, Eknath Easwaran and most recently Laura Day are some of the people whose writings I value.

[JuniperWoolf]

I was raised literally religion-free, and by that I don't mean "atheistic." It simply didn't exist for my family because my parents decided that I didn't need it, and they also felt that telling people what to believe in was wrong and that beliefs shoudn't simply be something that one inherets. I didn't even know that my mom believed in some version of a god until I was in my teens, and my father is one of those "if God exists then why is there so much suffering in the world?" kind of atheists, which is a conversation we didn't have until I was in the hospital in my early 20's.

Religion didn't exist in my childhood, so I obviously didn't even notice it's absence. I had an uncle who married a Christian woman, and she bought me a really nice book of Christian stories for my birthday once so I knew them, but I had a lot of books and didn't know that these stories were supposed to be any different from the multitudes of other stories I had. I learned about religion gradually throughout my life, through various individual realizations and discoveries (which, oddly enough, is exactly how I learned about sex). I snuck into kids' church with my friends after school occasionally because they got free snacks, I was aware of the Catechism kids who couldn't walk home with the rest of us because they were taking "extra classes" after school (or so it seemed to me) and I felt sorry for the poor (only) Jehovah's Witness in my school for not being allowed to celebrate Halloween, Christmas or birthdays and was grateful that my parents weren't "crazy." The other kids explained to me that religion was just like nationality, something you inheret from your parents. I remember when I was eleven or so my mom was driving me home after school and I asked "hey mom, what religion am I?" She responded with "I don't know, what religion are you?"

So there you have it, I'm the result of a literally religion-free upbringing. Sometimes people ask me how child-me understood the concept of death, since explaining death is kind of the main purpose of religion. My father told me the exact truth when I was little, but I really developed my full understanding of death from books. Like I said above, I read a lot, and I came to decide for myself about death from The Halloween Tree. If you haven't read it, simply put I decided that we don't know what happens after we die. No one does, there's no information, it's a great mystery and it seems to me that's how it's supposed to be, a mystery that everyone shares and absolutely everyone eventually discovers for themselves (or not, if it turns out atheists are correct). When the people I love die I dispair, but I don't hate death, and I don't try to explain it.

[OrphanPip]

There's not much of a story to how I got to where I am.

I was raised in a relatively progressive mainstream protestant home, specifically Church of England but I was baptised in a United Church of Canada because of the general scarcity of protestant churches in Montreal: my parents didn't want to drive far for the baptism. We went to church occasionally, but not every Sunday.

At some point in secondary school I became conscious that I had stopped believing, mostly because I couldn't find a personally convincing reason to. There's not much to say about it because it wasn't really a struggle or a life changing event.

[Jack of Hearts]

Fairly conservative religuous upbringing. This reader remembers being ten years old and praying to Jesus to never let him be an atheist. Well played, Jesus.







J

[Polednice]

Seeing as this thread is about "decisions about faith", I'll share how I came to my lack of faith: my parents never imposed any religious views on me, and I never came across any compelling evidence for any of mankind's thousands of religions. The end.

[WyattGwyon]

I was raised Catholic and believed in God at a young age because I actually saw him. At age three, my mom told me "We are going to God's house!," before we walked the two blocks to a gorgeous three-quarter size copy of a Romanesque French Cathedral with a million-dollar organ and world-class choir. I assumed the angry man in a white robe shouting at us from the pulpit must be God because he was acting like he owned the place. (A neighbor who was a doctor ended up having to give this scumbag CPR after he had a heart attack during a dalliance with the "church secretary.") At age five(?), I had that "Santa-Claus moment" when I said "Hey, that's not the same guy up there, are there two of them?" Then they did the classic bait and switch and told me about the trinity.

Anyway, by eighth grade in a Catholic elementary school, I was going through my own private Reformation; by ninth grade I no longer believed in supernatural phenomena of any kind.

[ShadowsCool]

I've had a few. Some are too private to divulge. However, some are curious to say the least.

One in particular I remember is a nun in seeing me, got down on her knees and started to pray. I suppose she thought she saw a devil in me. Who knows. Whatever.

[WyattGwyon]

.....

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Religion didn't exist in my childhood, so I obviously didn't even notice it's absence. I

I'm not sure this is even possible in America, unless one lives isolated from any other people and all forms of media. I was raised in a family much like you described, Juniper, but as long as I can remember, I was always aware of religion. Even though my parents, or anyone, never told me I should be Christians and believe in Jesus, I always felt like I should.


I learned about religion gradually throughout my life, through various individual realizations and discoveries (which, oddly enough, is exactly how I learned about sex).

This too sounds like an interesting story. :D

[KCurtis]

Interesting stories, everyone. And Pendragon, considering your geographic location, your experience is not a surprise to me. I am glad you are doing better, and having a son with mental illness, I can appreciate your struggle.
I was never religious, my parents weren't-but when I was in junior high school we lived across the street from a church and they made us go, I don't know why. They went too for a short time. I was baptized (protestant), but everyone was then. It really was meaningless to me.
I went to catholic confession with a friend once when I was 12, and I did feel a bit better afterwards. When I was a young adult I thought I was supposed to believe in god. I called myself an agnostic because it is easier to tell people that- in certain areas of the U.S. athiests are quite outnumbered by people who do believe in god, and most of the places I have worked and people I have met do. I am finally honest and will tell people I am not religious.
I also make it known that I don't want to discuss god or religion in the work place, because people assume it's okay to do so and everyone believes-especially here on Cape Cod and most of Massachusetts. I try to be as polite as I can, and let it be known that I respect others views. If I tell anyone I am an athiest I can assure you they will be taken aback, so I always try to emphasize that I am NOT a militant athiest. I don't mind the pledge of allegiance, said daily at school where I work.
What I do mind is having good friday off. Most schools in Massachusetts have that day off, even though it is a religious holiday. I don't go so far as to advocate for it to be banned though. I love seeing Christmas decorations in town, but towns around here don't put them up-which makes no sense since schools have good friday off.
I would never, ever try to change someone's views on religion. If a religious person wants to discuss it further, I won't. I like to be polite with people.
So that's my kinda boring story!
Oh, and to make it a bit more interesting, my thought about where people go when they die is simple. Some are in graveyards, which I kind of like because they have a lot of history, and some are cremated and mix with the earth, or the water, depending on preference. My mother in law's ashes are here at home with my husband and I, temporarily. They are under my son's bed (he no longer lives with us). I don't think she would object. Soon they will be with the earth, maybe some with the water-the rest may be spread among the living who loved her.

[JuniperWoolf]

I'm not sure this is even possible in America, unless one lives isolated from any other people and all forms of media. I was raised in a family much like you described, Juniper, but as long as I can remember, I was always aware of religion. Even though my parents, or anyone, never told me I should be Christians and believe in Jesus, I always felt like I should.

Church isn't a big part of society or daily life in Canada unless you're a church-goer. It's illegal for teachers to talk about their religion, and religion simply has no part in politics. I'd say about 80% of my town doesn't go to church, but my town's church-goers come in three varieties:

1. The nice ones who go to that pink church on the corner, I think it's called "universal" or "global" something. They don't really talk about church, so you usually don't even know they're Christians. About 30% of the church-goers belong in this category.

2. The mean church people who keep to themselves. Their children keep to themselves too, I think they're only allowed to hang out with other church kids. There are two groups, and they go to the brown one on mainstreet if they're Catholic or the blueish orange one near the prison if they're Protestant. I always felt like they considered themselves superior to the rest of us which made me feel kind of awkward and confused, but then I heard what they had to say about homosexuals and decided that they can go **** themselves. About 60% of my town's church-goers belong in this category.

3. We have this little Jehovah's Witness church across the street from the highschool, it's just a regular house that's been converted and it has only maybe 55 members. One of them was in my grade, like I said above. They're not bad, a little weird and uber friendly and they try to convert you sometimes, but I guess they're just trying to save your soul so that's nice of them. The thing is, and I have no idea why this is so, but by divine providence they've got a lot of extremely attractive guys in their congregation, six of them to be exact, all of them about five to seven years older than me and all of them absolutely mouthwatering. When I was little and they were teenagers I used to follow them around, them walking in pairs with their little black ties and rolled-up white shirt sleeves, yowza. Now they're all 29-31 or so.

"Excuse me, miss, would you like to spend just an hour of your time this afternoon hearing about the lord?"
"...Yes. Yes I would."

Oh yeah, also, we have:

4. Two muslim families, and

5. One jew, but I think he might have moved last year. I didn't see his Star of David set up on his appartment balcony last holidays.

[Paulclem]

The only religious thing that I was involved in as a child was the yearly harvest festival, though at assembliy in those days, hymns were sung and the Lord's prayer recited every morning. We also had the hated hymn practice on a Thursday afternoon which always seemed to be taken by a female psycho who seemed intent upon making everyone miss break time to practice some more.

I do remember sitting i one of the rare harvest Festivals looking up at the stained glass windows when i was a kid. There were doves on the outside of the stained glass fluttering around the eaves. I had a very strong sense of their outsideness, which i've often thought about.

My parents never mentioned religion, and I was left to my own devices in religious terms. A teacher once encouraged me to go to Sunday school when I was about eight. I did go, but only the once. My parents weren't impressed with this attempt to include me. Thinking back, the teacher was a nice lady, and I'm sure she meant well.

The 70s and 80s seemed to be a time when religion began to be rolled back. It was seen as the province of other people really - I didn't know anyone who went to church, and though there was always a few churches around, they seemed to be regarded as conveniant landmarks when describing a journey or directions.

Having said that there was a childish interest in esoteria such as ghosts, the afterlife, aliens, death etc etc. You can imagine how pleased I was when my Auntie gave us a box of books and I discovered The Devil and all his Works aged about 9. Part of the allure was the pictures of generally naked witches, but one bit really stuck in my head. Dennis Wheatley - successful author of many thrillers and books about the dark arts such as The Devil Rides Out, believed in reincarnation. He said it made sense to him, and when I read it, it made perfect sense to me too. I've never doubted it since.

As a young man, religion figured even less than it had as a chlid. In secondary school, the assemblies were less, and the religious component diminished considerably. My mate married when we were quite young 18 or so, and in the church I had a real feeling that what he was doing, marriage, was really important and not to be entered into lightly. I had no intention of entering into it at all - and didn't for another 8 years, but when I did commit, it was wth the feeling of the importance of it. I don't feel it was anything to do with the church - we were married in a registry office - but it was something to do with the commitment.

I met my wife in another church -a spiritualist one. this was where I came across other ideas such as psychics and guides and the like. My mate had taken me along once - as i knew he would eventually - and so i went to see what it was like. I wasn't at all spiritual at that time, but was living a very hedonistic lifestyle. This continued, but going to the spiritualist church introduced a different element.

I know people scoff at spiritualists, mediums etc, but what i found was something that was other than you would expect. I now don't go along with the whole spiritualist explanation of the next life and their rather woolly versions of reincarnation. It was very difficult to get any consistent picture of what it was all like, or what it all meant. But they had something.

What the purpose of it is, I'm not sure. They used to bang on about proof - in the face of the rise of science I suppose, and the mediums would sometimes go to great lengths to establish proof where there could never be any. Yet you would get odd messages and pieces of advice, that could not possibly have been inferred, deducted or known. They had something, but I don't think they really developed what they had.

After my wife and I had become Buddhist, we visited a Spiritualist Church again. We weren't kown there, and we didn't know the medium. My wife got the most garbled version of what we were involved in that she laughed out loud. The medium had picked something up - or been told something - but it was clearly beyond whatever intelligence was supplying the message. It was very strange, but in that moment, all credibility was lost. I still feel that they have somethng, but they are unable or unwlling to develop further.

The one thing that I do have respect for is their healing. I don't know how it works, or even whether it does any medical good. What I do know is that you get something given freely with the intention to help. Even the mere knowledge of that is not something you get often from anyone - least of all strangers. The healing does seem quite separate from their other stuff.

Going back a few years, I had gone to University and studied English Literature and Religion purely by chance. I had applied late and taken whatever University had a place. The course was almost an afterthought.

My Tutor for the comparative religion course was Peter Harvey who has been involved in The Pali Text Society, and has written An Introduction To Buddhism. I had little awareness of this at the time, but continued with my hedonistic lifestyle - though I was old enough now to study a bit and try to do as well as I could. I missed the chance of going along to his meditation classes, and learning something of the practice fo three years. The course was brilliant though, and i learnt a lot. One thing it did teach me was that in Buddhism there are moral dilemmas, but it comes down to intent and making the best of a bad situation in order to reduce suffering. If your sincere intention is to reduce the suffering of others, then you won't be far from the mark.

My future wife wrote to me, and we kept in contact. She was invited to a talk by HH The Dalai Lama in 1989, quite out of the blue - she thought at first that it was joke played by one of her friends - and was completely smitten by his aura. From then on her aim was to go to Tibet. She did go to India on her own and travelled around. When we got together we then both went.

By this time I had given up the hedonism. We travelled through Europe, and went to india intending to go to the Himalayas. We never got there. We met a Tibetan man one day and began to talk with him regularly. He seemed to know all about us, and, despite my intending to tell him about things in the West, we found ourselves just listening to someone who knew so much more than I had to offer. It was fascinating. He gave us a few pieces of advice, and we left India for Coventry where my wife is from. The impression he made cannot be adequately explained. Our lives changed.

A year or so later, after the birth of my son, I attended a talk given by a Buddhist Monk. We became involved locally, and thus began our involvement in Buddhsim that continues today. :biggrin5:

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Fascinating story, Paul. Thanks for sharing.

[Dark Muse]

I was raised in a secular home, me and my sister had no idea what religious views our parents may have had, because they did not believe that religion is something that showed be imposed upon children, but that it is something that an individual must decide for themselves when they are old enough.

Though ideas regarding Christianity are rather prevalent, I was exposed to it at school through other children, in school we had to say the Pledge of Allegiance, which included references to God, so as a child I was always sort of conflicted, on the one hand I had at that time just taken it for granted that there was a God (the Judeo-Christian God) because I was not really exposed to any other ideas but on the other hand there was always something inside of me that just did not connect with the idea of this masculine, monotheistic God. It just never really made sense to me, though I did not know that not believing was an option at that time, but I could not bring myself to truly believe in it either.

I was always inclined to be very introverted, solitary, I was never very openly expressive, and though I got along well enough with my parents, I just never developed one of those open relationships which involve a lot of sharing of feelings, and personal thoughts, I was always very much living inside my own head, so I do not recall really actually having any discussions about religion in my early life with my parents, I never questioned them about God or religion, I just tried to work it out on my terms.

I always felt an very close and drawn to nature. I felt a close personal connection with Mother Nature, in fact in the Pledge of Allegiance and when we had to sing the song America the Beautiful in school I started replacing the word God with Mother Nature. For me Nature itself did feel as if it was this living entity, that it was infused with a spirit. I felt I could feel the spirit within other living things.

In middle school when we began learning about Greek Mythology, I was really drawn to it, and I loved the Polytheistic idea, I loved the Greek Gods, there was something about it that spoke to me, and I thought to myself, that I wished I could believe in that but I still did not really have strong ideas about what my beliefs were.

Than in high school I happened to encounter an individual who was a Wiccan, and that was sort of the catalyst or the doorway. Though I decided that Wicca itself was not the path for me, through that I discovered Paganism, and it was as if I found the very thing I had been searching for. It was the first thing that made sense to me, and really resonated within me. Everything I had naturally/instinctively thought, felt, believed, exteriorized could be found within Paganism.

[Paulclem]

Fascinating story, Paul. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks mate. Incidentally, your avatar was in The Devil and all his Works.

It's interesting, Dark, how often as individuals we are affected by another individual who introduces us to ideas that resonate with us and seem to have been naturally developing.

[ShadowsCool]

I one time saw an evil hand. No kidding. It was a severed hand that crawled up a dark basement and grabbed a black book. I'd say there were 8 witnesses. I was about 7. We all got the hell out of there.

It's unusual in that evil spirits usually don't occupy bodily vessels. My guess is it was a particularly strong one and someone died in there. Turned out, there were 2 murders a year back. It was a famous case in which 2 young children disappeared and they turned up dead in the park up the road. The apartment was 50 feet from that basement.

I guess I should write a poem about it.

[Dark Muse]

It's interesting, Dark, how often as individuals we are affected by another individual who introduces us to ideas that resonate with us and seem to have been naturally developing.

Yes, it was quite an eye opening experience, and it always felt almost fated in a way.

The two of us had been in the same class more or less oblivious to each others existence for a while when it just so happened one day, the teacher was a little late, and we both arrived early, so the room was locked and we were left standing outside together waiting, and so started talking. Than when class started we took are respective seats but happened to catch each others eye and through an unspoken communication ended up moving so we were sitting together, and after that it was an instant connection. I always felt that some unforeseen hand or force of the universe drew me to this "key" that I needed.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Thanks mate. Incidentally, your avatar was in The Devil and all his Works.

It's my favorite Goya painting, The Witches Sabbath.

[Neo_Sephiroth]

My mom was a Buddhist but changed to Catholic. Dad was a Buddhist as well. However, the two didn't mention anything much about their religious background. I know why they didn't...Because they didn't care much about what religion you belong to. They just wanted their son (Yours truly ;)) to grow up with good morals.

So, during my youth, I didn't know much about any religion. I just focused on my schooling. All the while, my mom would teach me the basics of life as I was growing up. Such as, do good to others, don't curse, don't do drugs, don't fight, etc.

All that she taught me, I cherish up to this very day. I learned how to live from her. She taught me all I needed to know to make my own choices...Good choices.

One day, missionaries knocked on my door. I was in the shower at the time but my family answered the door. As I came out, I saw two young men dress in a white shirt and tie. I don't know what possessed me to do so but I started asking them questions about Jesus, God, and what not. I don't normally ask questions like those especially with strangers because I was one of the most shy kids at the time but I did.

Long story short, everything they taught me clicked with something inside me. So, after much pondering and a prayer...One of my first prayer, I decided to be baptize.

[ZTay]

I listened to Paul Simon's "Duncan" once and the line, "thanking God for my fingers" inspired a bit of a religious experience. By appreciating the design of the minuscule I was able to appreciate the vastness of the Creator's love.

[cafolini]

The only religious thing that I was involved in as a child was the yearly harvest festival, though at assembliy in those days, hymns were sung and the Lord's prayer recited every morning. We also had the hated hymn practice on a Thursday afternoon which always seemed to be taken by a female psycho who seemed intent upon making everyone miss break time to practice some more.

I do remember sitting i one of the rare harvest Festivals looking up at the stained glass windows when i was a kid. There were doves on the outside of the stained glass fluttering around the eaves. I had a very strong sense of their outsideness, which i've often thought about.

My parents never mentioned religion, and I was left to my own devices in religious terms. A teacher once encouraged me to go to Sunday school when I was about eight. I did go, but only the once. My parents weren't impressed with this attempt to include me. Thinking back, the teacher was a nice lady, and I'm sure she meant well.

The 70s and 80s seemed to be a time when religion began to be rolled back. It was seen as the province of other people really - I didn't know anyone who went to church, and though there was always a few churches around, they seemed to be regarded as conveniant landmarks when describing a journey or directions.

Having said that there was a childish interest in esoteria such as ghosts, the afterlife, aliens, death etc etc. You can imagine how pleased I was when my Auntie gave us a box of books and I discovered The Devil and all his Works aged about 9. Part of the allure was the pictures of generally naked witches, but one bit really stuck in my head. Dennis Wheatley - successful author of many thrillers and books about the dark arts such as The Devil Rides Out, believed in reincarnation. He said it made sense to him, and when I read it, it made perfect sense to me too. I've never doubted it since.

As a young man, religion figured even less than it had as a chlid. In secondary school, the assemblies were less, and the religious component diminished considerably. My mate married when we were quite young 18 or so, and in the church I had a real feeling that what he was doing, marriage, was really important and not to be entered into lightly. I had no intention of entering into it at all - and didn't for another 8 years, but when I did commit, it was wth the feeling of the importance of it. I don't feel it was anything to do with the church - we were married in a registry office - but it was something to do with the commitment.

I met my wife in another church -a spiritualist one. this was where I came across other ideas such as psychics and guides and the like. My mate had taken me along once - as i knew he would eventually - and so i went to see what it was like. I wasn't at all spiritual at that time, but was living a very hedonistic lifestyle. This continued, but going to the spiritualist church introduced a different element.

I know people scoff at spiritualists, mediums etc, but what i found was something that was other than you would expect. I now don't go along with the whole spiritualist explanation of the next life and their rather woolly versions of reincarnation. It was very difficult to get any consistent picture of what it was all like, or what it all meant. But they had something.

What the purpose of it is, I'm not sure. They used to bang on about proof - in the face of the rise of science I suppose, and the mediums would sometimes go to great lengths to establish proof where there could never be any. Yet you would get odd messages and pieces of advice, that could not possibly have been inferred, deducted or known. They had something, but I don't think they really developed what they had.

After my wife and I had become Buddhist, we visited a Spiritualist Church again. We weren't kown there, and we didn't know the medium. My wife got the most garbled version of what we were involved in that she laughed out loud. The medium had picked something up - or been told something - but it was clearly beyond whatever intelligence was supplying the message. It was very strange, but in that moment, all credibility was lost. I still feel that they have somethng, but they are unable or unwlling to develop further.

The one thing that I do have respect for is their healing. I don't know how it works, or even whether it does any medical good. What I do know is that you get something given freely with the intention to help. Even the mere knowledge of that is not something you get often from anyone - least of all strangers. The healing does seem quite separate from their other stuff.

Going back a few years, I had gone to University and studied English Literature and Religion purely by chance. I had applied late and taken whatever University had a place. The course was almost an afterthought.

My Tutor for the comparative religion course was Peter Harvey who has been involved in The Pali Text Society, and has written An Introduction To Buddhism. I had little awareness of this at the time, but continued with my hedonistic lifestyle - though I was old enough now to study a bit and try to do as well as I could. I missed the chance of going along to his meditation classes, and learning something of the practice fo three years. The course was brilliant though, and i learnt a lot. One thing it did teach me was that in Buddhism there are moral dilemmas, but it comes down to intent and making the best of a bad situation in order to reduce suffering. If your sincere intention is to reduce the suffering of others, then you won't be far from the mark.

My future wife wrote to me, and we kept in contact. She was invited to a talk by HH The Dalai Lama in 1989, quite out of the blue - she thought at first that it was joke played by one of her friends - and was completely smitten by his aura. From then on her aim was to go to Tibet. She did go to India on her own and travelled around. When we got together we then both went.

By this time I had given up the hedonism. We travelled through Europe, and went to india intending to go to the Himalayas. We never got there. We met a Tibetan man one day and began to talk with him regularly. He seemed to know all about us, and, despite my intending to tell him about things in the West, we found ourselves just listening to someone who knew so much more than I had to offer. It was fascinating. He gave us a few pieces of advice, and we left India for Coventry where my wife is from. The impression he made cannot be adequately explained. Our lives changed.

A year or so later, after the birth of my son, I attended a talk given by a Buddhist Monk. We became involved locally, and thus began our involvement in Buddhsim that continues today. :biggrin5:

Way to live and learn the most. Explore, discover and divulge. Very nice piece. There are no other productive ways to go about this matters regardless of the stage at which you find your potential, meaningful ways. Develop!!!

[Paulclem]

Way to live and learn the most. Explore, discover and divulge. Very nice piece. There are no other productive ways to go about this matters regardless of the stage at which you find your potential, meaningful ways. Develop!!!

Thanks. A timely reminder. :thumbs_up

[Freudian Monkey]

I find this thread interesting. It really insightful to read how people relate their religious experiences to their autobiographies.

I received a relatively conservative upbringing. My family belonged to a Baptist church. Our faith was a tiny minority in the area we lived in and we thought of ourselves as the sympathetic underdogs that were constantly bullied by the majority religion. I was always taught that a necessary part of faith is to be filled with the holy ghost. I felt tremendous social pressure since I had never experienced anything like what this experience was supposed to be, even though I did my best to receive this experience: I prayed a lot and went to sermons where prestigious preachers prayed for me to experience this miracle. But I never experienced anything other than feelings of comfort and warmth when someone put their hands over my head. Sometimes I thought that maybe I should just "fake" this experience just to feel more accepted. Later on I have thought that maybe some others in our church felt the same way I did and that they faked the experience just to fit in better.

So far the most religious experience that I've experienced has been the feeling that I felt when I was getting drunk with my friend on a cold autumn evening, and when I was shivering in the cold, my friend noticed this and offered his pullover to me so that I wouldn't catch a cold. The feeling of his warm shirt against my skin and his friendly smile were intoxicating - someone cared about me enough to take off his shirt and give it to me for me to wear. At this point I had already gave up my faith as a christian and my friend was not a christian either - we were just two nonbelievers sharing a moment of trust, respect and love.

[cacian]

I one time saw an evil hand. No kidding. It was a severed hand that crawled up a dark basement and grabbed a black book. I'd say there were 8 witnesses. I was about 7. We all got the hell out of there.

It's unusual in that evil spirits usually don't occupy bodily vessels. My guess is it was a particularly strong one and someone died in there. Turned out, there were 2 murders a year back. It was a famous case in which 2 young children disappeared and they turned up dead in the park up the road. The apartment was 50 feet from that basement.

I guess I should write a poem about it.

That is one spookystory ShadowsCool.

[mal4mac]

Monday morning I spent an hour pursuing samatha-vipassana meditation, and experienced several jhanic states, encountering ecstasy, timelessness, ultimate calm and infinite spaciousness, amongst other things. But usually my religious experiences are exciting as those of Mutatis-Mutandis. Is no religious experience a religious experience? Is that Zen?

[cafolini]

Monday morning I spent an hour pursuing samatha-vipissana meditation, and experienced several jhanic states, encountering ecstasy, timelessness, ultimate calm and infinite spaciousness, amongst other things. But usually my religious experiences are exciting as those of Mutatis-Mutandis. Is no religious experience a religious experience? Is that Zen?

It's one form of Zen.

[Paulclem]

Monday morning I spent an hour pursuing samatha-vipassana meditation, and experienced several jhanic states, encountering ecstasy, timelessness, ultimate calm and infinite spaciousness, amongst other things. But usually my religious experiences are exciting as those of Mutatis-Mutandis. Is no religious experience a religious experience? Is that Zen?

Yes.


Boredom is one of the states of mind we have to accept/ understand/ overcome. I haven't yet. :D

[El Viejo]

My mom was the child of a Catholic mom and a Lutheran dad who had converted to marry her. My dad, in turn, converted from the Methodist church to marry my mom. I am the product of equal parts unswerving faith and pragmatic apostasy.

We kept the sacraments consistently, and although we couldn't afford it they sent my siblings and I to Catholic schools all the way through high school. We were faithful, but not devout. Sometime during my grade school years an aunt of mine had her marriage annulled. The nuns had taught me that divorce was wrong, and I asked how this was different. The answer (the marriage never happened) seemed weaselly to me, and that was where I began to part ways with The Church. Or maybe it was when tongues of fire didn't appear at Confirmation. Both were around the same time.

I remained Catholic through high school. But apart from the formality of maintaining the sacraments my only real religious activity was leafleting against abortion, and writing against it when the opportunity arose in english class.

After high school I stopped going to confession and attending mass, but still considered myself a Catholic. I reacted angrily when my Catholic girlfriend began attending charismatic prayer meetings and trying to evangelize me. But resistance was futile, and I was assimilated, as were my fathers before me. Eventually this path lead me away from The One True Church and I spent a decade trying to find the real one true church. A parade of home prayer meetings, established independent churches, and one DIY startup which struggled along for a couple of years before being assimilated by another, more vigorous startup, occupied my time and attention. Along the way I threw myself into the support structures, helping out with the Sunday school bus runs, ushering, transferring sermons to tape, hosting prayer meetings, and other backgroundy stuff. I also read the Bible extensively, and made myself read it cover to cover in a couple of translations. I've never been able to cite chapter and verse, but I did acquire an overview knowledge, as one does when reading a favorite book two or three times.

But, as that one true church kept eluding me, I eventually became disillusioned and a backslider. As a backslider I had a moment that qualifies as my epiphany. I was re-reading the story of King David and Bathsheba, and suddenly saw the story from a different point of view. Here was David abusing his power, eventually killing Bathsheba's husband and marrying her to cover his tracks. God just kind of watches until the baby is born, then he moves in to strike with his mighty arm. Evil has been done, and someone must pay, so he smites the most obvious character in the story: the baby. And not mercifully. The baby suffers a protracted, lingering death. In his later years David has trouble staying warm at night, and has the country scoured for a pretty young maiden to help out. Apparently his two wives just weren't doing the job. Nevertheless, David is renowned, praised down through the ages as God's favorite king. The only character in the story with any integrity, Uriah, doesn't even get a footnote.

At that point I saw the God of the Bible as a country-clubbin' CEO. The kind of guy who looks out for his executives and their trophy wives, but doesn't hesitate to grind the insignificant under his heel when he wants to make a point. At that point a lot of business and politics that I had seen as sinful suddenly became scriptural.

I figured that God couldn't actually be as cruel, venal, and capricious as the God of scripture, so I stopped believing in Him. Perhaps both that conclusion and that decision were naive. It was a short step though to not believing in a god at all.

Not long after that the girlfriend who had seen to my conversion, whom I had eventually married, left me and our children for someone she'd met via Prodigy.

Today my children are grown, with families of their own, and I have started another family. My older children were raised in that hodgepodge of evangelical experiences, attended Christian Schools from time to time, and were briefly homeschooled. They range from atheistic to strongly evangelical. My younger children have been raised without formal religion. The oldest and I have talked much, and I've explained what I believe and how I got here. I've also explained that I could be dead wrong, because no one knows until they die what's on the other side. My child has adopted a faith or system loosely based on Shinto. My younger child isn't particularly interested in this stuff yet. Based on family history, somewhere between 64% and 99.999999% of my life has passed. I'll be discovering the mystery soon enough.

[mal4mac]

Boredom is one of the states of mind we have to accept/ understand/ overcome. I haven't yet. :D

Don't say that near a Zen master or he'll hit you with a big stick :beatdeadhorse5: :D

[Paulclem]

Don't say that near a Zen master or he'll hit you with a big stick :beatdeadhorse5: :D

What Zen master? What stick? :biggrin5:

[cacian]

Hi Pendragon forgive me if this is not what you are looking for but as someone who does not adhere to books and politics about religions, but all the same have my own beliefs personal to me and god that I decide to know for myself.
I find nothing in religions today that entice my time and so have my own little niche of gods and goddesses.
So I would like to have a go. I would not say I am of the spiritual kind as I have my feet both stuck on the ground for the sake of me and people I am with and know.
Religion I find as a whole a distraction from the real thing, an annoyance if you like, which gets in the way of me trying to understand everything around me without being given the third degree about what a god might do If I step out of line.
It is all well and good to have discipline but if I am going to listen and respond it better be coming from the god himself ie face to face but as it goes this is not possible and there lies the issue.
I am not here to justify religion or god I am here to jusfity me and the one way to do would be to hear it from the man himself but yet Again god fails not answer me back or waves at me. Oh well unlucky me. May be god is not interested haha. He does not like me or does he?
So since I hear not the voice of god so I must go with what I know and that is to turn to how I grew up and how surrounded by adults telling me what to do all the time. Obedience as child is what we all do and learn because we have to if adults are going to let us get away with things.
So it is a habit and I listen better when someones tells me things it face to face directly and with words I can understand.
Call it a bad habit but if that means the words of god from the pages of a book will suffer then so be it. I will go with I know.
My religious experience/views has not altered my personality and turned me into someone I do not like but what I have retained from it is that if God is not around then I better find a god in everyone here on earth and use it to my advantage to make myself and others happy. Why fly when I can walk.
Until then I retain God as the existent one with the exception, objection, which is this: Whatever you do not mentinon Lucifer as I could not be bothered to start with this one.
In life one has to make choices and is allowed to chose one at a time, just like marriage you chose the one, and god is the one I chose. The rest including lucifer can do whatever. That is all.

[ancast]

This is something I just needed to get out--this morning God saved my life, or maybe one of his angels. I was driving down I-35 and heading back to school, the weather was rough and there was rain coming down so hard it was hard to see at times. I will admit that I do not like to drive in bad weather, but I am no stranger to driving in fog, rain, or snow to get back to OSU after a weekend at the family’s. And I was listening to K-LUV, singing along with the Christian hits for comfort. And a couple of times by now, I reminded myself of the part in the Bible—where Jesus’s disciples are on this boat in a lake and a storm hits and they are freaking out and wake up Jesus. Who asks them why they are afraid, for he is with them. Well, I hit a rock or a pothole and suddenly I my car’s front end swings to the cement shoulder—straight ahead all I see is a wall of cement and I thought “Oh No.” . Mind you I was going the speed limit ~65 mph in a 70 zone, there is not a lot of traffic at 6:50, and already I have seen a lot of emergency vehicles on the road. My arms locked up, I couldn’t move—, and suddenly the front end of my car begins being pushed away from the median and the cement shoulder. It felt rough and bumpy, as my car straightened out; and I still fully expected to be crashing soon. The car straightens and no longer am I expecting to crash. I am just looking at my windshield driving in wonder. It takes a second or two to see it. There is a handprint on my windshield, at least two if not three lengths of my hand long and the fingers are pretty slim. It was there, against the lines of the rain, and it takes two to three swipes of my windshield wipers for them to fade. All I could say was “Thank you.” I finished the drive in kind of a daze, my mouth hanging open and trying to talk myself out of having seen that. The song that comes on next with perfect timing was, “Today is day one of the rest of my life...” and honestly I’m still kinda freaking out about it and it’s been about 11 hours. I am so grateful, Praise God! And I hope that if anyone out there is holding themselves back from God that they will read about this and let Jesus into their hearts.

[ancast]

Guess I should give a little of my background.
1. My early experience in religion was in the Sunday School in the Southern Baptist Church down the road from my grandparents home.
2. My mother was a single teen mom and very busy working and my grandparents would go when they felt like it.
3. My mother eventually married my step-dad, whom I just call "dad" and is pretty strictly atheist--though he does not discount ghosts, poltergeists, or psychics.
4. Mom from about 1999 to 2003 was Wicca and practiced tarot card readings on our neighbors and friends, the only church on base was Lutheran-based.
5. The month before 9'11 all of mom's reading pulled the towers.
6. Before moving back to southern Oklahoma mom basically became a christian Wicca
7. Recently, my mother has been moving more and more towards simpler Christianity and we have favored the Methodist denomination in our community, while dad still is pretty down on Christianity and Abrahamic religions.
8. I have always been christian, though I have occasionally wrestled with my faith and dedication.

So it's not like I have a narrow exposure to religions; Catholics, wiccans, druids, protestants, Pentecostal, evangelists, Mormons, , Methodists, atheists, Lutherans, agnostics, deists, Jedis, and Baptists. I mean the military is a pretty varied place, at least from the military brat perspective.

[YesNo]

5. The month before 9'11 all of mom's reading pulled the towers.


That was a strange experience you had driving in the car with the large hand print on the windshield.

I also heard stories about premonitions of the twin tower event. Rachel Pollack in her "The New Tarot Handbook" wrote something similar to what your mother experienced (page 78):


After September 11, 2001, Tarot readers as far from New York as Australia reported that for some two weeks before the terrorist attack on the twin towers, the Tower card appeared in every reading they did, no matter the subject.

I also heard that there were fewer passengers on the planes than normal, almost as if people seemed to know not to take that flight, but there may be other reasons why: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_175


It had 168 seats (10 in first class, 32 in business class, and 126 in economy class). On the day of the attacks, the flight carried only 56 passengers and 9 crew members, which represented a 33 percent load factor — well below the average load factor of 49 percent in the three months preceding September 11.

[affu933]

of course, i'll abide by the rules...