Religion and faith - Your story

[afleitch]

I thought it would be nice to ask people to lay out their 'story' when it came to their religious beliefs or indeed the reasons for their non-religous beliefs. Jsojourner laid what what was likely the most moving journey I have heard. Many of us are still young after all

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I was born in June 1984 and baptised as Catholic two months later. I was from a traditional large Catholic west of Scotland family however my dad's side was Presbyterian and my dad himself was and is unreligious. He doesn't really talk about what he believes in. In Scotland, the 'Catholic v Protestant' rivalry was and is still lingering. There were Orange Parades and the general harrasment of people from both sides which in working class areas could spill into petty violence. You also had people who tried to rise above that.

State schools are divided along religious lines and I went to a Catholic primary, St Joseph's when I was 5. Religious Education is a requirment under the National Curriculum. In Catholic schools prayers were said at the start and end of the school day and at lunch. RE was twice a week I think which was singing, reading and drawing. You wouldbe told a parable and illustrate it, or be asked to identify features of a Church. Time was also spent preparing for Confession and Communion which I received at 7. At 7, retrospectively I can't think of what I needed to confess (other than hitting my borther) I was pretty well behaved and made a few silly mistakes, but it was very difficult to fit all of that in to the context of a 'sinful act.' It took me a while to 'get' confession.

And that was that really. I went to Church every Sunday and everything was quite routine and scheduled. When I was 12 I was accepted into St Aloysius' College, a Jesuit run school in Glasgow. Here priests weren't just visitors or people from afar - they were teachers of RE, Geography and so on. The headmaster was Fr Porter who was a tall and fairly young man. People seemed to like him. RE was more theologically centred. We discussed Islam, Judaism. We tackled Liberation Theology. The whole school was involved in social programmes in the neighbourhood which I inveolved myself in. We also had charities; Justice and Peace, the Childrens Fund, Pro-Life and Amnesty International (which was wound down after I left because Amnesty moved sympathetically in favour of abortion)

I develeped a social concience there which I have taken with me. I also developed critical skills when it came to faith. The Jesuits encouraged criticism and analysis. Early on, I dropped my blanket opposition to abortion which was the first real 'un-Catholic' position I adopted. I also became aware of my sexuality.

I never struggled with that. I have quite a rational mind and I accepted it early on. I understood that the Church was at odds with it but I still went to mass. There was never an anti-gay enviroment in St Aloysius'. Far from it. However at that time schools were still restricted by Section 28 (or 2a in Scotland) which made it illegal to fairly discuss homosexuality in schools. There were plans to overturn it but they met stiff opposition from a well funded and misleading campaign. The Church stood against it's appeal and joined with people who tried to scare the public suggesting that 'five year olds would be taught gay sex' (something that was never going to happen and hasn't in the 8 years since) The Bishops stood against it.

At St Aloysius' it was discussed. Most people, even at my age of 15/16 seemed to support it's repeal. I was a debater at that time and gave talks and speeches and participated in debates voicing my support for it's repeal. That was accepted and seemed to go down pretty well.  Outside of school was different.

The Bishops sent out 'prepared statements' and I can remember my parish priest reading it out with a bit of a heavy heart (he was later removed from the parish for advising a gay parishioner to re-evaluate his marriage to a woman). Halfway through, hearing the content of the letter - the personalised attacks, the foray into civil society I decided to walk out. I didn't voluntary attend mass again for a number of years.

Around the same time I came out at school. It was great and everyone was wonderful. Even a priest (who I won't name) spoke to me about and discussed his own private objection to the Church's position. But I still chose not to attend mass except at St Aloysius' Church in Glasgow.

When I left and headed to university it was the first time I didn't formally study religion or theology. So I began to study myself. It was at this time I began to comb through the Bible and study the arguments that suggested what is the accepted translation of some unsympathetic words and passages could be wrong (which I've done to death on here!) I started to go to Mass again.

I also began to becaome more vocal. Pastors on boxes in the middle of the street are not common in Glasgow. However if I see people heckling passers by I argue. When I saw one group giving out money to help youths 'understand' the message, to bribe them into answering questions they posed. I told them the temple; the house of God was not just a building. I got angry with a group pushing and pulling at an old lady or ignoring the homeless man a few yards behind their pitch. And I'll do it again. However I also take time to talk with them now and then and there is often much in common. I also know that I can be as abrasive as they are! So I need to have a little humilty now and then.

I still have faith - but my feet never quite rest and I am critical and open to criticism. I've recently attended a new church, which I won't discuss here at the moment, but I feel comfortable in myself, my faith and my sexuality. I don't believe I need to compromise on any of them.

[Хahar 🤔]

I'd write mine, but it's entirely banal and I'm sure you can guess it as it is.

[dead0man]

I went to a So.Baptist church 3 days a week (2 Sundays, 1 Wed) until I was 19 or 20.  I've been in a church less than a dozen times since I turned 21.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     My mother raised me without religious influence. When I was 6, I had an epiphany & wanted to become a Protestant. However, my mother didn't, so that plan was shot down. Later when I was 16, I figured religion sucked & became an Atheist.

[Torie]

I was raised in an atmosphere where religion was for other people, and not for "us." All that was left to do, was rate the relative negative scores of the various sects. Some got much higher minus scores than others. One downside of all of this, is that I never "learned" the Bible, which is a BIG gap in my education, that I regret. I also have by and large deep sixed  the scoring sheet. It was not a useful tool for me for much of anything. The end. 

[Filuwaúrdjan]

My family was, and is, firmly religious and firmly Protestant but not really tied to any specific church (small families created by centuries of economic migration can be like that, I guess). My Mother is a Methodist (but never a chapel-goer), my father is sort of low church Anglican, sort of (Welsh) Calvinist. All of this goes back a long way; while most of my recent ancestors were working class, there's always been a strain of Nonconformist Ministers, Lay Preachers and so on going back longer than anyone can remember on several different sides of the family (interestingly my Godfather is married to someone who preaches in the Eglwys Bresbyteraidd Cymru; the Calvinistic Methodists, Wales's little contribution to driving theologians slowly mad with despair, and the Church that my Taid was involved in before he moved to England). Anyway. To an extent I grew up on a diet of bible stories and can remember spending hours reading through one of them childrens bible things when I was no age at all. As a result I have a real love of many of the Old Testament stories and so on (probably why I both "get" and like Dennis Potter's work) and for parts of the New Testament... mainly Matthew, Mark, John, Revelations.
I suspect that I was probably always a bit more religious than average for my age and so on (and have fond memories of, repeatedly, telling an incompetent (and, with the benefit of hindsight, obviously alcoholic) Vicar that he was wrong during the R.E. lessons that we had every Thursday morning in primary school; all schools were I grew up were (and, I think, are) CofE schools), but the main reason why I'm religious in the way that I am is the fact that I became seriously ill a little over ten years ago. When you spend years in the state that I was in, you turn in on yourself somewhat (I did anyway) and you think about things in ways that you might not otherwise think of doing. There's other stuff as well, but I'm not posting that here.

[Bandit3 the Worker]

I went to a Catholic elementary school where religion was the first class taught each morning. But because the school bus was so slow, I was always late. So the nun who ran the school tried making me take an additional religion class outside the school.

My parents refused to go along with this, because it was the school system's fault I was late every day. The school failed to insist that the bus bring me to school on time.

Result: no First Communion for you!

Eventually I ended up completely ditching the Church anyway.

[12th Doctor]

I went to a Catholic elementary school where religion was the first class taught each morning. But because the school bus was so slow, I was always late. So the nun who ran the school tried making me take an additional religion class outside the school.

My parents refused to go along with this, because it was the school system's fault I was late every day. The school failed to insist that the bus bring me to school on time.

Result: no First Communion for you!

Eventually I ended up completely ditching the Church anyway.

And Kentucky was stolen.  I'm sure that's exactly how it happened.

[Bandit3 the Worker]

And Kentucky was stolen.  I'm sure that's exactly how it happened.

Kentucky was stolen? That's weird, because it looks to me like Kentucky is still right here like it's always been.

[12th Doctor]

And Kentucky was stolen.  I'm sure that's exactly how it happened.

Kentucky was stolen? That's weird, because it looks to me like Kentucky is still right here like it's always been.

In the past, I never ceased to be amazed at your lack of ability to challenge your own assumptions.  As such, I trust nothing that comes out of your mouth at face value.  Sorry if I don't buy your story 100%, especially since you were probably to young to remember any of it.

[Bandit3 the Worker]

In the past, I never ceased to be amazed at your lack of ability to challenge your own assumptions.  As such, I trust nothing that comes out of your mouth at face value.  Sorry if I don't buy your story 100%, especially since you were probably to young to remember any of it.

Pooing is cool.

[12th Doctor]

In the past, I never ceased to be amazed at your lack of ability to challenge your own assumptions.  As such, I trust nothing that comes out of your mouth at face value.  Sorry if I don't buy your story 100%, especially since you were probably to young to remember any of it.

Pooing is cool.

OMG, school uniforms are fascist! Everyone at my school was a fascist! All the teachers hated me, and let people bully me, and that's how I learned to hate The Man.

[afleitch]

Will the both of you put a sock in it.

[Хahar 🤔]

Will the both of you put a sock in it.

^^^^

This isn't the thread to bring up 4-year-old feuds.

[12th Doctor]

Anyway, the story of my spiritual convictions started about 300 years ago.  For whatever reason, my family fled Germany and came to PA.  The story is that they came over as religious refugees, which leaves only two real possibilities.  The first that they were part of some Quaker-like organization, or that they were Jews (there is some evidence for this).  Eitherway, up until the early 19th century, my family were members of Unitarian/Quaker groups.  Then, the great shift began.  Every time someone in my family was married, they married into a more theologically conservative Christian sect, so from Unitarian-Quaker-Seventh Day-Baptist-Presbyterian-Methodist-Anglican and then finally, my grandfather married my Irish Catholic grandmother.  Withing 8 generations, my family had gone hard Left to hard Right.  My mother didn't convert to anything else, and so I was born, and baptized in the Catholic Church.

We rarely went to church for the first 13 years of my life.  My family, especially my step-dad, spent alot of time talking about Catholicism, and how much they hated Protestants, alot of rosaries and prayer cards, and asking God for wealth, and such, but they really wasn't much positive reinforcement in my family.  I wasn't raised in it, and the only examples I had were negative, and hypocritical ones. 

I spent alot of time buried in science books, didn't care about God, or Catholicism and really didn't believe in it.  I wasn't familiar with the terms at the time, but I could probably have been best described as a scientific atheist. 

I started attending Catholic school when I was 13.  I was well behind the rest of the class when it came to Bible studies.  In a humorous side note, when I learned I needed a Bible for the class, my aunt bought me a KJV not knowing it wasn't a Catholic Bible.  Eitherway, I stood out like a sore thumb amongst my peers at the school, all of whom were far holier than I was.

I used to watch alot of A&E.  There was a show on there narrated by Leonard Nimoy, where they approached the Bible from a scholarly, contemporary, but albeit, liberal perspective.  That interested me and I watched every Saturday.  It helped spark my interest.  Around this time, also, my Aunt went through her second bout with cancer.  She started to have a conversion, of sorts, and started looking into her faith more.  She is still with us.

When I was around 16, I encounter the anti-Catholic attack for the first time.  I knew a couple of points, but I had no idea what to say about the more sophisticated attacks.  Already having an interest in history, I brought the things people had said to my aunt, who knew where to look.  With time, I took my studies in a number of different, and in depth directions.  For a while, I started to become a bit of an uber-Catholic... read scripture alot, had a bookmarked Catechism, taught it, prayed the rosary, had 30 prayer cards, went to mass every week, went to confession every week, went to the communion vigil once a month... but there is a key difference between myself and my parents that I maintain even now... I rarely ask for anything, and a try to follow through on my faith instead of using it as a way to feel good.  I don't do it because I expect God to put me in a mansion if I act like a decent person, I do it because its right.

One thing I can say about where I am from is that we had a great collection of priests, who really believed in the faith.  When I got up to Erie for college, the center of the diocese, I saw alot less of that.  Up there, it was treated like a business by everyone.  Though it was a "Catholic" college, the only kids who seemed interested in practicing were liberaltion theologists, who ran around, talked about "Jesus" all the time and used it to advance their liberal political views.  With time, I started to identify less and less with the Catholics I saw around me.  I discovered the Byzantine Church and went there for a while.  A few years ago, I had a serious crisis of faith... I'm sure most of you remember it... as a result of all the hypocrisy I saw around me... everyone was either a hypocrite or an ultra-liberal Jesus freak.  I couldn't find too many people who were both serious scholars and had a really mental appreciation for the faith, and who actually practiced it as well.  I had alot of other problems at that time as well... generally, I reached the lowest point of my life since being an early teen.  The sum result is that I left the Church, became a deist, asked God to either put me where I was supposed to be, or kill me, just about every night, etc.

Well, I got my life back together, and over the past year, I have started practicing again, not the "uber-Catholic" I used to be, but, as you can all see, I still care.

Both in my personal and religious life, I have learned that I need to stop being concerned with both gaining approval of others, and being affected by how others behave so much.  Yeah, alot of people are hypocrites, shouldn't allow that to affect how I behave.  And if I keep acting to either gain or reject other's approval, then who am I in the end?  No one.

If I am true to who I am and what I believe, then it doesn't matter what everyone else is doing.

[memphis]

My family is nominally Jewish. Like most Jewish people, we're not really observant though my mother still attends services regularly. I always found synagogue painfully boring and I really hated having to go to Jewish school in the afternoon after regular school. While the cultural aspect of being Jewish is interesting to me, religion has never made any sense, and I remember, even as a child, thinking Bible stories were absurd. I've always thought that religious people were not good critical thinkers.

[Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin' for to carry me home.]

I became a Christian much like Paul did when he was knocked off his horse...it wasn’t by choice, I was called.  In 1992, I was dating a girl (who later became my wife).  She belonged to a Christian church (World Wide Church of God, founded by Herbert Armstrong) which was mixing a lot of the Laws of Moses (unclean foods, Jewish Holy Days) into Christianity.  After a couple of dates, she informed me she wasn’t supposed to be dating outside of her church.  So, I told her I would look into her beliefs.

I was raised a Christian (Catholic), but didn’t practice it, didn’t go to church, and knew only two verses of the bible, Gen 1:1 and John 3:16.  So, I could maybe be categorized a “Christian” for the purpose of a Census, but that is about as far as my Christianity went.

Luckily, I hadn’t been brain-washed enough by the Catholic Church to think I couldn’t interpret the bible myself without the help of the Vatican.  So, I thought, “All these denominations can’t all be right since they have differing beliefs.  I’ll just read the bible and see what it says and let the chips fall where they may, even if it means I can’t date my current girlfriend."

On my very first night of my “research” into the bible, I happened to begin at the book of Galatians.  Which just so happens to be addressed to a near carbon-copy of my girlfriend’s church.

After reading for about an hour, it was obvious that her church’s mixing of the Law of Moses was off-track. And God opened my eyes and I started thinking to myself, “What is the purpose of their deception?”  Then God allowed me to perceive the spiritual battle that was going on in her church’s deception – that there was a battle being waged over the possession of something of value – souls.  That there was a purpose to their deception, that demonic forces were deceiving them to keep them from being saved.

At that point, I got up from the table where I was studying and wept out of joy that I finally believed in Jesus (I guess you can say I believed in Jesus because God allowed me to perceive the forces deceiving my girlfriend’s church).  And I paced my floor of my apartment weeping out of joy that I finally believed.

At that moment I asked a myself a question, “Is this why [my girlfriend and the association with her church] had been brought into my life, so that I would believe?” (I actually used to subscribe to the free magazines her church published when I was a teenager, because I occasionally stumbled upon their broadcast on TV very late at night.  And it just so happened that when I was in college, I became friends with a guy whose dad was a deacon in that church.  And through that friend I became friends with many of the sons of the leadership of that church and they had become my circle of friends for several years and I hung around their families, including their parents, almost every weekend.  It was through them I met my girlfriend at a party and I felt an immediate spiritual attraction to her the first instant I laid eyes on her and I had never felt that before with anyone, much less the first moment of meeting someone.  This really perplexed me because I had always treated women worse than I had treated my cars, and I was hard on my cars.  I kept a close eye on her for a year because she was dating one of my close friends at the time and I was also dating someone.  After a year, neither one of us was dating anyone and I asked her out.  My study began a couple of weeks later.)

So, my question “Is this why [all these things] had been brought into my life, so that I would believe?” was very loaded and included events going back to when I was a teenager.  Immediately after I asked that I received the Holy Spirit and God spoke to me and said, “Yes, that is the reason why.  Now go and tell them the truth.”

Obviously, my revelation from God didn’t sit well with my girlfriend or her parents, or my friends in her church, or the parents of my friends who just happen to be part of the leadership of that church.  To put in mildly, it was as if God had dropped a bomb in my life and my “revelation” sent shockwaves through many families and turned mine upside down.  I had been a non-religious friend to several of the families of the leadership of a church, I had been a guest at their dinner tables dozens upon dozens of times...and now I was coming to them claiming that I, a non-religious person, had a message for them from God that they were deceived.

Through all of it, I saved my girlfriend (who later became my wife) and just of few friends out of that church.  But I also led my mother and step-father to Christ and my brothers still to this day frequently ask me questions about Jesus.

Since my wife’s old church was dabbling in the Law of Moses, I became a student of the Old Testament (OT) as well as the New Testament (NT).  That has helped me realize that the whole NT can be taught from the OT and every NT doctrine has an OT precedent.  This is how the Apostles were able to use the OT as the bible of the first generation of Christians.  That is how the people of Berea were able to use the OT to verify what Paul was teaching: “They examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” (Acts 17:11)

And since the whole NT can be taught from the OT, Paul commanded the churches “Do not go beyond what is written." (1Cor 4:6)

[Daniel Z]

My mother's family is Catholic, but very few were serious about it. Grandma went to church every once and a while, but my mom has not gone to mass in over 40 years. She would yell at me every once in a while for saying Hell or useing the Lords name in vain.

My dad's family is very liberal prodesent (UCC) and most of the men were actualy ministers, including Grandpa, Great Grandpa (although he was log dead by the lime I was born), six great uncles, and one uncle. However I'm pretty sure my dad is an atheist, but I can't be sure because I have never had a religious discussion with him.

When I was young I considered myself a christian due to my family. When I was 13 I realized I didnt really believe in any of it, so ever since then I have been an agnostic.