(April 23, 2018 at 7:16 pm)G Alan Wrote: Hi everyone. First of all I want to be honest and let you know that I am a Bible believing Christian. I did not join this forum with the intentions to attack, debate, or belittle anyone. I expect the same treatment, please. I am doing a personal study on the topic of apostasy of the Christian faith. Some believers think that a person of Christian faith can choose to not follow Jesus. I do have my own beliefs about this subject of which i will not discuss. I do personally know of one person who kind of turned away for a period of time , but eventually returned to the faith. I am here to ask if there are any of people who were a bible believing, Christ following, Christian who chose to "walk away" from that belief. If so, how long were you a follower of Jesus and why did you abandon that faith? What is your belief now?
Thank you so much for your time.
G.
I was born and raised as a Roman Catholic. It was a pretty laid back house, but I did have to wake up and go to church with my Dad every Sunday until I was confirmed at 18, right before I graduated from high school.
I had been known as a problem kid in my CCD classes, always asking pesky questions like, "Why are we right and the ancient Greeks wrong?" I learned to shut up but I always stayed curious.
The summer after I graduated, I attended a seance. I think a lot about how my life would have been different if I hadn't gone, but I did. I'm not getting into it, but the events of that night convinced me that Catholicism, and by extension Christianity, was hiding something, to say the least.
That sent me on a 22 year journey into the occult world. I studied everything, practiced pagan religions, read Tarot cards, and led rituals. I was a group leader in Kentucky where I lived for six years before coming back home to Michigan in 2014.
After 22 years, I realized that all the journey work, meditation, divination, and spell craft had left me with exactly one unexplainable event, that summer night after I graduated. I finally realized that it was more likely that the "unexplainable" event had an explanation that I didn't ever consider than it was that I had been visited by some mystical force that proceeded to ignore me for the next 22 years.
As I look back, I was always skeptical, even when I was knee deep in the neo-pagan world. I just needed to carry that skepticism one more step and apply it to my own life.
