RE: What's your background?
August 25, 2010 at 10:04 am
(This post was last modified: August 25, 2010 at 10:04 am by Entropist.)
This is the short version:
Raised nominally Catholic, but fairly open-minded parents. Didn't go to mass often at all and by my teens we stopped going altogether (I don't want to go into details). In my teens I was basically an agnostic with deistic leanings.
Again, without getting into too many long-winded details, by my early 20s I was dealing with a lot of personal emotional insecurity and low self-esteem issues. I ended up in the Church of Christ. After a couple years, was kicked out of the Church of Christ, along with some other friends and we had a house church (we thought the Church of Christ was too liberal!). This lasted a couple years.
More complications in real life, and the house church folded and I was basically a sort of agnostic, but soon became attracted to mysticism (Pseudo-Dionysius, Eckhart, as well as moderns like Buber, Tillich, Merton, etc. and some eastern philosophy). During this time I went to a few churches: Greek Orthodox, Episcopal, Universal Unitarian and Quakers. Again, without going into details, I had various problems with all of them-- and with Christianity in general.
By 2000 (at the age of 30), my dissatisfaction and my doubts started to come to a head. By 2001, I had let it all go and I was surprised by how liberating it was for me-- something I had not expected.
So it ends up something like this:
Nominal Catholic >>> Agnostic/Deist >>> Church of Christ >>> house church uber-fundie >>> Agnostic >>> Greek Orthodoxy >>> Episcopalianism >>> UU >>> Quakers >>> Atheism
I get exhausted just thinking about it... This was not a casual affair for me-- I read volumes of theology and wrote hundreds of pages of personal notes trying to suss all this out for myself. It was a real headache of my own doing.
Raised nominally Catholic, but fairly open-minded parents. Didn't go to mass often at all and by my teens we stopped going altogether (I don't want to go into details). In my teens I was basically an agnostic with deistic leanings.
Again, without getting into too many long-winded details, by my early 20s I was dealing with a lot of personal emotional insecurity and low self-esteem issues. I ended up in the Church of Christ. After a couple years, was kicked out of the Church of Christ, along with some other friends and we had a house church (we thought the Church of Christ was too liberal!). This lasted a couple years.
More complications in real life, and the house church folded and I was basically a sort of agnostic, but soon became attracted to mysticism (Pseudo-Dionysius, Eckhart, as well as moderns like Buber, Tillich, Merton, etc. and some eastern philosophy). During this time I went to a few churches: Greek Orthodox, Episcopal, Universal Unitarian and Quakers. Again, without going into details, I had various problems with all of them-- and with Christianity in general.
By 2000 (at the age of 30), my dissatisfaction and my doubts started to come to a head. By 2001, I had let it all go and I was surprised by how liberating it was for me-- something I had not expected.
So it ends up something like this:
Nominal Catholic >>> Agnostic/Deist >>> Church of Christ >>> house church uber-fundie >>> Agnostic >>> Greek Orthodoxy >>> Episcopalianism >>> UU >>> Quakers >>> Atheism
I get exhausted just thinking about it... This was not a casual affair for me-- I read volumes of theology and wrote hundreds of pages of personal notes trying to suss all this out for myself. It was a real headache of my own doing.
“Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.” ~ E.M. Cioran
