I was raised Southern Baptist (although we went to an American Baptist church for part of my youth due to a lack of an SBC church in the vicinity -- there's more differences than you'd expect -- when we moved to a city with a Southern Baptist church when I was a teenager I was rather shocked) in spite of my name, which is very, very Catholic (my parents were clueless and surprised about this when I told them about the reactions I've gotten to my name over the years). My father was a deacon and a Sunday school teacher, my mother a church clerk and a Sunday school teacher, and we went to church twice every Sunday, morning and evening, and sometimes to Wednesday night prayer service. I attended Vacation Bible School as a child, and taught in VBS as a teenager, and went to church camp and belonged to the youth group. Oh, and my first job was as a church secretary [g].
I married young, and as a young adult, I knew going through a divorce was going to send me straight to hell (I've talked about this with my mother since, and she claims not to know why I felt this way), but I had to go through one because if I didn't get out of that marriage... Telling my parents I was leaving my husband was no picnic. Well, anyway, the way I always explained what happened afterwards was with a flippant, "God and I had a fight and God lost." Not to my parents, however. That was more like the old "don't ask, don't tell" thing in the American military.
In my early thirties, I ran across the book Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler, which is a survey of Paganism in America in the 1970s(? -- I read it in the 90s and it seemed dated even then), and became something of a devout Pagan for a while. That sort of wore off after a few years, or at least the devout part did, and nowadays I think of myself as an animist more than anything else. I still observe the Pagan sabbats, although not anywhere near to the extent that I did twenty years ago, and I still have an altar in my bedroom that changes now and then. And I have a small statue of Kuan Yin in my bedroom which is similar to one in the Seattle Asian Art Museum which practically reached out and hugged me when I visited there a couple of years ago.
And that's about as clear as I can get [g]. Oh. I don't believe in original sin or why a god who claims to love us would have invented it. Mysticism, yes, depending on your definition. Don't believe in saints (although I do believe in multiple gods/spirits/etc. as aspects of a whole, so sort of the same thing if you squint hard enough) or the resurrection of the body or life everlasting, although I have my sneaking suspicions about reincarnation (an astrologer once told me, after running my chart, "wow, you've never been female before, have you?" and a whole parade of things I'd never understood about myself suddenly clicked into place).
no subject
I married young, and as a young adult, I knew going through a divorce was going to send me straight to hell (I've talked about this with my mother since, and she claims not to know why I felt this way), but I had to go through one because if I didn't get out of that marriage... Telling my parents I was leaving my husband was no picnic. Well, anyway, the way I always explained what happened afterwards was with a flippant, "God and I had a fight and God lost." Not to my parents, however. That was more like the old "don't ask, don't tell" thing in the American military.
In my early thirties, I ran across the book Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler, which is a survey of Paganism in America in the 1970s(? -- I read it in the 90s and it seemed dated even then), and became something of a devout Pagan for a while. That sort of wore off after a few years, or at least the devout part did, and nowadays I think of myself as an animist more than anything else. I still observe the Pagan sabbats, although not anywhere near to the extent that I did twenty years ago, and I still have an altar in my bedroom that changes now and then. And I have a small statue of Kuan Yin in my bedroom which is similar to one in the Seattle Asian Art Museum which practically reached out and hugged me when I visited there a couple of years ago.
And that's about as clear as I can get [g]. Oh. I don't believe in original sin or why a god who claims to love us would have invented it. Mysticism, yes, depending on your definition. Don't believe in saints (although I do believe in multiple gods/spirits/etc. as aspects of a whole, so sort of the same thing if you squint hard enough) or the resurrection of the body or life everlasting, although I have my sneaking suspicions about reincarnation (an astrologer once told me, after running my chart, "wow, you've never been female before, have you?" and a whole parade of things I'd never understood about myself suddenly clicked into place).
More than you wanted to know?