{"id":890,"date":"2004-07-20T14:39:00","date_gmt":"2004-07-20T19:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=890"},"modified":"2004-07-20T14:39:00","modified_gmt":"2004-07-20T19:39:00","slug":"my-religious-evolution-an-overview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=890","title":{"rendered":"My religious evolution: an overview"},"content":{"rendered":"

In response to an article<\/a> and personal story posted elsewhere, friends only.<\/p>\n

In 5th grade, after some serious emotional trauma, I split ways with Catholicism. I spent a number of years as an asshole atheist. <\/p>\n

I like to claim I turned down Catholicism for reason. That’s true, but elides an important detail. I left the Catholic belief system as an emotional reaction. When the shit hit the fan, I expected a caring, omnipotent, omnipresent hand to keep me from harm, and I saw no sign of such a hand. So I stepped onto a different path. A path with less certainty, but one where I felt more confident of the validity of its precepts. I was a little punk at the time. Religion had been my sole comfort in a dismal world. I wasn’t happy. Then I let go of religion and I let myself do whatever I wanted, and I still wasn’t happy. <\/p>\n

I continued on that vein for a couple years. I saw that I wasn’t happy, and so I reinvented my belief systems again. This time, it was organized around a principle of making others happy. I was pretty selective as to the others I applied it to, and the way I applied it, but that’s the same for all remotely functional belief systems, I think. <\/p>\n

My older sister graduated high school, went away to college, and became a Wiccan shaman. I was fascinated. I checked out several books on shamanism, and read them. I talked with her friends about it, on the rare opportunities I got. <\/p>\n

When she started up at her second university, I’d seen her go through a great deal of emotional turmoil. I’d been there for her while she was dealing with it. I met her cool new friends. I tried to straddle the skeptical and new age worlds. <\/p>\n

While I was learning chemistry and physics, I tried new age “energy manipulation” stuff. It was all so mercedes lackey, how could I resist? I started adding Animism as a partial descriptor of my beliefs. It offered a ready-to-plug-in belief system that let me see more, offered a more comforting, richer view of the world. Or so I felt at the time. But I could never quite bring myself to believe it. It hung on, suffering a lingering demise over many years. Bringing comfort and painful disappointment in one package. <\/p>\n

In college I looked at things with a new rigor. Somewhere along the line, my agnosticism became pretty militant (I don’t know, and neither do you, douchebag), with strong atheist leanings. I have warm, sort of wistful\/nostalgic feelings towards faith and the faithful, like my favorite fantasy novels. So long as they don’t chalk me down with the damned, I get along just fine with the faithful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In response to an article and personal story posted elsewhere, friends only. In 5th grade, after some serious emotional trauma, I split ways with Catholicism. I spent a number of years as an asshole atheist. I like to claim I turned down Catholicism for reason. That’s true, but elides an important detail. I left the … Continue reading “My religious evolution: an overview”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}