My religious history

So I thought it was time for a brief history of my background. I know at some point someone is going to come along and tell me that I just haven't studied the Bible, Quran, Torah, the Suttas or whatever other religious literature enough. I mean come on if I only prayed and studied more I'd be a believer, right? So this is my attempt to set that bit of nonsense straight.

I spent the first 27 years of my life as one of Jehovah's Witnesses. I was a devout, pious true believer. I read the Bible all the way the through when I was 16 and then the following year did the same thing again in the King James version. Nothing I read at the time convinced me my beliefs were wrong. Time went on until I started going on the Internet and I discovered the vast inaccuracies of the JWs. But that still didn't "shipwreck" my faith. I prayed and prayed to be able show others how their belief was incorrect. Time went on and I was undergoing an inward struggle. Soon the cognitive dissonance became too much. One Sunday in July I was sitting in the meeting and the person giving the talk said "Let's read in Matthew about this topic." As he read the topic and applied I kept reading it and I realized that what he was saying it meant and what it really meant were two different things. Suddenly all of the things I had been learning, believing and teaching others seemed ridiculous. Something inside me literally snapped. I waited until the middle song, got up and went home. I have not been to a JW meeting since.

But that was merely the prelude to the next 10 years. I wasn't interested in partying or making up for lost time due to my ultra-restricted childhood. I also wasn't interested in trying to prove to others the JWs weren't true. I reread the Bible again and felt "Well, I may not have a religion now but I'll always believe the Bible is true." Then I met my now husband and found out he was Jewish. I began studying Judaism in an attempt to understand him and his family. I mostly wanted to know what all these words they kept saying meant. In the process I started reading about why Jews don't believe Jesus is the Messiah. Soon I found myself believing along with them. After a 3 year study I converted to Judaism.

I quickly grew disillusioned with traditional Judaism and its rules. I found it difficult to accept that the Talmud and other writings were from God. The continued building of fences around the Torah began to seem like a heavy burden. Somehow my husband and I became affiliated with a Messianic Jewish congregation. Wow, I thought, I can have the best of both worlds. However, this group was just as controlling as the Orthodox and the JW world. In the meantime, I started college and concentrated on my studies. I continued to study and pray. I needed a humanities credit so I took a course on Buddhism and even attended Buddhist services. I could never quite wrap my mind around the core beliefs although to this day I do use many meditation and in the moment practices from Buddhism.

All of this searching was really beginning to bother me. I prayed and prayed but never seemed to get any kind of reliable answer. My heart began to ache and I missed having a tight knit community. Although I STRONGLY disagreed with many doctrines of the church of my youth I did miss the closeness and reliability of such a close group. Around this time the Mormons began to visit and after a year I joined their church. About four months later I realized what sick twisted cult this was. It almost made JWs look tame.

Having now went to all kind of fringe groups I went with friends to a "true Christian" church. Very evangelical and large. Doing everything right kind of place. But I was appalled at the amount of money spent on upkeep of a church for 10,000 and the lack of concern for social issues. I also was appalled at the claptrap they taught children. I wanted my children to grow up feeling free to question and challenge and learn about any topic.

Perhaps a smaller church would be more my style. I still hadn't resolved the whole Jesus thing in my mind and thought perhaps it was because I was having trouble finding "real" Christianity. It doesn't seem like it should be so hard. After all, if the Bible was so infallible why was I having such a hard time? To a smaller mainline church I went. Although it seemed more liberal than the large church it still taught my children things like the reality of the flood. By now I had read enough and studied enough science to know that this was an impossibility. It was a deal breaker in my mind.

Suddenly I had to come to the realization that the Bible wasn't infallible. Once more I felt that familiar breaking inside me. But this time the ground grew unsteady all around me. I felt as though I couldn't count on anything. Around this time my oldest was diagnosed with autism and now I was truly floundering. What had my 10 years of prayer and study and searching and desiring and tears and heartache got me? Just confused, saddened and depressed.

Words supposedly from a French king helped. While viewing a field covered in flowers Louis the XIV is said to have remarked "Perhaps there are as many ways to God as there are different flowers in the field" or something to that effect. He probably didn't say it but it helped my aching heart.

Finally, I decided to put religion from my mind and research holy books. I did this for about another year. Hours and hours of research and at the end of the day I just couldn't believe. It was too ludicrous, too obviously written to explain ancient times. It was all a fake.

At the same time, one of my classes at college was Bones, Stones and Human Evolution. I went in totally not believing in evolution. I only took this class because it would count as one of my sciences and it didn't have a separate lab. This class took my breath away. It was like discovering an entire universe existed under my nose but I could never see it. I had read enough to have no belief in the early stories of the Bible. But the evidence we looked at, studied, touched, read about, saw pictures of and looked at under microscopes was incontrovertible. Evolution was a fact. There was no way for me to deny it. There were mountains and mountains of evidence and just no way for it to not be true.

Then I found humanism. There was not a principal in humanism I disagreed with. I believed the principles. It was me. I realized something very important before I gave up my last ditch belief in God. If God were true or not, it wouldn't change how I lived my life. I did most of the things religious people said you should do. If there were or weren't life after death, it wouldn't change how I lived my life. And in that moment I let God go. I could be a good person without being chained to beliefs made by men without any conception of life now. I could be a good person without thoughts of eternal rewards or torture.

That is when God became irrelevant to my life.