*shrug* I put off homework this long, may as well put it off a while longer.
1. When it comes to religion/spirituality, what do you believe, if anything?
I'll have to overview my religious/spiritual history to fully answer this. I started going to the Baptist church when I was 6 or 7 with some friends from school. I took to the idea of a god, but I remember that even at my young age I had ideas about god that were contradictory to the church doctrine. This disturbed me greatly, and I tried to see the god that particular overbearing institution wanted me to see for fear of my eternal soul's damnation (not joking). I honestly could not, though. I did believe in Jesus, in that I believed Jesus existed and walked the earth, and was possibly the son of god or something along those lines. So, I connected with my Baptist friends through the idea of Jesus that I had in my head at the time, as I liked that idea better than the idea of god the church seemed fond of.
When I left the baptist church at the age of 11-ish (or, when my parents pulled me out of the church, rather) I visited a different "religious" establishment with my parents. My parents were both pretty staunch atheists, and so we attended a mostly atheist congregation. The focus of the congregation centered around a kind of "academic" and scientific worldview, if that makes sense, although as I grew in the congregation I found it to be far too academic and not very scientific. Additionally, I still had this idea in my head that there was something else in the world, different from what they were fond of talking about. Call it god, or a guiding force, or whatever. This eventually led me to investigate Buddhism, and to try meditation, with which I did have some early success. I had less success with Buddhist groups, who reminded me too much of the Baptists in terms of how many questions one was supposed to ask at the groups, which was none for whatever reason. So, I continued with my own insight meditation practice.
I also had quite an appetite for spiritual literature. My less-than-agreeable attitude towards Baptism and atheism, caused by that suspicion of something else that was not the Baptist god, led me to read a lot of books on Buddhism. But I still was unable to find answers that jived with me. This really troubled me! I eventually gave up on spiritual literature altogether and tried to "logic" my way around the answers I was seeking in my spare time. This worked to some extent, but really only led me to temporarily suppress my, I guess you could say spiritual, conflict. Crazy, huh? I don't hear about people like myself often; people like myself being people who absolutely cannot just move on from spiritual conflict, who can't just let it sit. I often wondered if I was insane by any number of legal or psychological definitions.
In time I came to find out I wasn't alone, because I guess people like myself have a way of finding one another. I was found by another such individual, two individuals really, who were part of a more vast network of people like us. The network fell under the heading of a particular group with a positive reputation for being both a refuge and a resource for the spiritually restless. I jumped right in. I was aware that I was not going to get another opportunity to figure this stuff out that felt as promising as this group did. So, I met with some local individuals who all shared our interest on a weekly basis, and eventually traveled farther than I ever thought I would travel by car in order to meet with people from all over the world who were part of this network.
The meeting was far saner than I had expected, far saner than any outsider might be tempted to imagine. It struck me as so odd while I was there, that nobody was doing voodoo dances around the fire, or something along those lines. However, the meeting was far from a casual get-together. I felt a definite pressure to get my ideas in order while I was there, really to get myself in order. It became a continuous theme in my exchanges with a number of members of this group at and after the meeting. "Is your house in order?," was what one woman, who was of great help to me, would ask me for the next year or so.
I think that once a person devotes so much energy to trying to make sense of these kinds of things, that person's life experience comes to resemble a path. Any movement on the path begins to amount to advancement in the direction of trying to make sense of the problems that got the person on the path in the first place. Deliberate or not, one is always walking on the path. By the time I visited with the aforementioned group, I was definitely on a path. I spent a lot of time deliberately on my particular path over the next couple of years after my connections with this group faded. During this time I tried to make sense of the atheism my parents embraced. I turned to numerous resources trying to just understand what it meant to be human, the most helpful of which happened to be anthropological documentaries and Native American philosophy. I came to understand animal psychology to the point where I turned significantly vegan. (For honesty's sake, I'm still not 100% vegan, but I'm consistently above 90%.) I mentally toiled quite a bit on all of my experiences up to that particular time in my life, and tried to make sense of them in the light of any number of ideas about spirituality or god -- ideas coming from spiritual teachers and philosophers throughout the ages.
I can't say that I've found answers that would satisfy everyone or even just anyone. Interestingly, though, I just recently began to see likenesses of my own path in teachings I had long struggled to make sense of. I've come not to a belief, per say, but to an understanding that I can accept and work with.
I'm also still on a path, though it doesn't look much like the same path I started out on. There are many more things I hope to someday understand.
Anyway, it looks like I've managed to combine my answers to all three of these questions pretty well, so:
2. How did you come to believe it?
3. Do your parents (or did they when alive) believe the same?
Thanks for the thread necromancy, Faust. I like your reasoning behind your decision as well. Nothing wrong with putting all the cards on the table.
