How did you find your religion/philosophical beliefs

[Audrey]

Hmm... in a nutshell... I came to my philosophy through a great deal of inspection and introspection.

 

Slightly longer version... I was raised by a mother who was a socially minded Methodist and a father who was a lapsed Baptist turned foxhole atheist (disproving the old adage that there are none).  I never believed in a literal deity, but liked the story of it and wanted to believe.  Through childhood and self-study I came to feel that there was infinitely more of use to be found in Nature and Humanity, which forms the core of my philosophy, and there were only two useful points in the Bible, which form a quasi-framework of my philosophy  -- 1. Feed people (their bodies, minds, hearts) and 2. Don't be a jerk. 

 

I'm really good at the first.  Mostly good at the second. ;)

[J-rap]

I've really enjoyed reading these.

 

I grew up in a delightful, devout Christian home.  One striking thing about it:  we never talked about a personal relationship with Jesus, salvation, Heaven or Hell, different denominations, etc.  My parents just lived their lives as kind and decent people.  They were both smart, well-educated people, who simply loved others, did not judge others, helped others, didn't talk about others behind their backs, were honest, reliable, gave to the poor, helped the elderly, all of that.  (My dad was like Fred MacMurray in the Absent Minded Professor.  :))  They believed that if you led a decent life and were kind to others, you were basically a Christian -- whether you really were or not.  You just came to it differently because of your upbringing, and God would understand.  :)  We prayed every night together.  We were very involved in a lively, fun Danish-Lutheran church in Northern California.  It was our home-away-from-home, since we had no relatives on the entire West Coast.  It was a very accepting church, and in fact, our youth group leader was a Catholic nun!

 

When I met my husband, he was at a very different place.  He had pretty much left the Catholic faith (he grew up in a large Irish Catholic family), and was starting over again from scratch.  He was researching world religions and talking to college professors in different fields about their views, and that's when I fell in love with him.  Eventually he came to Christ from a very different angle (an academic one), and I think we were both helpful to each other.  His academic view inspired me to dig deeper and question more, and my more simple, direct view was helpful to him as well.

 

We've raised our children in very similar ways as my parents did with me, except that we talk about everything a lot more.  Faith was and is often a dinner-time discussion.  We probably discuss faith more than anything else.  We don't get hung up on legalism though, and realize that a lot of it remains a mystery and we cannot begin to explain it all.  Things aren't so black and white, and only God knows our hearts and circumstances.

 

One thing we have really stressed with our children is that science is good.  If science in front of our eyes tells us one truth and we thought Scripture was telling us something different, then maybe we need to re-evaluate how we were interpreting Scripture.  God desires truth.

 

The only time my faith was ever tested was after our family trauma some years ago.  It was the first time I began to question if there was even a God at all.  This thought really took hold in my heart, and I didn't pray for a long time.  I began reading books by various philosophers -- many of them atheists.  Eventually, my philosophical readings led me to Christian theologians like C.S. Lewis and others, and theists like Antony Flew.  In the end, it brought me back around again to my Christian faith, mostly because the complexities of science and life seem impossible to me without a Creator.  I still do not quite fully grasp the need for redemption, but I believe it to be true, and not only that, crucial. 

 

 

 

I

 

[Xuzi]

I was raised Mormon and I still choose to be a Mormon.  But I'm not really a very conventional one, depending on how you look at it, and my feelings and beliefs about religion and God have evolved considerably over the last 20 years. Watching how others live according to their beliefs, whether they're religious or not, has really helped me, as has living in so many different places.

This is pretty much me. (minus the living in so many different places part. I wish!)

 

I like to surround myself with people of different beliefs and viewpoints and can see the good in many of them. I won't be distraught if my kids leave the faith, so long as they're decent people who try to do good.

[Saddlemomma]

I didn't find my religion...Jesus chased me for years and years.  I just finally stopped and listened.

[MercyA]

"Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up."   :)

 

I was raised in a loving, non-legalistic, solidly Christian home, but didn't attend church regularly until high school.  I professed faith and was baptized as a teenager.  I wore Christian t-shirts, carried around my Bible at school, listened to Christian music, and knew (or thought I knew) Scripture.

 

Through a gradual process I became more and more unlike what a Christian should be, while still professing faith. When I hit rock bottom and realized how bad things had become, I started a long and painful process of reevaluation.

 

Long story short, I held on to the few things I knew for sure and went from there.  I came to intensely dislike a few things.  First, hypocrisy and inconsistency, which were rampant in my own life.  Secondly, my tendency and the tendency of other Christians to pick and choose what we like from Scripture while ignoring or explaining away what doesn't fit our pet system or preferences.  Thirdly, cultural Christianity, which is all too often tied to certain political views and poor teaching.

 

My brilliant, righteous, humble husband has been a great help to me.  I blame him for my old-earth creationist views. ;)    

 

I believe that Jesus is the Son of God, Savior of sinners, "of whom I am chief."  I believe that the Bible is Truth.  

 

I've really enjoyed this thread. I have a lot of affection for people on the board, even when I disagree with them.  I've been so curious about many of your backgrounds and experiences and am thankful you've been willing to share.

[Bluegoat]

My immediate family came from a Christian background, but have never been terribly observant.  My mother is a Christian of a sort, and she's a thoughtful person but her way of thinking about reality is largely about emotions - she's an INFP in Myers-Briggs terms.  My dad is a bit crazy and I don't know quite how to charachterize his philosophy of life.

 

Anyway, my mom's family is evangelical Lutheran and i attended church with my grandparents as a child.  At that time, here in Canada, that tended to look more European than the American version, but that congregation flipped during the time I was there.  I also occasionally went to church with my dad's family who were working class Irish Catholics.  Except my grandpa who was a sort of cynical classical liberal - what we call a Grit in Canada.

 

I considered myself a Christian during that period but I didn't have much intellectual background around that - it just wasn't part of my family life - they are a mix of military and business and working class, and some are quite literary, but not generally what you would call the intelligentsia.  My intellectual interests as a child were particularly centered around natural history, anthropology, and so on.

 

When I was a teen I didn't consider myself anything - not as a rejection of anything but it was a period of evaluation.  i did absorb a kind of idea that Christianity was essentially a naive religion for the uneducated, which was really about my limited experience.  I did seriously look at neopaganism, which appealed to me on a poetic level, and Buddhism, which appealed to me intellectually but about which I had some significant reservations (though to be fair it was mostly the Buddhism that was local to me that I was able to learn about, and that is a very western form.)

 

When I went to university I began to study philosophy and became I suppose a sort of Platonist.  I became a Christian not long after that.  There are probably a number of reasons - in many ways it seemed like the logical conclusion of Platonism.  I had been shocked to discover, when I arrived at university, the intellectual side of Christianity, and that it was accorded real respect from all the faculty - it was simply no longer possible for me to think it was uneducated, naive, or incompatible with sophisticated ideas, and in fact it seemed far less hemmed in by unthinking orthodoxy than most public discourse.  So it was easy then to take it seriously as an intellectual tradition and evaluate its historical claims.  And I was also at that time exposed to a very beautiful and rooted liturgical tradition that I found very moving. 

 

Most of what has happened since then has come out of that one way or another.