Recovering Spirituality?

I can relate to you in many ways. I've been religious in the past and was raised as a Christian, but several years ago I stopped believing. Since then, I've been a huge skeptic and I really wanted to believe, but just couldn't and that made me really sad. It was like finding out Santa Claus wasn't real and no matter what, you couldn't believe in him again because you know the truth. So I've been trying really hard to believe and sometimes I have by getting more involved with my church and listening to some religious music sometimes, etc.
The thing is, I'm not stressed out about it as much anymore but still a bit. Really I just want to do more research to figure out what I believe, since I still feel spiritual sometimes. I was thinking of reading up on different religions, but more-so Christianity since that's what I've felt the most connected to thus far. I know you're talking more spirituality than specific religious beliefs, but it could help to do some research and maybe explore some different types of spirituality. Maybe try something like meditation to feel spiritual. There are lots of websites online about different ways to meditate. There are also a lot of guided meditation videos on youtube.
Anyway, hope this helps

 

I was raised in a half-Jewish half-Christian family, so growing up I spent weekends going to both temples and churches. This tradition tapered off and stopped entirely during my middle school years. I'd stopped going to church because I only went with my grandparents and we weren't doing it anymore. I stopped going to temple because I hated the kids there and as they got older they became more cruel, yet they were treated by the adults there as "star students of tomorrow," you know, stuff like that. It was hard to stomach. What sealed the deal was having to give donations to fuel an overseas conflict I wanted to take no part in. Politically I try to take a neutral stance, and I purposefully distanced myself from religion so that nobody would consider me part of their religious community. I never felt closer to the other people who "shared my faith." In fact, there wasn't much to my "faith." More than anything it was ritual, and it was a ritual I eventually decided I didn't want to live with.

I decided that I would take my own path to spirituality. Going to a library, or even browsing online to look up information about religious mythos, practices and esoteric philosophy feels much more like the path to knowledge I desire. There's something quite satisfying about grappling with those ancient mysteries on my own terms, for no reason other than my own ambition to learn. My peace of mind is in asking questions and toying with myriad answers. Recently I've been studying up on the 10 Sephirot of the Kabbalah. My interest in religion and philosophy is at an all-time high now that I've decided to make it my own subject of research. And there's something quite empowering about interpreting it the way I prefer rather than having someone tell me what to believe, or try to enforce my compliance through "rituals" or "communities." Maybe that works for some, but for me, spirituality is an isolated endeavor. Perhaps it's the same for you?

 

You can be spiritual without religion. Religion puts people in a box. I, myself, don't identify with any existing religion though I was baptized as a Catholic Christian. I had been questioning religion since I was in my 20s because I felt like I really don't belong in any of them and had since stopped going to church. I do believe in a higher power and the Creator and so many things that humanity has no concrete explanation of.

 

Despite having a catholic family I never had any problems with them accepting my sexuality abut despite their support I was fearful of going to hell or being hated by God. What I basically realized is Jesus's everlasting love for us is real and is greater than any sin and i think you can seek in the bible Jesus loved everyone sinner or non sinner. But the truth is we all sinners but at the same time if you believe in him you are always worth of his love and that dedicated belief in him is what gets you to heaven. He died on the cross not because we were horrible people but because he loved us more than any imperfection or sin.

Also about sin. Many verses were mistranslated into English and many verses about homosexuality are now thought to be mistranslated which is greatly disputing them today. But most importantly is what is in your heart. God knows your heart and knows the trials you go through and a loving reasonable God should understand your sexuality is no choice you made it is the way you were born. Why would a loving God condemn you to hell for something you were born with. You cannot help who you love and God wants you to be happy while believing in him forever. I think most verses too about sexuality in the bible are speaking of lust and not really referring to a committed healthy relationship. People also like to make the argument that marriage equals procreation but someone can be infertile by no fault of their own. A reasonable loving God wants you to have the fulfillment of a loving committed relationship and understands that love and faith is what makes a relationship not exactly having children or anything else for that matter. I hope this helps and is kind of the answer you wanted but have any questions just ask.

 

No problem. I just went with the best response I thought of but in all honesty I was not sure exactly what you were getting at but I went with it anyway. Its all good.

 

If there's anything that you might feel you miss about the rituals, it could be primarily for the sense of comfort they provide. I know it's easier to feel comforted when you are part of a tradition that carries the weight of a religious ritual. It gives your actions meaning, if you let it. But since you say yourself that spirituality is something you are comfortable enough approaching on your own, I don't see a real reason for you to join in a community unless you truly think it will be valuable for you.

Communal religion likely didn't work for me because I was always there determined to learn, and I was disinterested in making connections with other kids my age. At temple I was the stereotypical "loner villain who craves knowledge and sees no value in friendship," lol. All my friends were outside of that religious "zone," if you will, so I adapted a different mindset for how I approached religion. I think if I'd stuck with it I might've became a legitimate scholar in the field of religion. But as I said earlier, it was those kids who made me leave the whole thing behind because I never made connections with them, and being the outcast eventually became unbearable. Like I said, what sealed the deal and made me leave organized religion wasn't even the bullying. It was the blatant militarization of Judaism in the end that made me feel dirty even sitting in that temple, surrounded by people who supported the IDF. I never wanted to take sides, and I eventually got fed up by their aggressive hive-mind attitude.

This is why studying religion on my own has been so much more valuable for me. It's stripped away everything I hated, the violent and dogmatic idiots, the awkward social trappings, and left me with the raw content. Nobody tells me what to read or where to look, I can ask any question I like and I have countless resources available instead of relying on a single religious text. As for how it's applied to my own thinking, it's kept me thinking broadly. It's a pity that religion is practically synonymous with narrow-mindedness in today's world (that's been my experience, at least) and I think the main problem is the sadly all too-common "us vs them" groupthink taking precedence over the individual's path to knowledge.

If you want a more specific example of how my approach to spirituality has had an effect on me personally, it's been one of the major driving forces behind my wanting to become a fantasy fiction author. I like exploring concepts such as the interaction between divine figures and mortals in an earthly realm. I write about those sorts of things and how they shape people who grow up in a religiously driven world. It's given me the perfect outlet to talk about my own experiences with religion and transform them into something fantastic.

 

Interesting question... In the past few years I had been looking for answers, what religion should I belong to? It was confusing at first, but I just decided one day to just let it go. I'll have the answers at the right time. One depressing incident happened to me in the past that opened my mind to this new-found spirituality in me. Answers are raining down upon me at that time that I don't even know how to contain it. And that's how I dismissed my consideration of identifying with organized religion--that's because I don't need to belong to any one of them. Even until now, I still have a lot of deciphering to do with those information that just comes to me. I may sound a bit insane to you, I can't blame you :lol:

The thing I'd like to point out here is this...You just ask for it...and the answers will come to you at the right time, when you're ready for it.

I know I talk in riddles, but that's how the universe will convey its message to you. Yours might be or most likely will be different from what I had experienced. But the fact that you're dealing with your spirituality right now is a sure sign that you're going to the path of awakening...

Have a blessed journey

 

I don't know if posting of links is allowed in here, but you may wanna look at these sites for referrence. (Anyway, I don't claim ownership of these sites and they don't contain my personal information.) Please do make use of your own discernment when dealing with all info on these sites:
in5d.com
simonarich.com
Enjoy

 

Death is a very strange topic. I'd call it an "unknown unknown". It's pretty clearly defined, but only for other people and never for you personally. There's plenty of empirical evidence of people all around us dying every day, but virtually nothing on its quality, how it might feel, or if it actually exists for the person who is allegedly going through it.

Immortality is always a hot topic, especially now with senior Google heads doing misguided vanity projects: Kurzweil and his anti-ageing fluff. Even if they gain some measure of success or cure some genetic illnesses, mostly it'll just mean that some people will appear to live relatively longer compared to mankind's typical lifespan. I'd like to hear what their underlying motivation for it is, because it's not self-explanatory. It seems like childish greed or gluttony for superficial bucket-list/trophy style things in life, and fear of growing up. It's basically Peter Pan syndrome.

Has anyone considered that maybe we're already immortal? That a second is actually like a 1000 years, and that we're just ignorant because we fail to see how much happens in that time?

Maybe it's not just an illusion that "our personal universe" seemed to begin for us when we were conceived? Maybe a synthesis of Last-Thursdayism and relativistic space travel (to make everything "age" faster) can help us realise that our conception coincided with the Big Bang? The memory of time does seem highly non-linear (e.g.: our younger years get more and more compressed, while "objective" frames of reference such as a calendar year feel like an eternity in childhood, but much shorter in adult life), but that wouldn't make sense if our time was just a little slice from something much bigger. People's different perceptions of history just wouldn't fit together if they're all correct, yet non-linear and with different starting points.

I don't know about what might come 'after' death. Maybe we have some kind of soul that persists after death. Maybe we really do become the living memories in other people's heads? Maybe there's an afterlife; maybe we get reincarnated. Maybe the ego gets thoroughly annihilated? And mine thinks that that option sounds rather sad, but of course I would think that...

 

After decades of defining myself as a convinced atheist, I had a brief reconciliation with religion as I started to read the bible again. Those were really happy times. I even went beyond and got interested about spirituality in general. I didn't recovered my faith because there was nothing to recover (I've been trying to understand the idea of God my whole life, and I never had any success).

It could have had a happy ending, my 'romance with the bible'... Having faith protects you from being confronted with the absurdity of life or the existential loneliness... But after my partner died, after I was a witness of so much pain, I became aware again that in this damned life we are on our own for good and bad, and that's all about it...

There is no possible explanation to the amount of cruelty we see around. I can't accept the idea of a merciful, loving god, after what I saw and lived through. I don't think the death of this person could have been justified, specially since he was just a loving, hard working individual who didn't deserved such an abrupt and absurd end.

And there is more like him... People who suddenly die for no reason in wars, in hospitals, in a damned random earthquake, just everywhere... Even little children who live until the age of 7 and then some cancer or dissease takes them away... So where is God then? What kind of God would do something like that?

It's true that we must learn from those experiences, but I don't need to add 'God works in misterious ways'. I don't need that after my own sentence. I just don't dig your God, and even if I respect your ideas, I don't want you around preaching me...

What I'm after is what's beyond nature : The science behind it, how everything works... I find my spirituality there, where Knowledge is.
Knowledge is my only God, and I experience the same passion and love of it that the saints and martyrs... Maybe after all I'm a spiritual person too, kind of...

And love, of course... Love is my God as well.

In my case this would be specially tempting... Sadly, as I have said, I just can't believe in God or in the afterlife, my brain just won't allow it even if psychologically speaking would take a lot of pain away, but I just can't, the way my brain is wired won't allow it.

 

May I weigh in? I hope I am getting the right end of the stick here...

The yearning for god (I think that is what you describe) seems to be a common thread running through human history. There seems to be a general appreciation in human beings that something else exists, or someone else, and that to be fulfilled we need to relate to him (male pronoun used for convenience and tradition's sake!).

Augustine of Hippo expressed it in his Confessions 'My heart was restless until it found rest in you'. Sometimes in modern churches one hears it said that we have a 'god shaped hole' in us, that only god can fill.

Approaches to god are varied. Clearly if God is all traditional religion claims him to be (I am a Catholic, btw) he is greater than any religious system. We are all unique individuals, and how we relate to god is unique to us. Or at the very least, varies from person to person.

My own relationship with God is fraught. Recently I read a book by a friend of mine, in which he describes being devastated by the feeling of God being absent. This 'Dark Night of the Soul' experience seems common. I find the complete opposite. God is always there, despite my best desire for him to go away and leave me alone.

More specifically, religion does provide for creativity, in an aesthetically pleasing way. This is mostly true in Christianity of the Catholic tradition, or Orthodoxy. I enjoy the drama of ritual, the music, the vestments, the incense, the flickering candles. My own approach to God is aesthetic, and more about doing things (ritual acts) than assenting to theological propositions, or anything like that.

 

honey as a future video game designer i feel like some games act like a mini-life we are the god in them we make everything but we then let the player do this do that and according to what he does the game plays along
for example in games where there is no specific story but random chances thrown at the player that can be stopped for example
an action game where you make your own army and stuff and for example the guy\girl had a crush on someone and lets say they confessed to that person and they became partners one day a war happened you went together now while fighting you are protecting your partner all the time there is a chance they might die if :
1-one of the bombs exploded near them
2-someone shoot them before you knew it
3-someone was going to shoot you and they took the bullet for you
etc.....many chances are generated by the game engine and once one of them happens you cant go back you cant blame who made the game for that and you cant blame yourself cause there was a war and anyway even if you survived that war there are always car accidents and maybe even a terrorist attack or a flood or anything and in the end if the game kept all the characters that you interact with alive it will overload the game saves with many people saved so from time to time the game might generate a death for someone if it fails on that someone then it passes to another
life on the other hand is the game people in the past lived more than thousands of years maybe because on earth alone there was barley some people living now every spot of the earth is heavily populated if nature kept all those animals humans and everything alive and they kept reproducing where are you going to live you will overload the earth look whats happening now its not a game god made to see you die its because when the earth gets really so populated it has to replace old people with new ones the death of someone will generate a new born but they are not the same soul they are just in place of someone else
about cancer and other stuff that happens to kids why dont we look at african kids who die of starvation the moment they are born ?
did you know that i read a study once about gay people being more nature made because we need more working hands and caring people and make this 10% of population not reproduce but instead care about the produced that is already thrown by straight people god did not make us gay but the world needs gay people they are people who give more than they take though god made the world like this but he did not select who becomes gay and who not its how your life occurs and how your mind is its not like god has a creation program that creates every part of us up there in the sky then throws an ID in our mother's womb yes he is a creator but he created adam and eve with the ability of having kids the rest is just how many people married each other until those many many shapes of human beings were created
honey the world is cruel but what really is cruel here is not god its humans why cant all those rich countries make a solution to those starving people in places where there is no work they can go picture them and send the videos all over the internet but they cant pay them to at least eat any kind of food that could just keep them alive tell me that god did that again please cause what i see here god is showing us how selfish us humans are
The UN employees get paid at least for the very least 1000$ per month and that's after cutting off the health insurance and all that some get paid 10x more than this and yet when refuges in places like syria cant pay to even get a shampoo and the UN gives them Aids they give them the worst and the most cheapest stuff the cheapest food the worst quality they can ever get a guy once was given a shaving cream his face turned to a tomato and his face got so irritated and was filled with big pimples they cant even give those poor refuges something that works they give them something cheap and not even used by poor people or low income don't even them buy them
and you come and tell me that god did this where is god?? in life god cant always look after all the humans but he left the task for humans to look after each other when humans become selfish and when people kill each other or when a war happens because of religion misunderstanding or when crazy teenagers speed up and kill people carelessly don't blame god blame these people for being stupid and ignorant and self centred
AND BTW IM NOT OFFENDING YOU im just making a point i respect that you don't believe in god but throwing all the messed up problems that were created by humans on god is just not right because its us humans who did this
also im sorry about your loss no one deserves to die i know but we cant control life and death its how life is idk what happened to your partner but death doesn't happen only for bad people no matter how bad the way your partner died that doesn't mean he deserved it hell many evil people are still alive while good people die young

 

I feel that a lot of people are too focused on justifying their religious beliefs and ethics. I think that is why some people are so focused on following every word in the bible without questioning it. I consider myself a very spiritual person, though I do not practice many traditional religious customs. I have always dictated what my religion means for myself. What does your spirituality mean to you? It doesn't make you any less spiritual to not always agree with the bible or to not go to church all of the time. Your spirituality is a part of your mind.

 

Joshy, just a friendly reminder : Even if we cannot control life and death... We can control our keyboards, and punctuation does matter. I'm sorry, but I wasn't able to read everything you wrote.

To Sartorius... If you don!t care about making a moral judgement about this 'entity', your spirituality must be then a belief on different forces interacting, and thus keeping an 'order'.

How would you explain our existence then? Why this world, and not another one? Or do you agree that everything possible it's happening inside a huge 'right now', and time is just an illusion?

If you are not looking for comfort... Are you looking for an explanation, or do you just 'feel it'?

I'm sincerely curious about the spiritual experience... Is it useful? Or does it put you under pressure, as most of religions usually do?

 

Dano218 thank you for your words. Lately, I have been struggling with life in general. I am a Christian and love the Lord with all my heart. But I am also a lesbian. I accepted Jesus into my heart 6 years ago and was baptized 4 years ago. To make a long story short, I lived an out of the closest lifestyle, met my bestie (who also is my ex - it was a short lived relationship - we were meant to be good friends). We started going to church, were convinced that our lifestyle was wrong and both decided to live a hetero lifestyle. She was successful at this and is now married and has had 3 more children to join her daughter she had from a previous hetero relationship as a teenager. As for me, not so successful at that lifestyle. I tried and tempted to date men but nothing ever worked out or really felt right. It's just not me. Not who I am. I just not into men. Now I live a single life and have for a few years. I struggle these days because I know what I like and who I am but I don't want to go against God. But then I think, we are suppose to love everyone and accept them as they are. Jesus did love all sinners and we are all sinners. My struggle is, if this lifestyle is wrong then why is possible for me to love someone of the same sex so much. Why would I be allowed to feel such love if it is wrong. My sisters are my biggest supporters. Recently while visiting one of my sister, she sat down with me and told me over and over that "baby Jesus doesn't make mistakes". This has stuck in my head ever since. Although I know that to be true, I still sit and wonder if I am a mistake. I'm just so miserable right now because I want to do the right thing but I also want to be happy and not alone for the rest of my life. Sorry I know I am rambling... I'm just so conflicted and confused.