Originally posted by whag
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I seem to have given the impression that I am going through this now. Also some nice people seem to think I need protecting. That's much appreciated, but I don't. By the way Whag, the way you write doesn't seem to fit with your description of "agnostic". I would have expected some version of faith. None of my business? that's OK.
In fact this happened around 15 years ago. I had been an atheist for a long time, but was somehow fascinated by religious belief, more perhaps than one would expect from someone that has decided that God doesn't exist. Anyway, as already described I attempted to contact "god" (with no expectation of what that might be). My reasoning was as already described, basically if you want a true answer to something ask an expert, and who could be a better expert on god than god himself.
To my surprise and pleasure things happened in my life that I decided were an answer to my request. So, I went forward, but as you may have gathered, I tend to take a scientific approach to things, which didn't include accepting the beliefs of any particular religion uncritically. My position at the time was I had contacted some kind of "power" (best word I can think of) which would help me in my life. To that end I asked for guidance and knowledge and cautiously moved forward. The analogy I used at the time was that it was like stepping into a deep fog, where my vision was limited to a few feet. I could step forward into that area and hopefully see a bit further, and so on. As you can imagine that required a lot of trust. Based on my experience so far, that trust seemed justified as the results all seemed to be good. At that point, I made a conscious decision that I suppose could be labelled "faith". Unless I received strong indications to the contrary, I would assume that whatever I was in contact with was benevolent.
I remained indecisive about my next step. Should I attend a Christian church, or look into other religions, or continue on my own. Eventually I joined the local Methodist church. Things went well for some time and then I got divorced, and spent two years on my own, followed by my current relationship, which is now about 12 years old. Somewhere there my spiritual feeling kind of faded away. I stopped going to church, which I now found boring. My feeling of the presence of god disappeared. I am somewhere back in a sort of atheist position, though not the way I was. I probably don't think about religion a lot these days. It's as if something got settled in my search for "god". Most people will relate to this example. Have you been desperately in love with someone who you were with for a while and then it all ended for some reason? Then, years later, you almost never even think about him/her and no longer have any feelings, one way or the other? That's similar to how I feel about that strange period of my life. It was good, it was real at the time, but it's gone.
A few weeks back I wondered if Theologyweb was still around. I read a few posts and got sucked back in. I do like discussions with intelligent people who disagree but don't get nasty. This brought a lot of it back, and I thought I would tell my story in order to get people's thoughts on 1) my approach to finding god and 2) any opinions on what happened, at a general level.
My next post will address something completely different.
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