If you intentionally changed religions, why?

Great Debates
21

Lust4Life, I started out as a Christian (more or less, although I went through and atheist period in late high school), so I can’t comment on a complete switching of views in the way that, say, my husband (previously agnostic/Wiccan/Pagan) could, but there are substantial differences between being Catholic and being Anglican, in terms of theology.

The following is what happened to us. YMMV, indeed.
Our conversion, as I mentioned in that thread, was mostly book-based. Anglicans are united much more by a liturgy and a creed (the Apostles and Nicene) than by any really systematic theology. We were both committed Christians, newly married, and gradually discovering that the reading we were doing brought up, over and over, the questions of church authority, and the points on which the Reformation was based- specifically sola scriptura (by the Bible alone) and sola fides (by faith alone).

Now, for many years I have not belived that faith and works are separable. I think it is no more a real statement to say, ‘saved by faith alone’, than it is to say, ‘I love my husband very much, but that doesn’t mean I have to do anything nice for him’. I think they flow out of each other. If I love someone, that love will be manifested in words and actions, and fed by words and actions. If I love God, then I will want to worship, and try to love my neighbour as myself.

So I could no longer affirm sola fides.

No matter what kind of Christian you are, you have some reverence for the Bible. If you are one who believes it to be God-breathed and sacred, and you are Protestant, you have a wee bit of a problem (or I did, anyway), because the canon of scripture was set at the Councils of the [SUB]mumblemumbleI’lllookitupifyoulike[/SUB]. Fourth or fifth century. Anyway, by the Catholic Church (which was pretty much the only church. Don’t know about Coptic, although the Orthodox didn’t separate until later). So, regardless of any denom’s stance on The Great Whore of Babylon, they still have to believe that the evil RCC was granted infallibility at those times, because, well, it’s the Bible, right? And the RCC determined the canon.

So if the Catholic Church formed the Bible out of the lots of gospels and epistles floating around at the time, and if they were given that sacred task, certainly they deserve respectful investigation. Especially if you can no longer affirm one of the two big separating points of the Reformation.

We gradually began to see tradition and scripture as interdependent. The tradition I was brought up in respects the saints and church fathers, but it tends to be a ‘pick your own stuff’ kind of thing. We gradually began to distrust construct-your-own-religion schools of thought, especially since that seems to be a response of personal infallibility. For me to do it felt like pride.

All of this was shot through with, at first, a profound desire not to become Catholic. Catholics were interesting and colourful, but they had formal obligations and all that stuff about the saints and papal infallibility and Mary. And it’s a very different world, to which we are only slowly becoming accustomed, with its own language and traditions. We were without a church home for several years, unwilling to take communion at an Anglican church since we became transubstantiationists (everyone should get to use that word. It’s got lots of syllables), but not willing to dive in headfirst without being reconciled to a lot of the doctrines. I remember coming to a C. S. Lewis-type understanding of saints’ intercession more than a year before I started praying to the saints. I was very worried when I started praying the rosary. We had some family tension about joining a church that no one else belonged to.

We were pulled. Whenever we became less observant, the pull slacked off, but we were aware that we were evading. When we were going to church, our understanding of worship and dogma slid in an evermore Catholic direction. Everything we read by Catholics was so damn beautiful and reverent (Chesterton, Scott Hahn, Michael O’Brien, Evelyn Waugh, the Catechism, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton…), and rooted in a deep understanding of God and of the history of the faith.

So now we’re half-way through the formal process of conversion, and I got halfway through this post before having to go off to Mass, and am just finishing it up now. Sorry it’s so long.

22

Speaking for myself, it definitely wasn’t one fell swoop. In childhood I’d almost never been to a church service and had never seen any real discussion of Christian doctrine. Now as I stated above, the process that lead to my conversion arose out of personal issues, and the observation that Christians seemed to deal with their personal issues better than others. But of course conversion has multiple angles. The personal angle deals with how people handle daily life and which decisions are the best decisions in a practical sense. The philosophical angle deals with whether the existence of the universe actually requires an intelligent creator. The historical angle deals with whether the man called Jesus Christ actually was what the Gospels say he was.

So these threads are separate. Some people may, for instance, join a Church without believing in God philosophically or Jesus historically because they believe it will help with a personal problem. (Not me, however. I reconciled myslef with the philosophy and the gospels before I started attending a church.) But I think there’s no true conversion to Christianity the convert accepts the doctrine related to all three angles.

That approach may oversimplify, however, because the three are intertwined. for instance, once I accepted that Christians do make better choices on major issues on a day-to-day basis, that challenged the philosophical belief (which I held then) that the Christian God didn’t exist and that all sightings of God, angels, Saints, had to be either lies or hallucinations.

It was easy and superficially logical to deny the existence of a spirit realm on the basis of the fact that I couldn’t personally see and hear what other people claimed to see and hear in the spirit realm. One of the major barriers to overcome in the philosophical acceptance of Christian doctrine was accepting that the spirit realm doesn’t obey the same rules as the physical realm.

23

I was raised Lutheran. When I was 11-12 I became interested in Greek and Norse mythology and checked out many books from the libary. Then when I was 13-14 I did the same for science and history, mostly biology (I was really interested in reading about insects, dinosaurs, undersea life and all that good stuff). I went on nominally “believing” in God and Jesus, although it was mostly to fit in with the crowd. Around the age of 16 or so I just dropped it because it reminded me of when I was 7 and had an imaginary friend.

The lesson is to not take your kid to the libary. It’s subversive!

24

The question of whether there is such a thing as a sincere conversion is one that I’ve been thinking about a lot, lately–and if I had time to get involved in a deep discussion, I’d start a Great Debates thread about it.

Anyway: I was raised in a nonpracticing but culturally Christian household. In the past several years, I have spent so much of my time with so many Jews that I am becoming culturally equivalent in household practice–I observe some of the basic kashrut (I never liked pork much anyway), dress modestly, etc. This was more of “unintentionally” changing my non-religion, than an intentional change of religion.

Since I have never really believed in a supreme being, I wouldn’t call this a conversion.

25

I was raised a Christian and at one time strongly believed in it, then I studied the Bible, read it through at least 25 times over the years, even taught it! I could see the contradictions in it and then began to realize that when we believe in anything( God or Science) we are really believing in what some human said. When I started to think for my self it was such a feeling of peace, I began to see all existance as connected and began to look at people and the world etc. in a different light.

I saw Religion as like a medicine what is good for some can be harmful to others. I found that my life was no better when I prayed almost incessantly to when I quit praying and just excepted what I could not change my life became better, I quit looking at people as fellow sinners and saw them as good people who had problems that only they could resolve because each person’s life experience was different.

I grow stronger in my belief each day and I feel my happiest time in life came when I no longer felt I had to conform my thinking to one thing, or what some human said.

Religions seem to make a God such a small thinking being, and has no attraction for me, but I still think belief is a personal thing and everyone has the right to their own beliefs as long as they do no harm to others because of it.
Monavis

26

I’ve always believed in a Supreme Being. I was born spiritual, it seems, the same way I was born with gray eyes. I was raised Catholic, but a lot of what the Catholic church taught didn’t make sense to me (what was up with the birth control thing?). I explored some other flavors of Christianity, but I never could get comfortable with “Whoever doesn’t believe exactly what I believe, is gonna burn”. That didn’t jibe with what I believed about God, which was that He is vast, and complex, and therefore, there can be no simple, single Truth. I floated adrift, no specific religion but still spiritual, for some years.

About 12 years ago, I met a woman who started teaching me about the Baha’i faith, and it made sense to me. I started sending my kids (who seemed to want some sort of spiritual instruction) to Baha’i kid’s classes with her kids. I explored the faith through them. About a year later, I ended up in the hospital, half dead with a blood infection (not literally “half dead”; but very, very sick. I certainly could have died from it). I did a lot of praying during that time, not for my life to be spared (I was so sick I didn’t realize how sick I was), but that if God wanted me to follow this particular path (Baha’i), would He please let me know? About two weeks after I got out of the hospital, I woke up one morning, and just didn’t wonder anymore. I felt like my question had been answered. I called my friend that night, and told her I wanted to make my Declaration. It happened to be the eve of a Holy day for Baha’is (the Ascension of Baha’u’llah, which is celebrated at 3AM), and she told me she could pick me up at 2:30, take me to the Observance, and I could sign my Declaration there.

My oldest daughter, 19, made her Declaration at 15, said at 16 that she only did it to make me happy, and declared herself Wiccan. That lasted for about six months, after which she decided she was a Christian. I dunno what she is now. My middle daughter, 15, is still seeking her path. She said she didn’t want to make her Declaration (15 is the youngest you can make it) until she was sure. She’s definitely spiritual, but just isn’t sure yet. My youngest daughter, 7, says Baha’i prayers, but often goes to a Baptist church with her best friend.

Oh, and my husband is an atheist.

27

How, pray tell, would one unintentionally change religions? :smiley:

28

Or maybe they are all true, in the sense that most humans cannot totally 100% understand things greater and more powerful then they are. Our minds can’t comprehend 100% spirtual things and happenings.
That is why there are so many religions in the world…the religions represent different people’s/cultures interpretations of Stuff We Can’t Understand.

29

Well, I kind of did. I was raised Lutheran, and in my teens I started learnig about other religions. I was not satisfied with the answers my church gave to my questions. In particular I had some real issues with fact vs. myth (“Miracles that happen in the Bible are fact, any other similar stories NOT in the Bible are myth”) and with preaching vs. practice.

I pretty much left all formal religion in my late teens, but in my late 20s through my 30s, I started paying attention to the ideals and ethics that I practiced and why. I started reading again and talking to other people, and gradually realized I was living a fairly strict neopagan lifestyle - and more importantly, I wasn’t feeling hypocritical about that. There wasn’t a disconnect between what I believed and what I practiced. This is not to say that there aren’t hypocrites (or flat-out weirdos) who also profess Pagan beliefs, or even that I am completely free of hypocrisy; just that I can comfortably “practice what I preach” on this path far more fully than I could on any other. So to answer your tongue-in-cheek question kind of seriously, I think I WAS a Pagan long before I made the conscious decision to declare myself as such.

30

Oooh, I’m brand-new here, but I just love talking about this kind of thing.

The weirdness is, I was the only religious person in my family. When I was in sixth grade I became a devout Pentecostal Christian independent of anyone in my family… mostly they thought I was nuts. I was an agressive Bible-thumper all the way through middle school (Yes, I actually brought my Bible to school with me and kept it on my desk.) I stopped being so irritating once I got to high school (I started attending moderate Baptist services, for one), but I was still obsessed with God… reading my old journals is actually kind of creepy. I have utmost respect for most religious traditions, but my behavior was not normal. My childhood was quite traumatic and I believe I clung so fiercely to the idea of God because I had no other form of stability. But as much as I depended on religion for stability, I also abused myself with it… I was convinced that everything bad that happened to me was the result of my failure to be a good Christian. I’m afraid when I look back on my years as a Christian I don’t see them as anything other than profoundly self-destructive.

I first started questioning my own beliefs in the later teen years, when I got to know some beautiful non-religious people who I greatly admired. Additionally, life got harder, I kind of got thrown into the adult world before I was ready, when I was just seventeen… and having adult responsibilities and no familial support at the age of seventeen does inform your life view. I kind of got to know human nature, and the world, and how relative everything is. I discovered that the world was not neatly divided between Christians and non-Christians, but rather encompassed a broad spectrum of beliefs.

I knew I was losing my faith. I prayed to God. “God, if you really want me to believe in you, you’re going to have to help me out. I’m being as honest as I can be here, and I’m trying really hard…” But you can’t FORCE belief. Belief just IS or ISN’T.

And by the time I got to college, it wasn’t.

The first thing I did in college was read Friedrich Nietzsche. I don’t see Nietzsche as a philosopher intended to be taken literally so much as I see him as a confused, psychologically ill, emotional human being trying to come to terms with his life experiences and his unbelief. Reading Nietzsche freed me from the guilt I had from turning away from Christianity. I read “The Gay Science” and that marvelous quotation about the murder of God, in which Nietzsche asked,
“How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling?”

My heart nearly stopped beating that day, because it was so authentically me, exactly where I was standing in that moment-- without horizon, without earth, without orientation, with nothing. How simultaneously and utterly liberating and terrifying!

Thus began my love-affair with existentialism, but I quickly learned you can’t stop with nihilism, because you are left, essentially, horizonless. In The Will to Power Nietzsche offers the notion that yes, morality, life, and existence may be relative and meaningless, but we are fools to leave it at that. This destruction gives us the power to construct anything we damn well please. We are the forgers of our own reality.

And since that revelation, I’ve been carefully building over the remains of my failed belief systems. I have always been a deeply spiritual person, and really into that whole compassion thing, so it seemed natural that I would find myself another religion. I’ve been a Zen Buddhist for about six years, but it has been a steady and tentative journey. I am terrified of doing with any belief system what I did with Christianity, and this has informed a lot of the beliefs I have. Most days I spend wandering around with no earth under my feet, freaking out because I don’t know what’s “true.”

But Buddhism is good like that, because all it requires are a few simple observations–the most fundamental (for my practice) being the impermanent nature of reality. And given my history, this is cake for me. Interconnectedness of all beings? No problem. No good or evil, only ignorance? I have empathy even with serial killers, so again, this is not a hard reality for me to embrace. With Buddhism the question of the existence of God/god/gods is largely treated as irrelevant. I say I’m agnostic because I hate pretending I know things I don’t, but the longer I live the more I feel like an atheist.

Lately something else has been creeping into my spiritual life – science and rationality. Ooh, I’m really growing to love science. It used to be people could say the most idiotic ignorant tripe and I’d reply, “Huh, you have a point there…” and go to bed miserable that someone just came along and shook up my belief system. To be able to say, “Um, what’s your evidence for that statement?” and walk away secure in my assertions makes me giddy and tingly all over.

I am learning to separate belief from fact, and also tAo be comfortable with the truth that Buddhism is a belief system, not a provable scientific reality. Despite my increasingly rational outlook on life, I still have a fundamental, unshakeable irrational belief that the divine purpose of life is compassion and that of all things in existence, the only thing that matters is love. But I’m okay with that. I HAVE to be okay with that, because as I said before, I don’t think belief is something we choose. I think it is human nature to be emotional and spiritual as well as rational and scientific, and it’s important to embrace both without getting them confused.

31

I was raised Roman Catholic by an extremely religious mother, but gradually started disbelieving it when I realized how much God (esp. of the Old Testament) resembled a 3-year old child throwing tantrums.

“LOVE ME! FEAR ME! WAAAAAH! IF YOU DON’T I WILL… UMM… FLOOD YOU!!!111! DON’T TRY TO RUN FROM ME JONAH!! YOU CAN’T ESCAPE! I AM LOVE! I AM EVERYWHERE! WORSHIP ME@!!! BUILD ME MANY TEMPLES BECAUSE I AM THE MOST INSECURE CREATURE EVER!!! I WANT! I WANT! I WANT!!! ME ME ME!!”

To be honest, I’d rather hang out with Satan than that whiny brat.

Add to the mix the (varying) intolerance of homosexuals and other random groups, the politicized nature of a lot of Christian religions (esp. Catholicism), the hand-waving explanations of science/religion contradictions and even contradictions within the Bible, the unsatisfying answer to why (if I was a new arrival to Earth) I should choose Catholicism over all the other religions, the fact that most religious people I know haven’t even tried to explore other religions or even know anything about most of them, the fact that most people are in the same religion they were born to, etc. It’s just so arbitrary, non-sensical, and human.

Even though I envy people who are so comforted by their Christianity and the social communities that form around it, I can’t make myself believe, even though I really wanted to previously in my life. It’s just so silly to me, like believing in the Gods of Mt. Olympus or Xenu; I would always know that I’m lying to myself.

BTW, now I’m an agnostic. I don’t know what is really true, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever figure it out.

32

I was raised Roman Catholic. By parents who told us about the God of Wrath.

I am currently Roman Catholic. I believe in the God of Freedom.

Same label, very different approaches to the same problems. Things that drove my Dad nuts are perfectly logical to me; things that Dad considered perfectly natural are things that I reject (as I said once when I was 11, as I was turning away from the balcony from which I almost jumped, “I refuse to believe that God is an asshole”).

33

And that, to me, is the perfect example of how one can reach one’s own conclusions about spirituality, without following the “herd” so-to-speak, and still live a very empowered spiritual life. That is the good to be found in faith. Thank you for sharing. :slight_smile:

34

I was raised in a very strict Roman Catholic family. We said the rosary and read the bible together daily. I attended Catholic schools for twelve years. I was fully indoctrinated. By the time I was twelve, I had begun to disbelieve many of the claims of the RC church, particularly transubstantiation and the intercessionary role of the priest, as noted above by Sonia Montdore. By the time I finished high school, I was an atheist (thanks, Jesuits!).

When I was 45, my wife died. A friend gave me a copy of A Grief Observed, by C. S. Lewis. He threw in a little book by the same author called Mere Christianity. I read both. The book about grief, written in the aftermath of the death of Lewis’s wife, struck me as the truest thing I’d ever read. Mere Christianity consists, in part, of an attempt to build a logical and empirical case for the existence of natural law, a case for a theistic source for that law, then the outlines of the Christian definition of that source. I was intrigued but not convinced.

An acquaintance asked me to meet him for breakfast. He told me the story of his coming to believe in Jesus and the impact this had had on his life. His personal sincerity and obvious faith began the process of converting me. I began to attend church (a non-denominational mega-church) with his family. I joined a small group of church members who met weekly outside of church to discuss scripture and faith. I read everything C. S. Lewis had written, and a bunch of other Christian writings. I began to pray to an entity I could not have defined at the time. I had an experience while praying that was as real to me as anything I’ve experienced. I won’t go into that here, except to say that I believe that it was a brief and personal experience of God. Such things are described, for anyone who is interested, in a book by psychologist William James called Varieties of Religious Experience. I became a Christian believer.

35

You would really enjoy listening to this.

36

I was raised Methodist (though my family and the churches we went to were pretty old-school, not like AHunter3 describes- sermons about how the end of the world was coming soon, non-Christians are all going to hell, that sort of thing).

That was very much my experience as well. I eventually realized that I didn’t believe in Christianity. I tried to make myself believe it, but I just couldn’t do it. Same thing happened when I tried to be an atheist in college- I just do believe in a higher power of some sort, and I can’t make myself not believe that.

I learned about Judaism when I met the then-future Mr. Neville. I realized that I liked what I saw, and ended up converting.

That’s how it was for me. I found a religion that was a better fit to the religious beliefs I have and can’t change than the one I grew up in was.

I did adopt some new beliefs and practices, but they were ones that fit with the beliefs I already had and with my general world-view, so that wasn’t a problem. It’s sort of like learning a new fact about the world, and thinking “that makes sense” when you think about it in the context of what you already know and understand.

Actually, that’s not true. It is true of some religions (notably some branches of Christianity and Islam) but not all. Some forms of Hinduism, for example, say that all religions are different paths to the same goal.

If you get into people’s personal religious beliefs, that’s even less true. For example, I wondered for quite a while if there are all these different religions, how we can know which one is right. Now, I’ve found an answer to that question that satisfies me- there is no one true religion, but some religions work better for some people than for others. Christianity didn’t work for me, but it does work for some people. Judaism works for me, but I don’t think it would work for everyone.

I don’t think all religions are good and legitimate paths to God, though, and I think that’s what all the ink in the Bible against idolatry is really about. I think the point of that is that there are certain things that it’s not OK to do in the name of religion, such as human sacrifice.

I keep kosher- I’ll try to explain this one.

There are some food rules (no eating a limb taken from a living animal) that I think are intended to keep people from inflicting excessive suffering on animals. But that’s not the purpose of all the dietary rules. I think most of the dietary rules are an example of a spiritual practice that can be useful for some people, but are meaningless for others. I find them meaningful, because they provide me a daily reminder that food isn’t the most important thing in my life. Just like the rule that you must give to charity is (among other purposes) to remind people that money isn’t the most important thing in life.

37

The responses so far have somewhat surprised me. I guess I was expecting more folk to describe switching from one christian faith to another, but I don’t know what that was based on. I guess along the lines of Heff’s observation

I assumed as folks matured, they would re-examine the underpinnings of their parents’ beliefs, and seek something similar but somewhat different.

I tried to group the responses so far, tho it was tough. Feel free to quibble with my admittedly somewhat arbitrary groupings. Also, the few responses are far to small to say anything significant. But here’s what I came up with.

4 christian to christian
2 christianity to other organized religion
12 christianity to no religion OR personal belief system
1 no religion OR personal belief system to christianity
0 other organized religion to christianity

I anticipate some folks objecting to my grouping of “no religion” with "personal belief system. The distinction I intended was between folks who belonged to a “church” and participated in group activities, versus those who did not. So if you said you were a wiccan or pagan, I put that in none/personal belief. If you told me you were a member of a coven, I would have put you in “other.” ceremonies.

So, even though I am an atheist/humanist, I included myself in the “other” category since I belong to a UU church.

38

I don’t think everyone does this.

For one thing, there are probably a lot of people out there who just don’t enjoy thinking about religious topics. There are other things I don’t enjoy thinking about, so I can sympathize.

On my own personal spiritual quest, I don’t really think my parents’ beliefs were my starting point- my own beliefs were. Of course, those were influenced by my parents’ beliefs, but they weren’t the same (which is why I ended up leaving Christianity). I took a class in comparative religions in high school, and read a lot of books about different religions, and I later realized that what I was trying to do was to find a religion that fit with my beliefs.

If you’re really dissatisfied with your experiences with your parents’ religion, why wouldn’t you look for something completely different?

39

And sometimes it’s not dissatisfaction, exactly, but more that another religion simply feels right. I was very attracted to Judaism myself, and considered conducting serious study into it with the possible end goal of conversion. I realized that, as much as I appreciated the philosophies of it, I still felt Christian, and knew I couldn’t give that up. If Christianity hadn’t been so important to me in the end, Judaism would have fit me just fine, I’m sure. So, it wasn’t dissatisfaction with what I was, but more of an apprecation of the other.

40

Exactly. I was practicing my religion before I really had an inkling that it WAS a religion. And yes, I do realize that some people are not comfortable regarding Paganism as an actual “religion” - and I’m OK with that, which somewhat surprises me while at the same time confirming that this IS the right path for me. How odd; I’ve just had an epiphany right here on the boards! (Don’t worry, I’ll clean that up.)

WRT to parental beliefs, my Mom was raised Roman Catholic, converted to Lutheran in her late teens, and pretty much abandoned even a pretense at religion in her 30s. My biological father was an Athiest who later married a very vocal Roman Catholic, and subsequently converted to Catholicism. Meanwhile, Mom remarried a Jew. But none of my parents or step-parents, whatever religion they claimed at any given moment, seemed to really care about or adhere to the “rules” of those religions. I have eight siblings/step-siblings; I’m the only one, as far as I know, who subscribes to any religious school of thought.