Well, I wasn’t raised neopagan, nor did I read about it and decide to study up so as to learn all the things I was supposed to know and believe in as a good neopagan!
I was raised in a family that wasn’t particularly or fervently religious but where something a bit more than lip service was paid to it. My family was nominally Christian, of the quiet Protestant type that tends towards emphasis on good works in the community rather than an emphasis on theological abstractions. There was nevertheless the obligatory mention now and then of some ideas that I never came to understand simply from hearing them spoken:
a) that Jesus was the Son of God / was God, at the same time.
b) life after death, somehow tied in with Easter when Jesus rose from the dead.
c) heaven; and perhaps hell, or perhaps not
I was agnostic about all of this, not “getting it” but also not being particularly pressured about it. Our congretation was pretty far from fundamentalist orthodox, and the preacher’s own kid, who was in our youth group, said openly that he did not believe in life after death.
In early adulthood, the state of the world and of the species caused me to wonder with great intensity about the validity and meaning of the feelings I’d always had about how life is supposed to be, and whether or not there was or wasn’t any underlying principle or order to which those feelings were tuned; or if, instead, life really did just reward the most successfully predatory and was therefore nothing but an adversarial power struggle.
Rather than turn to any religious (or other) resources, I turned to the feelings themselves and focused on them in prayer–prayer to something that might or might not be an entity, but with which I needed to communicate.
I did so and received my own set of answers, my own revelations direct from God, etc, however you wish to term it. Or (as I acknowledged then and there) I suffered from the delusion that such a thing had transpired. Either way, things made sense in light of the answers I received, puzzle pieces clicked into place and I felt that I understood life. So it was my own religion.
Subsequently, I discovered enough parallels in the more informal variants of Wicca to start saying (some of the time, depending on context and the mood I was in) that I was a witch. In particular, I thought I had found in Wicca a rather ingrained disavowal of dogmatic thinking and a generally shared belief that everyone has to find their own rather than a generally shared belief that the following list of Important Gospel Truths are The Truth that you must believe, which simultaneously appealed because it was important and because it made any other differences trivial and largely irrelevant since none of them could attain the status of an orthodoxy in that light.
Over the years I’ve been overexposed to Wiccans who are all caught up in things I don’t care about, including those who seem hell-bent on establishing a set of Fundamental Wiccan Truths that would allow them to say that someone else isn’t Doing Wicca Right, which has dampened my enthusiasm for identifying myself as such. On the other hand, all other attempts to identify myself with any collectivity based on religious beliefs have been less successful–being ‘Unitarian’ looked promising but I did not find congregations where inquiry and pursuit of individual spiritual truths + sharing and comparing were much present, finding instead congregations of atheists who like to do good communitarian works and sing in a choir or sit in a pew once a week and listen to a good speaker do an inspirational message.
My most successful group-identification was in fact not generally thought of as a religion at all–radical feminism, the politics and the theory behind it were so close to the views I held that had I not been male I have no doubt that this would have been my single overarching grouphood identity. It worked pretty well for nearly 20 years anyhow, but as the more visionary and idealized feminist thought faded I had less and less in common with the nuts and bolts of feminism as a social reform and female self-help movement, and also never attained the sense of belonging one tends to seek from membership in a congregation of the similarly minded.
So I’m pretty much left with “I have my own”, and I guess that leaves me about as neopagan as anyone effectively can be who utilizes the term and concept “God” as part of the world-view. Actually, I’m increasingly inclined to insist that I’m neither theistic nor atheistic, nor even agnostic, but instead can express my experiences and concepts with or without conventionally theological terms, and sincerely in either case.
