The Beginning

Where to begin?

I was raised in a home that really had no religion. We celebrated Christmas and Easter but mostly as consumers. The religious aspects of these holidays were unimportant, although I was baptized as an infant (this was to appease some bible thumping relatives who were very distraught at my being born out of wedlock). Over the years of my childhood and young adulthood I attended different kinds of churches for various reasons. Unitarian, Presbyterian, Catholic, Methodist. In all of them I could sense the community and overall well being among the worshipers and the believers. But I was not one of them. To me, none of it rang true or if anything, there seemed to be mere slivers of truth.

As I have gotten older I feel the need to identify what I do believe. I don't ascribe to any specific religion. I believe that religion is personal and that in someways slapping a label on it limits you. I consider myself to be Pagan, it's kind of a blanket term like saying you're Christian. To me, religion is mostly philosophy and a way of life.

Unfortunately there are a lot of people that do not see it this way. I've chosen to create this anonymous blog because I was beginning to feel as though I were dying spiritually. There is no on in my life that I would feel comfortable discussing these things with. Most of my peers are Christian, many of them right-wing, bible-thumpers that literally think Barack Obama is the anti-Christ. I don't like to rock the boat. I don't get into theological discussions. I don't feel the need to project my beliefs onto others, to have to explain myself, defend my beliefs, to have to justify why I think the way I do. And generally speaking, I expect this of others.

I struggle with this while I try to discover who I am and what I beleive. I believe that the universe has an energy, a power, that often balances itself out. I beleive that perhaps part of this energy could be called "God." I beleive that mankind cannot fully comprehend this entity or force in it's entirety and so we create gods and goddesses, mere fragments, much as we created the concept of time.

Now, just because we created the concept of time (for the sake of argument) does not mean that it doesn't exist. It just means that we have found a way to label a phenomenon in an attempt to further understand it and it's uses. Perhaps we created the God/Goddess persona because we cannot grasp the forces of the universe or existence. In my mind it doesn't make it less real or less true. Truth has several layers and pieces, there is no single truth, there are many.