1) What religious faith(s) have I left?
--None, yet I have visited many and have considered myself to be an adherent of and believer in many different faiths, over the years. Each of those faiths I "visited" seemed like the "best fit at the time", but, things change, people grow, wisdom is accrued. Yes, you loved those wooden blocks when you were three-years-old, but you don't play with them today, at age thirty-three. That's just the way it is. Often, I would enter a new arena full of enthusiasm only to investigate its boundaries more fully and discover I did not like or agree with what I found when I did my digging. Sometimes that would take years, sometimes mere weeks. I never found the perfection I sought in religion, I think, mainly because that perfection does not exist.
I state that I never "left" any of these religions behind because, depending on the day, or the weather, I may choose to identify, in part, as any one of them, and truthfully mean it. Sometimes I am a witch if being a witch means I offer oblations to a Goddess, communicate with the otherworld and give sick friends herbal medicines. Sometimes I chant the maha-mantra and consider Krsna to be the supreme personality of Godhead. Sometimes I think that Jesus and Buddha were both prophets like Mohammed, and we do God a disservice when we try to define his image and attributes. The aspects of those religions that for me remain treasured and worth upholding are the elements of such I initially found most attractive: they consider the "meta-concepts": ""what does it mean to be a human?" "what is good, and right?", "what is a connection with God/the Universe like?". My investigations taught me about myself, too: "ritual allows me to revel in my own ability to manipulate and control and be God-like", and "I'm infatuated with concepts such as brotherhood, Messiahs, and defining supreme truth".
While I have become annoyed, upset, frustrated, and made cynical by the various faiths I have thought "might be the answer at the time", as a fully-fledged adult I believe I am right to think that, in singularity, none of them are the complete answer, to anything. I also think that while they all feature positive and useful messages, metaphors, and instructions, in their way, and while I am grateful, in my way, to all of those crazy paths and stages as each of them have influenced my current perspectives and make me what and who I am today, I do not believe or agree with all of it, or any one of them, in their entirety. And that's completely rational.
2) Why did you decide to leave it/them?
I wanted to be a catholic priest as a child -- a major turning point for me was discovering that, as a woman, I had no bloody chance of doing that. I believed in Catholicism, Jesus, Mary and the Pope, virgin births and the infallability of Rome simply because I was told it was truth -- it was not an individualistic intellectual consideration that made me a catholic but repetition and rote-learning and immersion in irish catholic culture. At around age... seven... I began to think about the Apostles Creed I recited and came to realise I believed in very little of it and stopped reciting the bits I did not agree with. I knew that, for me, Catholicism wasn't "the true way", but, unable to comprehend what a true way would look like, I could do little else to protest than rebel...
I didn't have Anton Le Vey's Satanic Bible and the w.w.w. to instruct me, so I decided to be a little bugger instead. I adorned the virgin mary in the refectory with a garland of knotted tampons, I sang "walk in dog ****e" instead of "walk in the light", and I generally caused offense to all the holy rollers I could, and I spent around three years pretending to be "the anti-christ". I grew out of that when I realised my low-level "kiddie-satanism" wasn't actually good enough to count and, if I really wanted to be "the devil incarnate" that various priests, teachers and authority figures told me I was, then I had to perform activities I did not think were ethical or "right".
So, I became a witch; prayed to a Goddess, did minor pentagram rituals and candlemagicks. This was also acceptable rebellion within my culture, and appealed to me as a young feminist with vague notions of sacred femininity and a love of patchouli oil and Fleetwood Mac albums. My fanaticism did not last; mainly because I discovered that much of it was cold meats left over from previous buffets.
I thought maybe I could be a gnostic; believe in a totality of God, as an asexual spirit. I could still perform rituals and pray, and I could still be swept away by great winds, but their God was not mine.
I had a phase where I became a student of the kabbalah and a practitioner of the "ars notoria" of the western mystery tradition, got bored of it when I realised that most of it was just reheated cabbage originally cooked up by ancient philosophers and archaic religions I, as a white, working class urbanite, had yet to be exposed to.
I went back to Jesus, after that, and became a born-again Christian ( a new version of the same old story), but found the same patriarchal miseries I'd found first time around in catholicism. I flirted with Krsna for a while but decided that it wasn't much different for a woman there as within traditional christianity, even if the outfits and the food was better, and, eventually... I discovered buddhism, and found that I liked it best, intellectually, as a doctrine. It's not perfect, as a religion, as none of them are, but as a philosophy its damn near perfect. For the past... 18 years I have usually identified myself as a buddhist, of various flavours, and today I would describe myself as a ... non-traditional buddhist, and a buddhist who also carries a bag filled with a hotch-potch of non-buddhist rituals and tenets she is able and willing to dig into should the need or desire to do so arise.
4) To what religion/sect did you convert and why?
I have never converted. I am/have been... a catholic (indoctrinated: gven the religion of my family), a satanist (rebellion: in opposition to the religion of my family), a witch, (beginning to balance the extremes of indoctrination and rebellion), a gnostic (sliding backwards/ reconciliation with indoctrination phase), a student of the kabbalah and a practitioner of the "ars notoria" of the western mystery tradition, (sliding backwards/reconcilliation with rebellion phase), a born-again Christian, a devotee of Krsna (returning to a messiah-figure after the "self-propulsion of magic"), and, eventually... I took up the robes, metaphorically speaking. To convert, though, suggests you ... give up, denigrate, replace, subvert, one with another. I don't think I've ever done that.
Recently, in the past few months, I have discovered a reemergence of buddhist fevour, and have decided to wait a year, and, if I still am inclined to, deliver a series of lectures, in my version of buddhism, in my local area. Why? I am unsure. I suspect it is because I do not feel... whole... without identifying as a person with firm religious convictions, of some description, and I am also, psychologically, a classic overachiever... Part of me also believes that I have... a good take on it, and if people are going to look into it anyway, they may as well hear what I have to say about it, too. I also feel that, whilst I have become disillusioned over the years with different faiths for diferent reasons, buddhism was the only one of them all that was actually USEFUL.
