Reading everyone's stories was so engrossing. I hope more others follow. Our early experiences shape our thoughts and beliefs in so many ways. As do our later experiences and what we choose to learn.
I wasn't raised in any formal religion. I grew up with mixed messages about religious belief. I lived with my mom and her parents. My Mom really disliked organized religion. She had read up on religion some and concluded it was all just stories. Her inclinations was towards New Age. She used to say she believed in reincarnation and had some interest in paranormal things.
My grandmother was mostly interested in the paranormal and superstition. (Ghosts, Ouija boards, fortune telling, knocking on wood, not dropping spoons, etc) Grandma's parents had been something like Baptist or Pentecostal ? and when she spoke of it, she referred to them and the community of the time "hypocrites and fanatics". She told a story of how after she had left the church, someone from a neighboring church had burned their church down because they (her family's church) had hired a black minister. (This would have been the late 1930s or early 1940s in NYS) I guess Grandma tried taking my mom and her siblings to church when they were little, but they detested the screaming hellfire preaching minister and refused to go. They all ended up disillusioned with church.
My grandfather had not been religious most of his life. He was not raised religious. Someone in his family history may have been disillusioned Mennonites who left the fold, but I'm not sure. He always said his father bah-humbugged religion and my Grandpa was the same. Til he had a midlife crisis in the early 1970s. I was very little then and don't know exactly what happened, but, he somehow became a hard convert to the Worldwide Church of God (Herbert Armstrong church). This group is sometimes referred to as a cult, though I'm not sure how much worse it was than any other hard-line church. They were severe in their intensity and considered themselves "the One True Church" They were very skeptical and critical of Catholics and regular Protestants. They were right and everybody else was wrong. What was different about the WCG was the doctrine. They didn't believe in the trinity, they didn't believe in eternal hellfire (instead they believed in annihilation and conditional immortality) they did not believe in what they considered "pagan" holidays like Christmas and Easter, observed Old Testament dietary laws and Jewish fasting days, and they were intense about biblical prophecy and the idea of the End Times. In fact, the End Times were supposed to happen in the 1980s.
Now, my mom and grandma insisted on providing me (and my sister) with Christmas and Easter, though in a very secular way. So I had traditional holidays with minimal to no religious connotations, and a religious grandfather who bah-humbugged them. I never found any of this confusing either. To me, by the time I was 5 or 6, I had drawn the conclusion that a supernatural world containing God and who knows what else almost surely existed, but because it was invisible and people only got glimpses, there were a lot of theories and nobody really knew the whole story. I thought that all religions were theories based on scant bits of evidence from the invisible beyond.
Strangely, when I was 12, my mom insisted I go to summer bible school. I don't know her motives, as she couldn't stand organized religion and didn't buy into Christian churches. But I ended up believing some of what I learned and got baptized as a teen. (It was interesting when I did not understand what they were talking about with the Trinity, and mom told me to ask my Grandpa, and he grumbled for some while about the pagan ideas not in the bible etc) Still, I had just as much spiritual influence from materials my mom had on meditation and new age concepts.
I am not a practitioner of any particular religion, but I like the term "theistic rationalist". I always liked the line from Hamlet that said "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in [y]our philosophies" I have had some experiences that reinforce this for me. I lived in places that were supposed to have ghosts, and saw them
When I was a child,
I caught a fleeting glimpse,
Out of the corner of my eye,
I turned to look but it was gone,
And when I was a preteen, teen, and young adult, I had several precognitive dreams.
I self identified as vaguely Protestant for a long time, but only in my early 30s did I start attending church. I spent many years at Unity church and was very happy there. I also did a lot of internet research on religion to expand my knowledge. I always wanted to know what was really true, and to try to understand.
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If you got this far... thanks for reading
