Inspired by a comment I left on another thread, I thought I would see if we can get a discussion going about Finding religion, or at least wanting to. I have felt for years that I am missing something spirtual - a belief in something greater than myself. I am athiest and don't believe in God, Heaven, Hell or any thing in the Bible. I think of it as a collection of morality tales and guidelines at best. My mother is Catholic and my Father Protestant. When forms were filled in, I was Church of England. As a child I attended church only at Christmas (as part of a school service) and now as an adult it's the same - Christmas carol services with the odd wedding/funeral. I am not anti-religion. I just have never felt the need for it.
But...something is niggling away at me. I feel more and more that I have taken no comfort from my sceptical viewpoint (that the church is a business and a money making scam). I just feel cold and detatched - distant even from my fellow man. I scoffed at people claiming that Jesus has spoken to them, looked askew at anybody claiming that their prophet will return, even felt sorry for people tied to a medieval mindset and was safe and secure in the knowledge that they were wrong and that I and science are correct.
And while I still think that science is correct, I can't help but feel that a part of my understanding is missing. Is this it? I want fo find some spiritual fulfilment, feel part of something greater than myself. Something which permeates the entire universe. I don't want to just choose something half-heartedly...I want to believe.
Hi Ringo - FWIW I'll try to explain how it is for me.
Ive never been converted to any religion, despite all the attempts that have been made.
While some of my relatives were witchy, deities or worship of such never came into it. Still, I always had a feeling of "something," some force or power being out there, beyond sight.
My parents were nominally Lutheran, but rarely went to church. I did go to BIble school there, but was underwhelmed. When I was sent to Catholic school and attended Mass, the ineffable "something" felt closer.
But later, when I attented both Southern Baptist and Fundamentalist Christian schools (and of course had to attend the churches as well) the ineffible something might as well have curled up and died in those places.
At that time I did a lot of reading up on various religions of the world, from the Abrahamic faiths to esoteric Hindu sects. It was all very interesting, but nothing I could truly believe in.
Eventually I decided there was no way I could be Christian, as I simply couldn't believe in salvation.
Buddhism has much practical wisdom in it, but here it functions more as a philosophy, as its spiritual elements tend to be difficult for Westerners to grasp. And organizations of pagans and heathens seemed all wrong to me, too.
There was a sort of question I had and none of them could really answer.
Do you remember the book The Wind in The Willows and the chapter The Piper At the Gates Of Dawn? The animals meet the god Pan, but he makes them forget, lest this perfect moment destroy the rest of their mundane lives. They are only left with the feeling that something incredible had happened that they could no longer recall. Well, I've had that sort of feeling my entire life, and that's what I'd been searching for, spiritually. Some way to understand it. But I've had to conclude that organized religion is not the vehicle for me to get there.
As it is, I'm still pursuing that mystery, but mainly through private rituals and practices. Trying to connect with the ineffable something. Its much more effective now that I've stopped trying to fit into someone else's established system.
The epitome of spiritual but not religious, I suppose.
Note - I suspect that some people naturally have a sense of this whatever-it-is and some people don't. Neither way is necessarily right or wrong.