My Spiritual Journey (So Far)

I started out being raised by a Catholic father and a mother that had converted from Protestant to Catholic when she married my father. I went to church every Sunday from the time I was baptized in infancy. I honestly believed what I was told about God, Jesus, Mary, etc. To the point where my father was convinced I would grow up to become a nun. Then, at around fifteen, I decided to study the Bible. This led to the realization that the Bible doesn't make sense. After asking questions about it, like "how did Penguins get to the Ark?" and "was a volcano really responsible for the destruction of Sodom and Gemmorrah?", and receiving no satisfying answers from the Church, I chose to find a religion that made more sense.

After leaving home a few months after high school graduation, I met my first Wiccans. I jumped head-first into their beliefs, bought 101 books, and even professed my new faith to anyone who would listen. I was, I'm ashamed to admit, quite annoying in sharing my beliefs. I was one of the dreaded fluffy bunnies.

A few years later I moved back to my home-town, and began to keep my religion to myself. Without the constant input from others, the glamor of Wicca faded. The books went into storage, and I never got around to setting up an altar. Reading the ancient Greek stories led me to Hellenic Polytheism (though not reconstructionism). I believed, and still do, that the Gods exist. Not just the Greek deities, but all of them. I believed that they feel lonely with so many of their former followers converting themselves and their descendants to Christianity or Islam. However, I also believed that they understand the world has changed and they can no longer be worshiped the way they were once accustomed to.

I came to realize, after several years of quietly worshiping the Greek pantheon, that there was no reply. No feelings that prayers were answered, or that a deity is even listening. No evidence that my offerings were acceptable, and neither were they offensive. It was then that I stumbled across deism, which is the belief that there is a deity that created everything but now does not interact with the physical world. However, I believe that can't be exactly right. One deity can't possibly have created everything alone. More than one must exist. Which is where polydeism comes in. It's the same as deism, only with many deities involved. I have come to believe that deities won't, or can't, interfere with existence. That we are on our own in the physical world, and that what we do has little impact with what happens after death. Maybe it was decided that our species is evolved enough to not need them any longer. Maybe something happened in the last 6,000 years that prevents any deity from interacting with us. I honestly don't have the answer.

Who knows? Maybe something will happen to change my beliefs back to theism, or even swing the other way to atheism. Ask again in three to five years, and see if my beliefs have changed again.