Back to church - after 30 years

Now I'm really becoming radical in my old age ...

My earliest memories are with a Presbyterian Church. Then my mother married an army sergeant who was a Southern Baptist. Fortunately, being in the military, we mostly used the military chapels during my childhood. I don't recall going to church during early adolescence.

Then when I was 16 or 17 I started picking up an interest again, and by the time I got to college I was with a very fundamentalist group. What possessed me to join such an exclusive group is beyond me; probably their dedication to bible study which was answering the questions I had.

But within a few years I started having different feelings about their teachings, especially their insistence that their way was the one way, and everyone else are going to a very warm place after the judgment. The doubt grew until I couldn't do it any more.

My favorite label was "recovering fundamentalist."

I was neither atheist nor agnostic at first. The first few years I believed I was going to hell. I grew into a more agnostic stance, and then atheist. Still a part of me says that all there is, is the material world, and nothing else really matters. But the past five years, once again I started having different feelings about that stance as well. I think the movie "What the Bleep Do We Know?" started it, introducing me to Quantum Theories, and it grew from there.

I first looked into other systems; Hindu (the Bhagavad Gita remains one of my favorite books), Buddha, Tao; I seriously considered Zen Buddhism once but I didn't find any Zen centers near me. You can only go so far in that alone.

On beliefnet.com there is a tool, called Belief-O-Matic. You take a quiz answering questions about what you believe in, and at the last page it ranks you among the various religions it has, from the most compatible to the least. New Thought turned out to be 99% me. (Scientology was 100% but I heard things about that ...)

So Sunday I spent the late morning and a part of the afternoon at a Unity church. It was unlike anything I experienced.

I will post that experience in another topic.