This I Believe

[nightsong]

A splinter thread from the WOW. I just found this site! thread in the Intro section.

Dear jenjen,

 I know that NightSong is devoutly Christian and is very active in her church and receives support from her religious life and community which she often openly shares with us.

LOL.  Just for the sake of clarification, while I am very active in my church and receive good support from there, I am NOT a Christian.  I am a Unitarian Universalist, and while there are many Christians in our denomination, in general UU's believe that Jesus was a very good man that taught wonderful things, but was not necessarily divine.  Personally, I'm rather apathetic to the issue.  I do believe in some form of higher power, but whether you call it God/Goddess/Goodness/Gaia/Buddha/Allah, etc. is really not important to me, nor is whether Jesus was or wasn't divine or the son of that higher power.

That being said, I have no judgement for Christians.  Our Fourth Principle is to promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.  As my minister says, "I believe to the core of my being that this is true and right.  AND, I could be absolutely wrong." 

[Eight Ball]

Oh Dear NightSong, forgive me, I'm such an idiot!

 I should have taken the time and verified information - especially of such a personal nature, (my memory is swiss cheese and extremely fallible these day - brain damage and head trauma from epileptic seizures, do not a good memory make).  I've been familiar with Unitarianism generally from childhood, as it was and is very popular in LA, along with many other faiths other than Christianity.  We (my second Love of my life and I) even had the honor to play at a beautiful Unitarian Church up in the Hollywood Hills for a lovely wedding - and we were so thrilled that they had us set up to play next to a lovely statue of Pan!  We played everything from medieval to Middle-Eastern music, and many folks who had our cds or knew us from the two original, but now massive rennaissance faires in California that started the whole rennaissance faire craze (they were actually a sort of replacement for the love-ins that were dying out by 1970's) would hire us for all sorts of fun gigs in between our concerts, and busking on the street (when we had no concerts).

 Again, I am so very sorry for giving out incorrect information about something so personal!  I'm an absolute idiot!  Please forgive my stupidity.

[nightsong]

EightBall there is absolutely no reason to apologize!!!!  I do talk about church a lot, and given that Christianity is the predominant religion in my country, it was certainly a reasonable conclusion to make!  No worries!!!

In other amusing news, this happened to me the other night:

Some Baptists were going door to door last night to invite everyone to their church. At our house they found they had questions instead of answers when I explained that I'm a Unitarian Universalist.


They had heard of it but didn't really know about it, so they were curious about our "doctrine". I explained that one of our principles is the free and responsible search for truth and meaning for each person, which means that each person can believe something entirely different than the next in regards to God and Jesus. Perplexed, they asked how we can build fellowship with people of so many different beliefs.


My simple reply was, "We choose to."


So I meant to ask in my original post.... what do YOU (as in, everyone that cares to share) believe?

[jenjen]

EightBall there is absolutely no reason to apologize!!!!  I do talk about church a lot, and given that Christianity is the predominant religion in my country, it was certainly a reasonable conclusion to make!  No worries!!!

In other amusing news, this happened to me the other night:

Some Baptists were going door to door last night to invite everyone to their church. At our house they found they had questions instead of answers when I explained that I'm a Unitarian Universalist.


They had heard of it but didn't really know about it, so they were curious about our "doctrine". I explained that one of our principles is the free and responsible search for truth and meaning for each person, which means that each person can believe something entirely different than the next in regards to God and Jesus. Perplexed, they asked how we can build fellowship with people of so many different beliefs.

My simple reply was, "We choose to."

So I meant to ask in my original post.... what do YOU (as in, everyone that cares to share) believe?

All I know is from my experiences. I am fascinated by Jesus. I have studied him by reading the gospels in the bible.  I believe him to be God in the form of man. He came to save the hurting and is a bridge to a personal relationship with God the father.  I talk to God all the time and He helps me live. I find encouragement and peace from reading the Psalms.  I believe it's author David had some mental illness. I LOVE Psalm 18. God is very real to me. He never leaves me even though I mess up all the time.  I guess that's it. I don't have all the answers. The older I get the more I realize this. Peace and love ♡

[Dragon]

I've been deciding whether I want to post an answer to this thread or not.  Not that it doesn't deserve an answer but because I literrally wrote enough for a good sized book to formulate my own thoughts on the matter.  So, without further ado ...

History:
I was raised generally as a Catholic. Mom told me that she converted to Catholicism so she could marry my father (who wasn't a Catholic, btw) in The Church (they weren't) ... but that's neither here nor there.
For much of my schooling, mom sent me to Catholic (parochial) schools when we lived where there was one. While I did count one priest as friend, most of the clergy I knew were drunks, panderers or worse.
She also took me to church every Sunday, she seldom went but she made sure I was there.
At one point I thought I wanted to become a priest and actually spent one summer at a prep-seminary - one of the places I first ran into overt pedophiles. Cured of that desire, I spent some time in a small Benedictine monastery, these were lay brothers not full members of the order but ones who followed the Rule of Benedict by choice. Once again ran into a pedophile brother and escaped physically unscathed but emotionally and religiously fragile.
At about 16 I decided that I needed to look at Catholicism; decided that the attitude that "I can do whatever I want and confess and be forgiven" just didn't make it with me and started looking at the alternatives available to me.
If Catholicism was the first victim of my inquiries then Christianity as a whole became the second. If each of these "religions" could claim to be true to the teachings of Jesus then how could any of them be true?
To summarize this part of this book, I've over the years looked at many of the oriental religions and found them appealing; looked at Islam and it's offshoot Baha'i and found them distressing I'd come from one religion that believed in absolutes, I wasn't going to another. I looked at Judaism and almost married a Jewish girl, her father objected, her mother objected, they moved to Denver and that was the end of that. I've looked at the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) and didn't see that much difference from Christianity - except a nice fairy tale (I've since learned a lot more about them and still consider them a nice fairy tale).

Current:
Without excuse, I am a Deist - I *do* believe that there is some deity, you can call him/her/it God, Allah, whatever, I don't care. Generally I refer to him as god, but often refer to the gods. Specifically, when I'm referring to the creator it's god; when I'm talking about some display in nature it's the gods.
Is there a heaven / hell? Personally, I have no idea. I would like to think that a truly loving creator would not condemn someone to eternal punishment.
Is there a life after death? Beats me! Too many religions (and cults) use the concept of an afterlife to ensure that their members adhere to their standards. If you don't do this then you're going to be condemned to eternal hellfire (see the previous question). As I've matured in my life, I find it more important that we treat each other with respect, simply because that's the right thing to do. But it's taken me a long time to get top this point and being human, I sometimes don't.

With little provocation I could go on so I'll stop (and no, don't provoke!)

[jenjen]

Oh Dear NightSong, forgive me, I'm such an idiot!

 I should have taken the time and verified information - especially of such a personal nature, (my memory is swiss cheese and extremely fallible these day - brain damage and head trauma from epileptic seizures, do not a good memory make).  I've been familiar with Unitarianism generally from childhood, as it was and is very popular in LA, along with many other faiths other than Christianity.  We (my second Love of my life and I) even had the honor to play at a beautiful Unitarian Church up in the Hollywood Hills for a lovely wedding - and we were so thrilled that they had us set up to play next to a lovely statue of Pan!  We played everything from medieval to Middle-Eastern music, and many folks who had our cds or knew us from the two original, but now massive rennaissance faires in California that started the whole rennaissance faire craze (they were actually a sort of replacement for the love-ins that were dying out by 1970's) would hire us for all sorts of fun gigs in between our concerts, and busking on the street (when we had no concerts).

 Again, I am so very sorry for giving out incorrect information about something so personal!  I'm an absolute idiot!  Please forgive my stupidity.

Eight Ball. Please don't beat yourself up. Your intensions were good. I hope you are ok. I haven't heard from you in awhile. I really enjoyed the conversation we had going.