[Guest M]

I don't know how to do this formatting yet. Sorry!

I guess I can sound hostile. So I'm sorry for that.


Now that I think about it, and I can't believe I missed this, but I'm wondering why SHOULD you or anyone else automatically understand neo-pagan to have anything to do with the pagan gods? For the sake of PR mainly (and by PR, I mean not being burned at the stake or having their reputations ruined by fear) the neo-pagan movement has emphasized connection with the natural world. So I can see that my assumption might not have been as obvious as I thought it was.

Most, but not everybody, remains Christian after leaving the LC. It's hard to get it out of your system, and many don't want to. I've noticed that people go thru kind of stages after leaving, and the longer one is out, and the stages they go thru, frees them more and more from the LC Kool-Aid they've been drinking for so long. Seems that Kool-Aid becomes integrated down to the cellular level, and is hard to get rid of. It takes time. Please don't hold it against anyone on this forum for being Christian. Let's be 'christian' toward each others differences, even IF they are not Christian, or if they are.

yes that's fair! Yeah. I chalk this up a lot to the conditioning of fear, speaking from my own experience (which may not be wholely representative). I'll get into that later when I tell my story, which I'll probably do on the Alt views section at some point. But if there is one spiritual truth I have learned, regardless of belief system, it is the power of fear and its capacity to BE the evil it claims to be afraid of. The fear of making a mistake. The fear of being lost, somehow, of falling over some invisible edge past being rescued, because you were too stupid, and of COURSE you shouldn't have trusted yourself to know right from wrong.

I WAS that Christian who fantasized about being in spiritual warfare with people minding their own business. And I was incapacitated by fear to the point that it was difficult to enter adulthood, where you have to make choices, and no one can make them for you. I saw how crippled I was by fear.

I got tired. I was still afraid, but I was more tired by then. I realized I had to know. I had to know what I didn't know, and stop guessing or taking other peoples' word for everything. So I decided to look into the darkness (meaning the scary unknown) as it were, and face it, whatever it was. Lo and behold, not scary at all. Not nearly as scary as what fear makes people do, nor as scary as realizing no one is responsible for your life, but yourself, and you as a human being have great power and potential without necessarily certainty of wisdom to use it.

I've tried over the years, but have found Christians are hard to be around, unless I keep my mouth shut ... which is impossible. Since the local church I have low tolerance for pretend spirituality. I've been known to snap at anyone claiming they know what God wants for me, for example.


HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Impossible. I guess I know what that is like. This will be good practice for me in patience.

And you've lost nothing. And won't if I can help it.

*warm fuzzy* From what I hear, if you made it here, I should be okay?!


If it helps feel free to get angry at me any time. Many out here will vouch that I don't tend to get angry over any of this stuff, or our discussions, even when attacked, but I can make angry. I'm handy at that. I guess this is a case in point. lol.[/I]


Agent of chaos! :P Anger has helped me out a lot in life. But I'm at a point where I don't want to be ruled by it. If you or anyone else makes me angry, that's a choice I made....at least in part!

Now we're talking. Now I understand your paganism, to some extent anyway. I believe the gods were invented to represent unseeable forces. Poseidon is a prime example, being the god of the forces of the sea. I get it now, I hope. Question : Is paganism providing connections that you weren't connected to in the LC?

It does, but here's what you have to understand, if you can. It might make more sense when I get around to telling my story from beginning to end. To me, my polythiestic, animist way of looking at God and all creation is simply the other side of a mirror. I experienced all I could with monotheism. I couldn't squeeze out more. I HAD to go another way to continue my relationship with God (the divine or sacred by whatever name you know it), so I challenged myself.

And again, it's not like I intended to. I literally outgrew Christianity. I couldn't stay there. I see my change in religion as a rites of passage, the kind you can't stop. Sooner or later, everyone grows up. Sooner or later, everyone dies. Sooner or later, we all have to face the mysterious and find our own answers. So I did. And it took a while, but I never once have felt my relationship with God interrupted. I was very fortunate to have a good model in my mother, and my parents in general, who taught me early on that everyone has a conscience.

And she taught me the importance of hearing wisdom intuitively, "God's voice" if you will, and being able to know that rather than depending on what other people demand that it is. She would say to me, "There comes a time when every Christian has to walk alone." By that she meant that God's plan for each person is not ever going to make 100% sense to anyone else who isn't that person. So you have to learn to trust yourself, and your relationship with God.

This is just one of many spiritual truths that I learned as a Christian, that still serve me and feel like universal truths. It has saved me a lot of heartache and further prolonged abuse that I could have experienced, even by well meaning people.

I've also been able to wrestle with things as a pagan that I am pretty sure I would have had to wrestle with Christianity. I didn't just get to leave behind everything I didn't like. It was nice and a reprieve to live in a world that was not defined by or did not depend on Christianity, either positively or negatively. To live a reality where it was pretty much irrelevant. It's so influential in the world that you don't even have to be a Christian to be affected by the way it has shaped our culture and world history.

Even a Satanist only makes sense in the context of the Christian worldview, and they fully acknowledge this, which is why to them Satan is a symbol and they are actually mostly athiest. Their religion is literally a reaction against another.

When Christianity defines EVERYthing it relation to it, it is hard to get at the real meaning of things, to see things purely. You can't fit things into a world view that don't belong there. But whether people want to believe it or not, it was never the only path to God, and it is not now. It was once the shiny new thing. But it's truths weren't. The sacred wasn't. It's there as it is everywhere else when you're looking.

And sometimes a person needs a break. Sometimes it helps to see things from a different point of view. I have actually come to appreciate some things about the Bible and Christian spirituality a tad more SINCE I've become a pagan. That's because I have a better understanding of the symbols, language, and cultural background, which I wanted to have as a Christian anyway. There are parts that still resonate with me, and they mean more to me for that timelessness.

And now they stand out very clearly against the silliness that people tack on around them and obscure them with. It's like someone else here said a bit ago: Truth is truth. To that person, they have only one truth, and there are no others that can be real. To me, our truth is the same. I don't need mine to be the only way for it to have the power it does.

I've gone off on a bit of a tangent to your question; it is hard to get into the connections that I make differently. They're very personal, and I don't really want to necessarily hang them in the open to be disrespected or belittled. Pearls before swine and all that. (Pigs are smart so that's not an insult. It's just that they have little use for pearls!)

I suppose at some point it's better to do less talking and more getting to know people. I can't think of any argument that is stronger than relationship.

Me neither. But I'm delighted you gals have come here to share what you've gone thru since leaving the LC. We SHOULD be totally behind you. We should identify.[/I]

That is awesome of you to say! Likewise.

And you will, if you will please do us the honor of hanging around.


Oh, we're honored now?! *puffs chest proudly*