I usually think of myself as a happily questioning agnostic. It seems I was a questioner from early one - one of my mother's favorite stories about me, soemwhere between age 5-7, was the time I asked her if we could please say "Ah-ladies" at the end of bedtime prayers rather than "A-men."
I was raised casually Presbyterian, and always felt that my parents took us to church becuase they thought they ought to (it was the 1950s), an not because faith had any major meaning in their lives. We didn't discuss religion at home, and we didn't read "the" Bible together.
In high school, i beonged to a Young Life group for a couple of years, more for the socail aspects than the spiritual, as I look back. I don't thinnk it was as fundamentalist then as it is now. Altho, at that time, I bought into the accepting JC as your savior thing, I was never entirely comfortable with it, and didn't feel like I was fully committed, becuase I could NOT make myself do the whole witnessing thing to try to persuade others to accept that idea. Just plain could not.
Nor could I get comfortable with the idea that anyoone who had not accepted Jesus was going to hell. That whole, "No one gets to the Father except by me," thing. Were that "except by me" idea to be true, it's one thing if someone has heard the salvation message and chooses not to accept it - a choice has been made. It would be entirely something else for someone to be denied whatever salvation there might be becuase they never had a chance to hear the message. How unfair would THAT be?
Here's my take on the importance of welcoming a variety of spiritual frameworks:
- I'm a mom, and a pediatric nurse practitioner. My sons are now 27 and 25. There were many things I wanted to teach them as they were growing up. If I explained something important to them one way, and they didn't "get it," I would try as many other explanations as it took until I'd made my point. (Not all ot once, of course.)
- As a nurse practitioner, I must do the same thing - if I am trying to explain an illness and a treatment plan to a parent, I'd better have a vareity of ways to do so in case I don't see the light of understanding in the parent's eyes the first time. Failure to make things clear could have a really bad outcome.
Here's something else I am quite firm about. I can believe something "with all my heart," as the saying goes. My belief in something has NO influence about whatever really IS. None of us knows what might be after this existence that we are experencing right now. I'm OK with not knowing. I'm intrigued by the idea of reincarnation. I hope there is life on other planets. Who can prove or disprove that we are not all part of someon else's imagination?
Questioning and specculating is fun and fascinating.
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