My big fat religious conversion began with a simple misunderstanding. I was eight years old, and possibly maybe called my best friends lying heathens bound for Hell. The Christian church my family attended at the time had just discussed the issue of non-believers recently, so my little eight year old mind was absolutely sure of the facts: that there is only one God, all others are false and devils trying to get you to sin and commit your immortal soul to Hell, that Jesus was the son of God and also His name. So when my friends said that they worshiped Jehovah, I quickly determined that ‘Jehovah’ does not sound like ‘Jesus’, and cried ‘sinners’ and ‘heathens’ as I was hustled from their home. My parents were embarrassed by my rudeness, and informed me that ‘Jehovah’ really is just another way of saying ‘Jesus’. Apparently, just because the priest says it is no reason to burn someone for a devil.
I still had some questions, though, and a sense of betrayal lingered.
I studied history, and the disgust arose. Religion is the battle cry for a lot of wars. Although several religions preach love and brotherhood, people hate and kill each other. The hypocrisy frustrated me. I liked things to make sense, and hating in the name of love sounded insane to me. Finally, sometime during high school, I took to wearing scarves on my hair and was instantly labeled a Muslim. In a surge of teenage hormones and rebellion, I renounced Christianity, claimed a spirit animal as my totem, and went searching for dragons. Well, sort of.
My parents, although not the strictest Church-going Bible-thumpers, refused to accept my separation from our family religion. Their only acknowledgement of it was to throw me into a string of churches of varying denominations in the hope that one would stick. I never lasted more than a year. In each one, I found good and bad. Invariable, I would look around and notice more people checking their cellphones or sleeping than sincerely feeling the power and truth of their god. I would leave.
I felt alone and misunderstood. It made me angry and bitter and blind, able to see nothing but the reflection of my own feelings of confusion and inadequacy. I investigated other religions, deciding to just find one that fit me better. My prolonged engagement with Christianity made me adamantly anti-Christian, so I started with Bahaianism, whipped through Buddhism, and fell in love with Islam. Examining various mythologies, though, I stumbled upon an argument about the difference between mythology and religion, and how in anthropological studies, religiosity changes and is quantifiable.
Comparative Religion 101 blew my mind.
This religious conversion story doesn’t have an ending. I never settled on a particular religion. But I’ll tell you one thing that pulled me up from the well of despair. I met an agnostic on the train one evening. We had a rousing discussion on deity and belief, but essentially disagreed on one core issue: he believed that God is knowable, and I asserted that the very nature of religion is that you believe in something beyond your ken, your knowledge. Until that discussion, I hadn’t realized this core belief of mine on the very nature of religion. That settled the growing despair, because I recognized that I still had faith in something. It also slammed the brakes on my run through all the world’s religions and mythologies. My bitterness faded as I accepted that no one religious group was right. They all did the same thing, had equal value despite their discord. As that desperation faded, deeper appreciation of the various belief systems seemed to flourish. I stopped looking for that single perfect fit, and found more to like all around me.
Currently, I’m studying Wicca. Oh, and ‘Jehovah’ really does not mean ‘Jesus’.