Quote from NeoRio1:
Ya, my 6 year old nephew thinks he knows everything too.
How were you raised I am?
Like everyone else, in ignorance, for an experience of "liFe" nOt the truth. I called someone "mom". As far as I know, no man is my father.
Quote from NeoRio1:
Were you raised to believe in a god? Maybe you weren't raised to believe in it but you had an epiphany about god?
I was raised to believe in gOd [not GoD]. I've had perhaps three epiphany's. First when I was 20.
First epiphany. I was in a heavy metal band and we were about to cover "The Number of the Beast" by Iron Maiden. I couldn't play that fast, so I got scared and went to church instead.
Just kidding. Actually, I could play that fast, but I got scared by Hal Lindsey's book, "The Late Great Planet Earth". I said the "sinners prayer" at the end, and woke up the next morning with an epiphany...a voiceless message:
"This is not your home". Everything seemed different, kind of dreamy. I looked up at the stars at night wondering where or what my "home" was. Within a week I quit both my bands [and my music career] and got myself into a fundamental bible church. The band leader tried to get me to stay, saying, "We will be guitar gods". After I quit, they changed their name to "Metal Church", and I went to...mental church.
There, I ate the bible morning noon and night, backwards, backwards masked, and forwards again. Strong's concordance, the whole shebang. One day, two years later, I went to church without my bible. Then some pastor's speech was bragging about all his converts in South America, and how they all carry their bibles with them. And he said, "In fact, if you're not carrying your bible with you to church you're probably not even a christian". As the people were guided to turn in their bibles to some verse, I got up and walked out down the middle isle...gone forever. That was my graduation day from Prayer Prep.
Surely the Catholics knew what they were talking about, right? After all, their tradition went all the way back to Peter in an unbroken chain of laying on of hands, er... So, I signed up for catechism, graduated, and attended mass religiously for the next five years till a personal crises with a broken relationship drove me into the desert of Arizona for months to contemplate. There, under the stars one warm night, I challenged every notion I ever held of gOd, of GoD...whatever! It was like a scene out of that movie "Forest Gump" where his former Nam lieutenant, legless, is cursing gOd in the middle of a storm on a shrimp boat. I gave gOd three minutes to answer the charges I brought against him. Challenged him to kill me. Told him I would crucify him if I could get my hands on him. I suddenly realized that my notions of gOd were all a figment of my imagination. Peace came over me, and the storm stopped. This was my
second epiphany. It came from the very core of my being, this voiceless message:
"Whatever comes of fear is entirely illegitimate". This I seemed to "know". This epiphany came to me at the base of Superstition Mountain. There, I broke some very superstitious chains that held my mind down in a vicious vice grip of obsequious, subservient, abject fear.
I was left an agnostic and left "the Church". I had
no opinion about God, except that if there was one, it was probably "good" and nOt "good and evil". For perhaps ten years I remained somewhat agnostic, daring not to develop an opinion one way or another. So I developed what I call "backburner theology". If I had a question, but was not sure the answer, I was careful not to make an answer, but rather, to put the question on the *back burner* of my mind, to sit there and stew and simmer. There, the question of who was Jesus simmered for about ten years. Only as I tried to walk in his shoes and identify with him did his way of thinking begin to emerge for me and dawn, quietly, upon my mind.
My
third most important epiphany came within a year or two of my second, during which I was digesting several self-help type books, ie. "Think and Grow Rich", "Psycho-Cybernetics"...ect. Anything having to do with the mind, I was interested in that because I was interested in mending the broken relationship I mentioned earlier. I learned that people have beliefs about other people that are simply not true, and simply vicious. And I could see that this was a kind of mental illness that I was not prepared or able to cope with. Somewhere in all the information that I inhaled, I took as a *core belief* that
I am responsible for everything that happens to me. I did not realize it till years later that
this is the turning point in salvation. And from that point in time, I was heading home along the straight and narrow path.
Christ!
