On Religion

questionoftheday asks: Did religion ever play an important part in your life? Was it a positive or negative experience?

My answer:

Yes ish... mostly positive.

I've been a modern pagan for most of my adult life, but spent most of that time being the loner type. I wasn't really like other pagans or Wiccans, and they were kind of scary. I always wished I had someone to share my beliefs with, but never found anyone to whom I would've been fully comfortable trying to explain, and also never found anyone who cared enough to ask. I have short answers available for the polite level of questions, and that was as far as it got most of the time.

The one exception was a pair of church ladies who came to my door one evening to invite me to join their bible study. The younger of the two was extremely intrigued by what I believed and I think she would've happily stood there all night asking me questions, and I was happy to answer. But the other one apparently decided that I was the devil quoting scripture or somesuch, and ended the visit. And that was it for interest in my religious beliefs, over the span of my entire lifetime.

Even after I joined a pagan community group, no one really cared. The basic tenet was that everyone was free to believe something different and worship the god(s) and/or goddess(es) that most spoke to them. No one asked about mine. So I was mostly there for the social aspects - and pagan religious ceremonies are certainly more up my alley than any of the Christian or Buddhist ones I've been involved in. They're less formal and more communal. We don't sit in rows in a building facing a speaker at the front, we stand in a circle outside with the priest/priestess in the middle.

That was back in Mobile. I haven't found any new pagans (that I know of), and haven't gone looking either. Religion hasn't come up as a serious topic of conversation with Brett (he's not very religious). Which is odd, considering that we've gone to church functions several times at the invite of my first landlady - but then neither of us are Christian, and we're just there to be social.

Actually now that I'm thinking of it, there was also the old and young Buddhist monks that stayed at my mother's house for a couple nights. The younger one was extremely intrigued by paganism in general, and expressed some interest in sticking around in the western world to learn more about it. But that wasn't really about my personal beliefs, so much as "what's paganism."

So I still haven't found anyone to share my religious beliefs with. But at some point it stopped mattering so much. A lot of things that used to be important to me have become less important as I go along, while other things have become more important. I guess that's just how life goes.