Changing religions is not an easy process. (Not if your former religion had any importance or presence in your life.) I think it's one thing to go from believing in no higher power at all, and then finding the spiritual outlet that best suits your beliefs. It's entirely another to question everything you once knew, (or thought you did,) and realize that it leaves you feeling not just empty, but in a constant state of pain.
Quite simply, I lost my connection to the Christian concept of God. I realized that unless I adhered to, believed in, and acted upon the teachings of the Bible, I had no right to call myself a Christian. Not if I was being honest, and not if I wanted to have inner peace. I HAD put my faith in Jesus Christ. But the cost was to divorce myself from my own insight, my own thoughts, my own experiences, and anything that existed outside the spectrum of one idea. And that was a cost I simply could not live with.
At some point, I am going to write about what I DON'T believe about God. This post, however, is about what I DO believe.
I believe that there is One Creative source. But I believe it manifests itself differently for everyone, depending upon their ability to relate and understand it. I also think that, no matter the face it has, (or the face we put on it,) at the end of the day, all concepts of God are simply that: concepts. Ideas. Unable to be separated from the Human elements of our OWN personality. And that when we're connecting with Deity, we're also really connecting with a part of ourselves.
I think that for one religion to claim absolute truth, all religions outside of it must be provably false. Because this cannot be done with faith, (which is belief despite an ABSENCE of scientific/factual evidence,) the only thing that makes a religion valid for ANY one individual, is whether not it satisfies the spiritual needs of the adherent.
Christianity claims to be the only road to God. Yet if that were true, I don't think it would be possible to connect with Deity in any other religion. But people do. Their beliefs and religious practices fulfill their need to commune with God, regardless of whether or not they're Christian. Let's break that down even farther, to the literal handful of denominations within each religion. You can talk to a Catholic, and a Lutheran, and both have entirely different interpretations on the character and expectations of God, to the point where He's almost a different person in totality.
I think if one religion was meant to be the only path to God, everyone would come to that path because it spoke to them, and not because people shove it down their throat. But some people feel absolutely no connection to Christianity. If it was a religion meant for all, then all would feel at home there. Yet not everyone does. Because we're all different.
And I think that's exactly as it should be.
