Your Personal Religious History

[RINO Tom]

What is your personal religious history?  This is meant to include a "lack" of a religious history too, for our secular posters.  I think it will be interesting to see the wide variety among our Atlas friends.

Please feel free to answer this question in whatever form you want - free-form "talking," a structured bulleted list, ten paragraphs, one sentence, way more detail than mine, way less detail than mine, etc.  I just structured mine like this because it happened to make sense for me!  Here is mine:

Baptized: Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS) - Redeemer Lutheran Church in Peoria, IL
Confirmed: Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) - Zion Lutheran Church ELCA in Iowa City, IA
Current: Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) - Saint Luke Ministries in Chicago, IL

My mom grew up Catholic, which I have always found peculiar, because my maternal grandpa is 100% Swedish and grew up Lutheran (and refused to ever go to her Catholic church services, lol), while my maternal grandmother comes from a wide variety of ancestries, none of which are traditionally Catholic.  My dad grew up LCMS Lutheran ( and has German ancestry), and I think we only went to an ELCA church in Iowa City out of convenience - in other words, he was never a fan and probably still identifies with the LCMS.

My family started going to church a lot less when my sister and I got older and were involved in club sports and whatnot, and we were pretty much full-blown Christmas & Easter churchgoers by the time I was nearing the end of high school.  I never really went to church in college or the years after, and I eventually just only went on Christmas Eve with my family when I was back home.  However, a couple of years ago my parents got annoyed with how "liberal" and "political" our church had allegedly become, so now they don't even go there or to any other church.  So, that left a gap of a good 3-4 years (including COVID) where I didn't step foot in a church for anything but a wedding or a funeral.

I have very recently started attending church again, however.  The main catalyst was my wife being pregnant and us wanting to get our son baptized ... as my wife said, the church is not a drive thru for baptisms, and we would feel trashy asking a church we never attend to baptize our baby, haha.  I spent the last several months getting way more interested in church history and theology in general, and I spent a lot of time researching Lutheran churches in Chicago and watching bits and pieces of several virtual services before choosing our current one.  Call me superficial, but I strongly believe a church should be a place of beauty and tradition and should evoke a "scared" feeling, so all contemporary buildings and services were immediately out (which wasn't a huge obstacle in picking a Lutheran church).  Both my Best Man and her Man of Honor are gay, so I also did not feel overly comfortable with an LCMS church, and my bias was definitely toward ELCA ones; however, my generally theologically liberal orientation ironically led to this not being a deal breaker, as I don't really see my pastor's job as telling me what to think on specific issues.  

We finally attended our first service at the current one in August, and I really like it.  I doubt we will ever be weekly church attendees (especially since my wife is a nurse who will have to work some weekends, and I am unlikely to go by myself), but we have tried to go as much as possible recently to kind of establish ourselves there before hopefully having friends and family in town for a baptism next Summer (baby is due in January).

Anyway, I would love to hear others' personal backstories, whether you've always been the same thing or things have fluctuated!

[afleitch]

I was baptised Catholic. Attended Catholic school from age 5 to 17, first state school and then private Jesuit. This meant regular mass attendance and participation in religious retreats with religious orders and other community engagement with an emphasis on deprivation and poverty.

Very early on and very openly I might add given the environment I was in, I was gay affirming (and out) and pro-choice with respect to abortion and end of life issues. It's clearly an issue at my moral core.

In terms of personal faith , there are aspects I am not able to discuss, but there was a later realisation that early on there was 'aesthetic' and 'routine' aspects to my worship tied in with my neuro divergence. This was more central to it than I realised at the time, at least in comparison to 'your family is Catholic', 'you're friends are Catholic' and 'your town is Catholic' as being the main foundational tenets.

Attendance dropped off after I left school. I was still nominally Catholic.

I joined here at 19. It's easy to see where I stood if you search; I was a liberal Christian apologist. I was textually critical. I eventually reached a point of accepting the adoptionist position of Jesus' divine nature at which point I lost my faith in god entirely. It wasn't linked to that development; it was completely out of the blue. That was in my mid 20's.

Cue a few years of atheism with an 'edge' followed by a now decade plus period of general ambivalence. My mental and physical health improved. Politically I swung back to the left, and by some measure.

'Atheist' being a identifier more suited to US discourse, I consider myself to be non-religious and Humanist. Not that I don't consider or ponder the nature or teleology of god, if there was one.  As I've touched upon, if I believed in god tomorrow, then Islam would be a natural development stemming from that.

[John Dule]

N/A

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

0 Baptized in the Catholic Church.
0 - 7 I suppose my parents brought me to Mass regularly, but I was too young to remember much of anything.
7 - 11 Catechism, or what you would more likely call Sunday School, except it was not on Sunday. I went to Mass fairly regularly with my parents. I definitely believed in God in some form but I think it was somewhat vague and incoherent and without a strong grasp of theology.
8 My first Confession.
9 My first Communion.
11 My Confirmation.
11 - 13 This period coincides with middle school and with the onset of puberty. I think I started lapsing around this age. I mostly remember finding the Mass boring and like an inconvenience and being afraid of going to Communion, and perhaps I lacked a spur after having completed my sacraments of initiation.
13 - 15 I remember a period around this age when I asked my father to bring me to a different church each Sunday, but it failed to stimulate my interest. Not much later was the moment I last went to Mass outside of special ceremonies (e.g. sacraments of relatives) until I would be 19 and a half - see below.
15 Likely when I started to publicly identify as agnostic.
15 - 18 For most of my teenage years I was some sort of agnostic, vaguely deist, "spiritual but not religious" (lol) person. My most notable expression of spirituality involved stars and constellations, which at times I venerated, especially Orion. I disliked the concept of organized or institutional religion mostly out of a belief that faith is personal and private and unique for each of us, but I always equally disliked actively anti-religious people, and was still in many ways fascinated or moved by religious and Christian ideals.
18 - 19 I gradually developed a stronger - if seldom put in practice - interest in going to churches outside of service hours to reflect or meditate or pray. At some point I also started to reflect more consciously about what we can call my cultural Catholic background.
19 The COVID pandemic happened. I joined Atlas/Talk Elections. The aforementioned developments became more prominent, and I got to a point where I felt like I was searching for religion, albeit projected onto a non-specified non-immediate future. Then between the end of August 2020 and the beginning of September 2020 something sudden and overwhelming and peculiar happened, which we refer to as 'my religious conversion' to be short, and I found myself becoming a practicing Catholic (again). Not that it will surprise anyone but there was a strong (involuntary) influence of Nathan in this, and also for some parts some (involuntary) influence of Scott. I have been profoundly changed by this despite remaining fundamentally the same in various ways.
19 - 20 Committed Catholic with fairly discontinuous practice and strongly affected by a series of events that have made my last year or so an anguishing emotional wild ride. I have been still somewhat influenced by a more personal and 'vertical' conception of faith. At the moment of writing I am in a relatively confused phase, but I still pray God almost daily.

I am now 22. In the two years since the original post I don't think much has changed, although my levels of practice and faith have kept going up and down. I have taken part in various church-related social activities but for the most part it is still just as much of a solitary pursuit as it was in the beginning, which is something I have to grapple with even if it does not impact my religious convictions per se. I also feel much better in overall terms than I did in mid 2021 but this is outside the scope of the thread.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     I was raised irreligious (albeit from a Roman Catholic family) and considered myself a materialist/anti-metaphysician. A confluence of events when I was 27 led me to re-evaluate my belief system, and I was baptized into the Orthodox Church on Pentecost in 2020.

[LabourJersey]

I was baptized Episcopalian. My parents were of different denomination (Dad was Presbyterian, Mom was Catholic) and so they "met in the middle" denominationally speaking.

I didn't go to church beyond the main holidays for my teenage and college years. Never the less I always believed generally in a creator of the universe, the maker of all things visible and invisible. I was never particularly religious but if someone were to ask me if I believed in God, I would say "Yes."

The pandemic, along with some family issues that happened in the two years before, made me question a lot of things and in 2020 I really yearned for religion in a significant way. I had always been satisfied with the Episcopal church, so I did research and watching virtual services of several parishes in my area.

I became intrigued by the high church/Anglo-Catholic types. As someone from a very Roman Catholic town and with Catholic family, but being only familiar with low/broad church services, it was very new and unique but still incorporate so many aspects of Christian ritual that I knew existed, but never thought it could be "mine," so to speak.

So I started going to the local high church parish during Holy Week of 2021, and have been a regular church-goer ever since. Thankfully my parish has a pretty robust population of people my age, which made the community "stick" and provided a lot of positive reinforcement for going and becoming involved.

I don't know if I would consider myself chiefly an Anglo Catholic just yet, but this particular tradition in the Episcopal Church is really valuable and the home of some really tremendous, kind and thoughtful Christians.

[kyc0705]

I was raised Mainline Protestant in a very religious family, but in a context and era in which there was strong Evangelical influence on the denomination and the church (particularly in congregant-led Bible studies and children's ministries), and so I received... a lot of different information. Not to relitigate something I've talked about a strange amount on here, but the main thing was that I was told that accepting Jesus as your Savior was the only thing that mattered, and if you did not do this, you would go to hell. So this deep fear of going to hell was ingrained in my mind from an early age and associated with Christianity.

Around when I was 10, our church got a new pastor who did not generally view Christianity in such a way and all that it implied in the contemporary American context. He was rewarded with a decently sized number of members switching to some of our area's exurban megachurches.

Not long after, I spent a couple of years in a private school that was associated with an Assemblies of God church. There were a few genuinely awful experiences here, mostly involving the fact that I was realizing I was gay around the peak of the Culture War over gay marriage. I left with a rather defeated attitude about religion. I just didn't know what it could mean for me.

That persisted, in increasingly apathetic terms (I managed to avoid a New Atheist phase), until maybe a year or so ago, when I've become more interested in religion in a personal way again. I have been thinking about Christianity, and how it has shaped my views and my family's history, in a way that I really haven't before. Various events within my family in recent years have made me really think about this, even as my own lack of spirituality remains.

I think I described myself as a "wishy-washy agnostic" on here because of these ambivalent feelings. But upon interrogating my own personal beliefs regarding a god or higher power, I'd have to conclude I am definitionally an atheist and have been for a long time. Just one who can't and wouldn't deny the continuing effect of my own religious history, which I recognize is something very much ongoing.

Or, to make a long story short, I posted here because I saw this thread on one of those Friday nights when I listened to the Phoebe Bridgers song "Chinese Satellite" again:

[vitoNova]

Born/baptized/raised Catholic.

Never swallowed.

Not really anything against it, mind you, (like any other religion/cult) just something that never really interested me.
 
Fin.

[Kleine Scheiße]

Birth through age eleven. I was raised agnostic. My entire family is agnostic, atheist, or antitheist. The sole exception was my late grandmother, who was ELCA Lutheran. When I was a kid, we went to church as a novelty a few times, mostly because I was curious. We already had a decent grasp on the local politics and which churches to avoid. I did "vacation Bible school" a couple times -- a two-week youth program -- again, mostly for the novelty and social aspects. These were quite mild-mannered people and I was sort of always under the impression that they could not possibly believe literally in the things they were saying, or sometimes that they were leaving implied.

Ages eleven through sixteen. By that time, I considered the whole question pretty much resolved and was essentially (if not nominally) an atheist. Never really considered anything more much at that point, and didn't really think too highly of the subject, though I had strong leanings toward many of the more pseudoreligious aspects of German idealism. I would say things like "I believe in the God of Spinoza" and "I'm a pantheist" with only an introductory-level understanding of what those terms meant. I took some interest in Buddhism but found a lot of it -- rather, I found a lot of the misrepresentations available on the internet directed at the American laity -- insubstantial and obfuscatory.

Ages sixteen to twenty were a period of much experimentation, research, and consultation. In the second half of high school, I embraced a radical form of epistemological anarchism in large part based on the political goal of constructing a new, class-conscious American civil religion; and in the first half of college, all of this preceding nonsense was shattered when I was formally introduced to Indian philosophy and the extraordinary world of Hinduism. American education on this subject at the university level is frequently vedanta-centric, and mine was no exception, but I had the good fortune to study under someone who is highly-regarded in many other areas of the subject and not readily accused of being a "neo-vedantin" -- a term which is at once loaded, controversial, and (often) useful.

Since age twenty. I no longer regularly attend services but I have an at-home set of practices and I intend to find a temple again at some point. We're in year six and I don't see my mind changing too easily, though there is an obvious trepidation around telling people flat-out what I am by label unless they directly ask. I almost feel like while a certain amount of awkwardness is to be expected, it may actually be more offensive to ambiguate about it at this point, since I'm no longer really "questioning" or "learning more" but am a committed -- though deeply flawed -- adherent to an (at least somewhat) organized belief system. If I go around saying "sanatana dharma," the term "Hindu" inevitably will used in any subsequent explanation, so why not just cut out that whole middle section and get to the chase? Regardless, it's not like my beliefs are strictly advaitin (not that it would necessarily be a problem if they were), and I am, after all, an actively practicing theist.

Notes. As you may be able to tell, dear reader, I take quite a few issues with the way many people think and act about this topic. Academia is, by and large, doing a very poor job with this subject area and as a result, many continue to hold serious misunderstandings about what Hinduism is and how it functions. Conversations about Hinduism in the average U.S. university frequently come down to a bunch of white guys overintellectualizing things they would find completely boring about Christianity or Judaism -- or, arguably worse, they take the form of a conversation about Buddhism with many of the names switched out. In my view, this is the world's oldest major tradition that is still widely practiced. It does not need whatever intellectual contributions I may make to it, at this stage. At some point, perhaps I will have good reason to be more opinionated, but I'm objectively not there yet and it makes me highly uncomfortable when I see people rush to take positions like "it's not a religion, it's a way of life;" or that "Buddhism is a thinking man's Hinduism;" or "no, here's what that tradition actually means, which I gather from a second-rate English translation of three randomly-selected Upanishads." It's a very sad form of baseless intellectual posturing which no one could possibly be stupid enough to think wins them any points, and yet...

[JGibson]

Neither of my parents were big on religious services; however, the grandparents on my mom's side were big into church.

1997-2007:
I stayed with my grandma almost every Saturday night, and went to church with her until she couldn't drive anymore. After she quit driving, then the bus/van ministry took me there and back.

Until 2000, I went to Suburban Baptist (now Unity Baptist) in Granite City, IL.

From 2000 until 2007, same drill but switched to a different SBC church in Grace Baptist in the same town.


2007-2013:
Even after my grandma died, I still went to Grace Baptist for another 6 years, thanks to their then-robust bus ministry. If it didn't have a bus ministry, then I'd been gone almost right then.

This period was when my liberal Christian identity began to forge, and grew stronger in the later years of the tenure.

In October 2011, the then long-time pastor there left over some sort of scandal, and since then, GBC has declined a lot, especially after the current pastor took over and the then-youth pastor left elsewhere. GBC now has barely any attendance.

During the summer of 2012, I began filling in as an usher at times during the early morning service prior to the reversion to one service.

In November 2013, I broke my longstanding ties to that church and the Southern Baptist Convention, plus, I moved onto a new church and denomination, after it became increasingly obvious I didn't fit into the direction of the denomination and the church.



2013-present:
November 24th, 2013 was when I permanently began attending my current church home of St. John UCC in Granite City, IL. I did make a one-off appearance in August of that year before the big switch a few months later.

June 8th, 2014 was when I became a permanent member and was baptized into the church. During my time at St. John UCC, I moved further to the left and still a solid Christian.

I used to usher the 2nd service regularly in the pre-COVID days, and did the noisy offerings quite a bit. I do get to serve communion a few times a year. Prior to COVID, St. John UCC had two morning services (9AM and 10:30AM) during the majority of the year and solely at 9:30AM during the summer months. Now, it's 9:30AM every Sunday both in-person and on Zoom. 


On January 20th, 2019, on a cold Sunday, I was waiting for someone to pick me up to my usual church home. However, when that didn't materialize, I improvised on the spot, and went to a new church up the road from my house called Calvary Life Church, a Pentecostal church affiliated with Independent Assemblies (NOT AoG).
This church remains my secondary home, while St. John UCC continues to remain my main home.


During the period of Summer 2020-Spring 2022, I was at Calvary Life more often than at St. John UCC due to the combination of my dad working Sunday mornings and COVID shutting down in-person worship at my main home church (moreso the majority of Summer 2020-Spring 2021 part there).

[UWS]

Catholic from birth

[satsuma]

Parents: mom Southern Baptist, dad Catholic (his parents: mom Catholic, dad Southern Baptist)
Louisiana, naturally. Some exposure to Catholicism but never got that much into it.
Attended a Southern Baptist church – infancy to around 18, baptized at age 7, became atheist at age 15, didn't tell anyone but a few people, still sporadically attend church with family.
My mom's home church is called a community church, but given the beliefs of its members, not really distinct from Southern Baptist, and I have other friends and family who attend there.
As I got older and became independent, I naturally had no more worries that I'd materially have any issues with openly being atheist, but given enough time with it as a secret, I stopped caring about being open and honest about my beliefs around others.

[Alben Barkley]

Raised and baptized as an evangelical "non-denominational" (i.e. Southern Baptist in all but name) protestant Christian.

Became an agnostic by the time I was a teenager. Then an outright atheist by college. Then a deist. Then a deist with a vaguely spiritual side who considered himself culturally and morally Christian, i.e. "Christian deist."

And now I'm going to OCIA (formerly RCIA) and might well be a Catholic by Easter.

[PSOL]

The only time metaphysics manages to be a factor to me is when I am depressed and unable to think properly, accepting nonsense like reincarnation or prior rage against the heavens agnosticism. When I am actually happy and thriving I just go back to being a standard atheist. The latter state is also when I am least revolutionary and when I cease developing my political line.

[vitoNova]

And now I'm going to OCIA (formerly RCIA) and might well be a Catholic by Easter.

I had to Google what this was.  

Why the need for a "middle man" such as this?  Seems like an ordeal.  Can't you just walk into some random Catholic church, make an appointment with a priest to have some some holy water splashed on you (adult baptism), and then--BAM!--you're Catholic?

(yes, I know.  I'm Catholic and even attended Catholic school as a kid.  I should know this stuff, but I don't)

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

I was raised Catholic, learned about the Virgin Mary and the sacraments and the rosary in Sunday school and all that stuff. Stopped believing in it pretty early, went through a cringy atheist phase that I got over relatively quickly because I got bored of it. Had several Unitarian Universalist friends in high school and was interested in the concept - plus the longtime influence of my mother, who’s a biblical scholar, gave me a very academic and intellectual view of religion (especially Christianity and to a lesser extent Judaism). I decided to check it out when I got to college and I had a blast - it finally made me understand why people went to church, what they got out of it, etc. The music, the range of spiritual influences (I sometimes critique UU for being essentially watered-down Protestantism - or worse, the Democratic Party at church, with no element of faith or religion at the center besides the reification of contemporary progressivism, but this was definitely not that). I was hooked instantly.

At this time and for the next several years I would probably describe my own personal views as essentially agnostic atheism and cultural Christianity. I have a lot of thoughts on UU, some of which I’ve shared on this board and others of which might be a little inside-baseball, but I generally view it in its ideal form as fundamentally pluralistic and community-oriented - I don’t think you can be a UU on your own unless you’re either just a hippie, a very liberal Christian, or perhaps an atheist who dabbles in Buddhism. Otherwise you’re just…what you believe (although I suppose the theoretical UU commitments to openness and pluralism do count for something). So in that sense, I was essentially an atheist with a longstanding appreciation for the history of religion in general and Christianity in particular.

This continued for the next seven years or so, until about six months ago when I had a very moving and spontaneous religious experience involving Oscar Romero, following a UU sermon that referenced him. Over the next week or so, I found myself spontaneously praying to various Catholic figures all the time for various things - Romero, Rutilio Grande, Mychal Judge, Francis of Assisi. It was rather surprising and at times bewildering - I’d had some experiences of religious feeling before, but they were more…controlled than that had been (mostly some meditations on Julian of Norwich during the pandemic). At that point I resolved to incorporate Catholic spirituality into my own personal religious life in some way, either through the prism of UU or through direct engagement with Christianity - although I knew I wasn’t going to go back to the Church. I did a little searching about Episcopalianism and found Anglo-Catholicism, and that was where I really dove into Christianity. The first time I attended an Anglo-Catholic mass in person, it just felt like home again. It felt exactly like a Catholic mass on the fancier end of the spectrum, but without the Issues around women and LGBT people (and the abuse scandal, etc) and I was particularly moved by the experience of receiving communion from a trans ministerial intern (similarly I was moved by how openly gay the pastors at my old UU churches had been - in some way attending this Episcopal church has been an attempt to keep up my streak of LGBT religious leaders).

I’m currently splitting my Sunday mornings between an Anglo-Catholic Episcopal church near me and a UU church in the general area (though much farther), the former more often if only for the distance (if they were equidistant from me I’d be going every other week). I haven’t been doing it for very long, though, so I’m still settling in. I think overall my positionality hasn’t changed much throughout my adult life - my religious life was always personally centered on Christianity, I’ve always had an appreciation for mysticism and medieval spirituality, I’m still open to learning new things and think it’s spiritually valuable to understand other perspectives - but recently I’ve gone from a distanced, intellectual approach to a more personal, emotional, dare I say vibes-based one when it comes to Christianity. Maybe that makes me a Spongite, although I like to think my answers to those sorts of questions are “well, X feels nice so that’s what I choose to believe about Y” rather than “X is purely a Metaphor” (Bishop Spong would have been a great Unitarian, which is fine for a lay Christian but perhaps not as much for a church leader). But hey.

[satsuma]

Why the need for a "middle man" such as this?  Seems like an ordeal.  Can't you just walk into some random Catholic church, make an appointment with a priest to have some some holy water splashed on you (adult baptism), and then--BAM!--you're Catholic?

(yes, I know.  I'm Catholic and even attended Catholic school as a kid.  I should know this stuff, but I don't)

Hardly unique to the Catholic Church. For membership in any organization to be meaningful, the organization must spend some time ensuring a new member is aligned to the values and aware of how members ought to behave.

[RINO Tom]

Thank you to all of those who responded.  Like I said, it is interesting hearing about such diverse backgrounds!  While I would be chatting (almost) all of you up if we were discussing this in a bar, I had one pertinent question based on the responses...

I was baptised Catholic. Attended Catholic school from age 5 to 17, first state school and then private Jesuit. This meant regular mass attendance and participation in religious retreats with religious orders and other community engagement with an emphasis on deprivation and poverty...

afleitch, I confess I am ignorant of the religious demographics/situation in much of Europe beyond very surface-level knowledge, so bear with me.  I guess I kind of always assumed Scotland was about as Presbyterian as England was Anglican, so I am curious about your Catholic background?  Are there sort of Catholic enclaves in certain cities in Scotland?  And is that something that developed more "recently" due to "external factors" (e.g., New York being more Catholic than Kansas because of decades of Italian and Irish immigrants), or were there areas of Scotland that never fully adopted Protestantism?  Or is it more that Catholics were always a minority in these places, including where you are from, and it's as simple as that?

[Alcibiades]

I was baptised Catholic. Attended Catholic school from age 5 to 17, first state school and then private Jesuit. This meant regular mass attendance and participation in religious retreats with religious orders and other community engagement with an emphasis on deprivation and poverty...

afleitch, I confess I am ignorant of the religious demographics/situation in much of Europe beyond very surface-level knowledge, so bear with me.  I guess I kind of always assumed Scotland was about as Presbyterian as England was Anglican, so I am curious about your Catholic background?  Are there sort of Catholic enclaves in certain cities in Scotland?  And is that something that developed more "recently" due to "external factors" (e.g., New York being more Catholic than Kansas because of decades of Italian and Irish immigrants), or were there areas of Scotland that never fully adopted Protestantism?  Or is it more that Catholics were always a minority in these places, including where you are from, and it's as simple as that?

I’m obviously not afleitch and I’m sure he’ll expand on it, but the main reason for the sizeable Catholic presence in Scotland was that there was a huge wave of Irish Catholic immigration during the 19th century (augmented to a much lesser degree by Italians and Lithuanians), largely to the industrial towns and cities of the Central Belt. This infamously led to some quite nasty sectarian tensions, which might be most well-known to foreigners through Glasgow’s Old Firm football rivalry between Protestant Rangers and Catholic Celtic. There is an area of Scotland which never fully adopted Protestantism, but this is the tiny, remote Western Isles, and so not really relevant to the bigger picture here. Most Catholics in England also have an Irish immigrant background, by the way (which has in recent times of course been added to by Polish and other Eastern European immigrants).

[Podgy the Bear]

And now I'm going to OCIA (formerly RCIA) and might well be a Catholic by Easter.

I had to Google what this was.  

Why the need for a "middle man" such as this?  Seems like an ordeal.  Can't you just walk into some random Catholic church, make an appointment with a priest to have some some holy water splashed on you (adult baptism), and then--BAM!--you're Catholic?

(yes, I know.  I'm Catholic and even attended Catholic school as a kid.  I should know this stuff, but I don't)

I grew up the same--went to Catholic school and had catechism--but I didn't pick up very much in my early years.

After dropping out (going through Deist thought and then mainstream Protestant churches), I came back to the Catholic church after 35 years.  Even though I didn't have to, I went through RCIA--which consisted of very informational sessions in which I learned so much.  I'm definitely one of those "Catholics Come Home" that they advertise and market.

I think Catholicism is a complex faith--lots to comprehend and it's probably much better understood as an adult.  The RCIA (now OCIA) process really helped me on my ongoing spiritual journey.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

I was Christian went to Moody in Chicago then Buddhist in my teens and played sax in Band and became Christian again in 1994, I was the first to go to Christian route then my family followed because the Priesthood separation from Lauty in Buddhism

But, the Law is cause and effect with the 10 Commandments anything you put out good or evil can come back, the difference is resurrection or incarnate of the soul not body

We never know what happens to you soul after death but reincarnated isn't right away it's futuristic we don't know, so you can meet your relatives that died in the Astral plane

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

All Agnostic All The Time.