Converting to Neopaganism: Reconciliation

[Starlock]

This was a point braught up in a podcast I was listening to on the long drive home, so I thought I'd throw it out for a topic of discussion here. One thing that characterizes the Neopagan movement in general is that it is a movement of converts, by and large. Most of us come to Neopaganism from another religious system (usually a form of Christianity) rather than being raised within a Neopagan religious tradition. The specific topic that this podcast addressed was how do we, as converts, reconcile with the religion we left behind?

arrow What was your religion before you chose to walk a Neopagan or alternative religious path?
arrow How do you reconcile with your previous religion? How do you feel towards it?
arrow What similarities, if any, can you see between what your old religious practice was and what your new one is?

Some I've noticed tend to be relatively bitter about the religion they left behind while others have a more neutral or even positive appraisal of it. I was just wondering where you all came from on this. whee

If by chance we have any second or third gen Neopagans in the guild, it would be especially interesting to hear from you. Since you don't have an old religious affiliation to reconcile with, what is it like to grow up following a Pagan path? How do you view religious systems other than your own?  

[m3_3aT_mUffinS]

That's very interesting. Those observations seem to hold very true. Here's how it is for me:

arrow What was your religion before you chose to walk a Neopagan or alternative religious path? I was raised Catholic. My family went from being extremely religious, go to church everday sort to not at all religious. I only went to a Catholic Pre-school but even that young I remember questioning. Nonetheless I went to Sunday School for many years under my parents orders. My mom has always been extremely devout but in what's considered in a heretic way. (She's actually the one that brought me closest to Neopaganism, considering she loves Tarot, Oujia, and other spiritual things.) My dad's the opposite. He's relatively religious but is strongly against all the things my mom taught me. He told her "not to encourage" me. Yet by 6 or 7 I really didn't believe in "God" the way I was taught about him and by 10 I converted.

arrow How do you reconcile with your previous religion? How do you feel towards it? I never really cared. I still really don't as sad as it sounds. Yes for about 6 years of my life I went to church daily, read the bible, learned all my prayers, but it never meant anything to me. I remember always asking the : "How do you know...?" Sort of questions. Once I told my dad: "No one can be all good or all evil." And he got really mad at me. It didn't seem feasible to me and I didn't believe. I didn't deny the possibility of deities, just the possibility of an ultimately good or evil one.
I'm pretty much neutral towards it these days. I don't like it being forced down my throat like most people do sadly, yet I have no problem with people of Christian faith, so long as they do nothing to me.

arrow What similarities, if any, can you see between what your old religious practice was and what your new one is? I really don't see many similarities. I imagine there'd be some there, but at the moment I can't seem to think of any. I guess the most obvious would be the belief in a deity of sorts.




 

[Anabis]

I didn't have a religion beforehand, Mom didn't raise me with a set religion and told me I could choose my own, Grams tried but failed, So, there ya go.  

[Jezehbelle]

Depending on who I went to church with, I was either a Southern Baptist or an Assemblies of God droney/Pentacoastal.

You know, the tamberine slinging, tongues speaking, Puritanical Christians.

I went to AoG summer camp once. It was co-ed, but you wouldn't know it -- once, the girls group was walking back to the cabins from the pool and the boys were walking from the cabins to the pool.
The boys had to turn around and cover their eyes while the girls ran out of sight, so the boys wouldn't have unclean thoughts about prepubecent girls in one peice swimsuits and shorts.

sweatdrop

I just never felt it. I couldn't feel it. I got baptized and I still couldn't feel it.

I don't really care for AoG anymore. Theres a bunch of dark people in that church system. I know way too many girls who've had their lives screwed up because they couldn't conform to it, but they were so convinced they'd go to hell over simple things, like, you know, kissing boys.

It's just a big shame.
They're welcome to follow it if that's how god calls them (though, if that's really god, I can't say).

The only real similarity between my old religious practices and my "new" ones, are that...
... That...
uhm...
hmm...

Well, I still give monetary offerings. Except, its in the form of buying a homeless man a meal, or feeding a stray cat, or donating to clean up a park, or for generally good causes, instead of putting the pastor in a bigger and better house while the church crumbles around them. rolleyes

Church was always boring. I never got the concept of sitting in an artificial building, decorated with artificial plants, if everything god made is outside. I'd pretend that the dots on the tiles of the ceiling were stars and I'd try to find the constellations in them. I wanted to go outside and play and not do paperwork on a book that was written thousands of years ago..  

[Starlock]

One thing that's somewhat interesting is that Margot Adler actually argues *against* Neopaganism being a religion of converts. What she argues against though, I believe, is that Neopagans convert in the normal sense that we usually think of when we say 'conversion.' Aka, someone who represents the religion comes and drills you and attempts to persuade you to adopt Paganism because if you don't the Gods and Goddessess will throw a tornado on your house or some such nonsense.  

[The Bookwyrm]

I was baptised and confrimed a Catholic before I made my break from traditional religion; I had dabbled a bit off and on for years, but my mother and her parents pushed me through the Confirmation ceremony (which I vocally protested).

For a long time I was very bitter towards it, and there's still some there; not so much towards the religion itself most days, but towards the pretentions of some of the practitioners. My grandparents, my grandmother especially, are Sunday Catholics; they get dressed in their best and are as devote as you please when in church, but the minute they're out the door, they're looking down their noses at someone in the congregation. They're good people, very kind and genrous, but a lot of what they've always preached only ever seems to apply to them when they're at mass.

I'm pretty ambivalent to it all now; I think it's a beautiful faith, but I think it has a lot of kinks that it needs to work out.

As for similarities, I'm not sure there are many. There's definately an emphasis on helping others rather than harming them. Belief in a benevolent higher power and a plethora or other entities that can be petitioned in times of need, and an emphasis on ceremony. But that seems to be the extent.  

[Redwing~Shadow]

~ What was your religion before you chose to walk a Neopagan or alternative religious path?

I didnt really have a religion. My family mainly focused on being Chrisitan, but I never cared much for being of that religion.

~How do you reconcile with your previous religion? How do you feel towards it?

I never cared for being Christian but as I went to studys and worship I never felt comftorable with what the pastor would say, such as when he discussed sins and hell. Ppl out there do sins all the time, and there are so many other types that dont belive in that type of god, so does that mean all ppl are bad and going to hell? I never thought to belive in what they said and all I saw the bible as was a history book. Its true, but it doesnt tell us what to be. I got into pagenism first from a friend in middle school. As i looked up more on that and Wicca, I saw similarites with that and Chrisians, but it had different and better views to it. Pagenism to me is a more free expression and I dont worry as much about what others think and how I have to be in the world. Im happy for who I am.

~What similarities, if any, can you see between what your old religious practice was and what your new one is?

I can say that there is some kind of god out there, but I wouldnt call it a god...I'd call it a source of energy, and everything living has that. I do think that there is a God and Godess and if you think of it their had to been a female to develope the world as it is today. Both male and female create, and I see that of our developing of our earth, though in reality no one can say how earth really came to be. But that dosnt matter for we are here and all we can do is live.  

[Caerwiden]

I didn't have a religion before becoming Pagan, although there was a brief period when I tried Buddhism but it's hard to stick to a religion like that when you are a teenager  

[MsAmberly]

arrow What was your religion before you chose to walk a Neopagan or alternative religious path?
I had been involved with some Christian programs so I suppose I could be considered loosely Christian before. All that went on when I was still very young. Through my teens I tended more towards atheistic ideals. For the last 15 or so years now I have been more agnostic like in my beliefs.

arrow How do you reconcile with your previous religion? How do you feel towards it?
I don't think I have a problem with the religion, or any religion really. It's some of the people that I have trouble with. It doesn't seem good enough that they have (or at least seem to have) a firm grasp on their own religion, but have to be bad mouthing anyone who doesn't fall into their neet little idea of how one should behave and believe if they claim to be in that religion. Don't even get them started on those who don't claim the religion at all.

arrow What similarities, if any, can you see between what your old religious practice was and what your new one is?
I still believe we are here to do the best we can with what we have, and if possible to help others along the way. The difference is that I believe we do what we can because it's the right thing to do, not for any special privileges or passages when we cross over. I don't think I ever really believed in specific heaven or hell, just many levels that we all must work though in whatever length of time we can manage.  

[Kakure Basho]

arrow What was your religion before you chose to walk a Neopagan or alternative religious path? I was raised as a Baptist. I never really believed in God...not in the Christian sense, anyway. But when you're little, or at least in my case, church was somewhere you went because you were told, not necessarily because it was what you believed. I, like many of you, was the one who got in trouble a lot in Sunday school for asking all the "Why?" questions that no one seemed to want to answer. I got tired of it. I knew it wasn't what I believed, and finally I got tired of sitting there every Sunday. I felt out of place. At nine, I discovered Neopaganism. I studied for a year, and by the time I was eleven, I decided it was for me. I talked to my mom about it, but she was not happy. Thought it was 'devil worship'. I had the same talk with her again in August. Now she seems fine with it.

arrow How do you reconcile with your previous religion? How do you feel towards it? I really still don't care. I've only been out of the broom closet to my family since August, and although my mother and brothers seem to be okay with it, my grandparents are extremely judgemental. They say Im going to burn in hell, but they are not exactly very good examples of Christians, either. What they and the church have to say about me doesnt matter. Im not bitter towards Christianity at all, though.

arrow What similarities, if any, can you see between what your old religious practice was and what your new one is? There are no similarities that I see, and Im comfortable with that. I may have been a Baptist before, but I never believed in the Christian god, so it doesnt surprise me that what I was and what I am now arent similar.  

[Starlock]

I've noticed this in the other thread I put on on this as well in PFRC, but it seems that many have trouble pegging similarities. I guess I find that odd since I can find dozens upon dozens of similarities between just about any two religious systems. Perhaps it's a matter of nobody has thought about seeking out these paralells before? Do you not see similarities because you really haven't thought about it before?  

[danndelion]

I was *kind of* raised Southern Baptist.
As in my parents took me to Macedonia Baptist Church every sunday until I got about 5 years old, then they half-assed it by quitting church and sending me to a certain school named Wake Christian Academy.

I didn't enjoy it all too much... everyone seemed completely... obsessed with God... and I more or less just held a respect for his existance (or to some people's views, a lack therof).

I dropped out of the whole "christianity thing" when my parents finally decided to send me to public school around the end of 5th grade, due to WCA's too-high costs.
For a while I had considered becoming an Atheist, but I didn't feel quite right with that either, because I do still believe in a higher deity/ies.

I became interested in both wicca and witchcraft around the time I started high school. But I never got too close to the idea for fear of my parents getting.. well you know... parently.

Until just recently. (Recently as in about a half a year to a year ago) I talked it over with my mom and she baisically said she didn't care as long as I wasn't worshipping Lucifer.
So now I'm 18 next month and almost out of high school.
I haven't dedicated myself to wicca just yet, but I am spending alot of my time studying and researching it.

So I suppose my view on Christianity is neutral. It's just that alot of christians around here don't really behave the way they should... Very violent lot... the ones around here are.
They have a knack for always threatening a close scientologist friend of mine whenever he just speaks his opinion and is trying to start discussion.

But ah I've been rambling, so I'll cut my post off here.
But the similarities between christianity and what I believe now are... well they are almost identical.... the trinity (instead of father, son, holy ghost it's the Great Spirit, and the God and Goddess.) and of course the Golden Rule.  

[The Bookwyrm]

Starlock

Perhaps it's a matter of nobody has thought about seeking out these paralells before? Do you not see similarities because you really haven't thought about it before?

I know I had never looked for them. I can see them when I look hard enough, but I'll be honest and admit that I'm lazy and prefer not to look for them. I think it's also a matter of comfort; many people leave their former faith with a chip on their shoulder and take comfort in the fact that they've found something that has no resemblence to their former faith. It can be a little unsettling to find the similarities if you're not ready to look for them.

You're right in a way that you can find similarities between just about any two religious systems, but I find that a lot of that is only on paper so to speak. You can go through the same gestures, but they can have vastly different meanings from one faith to another which is usually enough to classify them as being "different".  

[LunaInverse]

arrow What was your religion before you chose to walk a Neopagan or alternative religious path?

I was a Roman Catholic. I even went through the confirmation ritual.

arrow How do you reconcile with your previous religion? How do you feel towards it?

Some more conservative paths of Christianity look at Catholics as being little better than heathens. I even read a letter from a missionary that told about how their work "converting the Catholic pagans" was going.

I'd be lying if I said I was never angry at the Church. But that was when I was 18 and rebelling against most forms of authority. After reality came and beat the crap out of me, I realized that I didn't hate Catholicism. Sure, I didn't agree with many of their beliefs, and I certainly don't agree with many Christian leaders today, but it wasn't hate. I was more angry with myself than anyone or anything else.

And then I began to look more closely at my previous religion. But if I were to ignore my upbringing, I'd be ignoring a part of myself. So I embraced my past. I was born and raised as a Roman Catholic, and I'm not ashamed of it. I chose a different path because I felt the path of Catholicism was no longer right for me.

And as far as I know, God would rather I be a good, peaceful pagan than a bigoted, small minded Catholic.  

[Goddess Hekate]

Starlock

One thing that's somewhat interesting is that Margot Adler actually argues *against* Neopaganism being a religion of converts. What she argues against though, I believe, is that Neopagans convert in the normal sense that we usually think of when we say 'conversion.' Aka, someone who represents the religion comes and drills you and attempts to persuade you to adopt Paganism because if you don't the Gods and Goddessess will throw a tornado on your house or some such nonsense.

Hmm Then it's not only I...
I don't really like to use the word convert about anything... I really do feel it has this after taste of being coerced into something which is against what you really feel... Maybe that's just me?

Now the questions...
I was brought up with no actual religion at all... my parents are christians in a sort of overly loose way?

So I guess the two last questions are kinda moot since there's really no way to compare nothing to something...