Iris Moon
November 28th, 2002, 03:57 AM
I've started a new thread because this is an issue that has been worrying me for a while now, and I wondered if any of you could help. I'm having problems with getting rid of the Christian preconceptions I've been taught when I was younger- these aren't feelings that I want to deal with or enjoy having, they make my initial studies more complicated than I think they should be.
It's taken a lot of soul searching for me to actually come out in the open (to myself and a few close friends) about my beliefs. I've always had them, and they've always contradicted ky Christian upbringing- but I had a bad experiance a few months ago, you see, I was in love with a man who loved me back, we were so much a part of each other it was scary, and it had an otherworldly quality to it that I would call magic. But he was a Jehovah's Wittness, and he shouldn't have fallen in love with me in the first place. I never plucked up the courag to talk about my own beliefs, except to say that I respected his, but believed someting very different myself. Eventually the strain became too much, and we admitted that religion meant so much to him that he had to give me up, and I went through a horrible period afterwards of having all my old fears about paganism ressurected. I know that I'm on the right track, but because I've been brought up being made to believe one thing I still have a part of me trying to tell the 'free' part that it's wrong.
For instance, I can see how Christian writers have demonised the horned God in using him as the blueprint for our image of Satan, and that this is nothing more than blatant discrimination and one religion trying to assert it's correctness over another- but there is still a part of me that fears this image. This confuses me because right now I have a better relationship with the God than the Goddess- I know she's there, and I feel her presense all the time- but he is the one who appears to me more regularly in dreams and visualisations.
I don't know what all of this means, or if it is normal- I just needed to know if anybody had any similar experiances, or had any advice on how to overcome this built in prejudice?
Confused,
Iris xxx
It's taken a lot of soul searching for me to actually come out in the open (to myself and a few close friends) about my beliefs. I've always had them, and they've always contradicted ky Christian upbringing- but I had a bad experiance a few months ago, you see, I was in love with a man who loved me back, we were so much a part of each other it was scary, and it had an otherworldly quality to it that I would call magic. But he was a Jehovah's Wittness, and he shouldn't have fallen in love with me in the first place. I never plucked up the courag to talk about my own beliefs, except to say that I respected his, but believed someting very different myself. Eventually the strain became too much, and we admitted that religion meant so much to him that he had to give me up, and I went through a horrible period afterwards of having all my old fears about paganism ressurected. I know that I'm on the right track, but because I've been brought up being made to believe one thing I still have a part of me trying to tell the 'free' part that it's wrong.
For instance, I can see how Christian writers have demonised the horned God in using him as the blueprint for our image of Satan, and that this is nothing more than blatant discrimination and one religion trying to assert it's correctness over another- but there is still a part of me that fears this image. This confuses me because right now I have a better relationship with the God than the Goddess- I know she's there, and I feel her presense all the time- but he is the one who appears to me more regularly in dreams and visualisations.
I don't know what all of this means, or if it is normal- I just needed to know if anybody had any similar experiances, or had any advice on how to overcome this built in prejudice?
Confused,
Iris xxx