Nosce Te Ipsum...

I grew up in a Christian home and there I found warmth and love. As I grew older I began to ask questions at sunday school. Questions which were not well recieved. I can remember one perticular sunday at church when I was asking too many questions about evolution. I was trying to work out a way for what I had been taught at school about evolution to co-exist with what they were teaching us about our religion. They told me to stop asking questions. And at the end they pulled me aside and asked if I was having trouble at home. If I was being mistreated! Thus the bricks of my faith began to fall and when I was a teen the wall came down. Not long after the sunday school incident I was riding my bike down the street and came to a sudden stop in the middle of the road. I paused as a cloud saturated with rain came overhead and proceeded to rain down on me. But just a few feet away it was dry and sunny. Something came over me. In the face of something so phenominal I realized for the first time there was no God. But my family continued to go to church and I with them. I began to see things there that I had not seen before. Greed, arrogance, glutony, intolerance. Everything I was told was evil grew and breeded there. I am not saying that all churchs/Christians are like this but there...there everything that could have been was murdered by their selfishness and weakness. And so, with time, I stopped going to church and religion faded in my mind. That is until I found myself in the Holyland at the age of 23. Faith and goodness slowly grew in me again and with the past so close at hand I found God again. But not the God I grew up with. Before I left I visited Jerusalem and found that although God was there I could not accept Jesus. I am still not sure if I believe in him as a real man or just a model for us to follow, but I don't believe he died for my sins. My sins are my own. I have always believed that you should be responsible for what you do and if my sins are so evil that I deserve to go to Hell (if it exists) then to Hell I will go and pay for what I have done. And so I find myself still a little confused about what I believe...No one religion rings true with me and I find I must construct the world in a way that has God(s)/Mother Earth/humans...everything. The world has become large enough again in me that they each inhabit part of my mind and heart...I can live once more. Without knowing it I have been on a spiritual journey and have been getting to know myself. If the Kindom of God lies within then by getting to know myself, maybe I have been getting closer to that miracle.