Welcome to Gaia! ::

I was born into a family of mixed religions; my father was Jewish and my mother was Catholic, and the two of them decided together to raise me as a Christian. The Catholics grade school I ended up attending was, unfortunately, an absolutely horrific establishment that warped my beliefs into a fear-based faith. A 'God loved you unconditionally UNLESS-' sort of thing.
As I grew, I sat down and did some Bible reading myself over the years and found that I wasn't exactly agreeing with everything I read on a moral level. (The sections on homosexuality had me particularly steamed, as I myself am a bisexual and see nothing wrong with it.) While there were things I agreed 100% on, such as sex being a special, sacred thing and the ultimate expression of love, there were still a good number of issues I could not and would not agree with, and I left Christianity in search of a religion that better fit my own personal set of principles.
I've looked into Wicca, Judaism(my father's religion), Buddhism, and Hinduism since then, and even though all of these religions had things I liked about them, none of them ever really fully sat right with me. I did some thinking on my own, however, and I think I've come to a conclusion I can be happy with.
I do think that all religions have parts of them that obviously aren't true and were only written in long ago by men looking to control the masses, but every religion points towards one thing - that there is some sort of higher power that created all of existance. I don't believe that this power, this being (or beings) that was able to shape our entire universe and the universes that might lie beyond it, is anything that a human mind can even begin to comprehend, let alone put down in a book.
I believe that there is something out there that created us along with everything else. I believe that the energy that drives our bodies came from It, and when our bodies die, that same energy returns to wherever it came from - perhaps Heaven? Maybe it goes to power another body in another universe? Or maybe that energy merges back with its creator. It is, after all, a scientific fact that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Energy simply is, always was, and forever will be. Maybe that right there is God.

In any case! sweatdrop Does anybody feel sort of the same?

Mm! Every religion I've come across has had the same overall theme - just to love those around you, because we're all made of the same material, we've all come from the same source, and we will all go back to the same place when all is said and done. I love that part of religion in general; it's just when I start to look closer at specifics that I get turned off.
My biggest fear used to be of death. I know for a fact that our driving forces, that energy I was yammering about before, go somewhere at the end, but what of actual sentience? What if consciousness as we know it is simply a product of the human mind, which dies along with everything else? Would I not be myself anymore after death? Would I even be aware?
Then, however, I did some research and found that without fail!, no matter what the person's creed, every person who has had a near-death experience has seen and felt the exact same things. First comes the out of body experience, then the sensation of being pulled through a tunnel, then seeing the faces of friends and family that have gone before around you, and some sort of being of light at the very end. And best of all, full awareness the entire time. This, to me, proves that consciousness is a part of the soul and not just a product of the brain. So at the end, we definitly go somewhere. smile