Jodou1

I know I've already posted my hello thread but I figure I will now tell about how I came to call myself Agnostic.

I grew up in a house with a Mormon mother and a Baptist father who decided not to push religion on the children. I wonder if they'd make that same decision now that I'm Agnostic, regardless I am grateful they made it.

At the age of twelve I decided to learn about the Mormon beliefs and even ended up being baptized into the Mormon church. For the next five years I was guilty of extremely weak fideism. I would of gone through life this way had it not been for the acceptance of my sexuality at seventeen.

I looked into the religious views of homosexuality and had a short internal struggle with that until I decided to listen to my heart and mind. The only thing I knew with absolute certainty in the equation was that it wasn't by any choosing of my own that I was gay. This left the options to me mostly very bleak.

The first being that whichever god was up there made me this way and still deemed me an 'abomination'. This god makes no sense at all and won't have me as a follower.

Option two is just as senseless with the possibility being that this god created me this way and just wants me to not experience love as others do. This is the view where some religious people believe people are born gay but should lead a celebate life. Again for several reasons I couldn't find the sense in this option and discarded it.

Thirdly is the idea that whichever god is up there doesn't necessarily hate me for existing, but his message had been screwed up or misinterpreted somehow. This would lead to the conclusion that everything else in the said religions were open to the same misinterpretations and the entire systems of faith were fallible.

Lastly is the conclusion I came to, and is similar to option three. That the religions had it wrong all together, and even if there was some truth or historical accuracy in them they were too far disfigured to adhear to anyways.

Without ever hearing the word Agnostic I spent the next year or so saying to people "I'm an atheist but..." in an attempt to explain that I didn't exactly believe as Atheist did, but I didn't believe in any of the revealed religions and my main belief was "I don't know". It was by this that a friend told me "there's a word for that...Agnostic I think it is".

From there I started my journey into understanding the different belief systems and even studied a bit more into the christian faith. I now have several more reasons to disbelieve and understand better the different free-thought belief systems.

So in short my journey was Mormon-->Atheist(even though I wasn't lol)-->Agnostic

This journey being one of many has helped in developing me as a person and I do believe I am better for it.


If you read all of this, two brownie points for you!

-John

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“Infidelity does not consist in believing or in disbelieving: it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe.”-Thomas Paine