thread: 2006-09-08 : Salvation, damnation, justification, a la Sydney
On 2006-09-12, Twila wrote:
Hi! I hope you don't mind me coming in here (long-time lurker, never-before poster) but this thread has been very timely for me.
Some background so you see where I'm coming from—I was raised atheistic, in fact, my father in particular was derisive about religion in general, but I always felt that there had to be more, more something divine in the world, from the time I was very small (my mother tells a story about me very seriously telling her about a conversation I had with God when I was two or three or thereabouts) so I spent a lot of time in my younger days looking for it—and I ended up becoming a Christian. I took many history of religion courses in college (I went to a religious college, due to the fact that I was able to get a scholarship to it). I got married, had kids, moved to a town where it wasn't easy or even really very possible to go to an organized church, so the overt relgious aspect of my life was allowed to dwindle.
This last week, I turned 50. I'm a grandma now, have been for four years, though I've got a new grandson just a few months old, too.
This summer, my daughter (who'd originally said she was allergic to churches as a teenager) finally admitted to me that she was not a Christian and that she didn't believe in Jesus—that she couldn't believe all this "supernatural stuff". I realized at that moment that I had failed as a parent—that I hadn't communicated my bone-deep beliefs to her—and I resolved that I needed to start back at the beginning and re-examine my faith and why I believe it.
And the thing that I keep coming back to is that I simply cannot believe that death is the end—there is too much of
a personality, a being—divinity, if you will—in any one person for it to be wiped out like that. So I'm just saying—Vincent, your belief that we just become dirt is one of the saddest things I've seen in a long time.
I want to thank everyone who's talked in this thread and the other ones for giving me a lot of things to think about and to chew on as I go back to redefining what I believe and what I want to do with the rest of my life—what good I can do for the time I'm here.
