How difficult is it to not be Abrahamic?

[BilliardsBall]

Honestly, I get a lot out of going to a Catholic mass and praying Catholic prayers, liturgies, chaplets, rosaries, holy cards, miraculous medals, icons, etcetera.

Despite, I'm not really Catholic. Unless Shinto Shaman Catholicism is actually a real thing.

I simply don't believe everything the church teaches. Also have a repugnance for many Catholics.

I like how I can walk into a Catholic church or the cathedral, stay for the service, receive the sacraments, and walk out of the church without anybody approaching me like at the Protestant services.

I go to Protestant services as well, but they are really annoying me.

I was inspired to make this thread from something @Quintessence said about Druidry and how beautiful the Earth is.

It does sound like a much more beautiful spirituality without all of the guilt and scrupulousity about sin.

Thing is, I would rather not adhere to an Abrahamic faith. It's not very easy to do that.

Every time I try to practice a faith that is not abrahamic, or anytime I try to be an unbeliever, I get a lot of guilt and fear.

Do you experience that?

It makes it feel like I have demons.

I'm saying, it's very difficult for me to believe in a faith that is not abrahamic, and practice that faith with peace, without any feelings of guilt or fear of punishment/hell etc.

Can you therefore "get your conversion over with" faster and switch? I prefer people who constantly attack Abrahamic religions to not be adherents of those religions, it limits the number of wolves in sheep's clothing. IMHO, repent it or quit it!

 

[Shiranui117]

You can't receive the sacraments unless you are a baptized catholic in good standing with the church... can you???

Correct. But so many Catholic parishes are so massive, the priests rarely know all the people who go (or don't go) to their parish, so it's relatively easy (albeit improper and in many cases extremely disrespectful to yourself and to them) to go up and receive Communion without being a member of the Catholic Church at all. Catholic priests rarely check who they're giving communion to.

 

[Quintessence]

Thing is, I would rather not adhere to an Abrahamic faith. It's not very easy to do that.

Every time I try to practice a faith that is not abrahamic, or anytime I try to be an unbeliever, I get a lot of guilt and fear.

Do you experience that?

It makes it feel like I have demons.

I'm saying, it's very difficult for me to believe in a faith that is not abrahamic, and practice that faith with peace, without any feelings of guilt or fear of punishment/hell etc.

There are those who say they don't believe in demons (in the Abrahamic sense). Usually such folks take the term "demon" fairly literally while missing the crux of what stories about demons are really meaning to tell us. The stories mean to tell us that we all wrestle with certain things in our lives, both internally and externally. Demons are given a supernaturalistic guise in part to express how their power seems to transcend the ordinary. It grips us in ways we don't expect, and their influence defies time, space, and often reason. Perhaps it isn't literally supernatural, but it can certainly feel so. It can certainly feel like we are creatures possessed, governed by our adversaries, and that we lack control over our lot in life.

Everyone has different demons - different adversaries. You've identified one of yours. What now? What do we do with our demons? I'll let that thought sit for a while.

I didn't have the experiences you do when it comes to following a non-Abrahamic religion in part because my experiences within that tradition were both brief and fairly benign. I was not exposed to the guilt-tripping, fear-mongering culture of Abrahamic religions. Even if I had been, I grew up in a household that was loving and tolerant. That would have blunted any such teachings.

While I may not have experienced guilt and fear, I did experience... well... I like to call it angstheism. Yes, I was one of those guys who would strut about all smug and superior because I was a free thinking individual not bound to that stupid, superstitious, outdated thing called religion. I would sneer at the word "religion" and laugh at the word "god." If someone dared call me religious I'd get an expression like they'd just slapped me across the face.

Religion and God were among my demons.

Everyone has demons. We don't always identify them as such. I certainly didn't. When we don't name our demons, we don't bother confronting them or doing anything about it. That's how it was with me, religion, and God for quite some time. But it couldn't last. Not with who I was. Inevitably, critical thinking got the better of me and I actually bothered to learn about religion and theism. I had to unlearn a lot of what I had "learned" about religion and theism. That's where it starts, I think. Unlearning what you learned and disassembling narratives you take for granted.

At some point, things click. You can't predict when it will happen. Sometimes it's something really small - a single sentence someone says or you read somewhere. But the box you were thinking in gets shattered, and suddenly you're free to explore and rebuild things how you want them built. And the demon? A distant memory.