I put out one of these polls a few years ago and thought it would be interesting to see if and how the demographics around here may have changed.
So, which religion do you follow? I'd love to know if there is a particular denomination or church or sect or other specific version of the religion you belong to as well. Were you raised in that faith? Did you convert at some point? Or deconvert perhaps?
Thanks for your input!
Contemporary Paganism - Kemetic (Egyptian)
I used to be on the quite reconstructionist side, and insisted that one cannot follow the Netjeru of Egypt without having studied the culture and language in depths... To the extend of repudiating most of the Late Period religious developments as false and "impure" and making fun of Kemetics who can't read hieroglyphs.
However, recent discussions and research of Polytheism and modern pagan movements made me rethink a lot of assumptions. Religions change all the time. All reconstructionist views of the gods, in the end, go back to human experience of the divine and the human interpretation of that experience - so why should the interpretations of a certain era be more valid than others?
I grew up Lutheran and from an early age I was actively interested in religion, dogma and history. My grandfather was a university professor in Christian Dogmatics and my aunt is a high-ranking member of the liturgical council that decides on how Lutheran services are to be held in Germany. So you can imagine that my religious education was probably more scientific than average .
I left Christianity behind at 18... The more I studied and prayed, the less it all made sense to me.
A few years later I got into Egyptology entirely by chance (or by fate?) - and I was surprised to find the coherent theology and ethics that I was missing from Christianity in the ancient Egyptian literature.
Today, I nominally belong to Kemetic Orthodoxy, but I am not an active member in the community right now. I also lean a bit more towards hard polytheism, rather than the monolatric view of my church.
and as I said... My reconstructionist focus has shifted. I still venerate the Gods and Goddesses in Egyptian and largely in their forms of the pre-Dynastic to New Kingdom - but I no longer scoff at Hermetic mages and Isis-worshippers. I am still drawing the line at venerating A/pep but I admit that's a personal interpretation
(and I still make fun of people who can't read hieroglyphs, but only if they pretend they can)