ORGANIZED RELIGION?

I grew up immersed in organized religion. Both parents were ordained ministers in a relatively conservative church. My parents may have been a bit more conservative than the church, however, so I had a pretty tight leash. I was taught (and was expected to demonstrate) their beliefs, their values, their ideology. They made sure that my grade school education was at private, Christian schools, even though we had little money. Any potential rebellion simmered while attending public middle school, then erupted late in high school. I got in with the wrong crowd -- no, not the pot-smoking free-love hippies there in San francisco during the mid '60s, it was the philosophical intellectuals, some of whom were in our own church! We questioned everything, stripping it to the bone looking for flaws in logic, looking for reasonable explanations, wondering why so many religions based on the same teachings expressed differing doctrines yet there were similar doctrines between religions based on differing teachings. A few years of this and I got pretty frustrated with organized religions, in general.

About the same time, I took up the martial arts of Karate and Aikido. Although not religions, there is a strong Buddhist philosophy supporting them and this led me to explore eastern religions a bit more. After all the intellectual gymnastics I had gone through, I found eastern philosophies very refreshing and surprisingly well-aligned with what had turned out to be my personal spiritual values. I didn't "adopt" Buddhism, but in my non-religious life it was comforting to know that it was sort of within arms reach, in case I needed to look somewhere for guidance.

I still had pieces of the belief system I grew up with, and I had borrowed theories here and there from the diverse religions I had explored during my questioning period, but nothing had been codified in any sort of doctrine or even "value statement." Although I had found great value in meditation, that happened sporadically, often only while I was on the massage table and just before falling asleep.

So now I find myself back into that questioning mode at a time when a belief system associated with an organized religion might be a nice thing to hang onto. Do I want to retreat into a snug, comforting, "has-all-the-answers" organized religion? Hmm… no thanks, I think I'm pretty comfortable with my unorganized religion.