Welcome to Gaia! ::

Awesome idea! I know a friend who did that.

Hello everyone. I am a spiritual person, biggrin .

Hi, I'm Psyche. I just joined Gaia and thought this guild looked cool. I hang out on Beliefnet.com a lot and am terribly interested in religions. I was raised Catholic, but have had various problems with it and christianity in general since i was 8 or so. I was agnostic for a long time, but kept reseaching paganism. I'm still not completely sure of what's out there spirit-wise, but i believe that there is a masculine and a feminine force and that the Earth is sacred so i currently consider myself a Pagan.

Like the person above me, my name's Rachel and I live in Virginia. Northern Virginia, not the hicksville that is the rest of the state. I always clarify that.
I am a Conservative Jew. No, that doesn't mean conservative as in political viewpoint. The Conservative movement is kind of between Orthodox and Reform. We pray in Hebrew and do almost as much in the service as the Orthodox (not quite as much though) but we allow women to lead services and be rabbis and such, and we don't have seperate seating for men and women.
Judaism is a very important part of my life. I attend synagogue just about every Saturday for the Shabbat morning services. I am also at synagogue on every single Yom Tov, or holy day. That includes the days that many don't realize are Yom Tov, like the last two days of Pesach (Passover). I attend classes at synagogue Sunday mornings for my confirmation, which is basically just post-Bar Mitzvah study. I'm the Religious Education VP of my United Synagogue Youth chapter. I attended a Jewish Day School kindergarden through part of eighth grade. I still spend my summers at Pinemere Camp, which all my friends at home call 'Jew Camp'. Oh, and I'm a mod in the Jewish Gaians Guild mrgreen
Most of my friends are not Jewish. They range from Lutheran to athiest to various forms of Pagans and Wiccans to one Reform Jew. Obviously my friends from camp and USY are all Jewish, but that's a different story. I don't really have problems with any religions. The only things I have problems with are evangelicals and Messianic Jews/Jews for Jesus. Evangelicals just annoy me because I'm perfectly happy with my religion and we don't evangelize at all. J4J/Messianics... Oy. They're Christian, damnit! Not Jewish! That one just bugs me. But I try to be nice.

Well I might as well say that I grew up, and still growing up, in a happy and supportive family. I guess my family's faith was agnostic to possibly methodist, but being the chaotic one in my family I chose paganism. At first I tried a monotheistic religion and after about half a year before I scrapped it. From there a revelation hit me, life and death are the same in a sense. When you're born you are dead to the dead, and when you die here you're born into the land of the dead. It's not confusing if you think of reincarnation. Using that to pave the foundation for my religion, Klairete. When I began I was told very little by the spirits, but what I was told that there were 2 primary deities and 5 elements(fire, earth, air, water, and akash (at the time cosmos). The names of the 2, were Kiptaire and Malketh. Now they control 2 sides of the world, not in the physical sense but rather the living and the dead. Kiptaire rules the living from birth, and Malketh rules the dead from death. Well enough about my theology, ask me any questions about it via PMs.

Later! ^_^

Hey, I'm Banu and I'm new to the guild.^_^ I came here to learn a bit about other people's religions, help them to learn about mine, and build a few bridges to help us all live together in relative harmony. It occured to me during a conversation with another Pagan on LiveJournal that I don't do a lot of interfaith work anymore- I've kept my focus on my own religious community for the past several years now, and with the religious climate in my own country (U.S.A.) getting to be the way it is, I figured it was high time I poked my head out of my bubble and started taking account of the other communities. After all, if we're going to have equal rights and religious freedom in this nation, how can we even start to expect people to respect our rights if they don't know that we exist? So with that in mind, I'd like to participate in this guild toward a better understanding between us all, in a setting where people have come to a place of learning of their own free will- so that I don't accidentally end up cramming my religious views down someone else's throat.

I've already described my religion in the What religion is everyone here? thread- that should be a direct link to my post, and if you let the page load all the way it should, in theory- take you right to it. If it doesn't, it's somewhere on that page, I promise.^_^

Like most people in the guild it seems, I was raised Christian. Episcopalian, in fact. I loved the ceremony- their setups were quite beautiful, and I think that their approach to God reflected the majesty of the Divine with which they seemed to be quite impressed.^_^ But the religion itself didn't speak to me, so my mother took me to a Methodist church to try to reawaken my spiritual senses. Again, I loved the people- their setups were so cozy, the congregation was like a big family, and everyone there loved to sing! I liked to sing, too, and their priest seemed well acquainted with other religions and was not condescending in discussing them, so I was happy there for a time. But still, the religion itself did not strike a chord with me- I was only going because I was trying to be a good kid, and I didn't really have much choice anyway.^_^'

When I got a little older, I found a book on Wicca in a bookstore. It was right after a sermon which had really upset me- where the parts of the Bible which particularly expressed to me some of the aspects of the religion which I found objectionable were read as if they were admirable (we had a different priest by this time- so no more pleasant theological discussions for me^_^'), and I'd finally decided to give up on that faith. And I found this new one that I'd never heard of before, and was fascinated. To make a long story short, I started studying it and my sense of spirituality was revitalized. I became a Wiccan with a mostly Egyptian/Greek pantheon.

Over the years, my Greek deities started wandering off, and Bast- one of my main goddesses- kept introducing me to more Egyptian deities. Eventually I got what I thought was a novel idea- to study how these gods were honored in ancient Egypt, rather than using a strictly Wiccan frame of reference. I was greatly surprised to find an already existing Kemetic community here on the 'net, and after some initial reluctance (I stuck with Wicca for about as long as I could) I realized that my practices had changed so much that I could no longer call myself one of them- I'd crossed the line into Kemetic reconstructionism.

I spent my time in the Kemetic community studying various different sects as I encountered them- I still love to learn about the different approaches to the religion, though I only consider a sect to be "Kemetic" if they use a reconstructionist approach. However, you may be surprised at how much variety there can still be given that requirement. I suppose it's like any other religion, really- there are always so many differen denominations or groups, with core concepts in common but different emphases or understandings.

Anyway, nice to meet you all.

Hello lads, you can call me LM.

I come from a very strict Spanish Catholic family, currently living in an equally (if not more) Catholic country, Mexico. As a child, I was raised between my two parents to become a perfect Roman Catholic; my father is a former priest, my mother a former nun-cloister student. Perhaps it was this very strong, rather overblown imposition of the religion that made me question it in the first place. By the time I was 13, I 'came out' to my parents, telling them that their religion had completely stiffled me, and that I wanted out.

Ever since my resignation from the Catholic Church, it went downhill with my family. I was excluded from most of the activities, and I, in a feeble attempt to turn to something, focused on science. For several years I was a complete atheist believing in numbers, equations and facts. Wrong again, for it was quite a pathetic excuse for a faith (or lack thereof). A few years ago my spiritual side emerged in a very odd way. I found reasons to believe in god again; a god of my own understanding, yet quite universal, and unbelonging to any doctrine that I know of.

Though I am a bit resentful towards the Catholic shurch for personal reasons, I currently respect every belief there is, and strive towards in inclusion, perhaps because of the exlusion I've experienced in my life. Currently I am still doing things on my own, understanding God and coming to terms with my spirituality one step at a time.

For now, as corny as it may sound, I believe in love. I believe love is what redeems man, and the single most divine action a man can do (as well as the common denominator in the mainstream religions, have you noticed?). So while I find a true religious identity I can stick to, I believe in love.

Hi everyone.

I'm very glad I was able to join.

I guess I should start my intro.
I grew up in a home where religion wasn't the focus in any way. The only one to really talk about religion with me was my great grandmother when I was left with her while my mom did grocery shopping. My great grandmother one day pulled out a children's christianity book and started going through it with me. That day I learned from my mom that she (great grandmother) had spent years trying to find her own religious path and tried multiple religions until she found the one she felt fit with her beliefes which happened to be christianity for her.
My parents didn't push religion on to me because they thought it was my own individual choice and when I was "ready" and wanted to explore different paths I'd be allowed to.
I was 12 when I learned about Wicca. I was egar to learn more but my parents didn't believe I had the maturity yet to go and examine a religion and choose if that was the appropriate path for me. I still borrowed books from the library with a friend and we both tried to learn, but at that point my reading comprehension wasn't great. But I was told I could learn tarot so that's how that portion started.
Tarot got me interested in the occult.
A couple of years later my reading comprehension was great and I started looking at Wicca. (that was when i was 14.) I didn't ever claim to be Wiccan because of the fact that although I new a fair ammount I studied off and on and I didn't really do the rituals. I guess you could say I didn't feel I needed a ritual to be done to feel close to a higher power.
This year well actually almost a full year ago in January I started to have doubts about where I was headed, what I was doing, and if I was going the direction I should be going. I felt lost and I hadn't felt that way before. My own beliefes where very important to me and for about 6 months before I was interacting mainly with christians and seeing my views start to change so I wouldn't feel completely seperated. In some ways I was glad that I was seeing less of them because i wasn't forced to battle myself. Later on I realized I wasn't as firm in my beliefs as I might have thought and that I was going to have to ask myself some tough questions.
Around September I decided I wasn't really Wiccan. Somethings I still identified with while there was more that didn't fit as well with me anymore.
So I started to try and figure out what my path was really supose to be and if it could even be labled.
Interestingly enough I still saw myself as a pagan. I but saw that there wasn't an area where I could actually fit myself into at that time (and still haven't been able to)
So I see myself right now as a pagan/occultist.

I've had many friends of different religions, and since 8th grade I've had an interest in different religions. At that point I also felt deeply in myself with out a doubt that there wasn't a perfect religion, nor was there only one way to connect with God and or Goddess. Each religious path was valid, and that each religion there was something to be gained. There's plenty to learn if you're open to what is being told. On top of that it's always been important to me since I was about 5 years old that people be accepted for who they are.

I guess that's it for my intro, anyone is welcome to message me if they'd like.