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Have been thinking about this over the last few days esp in the tougher moments [you know the "what was I thinking, how could I have been such a bloody moron, I've just wasted x years of my life, I'm so angry I could scream but at the same time so sad I could sob for days" kind of thing].I guess its one of the predictable stages you go through after leaving, but how could I have ended up in the RF? Why was I there for that period of time? Was I led there of God? or if not God then who/what? why would a loving God lead a person to an organisation like that? or was it nothing to do with God and just a bunch of stuff that happened?Discuss![btw I know I think too much & overanalyse everything so please don't bother pointing that out - I have a wonderful psychologi

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Hi missy...I know exactly how you feel, although I haven't had those feelings for about 6 mths now and I've been out for a year. I was in for over 15 years. I think thinking is good... healthy, truth seeking thinking! (try saying that last part 3 time really fast!)

What excellent questions...wish I had some answers.... I'll give it a go!!

I truly believe that my salvation was real and led of God. When I look back at the circumstances and what I was going through at the time, I know God answered me. I know He showed me how to have a fulfilling, spiritual experience. Unfortunately, I allowed the structure and routine of assembly life to interfere with my spiritual life. I was part of a grand theatrical company, where I was expected to play the role and behave according to a vision. The outward appearance became more important than the inward truth. 

From what I can see of most Churches (and I haven't physically checked them out yet) is that they teach people how to act like Christians, in the natural (the flesh). Their focus is outward. They are not taught to look inward, within themselves, where the Lord dwells, in their spirit, by the Holy Spirit, where they are enlightened and shown the wonderful truths of God.

Joh 4:24 God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.

The answers are not the leader or the assembly or even a book. The answers are written upon the hearts of believer's and we only have to listen, quietly, to know and understand the love and unity of God and the spiritual realm of the world.

I used to think that the warning to the Pastors that scatter the sheep was for every other church but mine. Now, I feel that there is a famine in the land, of the Word of God, the Word, that lives within the believer, the Word, which is Christ. Not the Bible...no disrespect to the Bible, but I don't think it can really be understood until the reader is in unity and harmony with the author. Not a vision, which is revealed exclusively to one man. Something that today's leaders fail to impart is how to have a truly divine relationship with God.

This has been my focus and for the first time in 15 years, I have experienced again what I had in the beginning. Peace, stillness and a knowing...

Here's to restoring and rebuilding what the Lord always intended...

FZS

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Havebeen thinking about this over the last few days esp in the tougher moments [you know the "what was I thinking, how could I have been such a bloody moron, I've just wasted x years of my life, I'm so angry I could scream but at the same time so sad I could sob for days" kind of thing].I guess its one of the predictable stages you go through after leaving, but how could I have ended up in the RF? Why was I there for that period of time? Was I led there of God? or if not God then who/what? why would a loving God lead a person to an organisation like that? or was it nothing to do with God and just a bunch of stuff that happened?Discuss![btw I know I think too much & overanalyse everything so please don't bother pointing that out - I have a wonderful psychologi

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I agree with For Zions Sake, that your questions , are good questions.   I felt the same as you .

Reply to : For Zions Sake

I feel that your reply to misswooty was right on the mark.  thanks for that

regards viridian

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Have been thinking about this over the last few days esp in the tougher moments [you know the "what was I thinking, how could I have been such a bloody moron, I've just wasted x years of my life, I'm so angry I could scream but at the same time so sad I could sob for days" kind of thing].I guess its one of the predictable stages you go through after leaving, but how could I have ended up in the RF? Why was I there for that period of time? Was I led there of God? or if not God then who/what? why would a loving God lead a person to an organisation like that? or was it nothing to do with God and just a bunch of stuff that happened?

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I'm going to go with 'or was it nothing to do with God and just a bunch of stuff that happened?'

In my opinion this life is a series of random events... but mathematically speaking there is even pattern in chaos. These patterns can be sometimes intepreted as coincidences and luck. The more romanticly natured people will fancify such clusters of coincidence as divine intervention from a god pulling at the strings. Their God is a loathsome creature who 'allows' the most grotesque things to happen to his 'beloved children'. Any purely good god would have intervened and thought up a better way to make a set of toys to play with and keep him company.

We've spent a good part of our life in ignorant bliss. That's fine... at the time it felt fine. In the light of new information and a new mindset, we can see that it was a waste of time. We'll still live and die and will currently do things that will still seem to have been a waste of time in years to come. Hopefully, people won't have actually wasted their time by not planning properly for retirement and old age because they held on too tightly to the concept of the Lord returning 'soon'. That's where one of the major regrets will be.

Other regrets may come by not spending enough time with your kids when they were in their wonder years. I know I spent far too many Sundays trying to get my kids to sit down and shut up on their mats while the talk was on. I spent far too many Sundays not even hardly communicating with my kids between 12.00 to 6pm on Sundays. I'm sad for that, but at the time I thought it was fine.

We lost years and de-evolved somewhat, but worse things could have happened. People lose arms, they lose children... people can be swindled out of their life savings, they can develop painful deseases that cripple and torment... people can find love only to lose it and suffer from the memory of it... people have a 'bunch of stuff happen' happen to them, because (pause) - because it's random and they sometimes don't take personal control and responsibility for their actions.

Earthquake, war, plague... shit truly happens and always always has. I know I'm labouring the point somewhat. I'm just saying that in the grand scheme of this insignificant little planet, it's a speck of dust in a huge universe of matter and space... every now and then the conditions are right in the life of a planet for life to form. The balls of matter is just the right distance from it's sun, and is protected from meteors by the larger planets in the outer regions of its system. Whenever these conditions are right in the countless billions of years this universe has been expanding and retracting life has a short amout of time to form and evolve, in response to stimuli around it. These lifeforms evolve to a level of self existence where they are intelligent enough to question their own state of being. They get so smart that they begin to label the random coincidences as part of a plan by a god that simply doesn't exist outside of the common union of their own hearts.

So yeah, it's just stuff that happened.

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Please don't interpret this as accusatory/critical/argumentative, I'm just in the asking-too-many-questions phase & am genuinely interested in what you have to say...

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Okay, get ready for this. It's gonna be an essay, but I'll try to make it worth the read.

The supernatural and miracles. What do I make of them? I wanted to believe in things unseen and I spent a huge amount of my life pursuing them. Even my online 'Moth' personas originally resulted from my fascination with the Mothman Prophesy ghost stories from American mythology. During my latter years in the Revival Fellowship I even wrote a book about Angels from a Revivalist point of view. I really believed in angels but didn't know how they worked into the Revival way of thinking, so I wrote a really embarrasing, longwinded and somewhat plagiarised 'book' on the subject (Something that will always remain deeply hidden in the corner of an old hard-drive). I did a really pretty PowerPoint to go with the book and presented it on a Sunday night meeting. In retrospective, I feel like an utter fool.

Anyway, in truth, there are unseen powers that run along the meridians of this planet. Aren't magnets fascinating? I wonder what the ancients thought of magnets? You can actually make a 'rock' float above another rock. I'm sure this was labelled as supernatural until we educated ourselves and found they were perfectly 'natural'. Some even theorise in other unseen energy sources that run through the course of our planet... crystals, min mins, water divining (just some random words that I think are related to what I'm trying to describe). In summary, 'supernatural' is just a term we give to something we don't yet understand or are unable to classify based on information we have already aquired.

The wondrous gifts of the Spirit: The first thing ex-Revivalists have to confront is that the amazing ability to verbalise 15 minutes of random noise from their mouths is not miraculous. Like, hit yourselves in the head with a hockey stick until this sinks in. I truly convinced and persuaded myself I was doing something only 'magic' people could do. I made this real in my head, and I had the misfortune of hanging around a hundred other people who also let themselves believe in this remarkable over-rated ability to make nonsensical 'sounds'. Together we built a huge noisy straw man and worshipped it.

This is a process called 'confabulation' - and it's not the same as lying. It's when people combine fact and fiction to produce fantasy. Christians want to feel really special and 'super-powered' so they attribute fanciful meanings to basic things... for instance, consider the other gifts of the spirit (wisdom, knowledge, tongues, interpretation etc) They're not like real super powers (x-ray vision, flying, walking on water - Jesus should have fought crime with his super-powers); they are just things that anybody can do. The gifts of the spirit and given 'special' interpretations and some pentecostals go to such extremes where they use such gifts in the same way that clairvoyants and seers do in travelling circus shows.... "someone in this corner has a bad back", or "the Lord told me this and the Lord told me that" - bah. Other churches go with the whole Toronto Blessing thing and try to convince us that shaking uncontrollably on the floor is also another amazing god given superpower. It's not... it, like tongues, is just another thing that gullible and naive people do to make themselves feel more important than they are.

End of part 1

Any comments before I continue my rant?

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But hey I know that will get better with time/counselling/reading/visiting this forum/eating lots of chocolate

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Actually chocolate (and Jaime Pressly from My name is Earl) give me good cause to believe in an intelligent creater/administrator/deity but for now I'm entertaining the thought that we're part of a celestial moment of chance. I remember once feeling special about being able to create a PowerPoint presentation but nowadays anyone can do it from children to small puppies... even some pastors (blue and green should never be seen though eh?).

Part 2

Skip the first paragraph if you're not in the mood for waffle... the real polywaffle starts after it.

I would love to believe that every move we made was part of some individual god's big master plan or practical joke. All six billion of us separated and sorted into little boxes depending on where, when and who we were born to; ultimately packed into two boxes - one marked goat, the other sheep, and then prostrating ourselves at the feet of him for eternity pandering to his enormous ego, forever telling him how awesome he is. It would be great to believe that all the bad decisions and mistakes I've made in my life are not regretable but rather necessary steps on the road to enlightenment. Sometimes I force myself to believe in predestination, destiny and fate to stop myself from wallowing in regret for missed opportunities. It's no wonder people get so confused when faced with the death of a loved one. It just doesn't make sense when it happens; it doesn't compute. We're assured by the religious nutters who gets rolled in to speak at funerals that the death served a purpose that we mere mortals just can't understand. Poppycock! Sometimes we simply make a wrong step and our fragile bodies blow away back into dust.

 "Behold, I show you a mystery!" wrote Paul; he was an enigmatic speaker. When it comes to supernatural phenomena, I love a good mystery and sometimes there is simply no explanation. The same can be said whenever I go to see a professional magician. Those guys are professional hoaxers and are experts at making us believe something truly magical is happening... but there's always a trick.. there's always an explanation. They're very good at keeping it quiet though. The same goes for supernatural happenings, in my opinion, there's an explanation somewhere, but it's just not always forthcoming. There have always been hoaxers, both amatuer and professional for as long as we've been around. Some are tongue in cheek but others are confidence tricksters who work very hard to persuade the ignorant to believe a lie. And that's the thing... people lie. They lie all the time and they're good at it. Some lie so well they convince themselves. Heck I used to convincingly lie that I'd seen something strange; it was an attention seeking device. I sometimes even relayed the stories of others, making them my own because I believed them so wholeheartedly.

When dealing with this subject it's important to keep Occam's Razor in mind.. which says that the simplest explanation is usually right; and you shouldn't add unnecessary complications when trying to explain something. The tricky part is deciding which exlanation is the most likely. Also, it's important to keep an open mind, which is hard when facts challenge assumptions. Sometimes we want to believe something so badly that we ignore the evidence altogether. I recommend starting without preconceptions and then listen to some new ideas. I myself am not really a sceptic, I'm open to anything and then I try to disprove it through logic or reality (my reality). This is your journey and will ultimately be your reality.

The trouble with paranormality is that most of the evidence is heresay. It happened to a friend of a friend, who is no fool.. hmmm. If I personally had a ghostly encounter or an alien abduction and was not after a few drinks then I may think differently. However, I've never seen anything that fractures the laws of physics and I have trouble believing the stories of people who tell me they have. Most people don't understand the nature of probability and random chance, therefore they attribute mystic intervention when all it really was was a trick of perception (I just typed was was... was there a better way of putting that?).

If I come across someone who seems to be happily convinced they were abducted and probed by E.T. then who am I to call them a liar? I might back up and feel sorry for them, but I'm not going to call their bluff. It seems many people are absolutely convinced that they've touched the light fantastic. But everyone can't be right... and it seems that reality is easily skewed, what with Psychokinesis, ghosts, unexplained creatrues, Crop Circles (my favourite), UFOs, and Mary sightings.. ra ra ra... the list goes on and on. And poor old me hasn't seen as much as a pesky poltergeist. 5 million people in America alone claim to have been abducted by aliens. Is this mass stupidity or are we really craving attention. Sorry America... I think you are coming across a little needy. 

End of part 2