- Joined
- Oct 20, 2009
- Messages
- 28,431
- Reaction score
- 16,990
- Location
- Sasnakra
- Gender
- Female
- Political Leaning
- Moderate
My father's a minister - which means that he made every choice possible in his life to live a Christian life, surround himself (and thus me and my sisters - and my mother) wit ha religious community, and made every effort to instill in us the same values he holds.
Every aspect of my life has been altered or governed by his religious views:
Where we lived when we were born.
Every move we made (state-state / church-church).
The friendships my parent's hand and the friendships us children were permitted to have.
Books and movies we watched.
Food we ate.
Our weekend life.
Charity.
Efforts to engage the community and bring them into church issues.
Deaths - lots of death bed calls and last prayers.
Evening visits.
Taking homeless families into our home.
His religious beliefs were more important to him than his marriage and even us children.
This is serious conviction. The life of not just him - but everyone around him - has been impacted by his beliefs. He feels he is so *right* in his beliefs that making a lot of these decisions, and whether or not they were the right ones, never seemed to be a concern.
And I believed in none of it. It was an irritation, a senseless 'purpose', a reason for him to get up in the morning and walk through the town and come home in the evening after handing out pamphlets.
Most people don't have a fraction of that type of conviction - and in fact - his conviction was so thorough and so deep that I now look at it (and he still lives this way, btw) and I wonder what makes him really tick. Why does he believe in something so firmly that he would dedicate every moment of his life (since he was 15 - 50 years) to it.
So this makes me wonder: how deep do other people and their convictions go. Would anyone else go to such great lengths to satisfy their religious beliefs? Where do most people draw the line, if there is one.
Every aspect of my life has been altered or governed by his religious views:
Where we lived when we were born.
Every move we made (state-state / church-church).
The friendships my parent's hand and the friendships us children were permitted to have.
Books and movies we watched.
Food we ate.
Our weekend life.
Charity.
Efforts to engage the community and bring them into church issues.
Deaths - lots of death bed calls and last prayers.
Evening visits.
Taking homeless families into our home.
His religious beliefs were more important to him than his marriage and even us children.
This is serious conviction. The life of not just him - but everyone around him - has been impacted by his beliefs. He feels he is so *right* in his beliefs that making a lot of these decisions, and whether or not they were the right ones, never seemed to be a concern.
And I believed in none of it. It was an irritation, a senseless 'purpose', a reason for him to get up in the morning and walk through the town and come home in the evening after handing out pamphlets.
Most people don't have a fraction of that type of conviction - and in fact - his conviction was so thorough and so deep that I now look at it (and he still lives this way, btw) and I wonder what makes him really tick. Why does he believe in something so firmly that he would dedicate every moment of his life (since he was 15 - 50 years) to it.
So this makes me wonder: how deep do other people and their convictions go. Would anyone else go to such great lengths to satisfy their religious beliefs? Where do most people draw the line, if there is one.