[Megan]

I've suffered many things from several stripes of Fundamentalism over the years--pretty much lost my mind over it.

I was a person who took my faith very seriously, and read the Bible a lot. When I started questioning things I'd been taught about God, the tribal instinct kicked in, and the religious people gave it to me with both barrels.

It's very difficult when your tribe thinks you're Satanic.

Interestingly, at least to me, the reason I started questioning things I had been taught was that the God I was experiencing from my devotional study of the Bible and prayer did not seem to comport with the God of the Bible as printed, and taught in a literal fashion. Hmmm. Very confusing.

I went through a long period where I vehemently rejected Christianity altogether and sort of did the New Age thing.

That's when I started noticing that spiritual insight is just spiritual insight--a lot of the New Age insight was Christian insight translated to a different language. Likewise, Buddhist and Hindu insight. There seemed to be an underground river we all draw from.

I still couldn't relate to Fundamentalist/literalist Christianity, could barely tolerate it, but I had a growing sense that something deeper was going on.

At length, I have arrived at a universalist perspective through a completely organic process of working and reworking all this material over several decades, not just intellectually, but at the blood and grit level.

This is not a way of holding on to Christianity as "real," for truly I don't identify with organized Christianity at all. But I recognize my soul process in all the anguish I went through over religion, and I found some nuggets of gold there.

At present, I see religion as part of our evolutionary process, and, like Teilhard de Chardin, I see it as Ariadne's Thread to guide us through the maze, confusing as religion itself is.

Nobody ever suggested that evolution isn't messy!

So, yeah, this blood-thirsty God who requires retribution and tortures beyond all reason, how repugnant!

But, still...somehow...there is a rio abajo rio, a river beneath the river, and it runs pure.