PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum - View Single Post - Religious certainty and breadth of religious experience

elchivito · #8 08-30-2011, 03:03 PM

Pesky words again. I guess we have to define "religious conviction". I can't speak other than personally. Since escaping the confines of dogmatic religion and listening to my intuition instead of some priest or book, I consider myself more religious than ever. By "religious", I mean personally convinced that there is a life force in the universe, that it's not all by accident (although not necessarily all by design, either) and that that force can be in some way gotten in touch with on a personal level.
If we mean to define religious conviction as devotion to a particular set of dogma, then yeah, I'd say the broader one's exposure is to different spiritual and non-spiritual philosophies the less likely one is to hold onto one particular set. One of my spiritual mentors is a retired archbishop. He is an anthropologist by education and has lived and studied the religious and spiritual practices of cultures all over the world. A deeply devout man, he is probably one of the least Catholic catholics I know. More of a Gnostic than anything else.