what you don't trust or what you cant get any reasonable answer leave it as it is, put it aside, not all of questions in our life can be or will be answered for sure because answers seem right but also can change and feel like incomplete,

I don't understand some words in post but that's ok I guess

I understand the confusion in duality of beliefs. I live it often. So much of what I was brought up with compare well with the beliefs of the "otherworld" and the ability to grow through successive lives.

My fathers side, including my uncle that taught me, believe strongly this way. Then there is the Catholic upbringing, forced on them to assimilate in this world. Not so long ago really. My father was " enrolled" in one such Catholic school for Indians. So he became obsessive to all the translations that were adapted to meet the need of the powers that be, at those times. Why some works, scrolls of different apostles were included, excluded or altered in timelines to fit the "picture" of the religious leaders.

Where as our/ his natural upbringing more resembled the early druid Polytheistic thinking. Which here predates the bible, but in oral tradition.

confusing yes, accepting both though, is needed to survive for me.
Since who is to say that the great spirit, did not in fact visit each continent to help. But in each peoples way of decifering the messages they may have been changed. Ours was not a written history much like the Celtics. It was passed down in generational teaching by word. It could not be edited to fit one hierarchy's needs.

"While a Christian Druid may believe that the soul is only born once on Earth, most Druids adopt the belief of their ancient forebears that the soul undergoes a process of successive reincarnations either always in human form, or in a variety of forms that might include trees and even rocks as well as animals. "

That could also be said by most tribes here.
J.

sort away.

I honestly believe my father's most sacred ism was alcoholism. By the third six pack he could -and often did- justify any act in any ism. I most often remember him as a very sick man. Sickness happens in all cultures and religions.

An aside for jewells: my father claimed Scott's Irish lineage which he claimed did not trust literacy in general. Among my memories of his drunken tirades is the dramatized refrain, "Conquering professor's always arrive with books and cries of 'It is written!"

My father did not like the Celts, either. Considered them among the well-written oppressors. I think my father had Irish Alzheimer's. He forgot everything but the bitterness.

Damned auto-correct. "professors" is supposed to be "oppressors." Sorry to all my favorite profies.

First, on the light side. As an associate professor at a little college, your spellchecks error put me in stitches. I imagined my future promotion from associate professor to full professor as from associate oppressor to full oppressor. Ha!

On the serious side, Im so sorry for the spiritual abuse that accompanied your physical and sexual and family abuse, remembered on this anniversary. Since my abuser was a pastor who claimed to commune with the Spirit, that spiritual darkness was a part of my victim experience, too. Though not druidic, it was powerful. Sometimes it was harder for me to bear than the sexual abuse and constant domestic violence. Sometimes this spiritual warfare in my home was harder on my psyche and soul even than the 6 years of miitary war we lived through along with it all in Uruguay back then. I can imagine how it was, then, for you along with what you describe as the role he wanted you to play in what he scripted for you.

As for me, fathers dark abusive personality, which was passed off as sacred, constantly drew the mentally ill and those who dabbled in South American "espiritismo" to him and his church. I remember regular church services with my father in the pulpit which were interrupted by rivals in the congregation.

These strangers who walked in off the street were attracted to my fathers claim to manipulate the Spirits power and challenged him to supernatural duels in the middle of church services. A truly strange spectacle, hard to describe. Absurd and as cartoony as if I were Luke Skywalker in a Star Wars movie watching my evil father Darth Vader use the dark side of the Force on his rivals.

On week days in between church services, my father locked himself away in his "study" in our home and brooded aloud. He said he was speaking in tongues, but it didnt sound like the familiar speaking in tongues I heard regulalry from other Pentecostals at our church. My fathers utterances through that door were spooky, ghostly, chilling, and dark. There were not the joyous utterances of someone touched by an angel, but the brooding, dark rages of someone communing with demons.

This aspect of my therapy was the last I brought to the attention of my PTSD therapist. It so happened that by then my therapist, who was a VA doc with a PHD in PTSD therapy, also belonged to the same mainstream Christian Protestant denomination I belong to and was ordained in as a middle aged adult. I didnt choose him for that reason, but it turned out to be useful when we went from the physical, sexual, and mental abuse to discussing the spiritual abuse.

Whether they meant to or not, in their enterprising careers as fraudulent faith healers, my father and mother both manipulated not only minds and hearts but spirits and souls. They chose to be lost souls themselves, what M. Scott Peck calls "People of the Lie" in his book about evil by that title. To justify themselves, they had to drag others down, too. I watched them do that to a rival pastor when my mother had my father take his church from him so my father would be its pastor and not be on the road traveling so much.

It was a two year order of playing congregational politics that pitted parishioner against parishioner in that church in raucous congregational business meetings that actually led to blows. My mother and father finally did get the church for themselves, and drove out the former pastor and his few followers left. Then the former pastor died of a heart attack. I remember being stunned by the nerve of my parents as they attended the funeral wake of this former pastor they drove to his very grave.

This has nothing to do with your anniversary, arfie, but you raised the topic of the spiritual dimension of our abuse. That is a rare topic for us to put words to, and I thank you for the chance it gave me to speak of it. Im sorry for the dark memories this anniversary triggered for you and wish you strength and healing today. You certainly have the support of those of us here whove been through similar ordeals. Once again, youre not alone.

"Conquering "oppressors" always arrive with books and cries of 'It is written!"
Yep, On the wall in pyrogliphics.

I often feel I was raised in the Schism of the Isms. Everybody's ism was better than everybody else's ism and not a one of them could have found faith with a library of well-researched tomes.

And then they call ME crazy...
Well...
Different thread...

Funny how making a thought from an opinion into an "ism" implies theres a rational ideological system behind it. Not always so, Ive found....