Replies

“I left the Methodist church over the abortion issue”

This was one of MANY issues of why we left. The straw was dealing with the attitude of leadership over occultic practices. Apparently, visiting a psychic wasn’t a problem and if channeling leads to solace...well....have at it, then. The New Age is very huge....and no one questions anything from the pulpit.

http://www.rcrc.org/
The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice is stomach-turning.

That was the main issue at the time, and it was very personal. My 17-year-old daughter had become pregnant; of course it was "inconvenient", but both my best friend and my sibling said without missing a beat that if it was their daughter, they'd have her get an abortion. I remember clearly thinking at the time, "if this is the kind of thinking the Methodist church produces, I have to leave."

Leaving is a very hard thing and takes the courage of one's convictions, so what the other poster wrote, I understand. But even though there is a price, if you don't stand by your convictions, then you might as well not have any. I was always a "follow-the-leader" type before then.

My best friend, very intelligent and far better educated than I, who is now deceased was into reincarnation, and I was curious about that and the occult at that time, too. I can't say I was directly exposed to that in church, but through some of the members. The book that so fascinated us at the time was "Gretchen, I Am."

Actually, I credit the Pentecostals the most for getting me to see the error of my ways in dabbling in the occult. At a catholic college course in Sociology, I wrote a paper about reincarnation and got an A on it although the professor said I quoted too much from a book." He should have flunked me lol.

I wasn't Catholic then, but two Catholic girls accompanied me to a seance in the dark basement of the spiritualist church here. By then, I was wary and prayed I wouldn't get any messages. Fortunately, everyone present but me IIRC got one. I was relieved I didn't. So theses poor naive Catholic girls did, and might not have gone were it not for me, may God forgive me for that. And I made other mistakes like that during that period of my life, looking for answers, takss a long time to be cleansed from all of it and an effort of the will.

Not too long after, the girls invited me to go with them to a witchcraft initiation at night at a local state park. That was just too far out after that spooky seance, and I wanted no part of it and declined, wish I'd known enough then to warn them that their church frowned on such things as that, officially.

I have since remonstrated (nicely) with some ignorant Catholics about what their church teaches about some of the things they get into.