Monday, August 13, 2012

Superficial Conversions

Blessings Darlings!

The Wild Hunt recently featured a story about a woman who had been a Pagan artist, who has now gone back to Christianity and is calling her Pagan time as being demon possessed.  Which brings up the whole topic of folks who, having converted, then go back to their original religion.

Do you ever get that gut-feeling, when interacting with a 'convert' of one or another type, that they are going to end up going back to their original religion/philosophy/system?  I've run into that rather a few times.

Like, WAY back in the day when I was running the Off Brands Religions  Icons and Iconoclasts BB on Prodigy.  One woman there had a screen name of "X-Mormon".  She posted a lot (as in, as much as I did) and most of her posts were about how she was, yes, an EX-Mormon.  Not that much about what she was now, so much as 'debunking' her old Mormonism, which by this time she had left 5 or more years before.  But, as you might have guessed, well before Prodigy.com became Prodigy.net, let alone before MSN bought it, she was back in the fold of Mormonism. It wasn't a surprise to me, since so much of her time was still being spent with her in relationship, negative tho' it may have been, to Mormonism.

Now, I'm not saying that when a person converts that they lose their ethnic heritage.  Only the original High Priestess of the coven I'm now in didn't pick up on me having been raised Jewish - and that's likely because she was so focused on my more-recent 10 years in Ar nDraiocht Fein Druidism. OTOH, I'm neither at war with Judaism nor trying to make over my Paganism into the same form as the Judaism I grew up in.

But sometimes you get to know folks, and you just have a gut feeling that they are going to go back to their milk-religion eventually. I can't even put my finger on the reasons I feel some folks I know are going to do it. Often it involves having to analyze everything from that original worldview in some way, but not always.

I'm going to have to puzzle this one some more, I think.

Frondly, Fern

2 comments:

  1. I'd say a lot of converts never really leave the framework of their old faith. Like you say analyzing from the old view. Like a veneer.
    Even jesus speaks to this in the pouring of new wine into old skins or patching an old garment with new cloth.

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  2. When one focuses on the EX whatever, in neuro linguistics, the negative is always disregarded. for example, in ones mind if one is an ex smoker one is always and will be a smoker. The brain seems to negate the negatives.

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