My parents were Methodists (mainline Protestant Christian). A friend of theirs wanted to get their support to become a pastor of a new, independent Protestant church. They said, essentially, "That's great! Which seminary are you going to?" His response was that he'd heard the call of God, so clearly God figured he was qualified. And if God wanted him to know any more about the Bible than he'd already figured out, He'd let him know.

I don't believe my parents provided any financial support.

And they asked me why I abandoned the church.

Huh. There wasn't any hypocritical stuff going on in my church that I knew of.

I abandoned the church when I was 19 because I thought Pascal's Wager was lame.

There's a variant of Buddhism called Pure Land Buddhism that holds that nothing matters except a true belief that a particular boddhisattva will save you.

Similar to the Hindu Bhakti movement.

That was part of the Reformation, though, that people should actually read scripture and not just get told what it said by the Church.

Which is one reason why I don't understand why so many Protestants don't do it. I mean, my mom read the Bible a lot, but she read the same "inspiring" passages over and over.

Catholicism has a lot of requirements, but reading the bible isn't really one of them.

I did not know that.

There's a variant of Buddhism called Pure Land Buddhism that holds that nothing matters except a true belief that a particular boddhisattva will save you. That sort of thing is appealing to many people, of course there will be organizations that espouse it.

It's a very appealing idea. I think (limited knowledge here) that there's a similar belief in a certain sect of Hinduism, that loving Krishna with all your heart is all you have to do.

Similar to the Hindu Bhakti movement.

Ha! I think that was what I was thinking of.

Huh. There wasn't any hypocritical stuff going on in my church that I knew of.

If not for that, I might still be in it. I just couldn't deal. It was rampant, both in the church that ran my high school, and the local small-town and rural churches I went to growing up. (Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist. My mom didn't believe in denominations, so we went wherever people weren't being dicks. We changed churches a lot.)

My great grandmother was Christian Scientist, although her husband was not, so my grandmother and her sister were only sort of raised that way. Grandma was sort of taken under the wing of a Jewish family that lived nearby and was more well-off than Grandma's (I believe they owned a department store, to tie in to the earlier topic) which left her with a life-long fascination with and fondness for Judaism. She was pretty happy when I converted. She herself became Catholic when she married my grandfather (although she was buried as, I think, a Lutheran because she decided that was genealogically appropriate (some of our ancestors went around starting Lutheran churches all over the west)), and my Mom raised us Catholic (more or less as terms for getting married in the Church and against my other Grandmother's wishes although we would have had a hard time being Russian Orthodox in Baton Rouge when I was a kid if we had tried). Now my brother is an atheist, I'm Jewish and my sister is Buddhist. Dad is more or less a pantheist and Mom's religion is nobody's business, as far as I can tell. We're very ecumenical. It's made for an interesting set of family wedding pictures, at least and holidays are very choose your own adventurish.

One of my college friends left her church when her parents got divorced after her mother had an affair with the minister.

-t, I think that's all pretty wonderful.

Hil, that would do it for me, for sure.

That is immensely understandable.