One might expect that anyone choosing to sign up for a world religions elective course would be fairly broad-minded. After all, the point is not to study one faith in depth but to learn some basic facts about major world religions and other less familiar paths. However, there is one fellow in my class who absolutely drives me mad with his refusal to tolerate any teachings that don't stem directly from Protestant Christianity, specifically a fundamentalist/conservative outlook. Today was particularly frustrating, as we've started covering Islam. His reaction to Islam? It's hateful, violent, evil, etc, etc, etc and shouldn't be recognized as a major faith. Basically, he found Islam so intolerant than he didn't want to tolerate it any more. The whole class got hijacked as he proceeded to display all these newspaper clippings from mainly conservative newspapers stating how Islam is wicked and subversive. Apparently, he'd been planning this quite a long time.
Things like this frustrate me terribly, because I've been raised very tolerant of other faiths and I've tried on many religions. My religious upbringing is thoroughly confusing. Here's the long story...
I was born to two fairly non-religious parents. My father is originally from the USA and was raised strictly Christian Reformed. Later, when he moved to the UK, he attended an Anglican church for a while but basically lost interest. My mother was born in Romania and was Eastern Orthodox, then started going to Catholic mass when she went to the Uk to study, although once I was born she was having a crisis of faith and I had no religious training at all until I was four.
When I was four, we moved from Romania to Canada in order to be closer to my maternal grandmother, who was very ill. All my parents' resources were spent on my grandmother's medical bills, so when I was five they sent my sister and I to stay with family friends, although we still saw them all the time. The family we stayed with was Jewish. I learned some about Judaism from them and they were truly wonderful people.
The following year, my grandmother passed away and my parents decided to relocate to the UK. Until I was eleven or so, there was no religion at home.
At age eleven, my parents went through a nasty divorce. My father moved back to the USA. My mother was unable to cope and went into various hospitals. Since there were no local relatives, I was put into foster care with a Muslim family around age twelve. Although they did not force me to revert to Islam, I was required to study Islam extensively, and to pray, fast, attend events, etc.
After I'd lived with them a year and a half, my paternal aunt found out about the situation and pressed my mother to let her take my sister and I. I was taken out of the foster programme and moved to the USA. My aunt and uncle were extremely conservative and absolutely appalled to learn that I'd been exposed to Judaism and Islam but not Christianity. I was immediately put into a Christian school and made to attend three church services a week along with other religious events, camps, Bible studies, etc. Absolutely no questions were allowed and anything that was considered to promote other faiths was banned from the house. I fought this quite heavily. At fourteen, I started experimenting with Wicca and then quickly moved on to studying Shinto, and then decided I wasn't religious at all. This increased the tensions in the house a lot.
When I was fifteen, my sister, who had since moved back to the UK, got married, and I was allowed to fly out for the wedding. While I was there I had the opportunity to talk to my mother, who was living independently again, and we decided she was capable of caring for me. She and I moved to Canada, but within a few months I was back with my aunt.
I continued to have Protestant Christianity pushed on me until I was seventeen, when my aunt decided I wasn't benefitting from living with her. My sister and her husband invited me to live with them, and they've been my "home" ever since. I spent about a year detoxifying from a lot of religious confusion, because I needed serious time to think. Then, last year, I started attending Catholic mass. I'm hoping to start RCIA next year.
That is a very long, detailed story, for which I am sorry.
Ziadas
Dear
when I was reading your intrestimg story I concluded that religions didn't satisfy your personal inquieries. In fact, religion is a way of dealing with god and a tool to protect human values and quality. but it should never be a criteria to categorise and devide people. can you tell me the difference between a muslim and a christian or a jews in there relation to social and economic challenges? is there any difference between a poor christain and a poor muslim?
I think that we have to put religion aside and people must focus on their human values.
My understanding from what you told about your anti-islamic friend in the school is that extremism in different religions leads to the same result. fundamontalist judaism lead israel to violate all the intrenational laws and the human rights of the palestinians and the neighbering people.
islamic fundamutalism (whether it jihadist, salafist or fundamentalist) lead to distroy many nations such as in afghanisatn, in iraq and this will continue if the root causes will not be adressed seriously by the intrenational communty. this later mast understand teh root causes of this reaction and address it in a wise and clever maner based on teh respect of the Human rights and the intrenational laws.
the christian extremism reflected in the recent US policies is leading the whole world to a new world war because they cannot see but money and power.
Me too I was grown in a mixed religious family; this helped me a lot to understand that differences are not religious beleives and faith based, since god is the same, or at least he must be the same for everybody, but differences are amomg political, economic, social and cultural conditions.
sincerely