Grew up Lutheran, with a mom who is very strong in her faith. Felt a connction my self for a while but always struggled with skepticism. Always dealt with self-image issues growing up, and the idea of sin turned much of that to into self-hatred. Sure, sins are forgiven, but you are still supposed to try and avoid them, but I always felt at odds with what I felt was just part of who I was (don’t really want to go into it, but not anything gender/orientation related).
Eventually, learned to love myself more, but this started the rift for me. The other thing is something I’ve always been unable to shake: of all the religions in this world, who is to say one is the “real” one? Everyone has their own image of what “God” is.
Much further reflection and family conflict later, that got expanded to the understanding that religion in general is just one of many ways we try to frame or understand things that are otherwise difficult to. Things like Purpose, Creation, our place in the grand vastness and chaos of the universe.
Nowadays, when it comes to spiritualism I align more to a sort of naturalistic pantheism. Instead of prayer, I meditate, and focus on celebrating life and wondering at the beauty of it all.
This got long and I’m not sure it makes much sense, but I tried. Not great at translating concepts/ideas into words.
On my work laptop, Teams has started to ignore my default browser settings. Firefox is still the default, and everywhere else links open there, but from Teams they open in edge anyway. Its really annoying