For the Wiccan converts.

[Jin-Roh]

Hi Wiccans!

I am working on some stuff for my Theology class right now and I was hoping I could get informal interviews. :smile:

The question I'd like to ask is why have you decided to be a Wiccan? I've heard hints there and there of some of you where atheists and others who were sincere Christians. I'm curious as to why changed. I'm bascially asking for the equivalent of a "personal testimony."

I may quote you in the paper I'm writing. Let me know if you don't want that to happen.

[Heathen Dawn]

The question I'd like to ask is why have you decided to be a Wiccan?

The short of it: my background was atheism and Orthodox Judaism. The former embraces the world but has no promise for after life, and the latter has a promise for the after life but shuns the pleasures of this world. I was looking for a religion with both transcendent hope (afterlife, Gods) and immanent enjoyment (this life, the body) in perfect balance, and I found that in Wicca.

For longer elaborations about it, you can take a look at my website:

Ex-Atheist (http://eclecticsatyr.hostultra.com/whylefta.htm) → Ex–Orthodox Jew (http://eclecticsatyr.hostultra.com/ojexp.htm) → Joyful Wiccan (http://eclecticsatyr.hostultra.com/joy.htm).

I hope that helps. :smile: Feel free to ask questions.

[Durthorin]

Hi Wiccans!

I am working on some stuff for my Theology class right now and I was hoping I could get informal interviews. :smile:

The question I'd like to ask is why have you decided to be a Wiccan? I've heard hints there and there of some of you where atheists and others who were sincere Christians. I'm curious as to why changed. I'm bascially asking for the equivalent of a "personal testimony."

I may quote you in the paper I'm writing. Let me know if you don't want that to happen.

A long story that starts with childhood and progresses. I was raised as what I refer to now as a "social" Christian. That is my family identified as Christian but took little to no actual part in that faith other than perhaps Easter, Christmas and weddings and funerals. It was simply social background noise. Over time and the deaths of certain friends and family my personal beliefs changed from that to agnostic (ie.. there perhaps was something out there but no one could be sure of who, what etc.) to a rather bleak period of personal athism where all I believed in was what I could see, touch etc. I considered even love etc.. to be someones personal illusion. At this time I took up Kendo and martial arts and was introduced to Zen and Taoist philosphy as part of that. Its hard to study any martial art I think without finding yourself when you dig into it facing the religions that supported them. What that did is in a sense awaken in me a realization that we are all spirtual beings. There is a facet of our minds that needs spirtual answers. It was then that I met and started dating my soon to be wife. She was what I would consider a devout Christian. Raised in the church, father was a Deacon.. mother head of the WMU. That sort of thing.. she lived her faith then as now and that called to me. I began attending church with her and while she never pressured me to convert What happened is over time I came to a deeper understanding of being a Christian and accepted Christ as my savior. Was it a valid experiance? Some here would argue that having left Christinaity I was never really saved, never really a real Christian. Its an argument I leave to them.. for 8 years I was a devout Christian, teaching Sunday School, witnessings.. etc. But as I dug into my faith as I taught it.. I found things that I could not reconcile with what I felt on a deep level as my realationship to the Divine.

Humorously enough, getting out of the military and as a Police officer I went back to college and met my very first Pagan/Wiccan. I was trying to convert her to the "One true faith" when she made me a deal. She would listen to me, if I listened to her. Which I did. The faith she explained "clicked" so that the more I spoke with her the more I found myself agreeing with her views of the Divine. At the same time I was in the midst of what some would call a crisis of faith and a personal crisis where I could not reconcile Christian teaching on a matter I had to decide with my personal feelings towards a freind who was gay. I could not see her as evil nor the love she and her companion shared as evil. Knowing them both I knew their love was every bit as valid as that love I shared with my wife.

So one evening I found myself outside praying about it and looked up and in a moment that still reminds me of who and what I am calling out to God and Goddess for an answer rather than to the Christian God. The Goddess answered and that answer stilled my troubled heart.. and set me on a course I have now followed for over 20 years. It has enriched my life, guided me and fufilled me in a way my Christian faith never did. It has been my strength in adversity and my blessing in good times. Christians speak of salvation being a life changing experiance. An when I was saved my life changed.. at the same time that life changing experiance is not unique. My life changed again when I took up a Pagan path and I walk it now learning and growing. As both a believer in the Gods and as a Priest. (a job I never asked for but seems to have come to me with age)

Danu Bless, Dur

[Cu Mhorrigan]

Well Im not technically a wiccan but I think I will answer this one anyway,

I grew up roman catholic and at the age of 14 I became a born again christian. I spent ten Plus years of my life trying to find my spiritual path ad even tried to go into the ministry. when that failed and blew up in my face, I left the chruch and wandered about for about two years or so when I started hearing alot about wicca and paganism. I studied for a while and went to my first ritul and Had a blast, this was somethign I have needed in quite some time.
Long story short, I discovered something that worked for me.

[junipersilver]

The question I'd like to ask is why have you decided to be a Wiccan?

When I was younger I was Christian in a loose sense of the word. Meaning...I thought that I was, but didn't really understand what being a Christian meant other than being nice to people and loving God. When I was about 13, I started to read the bible for the first time & found out that it couldn't be what I believed. I had a Bahai friend & read that she would go to hell. She was and still is the sweetest person I've ever met. A year later I figured out that I was bi, so I would go to hell too, but I couldn't see being bi as a bad thing(or at least not hell worthy).

For about 2 years, if someone asked I was a Christian, but I no longer really felt like one. I was interested in studying different religions & read a lot about Wicca. One day someone I knew mentioned Wicca in a brief way & it just clicked that I was Wiccan. That was really how I'd been living & feeling for the last 2 years, I just hadn't put the words to it.

Since then, I've been practicing Wicca for 2 extra years, but I don't belong to a coven or know anyone else who is Wiccan.

[tmancour]

The question I'd like to ask is why have you decided to be a Wiccan?
I may quote you in the paper I'm writing. Let me know if you don't want that to happen.


You may quote me at length.

I was raised Wonderbread Protestant (Luthern) and attended all of the requisite youth-group camp outs, beach trips, lock-ins, etc. While the bible was not pushed particularly hard, nor were we a terribly evangelical church, I did have a definate unease about the Church. It peaked with a spiritual crisis in 9th grade.

We attended a week-long confirmation camp at Lutheridge, a beautiful camp in the North Carolina Great Smoky mountains. Utterly spectacular scenery, got up early every morning, sang all the time, prayed a lot, had bad camp food, went to bed late, had two "Midnight lessons" where they wake you up in the middle of the night and preach to you while you're half asleep. The trip culminated with a great outing to Slippery Rock, a mountaintop picnic with real KFC (after a week of camp food, it tasted like ambrosia) and a screening of Jesus Christ Superstar (which remains one of my favorite operas). A late-night Saturday dance and one golden hour of unsupervised flirtation allowed us to get to know Lutherns of the opposite sex just enough to keep us frustrated. Then one last service, more singing, and back to civilization.

I had a great time, was full of God, and even considered attending seminary -- God was so swell.

While I was going through this, I chanced upon a book in the school library called Moonstruck, an insider's account of the rise of the Unification Church in America ("The Moonies") which detailed the brain-washing techniques used to accrue followers. As I checked off each technique -- constant signing, praying, sleep deprivation, bad food followed by good food, sex segregation followed by brief opportunities for flirtation, etc. I realized that the techniques were essentially the same regimen as I had undergone at Lutheridge.

That disturbed me. If Christianity was "The Truth", why would any church, even one so middle-of-the-road as Luthernism, feel it necessary to brainwash people into believing? I took the question to my Pastor, who was pretty cool about it. We discussed my concerns, and he indicated that I would probably not stay in the church very long as I conducted my search for meaning -- but he told me there was always a place there for me.

About the same time I was reading Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, which delves into the subject of human religion in depth. Of course it is partial satire, but for all of that it still had several compelling and thought-provoking points. I set out to read the Bible, then several versions of the Bible, then the Torah, Koran, etc. By High School I was completely disillusioned with the hypocrisy of the Church.

By the time I was 16 I was into Fantasy Role Playing (Think D&D, although we were far beyond that) and, like a bad Evangelical tract, one of my fellow gamers offered to teach me magick. From magick we went into the basics of Wicca, and before I was 18 we had formed a coven that lasted over three years -- pretty long for a coven, actually.

The seminal experience that really got me fired up came in a guided group meditation which, for me, spiraled out of control into a full-blown mystical experience. Sure, we had talked about the Goddess before, but at that Circle she essentially came down and sat in my lap. I lapsed into a trance and stayed there long after the circle was banished. The Goddess in question (I discovered later it was Brighid) asked me many questions and ended up giving me three tests. As I concluded each test I became more and more involved, mentally, spiritually, and intellectually, in the power of a manifest Goddess. The feminine divine principal was something completely alien to me from my upbringing, and when confronted with it fully for the first time I realized that this was the piece that was missing from the Abrahamic faiths: they had banished the Goddess, and were therefore cut off from her eternal compassion. Goddess wasn't just Jehovah in drag, but a seperate and equally important spiritual principal. After the third test, which involved a vision quest on the other side of the continent in the great forests of the Pacific Northwest, I knew: I had come home.

I went to college about that time determined to get an education (not a job) so I studied Religious Studies and focused on Psychology of Religion. Mirciea Eliade's Varieties of Religious Experience was an eye-opener, and as I continued my collegiate career my magickal education also continued under a few very good teachers. I also sparred with "pit preachers", seminary students bussed in from the local Baptist college. This was back before being a Wiccan was "cool".

Between my profound religious experience and my conclusion that Christianity was an inherently unhealthy, doomed and dying religion, the choice to commit myself to the Goddess and her newly-rediscovered religion was an easy one. Every difficulty I came to melted before me. Sure, I had problems -- who doesn't? But the Goddess showed my that with introspection, meditation, a commitment to the Path of Wisdom, and a determination to follow my Divine Will that all ways were open to me.

It is interesting to note that one of the pre-seminary students at school had declared that by the time I was 35 I would be a drug-crazed satan-worshipping personal and professional failure unless I turned my life over to Jee-Zus. He didn't just guess this, he prophesied it. We ran into each other last year (when I was 36) and he looked me up and down, asked about my life, and asked if I had given up the lies of the devil and found Christ.

No, I hadn't, and I actually had an even stronger commitment to the Goddess. I reminded him of his prophesy, then proceeded to tell him how I had published a book before I graduated college, had it hit the NYT Best Sellers' list, how I had continued to plough a straight furrow into professional success. He asked about my personal life: was I miserable and single? No, I countered, I married a wonderful woman who, while she didn't share my religion, nonetheless supported me in it and allowed me to raise my (two at the time) kids as Goddess-worshipping, spellcasting little Pagans. Not only that, I had a good job, owned my own home, was an upstanding member of the community, had run (and lost -- hey, I'm a Libertarian, it's kind of expected) for state office, and was now ordained as a pagan priest who could (and does) perform marriages.

He, on the other hand, was on his second divorce, living in a student slum, and was spending all of his time preaching when he wasn't delivering pizza. The Lord Moves in Mysterious Ways.

Further religious experiences contributed to my continued commitment to the religion and the Gods. I won't detail them here, as they are of interest only to me.

Hope it helps,

Arion the Blue
High Druid of Durham

[bar Jonah]

Does this apply to me, as a former Wiccan myself? Just curious.