A glimpse of my scrupulosity.

This is a very personal blog post. I ask for your understanding and consideration when reading it. Feel free to comment but stand by the principal of "If you have nothing nice to say then say nothing at all".

The problems that scupulosity poses to me.

On one hand, I have my longstanding,  wooly beliefs, my runes, my fondness of heathenist teachings, eastern mysticism and my tattoos.

On the other hand, I love churches, find christianity fascinating, and have a strong desire to share in the positive aspects of it.

Were I not someone who suffered from Scrupulosity as part of their OCD then I would probably find it easy to move between one and the other, maybe even follow this new direction my spiritual path is showing me.

But I am, so I can't.

I did try, in fact have tried on numerous occasions, but I get stuck.

You see there comes a point where, when following the new direction of the path you kind of need to make your mind up about a few things, this leads to conflicts between my two hands and leads to this cyclical wandering which I have been doing for well over 10 years.

So what are these things, these conflicts?

A few examples:
- is there one God or many Gods?
- is one religion right and all the others wrong? Can I belong to a monothiest religion and live with what it teaches about those who do not follow it?
- are people who don't follow a particular set of rules damn to eternal hell without hope of redemption by a loving aspect of the divine?
- if I were to get baptised would I be selling out?
- As someone who practices divination how can I profess one faith when knowingly breaking it's rules?
- How can I condemn something like rune casting when it is something that I do, something that helps people and something that has, for me and others, worked - really work.
- How can I become a christian when I disagree with so many of the instructions in the bible.
- By the same token how can I profess to be "pagan" or "heathen" when, despite having consulted my runes a few days before, I was walking to the theatre to have my operation I was praying to one god, the way that when as I child and as far as I knew there was only one god.
- I am not comfortable to taking any step that would then require me to brand my previous actions/beliefs to have been wrong. They weren't wrong because they were right at the time.

You get the idea.

If I go one way, then I feel like I am closing my mind.

If I go the other way then I feel like I am turning my back on what is a big part of who I am.

I have tried athiesm but that is way to bleak for me.

In fact the afterlife plays a big part in my personal view. You see for as long as I have had an opinion on the existence on "heaven", "afterlife", "valhalla", "paradise", that all but the most evil of souls go there.

With all my concious I cannot bring myself to believe that the criteria for entry into "heaven" (replace it with whatever term you prefer) would be so strict as to restrict it to a very small percentage of the people alive (and that have lived, or will ever lived) - good people as well, people who do so little wrong in their lives but don't quite meet the required criteria.

How can that be?

If that is the way it is then I won't get in.

I don't want to get in.

In fact when I get to the gates, if that's the case, then I'll turn round or chain myself to the railings rather than go in.

But I do want to go to same place as my grandparents, friends and other family that have gone before me. I want that more than anything, that is all that matters to me when it comes to considering my faith.

As it stands I make a crummy heathen, a rubbish christian, an overly motivated agnostic but quite an efficient tortured soul.

So there you are, a glimpse of the inside of my head.