Turned off to religion?

For most people, their approach to spirituality and their understanding of religion are learned phenomena. When they are children, people first learn about religious practices and beliefs from their parents and religious authority figures. For most of their childhood, though, the spiritual aspects of religion remain beyond their comprehension. As people grow into adults, they begin to directly experience the spiritual aspects of life from their religion and form sources other than religion.

People may not hold the same beliefs in adulthood as they held in childhood. As children, we were told what to believe and told not to question our religion. As adults, we acquired the freedom to question and to choose whatever belief system we wanted (even though the religion of our childhood restricts this freedom). Given the choice of "stay or stray," people often stray from the religion of their childhood because the beliefs they held as children are no longer seen to be relevant or valid in adulthood.

Why are people turned off to and turned away from the religion of their childhood?

Changes in one's attitude towards religion play a pivotal role. Many people characterize organized religion as a system that imposes its rules and regulations not only on spiritual beliefs but also on behavior and thought. When children become adults and begin to make their own life decisions, they may also experience the need to change their belief system. If they were raised in a strict religious environment, the change may be seen as a movement away from a system that imposes many rules and restrictions. If they were raised in a liberal religious environment (or in none at all), the change may be seen as movement towards a system that imposes few rules and restrictions.

The sad fact is that sometimes religion gets in the way of being closer to God rather than facilitating it as it should

Random musings

We are but a blade of grass in an endless lawn. A sapling in a forest. A pebble on the beach. We are an indelible part of nature..and yet we are thrust further and further away from nature by the confines of our environment, by the buildings, by the homes, by the institutions of our society. To the point of where we can no longer see our connection with the rest of the world. To the point of where we are separated from nature: from God's creation. Wherein we live among the cities, all we see are Man's creations. We hear the sound of construction, of cars and busses, we smell their exhausts and the fumes from factories. How can we listen to our own inner voices when we cannot even hear the voices outside us?

Life scripts

What makes a movie different from, let's say, a live, random news report, is that the events are scripted to occur in a meaningful, if not predictable way. Not only are they scripted, but the action occurs under the direction of someone outside it. To the untrained eye, the news report and a filmed dramatization of it may look the same. However, if you know what to look for, you can spot which is real and which is a scripted reconstruction.

The same is true for evaluating the events in one's life. If you approach them with the idea that at least some were scripted to happen, then you can look for the clues that identify them as nonrandom events. The key feature of a random event is that it has no relationship to events preceding it or to events following it. When you can begin to see patterns and relationships among the events in your life, then you are on the right track.

Rarest particle on Earth found after 10 year search

RAREST PARTICLE DECAY SEEN AT BROOKHAVEN LAB

UPTON, NY -- After ten years of searching, an international collaboration of physicists working at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) believes it has seen the rarest decay of a subatomic particle ever detected.

The phenomenon is thought to happen only once or twice in every 10 billion self-destructions of an unstable particle known as a kaon. Instead of producing the usual breakdown products seen when a kaon decays, the rare kaon decay, as it is called, is thought to have released a positively charged pi meson, a neutrino and an anti-neutrino.

Not only is the proccess rare, it is also extremely elusive. The scientists report that to see even one such event using the most sensitive equipment at BNL's Alternating Gradient Synchrotron accelerator, they had to sift through one trillion ordinary decays to achieve the one-in-ten-billion level of sensitivity required.

The team, made up of 50 researchers from Brookhaven, Canada's TRIUMF laboratory and University of Alberta, Japan's KEK laboratory and Osaka University, and Princeton University, describes its findings in a paper in the September 22 issue of Physical Review Letters.

The spotting of the rare kaon decay sheds new light on the universe's most elemental forces and most basic building blocks, as explained by the extraordinarily successful theory of subatomic particles known as the Standard Model. It may also suggest new phenomena that cannot be explained by the Standard Model
.
Rare, But Important

Because of its highly unusual nature, the knowledge gained in studying this decay is expected to be exceptionally important to particle physicists."This is a phenomenon that physicists have been looking for since the 1960s, but that nobody knew for sure we would see," said Douglas Bryman of TRIUMF, one of three co-spokesmen for the collaboration, which is known as E787. "Now, after years of searching, we believe we have seen it."

Added co-spokesman and Brookhaven physicist Laurence Littenberg, "From here, it is up to us and others to test that belief through further exploration and experimentation. We plan to collect and analyze ten times more data in order to gauge its consistency with the Standard Model, and to test the possibility that the event we've seen could even involve entirely new particles or forces."The usual decays (and similar interactions) seen in particles and in radioactive atomic nuclei occur by the transmission of one massive W or Z boson, which are carriers of the weak force in the same way that the particle form of light, known as photons, carries the electromagnetic force.

The Standard Model predicts that the decay of a kaon to a pi meson and a neutrino pair sometimes involves the momentary creation of both a charged W boson and a neutral Z boson (which itself instantly decays into the two neutrinos), rather than the more easily produced exchange of a single W or Z. It can also involve the recently discovered massive top quark, and thus give a window into the relation between that exotic object and the normal quarks which make up our everyday world.

Understanding such complex forms of decay is especially important to physicists attempting to learn how matter behaves at the most fundamental level. The one-in-ten-billion probability of a kaon decaying to a pi meson and a neutrino pair is a remarkable prediction of the Standard Model and one that the experimenters set out to test.

Catching A Shooting Star

Finding the rare kaon decay required an accelerator powerful enough to produce kaons in vast numbers, making BNL's AGS an appropriate choice. Recent upgrades there made the accelerator capable of producing the world's most intense kaon beam.

But equally important was the team's array of detectors sensitive enough to catch the particle equivalent of a shooting star: Kaons last only about 12 billionths of a second before decaying, and they can decay a multitude of different ways, creating showers of particles that can only be seen with specialized equipment.

So, to catch a fleeting pi meson, the E787 team, led by Bryman, Littenberg and A.J. Stewart Smith of Princeton, in 1995 built a new "catcher's mitt," located in a strong magnetic field and made up of sophisticated particle detectors used to measure as much as possible about each pi meson that passed by. These detectors included scintillating fibers, a tracking chamber and several other devices used to determine the energy and momentum of the pi meson and to observe its characteristic decay into other particles.

The improved equipment increased the chances of seeing a rare decay if it occurred, and vastly reduced the chances of confusing it with other phenomena that send out nearly the same signal but happen billions of times more often.

"The experiment's state-of-the-art apparatus is sensitive enough to examine one million decays per second," said Littenberg. "We collected thousands of gigabytes of data, and out of all that data, we saw one event that was completely unexplainable except by the rare kaon decay we were searching for."

A Nod to the Past, a Glimpse of the Future

The discovery ties in to both past and future research at BNL's accelerators.

"It's especially fitting we should see this phenomenon at the AGS, since kaon decays have figured centrally in past important discoveries there," said Bryman. "The most notable example, of course, is the work on CP-violation that won the 1980 Nobel Prize for James Cronin and Val Fitch. That discovery, which among other things may help explain why there's more matter than antimatter in the universe, was an unanticipated rare kaon reaction which had a revolutionary impact."

And, he added, the E787 collaboration plans to continue the present study of rare kaon decays for the next several years, even after the AGS becomes the injector for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) when it
begins operations in 1999.

There are also plans to study the closely related decay of the long-lived neutral kaon into a neutral pi meson and a pair of neutrinos, a process that may offer the single best window into the still-mysterious phenomenon of CP-violation.

RARE KAON DECAY GRAPHICS A pi meson travels swiftly through the detectors in the E787 experiment at BNL's Alternating Gradient Synchrotron after another particle, called a kaon (red striped squares), spontaneously decays. The pi emerges from the stopping target (its path is shown by the blue squares) and enters the detector's central drift chamber (the small circles in the drift chamber are tangent to the path of the pion). It then penetrates the range stack, an array of scintillators (excited ones shown as blue rectangles) and chambers and loses energy until it stops. The signal in the scintillator where it stops is shown at the top right. The double pulse is characteristic of a pion. After examining 1.5 trillion events, the E787 collaboration found the pictured decay in which a pion is completely unaccompanied by other detectable particles, an important find for physics.

Members of the E787 collaboration at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Alternating Gradient Synchrotron pose in front of their apparatus, which allowed them to spot the rarest particle phenomenon ever seen.

When it comes to probability, bigger IS better!

The odds of the Earth and all its life being created by chance alone is a gadzillion to one.

Wow. All those hundreds of zeroes to the right of the decimal point. With such an incredibly small probability of this world occurring by chance, how could anyone not see that it just has to be the work of an Intelligent Designer...or even God!

Wow. How wrong can anyone be? Unless there are two, and only two, mutually exclusive causes for a phenomenon, one cannot know anything about the odds of one causative agent simply by knowing the odds of another causative agent. What's more, if given the choice between being the causative agent by virtue of another causative agent being extremely unlikely, and being the causative agent by virtue of having an enormously large likelihood, which one would God choose to be?

Does God want to be thought of as "The Only Explanation for All Things Unknown?" or "The Most Ubiquitous Explanation for All Things Known and Unknown?" If I had to choose, I would pick the latter. I doubt if God wants to be seen as the last alternative after Science has failed to provide a "Theory of Everything" mainly because Science is still trying to do so and because God already has His own theory of everything.

The "Science cannot explain this, so it must be God" premise is one of exclusion. It is the premise of last resort. To be sure, Science and God are not involved in any turf wars: Science has its own methods and God has His own methods. Sceintists seek truth through experimentation, but experimentation can also be used to seek God's truth as well. Gideon used experimentation:

(Judges 6:36-40)

36 Gideon said to God, "If you will save Israel by my hand as you have promised- 37 look, I will place a wool fleece on the threshing floor. If there is dew only on the fleece and all the ground is dry, then I will know that you will save Israel by my hand, as you said." 38 And that is what happened. Gideon rose early the next day; he squeezed the fleece and wrung out the dew—a bowlful of water.

39 Then Gideon said to God, "Do not be angry with me. Let me make just one more request. Allow me one more test with the fleece. This time make the fleece dry and the ground covered with dew." 40 That night God did so. Only the fleece was dry; all the ground was covered with dew.

That, my friends, is an example of an experimental design called a "reversal design" whereby the conditions of the experiment in the first trial are reversed for the second trial. Here is a perfect, scientific experiment used to test God's will that was conducted more than 2,200 years ago!

My question is, "If Gideon could do it, then what about me?"

I am a scientist. I know how to conduct experiments. I am also a believer in the God of Israel, but not by experimentation, per se. Meaning, I have done my own experiments, but only as a way to confirm what I already believed to be true. Can scientific experiments be used to prove God's existence? If by "prove," we mean "demonstrate according to some preset statistical criteria," then, the answer is "Yes." Remember that Science does not "prove" anything in the sense that it removes all shadows of a doubt. There is always room for doubt.

What I intend on doing is showing that God is not a God by exclusion but a God of inclusion...that God is not just the answer when none is available, but that God is the most likely answer when others are available. Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am." Is there anyone who would deprive God of the ability to think? Did Descartes say that he exists because none have proven that he does not? In other words, let's put God on the same footing as Man if we are to use the same criteria.

Adam & Eve: a new twist on an old story

The story of Genesis, of Bereshit, has always fascinated me even from the time I was old enough to read. At eight years old, I was very much into astronomy and cosmology. So, reading about the creation of the Universe as told in the Torah came naturally to me.

However, I did not have as much interest in the story of Adamah and Heva, or Adam and Eve until I reached my later early adult years when my interest in male-female relationships increased.

The story, as I understood it as a child, bothered me for a long time. I felt like Adam was set up by God…that God had given him a test God knew he would fail. What puzzled me was that if Adam had no t eaten from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, then how could he know he was doing something evil? You see, I equated the knowledge of “good” and “evil” as being the same thing as knowing right from wrong.

Later on, I understood that the two are not the same. I do not have to touch a hot stove to know not to touch it. Likewise, I do not have to desire to know evil to realize that it is wrong. The desire to know evil is wrong not only because God tells us to avoid it, but also because there are consequences involved. To often people are unaware of the consequences of evil until after they have engaged in it.

From the very beginning, God made it clear to Adam that there would be consequences for the desire to know evil.

Like most people who first heard the story, I was taught that Adam was created form the ground and that Eve was created from Adam’s rib. About five years ago, I started reading read commentary on this story by Rashi and others, such as the Arizal, What I learned was that a literal translation of the Hebrew says that Eve came from Adam’s side. It does not specifically say, rib. In other words, Adam and Eve were attached to each other – either at the sides like Siamese Twins or back to back. Further reading seems to point to Adam and Eve being attached back to back. He looks at Adam and declares, "It is not good for man to be alone I will create an ezer k'negdo." The word ezer means helper, and the word k'negdo takes on various explanations, each defining the role of woman in completing and perfecting creation.
Simply put, the word k'negdo means opposite him. It can even mean against him. Rashi quotes the Talmud that explains that there is no middle ground in relationships. If one merits than the spouse is a helper; and if one does not merit, then the spouse is a k'negdo, against him.
The passage says that Eve was created to be against Adam, or literally to face him This is what you’d expect if she originally was behind him. Eve was created to be Adam’s counterpart in everything.

It raises a very interesting idea. If Eve and Adam were actually physically joined, how is it that neither them were aware of the other. The reason is because Adam and Eve were one single entity. Adam was a newly created being and was just beginning to learn about himself. This is not hard to understand. How difficult is it for us – beings of a single gender – to understand ourselves?
Adam was a perfect human being with both masculine and feminine qualities in equal abundance.

In Bereshit 1:27 it says, “And G-d created man in His own image, in the image of G-d created He him; male and female created He them.” Therefore, in the beginning, men and women were one. However, even the most complete human being still requires companionship. Even the most perfect man still needs to have the love of a woman. I know I do.

Adam was lonely and so God separated Eve from him to be his bashert – his soulmate.

However, there were consequences of splitting them apart. In splitting Eve from Adam, the male and female abilities of humans and their respective souls that once totally integrated and enmeshed were now divided. Together as one entity, both male and female sides complimented each other and worked in concert. By being split apart, they became vulnerable – mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

Once totally connected at the back, now Adam and Eve would have to learn how to reconnect to each other emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.

Adam and Eve existed on both a spiritual plane of existence and a physical one as well. Essentially, they were in two places at the same time. Some Torah scholars describe Adam and Eve as literally walking with their heads in the clouds. Before the Fall, that is where their minds and souls spent nearly all of their time.

The one thing that did not exist on the spiritual plane but did exist on the physical plane was the end of existence, or, as we commonly call it, Death. Adam and Eve as primarily spiritual beings had no knowledge of death. They were unaware of death. They were unaware of nakedness.

When Eve was separated from Adam, Adam recognized that she was “bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh,” There was instant chemistry. He immediately recognized the physical connection between himself and Eve – however, he failed to see the spiritual connection between them (or the necessity of having a spiritual connection) – that would come later.
I have to believe that when Adam first saw Eve, what he experienced was love at first sight. Remember how you felt with your first love. It felt all consuming. The desire to find and to bond with someone of the opposite sex is so powerful that even the Torah makes special mention of it:

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh. (Bereshit 2:24)

Originally, a man and a women were of one flesh. Now that they are separate, they yearn to be one again.

Adam and Eve were in love. They were inseparable. Wherever Adam went, Eve went, and wherever Eve went Adam went. Whatever Adam did, Eve did, and whatever Eve did, Adam did. That is why Adam ate what Eve ate because the two of them were inseparable. But, more than that, it is because Adam so loved Eve that he could not stand to be without her. He could not and would not allow her to suffer, all by herself, the consequences of her actions. I will explain why.

For, you see, at the moment Eve ate from the Tree, she fell away from Adam – she disappeared from the spiritual plane of existence. She became mortal. Adam then realized that the only way he could stay with Eve, the only way that he could be where she was now would be to eat from the Tree.

Before eating from the Tree, evil existed outside of our bodies. Evil and the yetzer hara (the evil inclination, or the desire to do evil) existed outside of Adam and Eve. When they brought the fruit into their mouths, evil entered into their minds and hearts as well.

Adam mistakenly thought that he would be strong enough to withstand the effects of evil. He thought he could withstand the yetzer hara all by himself – without God’s assistance. God knew though that Adam was not ready to handle evil and that is why God prohibited Adam from eating from the Tree.

However Adam was not able to withstand the effects of evil and neither are people today. How often do people make the same mistake as Adam…thinking that we are strong enough to withstand the powers of sin without the help of God? Every day we do battle with our evil inclination that tries to lure us into sin – whether it is as subtle as talking gossip or as unthinkable as committing murder. The reason we have addictions to alcohol, drugs, gambling, and pornography even the Internet, is because we are not strong enough to handle it by ourselves.

The consequence of eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was that Adam and Eve became mortal. Death was not a punishment, but the result of becoming mortal.
Adam was not punished because he harkened unto the voice of his wife (as it says in Bereshit 3:17) but because he spoke as his wife had spoken; that is, to refuse to accept responsibility, to obscure the truth, to blame others for his own transgressions, and to deny the good that God had done for him by bringing Eve to him.

When God asked Adam, "Where are you," God was not asking Adam where he was physically. He was asking Adam where he was spiritually. Adam had disappeared from the spiritual plane of existence. Adam's body had gone from being a body of light to one of naked skin. Adam experienced shame not only for disobeying God but also for desiring to do evil.

And as is usually the case, the cover-up is worse than the crime.

When God asked Adam, “What is that you have done? Have you eaten from the tree which I commanded you not to?“ God was giving Adam a chance to make amends. This was the perfect time for Adam to come clean. Had Adam admitted responsibility and made tshuvah, repented his wrongdoing, God would have forgiven him and allowed him and Eve to stay in the garden.

Instead he did not accept responsibility, he was not contrite, he did not repent or ask for forgiveness, he made up lame excuses for his behavior, and he blamed his wife and God for his own failures.

Think about our society. So many people think of themselves as being a victim. People are quick to blame parents, teachers, and bosses, everyone else except themselves. Do you remember the boy who was acquitted of murder because he claimed that playing violent video games was responsible? The lack of responsibility for oneself is the biggest downfall in society. And the tendency to blame everyone else is pervasive in every facet of society.

Adam’s eating of the Tree created more than his separation from the spiritual plane. It caused more than his separation from God. It also caused a separation between him and Eve – the woman that he loved. “Straight is the way and narrow is the path” that leads to God, and the only way that a man and a woman can stay on that path together is for them to be spiritually in sync. When Adam was created, he and Eve were together both physically and spiritually. As a consequence of becoming physically separate, their spiritual connection was compromised. It was easy for Adam to recognize the physical attraction he had to Eve. What he failed to recognize was just how important was their spiritual connection and how important re-establishing that connection would be.

Had they remained as a single entity, they would never have succumbed to the lies of the Serpent. Had they waited until Shabbat, they would have been reunited spiritually and that spiritual connection would have made them able to ignore the physical world and to turn a deaf ear to the Serpent.

But they had not been fully reunited. They were still vulnerable, spiritually and emotionally. They were not on the same page. And, they did not realize what would happen to them if they tried to go their own way.

I believe that Eve was jealous of Adam's relationship with God. She was envious of the amount of time that Adam spent with God. It was her envy that the Serpent used to entice her. If the situation were reversed; that is, if Eve were the one who had the primary relationship with God more than likely Adam would be envious of Eve as well.

Eve was also testing Adam by eating the fruit. She was testing him to see just how much he loved her. Would he disobey God for her? She wanted to be the most important thing in Adam's life. It is not hard to understand her motivation. When people who are immature fall in love they can become very jealous and possessive. They do not like to be apart from one another and demand more and more of each other’s time. Adam and Eve were immature.

The Serpent convinced Eve that if she took the fruit from the tree, that she would be like a god. Eve did not want to have the power of God, but she did want to take Adam's attention away from God. What happened was a reversal of fortune. God said to Eve, "Because you have done this, all of your desire will be directed towards your husband and he will rule for you." Instead of all of Adam’s attention being directed to Eve, all of Eve's attention would now be directed towards Adam.

In the end, Eve did become God-like in her capacity to create life through childbirth. A woman's innate desire to have children is the strongest one she has, and it is that desire to have children over which her husband has dominion. Do not interpret that to mean, “control.” By making Adam the focus of Eve's attention, God intent was to underscore the importance of a husband and wife working together to fulfill God’s purpose for them.

While the relationship that a husband has with his wife is very important, it should not take precedence over his relationship with God. Likewise the love a man has for a woman is not the same love that a man has for God – even though the two are similar in nature. Eve should have realized that the love and attention Adam gave to God and that God gave to Adam took nothing away from their relationship or from the relationship that God wanted to have with her.

In other words, Eve had no reason to be jealous or envious.

In an ideal marriage, there is a love triangle: the husband loves his wife, the wife loves her husband, and both of them love God just as God loves both of them equally. Even when there was a breakdown in this love triangle, when Adam and Eve looked to blame each other, God never lost his faith in them, or his trust in them, or his love for them.

Sin is all about allowing evil to enter into our lives. Sin is about walking down the wrong path. Because when we do, when we allow evil to enter our lives, it turns us against our spouses, our families, our children, our friends, our neighbors, and ultimately ourselves and G-d. What Adam and Eve lost in the Garden was more than their innocence. They lost more than their immortality. The most precious thing they lost was the unconditional love relationship that they had with each other and with God.

That is what the desire to know evil took away from them.

But, what they did gain from acquiring all that knowledge was that they can turn away from evil, that they can learn to rebuild the love and trust for each other again, that they can create new life and new beginnings, that they can reconnect on a physical and spiritual level if, and only if they keep their priorities straight – by keeping God at the top of that triangle, by making God the most important thing in their life with their spouse 2nd (or their kids 2nd followed by their spouse) and then themselves last. Not the way it usually is with “Me first.”

And to never again lose sight of which way the path to righteousness leads and what it takes to really walk together on that path and work together as equal partners in Life.

For that is the way G-d intended man and woman to be. For its only when man and woman are both on the same page spiritually and both understand what God requires of them, both individually and collectively, that the way back to Eden can be found.

Introduction

This book has both an unlikely beginning and a logicial one. I never intended on writing a book on spirituality, or, if I did, I never intended on sharing it with the rest of the world. For most of my life, I perceived spirituality as a very personal matter. One of the reasons for my sensitivity on individual spirituality stems from having been in situations where other's conception of spirituality was thrust in my face. Being Jewish, I have come to know what religious intolerance meant both from learning about the history of my people and from first-hand encounters with Anti-Semitic individuals.

Although I always thought of myself as being spiritual, I never considered myself to be a very religious person, Jewish or otherwise. I admit that there were times in my life (in my thirties) when I really saw no need for religion or for being spiritual. This was the prevailing viewpoint of the friends I had at the time. I viewed people who were very religious or outwardly spiritual as eccentric. All that was to change, however, when I came to acquire friends who were more religious and more spiritual than I ever imagined I could be -- or want to be.

I still came to view what my friends said with a jaundiced eye; but, because of our friendship, I became more accepting of their points of view. Even though I began to see how their set of beliefs worked for them, I still did not see how their beliefs could work for me. I was willing to listen to what they told me, but I still felt that they should stick to their religion and I would stick to mine. I did not see any reason to change what I believed or to change my approach to spirituality. I felt that religion and spirituality were really different things.
Little was I to know that this distinction would actually lead me to a deeper understanding of both spirituality and religion.

Traumatic events often cause people to acutely focus on the purpose and meaning of their lives. Traumatic events disrupt our continuity of life and thereby, force us (or challenge us) to change the way we look at the world and ourselves. In my life, there were two traumatic events that had that effect: one, the end of my job, and two the end of my marriage. They did not, however, occur at the same point in time. The loss of the job came first.

This was not the first time I had lost a job, but it was the first time I could not regain one. I became self-employed not by choice but by circumstance. What I lacked in income during my four years of self-employment (and underemployment), I made up for in introspection. The extra time on my hands were spent in thinking about myself and in writing about my abilities. I began to write and what was to become my first attempt at a book. However, it had nothing to do with spirituality. The subject of the book was on how we learn.

I was writing about how much our learning behavior is influenced by our attitudes, and, conversely, how much our attitudes are influenced by what we learn. At first, it seems like a "chicken and egg" phenomenon; i.e., which comes first, "attitude or learning?" What I concluded is that the meaning we attach to what we learn determines our behavior. In other words, it is not what we learn but how we use what we learn and how we reflect upon it.
How does this relate to the search for spirituality?

For many people, their approach to spirituality and their understanding of spirituality is very much a learned phenomenon. They first learn about God and the Bible from their parents. Then, they learn it from their Religious School teachers. When they are young, most of what they come to know about spirituality is learned from others. As people get older, they come to know about spirituality directly from their own experience. What we learn and how we learn affects how we interpret it later on in life.

People may not hold the same beliefs as adults as they held in childhood. When they were children, they were told that certain things are the way they are and children were not encouraged to question them. As adults, we naturally question everything, yet, for some, there are still prohibitions against questioning religious beliefs. For others, however, the religious beliefs that they may have held in childhood no longer have the same validity for them as adults. It is not that they are down on spirituality; rather, they are down on organized religion.
Why is it that people are turned off to or turn away from organized religion and primarily from the religion of their childhood?

Here again, changes in attitude play a pivotal role. For many, organized religion was synonymous with rules and restrictions: restrictions not only in behavior, but also in the exercize of free thought. I was raised in a fairly non-religious environment. I really did not experience many rules and restrictions. Some of my non-Jewish friends, however, were raised in strict religious environments where guilt and the fear of damnation were part and parcel to accepting their faith. It was, “Believe or else.” Other friends of mine were raised in fairly liberal environments like mine.

When they grew up and began to make life decisions for themselves, two things happened. For those raised in strict religions, there was a rebellion in opposition to what they were taught.