In what other ways do you practice your spirituality?

I've learned to have a whole "toolbox" full of techniques and then use the ones that are most effective.

In general, I practice my spirituality through my learnings of the Hawaiian ways of thinking (Huna) and some Native American techniques. There are a number of other belief systems that I've "picked and chosen" from such as Buddhism, Seekism, Judaism and many other "-isms".

I have found that the most effective, practical tools for me are: different ways of praying (sand prayers, rituals, chanting, focused attention/hypnosis/meditation) and listening to god (different symbology methods which include dream interpretation, animal symbology, tarot, numerology).

What are some points of Genesis where you disagree with the bishops?

Well, when I was a teen, instead of partying and getting stoned, I would hide in a corner of the library and read interesting books, such that by the age of 16 I have a fair grasp on the development of human society starting from the cavemen, and to me what made the most sense was to understand Genesis as a metaphorical tale that was intended more to give people a conceptual foundation without necessarily being exactly accurate in terms of what really happened, because of the level of mentality that people were in at the time, and it boiled down to two things in particular that I thought were strait-out metaphors and/or mistranslations.

The first was the story of Cain and Abel. From what I'd read about what anthropologists and archeologists had dug up from around the middle east, in particular diggings along the green arch, I figured that it was a tale about a battle between the agricultural farmers living between the Tigris and Euphrates versus the goat herders, and not just a battle between Cain who worshiped God(s) with offerings of grain while the herdsmen offered sacrifices of lamb.

I'd learned enough about social organization and population levels and how the climate had been changing after the end of the last ice-age to conclude that at one time the Tigris-Euphrates had been a very nice place to live, but as the ice-caps receded it started to dry out and heat up, such that people started farming and goat herding instead of just hanging out picking pomegranates, and the the farmers, by virtue of being farmers, got much larger populations than the goat herders, and that eventually one day their populations came to a point where, combined with the land drying up and heating up from the glaciers receding, there wasn't room enough for both, so the goat herders and the farmers went to war, and the farmers won because they had larger numbers and were better organized by virtue of having been organized into city-states with leaders, whereas goat herders were still running around as individual bands.

Thus the goat herders headed west, up and over the green arch into the western arm of the green-arch... the Palestine, and had their revelation that although the sons of Cain might have won the Tigris-Euphrates, they got the western arm of the green arch that is/was Palestine.

But the Bishop insisted that the battle between Cain and Abel was between two individual men who were the first two sons of Adam and Eve, and I said that I doubted it, else where did they get wives, and that if one looked at Genesis, a *lot* of the earlier parts of it are concerned with explaining the issue of how the Hebrew were not farmers, they were herdsmen, and how they lived in the harder western arm of the green arch and not the lusher eastern arm around the Tigris-Euphrates, and how it stressed two things: God liked them better for being goat herders, and they got the harsher lands of the Palestinian arm of the green-arch, but it had been given to them by God to be theirs forever... like they were standing on a hill and sticking their tongues out at the farmers of the Tigris-Euphrates who won the war of Cain and Abel... as if to make themselves feel better for being goat-herders who got whooped.

The second issue was about the Tower of Babel. The Bishop said that they were building it to reach to heaven and that construction stopped because of everyone suddenly speaking different languages, and at 16 I said (and still say), hey, at the top of all those zigurats what you find are temples, that a god is supposed to be in, so when Genesis says that they were building it to reach to heaven, that's just a lame translation that's been exaggerated through legendization from it originally being understood that they were building a mountain of stone that would have a temple at the top in which would be living a god.

I then told the Bishop that I thought that probably what happened is that they were being asked to volunteer a lot of labour to build the thing, and that during construction people who wanted to be paid for what they were doing started grumbling that there was no god up there, that it was just a myth and that they wanted to be paid or something, but others still believed there would be a god in the temple that would be built at the top, and so they got into *theological* disputes, and that's what stopped construction of the tower of Babel... because if you look at how slang happens in languages combined with how exact meanings can get confused with translations, it's easy to see how back then the term "what does he speak" is equivalent to "what does he say he believes".

And I told the bishop that... notice how the first time that Genesis finally gets around to the start of the story, which is Abram, who *had* been living in Ur, the land where the Tower of Babel was being built, and that his issue was that he was a monotheist, so much so that he left Ur, and went west up and over the green arch to Palestine...

Therefor, I said to the bishop, the reasons the story of the Tower of Babel is the last Genesis old-fable kind'a story before it finally gets around to talking about Abram, the world's first known monotheist, is because the Tower of Babel was about building a mountain with a temple to gos at the top, and that construction stopped because the workers got into arguments over whether or not there were really going o be gods in the temple at the top when they finished construction, and Abram was on that crew and his idea was that there was one god, and so he was one of those people who left the worksite in protest, thus causing the Tower of Babel to not be built.

But nope... the Bishop insisted that it was all about languages, and not faith.

So I walked out and spent the next two years checking out every other denomination, at the rate of about one per week for two years, so that was almost 100 denominations, which was possible where I lived, because it was the buckle of the Bible belt, and therefore not short of chapels.

What made you chose the Roman Catholic faith above another faith?

I chose this faith because this is where I was able to grow spiritually. I attended other church services and invited to attend other services and I have deep respect for them but I feel at home in the Catholic faith.

Do you ever share your church moments with friends or family, do you enjoy being alone with someone greater than yourself, or both?

Nice pictures.

I like to share church with whomever will join me or listen to my remembrances of the spiritual moments I have had in recent days on weeks. I like to share spiritual moments with my significant other everyday. I also have moments of profound spirituality while I am alone and in meditation.

Prayer is me talking to God, meditation is me listening.

Have you tried any other denominations besides Catholic?