The Different Religious Beliefs - Assignment Example

Sarahs Story Sarah is 42 years old, she is a housewife from Alabama; Sarah raises two children together with her husband Mike. Sarah has been raised in Protestant family, so until now she been confessing Presbyterianism. Her religion faith is deep but she doesnt follow all the basic rituals of her religion, even though her family does. The very first thing that I noticed about Sarah was that she didn’t seem like that kind of Protestants who like to talk about their religion concerning every topic in a conversation. When I asked her about her religious beliefs, she noted that she didn’t consider herself as a religious person, because she believed that religion and church were secondary things and her faith was the most important for her. However, she called herself Presbyterian, as she has been raised in this religion confession by her parents and just got used to identify herself with it. Presbyterian Church is one of the most numerous Protestant confessions on the territory of the United States. Alabama State, where Sarah lives with her family, is mostly inhabited by Protestants and Presbyterian Church commands a large part of protestant population of the state (Balmer & Winner 290). When we started talking about the religion itself Sarah said that there was a time when she considered changing her religion into Catholicism, because it seemed to her that a religion should bring discipline and she believed that it must have more rituals and religious traditions. However, in some time she realized that the main advantage of her religion was that it didn’t require any mediums and even didn’t require attending church in order to connect with the Lord. Presbyterian Church has two main ritual ceremonies which are the ceremony of Christianizing and the blessed ordinance (Balmer & Winner 290). Sarah was Christianized when she turned 21, as according to her church tradition, each parishioner should come to Jesus by oneself and the ceremony is supposed to symbolize start of the relationships between the Lord and a person. Thus when she was 21 years old Sarah realized that she was ready to establish these relationships and that she was absolutely sure about the fact that her faith was not going to be changed ever. Concerning the roots of her faith Sarah is considered to have very typical for Protestantism beliefs about God and His place in her life. She believes that her faith is guided by Holy Bible and that what is written there is the absolute truth. Whenever Sarah doesn’t know what to do in any situation of her life, she worships and asks God’s advice. She claims that she always had right answers to all of her questions and she found them in Bible by just random reading of the book. Sarah believes that her faith is her direct connection with the Lord and that Jesus supports her in all of her actions and He is always present in her life, because she feels like her life is going on under His guidance. During our conversation about her faith Sarah suddenly remembered a situation that happened to her when she was a teenager. She was swimming in the ocean and had a foot cramp, so she couldn’t move in the cold water. She started drowning. But then she felt like something was carrying her to the shore, like it was some sort of metaphysical force that saved her. Since that very moment Sarah now realizes that God is good and that he is constantly observing her life and cares about her. Sarah believes that her relationships with God are very special and personal, so her assumptions about the role of Church in her life are rather contradictory. Thus one of the most interesting of her assumptions about the Church is that she claims that there is no need for her to attend church in order to communicate with God. The only religious ceremony she had in her life was the ceremony of Christianizing, after which she has attended church for a couple of times. However, her husband visits it on regular basis. Sarah thinks that a remarkable feature of Protestant churches is that a person who attends them feels some sort of God’s presence and feeling of community. Protestants like singing worship songs and dancing during their meetings (Balmer & Winner 290). Though, Sarah doesn’t like all these kinds of activities, because she claims that she doesn’t need to sing songs in order to tell the Lord how she loves him. She also argues against usage of icons and different images of the saints, because she doesn’t believe they exist. Sarah thinks that the people who are considered to be “saint” personalities are just those who managed to establish their personal relationships with Jesus, so He started helping them to find the right paths of their lives. Sarah believes that living under God’s guidance means living a decent life, because no other life option except for morality is possible when you live together with Jesus. Sarah believes that she lives an ordinary life of not a very religious person, because she attends her Church extremely rarely and she hasn’t taken part in any other religious rituals and ceremonies except for the ceremony of Christianizing. Furthermore, she and her husband Mike haven’t registered their marriage in church. However, Sarah and her family regularly celebrate all the national holidays, including Christmas and Easter, even though she claims that these religious celebrations don’t symbolize anything special for her, they are just nice days to spend time with her family. An interesting thing I noted during our conversation is that she always said that Jesus was her friend, so I asked her whether she used any praying techniques or special prayers during her personal conversations with the Lord. She answered that she believed that all these kinds of praying were also rituals and she felt like they eventually made her conversations with Jesus some kind of obligation, which was not how conversations with a friend had to look like. Although Sarah is not a typically religious person, she has a deep faith and understanding of what faith is and what is the object of her faith. Thus this knowledge and her beliefs are leading her throughout her entire life. Works Cited Balmer, Randall Herbert and Winner, Lauren F. Protestantism in America. Columbia University Press, 2013. Read More