Refusal 1

I haven't been an atheist for a long time, although most of the authors I relate to and am influenced by would come under that classification in some sense. By the same token the way in which I am not an atheist would probably cause most religious people to put me under that classification as well.

I haven't considered myself one, despite not being associated with any religion for a very long time, and not having any belief in any of the gods of those religions as those religions describe them. This came about as a result of what I can only describe as a religious experience.

One of the issues with attempting to describe such an experience is that even during the experience, any attempt to grasp the experience conceptually, even to apply words to it, threatened to cause the experience to disappear. It wasn't an epiphany either, I've had the occasional epiphany and epiphanies give one something to understand, often too much at once, whereas this gave so little that it has been much more difficult to place it or even relate any particular meaning to it.
That's not to say words didn't attach themselves to the experience. I was, at the time, attuned to the possibility of such an experience. And I understood that such an experience would be in essence positive. However the only words that I could attach to the experience were "refusal", not a partial but a total refusal, and a "not you". This by no means appeared to be a positive experience.

Recently I've come to understand that refusal further than just the experience of the word. In later posts I will try to explicate the sense of refusal that I experienced and how that relates to my further development.