Is it normal to have this type of religious experience?

Before I write this out I just want to say that I vaguely hinted at this ordeal in this question here: https://www.isitnormal.com/post/what-should-i-do-about-this-very-embarrassing-moment--283872 and I recommend you read it first before reading the rest of this question. This event has haunted me for years, and I think it’s best to just let it all out. Be prepared, because this’ll probably be a long one.

The year is 2012. I’m a 13 year old kid and I just got big into Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. I’m also a Christian and my mother had always had mixed views on magic, letting me read fantasy books with them and letting me know that “real magic” is evil. I had heard some debate over JRR Tolkien’s works, but most Christians seemed to approve. Later on though I would have my own issues.

Now keep in mind I was a very socially awkward kid. I didn’t get out much, and I had spent a lot of time on a fan page I made for the hobbit movie that would come out later that year. As far as I was concerned, it was my whole life. I didn’t know very much about magic or the occult back then, but I had heard that summoning ghost (which I now know is called “necromancy”) was considered evil, and there was one particular scene known as “the path of the dead” that had started to bug me. Admittedly it’s an extensive series with a lot of detail, and at the time I didn’t quite understand what was happening in the scene, and instead of doing something logical like, I don’t know, looking up a summary of the scene or trying to see what it was about or whatever, I did what I still to this day consider the stupidest and most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done. Nothing I’ve ever read or heard about since comes even close to it.

I really don’t know where I picked up this practice, or if I just created it myself, but at the time I would make a prayer like “if____ is wrong, make _____ happen.” And what I did in this particular case is so embarrassing I won’t even say it. This whole thing is embarrassing but it’s the worst of it. But essentially I thought God had told me LOTR was evil and it really fucked me up. I spent time on that fan page I mentioned earlier feeling jealous that other people were excited for the new movie and I was stuck believing it was “evil.”

But believe it or not, it gets even weirder. There were points where scenes from the movie would play in my head, almost as if there were answering questions I was having. I thought this was God speaking to me through the movies, and I really over analyzed and thought God had made certain things happen in my life for some higher purpose (I now know this as “God Of the Gaps,” where if you don’t know something you just assume “God did it.” Looking back I realize I had a severe lack of knowledge on a lot of things).

Later on me and my mom had a long talk on a long car-ride when I finally got the courage to admit I did this ridiculous thing. I talked a lot about religion and certain fandoms of mine and how they might seem to be against or for God, and looking back I just think “God, I really should’ve got my head out of those fantasy worlds, I should’ve lived in reality more.”

Now I understand this as “having a cleared emotional blockage,” and it’s essentially a religious experience where you feel born again (those who have had it know what I’m talking about. But I had never had it before then so it really had an effect on me). This conversation took place a day before The Hobbit movie came out, and that was the same day that the sandy hook shooting happened (my mom said “talk about evil, huh” when she heard about it).

This lead me to go on yahoo answers and tell about it, and some comments were supportive, others were a bit weirded out, but one in particular was pretty mean and it still sticks with me. They basically kept saying I was wrong in my assumptions, and I since deleted the question, but I alluded to it in other questions, but those seem to be lost now.

For a while I actually began to resent Christianity, not just because of this incident but nearly every embarrassing moment I’ve had in my life, it made me realize how absurd I had been being. I just want to know, after reading all that, do you think my embarrassment is justified?

I like to think I was just a confused kid, who believed in some ridiculous superstitions, and had his head stuck in his own imaginary world. I don’t know if it was the best idea to share it again, maybe I’ll delete this question if it proves too embarrassing, but I just want to know if I really just blew this out of proportion.

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Comments ( 2 )
  • Primus

    If it makes you feel any better, when I was a child my mom convinced me the world was really ending in 2012, and I told everyone I knew this. The only reason this doesn't bother me is because it's in the past and I was just a stupid kid. We were all 13 once, and we all did stupid shit at 13.

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  • RoseIsabella

    When I was 13 to 14 years old my friends and I used to play something similar to the Ouija board that we called the glass. It was a bunch of stupid, make believe malarkey.

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