What are some good reasons for examining the basis for your religious beliefs and beliefs in general?

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When I was a teen, like many other teens, I made the Santa Claus / God connection and decided I was an atheist. I’d never had any beliefs, there was nothing to question. I just refused to buy into the dominant narrative that I was seeing.

Fast forward a few years and I’m just the tiniest bit curious about religion. Around me I had access to a spiritual group of people that called themselves pagan. I fell in with one group of them and practiced Wicca for awhile. It was there I learned how to meditate and visualize and got my first glimmers of what belief actually is and what it does for you.

Wicca is a religion, and religions require people to practice it with. The analogue that doesn’t require fellow player characters is spirituality. After I left that area, my spiritual explorations went dormant. I suppose you could say that I went back to my previous atheism, but that wasn’t really true. My spiritual experiences had left me dissatisfied with the cynicism of materialism. But my old way of doing things just wasn’t really an option anymore.

It took me a few years to figure out how to walk a spiritual path all by myself. I followed the lead of people I met online and restarted my visualization meditation practice. Eventually I found the right teacher for me, Dr. David R. Hawkins. I read most of his books and spent a lot of time processing them.

I am somebody who isn’t satisfied just believing in something. I ask a ton of questions and if I don’t get the answers, I’ll just forget about it. So as you can imagine that sort of demand would lead to materialism.

But Hawkins was different. He made claims about the world that, if they weren’t exactly falsifiable, they at least could be reasoned about logically. So I did. I wanted to understand, deeply, how Hawkins saw the world and where he was wrong.

This line of inquiry led directly to my spiritual awakening. Hawkins promotes something called muscle testing. I did a lot of muscle tests, dozens, sometimes hundreds a day. The test was my constant companion. It became even more so when I realized that I could use it to communicate with something that I believed at the time was a non-physical entity.

Finally I had something that I could use to actually get answers to all the questions I had. They might have not been good answers, but I could use the answer to ask a followup question. Eventually I could force an understanding out of the tests. What they were good at, what they weren’t, and, eventually, how to make the sorts of inquiries I did with the test, just in my own head.

Using the various tools I’d worked with over the years, I cobbled together a spirituality that is damn-well unshakable to all forms of cynicism. You can’t ask me a single question that I haven’t already carefully considered, isolating different areas of attack, identifying and categorizing arguments and counter-arguments.

So, the answer to your question, what are good reasons to examine your beliefs, I would say to that, all of them. Never stop questioning what you believe. You’ll never reach the bottom of the rabbit hole. There’s not enough time in the world, not in your entire life, to reach it. Question the fundamentals, question the incidentals.

If you have the stomach and the patience for truly-intensive inquiry, the only tool I know that can really accommodate you is muscle testing.

Or you can just cop out and become a materialist. It’s a good life, I guess.