My Journey - Part Two

Often, when someone reveals a break with Christianity, those who remain within the Christian fold assume that the one who left is "angry with God". Alternatively, the assumption is that the one who left the church has done so in order to be free of biblical/church restrictions on conduct and behavior. While this may be the case for some, this was not my thinking. And thinking it was, rather than an emotional reaction.

One of the positions that people take as regards to religion or faith that I cannot truly understand is a refusal to consider alternatives. "There's nothing that can shake my faith", or "nothing you can say can talk me out of what I believe". While steadfastness in the face of adversity or persecution is admirable, often it is a refusal or inability to think about what one believes. While many people have thought deeply about their faith and made reasoned decisions about it, I'm not convinced that this represents a majority.  One thing that I have long attempted to do was to question what I believed and considered possible alternatives. My leaving the Catholic Church and embracing the teachings of The Way International was a decision that I made after weighing the evidence. In retrospect I didn't have enough information to accurately form a judgement about what The Way was saying, but at the time it made sense. I wasn't mad at the Church, or the Pope or anyone or anything, I just thought The Way made more sense. Similarly, when I left The Way, I had spent a full year examining what they had been teaching and came to the decision that it no longer made sense to me. Granted, what got me started was immoral and unethical behavior by the leader and chief teacher, but in the end I would have retained the beliefs that I had learned in The Way if they still made sense.

Finally, my decision to no longer consider myself a Christian came after more thought and introspection. Once again, I wasn't mad at anyone, but had come to the conclusion that there was no reason that I could see to view the Bible as having come from God or view it as superior to any other "holy" book. At best it was a collection of books, essays and letters that reflected how various people had viewed God over the years.

Does my tendency to question and my willingness to change make me better than anyone else, or even think that I'm better than anyone else? To quote State Senator Ernie Chambers from last year's dedication of a Humanist/Atheist exhibit at the State Capitol: "It's not my place to tell you that something that gets you through the night is wrong. Everyone is entitled to have whatever beliefs help make them a better person. What is wrong is when we try to legislate some people's opinions for everybody. Then we have a problem." I may be completely wrong about the Biblical God and Christianity. Those who espouse Pascal's Wager might suggest that since I don't know, the safer course would be to believe in the Christian God. But Pascal engaged in a logical fallacy when he formulated his famous wager; it's a false dilemma - there aren't only two choice: believe in God or don't believe in God. There are a multitude of choices: be a Christian and be an atheist are certainly two among them, but there are many choices as to what kind of Christian to be; others choices include be a Muslim, be a Buddhist, be a Pagan, follow Hawaiian huna, venerate the Hindu gods, convert to Asatru and worship the Norse pantheon and on and on. So the wager doesn't really make sense.

When I finally get to the part of my journey since leaving Christianity, it will be evident that I am constantly changing, evolving and looking for more evidence.

Part Three up next!

Religious Work-Arounds

I just finished reading an article about a New Jersey town attempting to prevent local Jews from extending their eruv.  What's an eruv you ask?  To answer that question you have to go back to Talmudic and Rabbinic law which interprets the laws and strictures in the Torah. The principle in the Torah is that the Sabbath is a day of rest and that no work is to be done on it. That sounds pretty simple, but people being people, they needed clarification, they needed a definition of what "work" included. There are thousands of words written delineating what work is, but what is relevant here is the section that defines "carrying any object from a private place (like your home) to a public place" (like the grocery store or even the synagogue) as work. "Objects" are further defined as anything other than the clothes on your back, including your house keys, pushing a baby stroller or even an umbrella. Obviously this would cause problems if strictly adhered to. A "solution" had to be found; and by "solution" I mean a way to technically observe the rule while simultaneously getting around it. This work-around involved attaching some physical extension to the home that enlarged what would be considered the "private" space. In earlier times Jews tended to be segregated from the Christians and the walls of their ghetto served to separate what was inside (private) from what was outside (public). In modern times the extension usually takes the form of wires attached to utility poles, enclosing the neighborhood, or in some cases a whole municipality. So what you have is a fairly simple commandment: "Rest, i.e. do no work", that has been complicated beyond belief, but rather than admit that the rules are ridiculous, and say "we're just not going to do it", ways to get around the rules while technically obeying them are devised. Orthodox Jews can still claim to follow The Law, while being able to circumvent it in order to live their modern lives.

Lest you think it's just those crazy Jews who do things like this, I was involved in a Christian fringe group a few years ago that interpreted a verse that said "Owe no man any thing, only to love" as a prohibition against any kind of debt. While not as labyrinthine as the Talmudic rules, this organization, The Way International, had all kinds of rules about what was debt and what was not, but were very firm about prohibiting their members from having bank loans. This obviously would cause a problem  for anyone wanting to buy a home, since it is unlikely that anyone other than the very wealthy would have enough cash on hand to buy a home without securing a loan. What some Way people did was convince a non-Way family member to buy the home and sell it to the Way family member in some complicated deal that they convinced themselves wasn't debt. I never understood this maneuver, since you were still in debt, just not to a bank. The most creative debt avoidance move that I saw involved a guy who was buying his home from his parents a little at a time. Rather than call it a loan, he called it partial ownership. If he paid them $10,000 on a $100,000 home, then he owned 10% and they owned 90%. If he paid an additional $20,000, he now owned 30% and so on. He peddled this theory to Way leadership, but we never found out how well it worked since his parents died in a car crash and he inherited the home outright.

Finally, there's the example of the annulment. Some churches are against divorce and even consider it adultery if a divorced person remarries. But there is a loophole, the annulment.  A marriage that is annulled is treated as if it never existed. While I can imagine circumstances where a church might want to make an exception to their no-divorce rule, (e.g. underage bride or groom, diminished capacity, human trafficking) I know personally of situations where an annulment was sought and granted simply to recognize a divorce and get the couple back into the church's good graces. We don't believe in divorce but we'll grant you this divorce as long as we don't call it a divorce.

What are we to make of all this? These are just a few examples that have popped up in my news feed or in conversations recently. I think that in general people like to talk the talk and put their holy books and pronouncements by holy men up on pedestals, but when it gets in the way of what they really want to do, or if it becomes inconvenient, they still want to talk the talk without walking the walk.

Lughnasadh 2017

As a modern pagan I've always made a habit of changing my spiritual outlook as circumstances change, my point of view changes, and as I see that certain things don't "work" or don't fit into reality as I observe it. I meditate and do shamanic journeying, but have come to the conclusion that it doesn't matter if what I "see" during times of altered consciousness is objectively real or "just" exists in my mind. Are the gods objectively real, or just expressions of greater truth? Who cares? How about magic? If doing a ritual helps me focus so that I can mundanely bring my will to pass, what difference does it make if it's supernatural or not?

One of the things that I'm relatively faithful at doing as part of my pagan spiritual practice is spending some time in "the woods", i.e. Wilderness Park at every one of the sabbats.  Today was Lughnasadh, the "cross quarter" day approximately halfway between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox. There's a variety of ways that modern pagans view this sabbat, one, which I subscribe to, connects it to the first harvests. It's a time when plans begin to come to fruition. If you compare the Wheel of the Year to a person's life, with either Samhain or Yule as the beginning and end, Lughnasadh is about where I am now, about ¾ of the way through a typical lifespan. And wouldn't you know it - in a lot of ways things are coming together pretty well. I live a stable, yet fulfilling life, with a great wife and pretty cool adult kids; I have a job that is challenging yet not stressful, I make a difference in people's lives a wedding minister and I am beginning to get recognition for my main creative outlet: photography. As Lughnasadh marks a time in the year where the time of planting and growth is mostly past, but there is still plenty of time to reap and to enjoy the fruits of labor, so I stand at a similar point in the Wheel of Life.

This is one of the reasons why I do these nature walks on the sabbats - I get insight into life and living. This year was no exception.