Did You Know That Not Everybody Is The Same Religion As You?

It's easy to assume that everybody thinks like you do when everybody around you 

does think like you. 

When it comes to religion, a vast majority of people in the United States are Christians of one flavor or another. Nebraska is even more homogeneous in its religious leanings, a small Nebraska town might have a Presbyterian Church on one side of town and a United Church of Christ on the other side of town...and people think that they're different! Christianity is so much the default position for spirituality that even people who don't attend church, don't pray, don't have any spiritual tendencies at all, would be appalled and insulted if you suggested that they weren't Christian. But the truth is that there are a variety of different faiths and people who lack faith as well. There are Hindu temples, mosques, Buddhists, Baha'i, Wiccans and (gasp) atheists...in Lincoln they're all over! Yet many of these "others" are viewed as aberrations, somehow spiritually wrong.

Now if Christianity, or for that matter Islam or any other religion had objective proof, or even a hint that their faith was the correct one, that would be one thing, but there isn't a religion out there that can present any kind of proof, however small, that what they believe is right. Now some folks will say that there is proof, that, for example they prayed for something and it happened! Well, people from other religions pray and claim the same results, so we're deadlocked there. Another thing that most people don't consider, even when they claim to have "talked with God" (i.e. God talking back!) or "experienced God's love", when pressed to recount in detail exactly what they experienced, usually describe a very subjective feeling, that may, if you take their word for it, indicate the existence of some deity of some kind, but doesn't all all indicate that the warm, fuzzy feeling comes from the god who ordered all the Amalekites killed, knocked down the walls of Jericho and wrote on them tablets. In other words, it is a subjective spiritual experience that the recipient chooses to label in a familiar manner.

But we have A BOOK that was given to us by GOD! Really? What you have is a collection of books that someone claims was given by God. So why should the subjective religious experiences written down thousands of years ago and copied and recopied and translated and mistranslated, in a culture very unlike our own, trump our own religious experience today?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against Christianity or even religion in general, and I'm by no means an atheist (although I sometimes act like one and often take their side in an argument) but the position that any one faith is THE one true way to look at things is arrogant and misguided.

So get off your high horse and stop condescending to those who are different, stop thinking that they're going to a hell that they don't believe in and that you need to convert them!

Happy Halloween!

My Journey - Part Four

So what conclusions have I drawn in this journey? Some time over the last few years I decided to get honest with myself. Anyone who has spent any time around me knows how skeptically I view prayer. People pray for things to happen (or for hurricanes to pass them by) and sometimes things turn out as prayed for and sometimes they don't. People who believe in prayer tend to magnify the times when "prayer works" and ignore or explain away the times that it doesn't turn out according to their prayers. What about magic? What about spells? Witches and pagans perform various rituals in order to get things to turn out the way that they want. Moon magic, astrology, candles etc. But don't witches and pagans do the same thing that Christians do when it comes to prayer? Don't they tend to magnify the positive results and ignore or rationalize the negative? And do you know what? What I think are rationalizations could very well be the "correct" answer. Maybe the gods are capricious, maybe you just didn't do the ritual correctly, maybe it was the wrong phase of the moon. Who knows? I'm reminded of something I've heard said about moon magic more than once. If you need to receive something in your life, do the ritual during the waxing moon. But what if it's the waning moon and you can't wait? Easy! Just do a ritual to remove whatever it is that's preventing you from receiving what you need? To me that thinking sounds a bit ridiculous, in this scenario the phase of the moon is irrelevant as long as you phrase your intention correctly.

So do I believe that there is any reason to do rituals, burn candles, read tarot cards, etc? I do, but mainly as a way to focus the mind and to stir natural intuition. I think that, to a certain extent we can see the future. Not in a science fiction way. The future, from our point of view, hasn't happened yet, but we can ascertain patterns in the present, assemble possible paths based on the current trends and come up with a personal path to reach the desired result. Might there be supernatural intervention involved in this exercise? Perhaps, but it doesn't require supernatural intervention.

What about the existence of gods? Are they real? I guess it depends on your definition of "real". One of my spiritual practices involves meditation through shamanic journeying. The short version of what this is, is that I get into a state of altered consciousness, usually through the use of rhythmic drumming and see things in what feels like a waking dream state. Are the things that I see "merely" dreams, or do they have an objective reality? Are they parts of my subconscious that I am accessing? My contention is that it makes no difference. Since I'm not going to go out and try to fly from a high building, or murder someone because I'm "hearing voices", it doesn't really matter. One thing that I am clear about is that the various gods and goddesses, if they exist objectively and independently, do not account for natural phenomena. The god of storms doesn't make it rain, the goddess of the harvest doesn't cause the crops to grow. I look at the pantheon as personifications of natural forces, not individuals who are actively controlling their "areas of responsibility".

Although in some ways I act like an atheist, in that I do not make decisions based on what I think spiritual forces want me to do, and I think that natural events are just that: natural, I haven't ruled out the existence of spirits, I just don't see much evidence that they are very reliable.  

My Journey - Part Three

Having jettisoned Christianity, I still held to the prevailing view that there was some kind of spiritual otherworld, and that in some fashion gods, spirits and the like existed. I hadn't rejected the very idea of a god, or influencing events supernaturally, I had just come to the conclusion that Christianity had no more claim on being right than any other religion; that other religions were just as likely or unlikely to be true or effective. Being predominately Irish in ancestry, I began to examine and study what I could find out about pre-Christian Irish (Celtic) religion. Due to the fact that very little was written down regarding Irish religion before its displacement by Christianity, there isn't a lot of hard information about it. What is written was written by outsiders (Julius Caesar) and by Christians writing many years after the fact. Although there are modern people who claim to know what it was that the Druids did and the functions of the pantheon and day-to-day religious practices,  it's almost all speculation. How much truth there is in the speculation is the subject for another blog post, but due to this lack of hard information, my quest for information about my ancestral religion wasn't particularly fruitful. However, there are people who claim to be following the "old religion", and those people can largely be found within the various Wiccan and Neo-Pagan groups. The books that I found were mostly books about Magic and rituals, and some that promulgated a kind of pan-Pagan outlook, mixed with divination, meditation and influencing events by magic. It was around this time that I met my future wife who was involved in a local eclectic pagan group. I too became involved in this group and considered myself a Pagan.

I should point out that one of things that I did not want to do when shopping around for a new religion, was to get involved in another dogmatic faith. In addition to my doubts about the Bible, as a result of my bad experiences with The Way, I had also developed a strong aversion to groups, especially to anyone who claimed to have all the answers. For a few years I attended local gatherings and even learned to read tarot cards, but I mainly continued to read, study and form opinions on my own. I anted a spiritual worldview that I could call my own and which worked for me.

I'm going to digress for a moment on the subject of "personal religion". Those who follow a religion with a central authority, especially for those who use the Bible (or some other "holy" book) as their standard often deride those who construct their own systems of belief as "made-up" religious and ethical systems. But isn't that what most people do, even when part of a religion? How many Christians really know what the Bible says about their God, or what behavior their Bible encourages? How many people believe that God acts in a certain way when there is no evidence from the Bible to support their belief? Many of these people use personal experience to validate what they think and believe. They "know" God exists because they "experienced" him, or things worked out according to their wishes after praying. This is not any different, in my opinion, than those who construct their own spiritual system.

Part of my personal study involved a course called "The Temple of Witchcraft", a series of books by author Christopher Penczak. The series broke up "Wiccan" spirituality (Penczak's version anyway) into five segments: 1. The Inner Temple: meditation and other practices on a personal level; 2. The Outer Temple: ritual and outward expressions of spirituality; 3. Shamanic Temple: incorporating practices of shamanism 4. Temple of High Witchcraft: ceremonial magic, including the Kabbalah; 5. Living Temple: basically leadership in the pagan community. The information was presented in a non-dogmatic way, which I liked, and constantly emphasized that this was just one path among many possible. We traveled to St. Louis and to Colorado to hear Penczak speak and to participate in weekend seminars. I used a lot of his material to organize my thoughts and beliefs into a system that worked well for me, however, I decided against participating in online apprenticeships or further involvement because I didn't want to get involved in another group and I didn't want to lock myself into one particular spiritual worldview.

It was time to get clear on what it was that I actually believed.

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.

Bitter?

Before I start in, let me make clear that I have no problem with people who pray for things. I don't think that they're stupid or deluded, I just don't agree with them that it's effective. I don't particularly want people praying for me, and if they do, I don't want to hear about it, especially if they're praying for me to "see the light" or similar. Usually when I see people ask for prayer for themselves or others I keep my mouth shut and don't comment, it's not my place to try & dissuade them and the timing would usually be terrible! That all being said, it's been my observation that people who pray to get healed fail to get healed as often as they do get healed. When someone recovers, then "praise God!", but when they fail to recover it's either ignored or chalked up to something along the lines of God's "mysterious ways", or ultimate plan. But that's all hypothetical, let's move on to a specific example, as illustrated by the Facebook thread to the left.

Granted, I knew that I was starting trouble with my comment, but the person who was healing in this instance, unless he has changed greatly in the last year and a half, is not religious and was probably not praising God for the fact that his injury was healing. (The person making the initial comment is not the person who was injured). So I thought that I was on safe ground making a comment. Notice that, although one might easily infer that I was disagreeing with or contradicting the God praiser, my actual words merely added a group who merited some praise. (Not to mention the fact that our bodies naturally heal from minor injuries with or without prayer) I was then asked who "gave" the medical professionals their expertise. Even if one believes that there is power in prayer, surely my answer was logical, rational and fact-based...with no name-calling! But it's the response to that which really got my attention:

"Tom you seem bitter"

Bitter? I received no response to a request for an explanation of this characterization, other than that Jesus could heal "that". Now there might be areas where a case might be made for some bitterness in my life, likely harbor some toward my first wife for various reasons, and haven't quite put aside my attitude toward my former employer, but bitter...towards...what? Who? This seems to be a go-to response from some theists toward atheists, agnostics, skeptics and followers of other religions. There's an accusation that we're bitter towards God, or mad at God, or we hate God. I can't speak for a single person other than myself, but I arrived at my current worldview not because I was mad at any god or gods, but simply because it just didn't make sense to me any longer. If there is such a thing as "God", I don't see any evidence that he, she or it operates the way people think. 

So folks, pray all that you want, but not everyone else does, and it's not because we're bitter.