When I Speak of Myself 4

Hello friends, and welcome back! I'm going to skip the apology this time around, since you know it by heart by now, and get right into the story. Everyone remember where we were?

I had ethics, I had magick, I had a basic understanding of what a religion is and what components go into a belief system. I also had the desire to be a part of something larger than myself. Something that helps fill the gaps in my days.

And then I had to take my truck to the shop. Hang on, how this fits into the larger picture is coming, don't you worry...

I ended up having to take the shuttle home, and since I was the furthest one away, I was last to be dropped off. Once I had moved into the front seat of the van and we were on the way, the elderly gentleman driving started talking to me... Now some of you might know my gaming habits, and so will only nod when I tell you that I only had a couple hours of sleep before getting up to take my truck in at the butt crack of dawn. Basically what I'm saying is that I don't remember most of our conversation, but I do remember how I felt about it, and what lines of thinking it got me into.

Somehow we got to talking about religion, and/or philosophy, and he asked me some questions. I answered them honestly, telling him some of the conclusions I'd come to over the last couple years. He started challenging me, trying to trap me in my own logic, and how it applies to a Christian world view. I wasn't firing on all thrusters, so I probably wasn't my most eloquent or coherent...but the important thing I remember was that I wasn't upset or threatened in any way.

After I got home and had a nap, I started asking myself why I reacted the way I did to our conversation. He really wanted to shove me off the rock of my conclusions, and I just wasn't bothered. So why was that?

Ok, quick flashback...cue music...

When I was going through Catholic school, I learned quite a bit about faith and belief. One had to have faith to believe in the Church's teachings. Uh...ok...I never much liked that, because it seemed pretty passive to me, regardless of how it is for others.

In jr. high I started reading a lot of fantasy novels. I found lots of stories where the characters come face to face with their deity(ies), and even in one a Catholic priest asks that if he can no longer have faith, what does he have? The answer he got was, "knowledge".

Ahh...I liked that. Knowledge and experience (with things outside oneself) seemed to be a step up from faith and belief. I decided that's what I wanted...

...and end flashback.

How does one go about getting knowledge and experience? Well, I dunno about others, but what I did was claim that I had it. Oh, I was reading a great deal, about philosophy, pagan and otherwise. I was learning critical ways of thinking, different ways of seeing the world. There are layers to the way I see things now. Take the moon for example. As a kid I knew that the Moon could go where the Sun could not, that made her more magickal. As an adult, I have studied astronomy, and understand that the sun is many, many times larger than the moon and that we move around it. I haven't lost my view of the Moon as magickal, and science hasn't destroyed it. I just have a literal way of looking at it, and a metaphorical way of looking at it. The metaphor is still important to me because it helps me to deal with some of my own character flaws.

So I was studying and gaining knowledge, I just needed the experience to go with it. At this time I was participating in a study group that also did rituals during the esbats (the full and dark moons of each month). It was here that I started collecting experience. There are moments when things happened that aren't scientifically explainable...yet. I also had experiences outside of ritual that added to my catalog of moments that might make your hair stand on end.

While I was considering why the shuttle driver didn't make me feel threatened, I realized that all the knowledge and experience that I claimed simply because I wanted it was suddenly real. I added up my memories and felt a moment of arrival, for the lack of a better word. I had attained my spiritual goal and I was very content with it. This was the beginning of my epiphany.

Over the next few months, I kept re-examining how I felt about the conversation with the shuttle driver, and how I would react to other such conversations down the road. I thought that having knowledge and experience, instead of belief and faith, was the end of it. It was the evolutionary step I needed to take and that I was now done with that part of my spiritual growth. Little did I know that there was a step past that, and realizing what it was is what gave me the key to understanding my lack of reaction to a direct challenge to my belief system.

It has been my experience that one of the reasons people defend their faith so violently (sometimes literally), is that they don't want to be revealed as a fool or a fraud. If science came out tomorrow with proof beyond a shadow of a doubt that god (any god) doesn't exist, how crushing would that be for people? Whole lifetimes of hard choices made in the name of religion would be made worthless. To some anyway.

I asked myself how I would feel. My answer was a shrug. Seriously. I shrugged and knew it wouldn't crush me. That's a pretty strong response to a very fundamental question and it made look to try and see why.

This is when I discovered the step beyond knowledge and experience. It's choice. Conscious, self aware, fully engaged choice. Every day I wake up and choose the spiritual path I am on. And because I choose, I am not ironbound into anything. If part of my belief system no longer serves to help me be a better person, then it needs to evolve into something that does.

I joke now that I have spiritually and philosophically become like the Borg, if I find something that I like, "I will add your distinctiveness to my own". With this point of view, the possibilities for evolution are nigh limitless. I will never be in the position where I feel the need to defend my beliefs. I also never feel the need to tell anyone my beliefs so that they come to believe the same as I do. If someone asks me to explain my belief system, then I will, but my goal is to simply inform, not to convert. If there's something in what I say that works for you, great. If not, that's ok too.

It's almost impossible to convey here what a fundamental moment it was for me when I discovered the power of choice. The reason why the shuttle driver couldn't shove me off the rock of my belief is because there wasn't one. My beliefs are water, or the wind, they shift and move and I move with them.

With the power of choice comes the strength of evolution. With evolution comes a sense of security that nothing, not even myself, can shake.

I think I'll leave it at that today. There's some pretty nebulous ideas in this post, and I'm sure I'll have to do a "4a" at some point to answer questions. ^^; Thank you for wading through this post, I appreciate everyone who reads my words, whether or not they find value in them. Next time I'll lay out the particulars of my belief system as it stands now, and hopefully that'll complete the story I set out to write all those months ago.

Till next time, be well,

Red

When I Speak of Myself 3

I think it is somehow fitting that I tell this part of the story on the Summer Solstice...the longest day of the year. We are drenched in light and heat (well, out here in the desert we are) and there aren't many shadows. Thank you all for stopping by.

You guys remember where we left off, right? So, I was Pagan (or was I?), I had a new understanding of ethics with which to view the world and my movement through it, and even if I didn't completely like my life, things were better and that was ok.

This next part will probably make more sense if I explain a couple more things from my childhood...cue the flashback music...

Somewhere in a history or religion class, I was taught that there was a natural evolution of religion. The primitive people of the past were polytheistic, meaning they had lots of gods, but the modern, enlightened people were monotheistic, and had only one god. In my young brain (the same one that thought the Moon was more powerful than the Sun, because She could go where He could not...) didn't like this concept. For one thing, thinking that one being could take care of *everything*, every single little thing...just didn't make sense. Heck, even at home there were things my Mother did, and other things my Father did. I also didn't care for the feeling that we were supposed to look down our noses at those poor, poor people who still thought there were multiple gods.

No matter how many times I ran across this concept during my school years, I never liked it. It wasn't like going from stone to metal...a natural technological change. Why couldn't people have more than one god? Specially since the other gods I was learning about seemed way cooler than the robed, bearded duder who seemed so far away.

((Just a side note here...it's not my intention to insult those who have a relationship with Jehova, or Yahweh...this is simply how I felt about Him at the time.))

...and end flashback...

Alrighty, so it was somewhere around this time that I learned about Deism. From the Wikipedia page it says, "Deism can be a belief in a deity absent of any doctrinal governance or precise definition of the nature of such a deity." I realize that this only one facet to Deism, but this is the one that I gravitated to and it ended up forming the core of my eventual belief system. It made sense to me that if there was a intelligence or intelligences out there that were capable of envisioning the entirety of the universe as we know it (and perhaps all the rest we haven't discovered too...), then it would be something so beyond our experience as a human being that we couldn't possibly be able to connect to it.

Enter Joseph Campbell. Through studying at home, and seeing his lectures in a couple anthropology classes, Joe has become one of the most influential people I have ever studied, right up there with ol' Aristotle.

From Joe I learned what a religion is, and what a system of belief needs to do in order to be considered a religion. I learned what a metaphor is, separate from the literary device, and how it applies to a belief system. It was the first time I'd heard the phrase, "petrified religion", and it changed the way I looked at the Abrahamic faiths.

He said that believing the words of a book to be the absolute word of any deity was like going to a restaurant and eating the menu, instead of using it as a metaphor for the food you could order.

Woah...wait, let's see if I have this straight...

Ok, so on one hand, I have the idea that the nature of deity is undefinable. And on the other, I have the idea that metaphor is the language with which we communicate to deity.

Which deity? I dunno, it seems that it doesn't really matter...since the intelligence that created the universe is so much more vast than my human understanding.

What metaphors? Well, it also seems that there are so many out there, and most of them have some really good points, so it seems like it doesn't quite matter.

Now hold on a minute here, this is sounding like you're saying that because the nature of deity is unnamed and unknown, the metaphors that we use to communicate with it can be our choice?

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.

Oh...woah...really?

Yup.

And that's exactly what I did.

With that, I think I'm going to stop here today. I have a feeling that I raised more questions than I answered, and I really want to be able to go into my epiphany that I have been promising for like a month now, without feeling like you guys are gunna get to the point where it's all "tl:dr".

So I wish each of you a blessed Solstice, and as always, thank you for reading.

Till next time, be well,

Red

When I Speak of Myself 2

Well hello there! I'm finally getting to the next part of my story, and I'm glad you're here.

So to recap a little, we've covered my religious upbringing, the death of my Mother and how that shaped my ideas of the afterlife, and my transition into Paganism. Now today, I'm going to talk a little bit about magick, ethics and that promised epiphany that took a year. You guys all buckled in? Alrighty then, let's get to it!

I think it's important to note that three years or so before my Mother died I started studying magick. Ardriana was studying (she said it was research for a book...*snickergiggles*...a book...*ahem* that's her story tell anyway...) ...and she was bringing it home to us. The reason this is important is because from the very beginning, magick was the practice of the manipulation of energy to a desired result, and had nothing to do with religion. So yes, in this system, you could be a "good Christian/Muslim/Buddhist/Athiest" and practice magick.

Even today the "work" of magick, while tied into my spirituality and belief system, can easily be separated from it completely. Though to be fair, the step from magick to Paganism isn't very far, and it was a contributing factor in my transformation...specially since magick is generally frowned upon in the Catholic Church. (Hi Red...understatement much?)

So then, I was Pagan...now what? My life pretty much still sucked, but I felt better about it, I guess. Or perhaps I had better tools with which to survive it. In any case, once I'd graduated High School, I was given the option of college or a job. I took college. And promptly withdrew from most of my classes and generally did nothing. This went on for a couple three years until one day I decided to stop wasting my Dad's money. I stopped signing up for morning classes, because I just slept through them. I stopped taking five at a time, because I am generally lazy and wouldn't focus on the ones I didn't like. In short, I tricked myself into actually getting an education in college, and found the class that changed my life.

Since I was picking my classes by time frame, I took whatever professors came up that fit my criteria...class didn't start before 11AM. I was *very* lucky, and met several professors that challenged me in ways that still inform my life. But I think that it was my Philosophy prof that had the most profound impact...

It was an Introduction into Ethics class, using a brand new translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics as the text book. Good gods...I finally understood the phrase, "blew my mind wide open", I could literally feel my consciousness expanding, my internals shifting and my view of the world around me changing.

I understood for the first time what being a good person meant and entailed. I was given a step by step process that I could internalize and begin using as a metric for my daily life. Good and bad had real world definitions, and were no longer divinely inspired abstracts that I just simply had to accept. I learned that circumstance changed the amount of blame or praise you lay on someone for their actions. I understood responsibility, accountability and what it meant to be a person living in a civilization with laws.

And even as I stared uphill at the path that lay before me. A path with no handrails, no safety net, and no divinely inspired forgiveness should I mess up, I knew I'd go anyway. I couldn't not. The rewards, freedom, responsibility (how is that a reward?) and understanding far outweighed the work and other costs that this system of behavior came with.

That class was an oasis for three hours, twice a week, and I gulped down the concepts like a starving man gulps down food. I was fundamentally changed by the class...and then Aristotle said that the gods had no place in a system of ethics...

A bolt of lightning speared me through the head. I know that sounds overly dramatic, but that's what it felt like. My whole view of the world and how to move through it *shifted*. I was a different person after I read that line, and the world was never the same. If the responsibility ethical behavior lay with me because I wanted to live within the society I found myself in, and I did good because it was simply the right thing to do, and not because of some hope of reward or fear of punishment...then why did I need religion at all?

I didn't.

Oh, but that opened a can of worms didn't it? And I think this is where I'm going to leave this post for now. I suppose I was overly ambitious when I thought I could tell this story in only two chunks. I really should know better...I am Irish after all.

Thank you for continuing to read, and I promise to try to have the next installment sooner rather than later.

Till next time, be well,

Red

If Your Religion... Part 4

In my search for a belief system that settled comfortably in my psyche, giving me ideas that I liked about the unknown, and helping me to be a better person, I took an ethics class at the community college. We studied singularly a new translation of the ethics book by Aristotle, and I found myself changed by it.

One of the things I liked best about what Aristotle had to say was that religion had no place in the realm of ethics. You gave your due to the gods, but endeavored to live your life by the laws of your civilization, and by an internal understanding of what was right and wrong.

Certainly, religion contains wisdom on how to develop that internal understanding of right and wrong, but it seems to me that simply setting down rules of behavior that come with either promises of rewards, or fear of punishment, without having any sort of understanding of "why", just doesn't work.

So, if your religion makes you ethically lazy...you're doing it wrong.

I know there are people out there of all faiths who work actively to be better people every day. To embody all that is good and beautiful in their religion to be as close to the ideal as possible. These are obviously not the people I'm talking about.

I'm sure most people have seen the bumper sticker, "I'm not perfect, I'm just forgiven," or some variation thereof. What exactly is it saying? I think that the spirit of it is saying something to the effect of, "I cannot be perfect, as even though I try to be so every day, I fail. But I am forgiven for my failing, and that gives me the comfort and strength to continue." I know that there are those who actually believe this.

Unfortunately I also think that the majority of the people who would put this sticker on their cars tend to act as if it saying, "I can be as big a jerk as I want, because all I have to do is ask forgiveness." When all bad deeds are forgiven, why take responsibility for them?

I'm sure everyone knows of at least one person who does whatever they want, without really caring about the consequences, but still claims to be a good Christian of some flavor or another. I never understood how this was possible and it is probably one of the reasons I'm not Christian anymore.

I think the world would be a different place if everyone considered, and cared, how their actions and words affect those around them.

The Wiccan Rede states, "An it harm none, do what thou wilt," or some variation thereof. At its core, I believe this means, "I have used all the tools and gifts at my disposal to see whether or not my actions will harm another. I am not omniscient, so if there are circumstances that I cannot foresee that would harm another, may my actions come to naught." And again, I believe there are those who hold to the rede in this manner.

However, I know there are those who use the rede as a disclaimer, tack it on the end of whatever spell they're doing to cover their bases. They do whatever they want, trusting that the rede will take care of them, still taking no responsibility for their actions. This isn't any better than believing that divinity will forgive their transgressions so it's ok to behave however they want.

I suppose the core of my argument here is responsibility. If your religion helps you to *not* take responsibility for your actions (The devil made me do it!), then it's just not working. Giving your will up to god, letting the universe interpret your wishes, figuring your life is wholly predetermined, so do whatever you want...these points of view are, in my opinion, entirely to passive, and are part of what is wrong with society today.

Everyone makes an impact on the world around them (rings in a pond anyone?), and if we were more aware of this, and endeavored to do as little harm as possible, how could the world not be a better place?

I give my due to the gods, but do not give up my will to them, or let them decide my behavior because I am hoping for a reward, or afraid of a punishment.

I choose a different way, and so should you, whatever it may be.

Till next time, be well,

Red