I’m going to testify.
I lost my religion early. It took me a long time to not hate religion altogether. My bookshelf is a comparative religious scholar’s dream.
I admire those that have unshakeable faith. Let’s just say I had been broken. That I heard a lot of g-d but none of the love. Just felt the rod.
There’s still a lot of rage in me, but my problem is not with Jesus the Christ, Muhammad (PBUH) or Siddhartha Gautama. Certainly not with my boy, Spitama Zarathustra or my older boys of the Vedas.
This is as old as ever but, don’t institutionalize it. Jesus, who I don’t believe was divine, would hate you. I’m sorry, but I read the Gospels. I read the KJV when I was twelve in sixth grade reading time. Got in trouble for it, but my Christian teacher defended it.
Guess what, I wore a cross and loved Jesus and then read the Bible… I remembered God is love and Jesus loves me this is so because the Bible says so tautology.
I’d been to Bible camps and such. I read it myself. I was devastated. I’ve come back to it but through the Qur’an, Bhagavad Gita, Avesta, Tao Te Ching – you name it I’ve read it. If anything, Joseph Campbell gave me the best for religion:
Follow your bliss.
I don’t know if that means much to anybody else, but it would be interesting. I have no judgment. Not eternally, anyway. I’ve drawn and written poems to St. Dymphna, been influenced by Sufism…
My divine is very dear to me – but it is all my own. I don’t know if anyone else has a space for that stuff in their own way?
I’m not about to believe in traditional religion, but what gets you through these times, even if it is traditional? Whatever works for you.
Religion – Lost and Found
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Isn’t love divine? Or is it merely an evolutionary requirement? Therein lies the question. There seems to be little mention of love in historical texts,despite it’s central role in life.
Yet there is no shortage of records of hatred (for the other) – and the wars that were founded on same. History is written by the victor.
Love is the most powerful energy in existence. History is often written by the victor. However, it is not only written by the victor. Additionally, who determines who is the victor? Is the winner of a battle or a even a war always the victor? In the final analysis everything balances. The victor today may become the loser tomorrow.
I don’t want to talk past each other but there is loads of love. Sanskrit had three words, Greek, at least two. They separated lust from the divine. Arabic does this, as well. English, for it’s flexibility has a severe deficit for different forms of affection.
You posit an interesting question, and I do believe love, however you define it, is Darwinian. There was a great Adam Ruins Everything about the myth of the Alpha male. It varies, but, in our closest relatives, the male who helps out actually spreads its seed more than the most dominant.
This is is also true in wolves. Unfortunately foxes, which is my spirit animal, do apparently have a Spartan attitude – though they are fascinating in how much they can adapt quickly, like we do.
As to history… there’s the old dictum of if you had been born so and so you’d be Muslim or Hindu, etc. The best reply I ever got to that was something about destiny or the Holy Spirit. By that token I’d love to write the response to 300 if the Persians had won and Zoroastrianism spread.
Or had Spain fallen to the Umayyads before the Pyranees, or the Ottomans gotten past the Carpathians. Or the Norse held back the Christians. What often happened, instead, was a cross-pollination.
Every Christian, Muslim, and even Jew has the imprint of Zoroaster, just has he had the imprint of Indo-Aryan henotheism. Just as Judaism had the imprint of Babylonian religion [hardly any Egyptian religion, curiously – must have wandered a very long time].
The forms of Buddhism are strikingly more different than the schisms in Christianity or Islam. They, as well, melded with the older culture. I mean, Tibetan, Theravada and Zen are quite different in respect to adapting themselves to the culture. As it is Buddhism, there were few wars, however. Ashoka, being the most famous, and Tibetan warrior monks and the Sri Lankan war against the Tamil Tigers being among the most famous.
No religion is above violence. I say this having read the Qur’an. Allah proscribes peace for real. But this was written/revealed at a very violent time. Muhammad is given a lot of crap he shouldn’t be. I mean, at least if you’re defending the Bible, you have no right to judge – for his time and place he was a liberal, as was Christ and Siddhartha and Zarathushtra.
It’s always funny how misfits and political rebels become co-opted and the fetish of small-minded conservatives later. When it comes to Hinduism, I am a Shaivite. Whilst Vishnu is more associated with bhakti – or devotional worship [that would be a fourth love word in Sanskrit, come to think of it], I prefer Shiva, who retires to the mountain and gives boons to those who may chant his name for a thousand years, or who will just say fuck it.
In the end, the pagans, the Native, indigenous religions may have had a lot right. We are where we are now, and sure, my Celtic and Germanic ancestors may or may not have been head hunters, but the Manichæan impulse to come in and burn the forests and see Satan everywhere? If we were honest with ourselves, we would find a middle ground.
That’s where I am as a Unitarian Univeralist mostly atheist agnostic that still is moved and fascinated by religion. I started out angry at religion, especially Christianity. But, through my reading of religion, I almost fell in love with it. The culture, art, literature. I think sociologically, religion can be powerful for good, as well as bad.
I don’t know where to even start. But, kesmarn, this is the discussion I wanted. I’m not here to say this or that about any faith tradition.
I mean, I did start reading the Book of Mormon. I’m going into it not beileving in the Golden tablets. But for a charlatan, which Joseph Smith was, to spend that much time writing that, even plagiarizing others, took a lot of will.
I’m willing to believe that in Palmyra, New York, during the Second Great Awakening, not everyone was overcome by avarice or deceit. I’d like to go deeper into that period. Even if Joseph Smith was a con-man, there was a culture ready for it.
I’m reading the Book of Mormon, because, I’ve been meaning to for a while, and don’t know if I can get past the first book. It was given to my dad from a student. Where we grew up, – well, we had a lot of mormons.
I would say, that, while their beliefs are bizarre, they are good, kind people. I would also say it is a cult. I defended them as Christian in a high school editorial, but the fact that they had a seminary next to my Junior High and High School gave me pause.
And as I alluded to, with the rod, I spent time with evangelical Christians at a private daycare. Insert Catholic for Protestant. I painted Jesus up there – I believed. I still believe. But mine own eyes hath seeneth stuff and more I’ve dealt with through therapy and poetry.
In fact, the non-denominational stuff was the worst. The big gymnasiums, come here, have fun. I later found out my ‘friend’ got points for bringing me there. I was brought somewhere to have me accept christ – even though I’d been to plenty of churches before.
The love bombing of brother and hugs. I’m like, get the fuck away from me. I was never Mormon, so I don’t want to confuse people. But I also had my share of fucked up ‘Christian’ friends. If anything, my Republican friend in high school, was a lapsed Catholic.
We lost contact after he married his Jehovah’s Witness girlfriend and they started a family, but when I saw he was a Catholic again, I was like – thank god. I’m not becoming a Christian again, but between Catholics and a cult? I’ll take Catholics – at least modern ones. Still don’t talk to him over political stuff, but I’m a reasonable person – and respect saving someone from a cult.
I have not even begun…
My transformation has been long, and I’m coming back to it. Let’s just say I still identify as a Unitarian Universalist. I think Dawkins is fine, and I love that he and Hitchens as I do, know the Bible and have read texts – I don’t think either ever experienced a numinous experience.
Or, let me say this: when Sam Harris debated Reza Aslan, I thought they were talking past each other, and thought Sam Harris was being a dick. I like Sam Harris inasmuch as he recognizes the brain patterns induced by meditation and prayer.
My point of contention is that we’re speaking English but speaking with different parts of our brains. For instance, the Left brained will say there’s no such thing anymore than there is such thing as an astrological sign.
To which, I will say, I know there’s no such thing as a Right brain, but I would say there are things science has yet to discover. And quite frankly, this is was always makes them angry:
I almost like the mystery. I don’t process life by a formula. I’m sure you can figure out a way to replicate the Mona Lisa or a Starry Night with some algorithm, it’s still not the same.
I’m as cynical as the next person, but I believe god is within us. You can code my DNA, you can clone me in a different upbringing – I think he would be different than me. I don’t know what a soul is other than what I’ve experienced and what I feel. I believe genes have an effect on that, I am who I am.
I don’t believe I was preborn, or meant to happen, or someone is looking down at me. But, I still feel Wonder at the world and something might be out there. Not aliens, or god, but, maybe god in another sense – if you’ve ever gone off trail when hiking or something – you can’t define it – and if you could I wouldn’t care. When you find that spot, and feel yourself.
That’s god to me. Whenever you can find peace within yourself. By whatever name you call it.
Random Sunday morning thoughts here, Khirad. For me, sorting out the difference between religion and faith is a starting point. I don’t doubt that there were Inquisitors who were dripping with religion. Slaveholders in the old South who were marinated in it. Indiana Klansmen in the 1920s who lynched their fellow citizens on Saturday night and filled the “Amen Corner” during Sunday morning services.
But it takes faith to be a Luther — to take on corruption, knowing that you might be barbecued in the town square as an object lesson to others who dared to question a profit-based indulgence-peddling bureaucracy. Or to be a Martin Luther King, Jr. — calling out injustice, knowing that it was more than likely that one day you might step out onto a hotel balcony and never step back inside.
Faith. Not in a bearded, nightgown-clad old white man in the sky, but in a cosmic force for love, creativity, peace, even mirth. Personally, I happen to feel that Christ tapped into that force more effectively than most prophetic figures, so I pay a lot of attention to him. But I notice that my Muslim and Hindu and Sikh brothers and sisters are bearing a lot of “fruit” in this part of America — so they must be on to something too.
I guess it boils down to the fact that very few of us manage to get through life on this bizarre planet without arriving at a moment/moments when we hit the wall. We reach the end of our own strength. Can’t do it; can’t go on another day. That’s when it’s not unusual to have an encounter with something outside of ourselves — indefinable and transcendent. And life is changed.
I encourage you and Khirad to check out The Law Of One. I was indoctrinated in Christianity and I still accept the teaching of Jesus for the most part. However, even as a child I had reservations about Christianity, which was the only religion I knew of, as to me Judaism was the beginning of Christianity, since Jesus was a Jew. As I matured I began to have problems, not so much with religions, but with how men practiced their religions. It struck me as they were attempting to limit what my perspective of God was/is. The concept of The Law Of One has always resonated with me, but it wasn’t until recently that I became aware that it is really a thing, and many people believe as I do.
Basically, both creation and evolution are correct. This too was given to me at an early age. It seemed to me that everything that exist evolves, but before it can evolve it has to exist. So the concept that everything is a projection of The One Infinite Creator (love/light), and that all things work in service to The One Infinite Creator, whether they realize it or accept it, just resonates with me. I Am The One Infinite Creator, with a free will distortion as well as other distortions. I Am a mind/body/spirit complex. My “self” consist of The One Infinite Creator, my own mind/body/spirit complex and my other selves (everything else).
I’m an orthodox Unitarian Universalist [I say that ironically], and as open and liberal as we are, I’m not sure this coheres. I would like more information on what you are speaking of.
I believe that many faith traditions have truths and I take from them what I do.
I don’t believe in heaven or hell. I don’t beieve in someone watching over me.
But, I leave open the prospect of spiritual experience. I’m basically a nice atheist.
I’d like more of an explanation. And, I am not right. I just know what I know and don’t know.
I don’t speak of anything. I only shared that The Law Of One resonates with me, so I suggested you might like to check it out. The free will distortion allows you and I accept or reject anything. The Law Of One teaches that even that works in service to The One Infinite Creator.
https://www.lawofone.info/
I fail to see how this is anything new. Hindus beat you to it if not Raëlians. To each their own.
All is well. I leave you in the love and the light of the One Infinite Creator. Go forth, therefore, rejoicing in the power and the peace of the One Creator.
Thanks so much for the link, TOCB, and for your thoughts. I’m going to check it out now.