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Friday Five: religion
Oct. 14th, 2011 12:23 pmWritten by a religious cynic; read at your own risk.
1) What religion, spirituality, or belief system were you raised in? I was raised by a fallen away Catholic and a non-practicing Methodist, both of whom believed more in meditation than in religion. Until I was about twelve. Then they both hied themselves back to the Catholic church, something for which I have still not entirely forgiven the particular priest who was the cause. I spent the next six or eight years carefully not listening to readings that would infuriate me and being glad when the hymns were in Latin, which I didn't speak.
2) Do you subscribe to the same belief system now? If not, what do you believe/identify with now? Insofar as I am somewhere around an empirical agnostic or a relaxed atheist, yeah I guess it kind of did stick. I did go through a practicing Wiccan period but pretty much gave that up when every single organized form failed my litmus test of not being a basic description of the inside of my own head every day. (This is a frequent problem with me and spirituality of all kinds; all the "special reaching beyond states" seem to me to be not particularly special at all and not a descriptor of anything but my own brain.) Besides, I'm not big into useless symbolism. You want to cleanse a ritual space? Get a freaking mop and bucket.
3) Is belonging to an organized religious community important to you? Why nor why not? Rather the reverse. Given the bad effects I have observed to arise from pretty much every organized form of religion I have encountered, it's kind of important to me not to. I'm always up for a really good drumming circle, but that's about as organized as I want to get near.
4) Have you read any holy texts? (Of your faith or another). Have they had/do they have any impact on your worldview? In what way? Rather more of them than the great majority of practitioners I have known. This trend has been demonstrated frequently enough to really quite worry me. I can't say that they changed my worldview much, but then I'm really big on historical context in my reading and that tends to dump a lot of salt on most of those texts. Besides, they are uniformly bigoted and undesirably hierarchical, even when they're trying not to be. As for the explicitly "progressive" pagan texts? Don't get me started on cultural appropriation without context, or we're gonna have to talk about Kali and it isn't gonna be pretty.
5) Do you participate in any spiritual rituals? (Eg: prayer, religious services, nonsecular holidays, etc). *thinks* I still put no-cop spells on my cars? I try to circulate my energy properly when I'm walking to work? I talk to my trees? I think that's about it.
1) What religion, spirituality, or belief system were you raised in? I was raised by a fallen away Catholic and a non-practicing Methodist, both of whom believed more in meditation than in religion. Until I was about twelve. Then they both hied themselves back to the Catholic church, something for which I have still not entirely forgiven the particular priest who was the cause. I spent the next six or eight years carefully not listening to readings that would infuriate me and being glad when the hymns were in Latin, which I didn't speak.
2) Do you subscribe to the same belief system now? If not, what do you believe/identify with now? Insofar as I am somewhere around an empirical agnostic or a relaxed atheist, yeah I guess it kind of did stick. I did go through a practicing Wiccan period but pretty much gave that up when every single organized form failed my litmus test of not being a basic description of the inside of my own head every day. (This is a frequent problem with me and spirituality of all kinds; all the "special reaching beyond states" seem to me to be not particularly special at all and not a descriptor of anything but my own brain.) Besides, I'm not big into useless symbolism. You want to cleanse a ritual space? Get a freaking mop and bucket.
3) Is belonging to an organized religious community important to you? Why nor why not? Rather the reverse. Given the bad effects I have observed to arise from pretty much every organized form of religion I have encountered, it's kind of important to me not to. I'm always up for a really good drumming circle, but that's about as organized as I want to get near.
4) Have you read any holy texts? (Of your faith or another). Have they had/do they have any impact on your worldview? In what way? Rather more of them than the great majority of practitioners I have known. This trend has been demonstrated frequently enough to really quite worry me. I can't say that they changed my worldview much, but then I'm really big on historical context in my reading and that tends to dump a lot of salt on most of those texts. Besides, they are uniformly bigoted and undesirably hierarchical, even when they're trying not to be. As for the explicitly "progressive" pagan texts? Don't get me started on cultural appropriation without context, or we're gonna have to talk about Kali and it isn't gonna be pretty.
5) Do you participate in any spiritual rituals? (Eg: prayer, religious services, nonsecular holidays, etc). *thinks* I still put no-cop spells on my cars? I try to circulate my energy properly when I'm walking to work? I talk to my trees? I think that's about it.
