"How do you know that neo-paganism (witchcraft) is true?" - Here is a Guide! [Archive]

tmancour

June 6th 2005, 03:56 PM

Various questions to ask witches:

"How do you know that neo-paganism (witchcraft) is true?"

It is true for me; after confronting the falsehoods, bigotries, and hypocrisies of Christianity, I found that regardless of the wisdom that Jesus espoused, his followers had wandered so far from his path that there was no way I could call myself a Christian in good conscience. A close examination of biblical scriptures, over many years, showed me many things: one of which was NOT that they were somehow more "true" than any other scriptures. Subsequent discussions with Christians over this fact led to the following circular arguement:

"The Bible is the Word of God Because it is Old"
"Uh, so is the Enuma Elish, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and other religious texts."
"You must have faith in the Bible as the Word of God"
"You say that because you can offer no proof of its veracity"
"There are a billion Christians in the world -- we must be right"
"There are also a billion Muslims and a billion Buddhists. Are they right, too?"

So the "truth" of the scriptures came down to these three facts: The Bible is "true" because it is old, it is popular, and because we say so.

Sorry if that isn't good enough for me.

When measured against my own personal morals and ethics, I came to the conclusion that I could not follow any God who was less moral than I was. Considering Jehovah's bloodthirstiness in the OT, he lost me before the end of Genesis. As deities go, Jehovah has all the moral underpinnings of a two-year old having a high-chair tantrum. Why is he so insecure? One wonders . . .

The other reason I know my religion is "true" is because it includes the entire human race within it; it does not denegrate the feminine deity, the Great Mother who birthed us all, or tries to turn Her into a whore. In the process, the Abrahamics have denegrated sexuality, one of the clearest sacraments in the world, and turned it into ritualistic breeding. The basis for this is not anything Jesus said, per se, but the misogynistic, women-hating St. Paul and St. Augustine. Despite all the grand words of Christianity, by turning away from the Goddess it turned away from the source of all human compassion. The "believe now and I'll pay you off in the afterlife" crap that passes as doctrine in Christianity is as spiritually fulfilling as a diet of all cotton candy.

A Third reason I know my religion is true is that it doesn't seek some unnatural immortality -- "eternal life in the Kingdom of Heaven". I'm sure the lure of such a spiritual paradise was irresistable to my heathen ancestors, who were prey to the deprications of the Dark Ages: lack of medicine, slavery, plague, disease, poverty, sudden and brutal death. But I know better. Death is a part of life, and Death in the service of the Lifeforce is one of the noblest things someone can do. To attempt to "escape" that is a perversion of the life force. I prefer reincarnation, thank you very much; not only do I have sufficent "proof" (past life regressions) to convince myself of its truth (I do not feel compelled to convince anyone else), it is the only path that is consistant with the elegant circular/spiral layout of the rest of the universe.

Finally, one of the fundamental differences between neopaganism and Christianity is the latter's dependance upon Faith (absolute belief without proof) for its sustanance, while the former works on Wisdom (The Art and Science of Doing the Appropriate thing at the Appropriate time). "Believe, and miracles can happen!" is a common tag line of a local church. I counter with, "Be Wise, and you won't need so damn many miracles!"

"What if you are wrong?"

Firstly, my chances of being wrong are statistically insignificant, whereas the chances of a mouldy old mistranslated and misinterpreted book being wrong are pretty good. Even then, if I burn I will burn with a clear conscience, and in good company. Any God who would try to compel my worship with threats and fear is not worthy of my worship. I guess I'm picky that way. If I one day stand before the Throne of Jehovah and he looks into my soul, reviews my life, and condemns me on some bullsh!t legal technicality, then he isn't even worthy of my respect, much less my worship, and his greatness is no more than a PR job. If I am wrong, then I have walked the path that he set me on with the tools he gave me -- if he blames me for that then the game was rigged.

"If there are such things as gods and goddesses why have they not revealed themselves physically like Jesus Christ has?"

Who says they haven't? The "God become Man" thing has been around in cultures all over the world. Personally, my Gods are manifest in every tree, rock, river and flame. The whole universe is a testament to their presence -- only some narrow-minded desert-born woman-hating mystic would find that insufficient. Even the Bible acknowleges the existance of divinity apart from Jehovah, as the whole tetragrammaton/elohim debate clearly shows. It is myopic Christians who bear the burden on this one: if your God was so freaking powerful and so freaking moral, why did he mess around for three thousand years before finally figuring out that he needed a personal avatar to directly relay his divine will? The inconsistancies here are with the monotheism, not the polytheism.

Arion the Blue
High Druid of Durham

Cheetah

June 6th 2005, 04:44 PM

It is true for me; after confronting the falsehoods, bigotries, and hypocrisies of Christianity

Well there are many different denominations and most of them believe a wrong interpretation of the Bible, as you have clearly found out.

"The Bible is the Word of God Because it is Old"

False. It is the word of God because God said it, I believe it, that settles it.

"You say that because you can offer no proof of its veracity"

It's a faith thing.

"There are a billion Christians in the world -- we must be right"
"There are also a billion Muslims and a billion Buddhists. Are they right, too?"

Eh, no. According to my Islamic source, there are 2 billion Christians...

When measured against my own personal morals and ethics, I came to the conclusion that I could not follow any God who was less moral than I was.

(Less moral than you claim to be)

The other reason I know my religion is "true" is because it includes the entire human race within it; it does not denegrate the feminine deity, the Great Mother who birthed us all, or tries to turn Her into a whore.

And that makes it true???

In the process, the Abrahamics have denegrated sexuality, one of the clearest sacraments in the world, and turned it into ritualistic breeding.

:sigh:

The basis for this is not anything Jesus said, per se, but the misogynistic, women-hating St. Paul and St. Augustine.

Just becuase they do not say what you want them to say, or even what you believe, it does not make them women haters.

Despite all the grand words of Christianity, by turning away from the Goddess it turned away from the source of all human compassion.

Uh, right, whatever...

The "believe now and I'll pay you off in the afterlife" crap that passes as doctrine in Christianity is as spiritually fulfilling as a diet of all cotton candy.

Again, false. Someone hasn't read their NT.
(or their OT for that matter)

A Third reason I know my religion is true is that it doesn't seek some unnatural immortality -- "eternal life in the Kingdom of Heaven".

I see no problem with the idea of Heaven. It may well be inconceivable, but afterall, who can interpret the mind of the Living God? If God is so great, then I have no problem believing something I can not fathom, for me, it's about knowing that there is such a God.

the chances of a mouldy old mistranslated and misinterpreted book being wrong are pretty good.

Yep. but fortunately for me, the Bible isn't any of the above.

I guess I'm picky that way. If I one day stand before the Throne of Jehovah and he looks into my soul, reviews my life, and condemns me on some ******** legal technicality, then he isn't even worthy of my respect, much less my worship, and his greatness is no more than a PR job.

Well, if you think that all there is wrong with your entire life if a mere technicality, then you are greatly mistaken.

If I am wrong, then I have walked the path that he set me on with the tools he gave me

You'll have all the tools you were given, you just didn't use them.

Even the Bible acknowleges the existance of divinity apart from Jehovah, as the whole tetragrammaton/elohim debate clearly shows.
Eh, no - same God.

if your God was so freaking powerful and so freaking moral, why did he mess around for three thousand years before finally figuring out that he needed a personal avatar to directly relay his divine will?

Did He now?

Meh_Gerbil

June 6th 2005, 05:01 PM

Would this be the same Merlin from exchristian?

HEYA dOOd!!!!!! :sigh:

tmancour

June 7th 2005, 12:10 PM

Well there are many different denominations and most of them believe a wrong interpretation of the Bible, as you have clearly found out.?

How big of you to know the "correct" interpretation. How did you come across this knowlege? What veracity do you have of it?

False. It is the word of God because God said it, I believe it, that settles it.?

God said it -- in the Bible. Quoting a source to prove its own truth is circular reasoning and a logical fallacy.

It's a faith thing.?

My point exactly. "Absolute belief without proof" based on whatever it is that lets you sleep at night. What makes your faith any greater or more accurate than the faith of a Buddhist or Moslem?

Eh, no. According to my Islamic source, there are 2 billion Christians...?

I stand corrected. Does that make you right by the strength of sheer numbers alone?

(Less moral than you claim to be)?

My morality is my own. I know that genocide is wrong -- something that Jehovah apparently missed.

And that makes it true????

Any "world religion" that doesn't take all of humanity into its cosmology has issues. Didn't the Christian Church debate long and hard about whether the New World indians have souls? And the Africans?

:sigh: ?

I stand by it.

Just becuase they do not say what you want them to say, or even what you believe, it does not make them women haters.?[/QUOTE]

Their misogyny is well documented. Blaming the Fall, and all of its attendant evils, on Eve and her descendants is pretty misogynous. And denegrating sexuality as inherently evil, again because of women, is pretty rough too. They took what could have been a great religion and made it a tool of oppression.

Uh, right, whatever...?

Witty comeback, that. But it doesn't address the issue. The "compassion" of Christianity and Christians has led to more death, destruction, and suffering than any other single cause. Even excepting the Holocaust (I'll classify Nazism as a relgion, for the sake of arguement) that still leaves the Inquisition, the Albigensian crusade, forced conversion of Jews, expulsion of the Jews and Moors from Spain, the Witchhunts in Germany, the Crusades, the Conquistadors, and cultural genocides galore, to name the high points. Sure, you can say "those weren't real Christians", but that gets into the slippery slope of who is a real Christian and who is not. I'll go by the same standards as the newspaper use with my folk: if you are a "self-proclaimed" Christian, I'll count them. It all adds up to a blatent loss of compassion, which I attribute to the lack of the Goddess in the Church.

Again, false. Someone hasn't read their NT.
(or their OT for that matter)?

Please. I've read every major and many minor versions, including the Coptic and Orthodox, the Catholic Apocrypha, and the Nag Hammadi Scrolls. The difference is I look at the scriptures as a whole, not pick out the few verses that suit my purpose. And there can be no denying that the SOP for the Church for over a thousand years was to promise a heavenly reward in return for belief and obediance on Earth. It kept the peasants in line nicely.

I see no problem with the idea of Heaven. It may well be inconceivable, but afterall, who can interpret the mind of the Living God? If God is so great, then I have no problem believing something I can not fathom, for me, it's about knowing that there is such a God.?

The problem with the idea of heaven is that it is no more or less theologically valid than any other afterlife scenario in any other cultural context. Catholics once thought that meteorites were "proof" heaven existed, because they were rocks from the Heavenly City that fell. That was about as close to verification as y'all have ever gotten. And this "We can never understand God" stuff is a theological cop-out. If you use only scriptural references as your sole basis of source material, of course you won't: they aren't consistant enough to make sense. And even with that cop-out firmly in place, you cannot deny that "eternal life" was the buzz-word used to lure millions into Christianity in the first place. "Be kind to one another" just didn't have the selling power -- Paul understood that, which is why he re-wrote the religion. The implicit threat of either nihlistic death or eternal damnation has always been there.

Yep. but fortunately for me, the Bible isn't any of the above.?

mouldy -- I was speaking metaphorically.
old -- It's pretty old. Not the oldest, but old.
mistranslated -- Let's see, Hebrew to Aramaic to Greek to Latin to vernacular (OT) or Aramaic to Greek to Latin to vernacular (NT). Plenty of room for mistranslation there, and there have been some doozies. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," comes to mind. Purposefully mistranslated by King James' people to give him the biblical authority he needed to go after a group of Scottish witches who were p.o.'d at him. And that's just one example.
misinterpreted What part of "Thou Shalt Not Kill" gives the theological leeway for warfare and state-sponsored execution? The whole concept of a Christian Warrior is vile. Jesus would have wept. And that's just at the most basic level. The problem with all text based religions is the massive potential for misinterpretation and reinterpretation, and the potential for coreligionists to take issue with alternate interpretations.
I stand by my statement.

Well, if you think that all there is wrong with your entire life if a mere technicality, then you are greatly mistaken.?

There is very little wrong with my life. Nothing I can't handle. The Gods have been kind to me, and given me just enough challenge to keep it interesting. And the "spiritual ennui" that I possessed as a youth went away when I finally left the Church and its hypocrisies and inconsistancies. By any objective standard, I live a good, honest, compassionate life, and my mental and spiritual world are untroubled. If Jehovah has a problem with that, it's HIS problem, not mine.

You'll have all the tools you were given, you just didn't use them.?

Au contraire. I've used every tool I've been given, and it is HE who fails to live up to MY standards -- a decision I've come to using those self-same tools. If the demiurge wanted mindless worship from me, the demiurge would not have gifted me with the intellegence and reasoning to see through the hypocrisy.

Eh, no - same God.?

So YOU say. Why the plural/singular issue, then? And why "no other gods before me" instead of "there are no other gods?" Semetic religion has always had a multiplicity of divinity implied, even in Islaam there are djinn and demons and angels. Pretty whacky "monotheism" if you ask me. I won't even get started on the Trinity.

Oh, I see. It's an interpretation.

Did He now?

hey, that's what your book said.

Arion the Blue
High Druid of Durham

Cheetah

June 7th 2005, 06:18 PM

How big of you to know the "correct" interpretation. How did you come across this knowlege? What veracity do you have of it?

I believe that the interpretation of the Bible that I hold to is correct, becuase when reading the Scriptures, I attempt to preserve sound judgment and discernment, not to let them out of my sight; they will be life for me, an ornament to grace my neck.
I believe what I genuinely think that they are the correct beliefs of what is true, with anything I am unsure on, I listen to other people's views, ask questions, consult the wise, my council, prayer, and so on, and I end up with a view which I can honestly say I believe to be fair and truthful. (A bit like a judge in a court case, I suppose).
Ofcourse, that doesn't mean that I'm always correct, people do correct me, but the end result is growing in Truth.

God said it -- in the Bible. Quoting a source to prove its own truth is circular reasoning and a logical fallacy.

That's why it's faith - I don't need solid proof before I can believe it, God gave me the faith, by His grace and so I can see the Truth.

My point exactly. "Absolute belief without proof" based on whatever it is that lets you sleep at night. What makes your faith any greater or more accurate than the faith of a Buddhist or Moslem?

At the end of the day that's just it, a Muslim belives that their view is true and a Christian theirs. I guess my faith is ever strengthened by the continuing news I hear of many, many people being healed in Jesus' name, or prehaps the driving out of their demons.

Does that make you right by the strength of sheer numbers alone?
No, it just makes it more likely.

My morality is my own.
So is most people's, they set their own standards, and it's true to say (and I include myself here) that the standards men set themselves is low, and ever slipping. The ways of the world are evil and corrupt.

Any "world religion" that doesn't take all of humanity into its cosmology has issues.
Christianity takes everyone into account, don't know why you thought otherwise.

Their misogyny is well documented. Blaming the Fall, and all of its attendant evils, on Eve and her descendants is pretty misogynous.

1. Define "their"
2. Chapters and verses please?

And denegrating sexuality as inherently evil, again because of women, is pretty rough too.QUOTE]
WHAT???

[QUOTE=tmancour]
Witty comeback, that. But it doesn't address the issue. The "compassion" of Christianity and Christians has led to more death, destruction, and suffering than any other single cause. Even excepting the Holocaust (I'll classify Nazism as a relgion, for the sake of arguement) that still leaves the Inquisition, the Albigensian crusade, forced conversion of Jews, expulsion of the Jews and Moors from Spain, the Witchhunts in Germany, the Crusades, the Conquistadors, and cultural genocides galore, to name the high points. Sure, you can say "those weren't real Christians", but that gets into the slippery slope of who is a real Christian and who is not.
Okay, maybe they were real Christians, but that doesn't mean that they're right. Some people have agendas and want the Bible to say what they want.

I'll go by the same standards as the newspaper use with my folk: if you are a "self-proclaimed" Christian, I'll count them.
The thing is, that there is the visible Church, and the invisible Church. Not all those in the visible Church are in the invisible Church (i.e. not all those who claim to be Christians will be saved). You can count them as one, but bear that in mind.
(c.f. the letters to the churches in Revelation. There is corruption and evil within them, but it is not caused by those who are Christians, but those who claim to be yet are not saved).

It all adds up to a blatent loss of compassion, which I attribute to the lack of the Goddess in the Church.
That is just your opinion, or belief. There could be many reasons why some who claim to be Christians don't show compassion (i.e. they don't exibit the Fruits of the Spirit), see above.

Please. I've read every major and many minor versions, including the Coptic and Orthodox, the Catholic Apocrypha, and the Nag Hammadi Scrolls.
Yeah, you just haven't truly understood them.

And there can be no denying that the SOP for the Church for over a thousand years was to promise a heavenly reward in return for belief and obediance on Earth. It kept the peasants in line nicely.
What does SOP stand for?
You think that was all? That is not all the God promises, there is much, much more than that. He promises rewards, help, etc for this life, and the life to come. And it's not as if God's promise had failed.

And this "We can never understand God" stuff is a theological cop-out. If you use only scriptural references as your sole basis of source material, of course you won't: they aren't consistant enough to make sense.
Let's see some inconsistencies on this topic then...

And even with that cop-out firmly in place, you cannot deny that "eternal life" was the buzz-word used to lure millions into Christianity in the first place.
I have no doubt that that's what keeps a lot of people encouraged during difficult times of persecution, but I do not agree that it is that alone which would cause someone to become a Christian, it's the whole truth of the Bible
(c.f. Irresistible Grace)

mistranslated -- Let's see, Hebrew to Aramaic to Greek to Latin to vernacular (OT) or Aramaic to Greek to Latin to vernacular (NT). Plenty of room for mistranslation there, and there have been some doozies. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," comes to mind. Purposefully mistranslated by King James' people to give him the biblical authority he needed to go after a group of Scottish witches who were p.o.'d at him. And that's just one example.

Well, you could always read it in the original language, or buy an ESV.

misinterpreted What part of "Thou Shalt Not Kill" gives the theological leeway for warfare and state-sponsored execution? The whole concept of a Christian Warrior is vile. Jesus would have wept. And that's just at the most basic level. The problem with all text based religions is the massive potential for misinterpretation and reinterpretation, and the potential for coreligionists to take issue with alternate interpretations.
I stand by my statement.

Misinterpreted by some and as I said, agendas. But understanding is important.

There is very little wrong with my life. Nothing I can't handle. The gods have been kind to me, and given me just enough challenge to keep it interesting. And the "spiritual ennui" that I possessed as a youth went away when I finally left the Church and its hypocrisies and inconsistancies. By any objective standard, I live a good, honest, compassionate life, and my mental and spiritual world are untroubled.
If only you know how wrong you are.

Au contraire. I've used every tool I've been given
No you haven't. You've neglected the most important tool of all, the Bible. You fail to believe this, and then claim that you've walked on the path that God has given you, when you've clearly done your own thing and wandered away from the path that He tells you to go on.

tmancour

June 8th 2005, 01:49 PM

I believe that the interpretation of the Bible that I hold to is correct, becuase when reading the Scriptures, I attempt to preserve sound judgment and discernment, not to let them out of my sight; they will be life for me, an ornament to grace my neck.
I believe what I genuinely think that they are the correct beliefs of what is true, with anything I am unsure on, I listen to other people's views, ask questions, consult the wise, my council, prayer, and so on, and I end up with a view which I can honestly say I believe to be fair and truthful. (A bit like a judge in a court case, I suppose).
Ofcourse, that doesn't mean that I'm always correct, people do correct me, but the end result is growing in Truth.

Of course, someone else can do the EXACT SAME THING and come up with an entirely different interpretation of "truth", one that they are willing to fight and die for. Which is more valid? Both interpretations are RELATIVE and completely SUBJECTIVE. You are essentially saying that your interpretation of scripture is based on your own sound judgement; I am making the same claim, I just don't see the need to use the crutch of scriptures.

That's why it's faith - I don't need solid proof before I can believe it, God gave me the faith, by His grace and so I can see the Truth.[/QUOTE

"Truth" is provable, or it isn't truth. You can't say "It's capital-T Truth because I believe it to be" unless you are speaking of your own personal and highly subjective viewpoint -- which means it is True to you, but no other. Faith and Truth, therefore, are contradictory.

At the end of the day that's just it, a Muslim belives that their view is true and a Christian theirs. I guess my faith is ever strengthened by the continuing news I hear of many, many people being healed in Jesus' name, or prehaps the driving out of their demons.

Christianity doesn't have a monopoly on faith healing -- every religion does that. In Wicca we place a lot of emphasis on the healing arts, and I've seen plenty of instances in other religions. Does that fact strengthen your arguement or weaken it? Faith and belief are universal human traits.

No, it just makes it more likely.

Which is essentially saying the same thing -- "there are more of us, so we have a better chance to be right". There are plenty of instances where large groups of people have been wrong -- I won't detail them here -- and that doesn't take into account competing religious world views that have as many or more followers than Christianity.

So is most people's, they set their own standards, and it's true to say (and I include myself here) that the standards men set themselves is low, and ever slipping. The ways of the world are evil and corrupt.

I completely disagree. I strive for constant self-improvement, as do most pagans, and my overall worldview is that life, in general, has gotten significantly better in the last century or so, despite the problems inherited from the Christian Interlude. No more chattel slavery in the West. Human rights established. Far higher standards of living for more people than at any other time in human history. "The ways of the world are evil and corrupt" only if you postulate a Golden Age of Perfection that we have lost -- a common element in many mythic systems, and all equally untrue. Now, you frequently have this complaint by members of power groups who have lost status or privelege over time, such as the mullahs of Fundamentalist Islaam, hardline apperatchik Communists in the old Soviet Bloc, and the Evangelicals of North America, but looking at the rank-and-file of humanity I see a trend towards a more enlightened, compassionate understanding of each other, and a general improvement of the lot of humanity. Sure, "evil" still exists in dark spots across the globe (Darfour springs to mine -- heck, all of Africa is beset) but those are abberations. Two centuries ago racial and cultural genocide was the norm, not the exception.

Christianity takes everyone into account, don't know why you thought otherwise.

Your version of Christianity may take everyone into account in its cosmology, but that has not always been the case -- far from it. Despite the admonision to "Love thy neighbor", Christianity's Modus Operendi has been to "Love thy neighbor once they convert to thy particular subsect of Christianity, else demonize Him and all his kin". I don't think Jesus would approve. he didn't say "Love thy Christian neighbor," but clearly intended to mean (IMHO) "love thy neighbor no matter what" or the whole premise of his preaching is shot. When I've discussed the place of non-Christians in the Christian world-view with Christians, it usually comes down to them being upset that so many people are going to Hell.

1. Define "their"
2. Chapters and verses please?

"their" is St. Paul and St. Augustine.

St. Augustine clearly hated women. He asked "Why was woman created at all?" and then answered his own question thusly:

"I don't see what sort of help woman was created to provide man with, if one excludes procreation. If woman is not given to man for help in bearing children, for what help could she be? To till the earth together? If help were needed for that, man would have been a better help for man. The same goes for comfort in solitude. How much more pleasure is it for life and conversation when two friends live together than when a man and a woman cohabitate?"

St. Paul insisted that women cover their heads and should not talk in church.
1 Corinthians 11;3-12 ...14:34-35 should cover it.

[QUOTE=tmancour]
And denegrating sexuality as inherently evil, again because of women, is pretty rough too.
WHAT???

It's pretty clear. Many of the early church fathers (no mothers, just fathers) went out of their way to not only exclude women from the inner workings of the early church, but insisted that the original Sin of Eve was compounded by the "lustful and lacivious" nature of women, as typified by Mary Magdeline, among others. St. Augustine rails against sex, grudingly admitting it is useful for procreation but that it is inherently sinful in all of its other forms. Kind of a buzz kill, that.

[Okay, maybe they were real Christians, but that doesn't mean that they're right. Some people have agendas and want the Bible to say what they want.

And how are we to tell the difference? Sorting "real" Christians from "agenda" Christians is a pointless endeavor. Was their faith in their religion and their god any less than yours? Their victims might have something to say about that. Sure, they weren't right -- but they thought they were. We're involved in a war right now that I bet Jesus would not approve of -- are we wrong, then? Our leaders sure think God is on their side, and that they are being "good Christians" (those of them who are not Jews, that is). My point is ALL Christians have an agenda, and all want the Bible to say what they want it to -- and can use it to justify just about any heinous crime. Whereas Pagans have no "objective" standard by which we may measure ourselves. We have no book to argue over. We have only our individual conscience, and our own wisdom to decide what is "right" and what is not. And we hold ourselves utterly responsible for our actions, whereas Christians can perpetrate any crime in the name of their religion and get out of their spiritual responsibility by playing the "forgiveness" card.

[The thing is, that there is the visible Church, and the invisible Church. Not all those in the visible Church are in the invisible Church (i.e. not all those who claim to be Christians will be saved). You can count them as one, but bear that in mind.
(c.f. the letters to the churches in Revelation. There is corruption and evil within them, but it is not caused by those who are Christians, but those who claim to be yet are not saved).

And that is supposed to make me feel better about your religion?!?! You have an occult church full of people who think that they, alone, are worthy of salvation -- how many members in that church? I'm sure only Jehova knows for sure. The rest are all hypocrites. That just goes to my point: I'd rather be an honest Pagan than a hypocritical Christian. Jehova may not like it, but I've got to live with myself.

That is just your opinion, or belief. There could be many reasons why some who claim to be Christians don't show compassion (i.e. they don't exibit the Fruits of the Spirit), see above.

You are right. It is my opinion, based on a lifetime of observation and study of the issue. Note that in all of history, the only cultures who have waged continent-spanning wars of religion are the Radical Monotheisms, all firmly patriarchal. Maybe there can be a truly compassinate religion without the presence of the Goddess. I have yet to see one. Why, when every conservative Christian group in the world is screaming that a family needs a father and a mother for the children to be raised right, then totally rejects this idea for their pantheon? You would reject your Mother and rely on your Father, alone, to guide and raise you. Does not compute.

Yeah, you just haven't truly understood them.

No, that means "I read them and I don't agree with your interpretation." Big difference. I'm a pretty bright guy, and I wouldn't have taken the time, effort, and trouble to go through them all if I wasn't able to understand them. Just because I don't agree with you doesn't mean I don't understand. heck, most of the Christians I meet these days haven't even read the Bible cover to cover. Let me ask you this: have you read the texts of the other Great Religions of the world? Did you understand them?

What does SOP stand for?
You think that was all? That is not all the God promises, there is much, much more than that. He promises rewards, help, etc for this life, and the life to come. And it's not as if God's promise had failed.

"Standard Operating Procedure".
If I recall correctly, God's original promise was to not destroy the Earth again with water (generous of him, that -- he'll use fire next time. Much better!) and then re-promised the land of Israel to the Hebrews in exchange for their worship and adherence to his laws, and then with Jesus he re-wrote the contract promising Eternal Life to whomever believeth and confesses his sins. Which is what the early Christian missionaries used as leverage as they spread out across the world: convert and get immortality. Maybe that isn't what they meant, but that is what they said, and that's what my pagan forebears signed on for. Only they got screwed -- they died just like everyone else, a promise of heavenly reward stuffed in their pocket. I'm not denying that Jehova may have intervened in some of those early miracles, but then the Druids and the Vitki had plenty of gods-inspired magick of their own. In the end the pagan world fell because the Christians had better administration and they legitimized the violence of the "converted" barbarians to take over the lands of the "heathen" barbarians -- and supported it with writing and bueracracy. I'm sure if you had an accurate tally, you would find plenty of people who have called upon Jehova when they were in trouble and and were not delivered.

All part of God's plan, I guess. Seems an awful lot like luck, though.

Let's see some inconsistencies on this topic then...

"Thou shalt not Kill" -- Kill all the Canaanites. Even the babies
"Thou shalt not Steal" -- Steal the land of Israel from the Canaanites
"Thou shalr not Covet" -- unless God says it's really yours, then covet all you want.
"Love thy neighbor" -- unless he believes differently than you do
"Turn the other cheek" -- while you draw your sword and smite him

And those are just the major ones. Is the Bible for or against wine? Depending upon the chapter and verse, you can read it both ways. Heck, look at Job: pretty rough deal for a devout follower. He gets nailed over a bet with Satan, and when he has the temerity to ask why, he's told "Look, I'm omnipotent, and you are less than nothing. You can never understand me or what I do. So shut up and get back to praying!" This is the same "loving" god who destroyed the world a few chapters earlier. Face it: the God of the Bible looks pretty schizophrenic over time.

I have no doubt that that's what keeps a lot of people encouraged during difficult times of persecution, but I do not agree that it is that alone which would cause someone to become a Christian, it's the whole truth of the Bible
(c.f. Irresistible Grace)

"Irresistable Grace" is only worthwhile if you presuppose original sin and the inherent sinfullness of mankind -- concepts that Christianity had to introduce before they could play the Grace card. But Grace alone didn't win many converts -- it was that "Eternal Life" headline that grabbed the attention.

Well, you could always read it in the original language, or buy an ESV.

Even reading it in the original would lose something in the internal translation. Face it, it takes a lifetime of study to be able to think in another language, to absorb its "map", and that still doesn't overcome the inherent lack of cultural context that we, as post-industrial Westerners, would miss from the mind-set of a semi-nomadic desert-born herder culture. And why would I bother? So that people who didn't take the time to learn the original could argue with me about their own interpretation, or version, or translation? I'd rather live my life. And the ESV isn't any better than any other version out there, and has the same inherent flaws.

Misinterpreted by some and as I said, agendas. But understanding is important.

Some . . . but which ones? Whose interpretation/opinion is the "truth"? Far better to make up my own mind. I know what my agenda is. Should I trust you and your interpretation as being the "correct one"? Why? Why not the Mormons, or the Amish, or the Catholics, or the Copts? Or any subset thereof? I continue to stand by my statement.

If only you know how wrong you are.

Now you are just being condescending. My life is pretty much exactly what I want it to be. I am at peace. I am prosperous. I am happy. I have a great and loving family. I have inner peace and self knowlege, as well as a degree of self-mastery. My moral compass is intact. I am compassionate. I have acheived most of what I have set out to do, and the rest will come in the fullness of time. I am blessed. What can your religion offer me that I do not already possess, except guilt, shame and hypocrisy? Don't just tell me that I'm wrong. Address these issues.

No you haven't. You've neglected the most important tool of all, the Bible. You fail to believe this, and then claim that you've walked on the path that God has given you, when you've clearly done your own thing and wandered away from the path that He tells you to go on.

Neglected the Bible? It's been shoved down my throat all of my life. I've studied it, tried to believe it, asked God for the faith to believe it (back when I thought I might be a Christian), and got guidance and counsel from anyone who would talk to me about it. I was plenty open to the possibility. It never happened. The inconsistancies in the text, the acrimony surrounding its interpretation, and the flexible morals of Jehovah in regards to humanity did nothing to inspire me to a "leap of faith". it was only when I found the Goddess (or she found me) that my questions were answered to my satisfaction -- it was only then that the Truth was revealed. For there is more Truth in one tree than in all the books in the world.

And I didn't claim to walk the path God has given me -- I merely said that if Jehova's way was truth, and he made me what I am, then it's his own fault that I am who I am and burning me in Hell for all of eternity made him unworthy of my worship. I personally don't believe that. I believe that the Goddess has returned to the West, and we at last have a chance to bring wisdom and compassion back to the fields left fallow for so long by Christianity.

Arion the Blue
High Druid of Durham

Cheetah

June 9th 2005, 02:37 PM

Of course, someone else can do the EXACT SAME THING and come up with an entirely different interpretation of "truth", one that they are willing to fight and die for. Which is more valid? Both interpretations are RELATIVE and completely SUBJECTIVE. You are essentially saying that your interpretation of scripture is based on your own sound judgement; I am making the same claim, I just don't see the need to use the crutch of scriptures.
I dispute your claim. I do not believe this can be the case at all. Why? Becuase I try to turn my ear to wisdom, and apply my heart to understanding, and I call out for insight and I cry aloud for understanding, and I look for it as for silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, so that I can understand the fear of the LORD and find the knowledge of God.
Having this knowledge and understanding can not lead to wrong interpretations of the Truth. I am not saying that my sound judgement is alone my guide, becuase it is the Lord who guides, the Lord who makes light my paths.

"Truth" is provable, or it isn't truth. You can't say "It's capital-T Truth because I believe it to be" unless you are speaking of your own personal and highly subjective viewpoint -- which means it is True to you, but no other.

1. It will be proven, in the fullness of time with the second coming.
2. You say that assuming it doesn't already have a lot of lot of evidence towards it. (I avoid using the word 'proven' here because of the argument that it is impossible to prove anything).
3. It's not as if your view point is provable.

Faith and Truth, therefore, are contradictory.
Faith and truth are not contradictory. Just because I can't see something, doesn't make it any less true.

Christianity doesn't have a monopoly on faith healing -- every religion does that. In Wicca we place a lot of emphasis on the healing arts, and I've seen plenty of instances in other religions. Does that fact strengthen your arguement or weaken it?
Aye, whatever...I'm talking about real faith healing.

I completely disagree. I strive for constant self-improvement, as do most pagans, and my overall worldview is that life, in general, has gotten significantly better in the last century or so, despite the problems inherited from the Christian Interlude. No more chattel slavery in the West. Human rights established. Far higher standards of living for more people than at any other time in human history. "The ways of the world are evil and corrupt" only if you postulate a Golden Age of Perfection that we have lost -- a common element in many mythic systems, and all equally untrue. Now, you frequently have this complaint by members of power groups who have lost status or privelege over time, such as the mullahs of Fundamentalist Islaam, hardline apperatchik Communists in the old Soviet Bloc, and the Evangelicals of North America, but looking at the rank-and-file of humanity I see a trend towards a more enlightened, compassionate understanding of each other, and a general improvement of the lot of humanity. Sure, "evil" still exists in dark spots across the globe (Darfour springs to mine -- heck, all of Africa is beset) but those are abberations. Two centuries ago racial and cultural genocide was the norm, not the exception.
That's only half the picture. When left unchecked, we will eventually see things like the Iraq abuses - high standards??

I don't think Jesus would approve.
If Jesus wouldn't aprove then is it real Christianity?

St. Augustine clearly hated women. He asked "Why was woman created at all?" and then answered his own question thusly:

"I don't see what sort of help woman was created to provide man with, if one excludes procreation. If woman is not given to man for help in bearing children, for what help could she be? To till the earth together? If help were needed for that, man would have been a better help for man. The same goes for comfort in solitude. How much more pleasure is it for life and conversation when two friends live together than when a man and a woman cohabitate?"
Sounds like a Catholic view to me, and I'm not a Catholic so, next...

St. Paul insisted that women cover their heads and should not talk in church.
1 Corinthians 11;3-12 ...14:34-35 should cover it.
That has absolutely no relevance to you orginal quote which was about blaiming the fall and all its evils on Eve:
"Their misogyny is well documented. Blaming the Fall, and all of its attendant evils, on Eve and her descendants is pretty misogynous."

And how are we to tell the difference? Sorting "real" Christians from "agenda" Christians is a pointless endeavor.
It's easy, becuase in the case of those men, their folly will be clear to everyone.

You are right. It is my opinion, based on a lifetime of observation and study of the issue. Note that in all of history, the only cultures who have waged continent-spanning wars of religion are the Radical Monotheisms, all firmly patriarchal. Maybe there can be a truly compassinate religion without the presence of the Goddess. I have yet to see one. Why, when every conservative Christian group in the world is screaming that a family needs a father and a mother for the children to be raised right, then totally rejects this idea for their pantheon? You would reject your Mother and rely on your Father, alone, to guide and raise you. Does not compute.
In the case of Christianity, the Father doesn't need a 'mother' - God is not human, He is not bound by such restrictions. God can be compassionate, or don't you think that's what Jesus was.

No, that means "I read them and I don't agree with your interpretation." Big difference.
No, you haven't actually understood it. The Bible, as I have said before is more than just to "pay you off in the afterlife", it's about supporting, caring, helping and continuously rewarding those who seek God.
(Unless ofcourse you can show me a quote that says otherwise).

and then re-promised the land of Israel to the Hebrews in exchange for their worship and adherence to his laws
No, no. He promised the land becuase He had chosen them to be His people, the obeying laws and worship were expected anyway, as it is of all people.

"Thou shalt not Kill" -- Kill all the Canaanites. Even the babies
"Thou shalt not Steal" -- Steal the land of Israel from the Canaanites
"Thou shalr not Covet" -- unless God says it's really yours, then covet all you want.
"Love thy neighbor" -- unless he believes differently than you do
"Turn the other cheek" -- while you draw your sword and smite him

I do not believe that the commandments are to be taken literally at all times, I say this becuase of examples in the Bible, another for example would be 4th commandment, but then we see Jesus healing on this day, so we assume that if someone is in need of help, we are not to deny them this becuase we must not work on a Sunday. It's all about understanding what it actually means, truly.

"Irresistable Grace" is only worthwhile if you presuppose original sin and the inherent sinfullness of mankind -- concepts that Christianity had to introduce before they could play the Grace card. But Grace alone didn't win many converts -- it was that "Eternal Life" headline that grabbed the attention.
What are you talking about - Irresistable Grace is the Calvinist doctrine which teaches that God draws people to Himself by the working of the Holy Spirit in their hearts. It is not the Arminian idea that you seem to be presenting.

Some . . . but which ones? Whose interpretation/opinion is the "truth"? Far better to make up my own mind. I know what my agenda is. Should I trust you and your interpretation as being the "correct one"? Why? Why not the Mormons, or the Amish, or the Catholics, or the Copts? Or any subset thereof? I continue to stand by my statement.
Read the Bible, follow its instructions and heed its advice, and you will know for yourself.

Now you are just being condescending. My life is pretty much exactly what I want it to be. I am at peace. I am prosperous. I am happy. I have a great and loving family. I have inner peace and self knowlege, as well as a degree of self-mastery. My moral compass is intact. I am compassionate. I have acheived most of what I have set out to do, and the rest will come in the fullness of time. I am blessed. What can your religion offer me that I do not already possess, except guilt, shame and hypocrisy? Don't just tell me that I'm wrong. Address these issues.
You're going to hell, how can that gives you peace? Christianity gives the assurance that the Lord, the Lord Almightly is true to this religion, this faith, and these people.

Neglected the Bible? It's been shoved down my throat all of my life.
You're neglecting it right now. You refuse to obey it and then say you've used the tools you were given.

I merely said that if Jehova's way was truth, and he made me what I am, then it's his own fault that I am who I am and burning me in Hell for all of eternity...
Not at all. I believe that you should pay the concquences for the choices you made, and not blame it on God.

and we at last have a chance to bring wisdom and compassion back to the fields left fallow for so long by Christianity.
Your teaching are not wisdom, they are (to be harsh, but true) pure lies, words of the devil designed to lead astray the nations and decieve them with all kinds of evil - though you may not think that.

tmancour

June 10th 2005, 01:32 PM

I dispute your claim. I do not believe this can be the case at all. Why? Becuase I try to turn my ear to wisdom, and apply my heart to understanding, and I call out for insight and I cry aloud for understanding, and I look for it as for silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, so that I can understand the fear of the LORD and find the knowledge of God.emphasis mine

And now we come to the crux of the matter: your religion is based on fear.
Fear of Hell, fear of damnation, fear of divine retribution, fear, guilt, and suffering. Fear is the big ugly club you hold over the heads of the faithful. Jehova, as portrayed in the Bible, is an extortionist: obey me, or suffer my wrath, if not here then in the afterlife. Do my will and nobody gets hurt. That's not what I want to base my total response to the universe on. Any deity worthy of my worship would not need to threaten me.

Having this knowledge and understanding can not lead to wrong interpretations of the Truth. I am not saying that my sound judgement is alone my guide, becuase it is the Lord who guides, the Lord who makes light my paths.

Oh, but it can -- otherwise you are saying that all Christians have a correct understanding of the "Truth". And you have already admitted that that is not the case. Or are we sorting Christians into the "not real Christians" and "Everyone who agrees with me" pile again?

1. It will be proven, in the fullness of time with the second coming.

After the attempted assasination of the Goddess and the denegration of sexuality, the Second Coming is one of the worst things Christianity has ever inflicted on the world. The entire Book of Revelations has given a sinister cast to the religion that has made it, in effect, a nihlisting exercise. It has caused what could have been a very positive belief structure to encourage its adhereants to actively look forward to the destruction of humanity and the end of the world. The current crop of Evangelicals is so anxious to meet Jesus in their lifetime that they are doing everything in their growing power to bring on Armageddon, hoping that Jesus will take the hint and finally show. From what they've told me, they expect the event to take place live on Fox News, without commercial interruption. I know, yadda yadda like a thief in the night yadda yadda No man knoweth the hour yadda yadda. But despite that, your people are so hyped up by the prospect that if it doesn't happen soon, they want to make it happen.

That's not a world-view I'm comfortable with. I want my kids to grow up in a hope-filled environment, not one where their leaders anticipate global war and destruction with suicidal religious glee.

2. You say that assuming it doesn't already have a lot of lot of evidence towards it. (I avoid using the word 'proven' here because of the argument that it is impossible to prove anything).

Show me your evidence -- OUTSIDE OF THE BIBLE. If it is "provable" using only that as your source, you have succumbed to circular logic. The Bible is a discredited source as it stands.

3. It's not as if your view point is provable.
Well, let's see: according to science, the sun's fire warms our earth and lets the plants grow and the ice melt. The moon was the ladle that stirred the cauldron of life with its tides, throwing sealife up on shore to evolve into landlife. The trees gave refuge to our mammalian ancestors in the age of dinosaurs and allowed us to evolve an opposable thumb, depth perception, color perception, and brachiation that encouraged us to stand upright. And fire gave us the ability to protect ourselves from predators, warm ourselves in the cold, and preserve our meat for longer periods of time. And our glorious genders have allowed us to procreate and mix our genetics so that we have the ability to adapt to changing conditions.

While I cannot prove to your satisfaction that there are attendant gods and goddesses associated with them, these raw forces of nature have sculpted and shaped us into the tool-using, civilization building species that we are today. Perhaps your view of humanity is so dim that you do not see this as a benefit. Or perhaps you take the literal interpretation of creation in the Bible and discount science altogether. But my view, while unprovable to someone who exists on faith alone, honors the forces that shaped us, and has for the last 100,000 years and more. Jehovah's contribution? He encouraged people to read and he more-or-less invented the idea of history -- not a bad thing in and of itself, but pretty weak compared to the importance of the Earth on our development. So please excuse me if I drop Jehovah-come-lately and his narrow viewpoint in favor of the Mother who gave us birth.

Faith and truth are not contradictory. Just because I can't see something, doesn't make it any less true.

Perhaps. But you can't use a subjective faith to prove an objective truth. And that's what you are trying to do. "I know something is true because I have faith that it is so" is intellectually dishonest. Something is true because you have real evidence for it. The Bible is not evidence. It's a hagiographical oral history written down, heavily influenced by the surrounding (pagan) cultures of the land where it was born. Not even the monotheism part is unique.

Aye, whatever...I'm talking about real faith healing.

And how would you distinguish between the two? Provable efficacy? Or does it have to have the Jesus brand name on it to qualify as "real" faith healing? I have helped in many healing rituals, with generally good results. Sometimes spectacularly, miraculously good results. Every human culture has faith healing, and the Christian variety has no better track record than the Buddhist or animist varieties.

[QUOTE=Phil.D]That's only half the picture. When left unchecked, we will eventually see things like the Iraq abuses - high standards??

I would point out that the Iraq abuses were done by Christian soldiers. There are, indeed, many pagans serving in Iraq -- I correspond with several. And in the ONE CASE when a pagan friend of mine was ordered to do something that he knew was against the rules of engagement and the articles of war, he refused, stating that he would rather face a court martial than live his life knowing that what he did was wrong. He felt the compassion of the Goddess, and lives by a warriors' code that prohibits such things as torture and extra-judicial killings.

That aside, I think your opinion of Mankind is low. It's pretty endemic of your religion, actually -- part and parcel with original sin. And what do you mean by "unchecked"? Are you implying that if Christianity gets involved such things will stop on their own? History says otherwise.

If Jesus wouldn't aprove then is it real Christianity?

You tell me. I calls them likes I sees them. It is not my place to judge whether or not someone is an authentic Christian, nor whether I think Jesus would approve of their actions. I can have an opinion, but as it stands I lump you all into the category of "self-described Christians".

Sounds like a Catholic view to me, and I'm not a Catholic so, next...

and

That has absolutely no relevance to you orginal quote which was about blaiming the fall and all its evils on Eve:
"Their misogyny is well documented. Blaming the Fall, and all of its attendant evils, on Eve and her descendants is pretty misogynous."

Oh, you can't get out of that one that easily! Blaming another denomination for perceived problems isn't fair. Besides, until the 1500s, every one of your spiritual ancestors west of the Black Sea was a Catholic. The Nicene Council was a Catholic council -- do you reject the Nicene Creed? The entire NT was put together by the Catholic Church. Sure, the Protestants editied out some of it -- but did they add anything pertainent?

The fact remains that St. Augustine was a "Catholic" only because in the time in which he lived, CE 354-450, every Christian in the west was catholic -- the church would brook no competition even then. And Protestants inherited the bulk of that intellectual legacy when they split away from the church.

Augustine skilfully weaved the story of The Fall with the theology of the Original Sin in The City of God. The main casualty of his theology was the position of woman in Christian society. According to Augustine, woman was created purely for procreation and for nothing else. Furthermore, it was sexual pleasure that carried the original sin from generation to generation.

But he and Paul were not the lone voices in the wilderness, regarding misogyny. The list of woman- and sex-hating Church Fathers is long and distinguished: St. Clement of Alexandria (c150-c215), Tertullian (c160-c225), Origen (c185-254)(who so hated women and sex that he thought castration was the only way to attain Christian perfection), St. Gregory of Nazianzum (329-389), St. Gregory (330-395), Bishop of Nyassa, a highly influential thinker in the early Church, taught that the sexual act was an outcome of the Fall and that marriage is the outcome of sin; St. Ambrose (c339-397) "Remember that God took the rib out of Adam's body, not a part of his soul, to make her. She was not made in the image of God, like man."; St. Jerome (c342-420), the well known Biblical scholar and translator of the Bible into Latin said "woman is the root of all evil." and "Eve in paradise was a virgin ... understand that virginity is natural and that marriage comes after the Fall.";St. John Chrysostom (c347-407), who said "For what is a woman but an enemy of friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a domestic danger, delectable mischief, a fault in nature, painted with beautiful colors?" ; St. Albertus Magnus (c1200-1280) wrote:

"Woman is less qualified [than man] for moral behavior. For the woman contains more liquid than man, and it is a property of liquid to take things up easily and to hold unto them poorly. Liquids are easily moved, hence women are inconstant and curious. When a woman has relations with a man, she would like, as much as possible, to be lying with another man at the same time. Woman knows nothing about fidelity. Believe me, if you give her your trust, you will be disappointed. Trust an experience teacher. For this reason prudent men share their plans and actions least of all with their wives. Woman is a misbegotten man and has a faulty and defective nature in comparison to his. Therefore she is unsure in herself. What she cannot get, she seeks to obtain through lying and diabolical deceptions. And so, to put it briefly, one must be on one's guard with every woman, as if she were a poisonous snake and the horned devil. If I could say what I know about women, the world would be astonished ... Woman is strictly speaking not cleverer but slyer (more cunning) than man. Cleverness sounds like something good, slyness sounds like something evil. Thus in evil and perverse doings woman is cleverer, that is, slyer, than man. Her feelings drive woman toward every evil, just as reason impels man toward all good."

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who wrote: "Because there is a higher water content in women, they are more easily seduced by sexual pleasure." A learned arguement, no doubt.

Things didn't get much better, theologically speaking, under Protestantism. Worse, even: at least the Catholics have the Cult of the Virgin to inject at least a modicum of femininity into worship. Protestant theology is universally sterile and bereft of femininity. To Protestants, God has a penis. End of story.

It's easy, becuase in the case of those men, their folly will be clear to everyone.

Hardly. Every one of the saintly church fathers I quoted above is widely considered to be "real" -- they are still studied in both Catholic and Protestant seminaries today. And as far as present-day "agenda" Christians, should you call their piety into question in any way you get a hellstorm of counteraccusations and character assasinations. If you could tell a "true Christian" by his actions and folly, then nearly everyone in the present administration would not measure up.

In the case of Christianity, the Father doesn't need a 'mother' - God is not human, He is not bound by such restrictions. God can be compassionate, or don't you think that's what Jesus was.

And that's part of the problem: Jehovah is so remote and distant from humanity in the Bible that besides having a penis, there aren't enough details to allow him to relate properly with his chosen people. He needs a penis, but not a female with which to use it? The theological implications are amusing. And God the Father did "need" a mother, for the birth of Jesus -- pretty slack planning for an omnipotent deity. Indeed, the Virgin Birth is the best arguement yet for the importance of the Goddess. For all women are manifestations of the Goddess, just as all men are manifestations of the God. And God either did not choose to -- or was unable -- to send his avatar to Earth without Her divine assistance.

Your words are telling. "God can be compassionate" (emphasis mine), not "God is compassionate." Yes, Jesus was compassionate, enough so that he sacrificed himself rather than get his people involved in a bloody uprising against military occupation -- but he hardly held a copywrite on it. Buddah was at least as compassionate, as was Mohammed and Kung Tse, each in their way.

No, you haven't actually understood it. The Bible, as I have said before is more than just to "pay you off in the afterlife", it's about supporting, caring, helping and continuously rewarding those who seek God.
(Unless ofcourse you can show me a quote that says otherwise).
emphasis mine

And fire and the sword to everyone else. Just ask the Canaanites -- oops, you can't. How about the Caribe Indians? Oops, them too. The Jews in Eastern Europe? Uh-oh.

Doesn't that contradict the Christian imperative to "love thy neighbor?" Or did he mean "Love thy Christian neighbor only"? Or is it possible to love thy neighbor and murder thy neighbor at the same time? Face it, the Bible is a ployglot anthology of many sources, and it says so many different things that it is possible to use it for all sorts of purposes -- from justifying conquest and slavery to boycotting shellfish and hairdressers. Some chapters advocate selling your daughters into slavery. Taken as a whole (and you have to take it as a whole -- you people closed the canon) it's a pretty poor guidebook for living your life.

No, no. He promised the land becuase He had chosen them to be His people, the obeying laws and worship were expected anyway, as it is of all people.

So why didn't Jehovah appear to all people? And pass along those same commandments? Laziness? Indifferance? Busy elsewhere? If he was really omnipotent, he would have found a way. As it is, he's just the national god of Israel who St. Paul found as a convenient vehicle for building a religion.

I do not believe that the commandments are to be taken literally at all times, I say this becuase of examples in the Bible, another for example would be 4th commandment, but then we see Jesus healing on this day, so we assume that if someone is in need of help, we are not to deny them this becuase we must not work on a Sunday. It's all about understanding what it actually means, truly.

Firstly, Sabbath is Saturday, not Sunday -- at least in first century Palestine. Secondly, you are hair-splitting and nitpicking. Either they are COMMANDMENTS or they are not. Either the Bible is to be taken literally at all times, or it is not. There can be no middle ground. Sure, jesus may have reinterpreted the Covenant, but he failed to specify which elements of Mosaic Law he meant to keep and which he was altering.

The problem is that when you have a religion of Law, you inevitably have a congregation of Law Breakers, with a lot of useless guilt and jealousy and the like making everyone miserable. In a tradition that venerates Wisdom, on the other hand, it is realized that "YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY". Your individual life may or may not fit neatly into a master plan and be ameniable to a code of spiritual laws. So don't try. Law was a new and nifty thing back in the BCE days, as was writing. There is an all-too-human impulse to take anything new and nifty and try to make it act as the Answer To All Your Problems -- see our current fascination with technology, or the mercantilism of the 18th and 19th centuries. That doesn't mean it IS the answer to all of your problems.

The Wiccan POV says that you should act upon your divine will, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone unecessarily. It isn't a LAW in the formal sense. It is a guideline, and a darn good one, for how you should ideally respond to the universe. It is not an invitation to licentiousness -- on the contrary. It is a mandate of personal responsibility, advising you to live better by taking responsibility for your life. The only spiritual laws are natural laws, and they can vary from person to person.

What are you talking about - Irresistable Grace is the Calvinist doctrine which teaches that God draws people to Himself by the working of the Holy Spirit in their hearts. It is not the Arminian idea that you seem to be presenting.

hey, you brought up Grace, not me.

Read the Bible, follow its instructions and heed its advice, and you will know for yourself.

That means I should eschew shellfish, pork and masturbation, not cut my hair or beard, wear a hat when I'm feelin' holy, sell my daughter into sexual slavery if I run short of funds, cover my wife's face with a sheet, and lay with my concubine if my wife cannot conceive? That doesn't sound like spiritual growth. That sounds like a miserable life. Does Jehovah want me to be miserable? No, thank you.

You're going to hell, how can that gives you peace? Christianity gives the assurance that the Lord, the Lord Almightly is true to this religion, this faith, and these people.

I'm not going to hell. I refuse to acknowlege even the threat. It smacks of coercion and extortion -- is that how your god works? For a few years, that held sway over me, but that was before I found the endless compassion of the Goddess and turned away from your deity's threats. For that's how Jehova operates: with fear and threats. He's the Mafia Don of the universe: "Do what I tell you, don't ask questions, or someone's going to get hurt." Sorry, I don't think that's a terribly good attitude for a deity to take.

Again, if he sends me to hell at least I'll go with a clear conscience. And if he sends me to hell it will confirm every suspicion I've ever had about his motives.

You're neglecting it right now. You refuse to obey it and then say you've used the tools you were given.

I "refuse to obey" because it doesn't make sense. My gods don't want to make me a slave to their will -- they want me to develop my own, and act as guides and advisors and counselors to facilitate that. I have better things to do with my short time here than endlessly study the mistranslated musings of half-mad, sex-hating, desert-born mystics who don't seem to want me to do anything but feel afraid and alone and guilty.

I've done the Bible thing for years. I got the T-shirt to prove it. If you say "well, you have to keep studying until you agree with me" I'll take a pass. You can study ANYTHING long enough to drive you crazy. I'd rather live a hopeful, healthy, and happy life than a hopeless, sickly, and miserable life -- which is what most interpretations of the Bible advocate. I came to that conclusion on my own. I am ready to face the responsibility of that action any time -- from this moment to the end of eternity.

And I don't regret it one little bit.

Not at all. I believe that you should pay the concquences for the choices you made, and not blame it on God.

But is Jehovah willing to live with his own consequences? Nearly wiping out the human race? Advocating genocide? Causing misery and suffering to billions to satisfy his obsessive desire for affirmation? He's got a lot to answer for. He is a god unworthy of my worship. But I guess I just have high standards.

Your teaching are not wisdom, they are (to be harsh, but true) pure lies, words of the devil designed to lead astray the nations and decieve them with all kinds of evil - though you may not think that.

And you just blew whatever credibility you had. If I don't agree with you, you accuse me of being an agent of your other deity. And there is not a lie in anything I've said, much less a pure lie. And I don't intend on leading anyone astray -- evangelism and prostheltyzing are Christian and Moslem diseases, not Paganism's. We don't want to "lead" anyone anywhere. At the very most we would like people to have an honest think about what they believe and leave us the hell alone to do the same thing. If you choose to be a Christian, and want to live up to the standards Jesus set, I have no problem with that -- some of my best friends are Christians, and I think the world would be a lot better place if there were more Christians interested in living the kind of life Jesus advocated, instead of getting wrapped up in the unimportant minutia of a Semetic hagiographical legal history. Tear away everything else, all the unimportant crap, and get back to the basics: Love Thy Neighbor. All of your neighbors. Even the Pagan ones. Don't try to convert us, lead by your good example.

It is interesting to note that Christianity puts literally billions of dollars into Evangelism every year, and it's barely holding its own. Paganism, with no mandate for prostheylization or evangelism, no centralized structure or dogma, no flashy miracles or pricey merchandising, doubles in size every eighteen months. There must be something there, don't you think? Something worthy of study? The Goddess is awakening in the Land again, and Her children are coming forth. Humanity needs us, because in the last two thousand years you guys have really screwed things up. Western culture is sick and dying because of you. Your own religion is headed for a radical paradigm change because you have painted yourselves into a nihlistic, fatalistic and hopeless corner, and that pressure is going to force some changes. I just hope it doesn't destroy the innocent bystanders in the process.

Blessed Be,
Arion the Blue
High Druid of Durham

junipersilver

June 12th 2005, 03:45 AM

"How do you know that neo-paganism (witchcraft) is true?"
I don't, but honestly that doesn't matter to me. The point is that I feel that it is true & it gives me stregnth in the way that I need it. I think that's the point that having a religion boils down to. I'm not saying that everyone should be Wiccan by any means, but it's the religion that I should be.

"What if you are wrong?"
Then I'm wrong. How could I possibly know what would happen if I were wrong? If Christians were right I guess I'd burn in hell. Maybe no one in the world has ever known the "true" religion, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it.

"If there are such things as gods and goddesses why have they not revealed themselves physically like Jesus Christ has?"
Personally, I don't think they need to. Jesus needed to come because the religion he supports believes that if someone dies unconverted, they will be in hell. I don't believe in hell & I don't believe that someone would be punished for not being Wiccan. Therefore, there's no need for a savior to come convert/save people.

tmancour

June 13th 2005, 02:28 PM

Just a quick thought, here:

Would the God of Abraham rather see me a happy Pagan or a miserable Christian?

Arion

Cheetah

June 13th 2005, 02:37 PM

Would the God of Abraham rather see me a happy Pagan or a miserable Christian?

I don't think He'd rather see either.

P.S. I did try and respond to your previous post, but I typed out all of my reply, and when I tried to submit it, the computer lost it all - so I haven't bothered re-writing it.

tmancour

June 13th 2005, 03:01 PM

I don't think He'd rather see either.

Those are the only two choices that seem to work for me in your system.

P.S. I did try and respond to your previous post, but I typed out all of my reply, and when I tried to submit it, the computer lost it all - so I haven't bothered re-writing it.

I figured as much. Of all the gods and demons, the Computer Gods are among the most capricious, and the hardest to appease. You would be too if your fate was in the hands of Microsoft.

Reply at your leisure. I ain't going no wheres.

Arion

TuckEverlasting

June 13th 2005, 03:04 PM

"How do you know that neo-paganism (witchcraft) is true?"

I don't, but honestly that doesn't matter to me.

I like the refreshing honesty of many neo-pagans. :thumb: I was going to ask some more questions, but really, how do you talk to a person who freely admits that they don't care what the truth is? :shrug:

tmancour

June 13th 2005, 03:08 PM

I like the refreshing honesty of many neo-pagans. :thumb: I was going to ask some more questions, but really, how do you talk to a person who freely admits that they don't care what the truth is? :shrug:

While we rarely argue for the "truth" of anything (we are a religion of orthopraxy, rather than orthodoxy -- what you do is more important than what you believe) that still leaves plenty of room for opinion, of which we have an abundance.

Come on, lay it on us: what are your questions? What we don't know the answer to, we'll make up!

Arion

TuckEverlasting

June 13th 2005, 03:14 PM

Come on, lay it on us: what are your questions?

Well, my questions were specifically for juniper, based on what she wrote... because there aren't really many specifics about what a Wiccan is 'supposed' to believe, I like to talk to them individually and find out what each one thinks.

Still, I might come back later and ask anyway. :smile:

junipersilver

June 14th 2005, 08:07 PM

Well, my questions were specifically for juniper, based on what she wrote... because there aren't really many specifics about what a Wiccan is 'supposed' to believe, I like to talk to them individually and find out what each one thinks.

Still, I might come back later and ask anyway. :smile:

Ask away, I'd love to answer your questions :teeth:

Cheetah

June 23rd 2005, 04:13 PM

And now we come to the crux of the matter: your religion is based on fear.
Fear of Hell, fear of damnation, fear of divine retribution, fear, guilt, and suffering. Fear is the big ugly club you hold over the heads of the faithful. Jehova, as portrayed in the Bible, is an extortionist: obey me, or suffer my wrath, if not here then in the afterlife. Do my will and nobody gets hurt. That's not what I want to base my total response to the universe on. Any deity worthy of my worship would not need to threaten me.
No it's not. There is no fear of being destroyed by God because I mess up now and again, the Bible is full of passages on the joy of being a Christian.

After the attempted assasination of the Goddess
What?

The entire Book of Revelations has given a sinister cast to the religion that has made it, in effect, a nihlisting exercise. It has caused what could have been a very positive belief structure to encourage its adhereants to actively look forward to the destruction of humanity and the end of the world.

The destruction of evil - and why wouldn't anyone want to see that?

The current crop of Evangelicals is so anxious to meet Jesus in their lifetime that they are doing everything in their growing power to bring on Armageddon, hoping that Jesus will take the hint and finally show. From what they've told me, they expect the event to take place live on Fox News, without commercial interruption. I know, yadda yadda like a thief in the night yadda yadda No man knoweth the hour yadda yadda. But despite that, your people are so hyped up by the prospect that if it doesn't happen soon, they want to make it happen.
I don't think so, I've never heard of this. Infact, throughout your posts, the picture you have been painting of the Church is one that is totally unfamiliar to me. I don't know of one true Gospel preaching church that is like what you've described.

Show me your evidence -- OUTSIDE OF THE BIBLE. If it is "provable" using only that as your source, you have succumbed to circular logic. The Bible is a discredited source as it stands.

I'm not going to try and prove that the Bible is true to you. If you want to, you can seach for evidence yourself, but the Bible has to be believed by faith. If I proved it to you, you would have no choice but to believe it, because you wouldn't be able to dispute it, and if you could, then it wouldn't be proof.

Well, let's see: according to science, the sun's fire warms our earth and lets the plants grow and the ice melt. The moon was the ladle that stirred the cauldron of life with its tides, throwing sealife up on shore to evolve into landlife. The trees gave refuge to our mammalian ancestors in the age of dinosaurs and allowed us to evolve an opposable thumb, depth perception, color perception, and brachiation that encouraged us to stand upright. And fire gave us the ability to protect ourselves from predators, warm ourselves in the cold, and preserve our meat for longer periods of time. And our glorious genders have allowed us to procreate and mix our genetics so that we have the ability to adapt to changing conditions.

While I cannot prove to your satisfaction that there are attendant gods and goddesses associated with them
Yes, I was talking about your gods.

Not even the monotheism part is unique.
I have no doubt that monotheism is not unique to Christianity, but you are implying that it was copied from another religion, something which I do not agree, nor do I believe there is any evidence for.

And how would you distinguish between the two? Provable efficacy? Or does it have to have the Jesus brand name on it to qualify as "real" faith healing? I have helped in many healing rituals, with generally good results. Sometimes spectacularly, miraculously good results. Every human culture has faith healing, and the Christian variety has no better track record than the Buddhist or animist varieties.
So how do you explain this? All I can see is that your gods and godesses respond to all names.

You tell me. I calls them likes I sees them. It is not my place to judge whether or not someone is an authentic Christian, nor whether I think Jesus would approve of their actions. I can have an opinion, but as it stands I lump you all into the category of "self-described Christians".
Just because they are Christians doesn't make them right, nor does it mean that their view should be attributed to all Christians.

Oh, you can't get out of that one that easily! Blaming another denomination for perceived problems isn't fair.
If it is their view, and I don't agree with it, then I will seperate myself from it and make that known. Just becuase Catholics believe it, doesn't mean that I should take blame when they are wrong if I disagree with them.

Besides, until the 1500s, every one of your spiritual ancestors west of the Black Sea was a Catholic. The Nicene Council was a Catholic council -- do you reject the Nicene Creed? The entire NT was put together by the Catholic Church. Sure, the Protestants editied out some of it -- but did they add anything pertainent?

The fact remains that St. Augustine was a "Catholic" only because in the time in which he lived, CE 354-450, every Christian in the west was catholic -- the church would brook no competition even then. And Protestants inherited the bulk of that intellectual legacy when they split away from the church.

Augustine skilfully weaved the story of The Fall with the theology of the Original Sin in The City of God. The main casualty of his theology was the position of woman in Christian society. According to Augustine, woman was created purely for procreation and for nothing else. Furthermore, it was sexual pleasure that carried the original sin from generation to generation.

But he and Paul were not the lone voices in the wilderness, regarding misogyny. The list of woman- and sex-hating Church Fathers is long and distinguished: St. Clement of Alexandria (c150-c215), Tertullian (c160-c225), Origen (c185-254)(who so hated women and sex that he thought castration was the only way to attain Christian perfection), St. Gregory of Nazianzum (329-389), St. Gregory (330-395), Bishop of Nyassa, a highly influential thinker in the early Church, taught that the sexual act was an outcome of the Fall and that marriage is the outcome of sin; St. Ambrose (c339-397) "Remember that God took the rib out of Adam's body, not a part of his soul, to make her. She was not made in the image of God, like man."; St. Jerome (c342-420), the well known Biblical scholar and translator of the Bible into Latin said "woman is the root of all evil." and "Eve in paradise was a virgin ... understand that virginity is natural and that marriage comes after the Fall.";St. John Chrysostom (c347-407), who said "For what is a woman but an enemy of friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a domestic danger, delectable mischief, a fault in nature, painted with beautiful colors?" ; St. Albertus Magnus (c1200-1280) wrote:

"Woman is less qualified [than man] for moral behavior. For the woman contains more liquid than man, and it is a property of liquid to take things up easily and to hold unto them poorly. Liquids are easily moved, hence women are inconstant and curious. When a woman has relations with a man, she would like, as much as possible, to be lying with another man at the same time. Woman knows nothing about fidelity. Believe me, if you give her your trust, you will be disappointed. Trust an experience teacher. For this reason prudent men share their plans and actions least of all with their wives. Woman is a misbegotten man and has a faulty and defective nature in comparison to his. Therefore she is unsure in herself. What she cannot get, she seeks to obtain through lying and diabolical deceptions. And so, to put it briefly, one must be on one's guard with every woman, as if she were a poisonous snake and the horned devil. If I could say what I know about women, the world would be astonished ... Woman is strictly speaking not cleverer but slyer (more cunning) than man. Cleverness sounds like something good, slyness sounds like something evil. Thus in evil and perverse doings woman is cleverer, that is, slyer, than man. Her feelings drive woman toward every evil, just as reason impels man toward all good."

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who wrote: "Because there is a higher water content in women, they are more easily seduced by sexual pleasure." A learned arguement, no doubt.

Things didn't get much better, theologically speaking, under Protestantism. Worse, even: at least the Catholics have the Cult of the Virgin to inject at least a modicum of femininity into worship. Protestant theology is universally sterile and bereft of femininity. To Protestants, God has a penis. End of story.
I don't agree with any of the above, so there's simply nothing for me to get out of.

And that's part of the problem: Jehovah is so remote and distant from humanity
No, God talks to humans throughout the entire Bible, either directly (e.g. to Abraham), or through prophets (e.g. Isaiah), or in person (Jesus).

And fire and the sword to everyone else. Just ask the Canaanites -- oops, you can't. How about the Caribe Indians? Oops, them too. The Jews in Eastern Europe? Uh-oh.

Doesn't that contradict the Christian imperative to "love thy neighbor?" Or did he mean "Love thy Christian neighbor only"?
Love your neighbour, but don't ever withold justice from them. If they should be punished, then punish them.

Or is it possible to love thy neighbor and murder thy neighbor at the same time? Face it, the Bible is a ployglot anthology of many sources, and it says so many different things that it is possible to use it for all sorts of purposes -- from justifying conquest and slavery to boycotting shellfish and hairdressers. Some chapters advocate selling your daughters into slavery. Taken as a whole (and you have to take it as a whole -- you people closed the canon) it's a pretty poor guidebook for living your life.
Interestingly enough, none of the above pieces came from the NT, hmm. You see, you claim to have read every page of the Bible, yet you remember very little and understand even less.

So why didn't Jehovah appear to all people?
Prehaps you could explain to me why He needed to? Couldn't He make Israel His people if He so chose?

If he was really omnipotent, he would have found a way.
Assuming He wanted to.

As it is, he's just the national god of Israel who St. Paul found as a convenient vehicle for building a religion.
You have forgotten the Great Commission.

Firstly, Sabbath is Saturday, not Sunday -- at least in first century Palestine.
I know, that's why in the first instance of it, I referred to it as "this day" and in the latter instance by Sunday becuase I was referring to contemporary times.

Either the Bible is to be taken literally at all times, or it is not.
Now that's not true. You're saying that if there is anything in the Bible that is to be taken literally, everything has to be taken literally. And if there is a single metaphor in the Bible, everything has to be taken metaphoricaly.
Try applying that argument to every single book in the world - either a book must be read entirely literally, or not. Does it work? Ofcourse not.

The Wiccan POV says that you should act upon your divine will, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone unecessarily.
Your will. See, this is another point at which we vary. Everything is based upon what you think, your own judement, or at one point somebody else's. But with Christianity, everything is based upon what God Himself says is right, and what He says is wrong. Therefore, I have guidance. And with those who have spent their lives with the Law, I have wise councel.
It is well known that where there is no guidance, a people falls. And with Pagainism, there is no guidance, apart from that which you make up yourselves.

I'm not going to hell.
The way of a fool is right in his own eyes.

I refuse to acknowlege even the threat. It smacks of coercion and extortion -- is that how your god works?
Punishing the wrongdoer.

For a few years, that held sway over me, but that was before I found the endless compassion of the Goddess
Doesn't your godesses care about wrong, or about justice and what is right?

I've done the Bible thing for years. I got the T-shirt to prove it. If you say "well, you have to keep studying until you agree with me" I'll take a pass. You can study ANYTHING long enough to drive you crazy. I'd rather live a hopeful, healthy, and happy life than a hopeless, sickly, and miserable life -- which is what most interpretations of the Bible advocate.
Your interpretation is the most bizzare one I've ever come accross.

He's got a lot to answer for.
And what's God ever done that He needs to answer to you?

If you choose to be a Christian, and want to live up to the standards Jesus set, I have no problem with that -- some of my best friends are Christians, and I think the world would be a lot better place if there were more Christians interested in living the kind of life Jesus advocated.
I agree, yet earlier in your post you citisized what you thought the Bible taught.

Don't try to convert us
If we did this, then we wouldn't be following in the Great Commission, which is what Jesus taught.

It is interesting to note that Christianity puts literally billions of dollars into Evangelism every year, and it's barely holding its own.
I disagree. Looking the world wide picture, in the East, there are thousands upon thousands of conversions each year. Where the 'church' is in decline here, it is in massive growth there.

Cheetah

June 23rd 2005, 04:18 PM

Those are the only two choices that seem to work for me in your system.

I had a thought about this, and I've decided to answer your question with another:
What would God rather see, someone who is going to hell for all eternity, or someone who is going to be with Him in Paradise for eternity?

BlackOpal12

June 24th 2005, 01:02 AM

No it's not. There is no fear of being destroyed by God because I mess up now and again, the Bible is full of passages on the joy of being a Christian.

Its full of many things, Phil, and you know it. Job was a righteous man, and was not brought joy by your god. The Bible also contains many passages on the inevitable and horrific suffering of Christians, especially in the Book of Revelations.

The destruction of evil - and why wouldn't anyone want to see that?

One problem here - after the Fall, Humanity itself is evil - totally depraved, remember? Only the Grace of God (TM) can save humanity from itself - and, as such, anyone who doesn't agree with you will also be destroyed in this great cataclysm. I don't know about you, but I have a problem with the wholesale destruction of humankind. Don't bother saying "They wouldn't be destroyed if they were 'real' Christians" - you guys can't even decide what a "real" Christian is. You each have your own idea, generally along the lines of "Me, and the people who agree with me."

I don't think so, I've never heard of this. Infact, throughout your posts, the picture you have been painting of the Church is one that is totally unfamiliar to me. I don't know of one true Gospel preaching church that is like what you've described.

"One true Gospel preaching church" - care to define this, Phil? Its really very vague, as it relies on your standard of exactly what the "one true Gospel" actually constitutes. Once again, don't bother saying "A church that follows the real Gospel," or anything of the sorts - that's redundant, as it is implied in the definition of "One True Gospel Preaching Church." You're going to have to identify the exact protocols of this One True Gospel - and then verify it, with population statistics, since, as you said earlier, the more people who believe it, the more likely it is true. Which, by the way, is a fallacy.

I'm not going to try and prove that the Bible is true to you. If you want to, you can seach for evidence yourself, but the Bible has to be believed by faith. If I proved it to you, you would have no choice but to believe it, because you wouldn't be able to dispute it, and if you could, then it wouldn't be proof.

So you admit that you have no real evidence. We seem to be making progress here.

I have no doubt that monotheism is not unique to Christianity, but you are implying that it was copied from another religion, something which I do not agree, nor do I believe there is any evidence for.

Funny... I'd almost swear it was copied from Judaism. At least, Jesus copied it from Judaism. What with him being Jewish and all.

So how do you explain this? All I can see is that your gods and godesses respond to all names.

Like the God of All Things Great and Small? The Father who Is Omnipotent and Omnipresent? I do believe that I've been told repeatedly that, if you call upon the "Lord" in your heart, the name by which you call to him is unimportant. But I suppose that that wouldn't be of the One True Gospel (TM). Question - what do you call him? Jesus? Iesus? Joshua? Yeshua? Y'shua? Only one of these is "His" name, at least, his real name. Make your decision.

Just because they are Christians doesn't make them right, nor does it mean that their view should be attributed to all Christians.

Welcome to the world of Reciprocity, Phil. Allow me make a statement that I don't think you'll appreciate, or likely even understand - "Just because Phil D. is a Christian doesn't make him right, nor does it mean that his view should be attributed to all Christians." Notice something here? You are using arguments against which you are, yourself, entirely culpable and vulnerable.

If it is their view, and I don't agree with it, then I will seperate myself from it and make that known. Just becuase Catholics believe it, doesn't mean that I should take blame when they are wrong if I disagree with them.

Wait...so, the long-standing orthodoxy thhat your entire religion is effectively based on is... a non-issue? Because you are in the crowd that "really" understands what a man who died 2000 years ago "really said," as comprehended using languages who's structure was translated and interpreted by that self-same church. Has anyone ever told you that you might just be clueless?

I don't agree with any of the above, so there's simply nothing for me to get out of.

Phil, do you actually know what the word "subjective" means? Let me get a definition for you:

sub·jec·tive
Pronunciation Key (sb-jktv)
adj.
1. Proceeding from or taking place in a person's mind rather than the external world: a subjective decision.
2. Particular to a given person; personal: subjective experience.

You just made a dictionary-perfect example of a subjective statement. "Because I believe X/do not believe Y, anyone who does not believe X/disbelieve Y is wrong." Because you do not agree with the position of the long-standing church orthodoxy from which you sprang, they are wrong. You are committing the exact same logical errors as you accuse Wiccans of doing.

No, God talks to humans throughout the entire Bible, either directly (e.g. to Abraham), or through prophets (e.g. Isaiah), or in person (Jesus).

Funny... it looks a lot like Humans are talking to Humans through the Bible, possibly with some measure of Divine Inspiration. But that, too, is unprovable.

Love your neighbour, but don't ever withold justice from them. If they should be punished, then punish them.

"Yet he without sin cast the first stone." John 8:7. Recognize it? Its your boy, Phil. Your ground here is very tenuous. Try again.

Interestingly enough, none of the above pieces came from the NT, hmm. You see, you claim to have read every page of the Bible, yet you remember very little and understand even less.

And you claim to understand what the word "understand" means, but continue to misunderstand it - you seem to be working under the delusion that understand means "Agrees with Phil D." Unfortunately, that, too, is an incorrect definition.

Prehaps you could explain to me why He needed to? Couldn't He make Israel His people if He so chose?

Funny... thought he was your god. Can you explain why he would prefer to play "You scratch my back, I'll let you get slaughtered throughout the centuries" with just one group of people when he could be pandering to the whole populus?

Assuming He wanted to.

Big assumption, Phil.

You have forgotten the Great Commission.

You have forgotten how to conduct a legitimate debate.

Now that's not true. You're saying that if there is anything in the Bible that is to be taken literally, everything has to be taken literally. And if there is a single metaphor in the Bible, everything has to be taken metaphoricaly.
Try applying that argument to every single book in the world - either a book must be read entirely literally, or not. Does it work? Ofcourse not.

Commandment - that which is commanded. See the dictionary.
Command - To direct with authority; give orders to. Also see the dictionary.

Allow me ask you something... do you know what an "order" is? How about a authorative direction? How about a command? None of these brook traction on the part of the commandee - hence, a Command. As I've heard so many times from so many Christians, they aren't called the Ten Firm, But Sometimes Ignorable Suggestions.

Your will. See, this is another point at which we vary. Everything is based upon what you think, your own judement, or at one point somebody else's. But with Christianity, everything is based upon what God Himself says is right, and what He says is wrong. Therefore, I have guidance. And with those who have spent their lives with the Law, I have wise councel.
It is well known that where there is no guidance, a people falls. And with Pagainism, there is no guidance, apart from that which you make up yourselves.

Check it again. With Christianity, everything is based of what you think God says in an old book you are pretty sure he dictated. Unfortunately, again, you cannot prove that your god did anything of the kind, in terms of dictation. All you've got is a book that claims that it was written by your God. You've already patently refused to provide supporting evidence for this claim.

In legal terms, this is called "Hearsay." And, just so you know, its completley inadmissable as evidence in a court of law... do you understand why? Because you can't prove it, Phil. Get the clue, man.

The way of a fool is right in his own eyes.

Do you not see that, as we are fools in your eyes, you are a fool in ours. This quote goes both ways, Phil. Its a truism of subjectivity - you are sure you are right. We are not sure that you are right. Again, please understand the definition of subjectivity. You really seem to be having serious comprehension issues here.

Punishing the wrongdoer.

Taking the role of the divine judge, despite the words of your own god-man to the contrary.

Doesn't your godesses care about wrong, or about justice and what is right?

Doesn't your god like to have the option of dealing with right and wrong himself, as humanity was never supposed to have the knowledge of good and evil to begin with?

Your interpretation is the most bizzare one I've ever come accross.

And your's one of the most sadly bizarre combinations of uninformed self-importance and blowhard I've ever been unfortunate enough to read.

And what's God ever done that He needs to answer to you?

I believe commanding us to worship him would be a good place to begin, Phil. I don't know about you, but I tend to want a really good reason when I'm told to worship something.

I disagree. Looking the world wide picture, in the East, there are thousands upon thousands of conversions each year. Where the 'church' is in decline here, it is in massive growth there.

Oh, but Phil - how do you know that these Churches are of the One True Gospel Preaching type, and not the unfortunate bystanders getting slaughtered in the Second Coming type? Guess what? You don't. If you want to argue semantics about the numbers of convertions, go buy a calculator - it'll care more about your math functions than any cognisant sentient creature.

Oh, and Phil? For the love of whatever, please quit it with the Pascal's Wager crap. Its really old, really stupid, and really tired.

technomage

June 24th 2005, 01:44 AM

:bravo:

Pearls to you, BlackOpal! Well said.

Cheetah

June 24th 2005, 07:49 AM

Its full of many things, Phil, and you know it. Job was a righteous man, and was not brought joy by your god.
Eh, go read the entire book of Job again, particularly the end chapters.

The Bible also contains many passages on the inevitable and horrific suffering of Christians, especially in the Book of Revelations.
...but not one on the original point, which was some tosh about God hitting you on the head if you messed up. Which was my point.
Ofcourse the Bible itself says, "on behalf of Christ not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for him". I have no doubt that Christians may live a life of suffering but, "pain is temporary, glory is forever".

One problem here - after the Fall, Humanity itself is evil - totally depraved, remember? Only the Grace of God ™ can save humanity from itself - and, as such, anyone who doesn't agree with you will also be destroyed in this great cataclysm.
No, anyone who is not saved, you do not have to believe exactly what I believe to be saved - the Bible says that anyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

I don't know about you, but I have a problem with the wholesale destruction of humankind. Don't bother saying "They wouldn't be destroyed if they were 'real' Christians" - you guys can't even decide what a "real" Christian is. You each have your own idea, generally along the lines of "Me, and the people who agree with me."

Whatever God chooses to, I do not question.

"One true Gospel preaching church" - care to define this, Phil?

No. It is not for me to be dogmatic about what churches I think are and are not preaching the Gospel, if you were a Christian, you would have to decide that for yourself.

So you admit that you have no real evidence. We seem to be making progress here.
No, I'm admitting that I have no proof - there's plenty of evidence, if you really want some then you could try visiting some site like www.Bibleevidence.com (which I haven't checked out), or Google it: www.google.co.uk/search?biw=1259&hl=en&q=Bible+evidence.

Funny... I'd almost swear it was copied from Judaism. At least, Jesus copied it from Judaism. What with him being Jewish and all.
Nope.

Like the God of All Things Great and Small? The Father who Is Omnipotent and Omnipresent? I do believe that I've been told repeatedly that, if you call upon the "Lord" in your heart, the name by which you call to him is unimportant. But I suppose that that wouldn't be of the One True Gospel ™. Question - what do you call him? Jesus? Iesus? Joshua? Yeshua? Y'shua? Only one of these is "His" name, at least, his real name. Make your decision.
The name by which you call to God is not important, it's the point that you're calling to same God, which could not be the case with Paganism & Christianity. The question I was trying to ask was why do the Pagan gods seem to respond to people who aren't even calling on them?

Welcome to the world of Reciprocity, Phil. Allow me make a statement that I don't think you'll appreciate, or likely even understand - "Just because Phil D. is a Christian doesn't make him right, nor does it mean that his view should be attributed to all Christians."
That's quite true. Probably most of what I have said is wrong or incorrect to some degree. I am not claiming to be right in everything I say and if I was, it would deserve a :rofl: at minimum. If that's the impression you've been getting then correct it now. And yes, my views should not be attributed to all Christians, there are many who would disagree with me (e.g. on Calvinism).

Wait...so, the long-standing orthodoxy thhat your entire religion is effectively based on is... a non-issue?
Eh...

You just made a dictionary-perfect example of a subjective statement. "Because I believe X/do not believe Y, anyone who does not believe X/disbelieve Y is wrong." Because you do not agree with the position of the long-standing church orthodoxy from which you sprang, they are wrong. You are committing the exact same logical errors as you accuse Wiccans of doing.
No. I believe that they are wrong, as we all are at times. The Bible is "useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness".

Funny... it looks a lot like Humans are talking to Humans through the Bible, possibly with some measure of Divine Inspiration. But that, too, is unprovable.

Apart from ofcourse, my first point which was directly to Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah...and the rest of the prohpets...through the burning bush...etc etc.

"Yet he without sin cast the first stone." John 8:7. Recognize it? Its your boy, Phil. Your ground here is very tenuous. Try again.
"When he does wrong, I will punish him with the rod of men, with floggings inflicted by men."
"He is God's servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer." (In reference to rulers and authorities)
"Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every authority instituted among men: whether to the king, as the supreme authority, or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right."

And you claim to understand what the word "understand" means, but continue to misunderstand it
Okay.

Funny... thought he was your god. Can you explain why he would prefer to play "You scratch my back, I'll let you get slaughtered throughout the centuries" with just one group of people when he could be pandering to the whole populus?
And He is my God, and Israel are His chosen people.

Big assumption, Phil.
I know, that's why I'm not making it.

You have forgotten how to conduct a legitimate debate.
Quite possible.

Commandment - that which is commanded. See the dictionary.
Command - To direct with authority; give orders to. Also see the dictionary.
The question really is, what is the order. I know what it says, anyone who can read can read that, but not anyone can understand it. Not that my interpretation is right, my interpretation is just what I was told.

Check it again. With Christianity, everything is based of what you think God says in an old book you are pretty sure he dictated. Unfortunately, again, you cannot prove that your god did anything of the kind, in terms of dictation. All you've got is a book that claims that it was written by your God.
It requires faith. But if it was written by God, through Divine inspiration, then I have every reason to believe it. And I believe it was.

In legal terms, this is called "Hearsay." And, just so you know, its completley inadmissable as evidence in a court of law... do you understand why? Because you can't prove it, Phil. Get the clue, man.
The thing is, that in a court of law, if anything could be proved, that is evidence that no one could dispute it, right and wrong would be black and white, and it would be an open and shut case. Unfortunately, very little is ever proved, and it relies on what the jury believe.

Taking the role of the divine judge, despite the words of your own god-man to the contrary.
By "God-man" I assume you must mean Jesus. There is nothing Jesus said which was contrary to what I said. Unless you can show me otherwise.

I believe commanding us to worship him would be a good place to begin, Phil. I don't know about you, but I tend to want a really good reason when I'm told to worship something.
If God created you for the purpose of worshiping Him, then doesn't he have the right to ask that you do that?

Oh, but Phil - how do you know that these Churches are of the One True Gospel Preaching type, and not the unfortunate bystanders getting slaughtered in the Second Coming type? Guess what? You don't.

Don't I? What if I knew them, and it was my brother who sent them?
FYI: There are no bystanders. You are either for or against.

If you want to argue semantics about the numbers of convertions, go buy a calculator - it'll care more about your math functions than any cognisant sentient creature.

It was tmancour who brought up numbers, not me. Go argue with him.

tmancour

June 24th 2005, 03:01 PM

Instead of answering point-by-point this time, I'm going to step back and re-state some of my earlier arguements so that they can go forward undiluted.

The problem that most Pagans have with most Abrahamists stem from the latter's usual list of circular arguements:

1. You should believe in the Bible because it is Old.
2. You should believe in the Bible because lots of other people do.
3. You should believe in the Bible without any real proof of its veracity because that means you have Faith, and Faith is always a Good Thing.
4. You should believe in the Bible because if you don't and you are wrong, then you will suffer in Hell for all of eternity.
5. Even if you do believe in the Bible, you had better believe it in the same way I do, or refer to #4.
6. You should believe in the Bible because Jehovah told you too -- in the Bible.

None of these are reasonable, satisfactory arguements. There are other Old Books, some older than the Bible (Enuma Elish, Gilgamesh, Book of the Dead). Just because lots of people believe something ("the Earth is flat!") doesn't make it true. There is no intrinsic value to Faith ("I believe even though it doesn't make any sense to believe -- how cool am I?) -- it just makes you feel better for a little while. The only place that tells me I'm going to hell is the Bible, and even then it's kind of confusing how you reach that conclusion (Is Satan the personification and author of all Evil the way the Christians portray him, or is he the "accuser" mentioned in Job and other areas of the OT, basically Jehovah's Prosecuting Attorney? This is an important distinction!). You can't get Christians to even agree on who is really a Christian, and the whole "state of Grace" thing is so subjective that most of the Christians I've met are convinced that everyone else is going to Hell except for them (The Book of Revelations says only 144,000 are going to make it.). And Allah says that I should follow his book, right there in his book. What makes Jehovah any more believeable than Allah?

My over-riding point is that Radical Monotheism is bad for humanity in general, and the way it is practiced by most Abrahamics has brought us to the utter brink of disaster. While Christianity and Islam prepare to duke it out, both convinced of the absolute purity of their religion and the absolute degeneracy of the other, a whole lot of people stand to get crushed for no real reason whatsoever. You can chant "God Wills It!" all you want, but does it matter to the dead and suffering whether it is done in English or Arabic?

The current explosion of Neo-Paganism in the West is the result of a large segment of the educated population (and, increasingly, the less educated) seriously and intently examining the whole Abrahamic package we were born into and deciding that there must be more to life than being guilty and miserable all the time and waiting for the world to end. Most Pagans don't just pick up a book on Wicca and go "Hmm, maybe I'll try that one this week." It is usually the result of a long, complicated and exhaustive spiritual journey that often involves deep study of the scriptures, a lot of intense introspection and meditation, unparalleled soul-searching, and a final decision to leave behind the guilt and fear that Jehovah/Jesus/Allah uses as a club to beat his followers into submission ("obedience") and find the universal gift of unconditional love and compassion the Great Goddess has offered to mankind since we were mankind. In short, we have lost faith in Faith, because as it is currently practiced Radical Monotheism is long on promises of both eternal life and eternal damnation and preciously short on a workable, hopeful way to live our lives.

A case in point is the current Middle-East situation. Oil aside, the current crop of neo-cons is anxious to support Israel at all costs and control the battlefield for the much-prophesied Armageddon. Why? Because the Jews can't be converted unless Israel exists, and that is a precondition of the Second Coming. Meanwhile the Israelis are determined to hang on to their state because it is the fulfillment of the original covenant between Abraham and Jehovah, who promised Abraham's descendants all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates as their own. Meanwhile the Arabs view their occupation of Palestine, Egypt and Iraq (and points between) as the manifest fulfillment of the covenant because they view themselves as descendants of Ishmael, Abraham's first and eldest son. The resulting tangle of intertwined and competing ideologies, backed by the idea that each party is absolutely right because they have Faith, is dragging the rest of the world kicking and screaming into a war that no one outside of the competing parties wants or needs.

Why should I be concerned about a 3000 year old Semetic inheritance dispute? My ancestors came from Britain and Austria and Scotland. I live in America. Why should my children spill their blood in the sand for someone else's bragging rights about how they finally won a semi-arid patch of desert whose only real importance is its strategic location between Africa, Asia, and Europe? Why should I live my life by a 3000 year old tribal law that is remarkable only because it a) gave us the week-end (Thanks, Moses!) b) codifies some common-sense issues that were common to virtually every human tribe in history and c) makes an egotistical and misogynistic Semetic sky-god the center of a tribal cult?

I mean, really?

What positive elements does Christianity and its cousins really give to us, today? The literacy was nice, of course, and the (eventual) emancipation of slaves. Thanks, we can all read now. But civilization got along fine, grew, prospered, and florished long before Jesus and Paul came along to fill a power vacuum in the Roman Empire, and we'll get along just fine without them. Maybe even better.

Wicca and other forms of Paganism resonate with a lot of people right now because the alternative is an unbearable institutionalized orgy of misery and fear, the whole structure of which revolves around the utterly dehumanizing and impersonal whims of a deity who would be classed as a paranoid schizophrenic by any psych worth his diploma. Jehovah/Jesus/Allah's rules probably made a lot of good sense (barring the silliness revolving around his cult) for a semi-nomadic desert tribe. They have very little bearing on MY life in MY world. After studying the scriptures -- and I mean all the scriptures, not just the ragged few that "made the cut" at Nicenae -- I have come to the conclusion that I cannot trust a book, no matter how Old and Popular, to be a practical guide for living a happy, prosperous life in the world I live in today. A religion of Laws is inherently spiritually oppressive, and any god that demands my unconditional obedience had better be able to give me a better reason than "because if you don't, I'll make you suffer for all of eternity". Jehovah is the Sado-masochistic god, who encourages his followers to suffer for his Glory. "Pain is temporary, glory is forever" -- what kind of twistedly deviant philosophy is that? I'm sorry, that just doesn't measure up to my standards. I want a deity who has my best interests at heart.

The character called Jehovah in the Bible cannot be omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent, as the Abrahamists claim. By his actions throughout the OT he shows himself by his actions as unworthy of my worship. As the NT is based on the OT, and inherits its theological structure from there, it is inherently flawed, no matter how nice of a guy Jesus was. Glopping Original Sin, the Passion, and "the Great Comission" on top of the original folly has totally overshadowed Jesus' greatest contribution: his spiritual teaching that all men are brothers (ALL men -- not just Christians) and that a universally compassionate and non-violent attitude is contaigious and generally good for society.

Instead, institutionalized Christianity barrelled right past that to get to the Guilt and Suffering portion of the program. My personal opinion is that Jesus would probably look back on his crucifiction as a sign of his failure to communicate effectively. He spent three years teaching, a couple of days dying: which was the most important . . . to him?

Now we have this legacy to deal with. Evangelicals, convinced of their own moral superiority and their buddy-buddy relationship to jehovah, have siezed the reigns of power of the most powerful nation on the planet -- for the expressed purpose of blowing it up in another orgy of Guilt and Suffering. They want to Smite the Wicked and Punish the Wrongdoers -- they have no interest in promoting international brotherhood and compassionate non-violence. No, they want total temporal control and total spiritual domination, and armed with a easy-to-misinterpret book they have the mental justification to do just about anything to get there: the ends, in their myopic little minds, more than justify whatever means it takes.

It's no accident that there is a scandal involving the USAF Academy and Evangelicals. Of all the branches of the service, the USAF holds the key to the security of the Nation: they are the ones that control the missiles, and if the chain of command from the top on down is dominated by Evangelicals with a common nihlistic world view, then elections don't matter any more. The Constitution doesn't matter any more. Diplomacy, compromise, and democracy doesn't matter anymore. They will have the temporal power to enforce their will (or what they perceive as "God's Will") not just on our nation, but on any nation they deem unworthy.

The current neo-con dominated Administration looks like it has prepared itself to stay in office for a good long while -- even after the current term has expired. Things are looking suspiciously like a christo-fascist regime is on horizon, and that little black book has enough ambiguous passages within it to justify pretty much anything.

It was tmancour who brought up numbers, not me. Go argue with him.

OK. Yes, Christianity is making some gains in the East -- but small ones. Oh, it looks great on paper that there are a few million Christians in the far East -- but in a sea of 2.5 Billion people, a few million is a drop. There are no mass-conversions, no irresistable message there. And the East- and South-Asian interpretations of Christianity are so colored by their cultural matrix of beliefs that they little resemble the Christianity of the West. Yes, the Chinese Christians worship Christ. But they also leave offerings for Kuan Yin and the other Chinese folk gods. I don't think that would meet any Western Christian's objective standards for membership in the club. But they have different core concepts of divinity in the East, and the Monothesitic Semetic Paradigm doesn't translate well. Most of the Far-Eastern Christians are lured by the Western mystique of the Church, not by its teachings. It is popular in some quarters the way that Buddhism was popular when it first arrived in China. The Chinese will do with it as they have done with every foreign religion that has come along: they will assimilate it utterly and make it Chinese, and wash away any of the dangerous taint of foreign culture. Jesus will stand in a temple beside the statues of Confucious, Lao Tzu, Huang Ti, the folk deities, Shakiyamuni, Kuan Yin, Bodhidharma, and Allah (yes, they have statues of Allah in China -- it really pisses off the Moslems!).

So Christianity is dying out -- it lost its intellectual spark centuries ago, and has been subsisting on a low-cal diet of institutional inertia and blind evangelism, relying on the conversion experience for fuel. Barring a radical re-interpretation of the religion (which is always possible -- give it a new coat of paint, dig up a few convincing miracles, find some way to ease the feminine principal back into it without destroying it) I don't see it maintaining its claim to majority in the West for more than a century or so -- unless the neo-cons kill us all in the mean time.

Arion

Cheetah

June 25th 2005, 05:53 AM

1. You should believe in the Bible because it is Old.
No.

2. You should believe in the Bible because lots of other people do.
No.

3. You should believe in the Bible without any real proof of its veracity because that means you have Faith, and Faith is always a Good Thing.
That's more of a statement than a reason.

4. You should believe in the Bible because if you don't and you are wrong, then you will suffer in Hell for all of eternity.
Yes.

5. Even if you do believe in the Bible, you had better believe it in the same way I do, or refer to #4.
No.

6. You should believe in the Bible because Jehovah told you too -- in the Bible.
Yes.

The only place that tells me I'm going to hell is the Bible, and even then it's kind of confusing how you reach that conclusion
The Bible is pretty clear on it.

The Book of Revelations says only 144,000 are going to make it.
As far as I know, only JWs believe that. Everybody else sees that as being metaphorical (explanation on request).

And Allah says that I should follow his book, right there in his book. What makes Jehovah any more believeable than Allah?
An interesting question, I'll get back to you on that one.

My ancestors came from Britain and Austria and Scotland.
Sorry if I'm hair-spliting here, but Scotland is in Britian.

Wicca and other forms of Paganism resonate with a lot of people right now because the alternative is an unbearable institutionalized orgy of misery and fear, the whole structure of which revolves around the utterly dehumanizing and impersonal whims of a deity who would be classed as a paranoid schizophrenic by any psych worth his diploma.

Anyone who believes that can't possibly have had a "long, complicated and exhaustive spiritual journey that often involves deep study of the scriptures". And if that was true, then why do so many people believe it?

They have very little bearing on MY life in MY world.
I wonder what the world would be like if Christianity never existed?

demands my unconditional obedience had better be able to give me a better reason than "because if you don't, I'll make you suffer for all of eternity".
Well, if God created you to live for Him, and He's even prepared to give you a massive reward for doing that, even though you don't deserve it, can you blame Him for punishing those who are stiff-necked and hard-hearted and refuse to listen.

"Pain is temporary, glory is forever" -- what kind of twistedly deviant philosophy is that? I'm sorry, that just doesn't measure up to my standards. I want a deity who has my best interests at heart.
I think you've misunderstood the quote. The 'glory is forever' part was for those who have suffered the pain.

Instead, institutionalized Christianity barrelled right past that to get to the Guilt and Suffering portion of the program. My personal opinion is that Jesus would probably look back on his crucifiction as a sign of his failure to communicate effectively.
I don't think so. Certainly the all the churches that I know of, don't teach of condemnation, condemnation, condemnation. That's certainly part of the story, but not all of it. What guilt is there after someone has been forgiven? And Christians should be prepared to suffer for Christ. He gave His all for me, so I will give my all for Him.

Punish the Wrongdoers
I'm sorry, is there something wrong with that?

-- they have no interest in promoting international brotherhood and compassionate non-violence.
The Bible teaches otherwise.

-- they have no interest in promoting international brotherhood and compassionate non-violence. It's no accident that there is a scandal involving the USAF Academy and Evangelicals. Of all the branches of the service, the USAF holds the key to the security of the Nation: they are the ones that control the missiles, and if the chain of command from the top on down is dominated by Evangelicals with a common nihlistic world view, then elections don't matter any more. The Constitution doesn't matter any more. Diplomacy, compromise, and democracy doesn't matter anymore. They will have the temporal power to enforce their will (or what they perceive as "God's Will") not just on our nation, but on any nation they deem unworthy.

The current neo-con dominated Administration looks like it has prepared itself to stay in office for a good long while -- even after the current term has expired. Things are looking suspiciously like a christo-fascist regime is on horizon, and that little black book has enough ambiguous passages within it to justify pretty much anything.

You've got a very twisted view of Christians - are all the TWeb Christians the same as the type you've described - are any of them?
Either that or you're exaggerating.

As a Pagan, what do you believe will happen after death?

tmancour

June 25th 2005, 09:10 AM

So your only compelling reasons for being a Christian are because the Bible tells you to. That's not compelling enough for me. I tried the "leap of faith" thing many times, thought I was there a few times, but logic and reason always kicked in. The compassionate message of Jesus is great -- but the cultural and legal matrix that surrounds that message is contradictory, confusing, frequently hypocritical, and incompatable with my modern life.

As far as I know, only JWs believe that. Everybody else sees that as being metaphorical (explanation on request).

The JWs aren't the only ones, but it is, I conceed, a minority opinion. That being said, the Book of Revelations has plenty of other funky numbers -- like 666 (although the earliest extant text of the BoR says that the number is 616). Sure, they are allegorical -- but that is one of my issues. What parts are allegorical, what parts should be taken literally? Because of the ambiguity you have people who spend their entire lives stressing over some minor passage that they are SURE has significant meaning but is too obscure and misunderstood to be readily apparent; then they spend the rest of their lives trying to make other people see what they see. Is that any kind of way to spend your life? I think its pointless. But the Bible is all too full of stuff like that. All text-based religions are like that.

An interesting question, I'll get back to you on that one.

Please do. While you are at it, please address the validity of the Tripitika and the other basic Buddhist scriptures -- while they aren't as insistant on the literal interpretation of their text, they are quite as convinced of its inerrant Truth as a Moslem or a Christian -- and they don't use the "faith" word as a reason.

Sorry if I'm hair-spliting here, but Scotland is in Britian.

Lol. That's a personal thing. My grandfather always told me "Britain stops at Hadrian's Wall" -- he was a big-time Scottish Nationalist. I should have qualified.

Anyone who believes that can't possibly have had a "long, complicated and exhaustive spiritual journey that often involves deep study of the scriptures". And if that was true, then why do so many people believe it?

I assure you, that is my experience (it concerned me enough to take Religious Studies as a major -- not a brilliant career move!) and from an informal survey that is how most Pagans have arrived at their religion. The reason most people in America and Europe believe in Christianity is not, in most cases, because of its compelling and inerrant message -- it's because that is how they were raised, and they continue because they have not been seriously exposed to any alternative viewpoint. When you have cultural inertia behind you, of course you are going to have the numbers -- for a while. But if you were raised in another culture -- say Hindu, or African Tribal, or Confucian/Buddhist/Taoist, would you have converted? It is unlikely. If the message of the Bible was so compelling then Evangelism would be a lot easier than it is. Most people worship the gods that their parents worshipped in the way their parents did.

I wonder what the world would be like if Christianity never existed?

I wonder, as well -- frequently. Alternative History is one of my favorite sci-fi sub-genres. Would it be better? Worse? Hard to say -- it would definately be different. Christianity has contributed several amazing things to Western culture over the last two thousand years -- literacy and a virtual end to slavery among them. It has contributed to the legal system, the medical system, and even been a factor in the role of science. But it has also inspired horrific cultural crimes, genocides, and much misery.

Well, if God created you to live for Him, and He's even prepared to give you a massive reward for doing that, even though you don't deserve it, can you blame Him for punishing those who are stiff-necked and hard-hearted and refuse to listen.

The only place where it says Jehovah created me is in the Bible -- and the motives of the author are often suspect, and the translations frequently open to interpretation. There is no evidence outside of the Bible that leads me to believe it.

Even taking that into consideration, IF he created me, he created me with Free Will, and he created this screwed up system where we have "Original Sin" set as our default, where there are competing and ambiguous messages about how we are supposed to worship, etc. You say I don't deserve it -- but it is Jehovah who determines that, not I, under your system. If he wanted mindless worshippers he shouldn't have given me a mind. If he wanted mindful worshippers then he shouldn't have stooped to extortion and threats to compel me. And if he's willing to condemn me, his creation under your system, to eternal damnation with no hope of parole because I didn't agree with him, then his role as a beneficient deity is highly suspect -- if he is capable of anything and he doesn't have infinate patience, he is unworthy of my worship. If he is not capable of anything, then his claims to the contrary are wrong, and he is not worthy of my worship. If he is willing to lock me in the fires of Hell to suffer for no reason (punishment is only a valid reason if there is hope of correction -- if your kid spills the milk, you don't lock him in a closet forever unless you are a murderous sadist) then he is a murderous sadist who is unworthy of my worship.

I don't reject Christianity because I am stiff-necked and hard hearted. I reject Christianity because I am reasonable and compassionate.

I think you've misunderstood the quote. The 'glory is forever' part was for those who have suffered the pain.

I didn't misunderstand -- I just think it's stupid. What is the point of "glory"? Of what use is it? What meaning has it to contribute to our lives? Why is it worth the suffering?

I don't think so. Certainly the all the churches that I know of, don't teach of condemnation, condemnation, condemnation. That's certainly part of the story, but not all of it. What guilt is there after someone has been forgiven? And Christians should be prepared to suffer for Christ. He gave His all for me, so I will give my all for Him.

They may not preach it constantly, BUT IT IS ALWAYS THERE! And forgiveness in exchange for obedience is inherently coercive. You are still guilty -- you just get a reprieve from the consequences. I find that escape from responsibility spiritually offensive. As far as suffering goes, we acknowlege that it is sometimes necessary to suffer in order to learn -- but Christians have, throughout history, chosen to suffer as an expression of their faith, sometimes for the stupidest of reasons. I dont see much point in suffering for faith.

I'm sorry, is there something wrong with that?

No. But if that is a focus of your religion, I would say that those religious values are misplaced and inadequate for our times. If you have a religion of Law, you will have a population of Lawbreakers. Sure, punish criminals -- but the Christian obsession with "punishing the wrongdoers" has been used to justify everything from pogroms to the Holocaust to the torture of old widows with too many cats. It isn't something I want as part of my core philosophy.

The Bible teaches otherwise.

In places. In other places it preaches war and hatred. But the fact of the matter is that regardless of what the Bible may or may not say on the subject, Christians in positions of power are not following this injunction as much as they are the "punish the wrongdoers" and "convert everyone" and "adhere to the religious law" sections. Nor is this a recent phenomena.

You've got a very twisted view of Christians - are all the TWeb Christians the same as the type you've described - are any of them?
Either that or you're exaggerating.

Were my statistical sampling of Christians limited to TWeb, my conclusions might be different. But my conclusions are based upon a deep theological study of the scriptures, an examination of the evolution of modern Christianity, and a knowlege of contemporary practice. My conclusions run thus:

1. The Bible (whichever version/translation happens to be en vogue for your denomination) is the only possible canon, and the only recourse in any argument. If you adhere to it because it is a historical account, then you cannot ignore the other recovered Gospels.

2. Despite the compassionate message of Jesus, which is worthy of practice, Christianity as it evolved is based on the Old Testament, and is clouded with the inherited baggage of a radical Monotheism.

3. The Old Testament is a tribal history and religious handbook of the Jews about their national sky-god, Jehovah, with laws and rules and customs perhaps appropriate to Judaism -- but my ancestors are from Northern Europe. Why should they apply to me when I have my own inherited cultural and legal values that my ancestors painstakingly developed over thousands of years?

As a Pagan, what do you believe will happen after death?

When I pass I will go to Tir na Nog, the Summerlands, where my soul will be reunited with those friends who wait there. I will carefully re-examine the work of this life, rest, and prepare for my next incarnation. No Heaven, no Hell. Summerland is not a reward, it's a rest-stop. Life is the reward. To view it as something ponderous or burdensome is twisted.

Arion

Meh_Gerbil

June 25th 2005, 11:56 AM

While we rarely argue for the "truth" of anything (we are a religion of orthopraxy, rather than orthodoxy -- what you do is more important than what you believe) that still leaves plenty of room for opinion, of which we have an abundance.

Come on, lay it on us: what are your questions? What we don't know the answer to, we'll make up!

Arion

THANK HEAVENS FOR THAT ALREADY!
FREAKIN PEARL MATERIAL RIGHT HERE BOYS.

I want to be an orthopraxy Christian from now on.

I'll be thinking about that for weeks.

Thanks.

technomage

June 25th 2005, 11:59 AM

Don't be too impressed. Arion gets payed for using words properly. He's a word-geek. Sorry so-and-so probably didn't even have to look the word up to spell it correctly.

Ortho-whatzitz.

:hehe:

tmancour

June 25th 2005, 11:59 AM

THANK HEAVENS FOR THAT ALREADY!
FREAKIN PEARL MATERIAL RIGHT HERE BOYS.

I want to be an orthopraxy Christian from now on.

I'll be thinking about that for weeks.

Thanks.

I wish there were more like you. Perhaps the best thing about Pagans is that we help people to become better Christians. That would please me to no end.

Arion

Meh_Gerbil

June 25th 2005, 12:01 PM

Don't be too impressed. Arion gets payed for using words properly. He's a word-geek. Sorry so-and-so probably didn't even have to look the word up to spell it correctly.

Ortho-whatzitz.

:hehe:

Payed?

Meh_Gerbil

June 25th 2005, 12:05 PM

I wish there were more like you. Perhaps the best thing about Pagans is that we help people to become better Christians. That would please me to no end.

Arion

Well I don't want to misrepresent myself -- I do believe Wicca is wrong, just like I'm sure you hold many of my Christian views are wrong.

However, I find a great deal of learning in speaking with people who disagree with me -- I've learned wonderful things from atheists and I've learned a wonderful new word from you.

The orthapraxy thing has been bothering me for quite a while now -- I'm getting tired of people saying they care about this or that when their actions demonstrate otherwise. Such a thing is a problem within any world view and I'm glad to see it being battled.

technomage

June 25th 2005, 12:06 PM

Payed?
Hey, back off, rat-brain. Arion's the professional author here. And I can write "payed" if I wanna. :rasberry:

Meh_Gerbil

June 25th 2005, 12:12 PM

Hey, back off, rat-brain. Arion's the professional author here. And I can write "payed" if I wanna. :rasberry:

Gums still a little sore, eh?

*dips a 6 inch brush into some painkiller and begins to slather Justin's mouth with it.*

Cannot have a grumpy Wiccan around here...

technomage

June 25th 2005, 12:16 PM

Gums still a little sore, eh?

*dips a 6 inch brush into some painkiller and begins to slather Justin's mouth with it.*

Cannot have a grumpy Wiccan around here...

* muffle shumf wufumph * :duh:

Goodness, I'm incoherent ... not that anyone can tell a difference from my normal status. :hehe:

tmancour

June 26th 2005, 09:34 AM

Well I don't want to misrepresent myself -- I do believe Wicca is wrong, just like I'm sure you hold many of my Christian views are wrong.

However, I find a great deal of learning in speaking with people who disagree with me -- I've learned wonderful things from atheists and I've learned a wonderful new word from you.

That way lay Wisdom. Or lies Wisdom. Or lies. Lay, lie, lies, whatever. Wisdom is over thataway.

The orthapraxy thing has been bothering me for quite a while now -- I'm getting tired of people saying they care about this or that when their actions demonstrate otherwise. Such a thing is a problem within any world view and I'm glad to see it being battled.

It's one of the draws to Paganism for me. Judge me by my actions, how I live my life, whether I'm Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent. And try to appreciate my core perspective: in this society I would rather be a virtuous Pagan than a hypocritical Christian -- which I would be, had I continued in the faith.

I've met what I call True Christians before, people who help someone out simply because it is the right thing to do, with no thought of reward, and no overt preaching. The guy who gave me a half-gallon of gas on the side of the road in Fountain, NC, made sure my car started, made sure I had enough cash to get some more gas up the road, then drove off after apologizing that he had to make the Sunday School class he was teaching, that man was a True Christian by my light. He didn't ask me if I went to church, he didn't ask about the "Goddess Bless" and "Born Again Pagan" bumper stickers on my car, he just helped me out because it was the compassionate, Right Thing To Do.

Christianity, when done properly, is a verb.

Arion

Rose1987

September 6th 2005, 03:42 PM

"How do you know that neo-paganism (witchcraft) is true?"

I don't. No one can know for sure which religion is true. You listen to your heart, your beliefs, your intuition, and you make the best decision you can make. Paganism makes more sense to me than any other belief system.

"What if you are wrong?"

Um, what if *you're* wrong?

If I'm wrong, countless things could happen. I could reincarnate until I get it right. I could cease to exist. If the Bible is correct, I'll burn in hell. But I would rather burn in hell than get near a God - let alone worship one - who would eternally damn his "children."

"If there are such things as gods and goddesses why have they not revealed themselves physically like Jesus Christ has?"

This is a stupid question. I don't believe Jesus was God. I don't believe he was a diety, and I don't believe he "physically revealed" himself. Isn't that the reason why Pagans aren't Christians? Because they don't believe in the Bible? I thought that was obvious.

draoi

January 28th 2006, 09:14 AM

"How do you know that neo-paganism (witchcraft) is true?"

Neo-paganism is based off of paganism which has been practiced with success for thousands of years. Every cultural mythology speaks of magic and witchcraft as if it were a real practice and as if it works (including Christianity, “There shall not be found with thee any one...that useth divination, one that practiseth augury, or an enchanter, or a sorcerer, | or a charmer, or a consulter with a familiar spirit, or a wizard, or a necromancer.” Deuteronomy 18:10-11) something that is held to be true in every mythology throughout history (ie: the existence of magic) must have some factual basis.

"What if you are wrong?"

Something that is held to be true in every mythology throughout history must have some factual basis. But aside from that, any practitioner of the occult has tested his/her magic and magical principles and found them to work (if they didn’t work we wouldn’t use them), so if we’re wrong then someone has a lot of explaining to do to tell why magic works.

"If there are such things as gods and goddesses why have they not revealed themselves physically like Jesus Christ has?"

Well they have. Just as Yahweh revealed himself as a man (seen in the Bible), so too have the ancient Celtic Gods walked as men upon Ireland’s soil (shown in The Ulster Cycle), so too did the Gods terrorize Odysseus (Homer’s Odyssey), and so too did the Gods of Ancient Egypt send the Pharaoh’s who were Gods-on –earth (Book of the Dead).

Christ is not the only God to walk on the earth, nor is his story anymore credible than that of thousands of Greeks who saw the Gods, or men who fought for Maeve and Ailil against Chuhulain.

Mercuryrules

January 28th 2006, 10:17 AM

Hello Draoi,

Could you recommend any good books about Chuhulain, either folk history or authors approaching from a comparitive religious/esoteric angle?

I'd appreciate it.

technomage

January 28th 2006, 11:08 AM

Hello Draoi,

Could you recommend any good books about Chuhulain, either folk history or authors approaching from a comparitive religious/esoteric angle?

I'd appreciate it.
Hi, Mercury,

Best place to start is probably the "Táin Bó Cúailnge (http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/cool/index.htm)", though Draoi may have a better translation in mind.

draoi

January 28th 2006, 11:12 AM

XaositectCrayon

January 31st 2006, 09:41 AM

Neo-paganism is based off of paganism which has been practiced with success for thousands of years. Every cultural mythology speaks of magic and witchcraft as if it were a real practice and as if it works (including Christianity, “There shall not be found with thee any one...that useth divination, one that practiseth augury, or an enchanter, or a sorcerer, | or a charmer, or a consulter with a familiar spirit, or a wizard, or a necromancer.” Deuteronomy 18:10-11) something that is held to be true in every mythology throughout history (ie: the existence of magic) must have some factual basis.

Something that is held to be true in every mythology throughout history must have some factual basis. But aside from that, any practitioner of the occult has tested his/her magic and magical principles and found them to work (if they didn’t work we wouldn’t use them), so if we’re wrong then someone has a lot of explaining to do to tell why magic works.

Well they have. Just as Yahweh revealed himself as a man (seen in the Bible), so too have the ancient Celtic Gods walked as men upon Ireland’s soil (shown in The Ulster Cycle), so too did the Gods terrorize Odysseus (Homer’s Odyssey), and so too did the Gods of Ancient Egypt send the Pharaoh’s who were Gods-on –earth (Book of the Dead).

Christ is not the only God to walk on the earth, nor is his story anymore credible than that of thousands of Greeks who saw the Gods, or men who fought for Maeve and Ailil against Chuhulain.

That Deuteronomy verse is alittle... spooky
Archeological evidence states that Deuteronomy was written to combine the Gods Elohim and Yahweh as one. They claim "no divination" is there some reason for this? Were they hiding something about the spiritual world?

The wicca area (and the world religion forum itself) is for theist only.

draoi

January 31st 2006, 04:00 PM

tmancour

January 31st 2006, 04:14 PM

I can't attest to the Archeological evidence surrounding Deuteronomy, but as for Divination it has been demonized by Abrahamic faiths for many years. I couldn't tell you why, or whether they were hiding something about the spiritual world or not. It seems to me that it's probably rooted in a need deny common people any 'spiritual authority' so that they must come to the church for spiritual guidence. But that is admitedly a guess. It may just be that the religious authorities of the day fekt that divination was the same cup of tea as sorcery and necromancy. Remember that divination is often used to contact the dead, that would put in the same category as necromany or as "cunsult[ing] with familiar spirits."

It would seem that the Hebrews of that time were interested first and foremost with establishing the cult of Yahweh as THE only legitimate cult. Remember, this was in the face of Ba'al worship, and the worship of the Semetic fertility Goddess, both competitors. I believe that the combination of El and YHVH was an attempt, in part, in equating the God of the Exodus with the God ("El") of the bedouin-type nomads that ranged around Israel at the time. This wasn't much of a stretch, since Moses got his original inspiration for YHVH from his sheep-herding father-in-law. No doubt the YHVH "civilized" Israelites were interested in coopting the older, less-regulated El-worshipping barbarians into their kingdom.

The prohibition against "sorcery" is part of this integration. Ba'al in particular was a noted god for divination (His Arabian incarnation, Hubal, whose home temple was the Qaba in Mecca, used arrows for divination) and most of the tutelary Semetic deities employed a vast array of divinatory techniques. Remember, at this point the Egyptians and Sumerians had both conquered these lands, and the remnants from their cults were in evidence just as much as the Cananites and the bedu. Semetic magick was infamous for divinition, if the Tarot is any indication (allegedly Egyptian in origin). to dis-allow that by code clearly established who was a true, YHVH-fearing Hebrew and who was a backsliding goddess-worshipping poseur.

And not all forms of divination were banned, just certain ones dealing with fire and water and such elemental things. Dream augery was still widely practiced by the Hebrews.

Arion

Mercuryrules

January 31st 2006, 04:16 PM

Hi, Mercury,

Best place to start is probably the "Táin Bó Cúailnge (http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/cool/index.htm)", though Draoi may have a better translation in mind.

Thanks, I'll take a look at this, Cheers.

Mercuryrules

January 31st 2006, 05:26 PM

If you are looking for the original myths (ie: What he did/said/is famous for) I recomend the book The Raid by Randy Lee Eickhoff. It is the best translation of Táin Bó Cúailnge I have ever seen, it keeps your interest with great writing and maintains the flavor of the original. Dr Eickhoff is good at what he does and this retelling of Chuhulain's epic was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the International Pen Translator's Award, and the National Academy of Arts & Letters Translator's Award (so it's a darn accurate translation). Stray away from anything in the New-Age section because new-agers never capture Chuhulain's spirit right.

Is there a reason you ask or are you just interested in Irish Myths and Legends?

Thanks, I'll be ordering that book from the library.

I was born in Belfast and spent much of my life there. Long story short I got out and pretty much stayed out after my 25th year. I take a superficial interest in the present political goings-on.

Living with the troubles would put anyone off recent Irish history.

My interest in Chuhulain is that he is an indigenous Irish hero. People growing up in contempory Ulster are basically bereft of hero figures, exepting minor sporting figures, etc. And we are dealing with something pre-christian, so there is nothing of the sectarian element involved.

I suppose that for some time I have been living with the question as to how genuinely new cultural impulses might find their way into the present situation there, and so my interest is in the living esoteric significance of Chuhulain, and what it might mean for the present-day.

draoi

February 2nd 2006, 12:20 AM

Fair enough Mercuryrules :)

Thanks tmancour, I've not known alot of this and I'm impressed (though not supprised) at this information.

SinikalSaint

March 8th 2006, 10:32 PM

Good golly Moses! Can't all you kids play nice?

Well, I'm gonna offer my two cents here...

I'm gonna posit this, to both Christians and Wiccans, and everyone in between...

As a Christian, I ultimately believe that God (indeed, Yahweh, Jehovah, Elohim, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the eternal God believed to have sanctioned the slaughter of the Canaanites as well as commanded mankind, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, to love all including our enemies) is, in fact, more concerned with orthopraxy than orthodoxy. I wish I knew the Scripture verses off-hand that conveyed this, and hopefully I'll be able to cite them in a later post. In any case, I'll try to articulate what Christianity--as well as Judaism, and apparently Wicca, boils down to in a quote by C.S. Lewis: "People think God wants actions of a certain kind... God wants people of a certain kind." God is concerned with the soul, the heart, the spirit. What a person is on the inside is manifested in his actions, and his actions are essentially driven by his beliefs.

Wiccans, whom I love (and, I must admit, make fun of all too often--but that aside), and whom God loves, try to understand that the reason the Bible, Christianity, why God Himself, would be so concerned with orthodoxy is because when truly taken to heart, the True doctrine--whatever that happens to be--will produce orthopraxy. A belief about Reality that reflects the way reality actually is more conducive to developing a pure soul.
A humble Christian, I would think (and I'm sure there are plenty who would correct me) would remember that he or she is not infallible, nor omniscient, but only God is. A "true," humble, Christian would seek union with God--the one True God, who/whatever that happens to be--so as to ensure transformation into that pure soul, a pure soul who would, indeed, commit righteous action. And Christians happen to believe that union with God is achieved through Jesus Christ, as Christ is God incarnate, who endured the consequence of mankind's evil with His death on the cross and conquered it through His resurrection. The Judeo-Christian emphasis on orthodoxy is for the sake of helping make sure that one's spiritual journey results in the proper divine destination.

I happen to believe in the God of the Hebrews for several reasons, but one main reason is how He names Himself to Moses--and thus how the Jews subsequently understand God (I know some who have more knowledge than me about the ancient Hebrew language and culture might want to challenge me on this, but I'll say for the time being that what I'm about to say just happens to be my present understanding of Scripture, and my present understanding of the God that Scripture represents, and it is that understanding upon which my spirituality is predicated, regardless of intricacies of ancient Hebrew culture and language I happen to be ignorant of). God gives His name to Moses as "I AM." The Jews believed their God was the One True God because He is self-existent, indeed, that He was that which sustains all existence. As Paul Tillich said, God is the "Ground of Being." It could be argued (and I'm not presently equipped to fully argue it here, though I'd say I agree with it) that "pagan gods," or the gods of polytheists, are essentially personifications and/or anthropomorphized versions of things and forces of nature and life--gods/goddesses of fertility, of war, of love, of the seas, of the sun, of the moon, et cetera, et cetera...

The God of the Hebrews, however, if He is a personification of anything, is a personification of Being itself. Jews and Christians follow Jehovah because they believe He is being, and the sustainer of being.

As for belief in Hell and damnation, for the moment I'll just say that goes along with an understanding that willfully resisting the source and sustainer of existence (as well as the moral truths/rules He revealed so that those who would follow Him maintain existence) would come with certain--dare I say karmic?--consequences.

There's my two cents for the moment. Questions, comments, great thoughts?

tmancour

March 9th 2006, 01:12 AM

Good golly Moses! Can't all you kids play nice?

Whaddaya expect? We're a bunch o' heathens!

As a Christian, I ultimately believe that God (indeed, Yahweh, Jehovah, Elohim, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the eternal God believed to have sanctioned the slaughter of the Canaanites as well as commanded mankind, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, to love all including our enemies) is, in fact, more concerned with orthopraxy than orthodoxy. I wish I knew the Scripture verses off-hand that conveyed this, and hopefully I'll be able to cite them in a later post. In any case, I'll try to articulate what Christianity--as well as Judaism, and apparently Wicca, boils down to in a quote by C.S. Lewis: "People think God wants actions of a certain kind... God wants people of a certain kind." God is concerned with the soul, the heart, the spirit. What a person is on the inside is manifested in his actions, and his actions are essentially driven by his beliefs.

OK, with you so far . . . Orthopraxy is good.

Wiccans, whom I love (and, I must admit, make fun of all too often--but that aside), and whom God loves, try to understand that the reason the Bible, Christianity, why God Himself, would be so concerned with orthodoxy is because when truly taken to heart, the True doctrine--whatever that happens to be--will produce orthopraxy.

Let's stop here for a moment. The idea that Orthodoxy leads to Orthopraxy by the simple expedient of Following The Rules [tm] ignores some pretty essential stuff about human existance. The road to the type of spiritual life that Lewis was speaking of is not one that can be acheived by Following The Rules. It is one that comes, part and parcel, with a lifetime of continuous and rigorous self-examination. "True Doctrine" however pretty and noble does not drag a man through the thorny field of Wisdom to some exalted state, no matter how impressive the conversion experience. Wiccans and Pagans in general have a hard time with ANY doctrine, ANY set of spiritual rules that claim exclusive domain over mankind. Part of the problem is the moment you have a one-size-fits-all True Doctrine, you have some idiot that wants to point out how you aren't living up to the True Doctrine, or arguing just what the True Doctrine is and what it means, instead of shutting up and doing what's right in the first place. There's at least one in every crowd and they annoy us.

A belief about Reality that reflects the way reality actually is more conducive to developing a pure soul.

I am assuming here that you posit an Objective Reality. You have evidence for this? Most Pagans see Reality as subjective, inexorably intertwined with our own perceptions and perspectives and colored with our own self-delusions. And as to the purity of my soul . . . who is better qualified to judge that than me? No external law could take into account the complexities of my internal spiritual life and provide a pat solution, neatly packaged in easy-to-swallow scriptural form. The fact is, even positing an Objective Reality brings to fore the issue: how do you know that what you perceive as Objective Reality is, indeed, real.

A humble Christian, I would think (and I'm sure there are plenty who would correct me) would remember that he or she is not infallible, nor omniscient, but only God is. A "true," humble, Christian would seek union with God--the one True God, who/whatever that happens to be--so as to ensure transformation into that pure soul, a pure soul who would, indeed, commit righteous action.

Does righteous action require a pure soul? Again, who is the judge? David Koresh no doubt felt he was a pure soul, a righteous person, and in perfect union with "The One True God". I might disagree with that assessment. As far as seeking union with the divine, many Christian sects consider the idea to be blasphemy, others would say it is impossible. That's the problem with text-based religions: once you write it down, someone wants to argue about it.

And Christians happen to believe that union with God is achieved through Jesus Christ, as Christ is God incarnate, who endured the consequence of mankind's evil with His death on the cross and conquered it through His resurrection. The Judeo-Christian emphasis on orthodoxy is for the sake of helping make sure that one's spiritual journey results in the proper divine destination.

Heh. Yes, that is what Christians happen to believe. And they refuse to accept the idea that there might be alternate ways of acheiving the same thing -- or people who, for whatever reason, have no desire to take that spiritual journey. And there is absolutely no evidence that orthodoxy, especially Christian orthodoxy, leads one to the "proper" divine destination. Proper according to whom? The entire Christian mythology is predicated upon the belief that only by adhering to the Christianity Brand can you be a good (orthopractic) person, regardless of your actual actions in society and as a human being. The "us vs. them" dichotomy that results is dangerous, destructive, and ultimately defeats the orthopractic ideal.

I happen to believe in the God of the Hebrews for several reasons, but one main reason is how He names Himself to Moses--and thus how the Jews subsequently understand God (I know some who have more knowledge than me about the ancient Hebrew language and culture might want to challenge me on this, but I'll say for the time being that what I'm about to say just happens to be my present understanding of Scripture, and my present understanding of the God that Scripture represents, and it is that understanding upon which my spirituality is predicated, regardless of intricacies of ancient Hebrew culture and language I happen to be ignorant of). God gives His name to Moses as "I AM."

While intellectually intriguing and existentially interesting, the idea that any deity would use this line makes one suspicious.

Consider the time in which those early scriptures were written, and the cultural and historical context: the proto-Hebrews enjoyed a life much like the Beduoin, as simple herders and ranchers in the semi-fertile stretch of desert between two great and powerful civilizations. While a strategic location, the simple people who herded sheep had the Pyramids and the might of Egypt on one side and Babylon and the impressive Ziggurats on the other, not to mention mile after mile of fertile land that was not theirs.

At this point in history writing had just been discovered, and remained the exclusive realm of the priests. Writing is semi-magical, used not only for keeping track of grain harvests and taxation, but also acting as a symbolic language that conveys exact meaning -- such a thing allows men dead a hundred years past to have their words and thoughts spoken again. Writing is incredibly useful, so naturally it becomes incredibly magical and incredibly sacred in the two Big River civilizations. As nomads, you know about the concept of writing, but its mysteries are the sole property of the Big River priesthoods and jealously guarded. The Code of Hammurabi is written on a cliff wall, laden with meaning but understood only by those who knew the writing -- to an illiterate shepherd, they must have seemed impressive, bordering on the sacred, for the exact words of a king to be graven in stone and imbuing the Law of which he spoke with magickal potency, by the medium alone.

Along comes an exiled prince, well schooled and educated in every magical and intellectual art that the greatest civilization on Earth can conjure. As a result of Egyptian court politics he finds himself leading a band of ex-slaves
that he had arranged to carry out a rebellion. Naturally, he desires to upgrade their condition from illiterate shepherds to more sophisticated culture, benefitting from the inherent magick and blessings of writing. So he comes up with a simplified system that fits their language. But wait, there's more. . .

In providing the Hebrew written language he has given these ignorant peasants the key to civilization. In doing so, he also valorized the concepts of writing into a powerful relgious context. Then to boost their collective self-esteem further and give intellectual potency to what they were doing (namely, wandering around Siani looking for a permanent camp, and kicking the bejeezus out of the Cannaanites). So he borrows a little Sacred Law from Babylon, a little Radical Monotheism from his own people's religious past, and goes up a mountain to think about it.

The genius of Moses is evident: he raised the importance of writing from being the vehicle of spiritual and magickal power to being the focal point; he enshrined the very words themselves -- the Word. Jehovah is a god of history, among other things, and one of the very first: and you can't have history, secular or sacred, without writing. Moses comes down the mountain and says God has a name and you can spell it. Jehovah identifies himself as "I AM". So the Hebrews spend the next five thousand years worshipping . . . a verb.

The verb, To Be.

As an intellectual conceptualization it was brilliant for its time. The genius of Moses was to take an abstract concept like existance and deify it. "I AM" . . . "I AM WHAT I AM" . . . I am, I was, we were . . . the logical conclusion is to establish existance itself as a sacred ideal -- which is not a bad philosophical concept, on the face of it. Along the way you establish a sacred history "We were these people and this is how we got that way". Very uplifting stuff for a bunch of shepherds-turned-mercenaries living in the wilderness.

But the magic has worn off. We understand existance, in the abstract, now. We don't need to be awed by the idea that stuff exists; like the concept of pi or the zero, the verb To Be is a powerful idea with seemingly mystical context. That doesn't mean we should worship it and depend upon it for meaning in our daily lives. We're just a little more complicated for that to be fulfilling or useful.

The Jews believed their God was the One True God because He is self-existent, indeed, that He was that which sustains all existence.

Again, this abstract concept is cool, but is it worthy? The only reason they thought he was self-existant was because Moses said he was. The Hebrews took the verb To Be and ran with it. On the flimsiest of evidence they believed it -- orthodoxy, again -- and insisted that it was so. Their biggest saving grace is that they didn't insist on everyone believing it too.

As Paul Tillich said, God is the "Ground of Being." It could be argued (and I'm not presently equipped to fully argue it here, though I'd say I agree with it) that "pagan gods," or the gods of polytheists, are essentially personifications and/or anthropomorphized versions of things and forces of nature and life--gods/goddesses of fertility, of war, of love, of the seas, of the sun, of the moon, et cetera, et cetera...

You say that like it's a bad thing . . .
Of course the Gods are personifications of abstract concepts and natural phenomena! What is the verb To Be but an abstract concept? What is History but a natural phenomena? Yes, you can say that any particular god is lacking because he or she doesn't have Jehovah's rep for being the demiurge . . . but I think that demonstrates a lack of understanding of both polytheistic theology and the essential nature of divinity. Christians and other Radical Monotheists have this bad habit of denegrating polytheistic gods as "mere" representations of things . . . while not being willing to acknowlege that existance is just one more thing.

The God of the Hebrews, however, if He is a personification of anything, is a personification of Being itself. Jews and Christians follow Jehovah because they believe He is being, and the sustainer of being.

And he has a penis.
See, that's where we fall apart, and where Christians get confused when talking to Pagans. Wicca and the other Pagan religions do not see a representation of the abstract thought known as "being" -- the verb, To Be -- to be a worthy or useful deity to most people in their daily lives. Especially when this supposed demiurge, alleged creator and sustainer of the universe, has a bad habit of throwing his weight around, demanding attention like a two year old and making up arbitrary rules to keep the peasants in line.

The problem is that Christianity (and the other Abrahamic faiths) abandoned quite a lot of spiritually useful stuff -- some would say stuff that's vital to a meaningful human existance -- when they threw down their shepherds staves and blindly followed Jehovah. There is the small matter of the Goddess, a "mere" personification of half the human race. Perhaps the more important half. When the Hebrews insisted that the One True God was in their back pocket, they completely rejected the importance of the divine feminine (except in some esoteric sense among a small percentage of Hebrew mystics) and therefore forever doomed all their talk of orthodoxy to utter hypocrisy.

Because none of us would Be if it weren't for the Mother. Even Jehovah was forced to condescend to borrow a womb for his little experiment in creative avatar development. The Goddess has no creed but Life, no rules save 'an it harm ye none'; She does not reward Her people for their orthodoxy with a special place in the afterlife. She awards Her people in this life for their orthopraxy -- though sometimes it doesn't feel like a reward. She is our Mother, and every human who ever lived had a mother. When the Hebrews threw out the Mother, they made themselves half-orphans, spiritually speaking, forever removed from the Caritas that She alone provides the human soul. They got instead a domineering and not terribly sane Father. Talk about issues . . .

As for belief in Hell and damnation, for the moment I'll just say that goes along with an understanding that willfully resisting the source and sustainer of existence (as well as the moral truths/rules He revealed so that those who would follow Him maintain existence) would come with certain--dare I say karmic?--consequences.

And here is where we must part ways. Damnation, Sin, Guilt, Hell . . . they all add up to a kind of spiritual extortion. My deities do not demand that I follow them "or else" . . . they are loving parents who guide me through the vagaries of existance with advice and wisdom. For me to worship a deity who would stoop to such tactics would make me unworthy in my own eyes. Am I "willfully resisting" because I insist on intellectual honesty in my gods? I am naturally suspicious of all revelatory religions, and rightly so: you have said nought that distinguishes Christianity from any other "revealed" faith, and as such both the source and the medium of revelation are suspect.

Arion

SinikalSaint

March 9th 2006, 03:10 AM

Whaddaya expect? We're a bunch o' heathens!

OK, with you so far . . . Orthopraxy is good.

Let's stop here for a moment. The idea that Orthodoxy leads to Orthopraxy by the simple expedient of Following The Rules [tm] ignores some pretty essential stuff about human existance. The road to the type of spiritual life that Lewis was speaking of is not one that can be acheived by Following The Rules. It is one that comes, part and parcel, with a lifetime of continuous and rigorous self-examination. "True Doctrine" however pretty and noble does not drag a man through the thorny field of Wisdom to some exalted state, no matter how impressive the conversion experience. Wiccans and Pagans in general have a hard time with ANY doctrine, ANY set of spiritual rules that claim exclusive domain over mankind. Part of the problem is the moment you have a one-size-fits-all True Doctrine, you have some idiot that wants to point out how you aren't living up to the True Doctrine, or arguing just what the True Doctrine is and what it means, instead of shutting up and doing what's right in the first place. There's at least one in every crowd and they annoy us.

I am assuming here that you posit an Objective Reality. You have evidence for this? Most Pagans see Reality as subjective, inexorably intertwined with our own perceptions and perspectives and colored with our own self-delusions. And as to the purity of my soul . . . who is better qualified to judge that than me? No external law could take into account the complexities of my internal spiritual life and provide a pat solution, neatly packaged in easy-to-swallow scriptural form. The fact is, even positing an Objective Reality brings to fore the issue: how do you know that what you perceive as Objective Reality is, indeed, real.

Does righteous action require a pure soul? Again, who is the judge? David Koresh no doubt felt he was a pure soul, a righteous person, and in perfect union with "The One True God". I might disagree with that assessment. As far as seeking union with the divine, many Christian sects consider the idea to be blasphemy, others would say it is impossible. That's the problem with text-based religions: once you write it down, someone wants to argue about it.

Heh. Yes, that is what Christians happen to believe. And they refuse to accept the idea that there might be alternate ways of acheiving the same thing -- or people who, for whatever reason, have no desire to take that spiritual journey. And there is absolutely no evidence that orthodoxy, especially Christian orthodoxy, leads one to the "proper" divine destination. Proper according to whom? The entire Christian mythology is predicated upon the belief that only by adhering to the Christianity Brand can you be a good (orthopractic) person, regardless of your actual actions in society and as a human being. The "us vs. them" dichotomy that results is dangerous, destructive, and ultimately defeats the orthopractic ideal.

While intellectually intriguing and existentially interesting, the idea that any deity would use this line makes one suspicious.

Consider the time in which those early scriptures were written, and the cultural and historical context: the proto-Hebrews enjoyed a life much like the Beduoin, as simple herders and ranchers in the semi-fertile stretch of desert between two great and powerful civilizations. While a strategic location, the simple people who herded sheep had the Pyramids and the might of Egypt on one side and Babylon and the impressive Ziggurats on the other, not to mention mile after mile of fertile land that was not theirs.

At this point in history writing had just been discovered, and remained the exclusive realm of the priests. Writing is semi-magical, used not only for keeping track of grain harvests and taxation, but also acting as a symbolic language that conveys exact meaning -- such a thing allows men dead a hundred years past to have their words and thoughts spoken again. Writing is incredibly useful, so naturally it becomes incredibly magical and incredibly sacred in the two Big River civilizations. As nomads, you know about the concept of writing, but its mysteries are the sole property of the Big River priesthoods and jealously guarded. The Code of Hammurabi is written on a cliff wall, laden with meaning but understood only by those who knew the writing -- to an illiterate shepherd, they must have seemed impressive, bordering on the sacred, for the exact words of a king to be graven in stone and imbuing the Law of which he spoke with magickal potency, by the medium alone.

Along comes an exiled prince, well schooled and educated in every magical and intellectual art that the greatest civilization on Earth can conjure. As a result of Egyptian court politics he finds himself leading a band of ex-slaves
that he had arranged to carry out a rebellion. Naturally, he desires to upgrade their condition from illiterate shepherds to more sophisticated culture, benefitting from the inherent magick and blessings of writing. So he comes up with a simplified system that fits their language. But wait, there's more. . .

In providing the Hebrew written language he has given these ignorant peasants the key to civilization. In doing so, he also valorized the concepts of writing into a powerful relgious context. Then to boost their collective self-esteem further and give intellectual potency to what they were doing (namely, wandering around Siani looking for a permanent camp, and kicking the bejeezus out of the Cannaanites). So he borrows a little Sacred Law from Babylon, a little Radical Monotheism from his own people's religious past, and goes up a mountain to think about it.

The genius of Moses is evident: he raised the importance of writing from being the vehicle of spiritual and magickal power to being the focal point; he enshrined the very words themselves -- the Word. Jehovah is a god of history, among other things, and one of the very first: and you can't have history, secular or sacred, without writing. Moses comes down the mountain and says God has a name and you can spell it. Jehovah identifies himself as "I AM". So the Hebrews spend the next five thousand years worshipping . . . a verb.

The verb, To Be.

As an intellectual conceptualization it was brilliant for its time. The genius of Moses was to take an abstract concept like existance and deify it. "I AM" . . . "I AM WHAT I AM" . . . I am, I was, we were . . . the logical conclusion is to establish existance itself as a sacred ideal -- which is not a bad philosophical concept, on the face of it. Along the way you establish a sacred history "We were these people and this is how we got that way". Very uplifting stuff for a bunch of shepherds-turned-mercenaries living in the wilderness.

But the magic has worn off. We understand existance, in the abstract, now. We don't need to be awed by the idea that stuff exists; like the concept of pi or the zero, the verb To Be is a powerful idea with seemingly mystical context. That doesn't mean we should worship it and depend upon it for meaning in our daily lives. We're just a little more complicated for that to be fulfilling or useful.

Again, this abstract concept is cool, but is it worthy? The only reason they thought he was self-existant was because Moses said he was. The Hebrews took the verb To Be and ran with it. On the flimsiest of evidence they believed it -- orthodoxy, again -- and insisted that it was so. Their biggest saving grace is that they didn't insist on everyone believing it too.

You say that like it's a bad thing . . .
Of course the Gods are personifications of abstract concepts and natural phenomena! What is the verb To Be but an abstract concept? What is History but a natural phenomena? Yes, you can say that any particular god is lacking because he or she doesn't have Jehovah's rep for being the demiurge . . . but I think that demonstrates a lack of understanding of both polytheistic theology and the essential nature of divinity. Christians and other Radical Monotheists have this bad habit of denegrating polytheistic gods as "mere" representations of things . . . while not being willing to acknowlege that existance is just one more thing.

And he has a penis.
See, that's where we fall apart, and where Christians get confused when talking to Pagans. Wicca and the other Pagan religions do not see a representation of the abstract thought known as "being" -- the verb, To Be -- to be a worthy or useful deity to most people in their daily lives. Especially when this supposed demiurge, alleged creator and sustainer of the universe, has a bad habit of throwing his weight around, demanding attention like a two year old and making up arbitrary rules to keep the peasants in line.

The problem is that Christianity (and the other Abrahamic faiths) abandoned quite a lot of spiritually useful stuff -- some would say stuff that's vital to a meaningful human existance -- when they threw down their shepherds staves and blindly followed Jehovah. There is the small matter of the Goddess, a "mere" personification of half the human race. Perhaps the more important half. When the Hebrews insisted that the One True God was in their back pocket, they completely rejected the importance of the divine feminine (except in some esoteric sense among a small percentage of Hebrew mystics) and therefore forever doomed all their talk of orthodoxy to utter hypocrisy.

Because none of us would Be if it weren't for the Mother. Even Jehovah was forced to condescend to borrow a womb for his little experiment in creative avatar development. The Goddess has no creed but Life, no rules save 'an it harm ye none'; She does not reward Her people for their orthodoxy with a special place in the afterlife. She awards Her people in this life for their orthopraxy -- though sometimes it doesn't feel like a reward. She is our Mother, and every human who ever lived had a mother. When the Hebrews threw out the Mother, they made themselves half-orphans, spiritually speaking, forever removed from the Caritas that She alone provides the human soul. They got instead a domineering and not terribly sane Father. Talk about issues . . .

And here is where we must part ways. Damnation, Sin, Guilt, Hell . . . they all add up to a kind of spiritual extortion. My deities do not demand that I follow them "or else" . . . they are loving parents who guide me through the vagaries of existance with advice and wisdom. For me to worship a deity who would stoop to such tactics would make me unworthy in my own eyes. Am I "willfully resisting" because I insist on intellectual honesty in my gods? I am naturally suspicious of all revelatory religions, and rightly so: you have said nought that distinguishes Christianity from any other "revealed" faith, and as such both the source and the medium of revelation are suspect.

Arion
Forgive me for reposting the whole thing--I haven't quite figured out how to post partial quotes, yet...

Anyways... Alright, I'll agree that a doctrine doesn't necessarily lead to righteous action. What I was trying to say was that the reason Christianity emphasizes orthodoxy so much is because if true orthodoxy was acquired and put to heart (emphasis on "to heart"), then that would lead to righteous action, because you're basing your behavior on a true reflection of--yeah, I'll step out on a limb and say it--Objective Reality.

I'll be the first to admit that no one, including any particular denomination of Christianity, has necessarily found the truest of true orthodox doctrine. But my point in that post was concerned with why Christianity concerns itself so much with correct doctrine, rather than whether Christianity actually contains correct doctrine.

I can agree that no one's found 100% the right way, but that's yet to convince me to cast off altogether the notion that somewhere, somehow, there is a 100% right way. And if there is a True, Right way, I would think it would be found in achieving union with Divine. You were right to say that Wisdom, not merely following the rules, is the way to spiritual purity and righteousness, and that's actually what I'm saying. I think... (be gentle with me--I'm something of a greenhorn, and I'm in here to learn, as well, not just to argue). When God gave the Hebrews the Law, He then told them to meditate on it daily, to keep it in their hearts. Somewhat questionable aspects of the Mosaic Law aside, I find rather intriguing the Jewish belief that the Torah existed from eternity. Then you go to the Psalms, where Wisdom--personified as a woman, no less--is present at Creation; mix all that with the concept of the Logos, a kind of Hellenistic/Judaic unifying principle of all things...

What I'm trying, very clumsily, to get at is that ultimately there is some kind of unified Truth that holds existence together. Moral rules--including the Ten Commandments; religious rules, etc. are all ways to guide the genuine spiritual seeker towards Truth, and towards Union with God.

I'm aware that some Christian denominations find this idea blasphemous. I personally happen to believe that the Christian faith is actually very mystical--not leastly the notion of the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit, which, ironically enough, Evangelicals love to go on and on about even as they avoid like the plague just about anything labeled "mysticism." The lack of unity in our faith is truly frustrating and, I admit, doesn't help my case much. I'm not so foolish as to ignore the importance of at least a degree of subjectivity in any spiritual journey, regardless of which of us turns out to be right. Kierkegaard was no slouch.

You know what? Even as I type this stuff I realize I'm expressing more of my own spirituality than, perhaps, most Christians. That kind of subjective spirituality is kind of your point, isn't it? Silly me...

However, I still affirm the classic creeds of orthodox Christianity, and I guess the thoughts I'm trying ever-so-hard to articulate here are how I personally understand that orthodoxy--which is all I've really got, right? I happen to disagree that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has a penis, and that femininity is absent from the divine, though I'm willing to concede that's how earlier cultures and earlier Christians--any many, maybe even most, Christians, understand God today. But that is not what I believe about God.

If it's any consolation (which it probably isn't--it was probably rather condescending for me to even say that... pardon if it was... but anyways), I happen to not believe that you're going to Hell--not necessarily, anyways. God will judge, not I. I am a Christian because I believe in Christ, and I believe Christ will be the gauge, the scale, the benchmark by which all men and women, all beliefs and idealogies, all creeds and actions, will be judged. I believe all will be judged according how well their soul reflects the spirit of Christ. That would mean that anyone who has accepted of orthodox Christian doctrine, complete with belief in Christ as divine savior, [I]and as a result follows Christ's commandment to love God above all and everyone else as himself, will go to Heaven (which, in my view--and I would think in more contemplative versions of mainstream Christianity--is the same thing as union with God). Anyone who does not accept this doctrine will still be judged by how much his or her soul reflects the spirit of Christ. I would think you'd agree that one can reflect the spirit of Christ without true doctrine. It's just that true doctrine ensures it (assuming one actually takes that true doctrine to heart, which few people do--and few people, Christians included, even try to).

I probably make even less sense than ever, but it's 2:00 in the morning, forgive me. Thanks for the response! Stimulating the mind is always a blessing!

SinikalSaint

March 9th 2006, 06:08 PM

While I'm at it (several hours later, of course), what's wrong with being awed by existence?

I think a God understood as the Ground of Being itself would demand worship because to worship--to base the meaning of one's existence on--anything less than the very source of everything would likely be existentially/metaphysically risky business to say the least. The Jews had no beef with personiftying natural phenomena and what not, but it was worshipping them that they didn't like. Thank God for the Earth, but the Earth is a creation. Thank God for the moon, the stars, the sun, the seas--if one sees fit, personify them in the process of appreciating and honoring their majesty and beauty. But God is their source. Whatever else you can say about them, they are, so what ever it is making them be should get the glory (oi, I hope that made sense...)

And how is Being just merely one more thing to personify? Being itself is a pretty big deal. Mind you, I think Yahweh is a little more than just the personification of Being, but understanding God as the source and sustainer of everything would, I'd think, make sense of predicating the meaning of your existence on him. And I would argue that we don't understand existence as well as we think.

I don't see damnation as exortion. I understand damnation as consequence. Now because God sustains being, it can also be understood, I suppose, as God "sending" you to Hell. But when the will resists God, when the soul resists God, it is willfully severing ties with what sustains him. You may have heard of Hell being described as "eternal separation from God," and that all the language in Scripture referring to torment, fire, gnashing of teeth and what have you, is human, mythical language trying to convey the sheer horror of being cut off from your Creator. You say the Goddess and the gods guide you lovingly toward wisdom, and do not punish you for not following them, nor reward you with a special place in the hereafter. Fair enough.
I say God sustains me, gives me life, so that ultimately I may enjoy eternal union with Him (pardon the masculine pronouns)--a union so ecsastic and beautiful that all the language associated with Heaven, the gates of pearl, the streets of gold, etc. are but feeble attempts to convey it. The threats and "extortion" of Jehovah against turning away from Him are warnings of what ultimately happens when you resist Being.

There is no fault whatsoever in demanding intellectually honesty in the god or gods you worship. How do you determine the worth of a deity (I ask in all seriousness and curiosity)?

tmancour

March 9th 2006, 08:05 PM

While I'm at it (several hours later, of course), what's wrong with being awed by existence?

Nothing, on the face of it. But to worship the mere fact that there is existance seems unfruitful, unproductive, and existentially pointless. How is it benefitting your daily life? What challenges does existance assist you in overcoming? How does it help you feed your kids and put gas in the car? Get over the death of a pet? Deal with injustice? This harkens back to a common complaint that Pagans have against Radical Monotheists: that Jehovah/Jesus/Allah is simply too remote, too far removed from daily human existance in an existential way to be of any comfort or value. But if that's what floats your boat . . .

I think a God understood as the Ground of Being itself would demand worship because to worship--to base the meaning of one's existence on--anything less than the very source of everything would likely be existentially/metaphysically risky business to say the least.

I totally disagree. First of all, any Ground of Being that was true would not demand worship -- it would be redundant. To base one's existance on the fact of existance is circular logic that actually explains a lot with the other issues Christianity has. Even if it was the case that the Ground of Being insisted on worship (which would serve to prove against such an entity being, in fact, the Ground of Existance) we have no real proof that this Jehovah character is, indeed, that entity. For the Ground of Being to display any kind of personality at all would be inconsistant with its function -- and Jehovah, as portrayed in the scriptures, definately has a personality.

In Pagan theology the Ground of Being isn't worshipped as such -- as theoretical concepts go, it's about as ephemeral as they come. The fact that we exist is not attributed to a remote abstract concept, but to the idea that we are born of a mother through the sacred act of sexual congress. This is real. This is concrete. This is provable. It is a human universal element, unlike, say, encountering a law-giving flaming shrubbery on a mountaintop. Pagans in general have a problem with relevatory religion just because of this issue. Why turn to a bush when we know for a fact that our immediate existance is due to a sperm and an ovum going out for drinks after work? It is the worship of the abstract concept of the verb, To Be, that is risky business, and I think much of our modern cultural problems can attest to this.

The Jews had no beef with personiftying natural phenomena and what not, but it was worshipping them that they didn't like. Thank God for the Earth, but the Earth is a creation. [QUOTE=SinikalSaint]

You have proof? That the Earth exists, I agree. That the Earth came into existance, I agree. That the Earth came into existance because of the whim of some celestial demiurge is not only fanciful, but totally in contrast to recognized and established fact. The Earth is a planet that formed out of dust and gas . . . just like trillions of other bodies in our galaxy. To say that someone is personally responsible for its existance stretches the limits of credulity.

[QUOTE=SinikalSaint]
Thank God for the moon, the stars, the sun, the seas--if one sees fit, personify them in the process of appreciating and honoring their majesty and beauty. But God is their source. Whatever else you can say about them, they are, so what ever it is making them be should get the glory (oi, I hope that made sense...)

It did. But why does Jehovah need the glory? That's inconsistant with your posited statement, that Jehovah is the designer and creator of the universe. A being with such abilities would be far beyond the insecure need for affirmation from its creation. Just because a thing exists does not indicate that it exists because of a conscious decision on anyone's part. Ascribing such a responsibility to a tribal god of nomadic shepherds is, again, so unlikely as to be laughable. To read the scriptures and see how Jehovah insists on such abasesments by his alleged creations would make him, by any objective standards, neurotic at least, and psychoticly insecure at the worst.

And how is Being just merely one more thing to personify? Being itself is a pretty big deal.

Name one thing that doesn't exist as an abstract concept. What is the opposite of being? And why should we believe Jehovah is responsible for the concept in the first place? Yes, being is a big deal . . . but there is no real alternative, now, is there?

Mind you, I think Yahweh is a little more than just the personification of Being, but understanding God as the source and sustainer of everything would, I'd think, make sense of predicating the meaning of your existence on him. And I would argue that we don't understand existence as well as we think.
[QUOTE=SinikalSaint]

Even if Jehovah was responsible for creation, as unlikely as that would be, how can you prove it? To my satisfaction? Further, how can you prove that existance continues only because Jehovah wants it to? These are the shaky underpinnings of the Abrahamic religions.

[QUOTE=SinikalSaint]
I don't see damnation as exortion. I understand damnation as consequence.

But consequence of what? According to traditional Christian doctrine, damnation is a consequence of not living by the law established by Jehovah. If Jehovah established the law, and is responsible for the creation of everything in the universe, then he is therefore responsible for establishing the consequence of damnation for the crime of not following his law. Christian theology has proposed a system whereby Jehovah has set the standard, and also set the consequences of deviating from that standard, then has the temerity to insist that it's not his fault if we are damned -- when the whole thing was his scheme to begin with.

Now because God sustains being, it can also be understood, I suppose, as God "sending" you to Hell. But when the will resists God, when the soul resists God, it is willfully severing ties with what sustains him.

Firstly, you have to establish that Jehovah, does, indeed, sustain being. Secondly, you have made my point for me: Jehovah has set the rules of the game as "Do everything I say without question, do not resist, and you won't be damned . . . maybe." How is that not extortion?

Thirdly, what would constitute "resisting God"? That is a telling question. Who is to judge that? Are you saying if I resist the laws and rules that Christianity and it's spiritual cousins have attempt to impose on the rest of us, that I am resisting God because God allegedly made those rules? If God is responsible for my creation, then he is also responsible for every element in my creation, including my desire to resist those who would impose anything on me I consider profane and evil. So am I to be damned because I am being true to the nature that Jehovah imbued me with? How is that fair or logical?

You may have heard of Hell being described as "eternal separation from God," and that all the language in Scripture referring to torment, fire, gnashing of teeth and what have you, is human, mythical language trying to convey the sheer horror of being cut off from your Creator. You say the Goddess and the gods guide you lovingly toward wisdom, and do not punish you for not following them, nor reward you with a special place in the hereafter. Fair enough.

I actually appreciate that. It is rare that a Christian is willing to extend me the courtesy of respecting my beliefs as potentially valid. And the Goddess does not lead -- that is not Her role. She encourages us to lead ourselves and provides us with the skills and abilities to do so.

I say God sustains me, gives me life, so that ultimately I may enjoy eternal union with Him (pardon the masculine pronouns)--a union so ecsastic and beautiful that all the language associated with Heaven, the gates of pearl, the streets of gold, etc. are but feeble attempts to convey it. The threats and "extortion" of Jehovah against turning away from Him are warnings of what ultimately happens when you resist Being.

But I haven't resisting Being, and no Pagan does! Indeed, we rejoice daily in the magnificence of our existance and the agencies which caused it to happen . . . but we don't obsess about it. We have more important things to do. I Am, as a Pagan, in ways I never could have achieved within Christian theology. To our mind it is Christians and the other Abrahamics who resist Being as it was gifted to us -- in the enjoyment and fulfillment that comes in our interpersonal relationships, in sex and love, in reproduction and parenting, in abstract creation and ultimately in death in the service of the life force. How can I revel in the glory of my daily existance and still be "turned away from God"? It is the Christians who condemn us for enjoying these things that were laid at our feet like treasures. For this, we are damned?

Also, upon what basis do you believe that union with the Godhead will ultimately occur, presumably after you die and can't really enjoy it anymore?

There is no fault whatsoever in demanding intellectually honesty in the god or gods you worship. How do you determine the worth of a deity (I ask in all seriousness and curiosity)?

Excellent question, and one that too many Christians can't be bothered to ask!

I sum up the worth of a deity based upon my personal subjective standards. When I look at a deity and determine if they are worthy of my worship, I try to establish if they are Just, Honest, and Wise. Do they do their particular job? Are they capricious? Are they intellectually honest? Do they have a personal utility for me? There are other factors, but these are a start.

Arion

SinikalSaint

March 10th 2006, 12:52 AM

tmancour

March 11th 2006, 05:50 AM

One of these days, I'm gonna figure out how to quote parts... Your patience is appreciated till then...

Anyways, okay, you're pushing hard against me with this "God is the Source/Sustainer of Existence" thing--which is good. First off, I'd note the fact that I believe Yahweh is more than just the personification of the abstract concept of existence. We--or at least I do not worship the mere fact that we exist, I worship who I believe is the source and predicate of that fact.

And what would be the basis of that belief? Where is your evidence?

How that is fruitful and benefitting is a good--and huge--question. I won't front: not saying I can't answer it, but it's somewhat outside the scope of this debate. Then again, I guess technically it's not, but it's a lot to go into. It'd be a lot of tangents and things, going into several other aspects of the theology to which I adhere. But for starters, I'll note the concept of the Logos... You note that Paganism is subjective--that is fair. But is there no unifying Truth? No ultimate basis for the coherence of physical laws, the dynamics of life, of morality, of justice?

There is: Life. You can call it alleigence to the lifeforce, or acknowlegement of genetic destiny, or any number of things, but it all comes back to an understanding that our lives, and the life around us upon which we sustain ourselves, physically and emotionally, is, in fact, not mere creation, but absolute reflection of Divinity. This is why we Pagans get so pissed off when we hear "worship the Creator, not the creation." We don't see the two as seperate. Christianity postulates a remote, transcendent divinity which created the universe in seven days. Bang. Done.

Pagans, on the other hand, see creation as a continual process, one in which the hand of creation is still present and still active in all things, from the way we run our inner intellectual lives to the physical act of cell division. Creation is an aspect of the Divine. (So is destruction, but that's a different issue) We relate this continuous process of divine creation to our most primal and basic evidence of such: our own birth. Birth/growth/sex/age/death. Human universal experiences.

So we personify the creative impulse in the godheads of the Goddess and the God, the male and female aspects of divinity, which model our own parents. For us the divine is transcendent and immenent. For us it is more appropriate, more logical, and more intuitively accurate than the idea of a transcendent, omniscient deity like Jehovah/Jesus/Allah, firmly colored by the cultural bigotries of one narrow point of view in a vast human spectrum.

I'm not talking about rules and laws--I believe rules and laws are the best our minds can comprehend when trying to get to this Truth (this is why I believe God gave the Hebrews the Law and then told them to meditate on it. The point was to ultimately have that Law "written unto their hearts," not robotically or blindly followed. This is why Jesus seemingly broke the Law on several occasions).

Which is another key difference between the two theologies: Pagans put little faith or trust in religious laws, because such laws, however "divinely inspired" they might be, are made by men and made of language -- and language automatically acts as a restrictive control mechanism and an opportunity for pointless quibbling over arcane topics.
[/quote]

Yes, all we have are our experiences, our own senses--physical and spiritual, common sense and intuition; all we have are own ideas of justice and honesty and honor, etc. Ultimately, all this is subjective. But should we not be seeking for an ultimate unifying Truth, an absolute reality?
[/quote]

Ummm . . . why? To what use would you put one? How would you know when you got there, that there was no larger, greater Truth behind that one? And, most importantly, how could you establish through your subjective point of view that such a thing was, indeed, ultimate? Or Truth, even? Wicca and Paganism are pragmatic religions, despite all the candles and robes and swords and wands. Meditation is certainly stressed -- but meditation is a great servant and a poor master. We recognize at the outset that our personal meditative experiences, wherein such a thing as a transcendent "Ultimate Truth" might conceivably lurk, is no substitute for more down-to-earth religious issues that will actively contribute to your life.

I'm sure time and time again you've heard the arguments against subjectivist thought along the lines of "What if my morals/desires/feelings etc. drive me to steal, or swindle old ladies, or rape and kill children, or seek world domination?" or some jive like that (maybe the examples weren't that extreme, but I'm sure you got it). I'm not throwing that argument at you. I think arguments like that have their place, but I'm sure you don't think it's okay to rape and kill children (not leastly, of course, because it violates the whole "harm none" thing). I understand it's not as simple as all that. What I am saying is that while everyone's subjective experience is different, what is wrong with the notion that there is something that unifies all experience?

Because you can't prove it. Not even a little bit. Certainly not with a two-thousand year old piece of haigiography. I'll grant you some type of unifying force is involved . . . But how is that knowlege useful in either a practical or spiritual sense?

This is the beginning of my (yeah, I said it, my--I'll get subjective with you, because you're not without a point, there) understanding of the Jehovah of Scripture. He is not merely the fact that we exist, but he is behind the fact that we exist, and His Word is the unifying principle/force of all things. You might want to argue with me whether the Jehovah portrayed in the Bible fits any of this. That's fine. To be honest, I wonder that myself. But I have my reasons for retaining faith in what that dusty old book has to say, reasons that are beside my point here.

Uh oh. You used the 'f' word! We may delve into this later . . .

You said that you determine whether a deity is worthy of worship by your own subjective standards (interesting, basically, you judge your god[s], rather than god[s] judging you... My Christian instincts recoil, yet I am intrigued),

This is not an exclusively Pagan thing. It also lies at the heart of the Abrahamic religions, though y'all don't like to talk about it. In the story of Abraham and Isaac. At the end of the story a strong case can be made that Abraham retained his faith in Jehovah because Jehovah put him in an impossible, immoral situation and it was only after Jehovah proved to Abraham that he was worthy, by sparing Isaac's life, of Abraham's worship. It's a complex story with lots of shades of meaning, but that element is definately there.

It comes back to a basic theological/moral question: is what we know as 'Good' considered such because Jehovah said it was, or does Good exist independently of Jehovah? I maintain the latter view: I know Good when I see it, and if I see what I consider Evil perpetrated by a divinity I don't let them off the hook. Jehovah said "Kill the Cannanites and take their lands and daughers!" That ain't Good in my book, and I don't care if you did create the whole damn universe, it still isn't Good. Yes, my views of Good are highly subjective and far from universal. I can accept that.

starting with whether the god is Just, Honest, Wise, etc. Once again, fair enough. Any honest spiritual seeker, Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, Pagan, sooner or later would have to come to some kind of terms that a good chunk of their spirituality--and any morality derived from it--is subjective. That's just the case. Good old Soren knew that much. So I can't, and won't try to, really fault you there. But I'd also think that any genuine spiritual seeker would try to seek Truth. And I mean ultimate Truth, a Truth that unifies all experience.

Hopefully, that serves as a better introduction to where I'm coming from.

I understand where you are coming from . . . I just question why the obsession with seeking a transcendent Truth that can't be proven. In my view religion exists to serve the needs of humanity and culture, first and foremost. If a religion stops doing that, it dies and a new one better suited grows in its place. How do you personally benefit from this universal Truth that you are seeking? How will your life be different after your mystical union with the Divine? Like a dog that chases cars, what will you do with it once you catch it?

Arion

SinikalSaint

March 11th 2006, 04:43 PM

And what would be the basis of that belief? Where is your evidence?

I believe Yahweh is source/sustainer because the word means "I AM." Inherent in the name is the concept of the deity--that He is the Ultimate Subject. I don't have any evidence other than the fact that I exist. In fact, I'll further emphasize the importance of subjectivity that you're apt to emphasize so often, in saying that the only thing I can know, that anyone can know, existence. If there's nothing else true at all, I know for a fact that I'm here, because I'm conscious, I'm sentient. I may be a brain in a jar, I may be in the Matrix right now, and all my family and friends, this computer, you, the Bible I read, may all be figments or hallucinations. But I know I exist, if nothing else. And I know everything else exists at least in the abstract. So existence: that's for starters. The concept of Yahweh acknowledges not only the fact of existence, but the fact of origin. If I exist, I came from something. The concept of Yahweh is the ultimate something. Whatever that ultimate something is, that's what the Hebrews meant by Yahweh. Not a higher power, but the Most High, whatever is at the back of all this.

There is: Life. You can call it alleigence to the lifeforce, or acknowlegement of genetic destiny, or any number of things, but it all comes back to an understanding that our lives, and the life around us upon which we sustain ourselves, physically and emotionally, is, in fact, not mere creation, but absolute reflection of Divinity. This is why we Pagans get so pissed off when we hear "worship the Creator, not the creation." We don't see the two as seperate. Christianity postulates a remote, transcendent divinity which created the universe in seven days. Bang. Done.

Yes, the unifying Truth is life--or Existence. I posit once again, whatever is at the back of all this that's keeping all this together, keeping Reality coherent, the final object, is what us "Radical Monotheists" are referring to when we refer to God. The First Mover. Also, Christianity posits a holy trinity (Judaism I would argue does the same thing, although the Jewish tradition is understandably iffy about a trinitarian articulation of their understanding of God, but the attributes given to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are attributes Judaism all give HaShem), not a remote creator. God is transcendent, above and beyond His Creation (the Father), God has a will, a Word, that established, ordered, and sustains Creation (Logos, or the Son), and God is present, within everything in His creation, His energizing force, His breath, His life, the ruach adonai, the indwelling Presence of the Lord, the shekinah, which is a feminine word for the divine spirit of God (Holy Ghost). God is both transcendent and immanent in relation to His creation, and His will and word is what keeps it together. Indeed, all things do, in fact, reflect the divine, because the Logos, the unifying principle of existnce, the divine Discourse or Reason that is face to face and is God as mentioned in John 1:1, coheres existence: For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and from Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. According to Christian theology, God created ex nihilo, that is, He did not create from pre-existing material; but He still created from His mind and will, and so Creation is a reflection of God. God's spirit is found in His creation, flowing through it and sustaining it according to the principle of the Logos. And the Christian is believed to have that same Spirit dwelling inside of him/her. Not so distant. But God is not His Creation. He is its predicate. Jews and Christians are big on worshipping the Creator rather than the Creation because Nature didn't cause you to exist--at least not ultimately. God caused Nature to exist, and by His will keeps it, and everything it produces, existing.

Pagans, on the other hand, see creation as a continual process, one in which the hand of creation is still present and still active in all things, from the way we run our inner intellectual lives to the physical act of cell division. Creation is an aspect of the Divine. (So is destruction, but that's a different issue) We relate this continuous process of divine creation to our most primal and basic evidence of such: our own birth. Birth/growth/sex/age/death. Human universal experiences.

I actually don't disagree with this. I don't see how this necessarily clashes with Judeo-Christian theology. Except maybe the destruction issue, but you said that was a different issue so I won't press it here.
Read Ecclesiastes.

Which is another key difference between the two theologies: Pagans put little faith or trust in religious laws, because such laws, however "divinely inspired" they might be, are made by men and made of language -- and language automatically acts as a restrictive control mechanism and an opportunity for pointless quibbling over arcane topics.

It's true this happens, but one, are you sure you want to devalue language like that? I know it's limited, but it ought not be cast off. And two, belief in the Bible (please note that I'm not about to argue for its validity, here) is based on the idea that several men (yeah, men--sorry, patriarchy did abound in those days. It sucks, I admit) had spiritual experiences, encounters with the divine, and wrote them down and after a while a pattern was noticed. The experiences were all subjective, but people kept noticing the same sort of things happening. Now, assuming the mystical experiences and correspondences with the divine accounted or described in Scripture are true (by "true" I mean they were, in fact, actual subjective experiences, not that they are empirically verifiable)... well... what's wrong with that? That pattern must mean something...

This is not an exclusively Pagan thing. It also lies at the heart of the Abrahamic religions, though y'all don't like to talk about it. In the story of Abraham and Isaac. At the end of the story a strong case can be made that Abraham retained his faith in Jehovah because Jehovah put him in an impossible, immoral situation and it was only after Jehovah proved to Abraham that he was worthy, by sparing Isaac's life, of Abraham's worship. It's a complex story with lots of shades of meaning, but that element is definately there.

It comes back to a basic theological/moral question: is what we know as 'Good' considered such because Jehovah said it was, or does Good exist independently of Jehovah? I maintain the latter view: I know Good when I see it, and if I see what I consider Evil perpetrated by a divinity I don't let them off the hook. Jehovah said "Kill the Cannanites and take their lands and daughers!" That ain't Good in my book, and I don't care if you did create the whole damn universe, it still isn't Good. Yes, my views of Good are highly subjective and far from universal. I can accept that.

Yeah, that's a heavy one, indeed. The way I usually approach this question is, once again, noting the fact that God is not only the Creator but the Sustainer, and that He is present in His Creation. If I'm not mistaken, Socrates believed that the Good was ultimate reality, and was higher than the gods, that the gods did not determine what was Good and what was Evil. The Jews, and then the Christians, would identify this ultimate reality, this Good, as their God. But what is the Good? I posit that Good is ultimately about Existence--yes, Life. Evil is ultimately about destruction, or rather, corruption unto annihilation, non-Being, Nothingness. God is all about maintaining Creation, maintaining Existence.

Take Justice, for example. Justice is all about balance, right? It's all about fairness, equality. Balance. In the Law, if you murder, you are to be slaughtered yourself. Now, as I've mentioned before, the Israelites were commanded to meditate on the Law. Reflect on the fact that in the Law, you're killed if you kill. Why would that be? Perhaps it's reflecting an ultimate Truth that to take life is somehow, in the grand cosmic scheme of things, counter to maintaining Existence, and to run counter to that would be to cut off your own tie to Existence. Maybe it's a stretch, but I think that was the point of the Law. Yes, there's been plenty of awful squabblings over what the Law means, even today, but people are thinking about what it means, what Truth it's supposed to reflect. What is the Spirit of the Law?
Now, with your mentioning Abraham's sacrifice to Isaac, that can be connected to the first Commandments, the ones requiring allegiance to God. God is the One Who made all this, and keeps all this together. You often refer to practicality in religion: I'd argue that if God can sustain the Universe, He can help you take care of your kids. You often note life and the biological truths of birth and sex... You don't like the notion of attributing existence to a supposedly remote demiurge, but rather the univerally-recognized, provable fact of the procreative act. I am a Subject: "SinikalSaint does such and such..." and I am also the direct object of my parents: "SinikalSaint's parents created SinikalSaint in a passionate act of sexual congress," and this would be true, but you have to say the same thing about them, and go back, and back, and further back, to the formation of the stars and planets, and further back still, to some ultimate thing. Whatever this Ultimate Thing is is keeping all of us here, so I'm going to give myself to it rather than resists its divine will. If the will of the Ground of Being is to keep you here, why fight back? Now, the reason Yahweh keeps demanding worship and glory is because, it is understood, humans have done just that, by giving themselves to personifications of lesser things, things that aren't by any will keeping them here, things that are essentially mortal, at least in comparison with the Divine.

I understand where you are coming from . . . I just question why the obsession with seeking a transcendent Truth that can't be proven. In my view religion exists to serve the needs of humanity and culture, first and foremost. If a religion stops doing that, it dies and a new one better suited grows in its place. How do you personally benefit from this universal Truth that you are seeking? How will your life be different after your mystical union with the Divine? Like a dog that chases cars, what will you do with it once you catch it?

When I "catch it," my dear Arion (and I mean that--I like you. People in my own religion tend not to be so challening), I will live, as that is God's will. I believe my soul--spirit, breath, energy, consciousness, self-data, sentience, noumenal self, whatever you want to call it--will continue to exist eternally by virtue of sharing a life with God. And I will do so in a rejuvenated Creation, not a distant Heaven. The world to come/Kingdom of Heaven that Jews and Christians hope for is a uniting of the transcendent, spiritual realm and the physical realm, and those who by their free will align themselves with their Creator will experience that unity and a glorious continued existence, forever.

Huguenot

June 20th 2008, 04:04 PM

How is that you can empirically judge evidence for The Brown Bull of Cualnge?

tmancour

June 23rd 2008, 01:04 PM

I believe Yahweh is source/sustainer because the word means "I AM." Inherent in the name is the concept of the deity--that He is the Ultimate Subject.

>>SNIPPED FOR LENGHT<<<

Not a higher power, but the Most High, whatever is at the back of all this.

OK . . . let me get this straight . . . because a Semetic sky god's name happens to mean "existance" in the original Hebrew you're willing to afford him status as demiurge and transcendent deity, while dismissing other paleo-deities with similar semantic meanings out of hand? If existance is your primary methodology for establishing the Divine, then I would think that, intellectually speaking, you would be more inclined towards Buddhism, which makes existance a precondition of pretty much everything else. And while the "fact of origin" is meaningful, I would have to argue that the one, verifiable claim to existance and creation that you can safely make is that your existance was due to your mother (who in birthing you was participating in a sacrement of the Great Mother). If you wish to follow a genetic trail back to the primordial ooze, the formation of the planets, and the ultimate Prime Event, that's fine -- but that's a trail that starts with your parents. Whomever or whatever the "ultimate creative force" is or was, it is unknowable by humanity. Making a tenuous connectino between that impersonal force and your day-to-day existance without additional supporting evidence makes your jump to Jehovah as demiurge a denial of prima facia evidence of divinity within your own personal life in favor of clinging to the crudely written history of nomadic barbarians. I would imagine (and do, in my personal religious practice) that the beings most representitive of your creation are those who are responsible for your biological creation. I'm not advocating worshipping your parents, as much as venerating the idea of biological parenthood as an understandable demiurgic force. It's quite possible to hate your parents while still respecting and being reverent about parenthood.

Yes, the unifying Truth is life--or Existence. I posit once again, whatever is at the back of all this that's keeping all this together, keeping Reality coherent, the final object, is what us "Radical Monotheists" are referring to when we refer to God. The First Mover.

Then you are basically worshipping Unified Field Theory? Quantum Physics? Because that is what we can say with relative certainty is "keeping all this together". I'm not arguing against it -- Paganism places special emphasis on such things, representitive as the Four Elements, and elemental magick is very important to our practice. And we also acknowledge that the "fifth element" -- spiritual energy/love/magick/prana/The Force/etc. -- is vital to the realization of Life. But to see this essential force as the end all/be all of Divinity without some pretty compelling evidence would be a stretch.

Also, Christianity posits a holy trinity (Judaism I would argue does the same thing, although the Jewish tradition is understandably iffy about a trinitarian articulation of their understanding of God, but the attributes given to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are attributes Judaism all give HaShem), not a remote creator. God is transcendent, above and beyond His Creation (the Father), God has a will, a Word, that established, ordered, and sustains Creation (Logos, or the Son), and God is present, within everything in His creation, His energizing force, His breath, His life, the ruach adonai, the indwelling Presence of the Lord, the shekinah, which is a feminine word for the divine spirit of God (Holy Ghost).

And thus we go wlly-nilly from Prime Cause and Unified Field Theory to a hasty paste-up of Iron Age divinity in one ginormous leap. And without much evidence, or consideration of alternatives. Sure, the Hebrews and the early Christians recognized the inhospitablity of a purely transcendent deity -- who the hell was going to make lucretive sacrefices and donations if the deity in question wouldn't listen to their pleas? -- but arguing that because both of these RadMono religions recognized and named some of the manifold duties of divinity within human consciousness does not grant them a corner on the Truth market. Hindu and Taoist sages, not to mention the think-happy Greeks, had scoped these ideas out long before either of these religions was popular. And both of them (purposefully) tried to eliminate the feminine componants of divinity entirely. Without Goddess, in full equity with God, there can be no spiritual balance to a religion. Should Christianity publically embrace the Holy Spirit as Goddess, I might be inclined to have more hope for the religion, but this "don't ask, don't tell" policy on female divinity is just erroneous.

God is both transcendent and immanent in relation to His creation, and His will and word is what keeps it together. Indeed, all things do, in fact, reflect the divine, because the Logos, the unifying principle of existnce, the divine Discourse or Reason that is face to face and is God as mentioned in John 1:1, coheres existence: For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and from Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.

OK, more Semetic folklore. With a little (Pagan) Greek philosophy thrown in to make it taste better. I'll agree that a) there is a unifying principal to the universe ("The Force") that is both transcendent ("exists beyond ourselves") and immanent ("exists within ourselves"). That's a truism in most mystical traditions. But automatically ascribing that potent and formidable concept to a tribal divinity, without recourse to a broader study of human religions and their methods of dealing with the transcendent/immanent divine force is intellectually lazy. Just because Jehovah claims to be the demiurge doesn't make it so.

According to Christian theology, God created ex nihilo, that is, He did not create from pre-existing material; but He still created from His mind and will, and so Creation is a reflection of God.
>>>SNIPPED FOR LENGTH<<<

God caused Nature to exist, and by His will keeps it, and everything it produces, existing.

But they base their view entirely on superstitious folklore, oral traditions crafted by renegage Egyptian priests and surly illiterate shepherds, not on any compelling basis in "objective" reality. Yes, they ascribed the Prime Cause to Jehovah. They seperated the Creator from the Creation. Which led to the denegration of the Divine Feminine, the body/mind/spirit dichotomy, and unrestrained patriarchy. Have you ever considered what factors in their lives -- economic, political, social, historical -- might have influenced them to do so? For what it's worth, Pagans see no compelling reason to seperate the Creatrix from the Creation. Honoring one is revering the other. We see Prime Cause as manifest in all of Creation, and see the attempt at seperating the two as at best foolhardy, and at worst "blasphemous". As our lives are utterly dependent upon the "Creation" as much as Prime Cause, we give credit where credit is due.

I actually don't disagree with this. I don't see how this necessarily clashes with Judeo-Christian theology. Except maybe the destruction issue, but you said that was a different issue so I won't press it here.
Read Ecclesiastes.
[/QUOTE

Read it. A more compelling argument for not being a Radical Monotheist doesn't exist, in my opinion.

[QUOTE=SinikalSaint;1422418]
It's true this happens, but one, are you sure you want to devalue language like that? I know it's limited, but it ought not be cast off. And two, belief in the Bible (please note that I'm not about to argue for its validity, here) is based on the idea that several men (yeah, men--sorry, patriarchy did abound in those days. It sucks, I admit) had spiritual experiences, encounters with the divine, and wrote them down and after a while a pattern was noticed. The experiences were all subjective, but people kept noticing the same sort of things happening. Now, assuming the mystical experiences and correspondences with the divine accounted or described in Scripture are true (by "true" I mean they were, in fact, actual subjective experiences, not that they are empirically verifiable)... well... what's wrong with that? That pattern must mean something...

This is one of the biggest differences between RadMonos and neo-Pagans. The Big Three all developed at that cusp-point of human civilization where the written word was the exclusive property of the "power elite", the rulers and priesthoods, and all writings therefore were considered somehow more sacred than actual experience. It's easy to understand how this happened: Judaism rose in the Fertile Cresent, sandwiched between the math-happy Babylonian civilization in Asia and the magick-happy Egyptian civilization in Africa. Both the Babylonians and the Egyptians had "sacred books", from the Enuma Elish and Gilgamesh to the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Doubtless that had been written literally at the "dawn of history", and acheived greater and greater status with every generation due to their antiquity and allegedly divine origin. But the Hebrews -- through Moses and the Babylonian Captivity -- had become word-obsessed. When they took the original Monotheistic principal from the Egyptian cult of Aton, and combined it with the Codes of Hamurabbi and Babylonian attention to numerical detail, and then pasted JHVH's metaphysical head on the result, they came up with written words so sacred that even touching them unprepared could kill you. (Which, incidently, protected the preogatives of the priesthood in Hebrew society). But when looked at more objectively it becomes clear that the Hebrews were just continuing the worship of the process of writing. It's been said that Jehovah is the God of History, and I can't really argue that. Take away his books and he's just another Semetic tribal god. That doesn't make the "history" thus relayed any more reliable than any other folktale.

And my point here isn't with the divine experiences of the early Hebrews, or the relative validity of their writings. But such experiences are a human universal: there are no naturally-occuring atheistic societies, and no religions where metaphysics and personal mystical experience are not, in some way, validated. So that begs the question: what makes the Hebrews (and by extention the Christian and Moslems) somehow have more legitimacy than their pagan neighbors? Or, for that matter, the mystical experiences encountered by Pagans and other religions every day?

Yeah, that's a heavy one, indeed. The way I usually approach this question is, once again, noting the fact that God is not only the Creator but the Sustainer, and that He is present in His Creation. If I'm not mistaken, Socrates believed that the Good was ultimate reality, and was higher than the gods, that the gods did not determine what was Good and what was Evil. The Jews, and then the Christians, would identify this ultimate reality, this Good, as their God. But what is the Good? I posit that Good is ultimately about Existence--yes, Life. Evil is ultimately about destruction, or rather, corruption unto annihilation, non-Being, Nothingness. God is all about maintaining Creation, maintaining Existence.

Then Jehovah's got a funny way of showing it, considering all of his evil acts in the OT. I'll grant that his stuff in the NT is a little more morally ambiguous, but slaughtering entire nations and bringing down divine vengeance on innocents, as is replete in the OT, cannot fall under the heading of "Good" by most objective definitions. Including your own.

A Pagan perspective on this is that Good is the proper balance between Life and Death, wherein Death (ideally) in the service of the lifeforce is revered as a necessary part of existance. Needless death and unecessary suffering are generally held as Evil. But we also usually work on a case-by-case basis.

Take Justice, for example. Justice is all about balance, right? It's all about fairness, equality. Balance. In the Law, if you murder, you are to be slaughtered yourself. Now, as I've mentioned before, the Israelites were commanded to meditate on the Law. Reflect on the fact that in the Law, you're killed if you kill. Why would that be? Perhaps it's reflecting an ultimate Truth that to take life is somehow, in the grand cosmic scheme of things, counter to maintaining Existence, and to run counter to that would be to cut off your own tie to Existence. Maybe it's a stretch, but I think that was the point of the Law. Yes, there's been plenty of awful squabblings over what the Law means, even today, but people are thinking about what it means, what Truth it's supposed to reflect. What is the Spirit of the Law?

But "Don't murder your neighbors" exists as a postulate in almost all early societies. It's (nearly) a human universal, and in most societies it's recognized that murder is a bad thing that should be punished, depending upon the circumstances, without the Creator Of The Universe instructing them so. Also, Justice is not a human universal (belieive it or not). While we in the West have taken it as axiomatic to our socieities, due to both the Judeo-Christian tradition (itself due to the legalistic nature of Judaism) and the bureacracy of the Roman Empire, such ideals are foreign or tangential to other cultures and civilizations. Not that there aren't laws -- but the laws don't necessarily provide "justice" as much as they smooth social situations.

The problem with confusing Law with Religion is that you turn your priesthood into lawyers and your believers into plaintiffs and defendents, when Religion should ideally be about successfully completing the journey of life. Ideas of just what is "justice" cause interminable debates with little actual import, making the act of worship a contractual obligation, not an expression of your own divine nature. There are plenty of other problems to this legalistic approach to religion, but I would argue that it goes hand-in-hand with the Cult of the Written Word. After Kings and Priests, lawyers were the next ones to get access to writing, and the resulting codification of laws in Babylon (and its spread into Hebrew religion) eventually led to the idea that God's Laws could be "interpreted" i.e., legally avoided on technicalities. That led to all sorts of problems in both Judaism and Christianity (and plays havoc with Islam to this day).

Paganism, on the other hand, looks not at "Divine Law" for guidence in our daily living, because the Gods predate the laws of man and the written word. Instead we live according to "wisdom", the accumulated experiences of our ancestors, our teachers, and ourselves. It saves a lot of time in court.

Now, with your mentioning Abraham's sacrifice to Isaac, that can be connected to the first Commandments, the ones requiring allegiance to God.

Now we're getting somewhere! Continue . . .

God is the One Who made all this, and keeps all this together.

Says you. If you want to equate the demiurge and sustenant qualities of divinity to "God", for the sake of this argument I'll accept; but Pagans see the creation differently, as I stated, and therefore we have different axioms. Continue . . .

You often refer to practicality in religion: I'd argue that if God can sustain the Universe, He can help you take care of your kids. You often note life and the biological truths of birth and sex... You don't like the notion of attributing existence to a supposedly remote demiurge, but rather the univerally-recognized, provable fact of the procreative act. I am a Subject: "SinikalSaint does such and such..." and I am also the direct object of my parents: "SinikalSaint's parents created SinikalSaint in a passionate act of sexual congress," and this would be true, but you have to say the same thing about them, and go back, and back, and further back, to the formation of the stars and planets, and further back still, to some ultimate thing.

Let me stop you right there -- I agree, you can go back and back and back, but is it practical or useful to do so, when the representitives of all who came before and led to your conception are right there in front of you? Perhaps you are more enamored of the idea of Prime Cause than we are -- I can accept that. But insisting that the Prime Cause can help you with the day-to-day challenges of child rearing and such, without a compelling argument to be made in that case, falls short on the scale of intellectual honesty. From a Pagan perspective you needn't pursue Prime Cause because Prime Cause is apparent in all the effects. In point of fact, it is so equally present in everything that it can be accepted as axiomatic, appreciated for what it is, and moved beyond for more interesting and useful ideals.

This is a parallel of the common religious philosophy as the "Golden Age", which the Radical Monotheists share with just about every civilization: that Once Upon A Time, everything was just peachy and perfect (or at least more perfect than they are now) and that our lives should be a constant struggle to regain that elusive perfection (despite a lack of factual evidence of said "Golden Age" beyond folklore and legend). A cultic adoration of Prime Cause as both Creator and Sustainer is philosophically related to this "Golden Age" paradigm, as it sees the Past (however remote) as somehow more relevent and important than the present. It doesn't matter that your parents conceived you out of love (or not) and produced you as the culmination of millions of years of evolution and breeding and struggles for survival, because if you weren't at the Big Bang, how important can you be anyway? I'm not totally dissing the "Golden Age" paradigm because it, too, is a human universal (plenty of Pagans have the Matriarchy Golden Age paradigm without understanding just how brutal the Bronze Age really was.).

But I would ask you which is more impressive: the Prime Source, without which there wouldn't be anything and we wouldn't even be discussing this anyway, or the billions of individual decisions, strokes of fortune, narrow escapes, struggles against the odds, and eventual triumphs over adversity that, in aggregate, have conspired to create a self-aware, reasonably intelligent being? While Christianity usually places the weight on the former, Pagans generally accept Prime Cause as axiomatic and therefore focus on the utility and pragmatism of the latter. We KNOW the universe was created -- props for the spiffy job -- but getting from birth to death is OUR part of it, and that's where our focus needs to be placed. Continue . . .

Whatever this Ultimate Thing is is keeping all of us here, so I'm going to give myself to it rather than resists its divine will. If the will of the Ground of Being is to keep you here, why fight back? Now, the reason Yahweh keeps demanding worship and glory is because, it is understood, humans have done just that, by giving themselves to personifications of lesser things, things that aren't by any will keeping them here, things that are essentially mortal, at least in comparison with the Divine.

I call that Ultimate Thing the Goddess, She Who Bore Us All, the personification of motherhood and continuously-working Creatrix of the universe as I know it today. Having given myself to Her, I have acted in accordance with my own Divine Will, as well as Hers. I have as many compelling reasons to do this as anyone who has "found God" in the Bible. Why are my experiences less valid than theirs?

As far as Yahweh demanding worship, the fact that he requires such rites on par with what he says are inferior divine beings lends some serious credence to "Jehovah As Divine Poseur". If divinity is truly immanent, then personifications of "lesser things" should be pretty easy to see as extensions of adoration of the Prime Cause -- and those violent tantrums he kept having in the OT are pretty powerful arguments that Jehovah, as written, was not truly the demiurge/sustainer, but an upity Semetic tribal divinity Moses upgraded to Creator and Sustainer (without feminine help, of course . . . Jehovah has some gender issues . . .)

When I "catch it," my dear Arion (and I mean that--I like you. People in my own religion tend not to be so challening), I will live, as that is God's will. I believe my soul--spirit, breath, energy, consciousness, self-data, sentience, noumenal self, whatever you want to call it--will continue to exist eternally by virtue of sharing a life with God.

OK, I grant you that . . . but would you also grant that I have the same facility without bowing and scraping before a divinity whose morals I cannot abide? I place my faith and trust in the Goddess, and let the eternal disposition of my soul go wither it will because my job right now is not to obsess over where I'll go when I die, my job right now is to LIVE, have kids, raise them up healthy and happy, and pursue those aspects of culture and civilization I feel naturally equipped to contend with. Like Pagan Theology . . .

And I will do so in a rejuvenated Creation, not a distant Heaven. The world to come/Kingdom of Heaven that Jews and Christians hope for is a uniting of the transcendent, spiritual realm and the physical realm, and those who by their free will align themselves with their Creator will experience that unity and a glorious continued existence, forever.

Sounds a lot like the Summerland. And you fail to spell out what happens to those souls who do not align themselves (under any particular set of rules) to the Creator. That's all very well and good, but Radical Monotheism presupposes that the Believer alone can be "saved" and granted eternal existance, whereas I see it as axiomatic that a piece of our lifeforce continues existance after our corporeal bodies have whithered away, regardless of the beliefs of the soul in question. My process is a naturally (and therefore divinely) ordained state of things; in Pagan theology, all life works in circles and the life-cycle is do different. What is the evidence of your contention?

(BTW: Ditto on the debate. It's hard to find a Christian willing to meet me on my intellectual terms for debate without quoting mountains of misunderstood scripture at me. Thanks!)

Arion the Blue
High Druid of Durham

Cheetah

June 23rd 2008, 07:20 PM

Sorry if I've taken a while to reply to this tmancour, I thought I'd post some newer thoughts on this post, this time hopefully not making the same mistakes I have done in the past. You did say in another post that you weren't going anywhere, although you perhaps weren't expecting me to reply three years later!
Instead of answering point-by-point this time, I'm going to step back and re-state some of my earlier arguements so that they can go forward undiluted.

The problem that most Pagans have with most Abrahamists stem from the latter's usual list of circular arguements:

1. You should believe in the Bible because it is Old.

Well this could be develpoed into a vaild argument, since if the documents were written closer to the time of the events they describe, then they may be more likely to be accurate, and by pulling in other sources one may corroborate that, so if qualified that may be a valid line of reasoning, certainly in part.

2. You should believe in the Bible because lots of other people do.
3. You should believe in the Bible without any real proof of its veracity because that means you have Faith, and Faith is always a Good Thing.
4. You should believe in the Bible because if you don't and you are wrong, then you will suffer in Hell for all of eternity.
5. Even if you do believe in the Bible, you had better believe it in the same way I do, or refer to #4.
6. You should believe in the Bible because Jehovah told you too -- in the Bible.

And of course no to the rest.

My over-riding point is that Radical Monotheism is bad for humanity in general, and the way it is practiced by most Abrahamics has brought us to the utter brink of disaster.
I hate to interrupt your flow but that doesn't make it untrue.

The current explosion of Neo-Paganism in the West is the result of a large segment of the educated population (and, increasingly, the less educated) seriously and intently examining the whole Abrahamic package we were born into and deciding that there must be more to life than being guilty and miserable all the time and waiting for the world to end.
This sounds just like someone reading Ecclesiastes with their glass half empty. Personally, I think Christians tend to flip it and look on the positive side of things; I can't say I know a single Christian with the attitude you have described.

Most Pagans don't just pick up a book on Wicca and go "Hmm, maybe I'll try that one this week." It is usually the result of a long, complicated and exhaustive spiritual journey that often involves deep study of the scriptures, a lot of intense introspection and meditation, unparalleled soul-searching...
I could say the same about the testimonies of some Christians I know. Not everyone is brought up in a Christian home, going to Church every week and blindly accepting what they're taught; some have real struggles with what they believe and question what they believe, searching, only to conclude, sometimes against other interests they have, that Christianity is true. I'm sure I don't need to tell you all this, but I thought I'd point it out.

Why should I be concerned about a 3000 year old Semetic inheritance dispute? My ancestors came from Britain and Austria and Scotland. I live in America. Why should my children spill their blood in the sand for someone else's bragging rights about how they finally won a semi-arid patch of desert whose only real importance is its strategic location between Africa, Asia, and Europe? Why should I live my life by a 3000 year old tribal law that is remarkable only because it a) gave us the week-end (Thanks, Moses!) b) codifies some common-sense issues that were common to virtually every human tribe in history and c) makes an egotistical and misogynistic Semetic sky-god the center of a tribal cult?
Well that depends entirely upon whether or not this "Semetic (sic) sky-god" exists. For me at least, that's where it all stands or falls. You described how the godess was full of love, well I apply (some, at least, of) the same attributes that you give to her, to my god. And given that I view my god as a god who is powerful and full of love and kindness, yet thankfully not at the expense of justice and good standards, if this is true, then I would conisder it my responsibility to listen to ths god and hear what he has to say, and maybe even to serve him for all that he has done for me.

What positive elements does Christianity and its cousins really give to us, today?
Well I think that's irrelevant, what matters is whether or not its arguments are true. Educate me - my appologies I'm ignorant - is this an important factor within paganism? For me, I couldn't believe something if I knew it weren't true and if I knew it was, I would feel obliged to believe it, but you seem to be focusing more upon the tangible benefits of religion rather than upon its validity. Is this more important to you? How do you consider it?

The character called Jehovah in the Bible cannot be omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent, as the Abrahamists claim. By his actions throughout the OT he shows himself by his actions as unworthy of my worship. As the NT is based on the OT, and inherits its theological structure from there, it is inherently flawed, no matter how nice of a guy Jesus was. Glopping Original Sin, the Passion, and "the Great Comission" on top of the original folly has totally overshadowed Jesus' greatest contribution: his spiritual teaching that all men are brothers (ALL men -- not just Christians) and that a universally compassionate and non-violent attitude is contaigious and generally good for society.
Yes, but he also preached more in his early ministry about hell than about heaven. You seem to be rather selective in your reading if I may say so. And didn't he go on to say that he thought he was god, and was dying for the sins of people?

Instead, institutionalized Christianity barrelled right past that to get to the Guilt and Suffering portion of the program. My personal opinion is that Jesus would probably look back on his crucifiction as a sign of his failure to communicate effectively. He spent three years teaching, a couple of days dying: which was the most important . . . to him?
I would say that Jesus looked back on his crucifiction as a sign of success, especially the raising of his body and his post-mortem appearances some time afterwards. What an achievement.

Now we have this legacy to deal with. Evangelicals, convinced of their own moral superiority and their buddy-buddy relationship to jehovah, have siezed the reigns of power of the most powerful nation on the planet -- for the expressed purpose of blowing it up in another orgy of Guilt and Suffering. They want to Smite the Wicked and Punish the Wrongdoers -- they have no interest in promoting international brotherhood and compassionate non-violence. No, they want total temporal control and total spiritual domination, and armed with a easy-to-misinterpret book they have the mental justification to do just about anything to get there: the ends, in their myopic little minds, more than justify whatever means it takes.
I could hardly reconcile a word of that with my own experience, except punishing the wrongdoers. I see the exact opposite and can't help feeling that you've got a skewed version of Christianity - how many of this board's Christian members fit that profile, for example? Or have I asked you that already - I can't remember? But like I said, even if all that you said were true, that would have absolutely no effect upon the vailidity of what they were saying.

Ben

SinikalSaint

June 30th 2008, 11:11 AM

Back in the ring again! Good to see you, again, Arion, ^_~ Your arguments are rather formidable. I hope I've learned a thing or two since we've last tangled...

OK . . . let me get this straight . . . because a Semitic sky god's name happens to mean "existence" in the original Hebrew you're willing to afford him status as demiurge and transcendent deity, while dismissing other paleo-deities with similar semantic meanings out of hand?

Not necessarily. My understanding of who/what God is is conveyed in name of this "Semitic sky god."

If existence is your primary methodology for establishing the Divine, then I would think that, intellectually speaking, you would be more inclined towards Buddhism, which makes existence a precondition of pretty much everything else.

I give massive props to Buddhism. Unlike most other evangelicals here, I don't see its precepts--not all of them, anyways, and certainly not the Four Noble Truths or the Eightfold Path--as being inconsonant with Christian theology.

And while the "fact of origin" is meaningful, I would have to argue that the one, verifiable claim to existence and creation that you can safely make is that your existence was due to your mother (who in birthing you was participating in a sacrement of the Great Mother). If you wish to follow a genetic trail back to the primordial ooze, the formation of the planets, and the ultimate Prime Event, that's fine...

I appreciate you acknowledging the validity of the "ultimate creative force" or "Prime Mover," as it's a cornerstone to my belief in Jehovah. While I acknowledge that both Jehovah and Elohim are names used by the Israelites to refer to their (limited--as any other human culture's understanding would be limited) understanding of the Divine, I do not reduce my understanding of Jehovah as their primitive tribal god. When I say I believe in Jehovah because His name means "I AM," I mean to imply that though the Israelites' understanding of the divine was imperfect, (no human's understanding of God will ever be perfect, until, perhaps, the Eschaton) their attributing this philosophically, theologically-loaded name to this imperfect understanding (i.e., to this particular Semitic sky-god) itself indicates some acknowledgment of, encounter with, experience with, insight into, or at least a vague concept of a more universal divinity that transcends the limitations of tribal deities. Despite the limitations and knobly, grotesque particularities of primitive tribal gods, I believe in the universal, transcendant, and personal (or suprapersonal) divinity conveyed in the name Jehovah. As such, I reject deities or concepts of the divine insofar as they seem to fall short of this. Otherwise, I just understand them as another name for the same One. Once again unlike many of my fellow Christians, despite some differences in exactly how God is defined or described (trinitarian vs. unitarian, etc.), I ultimately have no problem identifying Jehovah with Allah, Ahura Mazda, Aten, Shang Ti, etc...

-- but that's a trail that starts with your parents. Whomever or whatever the "ultimate creative force" is or was, it is unknowable by humanity. Making a tenuous connection between that impersonal force and your day-to-day existance without additional supporting evidence makes your jump to Jehovah as demiurge a denial of prima facia evidence of divinity within your own personal life in favor of clinging to the crudely written history of nomadic barbarians. I would imagine (and do, in my personal religious practice) that the beings most representitive of your creation are those who are responsible for your biological creation. I'm not advocating worshipping your parents, as much as venerating the idea of biological parenthood as an understandable demiurgic force. It's quite possible to hate your parents while still respecting and being reverent about parenthood.

Ooh... touché... I'm gonna have to chew on that one. But in the meantime, I can offer that: 1) While I do believe that everyone has a deep sense of the divine in his/her heart, Judeo-Christian tradition as I'm sure you're painfully aware is quite dependent on the notion of God's self-revelation. I do believe God has revealed Himself to us--in Creation, in conscience, in the recorded mystical and historical experiences of people including (or especially) the Hebrews (i.e., the Scriptures), and ultimately, in the person, life, and work of Jesus Christ. But this more subjective than anything else, and really a personal testimony more than an argument, so you don't have to accept it--I'm only mentioning it to answer your question honestly; and 2) honoring or venerating the biological fact of parenthood is, I admit, an intriguing idea, but I'm afraid it's just not... I dunno... ultimate enough for me. I honor nature as a created manifestations of God's will, but I honestly can't jive with venerating nature apart from an ultimate, transcendent, omnibenevolent will. Anything short of a Lord Who is Love, and I'm bloody near a nihilist. "The universe is hostile, so impersonal; devour to survive, so it is, so it's always been," to quote Tool.

You often note the presence of principles and postulates claimed or commanded by the Judeo-Christian paradigm in other cultures and religions. And? All truth is God's Truth, and truth is truth is truth.

Yours is a hefty, challenging, and admittedly quite unexpected response. I'll end mine here, for now, and chew on the rest so I can return and hopefully give it its due.

Lepidopteryx

July 7th 2008, 12:24 AM

[QUOTE=Richbee;1015470]Various questions to ask witches:

"How do you know that neo-paganism (witchcraft) is true?"

What is true for one is not necessarily true for all. For example, I like my steaks rare - for me, the statement "Well-done beef is not fit to eat." is a true statement. My mom likes her steaks well-done. For her, the statement "Rare beef is not fit to eat.' is a true statement. Two diametrically opposed staemetns - both absolutely true for the person uttering them, both patently false for others. My path is true for me - it doesn't work for everyone, and that's okay.

"What if you are wrong?"

I could ask you the same question. Pascal's Wager leaves out the possibility that there is One And Only One True God and it isn't JHWH. If that's the case, and this OAOOTG is hacked because you picked JHWH and not him/her/it, then Christians are just as screwed in the afterlife as you seem to think we non-Christians are.

"If there are such things as gods and goddesses why have they not revealed themselves physically like Jesus Christ has?"[/size]

My deities are manifest in every aspect of my life. They are in the food I eat, the air I breathe, the birds at the feeder in my backyard, the sunrise I watch every morning over the rim of my coffee cup, the pets snoozing on various upholstered surfaces in my house, the love I made with my husband last night, my daughter's kiss, the friends we hosted over the weekend. Deity doesn't have to appear as a single person to manifest itself. We are all art of the Divine and it is part of everything that exists. The Divine is inextricably entwined in the mundane.

Lepidopteryx

July 7th 2008, 01:13 AM

Huguenot

July 17th 2008, 03:06 PM

What is true for one is not necessarily true for all. For example, I like my steaks rare - for me, the statement "Well-done beef is not fit to eat." is a true statement. My mom likes her steaks well-done. For her, the statement "Rare beef is not fit to eat.' is a true statement. Two diametrically opposed staemetns - both absolutely true for the person uttering them, both patently false for others. My path is true for me - it doesn't work for everyone, and that's okay.

You just expressed a series of preferences shaping opinions. What about Religious convictions based on your conscious thoughts or a thought process? Are you entitled to your own Facts? Now, surely we in America are entitled to our own opinions! :yes:

My deities are manifest in every aspect of my life. They are in the food I eat,

Brown bull or the golden calf? Side of Ba'al? :smile:

the air I breathe, the birds at the feeder in my backyard, the sunrise I watch every morning over the rim of my coffee cup, the pets snoozing on various upholstered surfaces in my house, the love I made with my husband last night, my daughter's kiss, the friends we hosted over the weekend. Deity doesn't have to appear as a single person to manifest itself. We are all art of the Divine and it is part of everything that exists. The Divine is inextricably entwined in the mundane.

Interesting, what proof do you have? When did you first believe in Pantheism?

Who is your guru?

Lepidopteryx

July 18th 2008, 11:36 AM

You just expressed a series of preferences shaping opinions. What about Religious convictions based on your conscious thoughts or a thought process? Are you entitled to your own Facts? Now, surely we in America are entitled to our own opinions! :yes:

The existence of my gods is as objectively provable as the existence of any other diety, including JHWH - that is to say, not at all. It all comes down to what you believe, and what maeks sense to you. It also coems down to what you see as the purpose of religion. If you see religion as a contest to determine which supernatural being gets custody of your soul after you die, then I can see why you would be afraid of choosing the "worng" one. I see the purpose of religion as providing a framework for the making of ethical decisions. For me, deities are not distinct beings that rule the world or can be appealed to by petitionary prayer for specific intervention in my life - they're more like notes to myself on my spiritual bulletin board keeping me mindful of the way I need to live in order to be a good person. From that perspective, any path that fulfills this function is as avalid as any other.

Brown bull or the golden calf? Side of Ba'al? :smile:

LOL. What I meant was that the aforementioned rare steak, and the accompanying baked potato, are just as inexticably entwined with the Divine as I am.

Interesting, what proof do you have? When did you first believe in Pantheism?

I have as much objective proof for my beliefs as any other believerof any other faith - zero. I know that it works for me - it keeps me balanced, centered, and always striving to improve myself.
Ever since I was a child, it never made sense to me that if there was one and only one Divine Being, that it would have chosen one single group of desert nomads to reveal itself to, and no others. It made much more sense that the Divine was perceived by different people according to their circumstances. I was an adult before I found out there was a name for people like me, and interestingly enough, I figured out that I was Pagan as a result of a series of classes on female spirituality at my local UU church called Cakes for the Queen of Heaven.

Who is your guru?

I don't have a guru. I read a lot. I have friends of many faiths, and we converse over cups of coffee or tea, bottles of wine or beer, and learn from each other.

MetalMark

July 28th 2008, 11:13 AM

Some common beliefs among witches:

1. Rejection of absolute truth.

Witches believe that experience and mysticism are the final authority not some book or creed. Each person must find and define their own reality and belief system.

Biblical View:

"All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus...I give you this charge: Preach the Word, be prepared in season and out of season....For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths." 2 Timothy 3:16-4:4

2. Tolerance

Witches believe that acceptance of other belief systems and religions (as long as those religions and belief systems are tolerant of theirs) is a must. Diversity is a virtue, dogmatism a sin.

Biblical View:

There is right and wrong. "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil...." Isaiah 5:20

Some things should not be tolerated. "I will set before my eyes no vile thing. The deeds of faithless men I hate; they will not cling to me. Men of perverse heart shall be far from me; I will have nothing to do with evil." Psalm 101:3,4

Most witches believe that they can cause changes in people and circumstances through invoking spirits, forces or gods in the unseen world. This is usually done through some prescribed ritual or incantation.

1. Is it absolutely true you reject absolute truth? What a load of nonsense!
2. Political correctness ≠ truth.

Seri

August 11th 2008, 01:18 AM

Pardon me while I barge in on this debate. It's late, I skipped over a few posts, and I just want to throw out a few thoughts.

Christianity did acknowledge the Goddess for some time. Certain sects still do. Protestants and Catholics notably do not. The Holy Sophia ( http://www.northernway.org/sophia.html ) was that embodiment of femininity. This was a wonderful counterpart to the more common Bull of Sumeria that Christians are accustomed to worshiping. Oh, you didn't know that was one of Jehovah's names? Note that many Christian sects decided that Sophia referred to Jesus. That makes the Song of Solomon a little...uh...yeah. I'm not going to go there. After all, it's Adam and Eve, not Solomon and Jesus.

The Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions are what are commonly referred to as "Apocalyptic cults." Take "cult" in the anthropological use of the word, in which any religious tradition is a cult. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all based on the end of the world, the final judgment, and the redemption of the faithful. Wicca and Paganism are "Fertility cults." This means that Wicca and Paganism are based on growth and prosperity of the race (or of all races, with races not referring to skin color, but to species of being, since all humans, regardless of skin color, are humans). The essential differences can be summed up as follows:

1. "Some day, at some time that we don't know, God is going to kill everyone who does not believe in (insert messianic figure here). The faithful shall be rewarded with eternal life, the heretics will die/burn/suffer."

2. "We exist to prosper, having been brought about into our current circumstances by a series of actions leading up to this point. Our actions determine the success or failure of our existence and that of our progeny."

Orthodoxy and orthopraxy at their finest. The first, which is the view of the apocalyptic cults, does not pay heed to the actions of the adherents, save for the requisite belief in the appropriate messianic figure (which has not come, according to the Jewish tradition, is Jeshua of Nazareth in the Christian tradition, and is, albeit somewhat vaguely, the Prophet Mohammed in the Islamic tradition). The second requires proper action of its adherents to ensure that an apocalyptic end does not occur. As a result, the apocalyptic cults are driven heavily by dogma, while the fertility cults are driven heavily by pragmatism. In essence, apocalyptic cults require that their members not think, while fertility cults require that their members do think. This last statement is a gross oversimplification of the issue, but it should be enough to get the Christians who have been posting in this thread inflamed enough to pay attention to this last point.

Jeshua of Nazareth (common parlance: Jesus Christ) is an astrological, solar deity figure. He is considered the founder of the Judeo-Christian Age of Pisces. Moses was the founder of the Age of Aries, who transitioned from the Age of Taurus. In about 150-250 years, we move into the Age of Aquarius. All of the symbolism of the life of Jesus exists in the Wheel of the Year and in earlier oral traditions. An interesting bit to throw in:

Malachi calls Messiah "The Sun of Righteousness" (Malachi 4:2). [source: http://ldolphin.org/Names.html ]

Don't think that I'm saying this out of hate. Genuinely, what I want to inspire in every person is the willingness to question themselves and others into stronger, healthier faith. To be fair, I bet that the majority of pagans did not realize that the Holy Sophia was a part of the Christian tradition, even if it was abandoned, just like how the Catholic church employed "white witches" until nearly 1500. I believe that a Christian of true faith, who believes whole heartedly in the message of Jesus, can bring about great positive change in the world. I do not, however, regularly find Christians who are willing to live a Christian life. Too many are focused on dying a Christian death to be bothered with alleviating the suffering of those who are dying in the streets, day by day, from disease, malnourishment, and violence. Christians who live, day by day, by the ideals of the teachings of Jesus are worth respect. Love thy neighbor (Matthew 5:43-48), Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you (Matthew 5:42), and live a life of virtue as an example unto others (Matthew 5:14-16). This is the way in which Mother Theresa lived her life and, by her faith, she considered herself to be doing no more than she was called to do.

I am not called by these imperatives. I hold to no religious laws but the Pyramid (Know, Dare, Imagine, Be Silent, and Follow the Rede). For me, it is sufficient and right that I act in that way. I refuse to fail at these laws and agree to abide by them in all hours, at all times. Who is more noble: he who sets achievable goals and attains them or he who sets lofty goals and fails to attempt to attain them?