Sunday, May 17, 2009
I Can't Let It Go...
I hate it when people spell the word magic with a "k" at the end of it. Ten years ago, you didn't see it often. Now it's everywhere. I don't know what happened but I'd love to grab whoever is responsible by the shoulders and shake them talk some sense into them. I don't care what the justification is, it's ridiculous and phonetically redundant. I don't care if it's meant to differentiate between real magic and stage magic. It. Makes. Me. Crazy.
To Believe
I am not Christian. But most of the people I know are, majority of the country is. It's everywhere. There are times I wish I was too, that I believed, that I was one of them. Not even in Christianity but in any religion. What a comfort it must be to believe in something so completely. To have the kind of faith in something that it no longer feels like belief but truth. I have never had this. I want it, but you can't force yourself to believe something that in your heart you know is not true.
I do not turn up my nose at the possibility of there being something "divine" out there. I believe that there is more in this world than we see. More to ourselves than we see. I also believe in science. But I think the idea that science and religion are mutually exclusive is ridiculous. I think, to an extent, science helps us understand the magic and mysteries of the world and the cosmos. We are human, three dimensional beings, and as such I don't think we will ever truly understand the nature of existence. But we can and will try.
I believe in destiny, or fate, if you will. To a point. There have been events in my life that seem to me as if they were meant to happen. I do believe that things happen for a reason but I also believe in chaos. Sometimes things just happen. Sometimes there is a purpose and sometimes there is not. Who are we to try and determine why this is? The fates, as the ancient Greeks believed, weaving their threads of fate? God? The Spirit? The Goddess? The Universe? We will never know, so arguing about it seems pointless.
So where does that leave us?
Personally, I am at a crossroads in my life. I am feeling more lost that I ever have. In such times it would be nice to have a religion to turn to for comfort or peace of mind but to me it seems a poor excuse to "find" a religion. You can't force yourself to believe in something because it is convenient.
Monday, May 4, 2009
The Beginning
Where to begin?
I was raised in a home that really had no religion. We celebrated Christmas and Easter but mostly as consumers. The religious aspects of these holidays were unimportant, although I was baptized as an infant (this was to appease some bible thumping relatives who were very distraught at my being born out of wedlock). Over the years of my childhood and young adulthood I attended different kinds of churches for various reasons. Unitarian, Presbyterian, Catholic, Methodist. In all of them I could sense the community and overall well being among the worshipers and the believers. But I was not one of them. To me, none of it rang true or if anything, there seemed to be mere slivers of truth.
As I have gotten older I feel the need to identify what I do believe. I don't ascribe to any specific religion. I believe that religion is personal and that in someways slapping a label on it limits you. I consider myself to be Pagan, it's kind of a blanket term like saying you're Christian. To me, religion is mostly philosophy and a way of life.
Unfortunately there are a lot of people that do not see it this way. I've chosen to create this anonymous blog because I was beginning to feel as though I were dying spiritually. There is no on in my life that I would feel comfortable discussing these things with. Most of my peers are Christian, many of them right-wing, bible-thumpers that literally think Barack Obama is the anti-Christ. I don't like to rock the boat. I don't get into theological discussions. I don't feel the need to project my beliefs onto others, to have to explain myself, defend my beliefs, to have to justify why I think the way I do. And generally speaking, I expect this of others.
I struggle with this while I try to discover who I am and what I beleive. I believe that the universe has an energy, a power, that often balances itself out. I beleive that perhaps part of this energy could be called "God." I beleive that mankind cannot fully comprehend this entity or force in it's entirety and so we create gods and goddesses, mere fragments, much as we created the concept of time.
Now, just because we created the concept of time (for the sake of argument) does not mean that it doesn't exist. It just means that we have found a way to label a phenomenon in an attempt to further understand it and it's uses. Perhaps we created the God/Goddess persona because we cannot grasp the forces of the universe or existence. In my mind it doesn't make it less real or less true. Truth has several layers and pieces, there is no single truth, there are many.
I was raised in a home that really had no religion. We celebrated Christmas and Easter but mostly as consumers. The religious aspects of these holidays were unimportant, although I was baptized as an infant (this was to appease some bible thumping relatives who were very distraught at my being born out of wedlock). Over the years of my childhood and young adulthood I attended different kinds of churches for various reasons. Unitarian, Presbyterian, Catholic, Methodist. In all of them I could sense the community and overall well being among the worshipers and the believers. But I was not one of them. To me, none of it rang true or if anything, there seemed to be mere slivers of truth.
As I have gotten older I feel the need to identify what I do believe. I don't ascribe to any specific religion. I believe that religion is personal and that in someways slapping a label on it limits you. I consider myself to be Pagan, it's kind of a blanket term like saying you're Christian. To me, religion is mostly philosophy and a way of life.
Unfortunately there are a lot of people that do not see it this way. I've chosen to create this anonymous blog because I was beginning to feel as though I were dying spiritually. There is no on in my life that I would feel comfortable discussing these things with. Most of my peers are Christian, many of them right-wing, bible-thumpers that literally think Barack Obama is the anti-Christ. I don't like to rock the boat. I don't get into theological discussions. I don't feel the need to project my beliefs onto others, to have to explain myself, defend my beliefs, to have to justify why I think the way I do. And generally speaking, I expect this of others.
I struggle with this while I try to discover who I am and what I beleive. I believe that the universe has an energy, a power, that often balances itself out. I beleive that perhaps part of this energy could be called "God." I beleive that mankind cannot fully comprehend this entity or force in it's entirety and so we create gods and goddesses, mere fragments, much as we created the concept of time.
Now, just because we created the concept of time (for the sake of argument) does not mean that it doesn't exist. It just means that we have found a way to label a phenomenon in an attempt to further understand it and it's uses. Perhaps we created the God/Goddess persona because we cannot grasp the forces of the universe or existence. In my mind it doesn't make it less real or less true. Truth has several layers and pieces, there is no single truth, there are many.
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