Demiurge in the Gnostic sense? Or is there some broader sense I’m not familiar with there?
So… your position is that all gods are real according to their own cosmogony, and one of them in particular has pissed you off but the rest just don’t rise to the level of being worth the effort of hating? My compliments, that’s a pretty interesting position and one I’ve not seen before.
Ahh, fair enough. That sucks.
Though chewable ‘nugget’ ice sounds like a pretty good consolation prize.
Because I feel like the Buddha had some pretty good ideas. Like I get that suffering comes from desire, I can vibe with the cycle of rebirth and renewal, etc. I just… I never got to the point where I was like ‘This is the one for me.’ Maybe because I didn’t investigate it all that deeply back when I was investigating lots of other religions around the world, I was always pulled away by other ideas in Hinduism or Gnostic Christianity, or Sufism.
Right, but like that has to be tempered with the understanding that different people think different things about stuff like religion, right? Some acknowledgement that what might be self-evident truth to you is a muddy contradictory mess to others? shrug Iono, people be dumb I guess.
Yeah, my parents were pretty chill, took a kind of ‘expose the kids to lots of things and let them make their own minds up’ view and didn’t even really comment (they asked, obviously, but they were just like ‘whatever’ upon hearing the explanation) when I told them I had been asked to not come back the church we had been going to. But I do get that this is a big deal for other people, so I don’t mean to demean their struggles or anything.
Fair, though I feel like most do nowadays? And I’m not living in some McMansion or anything, I’m on the poor end of things, but still I can’t think of a house I’ve lived in in the last ~30 years that didn’t have it.
Yeah, true that. Hell, reconstructionists in general are pretty rare, much less finding the rare thing within a group of rare things. ;) Also I’ve always been a lil uneasy around German pagans, unfortunately there’s a strong undercurrent of white nationalism that has co-opted/corrupted some of it and it’s hard to tell them apart at a glance.
Though Wiccans aren’t reconstructionists in the usual sense; they’re not rediscovering/recreating something that once was so much as syncretizing something new out of the pieces of a bunch of pre-Christian/indigenous practices.
48 SATANs and not one hidden SANTA - I’m impressed, and a little disappointed.
I’m curious why you would define your belief in terms of opposition to one deity in specific when human history is littered with gods, many of whom were huge assholes. How do you feel about, say, Zeus or Mithras or Ahura Mazda? 'Fuck all of ‘em’ is a position I can understand, but ‘Fuck this one in specific and the rest are fine’ just seems a little odd, ya know?
Man it’s been a while since I’ve come across a pagan reconstructionist in the wilds of social media. Cheers!
I hadn’t heard of Romuva before, but I used to know a bunch back in the day; Celts, Hellenists, Kemetics, etc.
I’ve kind of always liked the idea of Buddhism, but I’ve never really been able to grapple with it in a way that made sense (in a gut-feel sort of way) to me. I guess living somewhere that has a sizeable Buddhist population could make the difference.
I will never understand this. Every parent knows their children have their own minds; you don’t expect your child to think the same thoughts as you, or to have the same experiences as you had, so why would you ever be surprised - much less dismayed - that they come to different conclusions about religion than you do? Did you do your homework and come to that conclusion yourself? Great, if that’s what makes you happy then I’m happy.
The English speaking world as a whole is still, to my knowledge, majority Christian even if not actively so, so it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that many of us came from a Christian background. Nor, I suppose, that so many of are ex-.
Pantheism basically. The universe literally is god.
Diving into nihilism and existentialism was really an eye-opener for me. It kind of made me stop hating myself and other people and even stop being an atheist. If nothing means anything I get to decide what matters, I get to create my own meaning. So I did.
The short version: It’s complicated.
The long version: I fell out of Christianity at age 17 because I had hard questions no one wanted to answer, so they asked me to either stop asking or stop coming to church. I spent years and years reading everything I could get my hands on about religion in general and many major world religions in specific, didn’t find anything I could agree with or that seemed true to me as-is, and ultimately decided to cobble together my own beliefs from the useful bits I found in others. So now I have a highly syncretic mix of components from many religions (plus some I cooked up myself) that feels right to me. It centers around the idea that divinity is a kind of all-encompassing infinite ur-consciousness/hive-mind of which we are all a part, that the world is an illusion that creates a divide between us (which is why we feel like individuals), but also within us (between mind/thought/idea and feeling/emotion/experience), and enlightenment comes from learning how to heal those rifts and not just realizing or understanding but knowing in your bones that we are one. In short: the truth is love, love is the union of self and other, of mind (intellect) and heart (wisdom), of order/stasis/death and chaos/energy/life, into the unified psyche of one all-pervading ur-consciousness.
Building your own belief system is not a path I recommend for most because it requires a commitment to intense introspection in order to develop self-awareness and a deep willingness or even desire to have your understanding and beliefs challenged and updated with new perspectives and information. But for me anyway it beats being an atheist (I was one for many years, despite my fascination with religion), though I’m not here to convert anyone. This seems true to me, and that’s enough.
Is an icemaker an absurd luxury? Practically ever fridge I have ever owned has come with one, except like when I was a kid in the 70s.
It’s just an example man.
It’s just an example. Mentally edit it to polka-dotted hippopotamuses if it makes ya happy. ;)
Ah, fair enough, that makes sense and I generally agree. I have my own beliefs and ideas about personified deities, but I agree, I dunno why some of these deities are even worshiped given their legacy of evil and assholery, so if they do really exist they should absolutely be opposed.