Blessed un-assurance
Sweet relief.
It is well with my soul.
A conversation I’ve had often with a brother of mine is this: How do you change someone else’s mind about something they believe in.
An arrogant question perhaps.
But as a Christian kid I heard over and over that this was pretty much my main task in life, if I didn’t….people were going to hell. I saw a lot of people talk till they were blue in the face.
On some level I could never buy into the idea of witnessing to people.
Lucky for me, not believing in hell anymore (in the eternal sense) the pressure is off.
Blessed relief! And to be honest the trappings of Christianity…Heaven, Hell, church, contemporary Christian music….have all been quite easy to let go of.
Not being a Christian has really helped me appreciate a lot of Christian things. For instance, I love my Sabbath now. For the first time in my life I actually get a day of rest with no worries about dressing a certain way or being a certain place!
There’s been none of the guilt or fear I’d been taught to expect. There has been a lot of peace, and compassion and relief! Some mindsets are deeply entrenched though.
One of them: The idea that I need to help other people think like I do.
I love the place I’m at! I have more love, compassion, peace and happiness than I’ve ever had before. I suppose part of this is wanting other people to be in that place.
And so the conversation continued…how do you get people to change a deeply entrenched belief? I don’t see it happening on an intellectual level. I think when we have conversations our emotions usually take over. I think when we read non-fiction books the usually just reinforce ideas we already had, even if we couldn’t quite put them into words yet. Clearly works of fiction and music and art are powerful. And I’ve been going around and around with these ideas.
How do I share what I believe…when I don’t believe that sharing beliefs is necessarily positive or ever changes anyone! I frequently question this when I write a blog, and have stifled many of them for this reason, scared of doing more “damage” than good, and alienating someone.
I had two revelations this month.
1. I didn’t come to this place I’m at because of any rational argument, or book (fiction or non fiction). I came to this place because I was full of love and positivity for the first time in my life…and settled into it for a while, and looked around and….This was where I ended up! So I suppose the way to help other people get to a positive place is to just fill their life up love and happiness and they’ll get there on their own!
2. This one is a little embarrassing, but it’s a mindset that I was programmed to have for 26 years so forgive me if it seems obvious: I don’t have to worry about “messing it up” and “losing” someone to my cause by sharing what I believe in the wrong way. Because there is no wrong way, and getting it wrong doesn’t have eternal consequences! If I believe that science and religion teach the same things, then honestly I couldn’t care less if my views piss someone off and make them a more intense Christian, or atheist or whatever ist they choose, because I believe it’s ok and awesome to be those things as long as you’re pursuing goodness and peace and love! I don’t have to try to get anyone to pursue those things, I don’t have to worry about what method is the best method for changing their mind, because I don’t have to change their mind at all!
So now that that’s out of the way I can get back to finding the good in people and pursuing peace and love and happiness. I can express myself freely in prose, and poetry and pictures and art, and if that helps you see things my way, Awesome! And if that makes you love the way you see things all the more, that’s awesome too! The neat part is, I’m not even worried about being wrong. I’ll be a different person in 7 years and have grown and probably see the world in a totally different way, and I’ll make tons of mistakes a long the way, and that’s life, it’s ok! The stakes are a lot lower. I’m pretty inconsequential in the grand scheme of the enormous universe! I might as well enjoy my life, and for once, I can truly say:It is well with my soul!
Sex Cults, Satan Worship and the Godess (pt 3)"..it kind of seems like a cult."
quite a potent warning back in the day.
cults
new realization: cults aren't scarey anymore! at least...not any more scarey than big religions.
I've always known things like "normal" and "cool" are arbitrary and determined by majority rule.
I'm learning that things like "sanity" and even "truth" are just measures of the same.
Me, as a person that likes to discover things myself, I've always found people telling other people what to think a little scarey. But you know what, most people do like to follow and I'm no longer going to judge them for it.
And from my perspective if they want to follow a charasmatic leader, and have a cool extended family and community, and share their belongings, more power to them! (cult)
I think that's actually a lot cooler than following something just because it's been around forever and everyone else is doing it, especially when that something leads to wars and death and division and blind devotion (religion, sometimes)
so, cults are not bad to me anyomre, neat!
sex
sex is beautiful. sex is good. it's the culmination of all our senses. it is a merging of souls and energy.
it is normal, and pure and innocent.
why are we so effing scared of it? Martin Luther made it taboo. (no really...you think these things go way back, they don't. culture impacts and changes things! sexual practice was MUCH different in bible times. the bible doesn't say don't have sex before marriage, the KJV does. translation matters!)
so now we're so freaked out about it it's seen as dirty and scandalous, and people who practice it are whores and sluts and freaks and perverts.
we all get a little perverted and whorish and slutty when we're so damn repressed.
we've ignored the Goddess side of things and look where it's got us.
(please read Tom Robbin's book Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, there's an amazing conversation between Jesus and Pan in it)
you see, we used to have this dude named Pan around. he symbolized, welll....let wikipedia tell you:
Pan (Greek Πάν, genitive Πανός), in Greek religion and mythology, is the companion of the nymphs,[1] god of shepherds and flocks, of mountain wilds, hunting and rustic music. His name originates within the Greek language, from the word paein, meaning "to pasture".[2] He has the hindquarters, legs, and horns of a goat, in the same manner as a faun. With his homeland in rustic Arcadia, he is recognized as the god of fields, groves, and wooded glens; because of this, Pan is connected to fertility and the season of spring.
**
there it is! Pan, synthesis of nature, and human invention, of male and female interaction, of sex and reproduction.
we used to understand that life comes from sex, and death fertilizes the ground, and produces more life, and that it's all a beautiful cycle. and the earth is a big female reproductive force to be celebrated and cherished and taken care of.
then we got disconnected from it and got all heady, and "spiritual" and forgot about nature and forgot about the Goddess, and became scared of sex, and it became taboo
and God became the one and only God
And we were so scared of Pan we turned him into the devil....no really, look it up!
The christians yoinked the devil, and the other horned Gods and used the image for satan so that we'd be so scared of our connection to nature and reproduction we'd run away from good.
and we've ignored the pull of the moon
and the earth....
did you know that if females seclude themselves from artificial light, their periods line up with the phases of the moon? it's called luniception.
we're designed to be synched up with the universe
and celebrate sex
and man and woman, and nature
and death, and rebirth
and cherish the Goddess mother earth
and pan....who is satan
and so, no, devil worship doesn't scare me anymore either.