Pseudo-Spiritual Navel Gazing
Dec. 18th, 2009 02:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eumeliaI was looking through my tags this winter morning, it is raining buckets and I'm all nice and cosy in front of the radiator and the cat is purring next to me shedding hair on my black track suit pants and sweatshirt.
I was looking through my tags, specifically the spirituality one and I sometimes wonder if I'm right in the head. Well, ha, if you read this post you know I'm a bit wonky when it comes to my brain.
After the Lebanon war I had a crisis of faith, not surprising, I wanted something to believe in. As a teen I had been interested in paganism and even did a few rituals and all that, but comic books and the philosophy of Belief being the basis of Faith and not the other way around kind of ruined me for religion.
Not that I was ever really big on it. My family is a bit odd when it comes down to it. I mean, we're all sceptics and doubters, but we light candles for Shabbat and perform Kiddush on Friday night supper.
And we (well some of us) go to shul on the High Holidays.
I find going to shul tedious, always have, even as a child, I did my best to get out of the bencsh and go play outside - it helped that the shul we go to is egalitarian and there are no Women's section or Men's section and I could just run down the minyan and begone from the Bimah!
Is the Jewish jargon a bit much?
It's been years since I've gone more than once a year (on Yom Kippur), maybe for a Bar/Bat Mitzvah... but I try to get out of those as much as possible as well.
Belief is the basis of Faith.
If you don't have belief, there's not much faith can do for you.
The rituals I mention above are nice. I enjoy them to a certain extent. My Nephews insists I wear a kipah along with all the other boys when we all do Kiddush togehter - that's because I'm a "girl-daddy" you see - kids are so perceptive.
The holidays are always fun, families get together, we eat a lot, sing songs and yadda-yadda-yadda.
God is not there.
In name, of course, in the liturgy, no doubt.
I doubt, that for me, god ever was.
When I was a teenager I got involved with a bunch of other kids my age and we were all interested in witchcraft, wicca, paganism, what-have-you.
Ten, five, three years of perspective enable me to view those instances of hypocritical pretend on my part.
I was a weird kid who thought stories, myths and legends were "real" and here were a bunch of other kids who thought the same!
I just wanted to have friends.
And I did, even when my interest in practising religion waned - I still continued to "pretend" that I wanted to be a "Wise Woman". It basically became an elaborate role-playing game for me. Even when I was travelling with a friend and our brains somehow cross-wired we ended up doing a small "energy-raising" thing to counter act what was thought to be a kind of spiritual sabotage - when really, we were just stupid and we refused to see what was right in front of us - like the fact that were going in the wrong direction.
As I mentioned, it was during my very difficult year of 2007 that any last inklings of what I thought was belief just... went away.
I thought that with religion I could heal myself, but religion Judaism carries far too much negative baggage and I'm really much more of a cultural Jew, being Israeli.
The group of friends with whom I considered my "energy" activities as more play-acting than anything became a place in which I felt I couldn't be myself - I'm close friends with three people from that group that is no longer a group - I'm afraid the falling out I had with the de facto leader basically caused the whole thing to fall apart. Or as far as I'm aware, to re-organise without me, but I really have no idea as it's been nearly two and half years since I bothered thinking about the group as it was.
Once I was out of that group and no longer needing to play-act in order to interact with them, the whole notion of magic kind of died in me. I felt silly for pretending to be that kind of person.
I don't think there's anything wrong with being that person who raises energy and believes they do something with it.
It's just... not me.
I mean I was basically sitting around these people pretending I was one of them, when in reality I was more like Charles Dicketns in the Doctor Who episode The Unquiet Dead:
At 0:07 you can see him rolling his eyes spectacularly... the whole scene is good of course, 'cause it ain't spiritual!.
I'm quite sure that my close friends from that group reading this are not surprised. But maybe they are, I dunno.
And so I was finally free to say that I'm an Agnostic Jewish person who has issues with organised religion and really like the concept of Witchcraft and of being a Witch, but I can only be those things if I pretend.
I'd also like to specify that ghosts, spirits and other things that cause "paranormal" phenomena are not something I completely discount. I've experienced waaaaay to many things in my life to say with confidence: "There's no such thing as [insert paranormal creature]". I'm quite certain science will eventually evolve to being able to explain them and stop the con-people from taking our money in way.
BTW as a tarot card reader, it's not a spiritual thing, is a symbol thing. I've managed to crack huge amounts of baggage (for me and others) by using tarot and figuring out what resonate and what doesn't.
I conduct my life as a Jewish Atheist. I love my holidays, they hold no religious significance to me. The history of my people is an interesting and brutal one, the stories in the Bible of my mythology along with the Odyssey and The Sandman.
Were I able to, I'd rather go through my life not needing to explain all this to people and make myself out as an Aggressive Atheist rather than the Apathetic Agnostic that I am.
Religion is used in far too many ways to excuse bad behaviour, from Creationism to Terrorism, from Occupation to Jihad, from Misogyny to Transphobia.
In the words of Eddie Izzard (who paraphrased Martin Luther):
Ein Minuten, Bitte. Ich habe einen kleinen problemo avec diese religione.
I was looking through my tags, specifically the spirituality one and I sometimes wonder if I'm right in the head. Well, ha, if you read this post you know I'm a bit wonky when it comes to my brain.
After the Lebanon war I had a crisis of faith, not surprising, I wanted something to believe in. As a teen I had been interested in paganism and even did a few rituals and all that, but comic books and the philosophy of Belief being the basis of Faith and not the other way around kind of ruined me for religion.
Not that I was ever really big on it. My family is a bit odd when it comes down to it. I mean, we're all sceptics and doubters, but we light candles for Shabbat and perform Kiddush on Friday night supper.
And we (well some of us) go to shul on the High Holidays.
I find going to shul tedious, always have, even as a child, I did my best to get out of the bencsh and go play outside - it helped that the shul we go to is egalitarian and there are no Women's section or Men's section and I could just run down the minyan and begone from the Bimah!
Is the Jewish jargon a bit much?
It's been years since I've gone more than once a year (on Yom Kippur), maybe for a Bar/Bat Mitzvah... but I try to get out of those as much as possible as well.
Belief is the basis of Faith.
If you don't have belief, there's not much faith can do for you.
The rituals I mention above are nice. I enjoy them to a certain extent. My Nephews insists I wear a kipah along with all the other boys when we all do Kiddush togehter - that's because I'm a "girl-daddy" you see - kids are so perceptive.
The holidays are always fun, families get together, we eat a lot, sing songs and yadda-yadda-yadda.
God is not there.
In name, of course, in the liturgy, no doubt.
I doubt, that for me, god ever was.
When I was a teenager I got involved with a bunch of other kids my age and we were all interested in witchcraft, wicca, paganism, what-have-you.
Ten, five, three years of perspective enable me to view those instances of hypocritical pretend on my part.
I was a weird kid who thought stories, myths and legends were "real" and here were a bunch of other kids who thought the same!
I just wanted to have friends.
And I did, even when my interest in practising religion waned - I still continued to "pretend" that I wanted to be a "Wise Woman". It basically became an elaborate role-playing game for me. Even when I was travelling with a friend and our brains somehow cross-wired we ended up doing a small "energy-raising" thing to counter act what was thought to be a kind of spiritual sabotage - when really, we were just stupid and we refused to see what was right in front of us - like the fact that were going in the wrong direction.
As I mentioned, it was during my very difficult year of 2007 that any last inklings of what I thought was belief just... went away.
I thought that with religion I could heal myself, but religion Judaism carries far too much negative baggage and I'm really much more of a cultural Jew, being Israeli.
The group of friends with whom I considered my "energy" activities as more play-acting than anything became a place in which I felt I couldn't be myself - I'm close friends with three people from that group that is no longer a group - I'm afraid the falling out I had with the de facto leader basically caused the whole thing to fall apart. Or as far as I'm aware, to re-organise without me, but I really have no idea as it's been nearly two and half years since I bothered thinking about the group as it was.
Once I was out of that group and no longer needing to play-act in order to interact with them, the whole notion of magic kind of died in me. I felt silly for pretending to be that kind of person.
I don't think there's anything wrong with being that person who raises energy and believes they do something with it.
It's just... not me.
I mean I was basically sitting around these people pretending I was one of them, when in reality I was more like Charles Dicketns in the Doctor Who episode The Unquiet Dead:
At 0:07 you can see him rolling his eyes spectacularly... the whole scene is good of course, 'cause it ain't spiritual!.
I'm quite sure that my close friends from that group reading this are not surprised. But maybe they are, I dunno.
And so I was finally free to say that I'm an Agnostic Jewish person who has issues with organised religion and really like the concept of Witchcraft and of being a Witch, but I can only be those things if I pretend.
I'd also like to specify that ghosts, spirits and other things that cause "paranormal" phenomena are not something I completely discount. I've experienced waaaaay to many things in my life to say with confidence: "There's no such thing as [insert paranormal creature]". I'm quite certain science will eventually evolve to being able to explain them and stop the con-people from taking our money in way.
BTW as a tarot card reader, it's not a spiritual thing, is a symbol thing. I've managed to crack huge amounts of baggage (for me and others) by using tarot and figuring out what resonate and what doesn't.
I conduct my life as a Jewish Atheist. I love my holidays, they hold no religious significance to me. The history of my people is an interesting and brutal one, the stories in the Bible of my mythology along with the Odyssey and The Sandman.
Were I able to, I'd rather go through my life not needing to explain all this to people and make myself out as an Aggressive Atheist rather than the Apathetic Agnostic that I am.
Religion is used in far too many ways to excuse bad behaviour, from Creationism to Terrorism, from Occupation to Jihad, from Misogyny to Transphobia.
In the words of Eddie Izzard (who paraphrased Martin Luther):
Ein Minuten, Bitte. Ich habe einen kleinen problemo avec diese religione.
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no subject
Date: 2009-12-18 06:54 pm (UTC)He was from everywhere! ;)
I can totally see where you're coming from. After hopping from the lukewarm Protestantism I was raised with through Wicca and Buddhism and such, I have decided that a general aura of skepticism tempered with humility is the way most suited to my temperament and ethics.
At the same time, my husband (who was raised totally non-religious) and I thought it'd be nice to start going to the local Unitarian Universalist church just to have a nice little community to be in touch with. It works out pretty well!
I admit, I'm still occasionally curious about Judaism, particularly the mystic side (although I'm not going anywhere NEAR Madonna's Kabbalah Centre and their wacky woo-woo water).
no subject
Date: 2009-12-18 08:21 pm (UTC)