Let's all believe what we like

Mylissa's Nemeton

Thoughts, musings and other such profundities...

Friday, September 12, 2008

What makes you more right than me?

It’s a question I’ve often been asked. Most frequently when ‘passive leafleting’ for my university Pagan Society. ‘Do you honestly believe you’re right?’
Well, duh? Yes, I honestly believe that paganism is right. Some of my friends may not realise how strongly, how passionately I believe that, mainly because I tend to keep it to myself. I’m a quiet religious-nut (and no, that’s not a contradiction in terms).

Why can’t one person feel more drawn to one belief without it being ‘better’ or ‘right’? It just feels better or more right for them. And that’s fine. Nothing wrong with that. It would also mean that all religions are a valid path to The One, as a part of the whole. All religions are incomplete, imperfect ways of understanding something that is so much bigger and greater than us – something that we can never even hope to understand, let alone really conceive of completely.

But if we accept that no human can ever fully understand that powerful thing, then who has the right, who can honestly look inside themselves and say that their way is the ONLY right way?

Fallibility of the Church – its something I find very refreshing – the occasional comment in the press from an Anglican along the lines of ‘we don’t really know’ or ‘I agree with my Muslim colleague that…’
Surely this is what religion should be about - the exchange of ideas and practices with the idea of inclusion, not exclusivity or conversion being the aim.

Corfubob's comment

Falibility and Infalibility. Both concepts satisfy different needs in the human mind. A very basic division perhaps. One wants someone or something to be SURE, another wants a let-out clause, knowing that experience and learning provide valuable inputs to our human life. One of those two demonstrates intelligence it seems to me.

The big question for me is since nothing is known of ANY great deity that conforms to or originated all the physical forces that drive the universe, including spirituality, why bother to think about the different theories that the human mind has invented to come to terms with this need to understand. They are interesting for sure, these theories, but is the understanding of this need not more worthy of contemplation?