This photograph was not up to much and needed slight retouching, but it's a fair record of what I saw with my own eyes, and that's the god's truth.

Cold. Had to sit downstairs, near the stove, and write this with a BIRO, (sharp intakes of breath from the kids) Seems to me for the girls, blogging is the new knitting. When I was young most good girls spent half the day knitting. Clickety click, the needles a blur, reading a book and the knitting pattern, setting the table for tea all at the same time. The scarf would grow and grow, follow her around the room out the door down to the shop and back. At 11 o'clock it would come into its own. Down to the pub she would go, remind her old man that supper was getting cold and he would follow it to his front door which, to him otherwise looked like any other front door.

Now if you girls are not chatting up some middle-aged wierdo with an avatar like the Venus de Milo (mylissa told me) you are sharing your wisdom and secrets with the connected world on line. And wonderful it is too. I was born 45 years too early - I'll need more than an avatar to get into this game.

Stealth 2000's discussion is going well. But it's a pity you have to be so polite. It is my 'umble opinion that no believer can help his\her beliefs any more than I can help my disbelief. I am a born-again atheist, and it was quite a painful delivery; loyalty to my mum, a devout believer, was evtually overcome by reason and respect for the open mind. The point is, I had no choice - I could not believe.

Any religion will succeed if enough innocent children can be trained to believe in its ideas at an early age. Of course, dear reader your religious beliefs are correct, but what about the millions of young minds locked into absurd and cruell systems that, for instance, teach that women are men's possessions? Or that they can be mutilated to ensure no pleasure from intercourse is ever possible? Unless you are born-again as an adult, and possibly sectionable (certifiable), you have most likely reached your beliefs because they were forced into your mind from an age when you could NOT question what your parent(s) asked you to believe.

If I believe anything, it is that EVIDENCE should inform our beliefs; feelings can inform our 'faith' and be respected as an important contributor to our whole being. But I use the word 'faith' to mean trust in something we cannot say is true, cannot be proved, but we feel is right. I hear some of you crying "There's more to Life and Nature than is shown by evidence" Of course there is but leave it where it is - in the world of mystery - being studied - whatever, but not the stuff of truth.

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?

PC wisdom

Cocooned on the sub-tropical island of Corfu, Greece, political correctness as my motherland - England (Gordon Bennett, am I allowed to say 'England') would have it, does seem a tad too civilized to me on the whole.

Some people sincerely believe that certain groups or minorities have earned a poor reputation over the years, so what's the point of trying to stifle polite expression of these viewpoints?

Could not schools educate the kids to recognize opinion, prejudice, cynicism, hatred even, for what they are rather than than the government trying to supress the symptoms of these things as seen in language? After all, the feelings are still there and my point is that we are more informed by what we hear or read than by what we don't.

At home, in the bars and coffee shops people are freely expressing their feelings about immigrants, Muslim schools, etc. OK they are lying, exaggerating, drunk, but other people are not following their words with rapt attention.

But neither are they reading the best newspapers in the world that are afraid to call a spade a spade. Minorities of all descriptions should get all the support they deserve, and a bit more perhaps. But if they are 'offended' by things they read, better to ask why than lobby the politicians to hide what people are saying behind their back anyway. Well, that's only me going on; but what do you say