I feel like I've emerged from a very extended party. The night of my birthday featured a civilised meal with the parents, the day afterwards a very enjoyable and mainly civilised trip to the theatre, and the day after that a thoroughly uncivilised night with friends. There was cake consumption on unprecedented levels. The only thing which marred the experience was the school trip to the Tate Modern. I happen to detest most modern art, and I sat through a twenty minute video of coloured buildings and a voice trying to relate it all to identity and democracy in naked disbelief. You couldn't help wondering whether the lampcost on the corner was supposed to be a phallic symbol. That's what the Tate Modern does to you.
After that cursory personal announcement, I wanted to share some thoughts about—brace yourself—religion. Before I start, I would like to say that the following is all intensely subjective, and so nothing I say is meant as an arrogant declaration of a new gospel; I have decided to 'go for it' instead of crowding it all with little apologies.
Over the past three years I have had people trying to convert me, either seriously or otherwise, to either atheism or Christian fundamentalism. The first is all much of a muchness; you either believe in a god or you don't, and it's a leap of faith which can't easily be rationalised. I believe in one, and that is that. Fundamentalism also seems to ignore this principle. Our delightful headmaster, preaching on his own ego-fuelled pulpit, seems to believe that Christianity is indisputable. It's not, but that's the whole POINT of religion. You don't know, you believe.
I could rant about fundamentalism for a while, or I could explain (and attempt to justify, as far as is possible) my own beliefs. I choose to do the latter, because I'm rather tired of explaining to people that the word 'pagan' does not necessarily mean Wiccan or druid, or any other kind of nature worshipper. Part of the problem is simply communication; when I say 'pagan,' I actually mean 'part of a larger movement of neo-paganism, with a dash of meso-paganism informed by hermeticism and Jung-influenced monism.' Imprecision is a sin, but so are too many 'isms.' All I want to say right now is why...
# I reject organised religion.
Basic rebelliousness? No. Jung puts it better than me.
"[...] People had long forgotten what [the sacred archetypes] meant. Or had they really forgotten? Could it be that men had never really known what they meant, and that only in recent times did it occur to the Protestant part of mankind that actually we haven't the remotest conception of what is meant by the Virgin Birth, the divinity of Christ, and the complexities of the Trinity? It almost seems as if these images had just lived, and as if their living existence had simply been accepted without question and without reflection, much as everyone decorates Christmas trees or hides Easter eggs without ever knowing what these customs mean. The fact is that archetypal images are so packed with meaning in themselves that people never think of asking what they really do mean."C.G. JUNG, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Second Edition
Note the word 'arguably.' There are two major criticisms that can be made, neither of them entirely answerable: prayer and the alternate way. Christians pray to God. Muslims pray to Allah. Wiccans 'draw down the moon,' which is a pretty way of saying ritualised prayer. It's still 100% possible for someone to speak with the divine in an organised religion; the more intense it is, the more likely it is that you can feel God. By the alternate way, I mean that by rejecting organised religion, I am still following ways which have been paved by human hands, and littered with human terms and symbols. The Kabbalistic Tree of Life is a system, and anyone who has sat down and read anything of Aleister Crowley soon realises that his way of speaking with God is to learn a new language. That perhaps explains another of my beliefs—
# All faiths are doors to the same room.
No religion is more 'valid' than another, as all are centred round the same thing. So why make it harder for myself by rejecting the major and organised?
The point I have to make for both of those previously mentioned truths seems a shallow one: familiarity. To say it breeds contempt is a few miles too far, but to me, a person who has known the Christian story for as long as I can remember, it starts to become meaningless. If I sat alone and read the Bible, it would make an impact, one which would go beyond the symbols. Unfortunately, instead of having been free to do so, I have been subjected to such things as school assemblies and lectures by people who read the Bible as though it's a textbook recommended by Ofsted. Kabbalah, however, I discovered on my own. Mythology, stories untaught and so untainted, spoke to me: I discovered Odinism. Yes, to understand Kabbalah you have to read books written by those with their own little human views, but you are free to reject an individual's words; it is systemised and unrelenting orthodoxy that breeds alienation.
I am a pagan, but I am not an 'ism.'
