Making Light: All Religions are UPG [View all]

[rug]

June 13, 2013
By Sunweaver

I regret that the title of this post will be upsetting to some, but this statement is not meant to belittle or demean any religion in particular or all religions in general. I’m a religious person myself and one who believes in the reality of the divine, but I’m also a scientist. Much of what I write about here stems from my own doubts and a struggle to reconcile these two aspects of my life. This is, in its essence, a story about how I worked through doubt for myself.

The conversations about whether and how we include fiction in our religious and spiritual practices have been really interesting these past few weeks, and I’m pretty sure I haven’t got around to all the wonderful responses around the blogosphere. I hear tell that there’s some lively conversation on Tumblr, but I don’t Tumbl, so I’ve largely missed out on that. This post is especially good and explores the diversity of Pagan belief within the context of the discussion we’ve been having. Reading about the various opinions on pop culture and Paganisms has been especially interesting when the conversation is courteous and respectful, and I’ve done my best to be both courteous and respectful in my posts and responses as well. There are a lot of folks out there who don’t believe as I do and that’s okay. My own beliefs are either strong enough to withstand challenges to them, or flexible enough to change when new information is presented. It is good and healthy to have one’s beliefs challenged, since it provides opportunity to apply some critical thinking and to develop stronger and more nuanced beliefs.

I’ve long been of the opinion that there is no person in the world who can tell me what I believe except for me. It’s my responsibility to take the information I have, form ideas based on that information, and either support, alter, or abandon those ideas when new information is presented. Religion is not a field of study where measurable evidence is very useful. Faith and belief have more to do with experience than anything else and experience of the divine, or lack of it, is a highly subjective and individual thing. The sciences are different, of course, and require measurable evidence to answer questions. We can study archaeology and anthropology and cobble together an idea about how people practiced ancient religions. We can even figure out what they may or may not have believed. What we can’t do is verify any religious belief as true or untrue.

The atheist’s argument is that you can’t prove a god exists, and the believer’s argument is that you can’t prove a god doesn’t exist. Both are correct. The nature of the gods is such that they don’t leave measurable, tangible evidence, but rather that we know them through our experiences. Part of this discussion on “pop culture Paganism” has been about the nature of the divine: what “counts” as a divinity and what does not. In the absence of measurable evidence, I must assume that an individual’s experience of the divine is real. For my own part, I do let my inner skeptic ask the “am I making this up?” question to keep me from talking the crazy talk. Sometimes the answer is yes, but I wouldn’t be a believer if the answer was always yes.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/agora/2013/06/making-light-all-religions-are-upg/