Ah the quest for understanding. Such a fun journey.

So, as you so aptly put it, let's try this again.

I am truly split. I sit kinda smack in the middle between Christian and Pagan. Almost 20 years of habits built as a Christian are hard to break. So I didn't break, I just refashioned. ANd after MUCH meditation, musing, prayer and frustration, I came to some unusual conclusions. I believe there is one God, one Ultimate Supreme Being but that Supreme Being is both male and female and neither. So I pray to both my Lord and my Lady who are my God. As far as the patron that I chose for each, It just didnt feel right to regularly worship anyone other than Jesus. That is the name and personality I give my patron God. Now granted, I do call on other aspects of God, say the Hunter, for a given task or some such. But my regular worship is to Gaia and Jesus.

Um, that's a nutshell version. Yes I know, I'm odd. How bout the rest of the world?
Blessed be
~Rajani

I don't really associate with iconics in particular personally... I enjoy hearing or reading about them, seeing pictures of them, etc... I even really like some of them conceptually, like "the Blue God" is a personal favorite with regard to concepts... but I don't ritualize any of them. I do occasionally attend gatherings where other pagans cast circles, call corners and make request to specific iconic deities... and the symbolism is beautiful, I just haven't found any that I really wrap myself up in -- or need to. My interpretation of deity is a holistic one in which "all roads lead" to enlightenment... I tend to enjoy small Unitarian fellowships although established UU churches (with a minister) less so... There's a sort of "traditional" church in the US -- white walls and vaulted ceilings -- and it speaks to me of the image of heaven as clouds and winged angels with harps that's never really worked for me personally... I know it's my association, but that's what it is. :) And as far as icons and art go I honestly haven't ever found Christian symbolism to be nearly as compelling as that of other religions -- entirley asside from the seeming and actual contradictions. The central notion of the crucifixion as an iconic symbol on which to hang everything else, while I understand the purpose, is based on the notions of fundamental evil, hell and "original sin", none of which appeal to me in any way. I don't find that jewish or muslim symbolism does much for me either -- at least not what of it I've been exposed to, though I could just have a lack of exposure to them. Now the horned god -- there's a compelling symbol to me. Celtic legends a lot. The greeks and norse to a greater or lesser extent... although there's a lot of glorification of battle in all of those mythologies that isn't really my thing either. I enjoyed Troy, but don't really see Achilles as a compelling character, in spite of there being some great lines in the film that touch on important points of their ethos, like when Achilles says the gods envy mortals because we can die. Egyptian some -- not as much tho...

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last year trying to reconcile my Christian and Pagan beliefs. I was raised going to Church and Sunday school at the United Church of Canada- very liberal, very open minded. Yet even with all the open mindedness I found that something was lacking and drifted away. When I found pagan practices and the Goddess I understood that it was the Feminine Divine that I was missing in Christianity.

I also realized two other very important parts to my spiritual self. One was that the pagan rituals and beliefs that I read I had grown up doing, not realizing what it was of course, but I found the concepts of God being in all things, seeing beauty in nature was seeing God, etc… were concepts I’ve always known and my family has always known and practiced. I’m not claiming to have a family tradition of the Craft, but there’s always been something rather ‘magical’ about members of my family.

Second was about my relationship to Christianity, especially the Bible and Jesus. As a child, learning the stories from the bible and about Jesus were no different to me that reading fairy tales or Aesop’s fables, or Greek mythology. I never took any of them literally but understood that they were stories to teach morals, good behavior and be entertaining.

As I got older I started getting the impression, that as an adult I was meant to believe the Bible as literal truth, especially the stories about Jesus. Though I’ve always been willing and able to see the universal truths taught in the stories, I could not believe them as literal historical truth and for that reason as much as any other lead me to walk away from Christianity.

I’ve been practicing paganism, Wicca mostly, for over ten years now and have delved deep in to its mysteries. I believe that God is an unknowable energy in the universe; I believe that God is so huge, so incomprehensible that there is no way for humans to ever scratch the surface of just what this energy is. But we desire to understand it make in knowable in someway, to not would be terrifying, so we humanize God- create Gods and Goddesses in our image so we can attempt to have a relationship with something greater than ourselves. But the images we create are only tiny pieces of a bigger picture. Christians created their Father God, sitting on a throne in heaven image because that fit with the society and culture of the time. Pagans created their Horned one and Mother Goddess, and many other images because that’s what worked for their cultures.

For a long time I didn’t use the word God as a title for this unknowable energy because I didn’t want to conjure up images of a Christian nature. I would use Universal Energy, The Divine, or something like that. But in this last year or so my thoughts about this have changed. I use God now and think very little of it.

In my pagan practice I always practiced pseudo equality between lord and lady. I always spoke of them being equal, but really it was the Goddess, in different images that I was honouring in my rituals and prayers and meditations. About a year and a half ago the God – symbolically speaking- hit me over the head and demanded some attention.

The God verses God? As I said God- in my lexicon is the unknowable universal energy, The God is an aspect, an image, not a middle-man between myself and God, but a personification that I can relate too. I should probably say the Horned God, but I’m attempting to prove a point.

Anyway, after ignoring the male aspect of the Divine for a long time it was demanding some attention. After many meditations and shaman journeys my relationship with this male energy began to subtly send signals that I should go back to church and that I needed to explore if some reconciliation between pagan beliefs and Christianity is possible.

I attended a Christian based silent retreat last November where I spent a lot of time thinking and meditating on this. It was an amazing experience and I am still working with much of the wisdom I gained about myself after not speaking to anyone for 8 days. It’s hard to write about- it’s all still raw.

Some conclusions that I came to though that have been a big help to me are, one, that I can believe in the concepts and compassion of Christianity and Jesus without believing that the bible is literal historical truth. And that Jesus was a mortal man and not Divine. (Aee God part one post)

Which is, as I said to Rajani in an email, why I responded the way I did, initially, to her post about having Jesus as a patron God. I had just spent all this time convincing myself that Jesus was wrongly deified and my gut reaction to Rajani was to say ‘no’, NOT because she was wrong, but--- because by her saying what she did tore down a bunch of fragile walls around my belief system.

It pushed some comfort zone edges for me and I now realize that. Her sharing of some personal beliefs challenged me and I now feel the need to take back what I wrote in my first post. Though I continue to stand by my statements of my second post, that I believe Jesus was human, not a God, I cannot demand that anyone else believe as I do and have learned a lot from the challenge that Rajani, unwittingly presented me.

I’ve also learned a lot by rereading her posts and gained understanding of how she’s reached her conclusions about her relationship to God and I respect it.

Back to my own conclusions, my other big one is that I decided to go back to school to take my Bachelors in Divinity, which I began this spring with a lot of reading.

Another big conclusion for me is that spirituality and religions aren’t all that different from each other. Somewhat basic to say I know, but the more I read the more I see how it’s human intervention and human written dogma that has created all these rifts, rarely in the name of God, mostly in the name of power. Again basic to say, but important because if its humans that made it IMPOSSIBLE to merge Paganism with Christ than its humans that will make it POSSIBLE.

Okay this has gotten long enough. I’ll stop now.

Anne

This is all very great stuff to be talking about.

Hello, I'm new to this tribe. Wow. I didn't know there were pagans integrating their judeo-christian upbringing together.

In response to your question:
I use many names, sometimes based on the company I'm with, sometimes based on my mood, sometimes because I'm just lazy and stick with God. Any word is fine: god, goddess, the Great Spirit, jah (yahweh for the rasta folk), access to the divine, the divine, the eternal, the Great A'tuin (from Terry Pratchett) - this is supposed to be a joke if you don't know Terry Pratchett. I also use "the force," nature, It, the Tao, etc.

I was raised Christian, but don't really consider myself to be Christian. At the same time I walk each day with Jesus. Basically, I figure Jesus wasn't a Christian, so why should I be one. And I'm not ready to embrace Judaism...rastafari is a little closer...It all is just to - conveniently - male based. Therefore, I have turned to paganism. I must integrate the feminine and the masculine into my worship. And getting out in nature to worship/pray is such a blast.

Can anyone tell me something? Why do Christians want to wait to go to heaven? And do many Christians not have a direct experience of Jesus or God? I mean I just listen to many Christians talk about 'someday Jesus will come back and someday we'll go to heaven.' I mean as far as I'm concerned Jesus is right here and this is heaven. What is the reason for waiting?

Anyway, back to the question. I like to play with naming this unifying and creative force. It helps to break up the habits of my upbringing.

I do have to say that I probably have a different view of Jesus than most. I think the Bible is pretty cool when it is not being used as a tool to oppress women and children. However, the Gospels are all heresy. They were written many decades after Jesus walked around in a bag-of-mostly-water. There are some good sources for identifying the historical Jesus. Like the Jesus Seminar. Again, I turn to my direct experience in my heart and my "third eye."

I also think the human brain is not designed to actually be able to grasp the entire wonder of (insert name here). Additionally, in my opinion it doesn't matter what we think about It; It exists whether we believe or understand It. And I'm pretty sure that Peter started up this whole Christian thing and not Jesus. That is just my opinion though.

Wow, sorry to go all over the place there. I just got a little excited about this tribe. I don't expect anyone to embrace or agree with what I'm saying. I just wanted to share. Thanks.

I will try to summarize this in as quickly as I can. I was raised as one of Jehovah's Witnesses and was an elder in their Org. up until Dec. 2005 when I walked away from all of it. In an effort to no throw out the baby with the bath water spiritually speaking I have been looking at my old faith and searching for parts of it that resonate with me.

So the god archetype's I now most identify with is El, and Chiron, and the goddess archetypes I identify with is Inanna & Ereshkegal.

Hmmm, this is a complex topic for me, so I apologise in advance for the long post.

I was brought up Methodist Christian, the congregation was very small and everyone there was very close knit. I loved going there every Sunday and I loved the songs, the people and the atmosphere. But now that I look back I know that I saw things differently to everyone else there. I remember quite clearly when I was about 11 going to Sunday school a few days before christmas and telling my teacher that christmas was all about families getting together and making the effort to see each other after a year apart. I was quite embarrassed to be reminded that it was also the birth of Christ.

When I was a teenager I left the church and joined with an Odinist group with friends who also wanted to explore that side of religion. I took the Norse gods of Vidar (the silent god of the forest) and Hlin (goddess of compassion and handmaiden of Freya). Things eventually went sour and we drifted apart. I made peace with the gods I followed and moved on. For years I bought and read every book that I could on paganism. Luckily there was a bookshop in town that specialised in the subjects and also served coffee and there I spent long afternoons ignoring my chemistry A-levels and instead trying to understand this new world.

I have been a participant in many different types of rituals, from straightforward wicca to voodoo (without ritual sacrifice, it isn’t always needed you know). I even took an elemental corner for a hand fasting ritual. This is like marriage, but only for a set period of time. This period can be as short as a year and a day through to every reincarnation the couple has. It can even be an arrangement such as until their first child turns five, etc. It a good way to find out if someone is good for you before going the legal route.

Anyway I digress…

As time when on I realised that the rituals themselves were the important religious aspect for me. When I touched the gods, felt connected to my friends and to the spirits. So I stop reading books and started debating with people instead, learning from word of mouth and how things felt to me rather than trying to find revelation from letters on a page. As time went on I even realised that the ritual wasn’t important. It was the feelings of unity with other people and the fact that I wasn’t alone in how I viewed the world. That was when I stopped worshipping altogether and started to follow a simpler path.

I don’t believe in one all powerful unifying spirit, just as I don’t believe that my brain is the total essence of my consciousness. The universe is a living breathing thing, but it has no great creator, no great intelligence driving it. Like a person it might have ideas of where it is going, but the beginning of its existence is as unknown to it in the same way that as we don’t remember the first few days of our birth. When scientists pull apart the universe to understand it, it is the same as a biologist dissecting a part of an animal to see how the muscle groups fit together. They might know what it is composed of and where that bit fits into the whole, but they won’t be able to grasp that elusive essence that makes an animal alive…

However, having said that, I do believe in the gods. I believe in God; I believe in Odin, Baron Samedi and all the rest that are out there. They are as alive to me as my next door neighbour and I have been far too close to them to turn my back on them. But I do not worship them.

Because of this world view I find that I am able to accept everyone for who they are and what they believe. I know that they are right, but I have chosen not to walk that path. I have no conflict between my Christian roots and my pagan beliefs because that conflict does not exist for me. I still go to carol services with my family at chrismas and I still sometimes partake of the midnight mass at christmas eve at my local Methodist church. But at the same time I can go and draw a circle for someone who needs another person in their ritual. It is all real, it is all out there for someone to find. But it is not all one; it is diverse, wonderful and incredibly full-filling in many different and colourful ways.

I hope this makes sense, I always seem to have trouble explaining it in person. Maybe typing it will make it a little clearer...

Hello all, especially Karl

I recently posted this in an elven tribe... In response to some born again elves (don't ask me how this works) who were expressing their fears as judgements... It seems to fit into this conversation as well... I was raised southern baptist, luckily my parents were pretty relaxed about the whole thing... My dad has deep respect for the religions of the indigenous north american peoples, and my mom plays with faeries... here is my 2 cents on the Jesus thing....

"This is an interesting gathering... I have been exploring cascadia for some years now, and I must say, this is the first time I have met "born again" elves... oh, I have met many who have been reincarnated, and I myself have experienced rebirth many times... but I think its time we look at the human religion of "christianity" from a truly elven perspective... The Life of an elf stretches back long before the age of of the fisher king...

To begin, christ was not a person... christ is an archetype... many religions around the world have worshiped the son of god (je zeus as pronounced by the greeks) The story of the virgin birth, miraculous life, blameless sacrifice, and reincarnation are almost universal in pagan (of the people) religions... Look at Dionyssus, the green man, and horus... they all lived the same story told of the jesus of modern christianity... these elements of the story refer to the natural cycles of the sun as it passes the winter solstice (dies) and three days later, is resurected. And this is the common theme which allowed modern "christianity" to blend with so many hereditary faiths
the term Christian rightly refers to any religion that worships the christ (sacrificial lamb) not just to catholics, protestants, and hatemongering fundamentalists

There probably was a man in Galiele who came to be known as Jesus... A teacher who stepped up and spoke out against the roman rule and encouraged the downtrodden with important truths.... truths such as "Even the least of you, can do such as this." in reference to his miracles... What Jesus was telling the world is that we are all the sons and daughters of the creator, we can all access the magic directly, we do not need priests, angels, emperors, or saviors standing between us an divinity...

The emporer claudius saw the danger inherent in a populus with direct divine connection... This is why he converted to christianity... declaring himself the representitive of god on this plane... in order to place himself between the people and the creator... this was the foundation of the christian church as we know it... egomaniacle deification for the purpose of maintaining political control... before this, the term "church" in christian writings only refered to the collection of believers...

Perhaps the most misunderstand, misused, and misquoted verse of the new testament is "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the father except by me." Modern christians have blindly accepeted the definition of this verse as it has been handed down to them from the ancient roman controllers... They take it to mean that belief in Jesus is all that is required for mankind to enter heaven... In truth, this an example from the teacher called Jesus of practical spiritual living... Jesus was adknowledging the oneness of being... refusing to seperate himself from the life he lived..

Jesus defines himself (and all other spiritual beings) with the following 3 statements
I am the way (the Tao)
I am the truth (the absolute)
I am the life (the essence)

He then continued by using the word "me" as an analogy for the spiritual principals with which he just defined himself
No one comes to the creator except by (accepting the way, living the truth, and honoring life)... me

Jesus was not telling you to worship him... he was telling you to be your own guru... he lived an exemplary life as an inspiration to others, not to set himself apart from them... Jesus walked with those who were considered "sinners" at the time, without judging them... he expressed this in many ways... "Judge not, lest you be judged" "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone", and "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." If you seek to share in the life of the christ... do not seek to enforce your morays on others...

Elves, in this time of change you must set aside attachents to the dogma you have inherited... it no longer serves you, the mother earth, or the father sky... We are all sons and daughters of the creator... We are all miracle workers... don't rely on figures of ledgend to make magic for you... when even your christian savior has told you to do it for yoursElf... "


love light laughter and song
myrth

Some of the posts have reminded me of the "Jesus Seminar." Has anyone else heard of this organization? They are a group of scholars/intellectuals: biblical scholars, Jews, Muslims, etc. who meet and discuss the difference between what is probably the historical Jesus and what is mythology that was added later by early christians.

Basically, they discuss, verse for verse, whether each item attributed to Jesus was actually something he did or said. Then they vote about each item. I've read some of their books and recently discovered their website.

It is fascinating information and it definitely helped me integrate my pagan and christian values. It is all based on highly educated guesses, but it does help to weed out some of the weird crap that has come to be associated with Jesus over the last 2000 years. I don't have anything specific to share from their studies...just wanted to let people know about them.