Why I'm a Spiritual Liminalist, Part 5

Rather than adhere to a religion,

I am areligious. Religion is irrelevant

to me, except as a significant aspect of

the culture that formed me and continues

to be a reality with which I interact.

“-ity” and “-ism” free, I am polytheistic.

Henotheistic. Vanatru. I’m wed to Freyja

and loyal to Freyr and believe many

other goddesses and gods exist too.

Some I honor. Others I despise,

especially those who claim to be

almighty and the only real one.

I’m a seer and soothsayer.

I see Western culture from my

spiritual liminalist perspective.

What I speak is true to what I see.

I address Westerners, especially

Americans in the United States.

Others are free to listen too.

I judge individuals, groups, and

cultures by their wake. What I see

in the wake of Western culture

corrupted by Christianity is domination,

diminution, division, distress, damage,

destruction, and disease.

I see the denial of spirit.

I see doom and death.

The dawn of a new day I see too.

Sex, Religion, Politics: What My Elders Taught Me

The divisiveness among us in general, and this election cycle in particular, have inspired me to reconsider what my elders taught me: It's best to avoid three topics for polite and civil public conversations: sex, religion, and politics. I believe their wisdom was based on generations of actually experiencing the harm that such conversations, when had in public, can have on us and our relationships with each other. 

Public conversations on these topics rarely, if ever, change the behaviors, beliefs, or opinions of those who engage in them. If anything, they promote the hardening of positions and harming of relationships. They tend to dehumanize and divide rather than unite us.

I believe your opinions and beliefs concerning sex, religion, and politics are none of my business. Why would I care about them? If I did care, I would speak with you in private about them, not in a public setting. 

My opinions and beliefs concerning sex, religion, and politics are none of your business. Why would you care about them? If you do, speak with me in private about them.

Your opinions of my opinions and beliefs are also none of my business. Again, I do not care. Why should I? 

I do care about you and our relationship. I do care if you threaten or harm me or those I love and care about. Otherwise, I'm not here to live according to your expectations or hopes for me. Neither are you here to live according to mine. 

I also care very much about our freedom to live our lives, with no harm to others, as we so choose. And I care about our freedom to express our beliefs and opinions, whatever they are. Just don't expect me to give a damn about your expressed beliefs and opinions. I might or might not give a damn. 

When it comes to elections, I don't care about what you have to say about who you're for and against, unless I ask you in private. I care about what the politicians have to say to all of us. And I care about their record. 

You have no sway on how I vote, except when your public behavior and words tell me something about the kind of folks your candidate attracts. 

I wonder why candidates do not care more about what their own constituents say and do in public. 

So, I've decided to take to heart the wisdom of my elders. I'm going private with my opinions about sex, religion, and politics. From now on, I consider your opinions on these topics private too. They're none of my business. If you expose them, I'll pretend I didn't see them and move on...

Because I care more about you and our relationship than I do about your opinions and beliefs regarding sex, religion, and politics. 

Thumotics and Religion, Part Three

Unlike religion, Thumotics is a nature-based view. It's the new science, therapy and spirituality of spirit. 

Like other bodies of knowledge, it is empirically-based. As such it emphasizes all of our senses, especially our ability to see. 

Based on our own experience, Thumotics concludes that we humans can trust our instincts, senses, reason, and intuition to gather information about the world, interpret it, and make decisions for ourselves about how best to live our lives. 

It allows for many ways of knowing and for there to be more to existence than what we can perceive with our physical senses.

It also allows for some of us to know more about some things than others.

In the thumotic perspective, there is no reason to believe that we humans fell from some higher physical or spiritual state to which we need to return in order to fully be who we are. There is no Golden Age, no Paradise, Higher Realm in our past or future. There is the universe, all of nature, in all its glory and wonder.  This, what is, all of nature, is our true home. 

Thumotics and Religion, Part One

This is part one of series of posts that contrast Thumotics and religion in Western civilization.

In my view, at the heart of religion in Western civilization since the rise to dominance of Christianity, is an extremely low and devaluing view of human beings. The view assumes that we human beings are so deeply flawed (fallen, sinful, lost in the dark) that we are incapable of knowing and understanding the world and making decisions for ourselves about how best to live our lives. 

We must depend on Jewish prophets like Moses and Isaiah and most of all on the messiah and savior, Jesus of Nazareth, and his apostles and teachers to know the truth about the world and how best to live. They have special knowledge, revealed to them by God, written in books, that we must hear and believe in order to know the truth about the world and how best to live.

In this religious view, that remains dominant to this day, we humans are insufficient and must  depend on religious authorities and their divinely inspired writings to know the truth about the world and how to live. We must simply believe what they say because there is no way for us to verify the truthfulness of revealed knowledge. 

We either believe them or not. They promise that if we believe, we will live in peace, love, and light for all eternity after we die. If we do not, we will live in unimaginable pain and suffering in hell for all eternity.

Contra "Spirituality": Part 3

Religious beliefs have to do with beliefs (creeds) about divinities and other invisible beings, ourselves, the world in which we live, other worlds, and how we behave in relationships with divinities and others (codes and cultus). They may or may not say anything about our own spirit and that of others.

If a set of beliefs is not about our own spirit or that of others, why call it spirituality? If a belief has nothing to do with spirit, why call it a "spiritual belief"?

If it is a personal collection of beliefs picked from the world's religions, why not call it "personal religion"? Doesn't "personal religion" more accurately describe what it is?

Likewise, why not call personal religious beliefs what they are- personal religious beliefs rather than "spiritual beliefs"?

Those who are allergic to the "r" word can drop it and just say "personal beliefs."

Then we could use the word "spirituality" to refer to something actually related to spirit: a collection of ideas and practices related to spirit. We could also use the words "spiritual beliefs" to refer to beliefs about our own spirit and that of others.

If we are going to advance our love, knowledge, wisdom, and ability with regard to spirit, we need our use of the words spirit, spiritual, and spirituality to support rather than confuse our efforts.

More on this topic in Part 4, the final part in this series.

Contra "Spirituality": Part One

It is a popular, and apparently unexamined, belief that the word "spirituality" need not refer to our own spirit or that of anyone else. It can serve as a convenient label for our own personal collection of religious beliefs. 

For many "spirituality" is like a shopping cart into which we can drop our own eclectic collection of beliefs picked from the aisles of the religions of the world. To put into our "spirituality" cart we can from the aisle of Christianity pick some of the sayings of Jesus we like, hands on healing, prayer, angels, love, forgiveness, and helping the weak, sick, and poor. 

From the aisles of Hinduism and Buddhism, we can pick karma, reincarnation, non-violence, yoga, meditation, vegetarianism, mantras, mindfulness, devaluing our ego and identifying with the divine Self, and living in the present moment. 

On the Native American aisle we can pick love of Mother Earth and all of nature. 

From the Theosophical aisle we can pick Ascended Masters and Guides as well as the unity of all religions. 

And from the Occult aisle, we can add some Angel cards for guidance. 

Since there are many individual shoppers and many different aisles from which to choose, there are many different combinations of beliefs. Many refer to their collection of beliefs as their spirituality.

The "spirituality" label is convenient because it allows us to avoid applying the dreaded "r" word to ourselves: religious. So many of us are allergic to religion. We're "spiritual but not religious." It sounds so righteous, so "holier than thou" when said by some.

From the perspective of Thumotics, when we use of the word "spirituality" as a label for a personal collection of religious beliefs it begs this question: What word do we use to refer to a collection of ideas and practices related to spirit? More about this in Part Two.  

Three Perspectives of Gratitude, Part 1

Gratitude is a popular topic these days. No doubt Oprah had a lot to do with it.

The Cognitive-Expressive Perspective

For the most part, the current discussion about gratitude comes from the perspective of Positive Psychology and happiness research.  Research suggests that when we focus on things to be grateful for, feel grateful, and verbally express it, we feel happier. So, it directs us to think about things to be grateful for, keep a "Gratitude Journal", feel grateful, and say, "Thank you!" often. I call this the cognitive-expressive perspective of gratitude.

The Religious Perspective

Some of the current discussion about gratitude comes from a religious perspective of gratitude. From this perspective God/our Higher Power is the source of everything good in our life. Everything good in our life is a blessing from above. Since every blessing is a gift from above we should feel thankful to God/our Higher Power for all of our blessings and verbally express our thanks. 

From the religious perspective there is a sense that the more one recognizes and gives thanks for God’s blessings, the more faithful one is and the better one practices one’s religion.

Commonalities Share by both the Psychological and Religious Perspectives

The psychological and religious perspectives of gratitude share some common characteristics. 

Both are individualist. They focus on us as individuals and have us do a private self examination of how grateful we are as individuals.

Both lack a clear standard on how much gratitude is enough. The sense is that we could always be more grateful than we are.

Due to the lack if a standard, both judge us as falling short when it comes to gratitude and direct us to take some initiative to be more grateful than we are.

Both have a moralistic tone. They both say that we ought to be more grateful than we are. The psychological view says we ought to be more grateful in order to improve our mental health. The religious view says we ought to be more grateful in order to relate rightly with God/our Higher Power.

Finally, both offer prescriptions to remedy our short comings in the area of gratitude. They both say, "Be more grateful." Positive Psychologists direct us to journal about we can be grateful for. Religious authorities direct us to say prayers of thanksgiving. 

Assessing Both Perspectives

There is certainly nothing wrong with having a grateful attitude and practicing saying, “Thank you!”

However, I do question assigning and restricting gratitude to our head and tongue , the lack of a clear standard of how much gratitude is enough, fault-finding, and using a subtle form of guilt and shame to encourage us to be more grateful.

A Third Perspective

In my next post I'll present a third perspective on gratitude: gratitude as a specific kind of pleasure that we feel.

Religious Belief a Thought Virus?

As far as we know, we human beings are the only animals on Earth that have religious beliefs.* Dogs are not religious. Cats are not religious. Neither are crows nor catfish.

Does having religious beliefs make us superior or inferior to other animals? I wonder...especially since we, like other animals, are not born religious. We humans are made religious by other humans- parents and others in positions of power over us.

Religious belief is not natural. At best it is artificial. It consists of stories we humans make up and tell to help us cope with the challenges of life. At worst it is a serious, life-denying thought virus spread by word of mouth and reinforced by guilt and fear- guilt about our natural instincts and fear of divine rejection and punishment. Guilt and fear, expressed in words of divine love, join in our hearts and give birth to a bad conscience, the symptom of a sick spirit.

If religious belief is a serious, life-denying thought virus, we do well to cleanse our hearts and minds and cure ourselves of it. When we are clear, we will be free. We will be free to live spirit-related lives in which we love and celebrate spirit as that which makes us and all the living alive.

* Those who are "spiritual but not religious" may replace "religious" with "spiritual."

What I Believe: The Thumotics Manifesto, Part 9

I propose the following definition of spirituality: Spirituality is a body of thoughts and practices related to spirit. From the perspective of this definition, there is not one spirituality but rather many spiritualities. For example, there are Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Theosophical, Neopagan, and many other spiritualities. Each religion has its own body of thoughts and practices related to spirit.

 

Furthermore, from the perspective of my proposed definition of spirituality, most of what is called spirituality today is not spirituality. It is more accurately called "personal religion." It has little if anything to do with spirit as that which animates, and is usually a personal collection of beliefs and practices culled from different religious and other metaphysical traditions. While some personal religions, like established corporate religions, might have spiritualities, they are not themselves spiritualities.

What I Believe: The Thumotics Manifesto, Part 8

I Believe in a Spirit-Focused Spirituality 

We live at a time of great confusion and creativity with regard to both religion and spirituality. Our confusion and creativity are expressed in the increased numbers of people who either change from one established corporate religion to another, or leave them altogether, joining the ranks of those who identify as "none" or "spiritual but not religious."

We see the confusion and creativity in the vast diversity of what is often called "spirituality." Not only is there no general consensus on what the word "spirituality" means, but also much that passes as spirituality has little if anything to do with spirit as “that which makes alive”. Much that passes as spirituality is often an individual's personal collection of various religious and/or metaphysical beliefs and practices culled from different Western and Eastern religions.