Cav's Place

I read an essay a while ago on The Witches’ Voice and meant to write my answers to the questions included in it right then, but I didn’t get around to it. Then, while thinking about what I should include in this series of posts about my beliefs, I remembered it and eventually put the link in drafts. And then I started my last post with freedom of religion, which, combined with the time of the year, got me in the right frame of mind to actually write it, so here it is.

Before I begin, I should explain something once again, though I have done so a few times before, even recently. Some of these questions are being asked as if by a person requiring such clear labels, and therefore require specifying a religion clearly. I will use the term Wicca/Wiccan in those cases in order to satisfy that need for labels, but I must once again point out that it’d be a real stretch to even consider me an Eclectic Wiccan. Yes, there is a Wiccan “skeleton” in my belief system, but the rest of it is made up of ideas from other religions as well, scientific theories, theories about the paranormal and some ideas of my own. There are also even core Wiccan concepts that I don’t believe in, for example the Threefold Law. Yes, I believe that whatever you do will come back to you, sooner or later, but not tripled. Any action has an equal and opposite reaction, right? Therefore, the reaction can’t be three times as strong as the action that caused it!
That said, let’s see how I can answer these, because some of them are quite interesting to think about, though it starts with basics.

1. What is Neo-Paganism?
An umbrella term for modern religions with pre-Christian roots. The term “roots” should be taken in a very vague sense, since the ancient beliefs they refer to were obviously very different from what is now practiced. Some things were lost, many were intentionally changed, either to adapt the practices to modern times or to correct what were believed to have been mistakes made back in the day, and plenty of others were added.
But do your own research, it’s easy to find a place to start. However, I want to say I don’t agree with the idea that Reconstructionists are Neopagans, since they generally try to bring the ancient religions back to life and not “update” those beliefs and find ways to incorporate them into modern practices.

2. What is Wicca?
The best known Neopagan religion, founded around 1950 in England by Gerald Gardner and snowballing from there.
I personally don’t put any stock into his claims that it reflects a belief system that has been preserved since pre-Christian times, but instead think that even his original version was made up of various beliefs and practices, some old and some new. And considering the fast pace it developed at after that point, I will say with very little fear of being challenged that, in its presently most common form, namely Eclectic Wicca, it’s by far the most modern Neopagan belief system.
Past that, do your own research, I’ll only offer the usual starting point. And you could also take a look at the Principles of Wiccan Belief, since they have a great general relevance despite initially being written specifically for American Wiccans.

3. How and why did you get involved in your religion?
It’s pretty much the typical story you’ll get from most Wiccans, but here goes… I was raised by my grandparents and my grandmother is very religious, so religion was an important part of my life from the beginning. However, I quickly saw flaws in Christianity and started trying to figure out what really is out there.
I was 13 when I got Internet access, and one of the things I did early on was look into various other religions. One night, while reading articles on The Mystica, I stumbled upon Wicca and something just clicked into place, I knew I had the foundation to start building my belief system on.
What followed was the natural “fluffy” phase, lots of dreams but little actual research and (thankfully, considering the silly ideas I had back then) even less practice. A couple of years later I tried some things that were supposed to have tangible results and, to my complete surprise, I got exactly what I asked for, which was of course quite different from what I meant to ask for. I learned my lesson, but also got scared out of my wits and decided to put it on the back burner.
That situation lasted until around the time I turned 19, when I met a woman that used Reiki, meditation techniques and various forms of alternative medicine for healing. She was a rather devout Catholic, but the talks we had during the sessions rang true from a Wiccan perspective, so my interest was back in force. I tried bringing the topic up, but she wouldn’t hear of it.
Then something interesting happened. As I was letting the idea of Wicca swim around in my head one night, I picked a random person on DC++ and looked through their shared files. To my surprise, I found a folder named “Wicca & Witchcraft” with lots of files in it. Most were typical “fluff”, but some were quite interesting and the coincidence got me thinking. Shortly afterwards (I think it might have been the very next day), I was bored, turned on the TV and found myself catching The Craft from the very beginning, it was just starting on the first station I switched to. No, I didn’t know of it until then, but I just sat and watched and got more and more annoyed as it went along. By the end I was fuming at that outrageous portrayal of Wiccans…
I took that as one coincidence too many for it not to be some sort of message, so I started researching again and trying to make belief systems work together, while at the same time turning things around to see everything that woman was saying and doing while I still went to her from a Wiccan perspective. This “integration process” went on for another year…
And then Andra left and… The only good thing about having a ton of bricks fall on your head is that it shakes off anything you had been carrying around simply because you couldn’t be bothered to shake it loose before. So I left behind all the Christian practices I was still performing simply because I didn’t get to ridding myself of them and set both feet firmly on the path I knew for so long as being right for me.

4. What generated your interest in your religion?
I think I answered this already, above… It simply felt, and feels, right. Not completely right, of course, but by far the best “foundation” I found. It makes sense and answers more questions than any other religion I looked into, at least from my point of view.

5. What benefit do you get from being Wiccan?
What benefit does anyone get from the religion of their choice? (And that’s the key part, “of their choice”, not one that they are following blindly.) Some answers and way more questions, comfort alternating with loneliness, empowerment entwined with the knowledge of how insignificant you are in the grand scheme of things…

6. Who or what do you worship?
On occasion I can be more specific, but in the general sense I send my prayers and my thanks to any being higher than myself on the spiritual scale that cares for us lesser mortals and at least occasionally grants us what we request, when the request is deemed worthy and granting it would not cause unjustified harm to another. Also specify that those beings must not themselves cause unjustified harm to another and that they should neither demand nor expect for answering prayers anything more than simple, though perhaps long lasting, gratitude and perhaps the right to use the energy left unspent from the prayers or rituals they’ve answered.
I do use the terms Goddess and God, among others, but I’m not sure whether I believe Them to be two deities that are more powerful than the rest, at least where us humans are concerned, or calling those names is actually short for “this is for whatever deity I should be calling to right now, because I don’t know how to be more specific”.

7. What needs do you feel your religion meets in your life?
See what I said about what benefits I get from it… Seems like the same thing to me…

8. How do you know Wicca is the right religion for you?
Who said I do? I think anybody who says they’re certain one religion is the right one for them has a problem. All anyone can say is that they’ve found one that appears to make more sense and give more reasonable answers than any of the others they have studied. That doesn’t mean they won’t stumble upon something that will seem to be even better, nor does it mean that the questions can’t change at some later point, making these currently reasonable answers quite irrelevant.
That’s how it is for me… It makes more sense and seems to give more reasonable answers than any other religion I looked into, plus that it simply “feels” right. Of course, I made my belief system work as time passed, making changes and additions as I went along. Since each person is different, I don’t think anybody can take a ready-made belief system and really think it’s right for them without tailoring it for their own needs first.

9. How do you define truth, or know what is true?
Good one… I think there are quite few absolute truths. For everything else we just rely on theories and assumptions. Those that can be proven correct repeatedly are considered to be true and those that are proven wrong are considered to be false, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be situations where that could be reversed.
As for truth in the religious sense… Here everything is assumption! Don’t say you have “The Truth” because I’ll ask for proof and you won’t be able to provide it. That’s why it’s called “belief”, because we believe something to be right without hard evidence, which means the only thing we can be sure of is that we can’t be sure of anything in this aspect and should let each other believe whatever we want to believe as long as we don’t harm another by it and don’t try to force our beliefs on others.

10. Why did you decide your religion was truer than Christianity?
This seems repetitive… It makes more sense and offers more reasonable answers, plus that it gives its followers the freedom to correct any problems they think they notice. Plus that it encourages each person to establish their own direct contact with the higher powers, without priests, churches and so on.

11. What would convince you Christianity is “The One Way”?
Ha! Nothing could convince me that any religion is the only way, simply because you can’t prove that something does not exist. Even if you would somehow prove beyond any doubt the existence of one religion’s central deity, which would require nothing short of Their appearance and willingness to have a really long chat during which They’d explain everything, that won’t prove that others don’t exist.
It can, of course, be one of the ways. But it’d need a few changes to really convince me of that, starting with tolerating those who believe differently and not assuming that everyone who is baptized automatically becomes Christian, only counting as followers those who have willingly made that choice at a time when they were able to make such a judgment for themselves.

12. What do you define as evil?
Unjustified harm brought to another. And by “another” I don’t mean only another human, but another animal or the planet itself just as well. And “harm” means whatever that other considers to be harmful, not what you or the lawmakers think is bad for them. However, just revenge isn’t evil at all from my point of view, it’s fully justified harm. Sometimes karma needs a helping hand…

13. What happens to you after you die?
I’d like to believe I’ll get the choice to stick around as a ghost or another such form, visit those I care about and watch over them for a long time… But eventually, since I highly doubt I’ll evolve enough by then not to need to reincarnate (whether here or on another world that holds intelligent creatures is open for debate), my soul will end up connected to a newly born body again and go through another life to learn a few more things.
After I’ll no longer need to reincarnate I guess I’ll just continue to learn and grow spiritually, just without a physical body. After all, it makes perfect sense to me to consider all the physical lives as nothing but the soul’s childhood.

14. Do the Gods love their followers?
Using human concepts to judge non-human entities is likely to fail. So I don’t know whether “love” is the best term, but They’re interested, and that probably is both because They really care and because They need the energy we send their way with our prayers and rituals.

15. Why do you believe in unspecified Gods as Creators of the world, as opposed to the singular Creator proposed by the Bible?
I don’t believe in any “Creators of the world”, Earth and life on it was created the way science proved it was created. The only question is how was the universe created in the first place, where did that initial concentration of mass and energy come from.
My theory about that is that one entity wielding tremendous power, but not one of the most powerful, attempted to do something that required far more power than they had in order to control, so that initial explosion was the result and Nature took over from that moment on. And for such an entity to exist it’s necessary to have more entities that we would consider to be Gods…

16. Are the Gods immanent only, or immanent and transcendent?
Most are immanent, but They’re connected to the universe, not just to our planet and certainly not only to certain areas of it. And we are all connected to the universe and therefore to each other, these connections forming what is generally referred to as The All.
However, it makes sense to believe that some might have transcended. But there is also the possibility that the “oops” moment that created our universe killed all beings that we could see as transcedent Gods and that the others didn’t get to that level since then, either because They weren’t able to or because They decided there are too many risks involved.

17. Is it possible to reconcile Christianity with a Pagan path?
It is possible to accept Christianity from a Pagan perspective, but it would require fundamental changes in Christianity in order to make it accept Paganism.
I’m saying it’s possible for Pagans to accept Christianity because there is certainly no problem with accepting the possibility of Yahweh existing when you believe there are many Gods. It is also possible that said God gave humans certain advice that was really good at the time and likely that some humans in positions of authority later changed some of that advice to suit their own needs, but that others refuse to update those principles to suit modern realities. Or it could be that it was aliens in the first place, as Pagans certainly don’t reject their existence.
The idea of Heaven and Hell also can be explained from a Pagan perspective. You have the Summerlands, where you end up when you no longer need to reincarnate, which could be taken as Heaven, while the need to reincarnate and go through all the problems life throws at you once again can be seen as Hell. After all, we’ve certainly made our own Hell here on Earth… Or there is another thing I personally consider to be possible, namely that if you dedicate yourself to a certain deity you could end up having an afterlife according to said deity’s rules, so those who dedicate themselves to the Christian God could be split between Heaven and Hell in the afterlife and lose the chance of coming back and continuing their spiritual progress.
And Satan can also be explained simply by saying that Yahweh was caught in a bitter struggle with another such powerful entity at the time, so He needed all the help He could get. It is also possible that the entity referred to as Satan was trying to harm humans, but whether that was simply to remove Yahweh’s supporters or it was a goal in itself, who can say? As for the idea that worshipping any other deity is actually worshipping Satan, it can be explained by Yahweh not knowing exactly who was allied with His arch enemy and playing it safe. As I said, lots of things can be reconciled once you allow for multiple Gods.
And all miracles can, of course, be explained as magic, and for Pagans that’s a fact of life.
But for Christians to accept Pagans, they’d first need to accept the existence of multiple Gods and get rid of the idea that worshipping anything other than the Christian God actually means worshipping Satan, then to accept magic as a part of life and to stop considering it as being evil in itself, and then to update their principles to reflect the modern times and the needs of modern people and accept those different from them. Some of them have already adjusted their personal belief system to do this, but it seems a very tall order for Christianity as a whole.

18. What happens to non-Pagans after death?
See what I said above about Heaven and Hell from a Pagan perspective. There certainly is no punishment for believing differently, if that’s the question… Most likely they’d either reincarnate or evolve past the level of needing a physical body, but I’ll say again that it could be possible for those who have dedicated themselves to other Gods to be judged by Their rules and therefore have a different kind of afterlife.
And yes, it’s certainly possible to evolve past the level of needing a physical body by believing differently. All paths reach the same destination, it’s just that some are easier and others harder, some are shorter and others longer, some are more suitable for some people and others for others and so on. The day all religions will understand this will be a happy day for the world.

19. What happens to people who have done bad things after death?
They’ll likely be shown their worst flaws and then sent back to correct them in their next life. Of course they can choose not to correct them, but they’ll just keep coming back until either they do correct them or they’re no longer considered flaws.

20. What does honor mean, and how do you live an honorable life?
This question would be more suitable for a follower of the Norse pantheon, but… Always be honest and fair, even when it hurts you, always keep any promises you make and don’t cause unjustified harm to others in order to get what you want.

21. How do the Gods control natural phenomena outside of the country in which their worship originated? (For example: Why does a Heathen in the US believe that if they pray to Thor to change the weather He can do that, when He was originally worshipped in Scandinavia?)
This question is wrong from start to end… For one, Gods don’t change the weather. Not that They couldn’t, but it takes a lot of energy and it matters too little on an universal scale for it to be worth so much trouble. Humans can change it on their own if they truly wish it. And then I said Gods are connected to the universe as a whole, not just to our planet and certainly not only to certain areas of it, so it doesn’t matter where you are…

22. Do you believe that the Christian God Yahweh exists?
I think the odds of an entity that we could potentially recognize by that name to exist are quite high. Whether it really existed back then or the tremendous amount of energy focused by Christians during all this time reached the tipping point and became self-aware is a matter for debate. And whether or not said entity is still in any way involved with Earth is another matter entirely.

23. Do you believe every religion has truth in it? If so, how do you reconcile your religion as truthful with others that contradict it?
“Every” is a big word, but I think the vast majority of them do, even if in some cases it’s completely unintentional. And why couldn’t they be reconciled? If they have some truth in them it doesn’t mean everything they say is true, so the contradictions may arise in areas where one is true and the other isn’t or where both are wrong. And two opposite statements can both be true, it depends on specifics and the situation each applies to. Plus that you’ll find lots of things in common if you look at various religions with an open mind, they’re just worded differently.

24. Do you believe we evolved, or that there is Intelligent Design?
Come on! Evolution is proven fact, period! Of course, that doesn’t eliminate the possibility of some sort of intervention at some point, but in such a case I’d look more towards advanced aliens than towards Gods.

25. Are the Gods real entities, faces of a single God and Goddess, or merely symbols through which you focus magical energies?
Real entities, one way or another… I mean either They already existed when humans started worshipping Them or the energy focused by so many people worshipping certain entities for so long reached a tipping point and became self-aware, creating those entities from that moment forward. I certainly don’t believe the idea of faces of a single entity, unless you’re talking about how we’re all connected.

26. If the Gods love you, why didn’t They die for you like Jesus did?
This is insulting for all concerned… You have a God and a prophet, Yahweh and Jesus, respectively. With that in mind, many prophets and clerics have died for their Gods throughout history. And then there’s the other problem, namely that Pagans believe that humans are not inherently sinners and that you’re the only one responsible for your own actions and your own spiritual evolution. We don’t need to be “saved” by another, and actually we couldn’t be, we can only “save” ourselves.

There, I think I handled this well enough, considering everything…