Libra00

Yeah, that’s probably true. I fell pretty hard out of Christianity as a teenager and was extremely not interested in more organized religion. That didn’t keep me from being fascinated by the ideas held within various religions, but didn’t set foot inside another place of worship for at least a decade after, so all I had was books. Tried meditation and it was one of those ‘this is hard so I’m gonna quit’ things, unfortunately.

For Hinduism I like polytheism in general, I like the idea that divinity is not a monolith (and not a stern, judging father-figure), and I was pretty into karma and reincarnation for a while. From Gnosticism I really liked the idea that the world is a prison and that the enlightenment everyone is seeking has a practical purpose, to escape it and rejoin the divine. I hated the world and most people in it as a young man, so the idea that it was all bullshit suited me quite well. My current beliefs (which are very syncretic and come from all over the place) are rooted in a similar idea, but these days I think of the world more as an illusion than a prison. Sufism… man, what’s not to like? It’s kinda weird, most of Islam doesn’t do much for me, but I craved that ecstatic religious joy, that utter dedication and purity of purpose, for a long time, and I have long leaned more into the mystical aspects of religious experience and that’s hard to find in organized religion in general and Abrahamic faiths in specific.

Huh, that looks interesting. The art style especially for the thumbnail gives me strong Evil Genius vibes.

Huh, I haven’t played Prince of Persia since the original on an Apple IIe. Color me curious.

This isn’t a bad idea, but I think my priority in that situation would be some kind of feature the suppresses duplicate posts. I sub to multiple world news communities for example because they do get different posts, but also people post the same thing in several communities at the same time so I see a lot of duplicate posts. And only seeing news f.ex would only make the dupes even more frequent because they’re not interspersed with other communities.

Ah, fair enough, that makes sense and I generally agree. I have my own beliefs and ideas about personified deities, but I agree, I dunno why some of these deities are even worshiped given their legacy of evil and assholery, so if they do really exist they should absolutely be opposed.

Demiurge in the Gnostic sense? Or is there some broader sense I’m not familiar with there?

So… your position is that all gods are real according to their own cosmogony, and one of them in particular has pissed you off but the rest just don’t rise to the level of being worth the effort of hating? My compliments, that’s a pretty interesting position and one I’ve not seen before.

Ahh, fair enough. That sucks.

Though chewable ‘nugget’ ice sounds like a pretty good consolation prize.

Because I feel like the Buddha had some pretty good ideas. Like I get that suffering comes from desire, I can vibe with the cycle of rebirth and renewal, etc. I just… I never got to the point where I was like ‘This is the one for me.’ Maybe because I didn’t investigate it all that deeply back when I was investigating lots of other religions around the world, I was always pulled away by other ideas in Hinduism or Gnostic Christianity, or Sufism.

Right, but like that has to be tempered with the understanding that different people think different things about stuff like religion, right? Some acknowledgement that what might be self-evident truth to you is a muddy contradictory mess to others? shrug Iono, people be dumb I guess.

Yeah, my parents were pretty chill, took a kind of ‘expose the kids to lots of things and let them make their own minds up’ view and didn’t even really comment (they asked, obviously, but they were just like ‘whatever’ upon hearing the explanation) when I told them I had been asked to not come back the church we had been going to. But I do get that this is a big deal for other people, so I don’t mean to demean their struggles or anything.

Fair, though I feel like most do nowadays? And I’m not living in some McMansion or anything, I’m on the poor end of things, but still I can’t think of a house I’ve lived in in the last ~30 years that didn’t have it.

Yeah, true that. Hell, reconstructionists in general are pretty rare, much less finding the rare thing within a group of rare things. ;) Also I’ve always been a lil uneasy around German pagans, unfortunately there’s a strong undercurrent of white nationalism that has co-opted/corrupted some of it and it’s hard to tell them apart at a glance.

Though Wiccans aren’t reconstructionists in the usual sense; they’re not rediscovering/recreating something that once was so much as syncretizing something new out of the pieces of a bunch of pre-Christian/indigenous practices.

48 SATANs and not one hidden SANTA - I’m impressed, and a little disappointed.

I’m curious why you would define your belief in terms of opposition to one deity in specific when human history is littered with gods, many of whom were huge assholes. How do you feel about, say, Zeus or Mithras or Ahura Mazda? 'Fuck all of ‘em’ is a position I can understand, but ‘Fuck this one in specific and the rest are fine’ just seems a little odd, ya know?

Man it’s been a while since I’ve come across a pagan reconstructionist in the wilds of social media. Cheers!

I hadn’t heard of Romuva before, but I used to know a bunch back in the day; Celts, Hellenists, Kemetics, etc.

There is a history of religious violence both within Buddhism and against it, as with most religions, so some people definitely don’t like them very much.

I’ve kind of always liked the idea of Buddhism, but I’ve never really been able to grapple with it in a way that made sense (in a gut-feel sort of way) to me. I guess living somewhere that has a sizeable Buddhist population could make the difference.

I will never understand this. Every parent knows their children have their own minds; you don’t expect your child to think the same thoughts as you, or to have the same experiences as you had, so why would you ever be surprised - much less dismayed - that they come to different conclusions about religion than you do? Did you do your homework and come to that conclusion yourself? Great, if that’s what makes you happy then I’m happy.

The English speaking world as a whole is still, to my knowledge, majority Christian even if not actively so, so it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that many of us came from a Christian background. Nor, I suppose, that so many of are ex-.

Pantheism basically. The universe literally is god.

Diving into nihilism and existentialism was really an eye-opener for me. It kind of made me stop hating myself and other people and even stop being an atheist. If nothing means anything I get to decide what matters, I get to create my own meaning. So I did.