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There's something I understand better now than I used to back when I was self-identifying as a theist. I, too, was really upset that atheists were so prejudiced and bigoted and just pigeonholed any religious people they knew and assumed that if you aren't an atheist, you're an enemy. Or something.
I understand marginalization and privilege a little better now, though. Only some of it is from beginning to identify as an atheist. A lot of it's stuff I've heard from LGBT people and people of color and feminists and just... y'know, people who have experience with this stuff. Here's what I've learned about generalizing about the members (or affiliates) of organizations that hate me (or you, or someone else, or whoever).
It's hard sometimes, when someone walks up wearing the badge and uniform of one's oppressors, to assume that they don't want to be associated with the other people wearing it. It's hard for me (for example) to see someone who self-identifies as Catholic and not see an ally of the homophobia, misogyny, and just general callousness that characterizes that organization. They may not personally hate women or gays or child rape victims, but they're comfortable affiliating with an organization that plainly does, and I have to wonder at that rate whether they're true allies.
Sadly, that type of Christianity is still setting the tone in a lot of the country. While I'm supportive of the efforts of other Christians to clean up their image, I no longer feel like I should suffer at the hands of the Christian cultural system and simultaneously do their PR for them. When more Christians are like Quakers, I'll talk about them like more of them are Quakers.
I get that it's got to suck having people running around acting a fool who are using teachings from the same book as you are to do some terrible things to innocent people. It always sucks to feel like someone else has enough control over your reputation to screw with it by being bigots and just generally showing their whole ass to the world.
That's the thing, though, about continuing to wear the badge and uniform of a group that--for a lot of people--has done them nothing but personal and very tangible harm. Depending on how badly they've been hurt and for how long and how much hope they have left, they might just assume that you're an ally to the people who hurt them. They're not assuming this because they're bigoted, or bullies, or intolerant. They're assuming it because they're tired of giving chances to people who put on that uniform and then getting kicked in the face for it. So... they stop taking the risk.
I'm not quite there yet, but I've seen people get there, and it's hard for me to begrudge them. It's not hate. It's hurt, and it's weariness, and they're right. They should never have had to always be the one giving out chance after chance after chance to people who didn't take it. It's hard exhausting work, and the people I know who've given up on trying to find common ground with Christians? That's why.
So this is why I've stopped saying, "Not all straight/cis/white/etc. people are like that! Please only talk about your painful experiences in a way that protects my feelings!" and it's why I think it'd be great if Christians did, too.
I understand marginalization and privilege a little better now, though. Only some of it is from beginning to identify as an atheist. A lot of it's stuff I've heard from LGBT people and people of color and feminists and just... y'know, people who have experience with this stuff. Here's what I've learned about generalizing about the members (or affiliates) of organizations that hate me (or you, or someone else, or whoever).
It's hard sometimes, when someone walks up wearing the badge and uniform of one's oppressors, to assume that they don't want to be associated with the other people wearing it. It's hard for me (for example) to see someone who self-identifies as Catholic and not see an ally of the homophobia, misogyny, and just general callousness that characterizes that organization. They may not personally hate women or gays or child rape victims, but they're comfortable affiliating with an organization that plainly does, and I have to wonder at that rate whether they're true allies.
Sadly, that type of Christianity is still setting the tone in a lot of the country. While I'm supportive of the efforts of other Christians to clean up their image, I no longer feel like I should suffer at the hands of the Christian cultural system and simultaneously do their PR for them. When more Christians are like Quakers, I'll talk about them like more of them are Quakers.
I get that it's got to suck having people running around acting a fool who are using teachings from the same book as you are to do some terrible things to innocent people. It always sucks to feel like someone else has enough control over your reputation to screw with it by being bigots and just generally showing their whole ass to the world.
That's the thing, though, about continuing to wear the badge and uniform of a group that--for a lot of people--has done them nothing but personal and very tangible harm. Depending on how badly they've been hurt and for how long and how much hope they have left, they might just assume that you're an ally to the people who hurt them. They're not assuming this because they're bigoted, or bullies, or intolerant. They're assuming it because they're tired of giving chances to people who put on that uniform and then getting kicked in the face for it. So... they stop taking the risk.
I'm not quite there yet, but I've seen people get there, and it's hard for me to begrudge them. It's not hate. It's hurt, and it's weariness, and they're right. They should never have had to always be the one giving out chance after chance after chance to people who didn't take it. It's hard exhausting work, and the people I know who've given up on trying to find common ground with Christians? That's why.
So this is why I've stopped saying, "Not all straight/cis/white/etc. people are like that! Please only talk about your painful experiences in a way that protects my feelings!" and it's why I think it'd be great if Christians did, too.
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no subject
Date: 2011-07-27 04:29 am (UTC)From:It's also sloppy thinking to lump all Christians together. They are distinct denominations with distinct histories, policies and approaches. The Society of Friends has a long and storied history of fighting oppression; they were supporting the Underground Railroad during slavery. Don't say "Christian" when you really mean those other guys; it makes the groups who really are, really and truly, doing the work of tolerance and civil rights more invisible. It legitimizes the right-wingers claim to being the "real" Christians.
On the other hand, no, it's never helpful to exclaim "Not all $GROUP are like that!" We know.
no subject
Date: 2011-07-27 04:35 am (UTC)From:I actually considered adding a note that people with certain religious affiliations have even less room to bitch than straight people or white people, because those latter two things are innate characteristics whereas someone can totally just choose to stop attending Catholic mass.
I'm not a Christian myself, but I did study the Bible. In my experience, people take whatever morality from the Bible that they had when they approached it, because the Christians who make bad neighbors (guys like Breitvik) and the Christians who make good neighbors (I need to wear a button that says, "I love Quakers! ASK ME WHY.") are both working from the same sound Biblical footing. Neither of them is doing Christianity "wrong" as far as I can tell. Some are just falling into the pitfalls of faith and some are managing not to, but neither is really more Christian than the other in my mind.
If Christian communities want to make that distinction, that's what orthodoxy is all about. If some Christian denominations say Ann Coulter's no Christian, or Michele Bachmann's no Christian, or Glenn Beck's no Christian or Breitvik's no Christian, they can do that. I'm not really in a position to kick those folks out of someone else's club, though. If they self-identify as Christians and have Christians who identify them the same way, that means a lot more than my opinion.
I think I feel that way about it because despite being an atheist, I'm also a practicing Wiccan. (Another atheist I know summed it up better than my rambly self can by saying, "Oh! So you're Wiccan like I'm Jewish," so I use that as the quick version now. *laugh*) I have had people straight-up tell me that I am not Wiccan. They're not members of my circle. They're not even members of my local community. They don't know me at all. All they know is that they don't like me, and it doesn't matter to them whether I and my High Priest and High Priestess and our whole circle acknowledge me as part of the family.
That's not an experience that I feel right passing on, so even if someone is a hateful dirtbag, I'm not going to take my disapproval of them as sufficient reason to say, "That's not a real Christian." I would like it if bigotry were not a theologically legitimate way of being Christian, but it sort of is. =/
no subject
Date: 2011-07-27 04:57 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-07-27 06:34 pm (UTC)From:I don't have to buy into the idea that the only real Christians are the dirtbags, but neither am I going to buy into the idea that the nice ones are the only "real" Christians, either, because they aren't.
no subject
Date: 2011-07-27 08:34 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-07-27 09:04 pm (UTC)From:As a religious institution, Christianity has stolen your rituals and my scriptures. I don't know how you feel about that, but I personally feel that I have enough to do in the PR arena dealing with all the misinformation about Judaism that Christianity is responsible for. I'm not even talking about obvious bullshit like Christ-killing and blood libel. I'm talking about the way that they frame our scripture as the source of all the bad shit Jesus had to fix and our G-d as the punisher and the hater who had to be mollified by the blood sacrifice of his own son (btw, our G-d doesn't have sex with mortals and sire children). I'm the one who has to step up and correct them about the rules in Vayikra (Leviticus), which were only ever meant for members of the tribe, not outsiders, and tell people who think that that's how we all lived before Jesus that then as now, the Torah laws are constantly being re-examined and new 'amendments' go up all the time in order to keep them sane and sensible and workable and not egregiously cruel or senselessly enforced, and that they should never be taken as a literal legal code for all mankind. I'm the one who has to explain that while we're still arguing about whether that badly translated passage forbids anal sex, male-male sex or male-male rape, the punishment for transgression is a spiritual excision and not the literal death penalty, and also, the way it's written, bacon is forbidden just as strongly. Christians have used their interpretation of our Law as a justification for hurting people, and I have so much work to do around that that I'm not really interested in fixing their internal problems. Because if I don't do that work then I am also viewed as an enemy rather than an ally by some people who really believe that however bad Christianity is now, once upon a time, we were worse and if we had it our way we still would be.
I sort of feel like the problems pagans have dealing with the demonisation of their gods and rituals (the ones that weren't stolen outright for saints and festivals) are probably similar, but I do remember holidays being MUCH easier when I was Pagan-identified, so. *shrug*
The story that the kyriarchy tells about Christianity, like the stories that it tells about whiteness and masculinity and heterosexuality, can really only be dismantled by the people that it applies to. Everyone knows people of colour want white people to be different from the bad ones and everyone knows women want men to be decent but we don't get to make up those stories; we have enough trouble getting listened to when we try to define who WE are. I honestly don't think that the general public cares what you or I think Christianity is. Christians are the ones who have to come out of the closet and fight this rap.
We also have to live in a society where we constantly have to gauge how safe we are when dealing with those who have more privilege, and demanding that Jews and pagans and atheists not consider what many Christians are like and how they use their privilege is a lot like getting upset because blacks are slower to trust whites and women are slower to trust men.
no subject
Date: 2011-07-27 09:12 pm (UTC)From:I empathise with this because a lot of liberal synagogues are like that and I sometimes feel like I have a choice of putting up with Chabad's abominable politics to get all the kabbalistic stuff and the mysteries and the chanting and all (which are satisfying to my soul) or going to a really great synagogue where I agree with all their politics and causes but holy fuck, if I wanted to sit around and have a Unitarian meeting I would go to the Unitarian church :)
Actually my own personal thing is that if someone says they're Catholic I watch to see whether it's the magic or the politics they like; if someone says they're methodist or UCC or whatever I'm also less worried, but when they say they're "Christian. Just Christian. Non denominational." then I really worry because those are usually the scary ones. Also, there are scary denominations, like Church of God Anderson Indiana, but if you know what those are you at least know you don't have to WAIT to decide not to trust them ;-)
no subject
Date: 2011-07-28 07:01 am (UTC)From:I have less trouble with Catholics because I think a lot of them are there because the magic doesn't work for them in other churches.
This is the explanation I've gotten to. What it does mean to me, though, is that the ritual trappings are more important to them than the organization's well-earned reputation as a force of destruction and suffering. Now, we can say all we want about how important ritual beauty and spiritual mystery are, but what it does come down to is that those things are clearly what is more important to the people who stay for them than the harm being done in their name all over the world.
It sounds ugly to say it that way, but to me it really is exactly that ugly. I have a hard time imagining any ritual so beautiful that it would encourage me to give time, money, and PR to the Roman Catholic Church (to continue our example). Why? Because for me, deliberate (or at least willing) harm done to innocent people is a dealbreaker.
I mean, I wouldn't stand by the ASPCA if they earned a reputation for raping members' dogs, let alone their children, so I have a hard time understanding the priorities of people who will put their faith and confidence in the Catholic Church, giving it money and credibility in return (even knowing what the church will turn around and use that money and credibility for).
It's just hard for me. Politics is really important to me because "politics" isn't some abstract philosophical thing with no impact on real people. Asking "should abortion be legal" isn't like asking "which Ghostbuster is the most awesome." I mean, for some people, to whom those impacted by their decisions are not real, I guess it's as trivial as acknowledging Egon Spangler's clear and obvious supremacy. Even though people who prefer Venckman are PLAINLY wrong and TALKING CRAZY, I could circle with people who feel that way in a way that I cannot with an anti-choicer or a transphobe. It wouldn't matter for me how beautiful the ritual trappings were.
I'm rambling because it's late and I have probably repeated myself like five times, but is that making sense?
no subject
Date: 2011-07-28 08:50 am (UTC)From:I think the problem here is that you are assuming "the trappings of ritual" are a very shallow thing, an aesthetic preference, and that when I choose to suck it up and go to Chabad for Yom Kippur or when they go to Mass, it's the same thing as choosing which temple or church to go to by whether or not the curtains match your shoes. And yes, that's insulting.
Nobody I know who is liberal and in an Orthodox synagogue that's not Modern Orthodox or the Catholic Church or a fundamentalist church where they lay on hands or whatever is a person who believes that "politics" is some abstract philosophical thing with no impact on real people. The married gay Catholic guy spends way more money funding marriage equality than he has ever given to the Church. But then again, these organisations are never going to change if everyone who is a decent human being leaves.
I realise that while you are a Pagan you are also an atheist, and because of this I suspect that you may have trouble understanding that ritual isn't just a matter of "trappings" and "beauty" and has actual value. I know that my experiences and perceptions are important to me, and also that many atheists think they're imaginary, which makes these conversations difficult because if you think something is totally imaginary, it's hard to understand why someone would value it as much as they value something real. But magic and ritual ARE real to me and not just as a matter of aesthetics. The ideal would be to be able to have both, in one place, but that since I can't, sometimes I have to go to Chabad for ritual and not give them money beyond what it's costing them to feed me if there's food around.
Politics are deeply important to me. And my religious beliefs (particularly about the laws of Torah as I understand them) do inform my strong belief that all marriages should be respected and that people should be free to be what G-d made them and that love is important and that women should get to do what they want with their own bodies, period.
However, while my religious beliefs inform my politics, politics has nothing to do with worship. For me, and for my two Catholic friends and one Episcopalian friend with whom I've discussed this, most of the liberal churches/temples are not places where I can be on a holy day like Yom Kippur, because there is too much lecture and discussion and folk music and protest songs and hugging and people stare at me when I show up in a long white skirt and a white headscarf.
I want to daven and sway and chant and get out of my head and my conscious talky brain while I connect with G-d on Yom Kippur, because I'm trying to get free of my sins for the year and cleanse my soul. I do not want to have a discussion with our guest speaker about the wall in Palestine on Yom Kippur. I am too damn busy trying to transmute all the negative energy of the year through fasting and prayer.
For some reason, the vast majority of liberal religious groups in both Judaism and Christianity are really intellectually oriented and don't want to give you any space to have a-rational or irrational experiences of G-d or to use ritual in order to turn off your conscious mind and tune in to G-d and drop out of the world. They want to do a sermon which is really a lecture, they want to sing protest songs, they want people to stand up and share their personal experiences, they want you to hug the person on your left and on your right and all that. Now, while I really enjoy rational discussion of the laws of Torah and how religious beliefs should inform our daily ethics, that doesn't mean I don't also need to go to services where all the personal conversation in English is kept to a minimum and there's swaying and praying and contemplation and nobody tries to hug me. Talmud study is AWESOME but it isn't prayer and fasting and meditation and chanting. If I have to stand behind a mechitzah to do it sometimes I guess I will have to put up with that.
I don't especially enjoy knowing that I might be sitting next to someone whose politics I despise on Yom Kippur; but if we're both doing what we ought to be doing on Yom Kippur, I'm not going to know what their politics are because we're not going to be having conversations about it. And I don't want to sit in a room full of people that I know I agree with about all the really important real-world issues to do Yom Kippur if they aren't going to let me do Yom Kippur.
I haven't given up looking for a religious community that values the same things I do politically and won't interfere with my need to actually worship when I go to services. But I think it must be much harder for Catholics, because there are a lot of things they believe are important that Protestants don't, and vice versa. If you believe in transubstantiation, it's probably not easy to put yourself in a situation where you can only take communion in a church that not only hasn't been given the power to do transubstantiation, but also teaches that transubstantiation isn't real. For Catholics, questions like these are much closer to "why abortion should be legal" than "which Ghostbuster is the awesomest" and even if you can't understand that intellectually, you will probably be happier accepting that they believe that these questions are real and important than you would be believing that they'd rather go to a church with child molesters than a church with ugly windows. And even if you're not happier, you'll insult fewer people who actually agree with you on most of the things you do think are real.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-01 06:35 am (UTC)From:It was an exaggerated comparison, but to me the question of whether abortion should be legal is not the kind of academic abstract debateable thing that people can easily agree to disagree on. Agreeing to disagree on whether they're okay? Fuck yeah. But the "agree to disagree" position is called pro-choice because it means that people who disagree are all allowed to do what they need to do.
I couldn't remain part of an organization that argued "Everybody should do what they need to do" is an intolerable approach to really serious political issues like abortion, and I'm baffled by people who can get past it.
The married gay Catholic guy spends way more money funding marriage equality than he has ever given to the Church. But then again, these organisations are never going to change if everyone who is a decent human being leaves.
And that guy is doing very good work, but unless decent human beings are willing to leave, they won't have any more influence than the LGBT community has over the USA Democratic Party. They know we're too scared to vote for anybody else to leave them, so we're not really worth appeasing. Sadly, there isn't a viable alternative to that political party. (But then again, for people who believe that they will burn in an actual literal hell FOREVER if they leave the Catholic Church, they may not see any alternative either.)
I realise that while you are a Pagan you are also an atheist, and because of this I suspect that you may have trouble understanding that ritual isn't just a matter of "trappings" and "beauty" and has actual value.
You're right that this makes it much harder for me to understand some things, because I don't experience any sublime supernatural forces.
I do want to note, though, that a religion stripped of faith down to only its ritual beauty is clearly still meaningful enough for me to practice even though I share none of the faith-based beliefs of the religion. So while a lot of atheists place zero value on ritual or the beauty of metaphor or narrative that various religions offer, I'm not one of them, or I wouldn't be continuing to practice a religion whose stories I believe are all myths (because being a myth doesn't have to mean being "just" a myth, which I figure you probably understand better than my atheist peeps tend to).
In light of that, this is something I can totally feel you on:
Talmud study is AWESOME but it isn't prayer and fasting and meditation and chanting.
Studying religion academically is kickass, but there is frequently something tangibly good about practicing one, and even with my bone-deep mistrust of faith I still continue practicing mine because the practices matter.
I don't especially enjoy knowing that I might be sitting next to someone whose politics I despise on Yom Kippur; but if we're both doing what we ought to be doing on Yom Kippur, I'm not going to know what their politics are because we're not going to be having conversations about it. And I don't want to sit in a room full of people that I know I agree with about all the really important real-world issues to do Yom Kippur if they aren't going to let me do Yom Kippur.
I want to thank you for getting into such depth about where you're coming from here, because it's helping me to better understand and articulate my own feelings on it better. For Wiccans, when we get together to practice, we're not just getting together to do The Thing, we're getting together with The People. Circling with someone is an expression of trust and respect, an acknowledgement that we are here for each other and that this space is safe for all of us.
This is something I had a conversation about today as a matter of fact. I stopped attending ritual with the group I'm part of because one regularly-attending member was anti-choice. She told me that she respected me and that we could agree to disagree, but what she didn't understand was that her position was the antithesis of "agree to disagree." What she didn't understand was that to a pro-choicer she was basically saying, "You're real smart and all and Imma let you finish, but you're not morally mature enough to decide when you'll become a mother and I wish the law didn't let you."
I couldn't circle with her, because it's an expression of trust and respect that I didn't sincerely feel we had between us. It's hard to be in circle with someone and ignore what kind of world they want to create, because Wiccan rituals are creative exercises in which we direct our thoughts and energies on common goals. There's a metaphorical (some say literal, but I don't have the faith for that) dissolution of boundaries between us so that we can pool our wills to create what we came to create.
That may be why I have such a hard time imagining sitting next to someone at church who would despise me if they knew too much about me (whether it's my orientation or whether I'd have an abortion or whatever), or attending services led by an organization that's actively opposed to the world I want to be in. I can't let down my guard.
If there were no (or at least less) expectation that the community was there to connect with each other as much as with God, I can see that turning out differently. For me, though, I've always been there to connect with the other worshippers and to share a common vision with them, and even when I was a theist... connecting to that sort of being came a distant second.
This is probably a blind spot that I have because I've never been a monotheist. I was a Wiccan and then I was an atheist Wiccan. It's a blind spot I appreciate you helping me find, because by their nature they can be pretty slippery.
Hilariously, this probably makes me one of the only Neo-Pagans who has ever been so thoroughly ethnocentrically blind about the dominant religions in her own damn culture. Kind of amusing that I even managed that.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-01 10:03 pm (UTC)From:In liberal churches I think a lot of the huggy talky share-your-story-handholdy stuff is an attempt to introduce some feeling of community into the whole thing, but because anyone CAN show up, it makes me uncomfortable. Not just because I have social anxiety, and not just because my own religious practise tends to be more traditional and less huggy, but because anyone and everyone could be there and I don't know who I am sharing my story with. So even when talking and discussing texts (say Talmud, or Kabbalah) I still don't want to hug the person sitting next to me or give them the kiss of peace.
In a tribal religion (like Judaism, and most pre-Christian pagan religions) everyone who has been born or adopted into the tribe belongs to the tribe, whether they believe in anything or not.
That belief matters is one of the big differences between Christianity (especially Protestant Christianity) and Judaism and also one of the big differences between tribal paganism and Neo-Paganism. That is actually one of the things Neo-Paganism derives from the fact that it is a post-Christian religion and that almost everyone who is a Neo-Pagan is a convert from a nominally Christian or culturally Jewish family who has grown up their whole life long with the belief = religion equation.
Some Jewish people are very confused when you tell them that if you have Christian parents and are converting to Judaism, you're not a Christian until you become a Jew. It's hard for them to grok that even if you're baptised and given a Christian name, you aren't a Christian if you don't believe that Jesus is the Saviour (and of course, if you did, you wouldn't want to convert).
So even if I'm at a synagogue where the rabbi and I share all the same important beliefs, there's no telling what the woman sitting next to me thinks. And that's okay because in a synagogue where we're not actually expected to hold hands, sing protest songs and talk about ourselves in public, as long as she and I do what we came there to do, it's all good.
Anyhow, Jews believe that the world got broken during the process of creation and that our job is to help the Creator fix it. Which is similar to but a little different from the thing where you're envisioning a totally different world that you want to create.
I also think that in a lot of liberal Jewish and Christian congregations the de-emphasis (to the point of subtle hostility and overt discouragement) of mystical practise is not an accident. I think that it has a lot to do with the way they position themselves as being "modern", "liberal", and RATIONAL, and not like the scary crazy fundamentalists or your narrow-minded traditional old-country Orthodox grandparents/cousins/whatever. A lot of hand-holding in very liberal Jewish groups also is meant to make it very very clear that we're not like those people who think men and women shouldn't look at or touch each other while praying. (Which, fine. But I could do without men trying to flirt with me at those times so I don't actually mind the mechitzah as long as women aren't relegated to a place where they can't see what's going on.)
Unfortunately, it has the effect of forcing people who need the mystical practise to feel like they have actually done anything worshipful to make this choice between politics and fellowship and study or mysticism and getting out of your talky brain and the stress release that comes with that, which is, if you have this kind of neurological wiring--and I do think that neurological wiring has a lot to do with it--a TREMENDOUS stress release. If I can get up into that part of my brain and stay there for an hour, I may or may not be tired afterwards, but I feel so much BETTER.
I think that one of the attractions of fundamentalism and Chabad and ultra-orthodoxy and the conservative strains of neo-Chassidism is that they are not afraid of your strong emotions and your mystical experiences.
I find this disheartening not just for my own sake but because people who are overworked, underpaid and chronically stressed are not drawn to cerebral religions where there's a lot of debate and discussion. They need the stress release and they need to be told that they're okay (or that they can be okay without having to work and think and do MORE--the appeal of getting born again over social justice work to working class folks is not accidental).
Sometimes I think that what progressive political parties and religious groups need to do first is lay off the guilt tripping and make things more fun and more ecstatic and more emotionally accessible and EASIER. But now we are spiralling off into a whole different rant. Still, there's a reason Gay Pride WORKS and gets people to come back over and over and over, yet protests turn into riots or ten people come.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-06 09:29 pm (UTC)From:In liberal churches I think a lot of the huggy talky share-your-story-handholdy stuff is an attempt to introduce some feeling of community into the whole thing, but because anyone CAN show up, it makes me uncomfortable. Not just because I have social anxiety, and not just because my own religious practise tends to be more traditional and less huggy, but because anyone and everyone could be there and I don't know who I am sharing my story with.
Eeeeeyeah, I can see that. I think in your position I wouldn't be in super-duper-sharing mode, either.
In a tribal religion (like Judaism, and most pre-Christian pagan religions) everyone who has been born or adopted into the tribe belongs to the tribe, whether they believe in anything or not.
That belief matters is one of the big differences between Christianity (especially Protestant Christianity) and Judaism and also one of the big differences between tribal paganism and Neo-Paganism. That is actually one of the things Neo-Paganism derives from the fact that it is a post-Christian religion and that almost everyone who is a Neo-Pagan is a convert from a nominally Christian or culturally Jewish family who has grown up their whole life long with the belief = religion equation.
I thought this was really interesting, because for some definitions of "belief" it fits my experience, and for some it doesn't. I think if we define "beliefs" as "values," it fits perfectly. It matters to our group what you believe, because it matters to the people you're circling with whether you respect their freedom to decide certain things (such as how to initiate, or whom to be in a relationship with, or what gender to identify with if any, or whether to continue a pregnancy, etc.).
If you define it as "religious beliefs," though... it ceases to matter at all. We have a wide spectrum from atheists (of whom I think there are at least two or three, myself included) to people who specialize in dealing with ghosts to a woman who talks to fairies and another man who talks to a dragon that tells him about the future. As far as what we believe is going on around us and which stories are true, there's a really wide divergence.
I used to think that was just because orthopraxy matters more to Neo-Pagans than orthodoxy, but one of our priests sent me an article via email a bit back that changed how I looked at it. It's about how Neo-Pagan religions were cobbled together in a time when diversity couldn't be escaped, so they're frequently built to survive in a different environment than religions whose origins lie in a time when you could trust that your neighbor and the guy across the street and even the people across town probably believed more or less the same stuff you did. Because of that, being able to handle diversity can be as important to the basic nature of a lot of Neo-Pagan traditions as resisting diversity can be to a lot of monotheist traditions. So while sitting next to a homophobe in a Christian church might not be a huge problem in that circumstance, circling with one in a Neo-Pagan kind of environment prompts a lot more questions as to what the hell that person is even doing there.
This is not to say that Neo-Pagan individuals (or even Neo-Pagan groups) are always going to be better about these things than older monotheist traditions. There are too many Dianic groups for "women born women" and too many gender essentialists and heteronormativity in general (because hey, fertility cults, it's an easy pitfall) for me to say that. Wanted to give that disclaimer. Practicing a religion whose values and customs are shaped by the expectation of diversity doesn't mean members themselves always have the tools to handle it.
Unfortunately, it has the effect of forcing people who need the mystical practise to feel like they have actually done anything worshipful to make this choice between politics and fellowship and study or mysticism and getting out of your talky brain and the stress release that comes with that, which is, if you have this kind of neurological wiring--and I do think that neurological wiring has a lot to do with it--a TREMENDOUS stress release. If I can get up into that part of my brain and stay there for an hour, I may or may not be tired afterwards, but I feel so much BETTER.
I hear that. It's almost certainly more vital to you than to me, but it's also more important to me than almost any other atheists I know.
It made my handfasting interesting, because I wanted the ceremonial experience and I wanted to have the energy that I look for from rituals, but without invocation of or salutes to deities that we don't believe in. It turned out great, though, because the only blessings we needed were from each other and the community that loves us and we had that in abundance. For our group, a group that's based more on shared values and support of our common humanity than orthodox beliefs about the material world or the supernatural, this worked beautifully. I don't think that kind of arrangement would have worked in a group that's united in a different way, though.
Even a lot of atheists are sort of thrown that we had a religious commitment ceremony, because they don't always know what religious practice does aside from act as a vehicle for faith, so they don't know what could possibly be there for anybody without faith. I have a need for religious practice even though I've come to be comfortable with the idea that the stories are stories, but the practice I have doesn't happen to be one that forces me to choose between having the ritual I want and the community I want.
I picked my religious practice in large part because I like the religion as a cultural system, but if Neo-Pagans didn't show signs of working on the heteronormativity and weird gender stuff (which, from what I've seen, the Neo-Pagan community has been pretty responsive to), I absolutely would ditch them in a heartbeat. What I need is so tied up with common values that even if practicing with homophobes or transphobes or misogynists could still work for some people (because it leaves the thing they're after largely untouched), it undermines my whole reason for being there.
I need to connect with other people as much as I think some people need to feel a connection with a deity. I used to think I fell into the latter category until I visited a mosque in religion class and realized that I loved performing salat because I liked praying with the Muslims and not because I liked praying to Allah. (As you can see I would make a very poor Muslim.)
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Date: 2011-07-27 11:00 pm (UTC)From:The biggest problem, in my mind, with the "not all Christians are like that!" (replace Christians with white people, men, straight, cis, etc. as necessary) isn't that it's often the case of a Christian (or whatever) demanding that their feelings be considered too. They do, in fact, have a right to have their feelings considered, as much as anyone else's.
The problem is that the claim is insulting. It's implying that the people complaining have not noticed that the majority of Christians, of white people, of straight cis males, and so on, are decent people who have maybe some failings but overall, don't want to hurt anyone and would love for everyone on the planet to be happy and healthy.
When I bitch about Christians, I kinda take it for granted that the audience knows a whole lot of decent Christians, and that they know I know a whole lot of decent Christians. That I am either using handwavy shorthand for "the icky Christians," which we all acknowledge as existing even if we don't agree on which ones those are, or that I'm talking about a systemic unrecognized problem in almost all Christian communities, which they'd work to fix if they understood it was there at all.
I may get upset at how much they don't acknowledge it even when it's pointed out directly, but I don't get upset that they haven't fixed a problem they can't perceive.
The harping on "all Christians aren't like that!" implies that non-Christians who grumble about Christian behavior are stupid and unobservant and horrifically bigoted--instead of allowing that they know perfectly well that the majority aren't like that, and they kinda assumed their audience would understand which subset of Christians was actually the target of the rant.
When the Creepy Guy at the bus stop winks at me and tries to pinch my ass, and I angrily mutter "men!" to the other passengers, I'm not inviting a lecture about how most men don't do that. I'm saying, that's a man thing (no woman at a bus stop has ever tried to pinch my ass), and I wish the men who did that, wouldn't. When I bitch about Christians, I expect the readers to know I don't mean "all Christians do this" but "the Christians who do this, get away with it because they're Christians."
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Date: 2011-07-28 07:04 am (UTC)From:This, x100. If being Christian makes somebody uniquely able to be a jerk, if their jerkness is motivated by their Christianness, and if being Christian means they get to get away with it, then I don't think I'm being a bigot to say, "Damn it, Christianity. Why you hatin'."
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Date: 2011-07-28 09:02 am (UTC)From:Also, I wish I had a dollar for every person who assumed I was a hateful, mean, uneducated and ignorant bigot who has been horribly abused by Christians when I said that while I like Gothic styles, I won't wear anything with a cross on it because Christianity took our scriptures and teaches that we will all be converted to Christianity in the end and that they are the true followers of our G-d and historically has forced conversions of our people, so I feel I'd be letting them all down if I wore a symbol of Christian identity. I don't quite get how they can make the leap from "some Christians do this to Jews and this horrible thing happened in 1400 that was all an attempt to erase Jewish identity, so I won't give the impression of allowing my Jewish identity to be erased" to "Tiferet has clearly been driven insane by torture from individual Christians and now thinks we're all like that."