I am trying really hard to not be insulted by the insinuation that I think asking "should abortion be legal" is like asking "which Ghostbuster is the most awesome." I've HAD an abortion; have you? Similarly, my two Catholic friends are a very liberal woman and a married gay man. I don't think that she thinks abortion is this fuzzy thing or that he thinks marriage rights are this fuzzy thing.
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.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
chiming
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.