If you want to overcome a powerful adversary, one possible tactic is first to make a caricature of your enemy into a bogey to frighten your children, and then reduce that bogey to an absurd oversimplification of your enemy.
This is exactly what the Christian church did to ancient paganism.
Continue readingThe “Ten Commandments” of Solon (as recorded in Diogenes Laertius’ “Lives of Eminent Philosophers”, 1.60), are as follows:
Hat-tip to Richard Carrier, from whom I learned about this list of “commandments”.
Art: “Solon the Wise Lawgiver of Athens” by Walter Crane
Changing Paths challenge day 27: change
My favourite times of year are the transitional seasons of spring and autumn, when everything is changing rapidly. In spring there are new blossoms and new leaves emerging, and the days lengthen rapidly. In autumn, the leaves turn red and yellow and orange and are blown away in the wind. The smell of bonfires is in the air, symbolising the transformation of decay into the bright energy of fire.
Changing Paths challenge day 26 — wobbling
Spiritual wobbles can happen when your spiritual path becomes out of synch with your religious community. They can be dry spells, when it feels as if the source of your spiritual life has dried up, or the wobble can propel you out of your old path and into a new one. It depends how severe the wobble is.
Changing Paths challenge day 24 — wondering.
There’s wondering in the sense of asking questions about the nature of things, and then there’s wonder in the sense of amazement.
Changing Paths challenge day 23 — longing.
There are various words in other languages that can be approximately translated as longing or yearning. Sehnsucht (German), a longing for a person or a place. Saudade (Portuguese), melancholic longing for a person or a place. Hiraeth (Welsh), a longing for home, possibly unattainable since we cannot revisit the past. Tizita (Amharic-Ethiopian), a longing or yearning, which has given its name to a style of music. Romanian has the word dor, which comes from the Latin word dolus which means “pain” and is related to the Romanian word durere (which means “pain”).
This is an excerpt from my book, Changing Paths:
“Changing your religious or spiritual path can result in unexamined spiritual, emotional, and intellectual baggage from your previous tradition, which can cause all sorts of issues from depression to anger. We all need to unpack and deal with our unexamined baggage. The Tarot card of the fool traditionally depicts a small dog leaping up and biting the Fool’s butt. The dog can be seen as representing material from the unconscious trying to attract the attention of the conscious mind.”
Marriage is an odd composite of disparate concepts. It’s a legal contract to share property. It’s usually contracted between two people who love each other. It’s a meeting of minds and hearts. When it’s really special, it’s a sacred union of two people in an alchemical and spiritual relationship.
Continue readingReaders of Changing Paths may wonder why I chose not to address theological questions like the existence of God, the afterlife, and related questions.
The first part of the book is aimed at people seeking to leave a variety of high-control traditions, which could be anything including fundamentalist Christianity, fundamentalist Islam, high-control new religions such as Scientology, and even high-control versions of Paganism.
For each of these traditions, the theological arguments are different, so rather than devote a large amount of space to them in the book, or write yet another book about why a supreme creator deity does not exist, I wanted to write about extricating yourself psychologically from harmful religious traditions.
Some years ago, I started the festival of Borrowed. It’s on February 28th or 29th, and is a reminder that the Earth is precious and ecosystems are fragile. It seems even more relevant in the face of the climate emergency.
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Dowsing for Divinity 