Fluffy or non-fluffy, that is the question


What makes one path real and another not?

A very interesting topic came up over at the Wicca For The Rest of Us forums.

The question as I see it is what makes one set of beliefs real and another unreal?

The short answer is that I do not see an objective way to do it.

Subjectively, yes, I can make a distinction. I can say that Path A is destructive or counterproductive. I can say that Big Name Pagan B doesn't know what they are talking about. I can (AND do) poke holes in their scholarship and sloppy thinking. I can compare against known "good" references. I can try it out myself. I can take it to the gods and ask for advice.

But I can't point and say objectively, "That is a bad idea."

Matters of faith, spirituality, and religion are emotional and highly subjective. While reasoning isn't entirely eliminated, it certainly has less importance in the passion of the moment.

This was my latest post on that thread.

You know I have been thinking about this for a couple of days now, and I have tried a few times to post a reply. Windwalker has a point. It comes down to the story you bring into it.

And before you start making distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, let me tell you I can line up agnostics and atheists who I've discussed things with in the past. If you start saying that your story is more "real" than the stories of someone who follows Star Wars, the first response from my atheist/agnostic philosophy buds would be "Prove it!"

When it comes to our stories, there isn't an objective reality that we can point to and say "Look. Here it is!"

For that matter, we know that story tellers keep visiting certain themes again and again because they know those themes work. Heck, we know from his own words that George Lucas studied the works of Joseph Campbell pretty intensively, and applied it to his filmmaking whenever he could.

Oberon Otter Zell-Ravenhart has done some interesting work for Pagans over the years. But I don't believe for a minute that he is selling "real" unicorns, and I don't agree with many of the assumptions that went into his Grey Council thing. Does that make him fluffy? I would say so.

Does that give me the right to condemn his beliefs and actions? Ah, there is the rub, isn't it? I can't very well condemn his beliefs without opening myself up to similiar attacks for the same reasons.

The only other thing I can think of to judge him by (or anyone else for that matter) is how he has touched the lives of others. Even there, the questions can be dangerous. I don't think the question should be "Does Zell-Ravenhart make people's lives better?" Maybe the real question is "Do people choose to be better because of Zell-Ravenhart?"

Otherwise you are just exchanging one Messiah for another.

My grandfather's death taught me that the measure of a man is in the lives he touches. I guess that is the measure of his faith too.

I'm going to think about it some more.

Posted: Tue - March 21, 2006 at 08:30 AM
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