Comments on: Religion, spirituality, and personal growth

By: Kate Williams

Kate Williams — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 21:34:59 +0000

Really appreciate your practical take on such emotionally charged topics. Distinguishing between religion, spirituality and personal growth is a useful way to begin gaining the ability to peacefully accept people's different affiliations, beliefs, and perceptions. This acceptance leads to empathy. Being able to access empathy for others is critical if we want to universalize religious/spiritual teachings and learn from our different perspectives or "outfits". . . . Kate Williams’s last blog post..Heart of Money Pre-release Mistake! Oy!

By: Pace

Pace — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 19:59:12 +0000

@Bart: Why does it make you so angry?

By: Bart

Bart — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 19:56:27 +0000

OMG, I was kind of fascinated by most of your posts until I got to this piece of crap dribble. What color is the sky in your world anyway..

By: Iron Pentacle | Pace and Kyeli

Iron Pentacle | Pace and Kyeli — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:31:40 +0000

[...] week, Pace talked in depth about spirituality, both in general and personally. This kicked off a new series – we’re going to do a series of [...]

By: Pam

Pam — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:50:52 +0000

This is a great explaination of what I have been ATTEMPTING to explain to people about my views on religion (as a Pagan people tend to get tangled in the terms “religion” when I use it because they don’t agree that it can be a religion) and spirituality and how, really, they are different and personal and intimate things…

Thanks!!

By: Pace

Pace — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:29:36 +0000

@JoVE: I don't believe in the divine, at least not in the sense most people use the word "believe" as it pertains to supernatural or unobservable things. I don't have faith. I started out as a total skeptic and rationalist, then eventually opened myself up to the possibility of experiencing things outside of my scientific paradigm. I didn't suddenly choose to believe in things, I just opened myself up a little more. Then I experienced things like magick, feeling connected to the universe, moving energy, and other things that are hard to describe. At first I needed to understand it, to try to explain how magick worked in terms of psychology. Explaining why I felt this sensation of connection in terms of my temporal lobe being stimulated. But eventually I stopped being so rigid in my paradigm, because it wasn't serving me, and I adopted a more flexible "If it works, it works, regardless of whether I understand why it works" attitude, and I prefer it greatly. (:

By: JoVE

JoVE — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 03:17:32 +0000

This is very interesting and thought provoking. I like thought provoking. Like Paul, I have problems with the divine part (or maybe I just read his comment that way). I think you might have to believe in the divine to be open to it (though not believe anything in particular about it). And that’s where I kind of falter. But a lot of the other stuff makes sense, including Oliver’s point (with your clarification)

By: Pace

Pace — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:35:32 +0000

@Joely, @James, @Chris, @Megan, and anyone else with a five-letter name: THANK YOU! This post was difficult for me to articulate and scary for me to post. Thank you. (:

@Oliver: I agree that religion can be useful and helpful. As long as religion SUPPORTS individuals’ spirituality instead of trying to CONTROL individuals’ spirituality, it’s all good.

@Paul: That’s a very good question. I don’t think spirituality presumes belief in the divine. All it presumes is openness to the divine — whatever that means to you. Belief is anti-openness, because it means you’re already closed off to the possibility that what you believe could be false.

The type of experience I have in mind is definitely contemplative and meditative. Truth-seeking. As for self-verifying knowledge, provability, and that sort of thing, I think that all paradigms, including scientific paradigms and faith-based paradigms, eventually bottom out in assumptions. Scientific paradigms assume an objective reality; they assume that what can be measured is true. Faith-based paradigms assume unobservable things about the nature of reality; they assume that what is believed is true. At the end of the day, I pick the assumptions that are more useful to me. I pick the set of assumptions that make me happier. And personally, I prefer to live in a universe filled with the divine, filled with oneness and connection, rather than a universe made of random atoms bouncing together like a pinball machine. I know it’s a story I tell — but every paradigm is nothing more and nothing less than a story. And that’s part of my story too. (:

By: Paul Maurice Martin

Paul Maurice Martin — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 03:50:28 +0000

I share your views on much of this.

Question: does spirituality presume belief in “the divine?”

Alternately, if you’d be inclined to say that we directly experience the divine:

What makes the type of experience you have in mind as constituting the experience of the divine (sounds like it would be contemplative/meditative) necessarily “of the divine?” How does it tell us there’s such thing as the divine? Can knowledge be self verifying? If an experience carries the feeling of knowing something, does that constitute self verifying knowledge or something not quite that?

By: Megan M.

Megan M. — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 15:24:46 +0000

There are fundamental truths of the universe, and different people, different religions, and different spiritualities each interpret these truths differently. It’s like switching window managers but keeping the same kernel.

ADORABLE!

Your interpretation bit is just like what I do. I translate. It gets pretty easy when you’re used to it. (Some things don’t translate, but that’s usually a problem with the concept, not the framework.)