Barbelith Underground > Temple > Christianity

i do not want a sickly-sweet 'its true if it is true for you' sentimentality hiding from sight the ugly truths of death and suffering,

Neither do I. This is an unhelpful and not particularly convincing caricature of spiritual relativism. The ability to accommodate the validity of the spiritual outlooks of other cultural and ethnic groups into one's personal understanding of the Divine, does not equate to a "comfort-zone" where one attempts to hide from the naked truths of existence. Far from it. Any functioning magical practice brings you up hard against the bare facts of your physical existence. Voodoo certainly does. I can assure you that there is nothing "sickly-sweet" or "sentimental" within the spiritual perspective of a religion that survived intact through the horrors of slavery. Yet Voodoo is capable of incorporating core elements of religious perspectives as diverse as Catholicism, western esotericism and Hinduism into itself without undermining or compromising its essential nature - due to its ultimately experiential basis.

What we know as "Vodou" came into being because of the widespread practice among plantation owners of ensuring that their enslaved workers came from different geographical regions. It was understood that if you had too many enslaved Africans from the same nation, they would be more likely to bond together through shared religious and cultural beliefs, and rise up in mutiny. Therefore people from the same region were brutally separated from one another in order to cause division among the enslaved. The theory didn't exactly hold. The enslaved Africans managed to overcome their cultural differences and points of religious dogma through necessity, and hone in on the essential core of their spirituality - and we are talking about a broad diversity of different African groups most of whom didn't even share a language. Vodou also grew to accommodate the core elements of the disenfranchised Taino and Arawak peoples native to Haiti, along with elements of European folk belief brought by indentured servants, and ultimately Catholicism. Most Vodouisants in Haiti, and elsewhere, would consider themselves devout Catholics and not see any contradiction between that and their African spirituality, due to the experiential and participatory nature of Vodou.

The basic position is: there is only one Divine Source, and we all share the same reality together, therefore all cultural perspectives on the Divine must in some sense be reaching towards and attempting to understand the same fundamental mysteries of existence, each from a different angle. Vodou is about seeing beyond the tribal differences to the underlying spiritual truths, rather than focusing on the tribal differences and killing one another over them. It is a position of spiritual relativism that quite clearly doesn't boil down to your rather glib and new-agey 'its true if it is true for you', and one which has been maintained by a culture that has had significantly more confrontation with "the ugly truths of death and suffering" than well-fed westerners such as you and I with the leisure time to quibble about such matters for days on the internet.

If the powers of reasoning that you are currently displaying in this thread are the same ones that you have been using to grapple with the theological matters under discussion, much suddenly becomes clear.

I don't mean to suggest my powers of reasoning are greater than anyone else's, but i will defer to reason and logic above emotionalism when seeking truth.

So why have you made a "rational" decision to invest total unquestioning belief in something that contains so many somewhat irrational ideas? How does that work?

The sentence you quote was not directed at you at all but at myself. The fact that it is a challenge equally applicable to your currently professed position is incidental.

"Total coincidence, squire! Would you believe it! Funny old world, eh?" Bollocks is it.

Since those comments are all you've really offered in response to pages of reasoned argument from various parties, you can't really blame readers of this forum for taking the contents of your most recent post as being directed towards your interlocutors in some sense...

This is a discussion forum. Your consistent and sustained inability or unwillingness to engage constructively with any of the points raised that effectively challenge your position already speaks volumes and says just as much as anything you have actually contributed here. As does your tendency throughout this thread to characterise any comment that you are unable or unwilling to engage with as being "emotional" or based on "hurt feelings".

Christianity - the end point of Paganism?