TOPIC:

I'm glad Penny ousted that Reader guy. He was being rude, but it made me want to come play in the mud of the religious discussions forum.

I happen to be a solitary practitioner (a.k.a. witch), who dedicated herself to the Mother Goddess Earth, when she was 16. With all the religious schemes I've seen unmasked as control systems over the years, I'm very glad to worship a Goddess I touch every day. To gain my understanding of her I reach out to my interdimensional oversoul and ask for guidance and protection from the higher dimensional oversoul of the living being that is our planet.

The clearest vision I've received through this process was one in which I observed the Goddess pulling together strands of survivor groups from different timelines/dimensions and braiding them into a tight cord of survivors, who can carry the stories of the civilizations she has spawned past the current bottleneck. The Mother has been writing stories in the language of DNA for a couple of billion years, and she has been very glad to have a new flowering of sentient beings echoing and elaborating on the core stories of life and death in new languages. As I've developed my beliefs I've come to see story as the basic building block of existence. However, I need to work on explaining and defending this idea, as I don't often get to have deep meaningful conversations about ontology, with people who are able to challenge my ideas without deriding them.

One of the unique constructions of my ontology is how I envision the story realms. I like to imagine each self aware being as a point of consciousness traveling along a fiber. Taken as a whole the living minds of a world make up a cord that is shifting for position among the cords of it's other-dimensional siblings. Wrapping around these massed cords is the thin sheath of the two dimensional story realms. I think they serve the same purpose as the myelin sheath around neurons. By having a construction of stories, that are told, written, and depicted over the generations, we enhance the vibrations of the archetypes they contain, and shield us from the signals of other cords of embodied stories.

Any thoughts?

I want to let Penny know how brave and strong I see her being as she confronts a topic that has caused her so much trauma. I think the following excerpt from her recent post should be added to the rules post, which is pinned at the top of the forum.

PennyBradley wrote: How I define "religion":
A system of beliefs hardened into a dogma from which there is no allowed deviation.

It is based on Holy Books or personal interactions with beings not in 3D physical bodies.
It answers the questions:
Who created us?
What is our place in the world?
How do we interact with others?
What happens to us when we die?
Explanations for paranormal experiences.

There is a 'hero': A prophet, the writer of the holy books, the creator of their cult, a deity [usually not physically available]. As in someone to worship and/or someone to obey.

There are rules for behavior that may or may not make rational sense, and usually involve pecking order slavery and mind control.

Any group that worships ETs of any kind.

For my academic/philosophical purposes I've been trying to define some terms that get at a persons beliefs and how they shape perceptions that go beyond the classical definitions. One of my most important terms is going to be worldview. Worldview is the concept that each person has boundaries on what they will accept as real. I am someone who contemplates a multidimensional existence and makes room in my worldview for all imaginary things to also be real. I do this by including the following axiom in my worldview, "Existence is so vast that anything the human imagination can conceive of must be real in some where/when."

Another key aspect of worldview is that it is formed from the combination of a person's environment and their philosophy. I'm not sure that I will continue to use the word philosophy to define this aspect of worldview, but it is currently a placeholder for the combination of an individual's personal beliefs with their professional beliefs. A large part of the usefulness of my worldview model for understanding an individual's beliefs hinges on describing the difference between personal and professional beliefs.

I wish I could devote more of my time to this type of intellectual puzzle, but thank you all for making space to express these things here.

Thank you for your support about my decision to boot Reader--aka Peter O'Connor on YouTube. I appreciate that a lot. I thought he was rude and suspected he was an agent.

Also thank you for bringing this discussion to the Religion section where people triggered by the whole thing have the option to avoid it.

I used to be a devout Christian. The kind that drives everyone nuts because I was really living it--I had a group of widow ladies I would check on every week to make sure they had food and a friendly face in their lives. I applied to become ordained in the Episcopal Church. Because of this application, my Dissociative Identity Disorder became a problem. The hierarchy called it 'demon possession'. I was put into a 'treatment plan' of weekly exorcisms by 2 ladies trained by Elijah House. After 2 years, they declared me 'clean'. But I still had DID, so I was excommunicated.

When my memories of that first alter were activated, my belief in Jesus and the Church disappeared. I remember having it. I remember thinking it was the only thing that mattered. But it was literally gone overnight. Instead, I had a revulsion for any religious system that was based on mind control. And I have literal panic attacks when people force it on me, like my Church of Christ family does. [Oh, I'm damned to hell, just ask them.] And I have a potty mouth that I never did before as well--and not just in English.

What I actually practice is Contemplative Meditation, just like a Carmelite. The Practice of the Presence of God--only without the Christian Sky Daddy. I am reaching out to what New Age and Alchemists call 'Source' and the ETs in space call "The Creator of All That Is"--and it is genderless. I mostly concentrate on reintegrating my alters and finding a way to live with their crimes. Not judging every detail of the memories they bring with them.

I get your Gaia appreciation. That makes sense to me. The one goddess you can touch every day. That makes sense to me. And thank you again for being reasonable.