Quote:
Originally Posted by DechanDawa
I have tried to return to the Roman Catholic Church - religion of my birth. All was going well until I woke up to the fact that....how, how, how can I be a part of that broken system? I already did this for over 20 years with Buddhism until I could no longer ignore the "issues" around sexual abuse within the community --- Why oh why can't I accept that patriarchy must END? And that means the systems need to be destroyed because no one from within is looking at huge revamping. I do like communal ritual but what now? A Wiccan CIrcle? I cannot see myself dancing naked in the moonlight with a bunch of female drummers. No disrespect intended. (I have done solo Wiccan Rituals.)
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Something tells me your "What now?" was a bit rhetorical but since there's so much math and science in this thread, I figured I'd throw in some history.
Because people tend to hold so strongly onto their beliefs, I don't think you can ever truly 'destroy' a religion until every believer of that religion has died.... But even that isn't right anymore thanks to written records -- now the digital age -- because there will always be a record of it and it's inevitable that someone will eventually try to restore it.
{RANT} History is just as important as math and science. As George Santayana said, "Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it." If -- culturally speaking -- something died out, there was a reason for it doing so and before resurrecting it, it would behoove you to figure out why it died out in the first place to avoid making the same mistakes and thus ending in the same result. {/RANT}
I'm a bit of an outsider on religion since I never ascribed to one (even when my parents pushed it when I was a child) and maybe it's partially that I still don't fully understand them but the one thing I've found that religions seem to have in common is that they tie back to a creation myth (no offense). It doesn't matter if it's monotheistic (e.g., God) or polytheistic (e.g., Isis/Osiris/Horus/Ra of Ancient Egypt, Odin/Thor of Norse mythology, Zeus/Athena/Poseidon of Ancient Greece, etc), it always seems to go back to at least a bit of a creation myth. Heck, even Pastafarianism with its Flying Spaghetti Monster had a creation myth!
Circling back around.... I can't fathom how people would be willing to revamp a religion thus the only possibility would be to scrap it and start anew, but that's unlikely to happen without a new myth as a basis.
However, I will concede that things in history tend to cycle back around and polytheism -- in the form of neopaganism -- is becoming more and more popular around the world. So maybe it won't be too long before there's a new option out there that doesn't involve naked Wiccan dancing.