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silveradept[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
sonia talked about the difference between spirituality and religion, and how being atheist does not necessarily mean being without spirituality, in conversation with sabotabby talking about atheism, lack of spirituality, and all of those pricks who call themselves atheists and rational thinkers but still look at the world from a religious perspective. I agreed at sonia's that one can be spiritual without requiring a religious framework or a god or gods in your spiritual framework, and then I sat on my hands, because study of religious frameworks is a thing that I have done, both formally and informally, although not necessarily comprehensively, and infodumping where it's not asked for is usually bad form, or so I have learned.
It's not a secret of my life that I was raised religious, as a Roman Catholic, and that I did many of the things that Roman Catholics do when they are young, both in participating in the ritual and in being assistants to the ritual. This was several years after the decision to perform the ritual in the vernacular (Final Score: Vatican II, Latin 0) and a decision somewhere along the way that boys and girls could both perform assistant duties for the rituals involved. Still no ordination for women to the priesthood, still requirements of celibacy for priests, still some time before the numerous issues regarding priests and underage boys (and girls) became a regular part of the newscast. Also, at least one of my relatives is a Catholic priest.
One of the things that several religions that I have seen at work or studied academically do is have rituals for children that have them taking on greater responsibilities in the community of the religious, or moving themselves further along a dedication pathway toward fully committing to the religion and its belief systems and rituals. There's also a pathway for adult conversion, usually, but it's interesting that after the rituals of "a new one has been born into our community," a fair number of religions also have signifiers for children to continues along the pathway they are set on by their parents. Not just the learning of prayers and the procedure of common rituals (themselves containing easier prayers to learn and repeat, like Our Father, and much more difficult ones, line the Nicene Creed), but Catholicism's sacraments include both the first time of participation in the Communion at or around the ages of 7-8, as well as learning the ritual of the Confession (and absolution) of sins around the same age. After that, there is the Confirmation of full membership in the Catholic faith (after some additional amount of education) for those about age 13 or so. It was described to me at the time as the confirmation of being a full adult in the Church, several years before the secular authority would confer adulthood and the ability to enter into contracts and access age-restricted materials.
For the most part, these rituals and education processes were conducted with the air of inevitability, in contrast to some of the other Christian denominations that I was exposed to, that seemed to center quite heavily on the requirement that to be a Christian, you had to desire it, and come to the table with a sincere confession of your faults and a prayer that the merciful aspect of The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton, through the contract made with Jesus of Nazareth, both man and God, slaughtered as sacrifice so that we could take advantage of this contact, would win out over the aspect that would punish us as we deserve for or sinful behavior and condemn us to the eternal punishment we deserve. I suspect, however, that there were plenty of children and adolescents on those sides also going through their checkpoints with the feeling of inevitability rather than choice. For as much as Mennoinites, and the Amish specifically, are seen as odd ducks in the greater Christian ecosystem, their practice of "rumspringa," sending someone out into the world to experience it for some amount of time, so that if they come back and commit, they do so with the knowledge of what they are giving up, makes a significant amount more sense to me. It's interesting how little that practice is adopted elsewhere, even if other branches of Christianity don't intend to sequester themselves away from the world outside as much. It seems like an important part of keeping a community of worshipers through the ages would be to have communities composed of people who have engaged in introspection, evaluated, thought, possibly wrestled an angel or two on a ladder, and come to the conclusion that this community, this ritual, this belief system is what they want to live their lives by. (Stick a pin in that, we'll come back to it later.)
Not having rumspringa is one thing, but many of those denominations also express a desire to evangelize to the world, and eventually, to convert the world to their belief system. Yet they don't go quite as all-in on the idea as the Church of Latter-Day Saints does, sending out their adults on missions. I have seen several suggestions that this mission is not, in fact, to gain converts, although they would certainly be welcome, but to establish an understanding that the religious community is the only welcoming body these new adults can expect to have through the repeated rejection of the wider world to listen to their evangelism and proselytization. If so, one, that's not cricket to exploit an adolescent brain that is trying to establish connections and a group of their own for safety and survival toward the end of making them believe their religious group are their only friends, and two, if that is the actual purpose of the missions, why aren't more denominations doing it? Several of the denominations and churches that have abandoned their spiritual authority to sit at the feet of politics that strongly contradicts their religious charges would appreciate some tactic to keep their young as part of the church, whether through fear of eternal judgment or establishing a belief that only the religious community has their best interests at heart. (And if this sounds like something that should trigger warning signs and high scores on the Advanced Bonewits' Cult Danger Evaluation Frame, congratulations, you have been paying attention.)
[There's a digression here about the etymology of "cult" and how what made those Jews and early Christians dangerous radicals was their refusal to participate in the official religion of Rome that deified Emperors, and how there's a hypocrisy present in those whose origins are in defying a state religion and clinging to their monotheism now wanting to force the rest of us to treat their beliefs as the state religion. Plus how many of their beliefs are not spiritual, but political, deeply rooted in the worst of the -isms, and how easily they have been swayed from the worship of their god to the idolatry of whichever man is willing to take up their causes and promise them temporal power and the blessing of the state religion. Other people cover this aspect much better than I do, so this is a capsule summary of all that.]
While still at the age where the expectation of me would be that I would perform all the appropriate rituals and remain a practicing Catholic for the rest of my life, there were prominent cases of neopagans exercising their religious freedom rights to wear the symbols of their faith at school, cases that resulted in the courts ruling for the separation of the church and the state expressed in the founding constitutional document of the country and in favor of an individual's freedom to express their religious belief. The cases garnered significant attention, of course, because those symbols and names have been demonized for centuries by Christians, religious and secular, and there was much fundraising and public pronouncements about how the United States were losing the favor of The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton by allowing someone who had professed their allegiance to the Enemy (upgraded significantly from the previous role of the Adversary) to display their allegiance and practice their evil. (Not that long afterward, that entire apparatus would turn to the demonization of Islam and much fundraising and public pronouncements of how increased tolerance of other religious practices and of people who did not conform to compulsory heterosexuality or the sex roles and gender identity they were assigned at birth were also siphoning away the favor of said Being.) I'm pretty sure the Church of Satan had an opinion in the matter, and it was as flamboyant and attention-grabbing as possible while pointing out the obvious and correct point that religious freedom is not for some in the United States, and of one group gets to express their religion through choice of symbol, so does everyone else, regardless of what the opinion of the culturally hegemonic religion is. (Similarly, if you offer one group the option to deliver prayers before your meeting, you are offering all groups the option to driver prayers before your meeting.)
The concept of religious witchcraft, magical ritual, and the defictionalization of the supernatural effects present in many fantasy novels had a curious appeal. Demonstrating the skills that would serve me well in my later profession, I read widely on the subject and came to the rather quick understanding that what I was looking at was religious practice, with a conception of deity (or deities) as compared to a singular Deity, and ritual around asking for the assistance of those whose domain the ask was part of. Along with regular ritual honoring those deities (or their archetypes).
Yeah, there's always a little disappointment where the child who likes fantasy and wants a more magical world than the current one finds out it's much less obvious effects in the world and much more about putting yourself in the right frame of mind to notice and act upon the changes you want to see in the world, alongside the possibility of experiencing the interventions of things that cannot be logically explained. And, as I read more widely, I got to see some insight into how certain authors were being painted as far too much sunshine and rainbows, too much into leaning into the fad, and not following up their cotton candy and bubblegum with the understanding that this was a religious practice and worthy of study and deep thinking. As I would read much later on, after the brief bit of spotlight passed onward, the thing that had gotten lots of attention involved a small number of people and what they believed or wanted to believe or reconstruct about previous religious practices, with commentary about the whiteness and maleness involved, even in a system that has a Divine Feminine among with a Divine Masculine. And there were already works in dialogue about how to successfully perform ritual and archetypes to use if you were queer and looking to get away from compulsory heterosexuality or the gender binary. I didn't read those books when given the opportunity, which I now realize was a missed opportunity to broaden my understanding further and see into the dialogue (and possibly figure out whether some of the branches that concerned themselves solely with women and the feminine were also TERFy, not that I had the language to describe that so succinctly.) And people drawing differences between that practice and their hereditary traditions, or other branches of paganism, reconstructionism, heathenry, and the like. I had found my way, with the assistance of Interlibrary Loan and the World Wide Web, into a robust discussion of which I knew very little and could see myself in the groups being derided by the longer-term practitioners, and so I kept quiet and read.
I put my university studies to good use as well, as many of the courses that I would take that allowed me to walk entirely backwards into my undergraduate concentration and degree were either about philosophies, religious practices, or the societies that produced the same. I got to learn abbot Latin Christendom and the ways that religiosity suffused life in that area. I got at least a survey understanding of the Judaism that Christianity broke off from, and how Jewishness curbed on from that point, sufficiently that I can understand why there are so many arguments with the Deity, why there is an encouragement to both textual analysis and open discussion among practitioners, and why there is a large corpus of midrash to work through alongside the more scriptural elements. Similarly, a survey understanding of Islam, and the richness of interpretation, art, and hadith that developed from the origins. And the ways that all three of those belief systems have been used as justification for aggressive violence against the Other. I got to see the interplay of Master Kong, Master Xun, Master Moh, Master Lao, Master Zhuang, and how the appearance of a(t least one) Buddha both gave contrast and integrated well with those philosophies. As well as how those philosophies and ritual prescriptions integrated with, tried to get rid of, or changed in dialogue with animism and other ways of looking at the spiritual and ritual that grew out of the indigenous practices of the places these philosophies and religious traveled. (Because there was plenty of violence there, long before colonizers and would-be conquerors came to their shores and cities.)
What that's left me with is a lot of information and not a lot of practice. Some of that is the variable attention haring off to get more information, know more, learn more, and always be on the lookout for something new. Some of that is the perfectionist not wanting to approach a situation where something might go wrong, be wrong, or otherwise offend the other people of a group, or the person attempting to teach. Mixed in with that perfectionist is the person who takes rejection hard, thanks to trauma and the experiences of my childhood around what happens when the spinning plates crash down. Following this is a general lack of being around the right people that would provide introductions to different spaces to see public ritual, the time to to watch public ritual, and these days, the general danger of being around other people without a knockout vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. So if there is a grand revelation waiting for me, it may have to wait longer before thwacking me upside the head. Another possibility is that the grand revelation has already happened and is patiently waiting for me to stop chasing shadows and recognize the fundamental truth of living in this moment and no other. Or, the revelation has already happened as is waiting for me to fully embrace the Discord and stop trying to build aneristic structures. Or has happened and is patiently waiting for me to align myself with the flow of the Dao instead of trying to build structure to resist it. (There is an appeal to philosophical and religious structures that say we are already perfected and our task is not in striving for perfection or constantly falling short and needing grace and forgiveness to receive reward or avoid punishment, but to recognize our own perfectness and stop striving for it. Or to get in tune with nature/the cosmos and do the things that keep us best in tune with that.) When you are, as they say, too much in your own head, then there's less opportunity to get convictions or experiences that will assure you your chosen path is correct. (This can be both good and bad.)
Which gets us all the way back to that pin near the beginning, the one about optimal religious settings being composed of people who have studied, who have gone looking, who have sought an answer and who believe they have found it in this particular set of rituals, philosophy, ethics, cosmology, and community. It also brings back the discussion mentioned at the beginning to the fore. At least in US society, there is an expectation that as part of attempting to establish their own identities and find the peers who will accept them, adolescents will engage in a rebellion phase against the beliefs, practices, rituals, and prohibitions of their parents and instructors. Rarely, at least in media, is this rebellious phase treated seriously, respectfully, and with information and answers, because the grownups involved have often come to expect obedience to authority from their adolescents, and media often frames the narrative that Good Parents are entitled to that obedience because of their virtue, while Bad Parents deserve to have their authority flouted because of their failures and shortcomings. Everyone seems to agree, though, that the adolescents will eventually grow up and recognize the wisdom of their responsible grownups (who may or may not be their biological parents) and thank them for the adulting skills they provided, even when learning them was the last thing on an adolescent's mind.
Reality is far more complex than this, of course, and pertinently to this entry, there's are still plenty of people out there with very valid reasons not to go back to the places or the beliefs of their parents and grownups, and to have skepticism that any such systems will be a net force for good and virtue in the world. Or they went through the motions, but when it came time to independently continue what had been taught to them, they decided they didn't have the necessary conviction to go forward with it. Some of them got smug and superior about having broken away from the chains and the shadow plays and believe they are standing in the bright sun so all may bask in the glory of their Rational Thought, Effective Altrtuism, or similar items. These people often end up in places where "sheeple" is used unironically, where eugenics, fascists, and manosphere types all hang out and congratulate each other on their enlightened thought. Some of them do go back to the ways of their grownups, because they find out that their society has arranged itself around the church and who is at church and they cannot get ahead, or even maintain their current pace, without immersing themselves in that culture and using all the skills they learned as a small child going through the motions. Some of them have that experience that puts them on a path and nothing can shake them from it, because they no longer have to justify it in their own head, but instead draw on the experience itself.
I think that still leaves a lot of people with an idea of something, sometimes vague, sometimes very well developed, about the construction of the universe, the source of their ethics, and their approach to interacting with other humans and other creatures of the universe. There isn't necessarily a corresponding formal ritual component, even if there are informal rituals or practices that have been adopted without their religious context taught or applied. So you get a lot of people who say they're spiritual but not religious. I wonder how many of those are that way because they haven't found their community yet, which is a failure of information transfer and/or visibility of the thing being sought, and how many of those are because they have, in fact, done a significant amount of study and come to the conclusion that none of the current frameworks fit them and they're not interested in creating and maintaining their own bespoke framework. Not everyone will have access to both the time and the resources to go on a journey of learning, testing, and figuring out where they feel is the best fit for themselves, and not everyone will have an environment that will give them the space and the freedom to go out and explore. (Even if Luke 15:11-32 exists for Christians as a parable on how someone might best behave if their child goes out to explore and find their way among the rest of the world.)
As someone who has had a religious upbringing, and furthermore got the cultural Christian immersion of United States society, it makes me pretty conversant in Christianity and its metaphors and outlooks, and possibly a little quicker off the line to understand the metaphors and the outlooks that other people with similar backgrounds have, even if I end up vehemently disagreeing with them on those things or how the other person is choosing to interpret them. Ultimately, I have had an attitude toward Christianity that's in the same department as the attitude that I have toward masculinity, that there are too many people and interpretations in there that I definitely don't want to be associated with to consider an association with the greater item. (An attitude succinctly, if cheekily, summed up by "Lord, save me from your followers!") Perhaps if and when Christianity cleans house pretty significantly, with a large amount of driving out the charlatans, the political devotees, and the others who are doing a disservice to the religious tenets laid out in the books, there will be some amount of rethinking the position of returning to the faith of my parents. (In this case, "driving out" doesn't necessarily mean expulsion, as forgiveness and catholicism (as in, creating a church of many different people) are key tenets of the faith, but it definitely does mean stopping them from becoming people of power, influence, wealth, and amassing large numbers of followers to themselves, in pretty stark contravention of what they were told to do in the foundational writings.) It still may not happen, but there's currently too much no in the way of seriously considering it. As we get older, there's the possibility of Pascal coming into play, but there's also the potential comfort of either having another go at it in another incarnation or having managed to achieve the enlightenment and stopping the cycle of reincarnation. or possibly even the thought of having lived a life that stands well enough on its own regarding virtue and ethics that even if there is naught past death, it will not have been wasted time or a life filled with regrets about what could have been done better.
sonia talked about the difference between spirituality and religion, and how being atheist does not necessarily mean being without spirituality, in conversation with sabotabby talking about atheism, lack of spirituality, and all of those pricks who call themselves atheists and rational thinkers but still look at the world from a religious perspective. I agreed at sonia's that one can be spiritual without requiring a religious framework or a god or gods in your spiritual framework, and then I sat on my hands, because study of religious frameworks is a thing that I have done, both formally and informally, although not necessarily comprehensively, and infodumping where it's not asked for is usually bad form, or so I have learned.It's not a secret of my life that I was raised religious, as a Roman Catholic, and that I did many of the things that Roman Catholics do when they are young, both in participating in the ritual and in being assistants to the ritual. This was several years after the decision to perform the ritual in the vernacular (Final Score: Vatican II, Latin 0) and a decision somewhere along the way that boys and girls could both perform assistant duties for the rituals involved. Still no ordination for women to the priesthood, still requirements of celibacy for priests, still some time before the numerous issues regarding priests and underage boys (and girls) became a regular part of the newscast. Also, at least one of my relatives is a Catholic priest.
One of the things that several religions that I have seen at work or studied academically do is have rituals for children that have them taking on greater responsibilities in the community of the religious, or moving themselves further along a dedication pathway toward fully committing to the religion and its belief systems and rituals. There's also a pathway for adult conversion, usually, but it's interesting that after the rituals of "a new one has been born into our community," a fair number of religions also have signifiers for children to continues along the pathway they are set on by their parents. Not just the learning of prayers and the procedure of common rituals (themselves containing easier prayers to learn and repeat, like Our Father, and much more difficult ones, line the Nicene Creed), but Catholicism's sacraments include both the first time of participation in the Communion at or around the ages of 7-8, as well as learning the ritual of the Confession (and absolution) of sins around the same age. After that, there is the Confirmation of full membership in the Catholic faith (after some additional amount of education) for those about age 13 or so. It was described to me at the time as the confirmation of being a full adult in the Church, several years before the secular authority would confer adulthood and the ability to enter into contracts and access age-restricted materials.
For the most part, these rituals and education processes were conducted with the air of inevitability, in contrast to some of the other Christian denominations that I was exposed to, that seemed to center quite heavily on the requirement that to be a Christian, you had to desire it, and come to the table with a sincere confession of your faults and a prayer that the merciful aspect of The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton, through the contract made with Jesus of Nazareth, both man and God, slaughtered as sacrifice so that we could take advantage of this contact, would win out over the aspect that would punish us as we deserve for or sinful behavior and condemn us to the eternal punishment we deserve. I suspect, however, that there were plenty of children and adolescents on those sides also going through their checkpoints with the feeling of inevitability rather than choice. For as much as Mennoinites, and the Amish specifically, are seen as odd ducks in the greater Christian ecosystem, their practice of "rumspringa," sending someone out into the world to experience it for some amount of time, so that if they come back and commit, they do so with the knowledge of what they are giving up, makes a significant amount more sense to me. It's interesting how little that practice is adopted elsewhere, even if other branches of Christianity don't intend to sequester themselves away from the world outside as much. It seems like an important part of keeping a community of worshipers through the ages would be to have communities composed of people who have engaged in introspection, evaluated, thought, possibly wrestled an angel or two on a ladder, and come to the conclusion that this community, this ritual, this belief system is what they want to live their lives by. (Stick a pin in that, we'll come back to it later.)
Not having rumspringa is one thing, but many of those denominations also express a desire to evangelize to the world, and eventually, to convert the world to their belief system. Yet they don't go quite as all-in on the idea as the Church of Latter-Day Saints does, sending out their adults on missions. I have seen several suggestions that this mission is not, in fact, to gain converts, although they would certainly be welcome, but to establish an understanding that the religious community is the only welcoming body these new adults can expect to have through the repeated rejection of the wider world to listen to their evangelism and proselytization. If so, one, that's not cricket to exploit an adolescent brain that is trying to establish connections and a group of their own for safety and survival toward the end of making them believe their religious group are their only friends, and two, if that is the actual purpose of the missions, why aren't more denominations doing it? Several of the denominations and churches that have abandoned their spiritual authority to sit at the feet of politics that strongly contradicts their religious charges would appreciate some tactic to keep their young as part of the church, whether through fear of eternal judgment or establishing a belief that only the religious community has their best interests at heart. (And if this sounds like something that should trigger warning signs and high scores on the Advanced Bonewits' Cult Danger Evaluation Frame, congratulations, you have been paying attention.)
[There's a digression here about the etymology of "cult" and how what made those Jews and early Christians dangerous radicals was their refusal to participate in the official religion of Rome that deified Emperors, and how there's a hypocrisy present in those whose origins are in defying a state religion and clinging to their monotheism now wanting to force the rest of us to treat their beliefs as the state religion. Plus how many of their beliefs are not spiritual, but political, deeply rooted in the worst of the -isms, and how easily they have been swayed from the worship of their god to the idolatry of whichever man is willing to take up their causes and promise them temporal power and the blessing of the state religion. Other people cover this aspect much better than I do, so this is a capsule summary of all that.]
While still at the age where the expectation of me would be that I would perform all the appropriate rituals and remain a practicing Catholic for the rest of my life, there were prominent cases of neopagans exercising their religious freedom rights to wear the symbols of their faith at school, cases that resulted in the courts ruling for the separation of the church and the state expressed in the founding constitutional document of the country and in favor of an individual's freedom to express their religious belief. The cases garnered significant attention, of course, because those symbols and names have been demonized for centuries by Christians, religious and secular, and there was much fundraising and public pronouncements about how the United States were losing the favor of The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton by allowing someone who had professed their allegiance to the Enemy (upgraded significantly from the previous role of the Adversary) to display their allegiance and practice their evil. (Not that long afterward, that entire apparatus would turn to the demonization of Islam and much fundraising and public pronouncements of how increased tolerance of other religious practices and of people who did not conform to compulsory heterosexuality or the sex roles and gender identity they were assigned at birth were also siphoning away the favor of said Being.) I'm pretty sure the Church of Satan had an opinion in the matter, and it was as flamboyant and attention-grabbing as possible while pointing out the obvious and correct point that religious freedom is not for some in the United States, and of one group gets to express their religion through choice of symbol, so does everyone else, regardless of what the opinion of the culturally hegemonic religion is. (Similarly, if you offer one group the option to deliver prayers before your meeting, you are offering all groups the option to driver prayers before your meeting.)
The concept of religious witchcraft, magical ritual, and the defictionalization of the supernatural effects present in many fantasy novels had a curious appeal. Demonstrating the skills that would serve me well in my later profession, I read widely on the subject and came to the rather quick understanding that what I was looking at was religious practice, with a conception of deity (or deities) as compared to a singular Deity, and ritual around asking for the assistance of those whose domain the ask was part of. Along with regular ritual honoring those deities (or their archetypes).
Yeah, there's always a little disappointment where the child who likes fantasy and wants a more magical world than the current one finds out it's much less obvious effects in the world and much more about putting yourself in the right frame of mind to notice and act upon the changes you want to see in the world, alongside the possibility of experiencing the interventions of things that cannot be logically explained. And, as I read more widely, I got to see some insight into how certain authors were being painted as far too much sunshine and rainbows, too much into leaning into the fad, and not following up their cotton candy and bubblegum with the understanding that this was a religious practice and worthy of study and deep thinking. As I would read much later on, after the brief bit of spotlight passed onward, the thing that had gotten lots of attention involved a small number of people and what they believed or wanted to believe or reconstruct about previous religious practices, with commentary about the whiteness and maleness involved, even in a system that has a Divine Feminine among with a Divine Masculine. And there were already works in dialogue about how to successfully perform ritual and archetypes to use if you were queer and looking to get away from compulsory heterosexuality or the gender binary. I didn't read those books when given the opportunity, which I now realize was a missed opportunity to broaden my understanding further and see into the dialogue (and possibly figure out whether some of the branches that concerned themselves solely with women and the feminine were also TERFy, not that I had the language to describe that so succinctly.) And people drawing differences between that practice and their hereditary traditions, or other branches of paganism, reconstructionism, heathenry, and the like. I had found my way, with the assistance of Interlibrary Loan and the World Wide Web, into a robust discussion of which I knew very little and could see myself in the groups being derided by the longer-term practitioners, and so I kept quiet and read.
I put my university studies to good use as well, as many of the courses that I would take that allowed me to walk entirely backwards into my undergraduate concentration and degree were either about philosophies, religious practices, or the societies that produced the same. I got to learn abbot Latin Christendom and the ways that religiosity suffused life in that area. I got at least a survey understanding of the Judaism that Christianity broke off from, and how Jewishness curbed on from that point, sufficiently that I can understand why there are so many arguments with the Deity, why there is an encouragement to both textual analysis and open discussion among practitioners, and why there is a large corpus of midrash to work through alongside the more scriptural elements. Similarly, a survey understanding of Islam, and the richness of interpretation, art, and hadith that developed from the origins. And the ways that all three of those belief systems have been used as justification for aggressive violence against the Other. I got to see the interplay of Master Kong, Master Xun, Master Moh, Master Lao, Master Zhuang, and how the appearance of a(t least one) Buddha both gave contrast and integrated well with those philosophies. As well as how those philosophies and ritual prescriptions integrated with, tried to get rid of, or changed in dialogue with animism and other ways of looking at the spiritual and ritual that grew out of the indigenous practices of the places these philosophies and religious traveled. (Because there was plenty of violence there, long before colonizers and would-be conquerors came to their shores and cities.)
What that's left me with is a lot of information and not a lot of practice. Some of that is the variable attention haring off to get more information, know more, learn more, and always be on the lookout for something new. Some of that is the perfectionist not wanting to approach a situation where something might go wrong, be wrong, or otherwise offend the other people of a group, or the person attempting to teach. Mixed in with that perfectionist is the person who takes rejection hard, thanks to trauma and the experiences of my childhood around what happens when the spinning plates crash down. Following this is a general lack of being around the right people that would provide introductions to different spaces to see public ritual, the time to to watch public ritual, and these days, the general danger of being around other people without a knockout vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. So if there is a grand revelation waiting for me, it may have to wait longer before thwacking me upside the head. Another possibility is that the grand revelation has already happened and is patiently waiting for me to stop chasing shadows and recognize the fundamental truth of living in this moment and no other. Or, the revelation has already happened as is waiting for me to fully embrace the Discord and stop trying to build aneristic structures. Or has happened and is patiently waiting for me to align myself with the flow of the Dao instead of trying to build structure to resist it. (There is an appeal to philosophical and religious structures that say we are already perfected and our task is not in striving for perfection or constantly falling short and needing grace and forgiveness to receive reward or avoid punishment, but to recognize our own perfectness and stop striving for it. Or to get in tune with nature/the cosmos and do the things that keep us best in tune with that.) When you are, as they say, too much in your own head, then there's less opportunity to get convictions or experiences that will assure you your chosen path is correct. (This can be both good and bad.)
Which gets us all the way back to that pin near the beginning, the one about optimal religious settings being composed of people who have studied, who have gone looking, who have sought an answer and who believe they have found it in this particular set of rituals, philosophy, ethics, cosmology, and community. It also brings back the discussion mentioned at the beginning to the fore. At least in US society, there is an expectation that as part of attempting to establish their own identities and find the peers who will accept them, adolescents will engage in a rebellion phase against the beliefs, practices, rituals, and prohibitions of their parents and instructors. Rarely, at least in media, is this rebellious phase treated seriously, respectfully, and with information and answers, because the grownups involved have often come to expect obedience to authority from their adolescents, and media often frames the narrative that Good Parents are entitled to that obedience because of their virtue, while Bad Parents deserve to have their authority flouted because of their failures and shortcomings. Everyone seems to agree, though, that the adolescents will eventually grow up and recognize the wisdom of their responsible grownups (who may or may not be their biological parents) and thank them for the adulting skills they provided, even when learning them was the last thing on an adolescent's mind.
Reality is far more complex than this, of course, and pertinently to this entry, there's are still plenty of people out there with very valid reasons not to go back to the places or the beliefs of their parents and grownups, and to have skepticism that any such systems will be a net force for good and virtue in the world. Or they went through the motions, but when it came time to independently continue what had been taught to them, they decided they didn't have the necessary conviction to go forward with it. Some of them got smug and superior about having broken away from the chains and the shadow plays and believe they are standing in the bright sun so all may bask in the glory of their Rational Thought, Effective Altrtuism, or similar items. These people often end up in places where "sheeple" is used unironically, where eugenics, fascists, and manosphere types all hang out and congratulate each other on their enlightened thought. Some of them do go back to the ways of their grownups, because they find out that their society has arranged itself around the church and who is at church and they cannot get ahead, or even maintain their current pace, without immersing themselves in that culture and using all the skills they learned as a small child going through the motions. Some of them have that experience that puts them on a path and nothing can shake them from it, because they no longer have to justify it in their own head, but instead draw on the experience itself.
I think that still leaves a lot of people with an idea of something, sometimes vague, sometimes very well developed, about the construction of the universe, the source of their ethics, and their approach to interacting with other humans and other creatures of the universe. There isn't necessarily a corresponding formal ritual component, even if there are informal rituals or practices that have been adopted without their religious context taught or applied. So you get a lot of people who say they're spiritual but not religious. I wonder how many of those are that way because they haven't found their community yet, which is a failure of information transfer and/or visibility of the thing being sought, and how many of those are because they have, in fact, done a significant amount of study and come to the conclusion that none of the current frameworks fit them and they're not interested in creating and maintaining their own bespoke framework. Not everyone will have access to both the time and the resources to go on a journey of learning, testing, and figuring out where they feel is the best fit for themselves, and not everyone will have an environment that will give them the space and the freedom to go out and explore. (Even if Luke 15:11-32 exists for Christians as a parable on how someone might best behave if their child goes out to explore and find their way among the rest of the world.)
As someone who has had a religious upbringing, and furthermore got the cultural Christian immersion of United States society, it makes me pretty conversant in Christianity and its metaphors and outlooks, and possibly a little quicker off the line to understand the metaphors and the outlooks that other people with similar backgrounds have, even if I end up vehemently disagreeing with them on those things or how the other person is choosing to interpret them. Ultimately, I have had an attitude toward Christianity that's in the same department as the attitude that I have toward masculinity, that there are too many people and interpretations in there that I definitely don't want to be associated with to consider an association with the greater item. (An attitude succinctly, if cheekily, summed up by "Lord, save me from your followers!") Perhaps if and when Christianity cleans house pretty significantly, with a large amount of driving out the charlatans, the political devotees, and the others who are doing a disservice to the religious tenets laid out in the books, there will be some amount of rethinking the position of returning to the faith of my parents. (In this case, "driving out" doesn't necessarily mean expulsion, as forgiveness and catholicism (as in, creating a church of many different people) are key tenets of the faith, but it definitely does mean stopping them from becoming people of power, influence, wealth, and amassing large numbers of followers to themselves, in pretty stark contravention of what they were told to do in the foundational writings.) It still may not happen, but there's currently too much no in the way of seriously considering it. As we get older, there's the possibility of Pascal coming into play, but there's also the potential comfort of either having another go at it in another incarnation or having managed to achieve the enlightenment and stopping the cycle of reincarnation. or possibly even the thought of having lived a life that stands well enough on its own regarding virtue and ethics that even if there is naught past death, it will not have been wasted time or a life filled with regrets about what could have been done better.
