The Importance of Belief
Do we really need to speak about the importance of UPG? It gets tiresome so quickly in the modern day heathen community. I have distanced myself considerably from online heathenry in all its forms lately for a variety of reasons both practical and necessary. I am out of the loop so to speak for several months now. My greatest interactions have been merely a glimpse into a discussion here and there when it pops up on one of my feeds. As a newly minted social worker, the majority of my study time has been dedicated to social rather than religious concerns lately. I can't deny that even in a short time, my lens has changed considerably. I am living a very different (and better) life now than I was when I first began this blog, and my beliefs have evolved much farther beyond what they were then.
UPG is the "fuck" of the heathen vocabulary, or atleast seems so sometimes. Like fuck, for some it is a naughty word, and for others it is sacred. For a few it resides somewhere in the middle, something natural but mysterious all the same. My own feelings on UPG vary a great deal from day to day. I abhor misinformation and sometimes the abundance of UPG inspires me to a state of repulsion. On those occasions I feel as if I would like nothing more that to slice it all away, get down to the bare bones of what it means to be heathen, operating from a state of verifiable, historical information. I squirm at the amount of people it seems who view their tradition as happy fun times devoid of any sense of responsibility, seriousness, or respect for the very gods they worship. The gods instead become a mask for personal delusion, so ingrained in a person's mental state that deceit and madness flow about them like a palpable aura.
Yet what better is there on the other side of the coin? Individuals so obsessed with detail, with words, with accuracy, their religion is as stale and dry as a desert. It seems paradoxical to me to preserve religion so devoid of belief. And ultimately, is any belief not based entirely on UPG? To me, belief is a conscious abandonment of reason, a choosing of meaning. This is not to say that reason is not involved in the process, don't get me wrong. In any choice we reason, yet ultimately at that moment of choice we are relying entirely on our own perspective, our own experience of the world, for better of worse. When we remove choice from religion, we remove belief. When we remove belief, religion does not live. It cannot be called alive, it is simply a memory of what once was.
The middle is a shaky ground, an uncertain place. Yet for me it works. It is a reliance of reasoning, while at the same time living in the realization that what seems reasonable to me may seem like utter madness for another. I try to live with the gods, experience them, understand them. They are as real to me as the ground beneath my feet and the air I breathe. Yet at the same time, I realize the breadth of my own ability to understand, clinging to reason when passion threatens to sweep me into madness. I reprimand my own conclusions like a gadfly, reminding myself constantly that the nature of the gods will always be mysterious. What right have I to attempt to convince the next person that my way is the right one?
UPG is the fuck we all have to live with if we want a living tradition. UPG is life of our tradition, the fire of belief, no matter how it is informed. That which is nonsensical always falls to the wayside, eventually. To me it seems pointless, all the energy modern heathens put into "weeding out" nonsense that a handful of people might believe at a given moment. I prefer to leave a bit of life in my religion, and let it grow of its own accord, as living things always do.
In Frith
Cena
UPG is the "fuck" of the heathen vocabulary, or atleast seems so sometimes. Like fuck, for some it is a naughty word, and for others it is sacred. For a few it resides somewhere in the middle, something natural but mysterious all the same. My own feelings on UPG vary a great deal from day to day. I abhor misinformation and sometimes the abundance of UPG inspires me to a state of repulsion. On those occasions I feel as if I would like nothing more that to slice it all away, get down to the bare bones of what it means to be heathen, operating from a state of verifiable, historical information. I squirm at the amount of people it seems who view their tradition as happy fun times devoid of any sense of responsibility, seriousness, or respect for the very gods they worship. The gods instead become a mask for personal delusion, so ingrained in a person's mental state that deceit and madness flow about them like a palpable aura.
Yet what better is there on the other side of the coin? Individuals so obsessed with detail, with words, with accuracy, their religion is as stale and dry as a desert. It seems paradoxical to me to preserve religion so devoid of belief. And ultimately, is any belief not based entirely on UPG? To me, belief is a conscious abandonment of reason, a choosing of meaning. This is not to say that reason is not involved in the process, don't get me wrong. In any choice we reason, yet ultimately at that moment of choice we are relying entirely on our own perspective, our own experience of the world, for better of worse. When we remove choice from religion, we remove belief. When we remove belief, religion does not live. It cannot be called alive, it is simply a memory of what once was.
The middle is a shaky ground, an uncertain place. Yet for me it works. It is a reliance of reasoning, while at the same time living in the realization that what seems reasonable to me may seem like utter madness for another. I try to live with the gods, experience them, understand them. They are as real to me as the ground beneath my feet and the air I breathe. Yet at the same time, I realize the breadth of my own ability to understand, clinging to reason when passion threatens to sweep me into madness. I reprimand my own conclusions like a gadfly, reminding myself constantly that the nature of the gods will always be mysterious. What right have I to attempt to convince the next person that my way is the right one?
UPG is the fuck we all have to live with if we want a living tradition. UPG is life of our tradition, the fire of belief, no matter how it is informed. That which is nonsensical always falls to the wayside, eventually. To me it seems pointless, all the energy modern heathens put into "weeding out" nonsense that a handful of people might believe at a given moment. I prefer to leave a bit of life in my religion, and let it grow of its own accord, as living things always do.
In Frith
Cena
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