First post: 11/22/2008
Last post: 5/5/2009
Total posts: 59
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It's rather both, for me. I was raised Catholic, and that was (and still rather is) strongly bound-up with ethnicity in the old town, ...And that really wasn't even so much about *practices* as *narratives.*
I'm obviously Pagan, and *that* certainly has to do with identity and ancestry... to me, there was always a sense that the Catholic practice and narrative was really some kind of outside, imposed, influence, that 'the tribe' just couldn't be at peace with, ...like some kind of fever that someone may deal with in various ways, maybe even forgetting what life was like without it, but, I guess, never really being 'healthy,' (I'm really not meaning to imply Catholicism is a 'disease' or anything so inflammatory, just, well, it seemed like this outside thing everyone had to wrap their lives around dealing with, mostly causing a lot of distress and fear, and where it spoke sense, it always seemed to do it in a way that still managed to overcomplicate it, freak everyone out, and as often as not make them feel too crappy to act on even the simplest of virtues if they stopped to think about the religion end. Much effort spent on *saying,* "This is our identity," but even to the devout, it didn't actually seem to make *sense* in terms of our lives and continuity. Required its own special compartmentalized logic. )
Obviously, I could fill out a few comment cards about my experiences, but in terms of heritage and ancestry, well, I'm in an interesting position, I suppose... I call it personal experience that the Old Gods never left us... And that experience was quite different from what people said "Religion is."
The names and stories remain, of course, but the *practices* were systematically-destroyed, co-opted, demonized, edited and such... (No illusions here that there surely wasn't a bunch of stuff back there both we and the Gods can do nicely without, nowadays, mind you.)
But even lacking the *body of practices,* ...even being rather miseducated to believe I must be the Last of the Mohicans in this regard, *I* always felt that systems and words and practices are things *we* make, and if there's anything so mystically-defining as 'identity' in that way, then you find it by living and informing your nature, not by trying to *battle* it in order to cleave to some label or external system.
It seems to me that most religions have a way of dealing with conflict... And some ways of dealing with religions, in a sense, *are* conflict.
Where a tribe decides to invest their identity, whatever their religious beliefs, well, seems to be the determining factor about what leads to aggression.
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