Faith and all that Bullshit

I am somewhat angry and some what depressed right now. I am exercising my right to vent my spleen so here it is. I stumbled across Ricks new blog the other day and came across this post about “Community” in it he referred to the wiccan community that we both belonged to as “dysfunctional” and pionted out the moniker “communicable” *in his words* -“because it’s more like a flu-bug than a functioning, healthy, spirit-full community.”

I’m not angry at Rick. The Community was dysfunctional and (it seems) continues to be. I was reminded of this just the other day when I went to pick up some supplies for a third trimester ritual at the occult shop.

I was ringing in my purchases and speaking to a member of priest hood, *Who shall remain nameless* when this person began to spout at me about how they had the victim of “psychic attack” and how there student had had to use “black arts” to defend them.

OY.

Yup Rick, I gotta agree, very dysfunctional. I think the thing that has gotten me in to a funk is that even though (for the sake of my sanity) I have had to abandon some of the people in the community, the spirit of the community still speaks to me.

I still have something of my faith left. But all of the people that I respect from that community don’t really identify themselves as wiccan any more. The few times I have tried to “talk shop” with those people I have been met with polite blandness and responses that ranged from “I don’t really do that any more.” And the very cheerful “I’m ecumenically at large!” (Love you Roben, glad that’s working out for you.)

That’s great that everyone has moved on, and perhaps I should too. There’s a very nice looking Tibetan Buddhist Temple down the road from me and maybe I should just check them out.

But I can help but wonder, all of these people that used to be in this group with me …supposedly we all had beliefs, we all had faith, just because we lost faith in the system did that mean that we lost faith in the belief? Some of these folks have described real-time honest –to-goodness spiritual experiences. One of them invoked Zeus in my living room. Another blithely suggested to me that I should not have been initiated because I did not “see” things. He claimed that he saw auras and got “tv” like results from scrying “all the time” I asked “seeing guy” recently how that whole aura thing was going. His response? “I’m not really in touch with that any more.”

I have never had a vision, never had a deity “borrow” my body. The goddess does not have an on going dialogue with me. I would think that if any of these things had happened to me that it might be a bit harder to simply walk away from my faith.

Perhaps I am wrong.