“Question, Seek, Reflect, Respect.”

“Carry Light, Wield Thought, Honor Faith”

What follows will be thoughtful, researched, and controversial.  I do not swing swords at faith. I walk the edges, lantern in hand—seeking meaning, not argument; reflection, not condemnation.   If what I am writing ‘rubs you wrong’ I ask the same thing I ask of my daughter when she gets mad at me.  “Step away, reflect on why it made you mad, and if after 24 hours you are still angry, RATIONALLY DISCUSS IT. ”  I may be in the wrong and not aware of it, and I will admit my wrong if shown such.   For brevity, I am keeping comments closed.   Any such discussions will be via email, my proton account listed in the sidebar.   Keep it civil, keep it intelligent: any deviation from that will get round-filed.  Solid ‘debate, can and will likely get copied and pasted to this page as I would like to share with the rest of the world.  IF that doesn’t work for you, please address the email up front as such (even just the letters -DNP-  ), otherwise, you are warned that your words may be made public.

This is just a test page, to see if I want to pursue a full site.   Emails will be part of the judgement, my perception will be the crux.

SO, where to start?   Always start at the beginning.

I was 7 or 8 when I had my first deep questions.  I recall it vividly: I walked into the bathroom and when I caught a look at my face in the mirror, I asked “who are you?” because I really, truly, did not recognize that face staring back at me.   

Maybe I should back up a bit.   My family is both religious and agnostic.   My mother was the religious one, my Da was not.  Fact is, I have no idea what my Da believes to this day.  Something that I will be rectifying here soon.   But Da always told mom, “The kids are allowed to go to church until such time as they no longer want to, then its their choice; not yours.”

It was about the time of my ‘Who are you moment’ when I started questioning everything about the teachings we were getting.    Things didn’t sit well in my pre-pubescent brain.   Things like our pastor condemning Satanists, but the original ‘God’ in the old testament wanting blood sacrifices and virgins burned at the stake?  That sounded to this young’un exactly like what the Satanist’s were doing.    Then his Jealous God status,,, none of that sounded like the teachings we were supposed to accept on faith, definitely not the actions of a loving all powerful God.   Add in to that equation, how can a SINGLE GOD, the ONLY GOD, be jealous of anything, unless he wasn’t what he said???    Simple questions of a childhood, but with long thought-lines and profound answers later down the road.

At first, I just started looking at other religions, (my mother was a Baptist,)  Mostly in the various Christian sects because that was what we had near at hand, but later into the other faiths, like Islam, Buddhism, Hindi, Orthodox Russian, Coptics, even Paganism and Wiccan.   Why not, start looking at the full spectrum and maybe there will finally be some stray beam of light shown.

It wasn’t until I found the Gnostic texts that things started making some sense.    Islam was a flat no-go.   More of that whole Medieval Barbarism thing, like the blood sacrifices of the Old Testament Yehwah.   Brutality being the backbone of Sharia.  And most all of the religions (wicca and pagan as outliers) were highly Gender biased, meaning women were NOT equals, and in most cases were mostly “Property” and that totally went against my ethos against slavery.   I need you to realize, that while I was initially brought up with mild socialist views (I got better with age.), and with 2 older sisters, Feminism was never that big of a thing in my world.  I respected women, thats just how my family did things, but I never felt that women were better, more important, or any of that shit that has brought the world to its knees in the recent Gender Wars.    Women can be just as good as men, and the reverse is true; Its an indvidual thing, not a gender one.  The one exception: Men can NOT carry babies.   Men can be the ‘stay at home mom’ type and pull it off, but there is no way, short of MAJOR science and medical tinkering, that a man is going to carry a baby to term.  And I won’t lie, with some of the things I have been learning, I would bet the child of that Frankenstein experiment would be a literal monster in mental issues.  

But I’m jumping the gun here.

Comparitive religious studies, ad-hoc, deep dives into explorative reading, forced to study the bible in detail while in lockdown, eidetic memory for written words, and No mentor to direct my explorations: I came to many conclusions, right or wrong, on my own.   Most of my conclusions are biased for “human nature’ since that was where I had some experiance.   And most of that human nature experiance said “Most People will do and say whatever they need to, for THEIR BENEFIT.’   That was always the underlying thought as I dived into anything and everything I could get my paws on.   My dives really took off with the growth of the internet.  My goto source for reading now is “gnosis.org“.

Historical accounts of the Church after the Ascension of Christ also had much to do with my education: bearing in mind my bias of “Human Nature”.    

I’m going to leave this open for now, and will add on as I get my current writings organized into “this, then that, and this was the conclusion” as right now, its a jellyroll of chaos and extrapolations with little or no source citations and (admittedly) dogma flaming.   I intend on getting rid of that aspect.