Mixed Beliefs..., Such a thing DOES exist...

The belief in Christ as son of God, and as savior is not a mark of religon vs. spirituality. That, is a mark of a Christian. Now one can be Christian and not be religous. I hesitate to say that one can be truely Christian and not be spiritual. The way I see it, Spirituality is your connection with God. How familiar you are with the world beyond and those of it. Religon, I see as what I've heard described as 'Works'. Things like ritual, sermons, symbolism and all the other physical aspects representing a belief system.

I'll give myself as an example here. I consider myself as spiritual, because there are so many things that I am convinced are truely beyond this physical world. Every time I write I feel like it's from a world that can only be recognised as spiritual. I have seen, felt, and experienced way too many things that not only convince me of the fact that God exists, but have given me a feeling for myself as a spiritual being. I've not attained self-realization, But I believe that any being in existance can transcend any physical form. That anyone can reach outside and beyond their body and traverse space and time via a spiritual connection.

That said, I do not have many religous symbols in my life, beyond a crusifix hanging on the wall. I rarely go to church, and the closest I've come to practicing a communal pagan ritual of any kind was an attempt at crossing the veil and contacting Shadows last Samhain. To sum up. I rarely do anything that might be openly recognised as practicing any religon, yet I feel a deep, personal connection with the spiritual realm, and with God, including frequent conversations.

I hope this helps in understanding, at least what I see as the difference between religon and spirituality. Religon can help spirituality, just that one must be careful not to get too lost in it.

Well said and well put... I feel the same way... I used to get lost in religion, myself, as I was raised pentecostal... slowly but surely, though, I learned to grow beyond that bound and add other aspects to my beliefs...

Glad to say I'm still growing...

I myself think of mine as a mixed belief.
But then again, I think there is rarely anyone who has not a mixed belief in some kind, since there are only very few truely original beliefs left on earth. Christianity was developed from other beliefs. Some kinds of natural spiritualities are unmixed, I guess. But that should be about all.

you know the funny part about christianity is that some of the holy days are the same as the "pagan" ones they just changed the name!!!!i guess they thought that they could recruit people that way and take the fun out of things!!!aaawwkk.i mean what is wrong with the equinox, or say beltane??

I agree with Aaediwan, when he said that Spirituality is your connectin with God(or whatever you choose). Symbols, such as Crucifixes define belief, and kind of put people in a category, per say, of beliefs.
Let me tell a quick story....I went to a small women's Catholic college in New England, and before that I had no idea what Catholicism was. I was raised in a small Protestant church. My Mom asked the President of the college, who was a nun how the college in general felt about non-Catholics...her response was basically to say that it doesn't matter, as long as the school was giving the person( meaning me) a good education(and paying the bill!) My philosophy after that was "We all believe in the same God, although we may be on a different channel!!!!
Whatever we believe in, we all live in the same world, and have similar experiences. It is how we choose to participate in the world, and act on the chances that we are given that shapes our experiences with the world!1

Marti

Personally I don't find that funny at all. I'd even go as far as say each pagan holiday has a christian holiday around the same time, it's just that most of them are only regionally celebrated or almost forgotten completely.
But I think it's not only for recuiting people but also that when they realised that people celebrated their holidays and wouldn't stop, christians just invented their own holidays with some similar background, saying "if they must celebrate they shall at least celebrate our holiday".
I mean, beside the well known holidays such as christmas=yul, samhain=all hallows, easter= ostara, there's a feast called somewhat with johannes, where they have a big fire and dace around it, sing and jump over it, if it's not too big for that. sounds like litha, doesn't it? I believe imbolc also has some kind of christian holiday connected I just can't name at the moment. and isn't it the same with beltane? Then there's mabon, that should be around thanksgiving (at least the german thanksgiving).
Then there's only lugnasad left for that I don't know any christian holiday. But there's one for sure. *believe*

Lughnasa is aso called Lammas:

A quarter day in Scotland (Christian holy day when certain tithes are due); also commemorates St. Peter's miraculous deliverance from prison. It's a "first fruits" or early harvest celebration in churches all over the british isles, so I'd say its origins are pre-Christian, and Christian events in the calendar might have been selected to "paste" over the earlier pagan ones by missionaries.

Most people around here call Imbolic Groundhog Day, and Beltaine May Day. Perhaps not Christian by definition, but definately accepted by the Christian community.

*sigh* I do call it Lammas. I just thought this was not so common in english. At least, you know, what I meant

Groundhog Day? Like the movie with Bill Murray? COOL!

i didn't mean it as in hahaha, i meant it as in odd/strange that these things happened. that christian belief was built on the older beliefs of others.

it's not that paganism was the basis of christianity. Pagan holidays were re-named by the catholic churches in those new areas so that the "heathens" would have an easier way to relate to the christian church and likely by doing so would be easier to convert because the "church" thought that it would be easier to explain it to the uneducated and easily convertable. The two religions would then supposedly appear that they weren't that different from each other. At least that's what they thought they were doing by creating the christian holidays so close to the pagan holidays. Big difference than it being one of the building blocks.

The Catholic Church - believe me, one type of christian does not fit all christians - did it as an assimilation tactic, in my opinion. Bring everything under the purvue of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Back then, they thought they were doing God's will.

There are these underlying phenomena in nature -- world's nature and human nature -- that bring up the same impulses and needs or longings, and they come out dressed in culturally specific ways, but the bedrock longing is the same. Probably the most striking is the winter solstice, at least I feel it so -- inexorably getting colder, getting darker, symbolically and even literally death aproaching -- and then it stops, wavers there a few days while all nature holds it breath, and turns around. Nobody escapes seeing that. If you want to express it as spiritual life ebbing and a savior, identified as much with helpless man (as a baby in poverty) as with immortal god, born in the moment the sun turns around and validates the redemption with a powerful natural phenomenon, it's very compelling. It's another very rich layer added to an intuitive structure that already had countless layers -- and since these myths arose in all kinds of places independently, I believe "which came first" often isn't important. They all point to the same primitive human perceptions, fears and hopes. The odd thing would be if there were humans who had no myth about the solstice at all, even right at the equator.

Just an example.

Very profound of you...

>nods<