Search results

Does your religion or tradition have standard prayers, perhaps collected in a prayer book? Is individual, spontaneously formulated prayer a thing in your religion? If you do both, how do you decide which type of prayer to say?

I'm reading the latest book by Dave Lee, "Primordial Chaos". Published on Amazon - your local bookseller might not want to order it for you for that reason, but can't hurt to ask. It's an absolutely fascinating collection of essays and articles spanning four decades of Chaos Magic history and...

Dear all, I'm currently focussing on healing my foot (going very well, but taking time), with my remaining energy going into relationships and work. I haven't been able to keep up here, and this is not going to change in the short term. So, cheers to you all, see you at some point in the not...

I've been thinking about Patron Saints, and wanted to see what this forum has to offer in terms of collective wisdom and experience. So my one parent's family is Roman Catholic, and they have a history of revering the Lady of Częstochowa. It turns out her feast day was last Saturday, when I had...

To our Christian contributors: Have a wonderful Holy Week. In my family of origin, we didn't have any particular observances during Holy Week, but we had a custom of teasing the last one to get up on Palm Sunday, the "palm donkey" for the day.

Do you have friends who share your beliefs? Do you socialize outside your religious group? What are the beliefs of your real-life friends? My closest friends are mostly non-believers, one is a Buddhist, one a Christian, and my partner believes in keeping her Jewish heritage alive in a very...

Alcohol is a substance that's been with humanity for a long time now, since prehistoric times. Some researchers theorize that grain cultivation arose driven by the desire for beer-like fermented drinks, rather than bread, initially. Grapes and other fruit ferment readily. Human ingenuity plus...

Have a good one!

Dear all The forum software was just updated. It was a minor update, and went smoothly, but if you notice anything not working as before, please speak up and we'll look into it.

Are there songs from your tradition or faith that are important to you? Which ones, and what do they mean to you?

In my country, church bells are ubiquitous. They ring the hours, the half hours, and for religious services. In some regions on certain holy days, they seemingly ring without pause. There is no tradition of playing tunes on church bells here, however. I grew up in countries where church bells...

Are you familiar with the phrase "Spiritual Bypassing"? My understanding is that it refers to using spiritual or religious concepts to justify to oneself and others why one does not acknowledge and confront one's own shadow side in behavior. An example from Buddhist circles: Using the concept...

It's getting darker by the day where I live, on the northern hemisphere. As someone from Iceland put it, "We have the sun here, we just can't see it". Well, not that extreme in my place, but still, I could use some uplifting conversation. So here's a proposal: Choose a religion (or world-view)...

In a recent thread, @Ahanu mentioned having read certain texts of Nietzsche very carefully on the recommendation of a roommate. Since I only casually read "The Gay Science" and "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", decades ago, and admittedly for the shock value (I was a believer back then), I would like...

What are your thoughts on the founder(s) of your faith? Were they perfect beings, with irreproachable behavior? Were they fully human, with recognizable weaknesses, shadow sides, "warts and all"? How do you prefer to think of them? As a divine inspiration, due to their virtues? As a...

Hm, not sure which passage you mean? Dhammapada Verse 5? My stilted, mostly word-by-word translation: Not, indeed, is hatred by hatred appeased here at any time; By non-hatred it is appeased, this is the law, everlasting. However, I don't see any blunder in the more conventional renderings...

We will be performing a software upgrade in the coming 24 hours. The forum may be down for a few hours. We will try to minimize the downtime.

Some faiths have what I call "lineage" or "transmission". Examples are the ordination of clergy in some Christian churches, which trace their lineage back to the blessing of St. Peter by Jesus, or Buddhist monastic ordination lineages, which likewise trace themselves back to the historical...

In a recent thread, @Ahanu recommended the following paper by Roland Faber as an example of Baha'is understand Buddhism on a more profound level than "Buddha was a manifestation of God": Here is a link to the paper: Baha'u'llah and the Luminous Mind It is a rather long treatise at 54 pages in...