This God is Not for You
Did you know that certain Religions are "Closed Religions"
A micro-post on micro-religions to kick off this Memorial Day micro-week.
For reasons I can’t fully explain, part of my current spiritual formation has involved looking into new religions or “micro-religions,” as they are called in some places on the net. I find the idea interesting, and I like to see how they are constructed in the very nascent stages. It’s unlikely I’ll become an adherent of any of them, but then again, if I’m truly out here searching for truth and one of these speaks to me in that special way, why not? Either way, I’ve found that merely observing their construction shows me a little bit of the “inner guts” of religion that I was missing.
Some are almost completely pilfered from more established cosmologies, others are bizarre beyond belief, and many are somewhere in between. Most I come across don’t fully take themselves seriously, they are more of a metaphorical construction of a mostly atheistic ethical system. I find it all pretty unfortunate; I think our world needs something transcendent and authoritative to ground us as the tide of progress now sweeps us along at the speed of sound, soon light.
In the more structured discussion areas on new religions (very few), they almost all require some sort of exterior gate, whereby you have to prove you’re not there to just grief everyone else inside. One that I joined a month ago required a short application of six questions, some about me and some about my “new religious” beliefs. I found it to be a cute intellectual exercise, feeling a sense of great freedom in writing about something that required no certainty, that allowed me to be as vague as any novice prophet could get away with. I had fun being playful with my words, realizing that I was going more for a feel than any actual verifiable truth. Needless to say, I got in (praise be to Meta-Kroptnic, AltGod of Bismuth).
One thing that I found very interesting and wanted to share: one of these application processes asked me to verify that both me and my religious beliefs would be in alignment with two of their server rules: one being against transphobia and another against appropriation of “closed religions.” I had never heard of this concept before, so I decided to follow their link resources and look into it myself. Here is a selection that I found below from the site Practical Paganism:
I could carry on here, but I guess I’ll just say this and then leave the rest of the thinking up to the reader:
If religion is the means by which we search for the ultimate meaning of our lives and reality itself, and if identitarian drivel like this gets to set the “boundaries” around what that religion can be and who participates in it and how, then what is the actual religion being followed?