The Big Plus for New Age Religions

I've been doing some reading in the past few weeks about the beginnings and spread of Christianity, and it sure makes me glad to be alive in modern times. First of all, many of us are more comfortable with other faiths and philosophies these days ... but more importantly, our dissemination of information is so much better.

If the only way you learn something is to have it told to you orally, and then you travel around and tell it to other people who filter it through their own existing belief system, the whole praise and worship thing becomes muddy as Hell in no time flat. Now we have idiotic blabbermouths like me highly enlightened and educated writers who help keep the good ideas flowing, and allowing the free-flow of existing belief systems to be part of the process.

They say that New Age religion is wishy-washy because our deities are whatever we want them to be. Honestly, you could sure say the same thing about Jesus in the first 300-400 years of Christianity.

As far as Druidism goes, I for one am glad that there is a gulf between what we know about the Celts and what we practice as Druids today. A religion goes south for me when it demands a dogmatic "them or us" mentality, an "ours is the only way" philosophy, or a "we HAVE to do it like this" practice. What works and makes sense to certain generations of people, at certain historical moments, will not work as well at other times and historical moments.

The whole point of "The Gods Are Bored" is to be a member of the chorus of voices calling for religious tolerance, cultural understanding, and the ability to evolve beyond the practices of yester-era. We think Christians have always done things the way they do them now because there's been little change in a long time. But at first there was a wide variety of beliefs and practices, all with their charms.

New Agers (silly term!), let's establish one novelty. Let's allow people to say, "I don't do it that way ... I don't see it that way ... I don't agree ... That's not what I was taught ..." without judgment or approbation. You know when something should be written in stone? When it's interred in a grave.