C/D: "I'm not religious but I am spiritual."

I had a girl read my chart in front of my ex and say “if you guys got together it would be beautiful and mad” and I was thinking Well, yeah. We did.

i know people that run magic stores, sell Tarot decks, do readings, Reiki, etc. i have friends that give massages and do sound therapy. i have friends that use reclaimed witch & sorcerer imagery for show fliers, zines, art. probably 1/4 of my friends regularly post astrology charts in their social media. i am not going to try and argue with any of them that it isn't real or that magic doesn't really exist. what a waste of time.

ive had my chart read. you can't deny that sitting down and going through a process of self-analysation (however bs the power of the cards may objectively be) can produce some amount of insight or realization as a result. many of my friends have made art inspired by the tarot. some of them have approached the material with a spiritual attitude and some of them with a purely secular aesthetic admiration. both is fine, they are not hurting anyone. if anything they are creating things and partaking in an age-old global folk culture.

thats what our paedo priests said

Tarot as we now know it was mostly ginned up by some Golden Dawn weirdos sometime last century iirc

they saw it on 60 minutes

as i posted on another thread ten mins ago

is that where my rep for inscrutability comes from i wonder

It’s of a piece

i know people that run magic stores, sell Tarot decks, do readings, Reiki, etc. i have friends that give massages and do sound therapy. i have friends that use reclaimed witch & sorcerer imagery for show fliers, zines, art. probably 1/4 of my friends regularly post astrology charts in their social media. i am not going to try and argue with any of them that it isn't real or that magic doesn't really exist. what a waste of time.

In the last few years, I’ve definitely noticed an uptick of interest in tarot and astrology among hipster-ish women I know, mostly in their late 20: buying books, occasionally paying for readings, making comments like, “That’s such a Capricorn thing to do.” The coffee shop I play music trivia at started offering monthly tarot nights, and a each month has a night where people can do chart readings for a particular zodiac sign. They’ll usually say, “I don’t really believe in it, but it’s fun to think about,” though they’ll get defensive if someone mocks astrology or tarot. No idea whether a correlation, but I remember really noticing it after Trump was elected—reminded me of the counterculture interest in astrology and New Age stuff ramping up when Nixon was elected. Searching for a guiding light in turbulent times etc.

i think they're trolling tbh

it's definitely an ironic twitter-induced affectation

I have opinions but it's Friday and pub and just chillax it's all semiotics and fun people

Although I also wanted to ref the best bit in Foucault's Pendulum where the 60s political bookshops turn into 80s magic and new age bookshops

Tarot as we now know it was mostly ginned up by some Golden Dawn weirdos sometime last century iirc

there are precedents for card games and divining systems all over the world from before that. modern tarot decks predate the Renaissance. there is the Italian card game Tarocchini originating in the 17th century. this fits in line with the birth of modern occultism, the alchemy and kabbalah movements, etc. on one level we can call it out as Orientalism or cultural colonialism, yet no doubt influenced by the global access granted from new technology (the printed word).

by the time it hit the 19th century spiritualism movements it was a modern US cultural phenomenon, almost a "fad" by modern standards. tho the coastal elites like the Golden Dawn get the most attention it was more or less a national thing. plenty of poltergeist sighting were spotted throughout rural US. plenty of mediums became local celebrities, holding court, giving readings, which sometimes turned out to be quite the evening social event, complete with booze and nudity. ofc you had your power mad back stabbing nerds translating books and plotting against them but the spiritualist movement goes far beyond the big groups.

I don’t think these people are trolling

My current interest is a girl who charges 60 bucks a pop for an energy healing session. Quite confounding to me

There's no shame in finding interest in stuff like tarot. It piggybacks onto some very old archetypal imagery that seems to hold its power across the millennia. Just look at the Assyrian winged bull sculptures or Tibetan demons, and you can see how this stuff still connects to something in our brains.

The real shame is in thinking these images can mystically reveal the unknowable future, rather than prompt one to see a bit deeper into one's own mind, thereby uncovering some ideas and motives that may not have been visible to you, but were there and operating out of view, subconsciously.

60 bucks a pop for an energy healing session. Quite confounding to me

most physicians, if they are honest, know that very few of their treatments or therapies are doing any of the heavy lifting of healing their patients. it's the body's systems that still must do the lion's share of the work. most medical help is in the nature of minor assistance to the body's immune system or regenerative powers.

I have great respect for the placebo effect, and there's every chance that your friend is doing her clients some good, if only by enhancing the placebo effect, and assisting the body's own healing ability through unconventional means. the 60 bucks is part of the therapy and lends a seriousness to the exchange that both parties believe in. there are WAY more true believers practicing this stuff than outright charlatans.

you know what a body can really believe in, is sixty bucks

Oh Britany

On “He Loves Me,” you sing about having God’s love even while you’re doing whatever the hell you want. Are you a religious person?

I’m not religious. I don’t blame anybody for being religious but it’s not my thing. But I’m definitely a spiritual person. I wrote this song for people who feel they can’t have a relationship with God because they think they have to be Christian, or religious, have all these rules, sins. I was like that, definitely afraid. And then my sister died, and it was like: There is no God. Because why would God do that to a kid? The way she died was very painful to watch.

Then, as I got older, I just changed my mind. I really missed having that connection to something. So I just started learning how to have a relationship with God. And that’s what that song is about.

these rules, sins

is there anything more dud than taking issue with this sentiment?

Who even knows what is meant by "spirituality" at this point? It covers so many bases, including religious and quasi-religious beliefs and practices.

i am for some reason more into people being part of the religious heritage that they have roots in and embodies tradition, transmission from the ancestors, etc. than vague woo woo ideas or adoption of alien belief systems, and do roll my eyes at "im not religous, but i am spiritual" in general, but i suppose that's authenticity shit that i wouldn't be into in other contexts. but the heart wants what it wants.

interestingly both religion and spirituality are quite hard concepts to pin down with exactitude. like explain to me the what religion and spirituality are, and what they aren't, and what the difference is.

I’m not spiritual but I am religious

Already posted that a few years ago lol

i'm not religious but i'd do anything for woo woo

it it like how people get mad at the simpsons Viking thing?

Old answer: dud, mostly
New answer: classic, mostly
But:

this is the 'everything but country and rap' of religion

― iatee, Thursday, 12 May 2011 19:38 (nine years ago)

afaic spirituality is anything that isn't positivistic atheist materialism*

religion (*let's include this for a gratuitous hot take) seems to require the kind of cultural rootedness and historical continuity which is probably great if you're not some kind of misfit, the kind who doesn't want to be saved in the prescribed ways- or if you're in a religious community that's so open and nondogmatic it might as well be SBNR

Being this - potentially classic. Saying it - dud.

If it were phrased as, "I recognize in myself an innate need for belief in something intangible that makes the world meaningful to me and helps me keep my fear of death at bay, but I refuse to connect that to any organized religion," I don't think anyone would have a problem with it. The "I'm not religious but I am spiritual" line is a dud because it's a.) cliched and b.) permanently associated with white people co-opting indigenous cultural traditions.

i don't even own a spirit

complaining about the line is as much a cliche as the line itself but b) is a serious problem

this is white problem in general but it comes through a lot in the spiritual stuff. probably it's still perceived as a kind of frontier, maybe also as a potential source of some kind of moral absolution or existential justification in the colonial context idk

Lily Dale otm

lol mookie

but i cant start a thread at all, like?

Let people say things imo

Feeling feverish atm and self-isolating, sorry if this is incoherent
Dud because it's ambiguously critical of religious observance without making clear any distinction in name or (imo) in practice a lot of the time. "Spirituality" could mean asceticism. Or it could mean superstition, or animism, or universality or religious mysticism, or any combination of these things and others which are very often properties of "religion" as well. Since there are names for these things, we might as well use them imo instead of drawing distinctions where perhaps there are none and creating false dichotomy.

It's easy enough to say that you're a solitary practitioner, or have indeterminate supernatural beliefs, or dabble in the practices of one or more religions without observing any of them stringently.

Re: white people co-opting indigenous and nonwestern modalities- It irks me, for example, when "seekers" refer to religious traditions like Buddhism or Daoism as "philosophy". Like, maybe to you? Western Yijing studies for example have been plagued by a Sinophobic attitude that the Chinese are unfit custodians of their own heritage imo.

Assuming RBNS = observing religious traditions in which you do not necessarily believe, its meaning is much clearer than SBNR

Wonder why

RBNS honestly describes probably 75% of self-professed "Christians" ime. The other 25% are evangelicals who hear voices telling them to stone unbelievers.