kontextmaschine:

Well this came in a while ago, but it’s referencing something even older. Someone was archive diving, took me a while to even find that one to link. That you, lovegodsmashtyrants? morosombrero?

Eh. I don’t believe in any gods, but I do practice worship of the local gods wherever I go. Down in Echo Park I gave offerings to Santa Muerte and Jesus Malverde, when I was up in the Idaho Panhandle the whole place was clearly sanctified to Jesus so I gave thanks to him. I don’t think any divinities have established clear dominion over Portland, but the Germanic forest gods seem to have as strong a claim as anyone.

One of the (two or three) religions I’ve had it in my head to found eventually is Library Judaism.

(I grew up around Philadelphia, where the local Jewish community stretches back to colonial merchant families for whom it essentially became the Hebrew-ethnic branch of mainline Protestantism, Reform before Reform or even Mendelssohn; there was some immigration later on but the existing population set up settlement houses right quick to assimilate them lest the old guard be tainted by an association of Jewishness with yokeldom. The generation or two before me the community shifted to, and then from Freudian Judaism, by my youth the local Jewish families were mostly distinguished by taking their children seriously and having all walls of least one room of their house lined with books and I wanted in on that. Later on with more experience and further travels I encountered Orthodox [Modern and otherwise] Judaism; grievance-mongering Shoah Judaism; and the ethnochauvinist Staten Islanders, equivalent to the Boston Irish and Jersey Italians; those communities and styles impressed me less.)

The idea being that each house of worship would consist on one hand of a library, secular in orientation, housing humanistic works - a core canon plus whatever the particular congregation saw fit to focus on. And on the other hand a temple including a shrine to one particular diety drawn from any religious or representative tradition that the congregation would be named for, plus two lesser “junior” shrines.

And sects could form around one of the junior focuses and eventually calve off from the parent church, and it would be possible to use the shrines to syncretize with any existing religion - you could have a God the Father//Christ the Son/Holy Spirit setup for example, which wouldn’t be orthodox trinitarianism obviously but “imperfectly orthodox” and “new syncretic religion” kind of go hand in hand you know.

(And obviously it’s a stretch to call it Judaism to begin with, but I mean, “claiming continuity with traditional Judaism” is a pretty successful strategy for a startup religion - look at Christianity, and Islam, and Mormonism, and Adventism, or even say Reform, or even Rabbinical Judaism, to say nothing of the variants in the previous parenthetical paragraph.)

And then I thought on it a bit more, and the Google-equivalent in my brain was like

You searched for: pan-Western humanistic religion with strong elements of syncretism

Did you mean: the Roman Catholic Church?

But the thing is, I was raised Catholic, ish, enough. Taken to weekly Masses, was in CCD but kicked out before I could be confirmed which fair enough, I don’t, and didn’t, believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was born of the Virgin Mary, was crucified, died, and was buried, rose from the dead, and is now seated at the right hand of the Father, in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who came upon the apostles at Pentecost, in the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting, and was honest enough that I would have told the bishop so.

And oh, well, of course that’s just the fault of the degraded post-Vatican II church that drained the mystery and magic from Catholicism, that can’t catechize for shit, yada yada yada, right?

But I honestly find all the enthusiastic traditionalist-bordering-on-sedevacantists who peddle that line a little ridiculous. For one, because the idea of communicants being so obsessed with recovering and upholding The Proper Theology in the face of a church corrupted by concessions to the fallen world is more Prot than any modern Protestantism I’ve ever encountered, which tends to focus more on charisma and the born-again experience.

For two, their obsessive hate of On Eagle’s Wings. I loved On Eagle’s Wings, it was my favorite song in church. Precisely because it wasn’t as intricate as the ~beautiful~ choral music they fetishize, anyone with no particular training could just belt it out and feel part of something. (If you had put me on the spot to guess where it had come from, I would have said maybe a 19th century Boston Protestant hymn.)

Because my father, the guy who even tried to raise me Catholic in the first place, was an altar boy back before Vatican II. He told me what those old Latin Masses were actually like - a series of posture changes set to bells, while a priest spoke inaudibly to a wall in a dead language and the real energy was in the pews, where veiled widows from the old country rocked back and forth clutching at their fetishes and wailing prayers, basically attempting to cast magic spells.

And he told me of how he and an Italian altar boy (who would later be my godfather, and operate a motel just over the Philly border known for hosting prostitutes and outlaws, with an impressive pool/gym complex in the basement that I only ever saw used by him and my father and I on Friday nights, though I hear it was open to members of the local police as a courtesy) would get assigned to all the high-tipping funeral and wedding Masses, in return for kicking back some of their share to the priest, a genial old Irishman of the drunken, gambling, whoremongering type.

Because like, that’s what “true” Catholicism always was - as a practice, thinly whitewashed peasant paganism; as an institution, a collection of corrupt local elites, no different from your typical backwater courthouse gang, only with priests for lawyers and the parish for the county.

The scholasticist tradition the neotraditionalists hark back to was never more than a sideshow (albeit one that could occasionally accomplish something when by chance a power vacuum opened up to be filled by someone who took it seriously) conducted by a bunch of ivory-tower monks and minor nobility who were looking for an alternative hierarchy they could scramble to the top of. And the whole Chesterbelloc, Inklings thing was never more than an arcadian fantasia by a bunch of podunk punks too in love with themselves to notice that the sedate, “properly ordered” rural landscape and society they loved so much wasn’t a remnant of the good old days but the very product of the enclosure and industrialization that had driven all the peasants and all the productive activity to the dirty, squalid cities they recoiled from. Nothing more than a bunch of pompous pipe-smokers smoking each others’ pipes over how wise and noble they must be for rising to the top of this backwater society when the truth was there was nothing and no one left to rule over and no one of any ambition and competence could be bothered to compete.

And pf. Bitch, please.