Theology:
The study of the nature of God, Gods, and religious belief.
Setting to words a personal theology is not a simple thing, and to be honest, I am neither scholarly nor eloquent enough to do so in a way that would seem methodical enough for anyone seeking to study it in any meaningful way. But I am going to try here to lay out some of the basic concepts that drive me on this path, and to, perhaps, go into some detail about what each one means to me, and in the greater context of my life so as to illustrate their meaning. I want to make it clear at the onset, however, that my personal theology is not static, that it evolves and manages to find in itself resolution to its own contradictions, or perhaps sometimes causing me to accept the contradictions as part of the order of things rather than as problems needing solved.
There are a couple of concepts, or rather, religious realities that I want to address here right away, so that it is understood that no matter what my personal theology becomes as it evolves, these particular aspects of it remain the same.
One: The Gods. At no point, no matter how my writing style makes it sound, should you assume that I am an atheist. This religion is, to me, one based on actual living Gods. They are no figments of the imagination, mental projections, psychological manifestations, magical constructs, or Jungian archetypes. They can sometimes be made manifest in our lives in these forms, but they are living Gods, not imaginary superheroes.
Two: The Gods and the Universe are eternal, but our particular versions of them are not. More on that as I go along.
Three: The Universe was not created by the Gods.
Four: Man is not eternal. We are spiritual in the sense that we are beings who can grow and become greater than ourselves through introspection, but we are not eternal beings trapped in physical form. This is important as a theme in my personal theology.
Five: Myth is not literal, ever. It is figurative and part of our collective unconscious. Not only a manifestation of our own experiences of the divine, but also a manifestation of racial memory and universal memory, something that may simply be the mind concluding things at a logical level we are not aware of, but the stories themselves are to be studied and understood as part of our attempts to not only understand, but order the world around us, including the Gods.
The sidebar on this page includes links to the pages in this section of the site, and all of them have some connection to the idea of explaining my personal theology.
Iphigeneia by the Sea
