I apologize if this has been covered, I looked but couldn't find it. I come from a jewish/catholic background where prayers tend to be a bit more formulaic. A prayerful life has always been important to me, no matter what faith I've practiced, though I tend to be still drawn to the prayers that are a bit more formal. I was wondering if others would feel comfortable sharing their prayer style.
Worship seeing to have a negative connotation to many Pagans. Does worship have a play in your religion? Why or why not?
How do you know your magic is working?
What counts as successful? For example, if you cast a spell for money and you find a quarter in the parking lot, does that mean the spell worked? What if you cast a spell to draw love and you find an abandoned puppy outside your house?
How long to you allow before you stop counting something as a result of magic? For example, if you cast a spell to draw a mate to you and five years later you meet the perfect person for you and you are married within a few months of meeting that person, is that a result of your spell?
How do you tell success from wishful thinking/random chance? Back to the found a quarter example from the first paragraph? Is finding that quarter actually a result of your spell or is it just random chance? How do you know? Does it matter?
I know there are people who post on here who write blogs and perhaps even get books published, and I'm particularly interested in their responses - but I'll be interested in anyone's thoughts on this.
I've got some interesting (at least to me!) philosophical ideas (about the relationships between information, communication, and action among other things) which I don't at present believe I've seen clearly written down by anyone else. I'm not an academic philosopher so I might have missed something (quite easy I suspect) but nonetheless I suspect I have a fairly new position developed through my particular (somewhat interdisciplinary) experience. I think some of the ideas can help people understand things which are useful to them, but the ideas are really difficult to explain clearly - and I'd like to explain them to interested "lay" readers, not just to academics. I think I can explain not only why some things happen the way they do, but also give people a model of how those things work, so people can use it to think about other related problems. I've thought about writing a book then trying to get it published, or writing a blog (but it would probably be like a long series of essays). I'd really like to get my ideas to the most people possible who might benefit from them, but I've been struggling (for many years) to think what the best way to achieve this might be.
I'm not sure how well worked-out all the ideas are (although they've been developing over a number of years, so I hope they are beyond pure beginner's enthusiasm). Also I hope I'm not misjudging the usefulness of my ideas. In both cases, I think I'll only find out by exposing the ideas to lots of other people. I've got some reasonable experience of explaining difficult ideas to people, but I'm sure I could be better. So my question is - how do you think I should set about doing this?
http://vimeo.com/11461619
This is a bio piece my campus group, the Society for Earth-Based Religions, participated in at Ball State Campus. This bio piece was done by a few students (a couple guys I know from a few of my religious studies classes) for their end of the year project. I'm posting this here to gather opinions and feedback about the views put forth in the video by the group. Complaints, Pointing out flaws in arguments, Words of appreciation, all is fine by me.
Big reason behind my bothering in the first place is that I've been in the group for going on four years now (it will be my fourth year in the group come august), and the last group of people in the pagan community that really commented on what we do as a group (we're sort of like a pagan-study/Theological discussion group that is pagan focused), what we represent and such was at the 2009 Indianapolis Pagan Pride Day (which we've been attending for the past two years as a group). So I'd just like to see what the bigger community of pagans, and non-pagans, thinks seeing as you all are varied, and far more capable of an intelligent conversation and feedback than I am.
As you probably know for a US$25 donation to LyricFox's cancer-related bills, you can receive either our huge text file collection of spells or a numerology reading as donor benefit. For June 4-7, you can receive your choice for only a US$20 donation (20% off) -- via the lionks below. The spell collection is described here. The numerology reading includes a personality report and a month by month report for the next 12 months.
A friend of mine recently told me that I should never, ever buy books about paganism/occult/anything related for myself. Similarly, I should never buy any magic(k) tools or divination tools for myself. Apparently if you buy them for yourself it diminishes their power. Has anyone heard anything like this, or any other superstitions related to practicing magic(k)?