Day 2: Some of my thoughts re:religion, magic, and the divine

I don't have any set guidelines for my YAAD except that I want to learn enough about paganism to decide on a path for myself afterwards. However, I saw a video on Youtube about making a Book of Shadows/spiritual diary and what sort of things you can put into it-- one of those things being a list of what you believe. So! Here are some of my thoughts about religion, magic, and the divine. I've tried to group them roughly by subject, so hopefully it's easy to read.


The divine/gods

• Gods are the manifestation of a greater human consciousness. I think there's a better term for that, but I can't remember it at the moment-- basically, I think gods are what happens when a lot of people believe the same thing (or nearly the same thing) at one time. A good example of what I mean can be found in American Gods by Neil Gaiman.
• It's sort of like soft polytheism but instead of one god being all gods, the consciousness is what gods are born from. The consciousness isn't an aware/personable thing; it's more like a base that you add stuff to in order to get a god. Something like that, anyway. (I need to think about this more, obviously.)
• Like humans, gods have "good" and "bad" sides to them. They're also changeable, fluid, and ultimately unknowable.

Magic

• Magic is the connection between humans and gods (or the greater consciousness).
• The tools witches use in their magic are "keys" into the divine. Or maybe it's more like a phone number to the gods' answering machine.
• Which keys you should use depends on your personal history, where you are, and what you feel best using.
• Better quality tools work better because they (usually) make you feel better about what you're doing with them; a nice shiny athame is bound to make you feel more good than a rusted half-broken one, and that means your magic will work better, too.

Religion

• "Mixing and matching" things from different belief systems is fine as long as you are respectful of the source they came from. Cultural appropriation is bad.
• Christianity/Judaism/Islam/etc. are not bad religions. There are no bad religions (or good ones, for that matter). There are only people inside those religions who do bad things. 

Ethics/Morality

• "Do good things" is a good motto to have and a good thing to strive for.
• "Good" and "bad" are extremely subjective, but basically good = try not to hurt other people physically/mentally/socially/politically (unless in self-defense, maybe?), try not to hurt animals physically/mentally (don't know yet if that means veganism or what), try not to hurt the earth (littering, etc.). Bad = doing all those things deliberately.

Misc.

• Change is good. People change throughout their lives, and that's good! People need different things from religion at different times, and veering off onto a new path when the old one is finished or no longer fits is fine.

Part of my wanting to put this list up here is so I can compare it to the list I'm going to write at the end of my YAAD. I wonder how much it'll change?