Paganism is our native religion

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If you go back far enough, your ancestors would have practiced many different religions. Which one do you pick?

I think children should be allowed to choose their own beliefs instead blindly following the beliefs of their parents or ancestors. Especially since many of our ancestors' beliefs were wrong. I'm not saying that our ancestors were stupid, but knowledge at the time was very limited compared to today. Can you imagine believing that diseases are caused by evil spirits instead of micro-organisms? Or that fire is an element instead of a process (combustion)?

There seems to be some confusion between Abrahamic religions and proselytizing religions. Abrahamic just means branching from Judaism, and includes Christianity, Islam, Druze, Bahai, and Sikhism (which is actually a branch of both Islam and Hinduism). Proselytizing means finding proselytes (converts) and applies to religions that encourage their followers to spread their religion. Christianity and Islam are proselytizing religions, as is Buddhism, which was spread to China, Tibet, Korea and Japan by missionaries (although Buddhism did not replace beliefs like Taoism or Shintoism, it just added to them). Judaism doesn't encourage proselytizing, since it teaches that non-Jews can earn a happy afterlife just by following the 7 Noahide laws (which are included in many other religions). The Druze religion, as far as I know, hasn't accepted converts at all since the closing of the faith.

I don't think atheism, agnosticism, etc. are religions, since they do not mandate any particular practices.

Last edited by DrizzleMan on 21 Jul 2008, 3:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

People
Against
Goodness
And
Niceness

("Dragnet" -- 1987, starring Dan Ackroyd, Tom Hanks, Christopher Plummer, and featuring Alexandra Paul as "The Virgin Connie Swail")

You may be unfamiliar with the American comedian Lenny Bruce, who was to the 1950s what George Carlin was to the 1970s, but this is what he had to say about the situation: "If Jesus was electrocuted, we'd have generations of people wearing little gold electric chairs around their necks."

While there are pagan elements in there, I think they'd more accurately be described as Islamic heretics. Actually, they worship Melek Tawus - the Peacock Angel - who is the being known to the 'religions of the book' as Lucifer! They claim he's been reinstated and is one of seven angels who now rules the Earth on God's behalf, though, so they're not really Satanists as the West understands the term. I feel sorry for them - been undergoing some fairly severe persecution in recent years from orthodox Islam, apparently.



Interesting, given there is one identifiably 'Hindu' thread that runs through European paganism, at least in the north: horse sacrifice. That played a prominent part in old Irish kingship ceremonies, and in the cult of Odhinn in Scandinavia - and it's also an important ceremony in the Vedas, I seem to recall. I guess most modern Pagans wouldn't be desperately keen on that - most of the ones I've met have been vegetarians. My husband always remarks ironically on how odd it is to meet so many vegetarian Celts...'I thought pigs were sacred? Especially, you know, cooking and eating pigs?' (He likes bacon.)

I tend to think that there's a little bit of a danger in using 'pagan' as a catch-all term for non-Christian religions. For one thing, some people of non-Christian religions don't take kindly to it; I don't believe Hindus like the term, and I've heard similar things about practitioners of Voudoun and Santeria and some of the other syncretic religions.

But importantly, also, being Pagan today - in the Neo-Pagan sense, revived paganism, which goes back to about the 1950s (although it may well contain older, traditional elements) - is very different from belonging to any pre- or non-Christian religion in its original form. It was a whole different milieu and mindset. Most people weren't literate, and many teachings weren't supposed to ever be written down anyway. We have the outward trappings, often, but there are some crucial points we don't get. For example: Many modern pagans see the gods and goddesses as aspects of a single, unknowable Divine Spirit. Ancient pagans may have seen them that way too, or they may have seen them as separate beings. We honestly can't tell. So I feel uneasy when people say they're following an ancient religious path, because no ancient religion is really well documented enough for them to do so. The best you can do is an attempt at reconstruction.

I think a lot of what's behind this is the fact that the orthodox faiths have traditions that claim to go back 2,000 years, 4,000, whatever...and so to be accepted, a new religion feels obliged to come up with a history, even if it's not accurate. (Ron Hutton, a Wiccan and a historian, has written some great books on this.) Really, if you address God or the gods with a prayer you made up this second, why is that any less valid?

In short: Maybe use Paganism (capital P) for the new-with-old-elements religious family, and paganism (small p) for the ancient non-Christian religions, but it would be unwise to claim that the two are the same thing.

And yes, I do describe myself as Pagan. But I'm very eclectic, and I put a lot of qualifiers on that.

Paganism is not my native religion. Just as Swahili is not my native language.

Well, you've named a lot and it seems to me that to your mind none of the mentioned above has it's own unique feature...

You made me laugh a lot
Watch TV less

Yeah, I really have never heard about that!

When you get down to the essence, no religion really has any unique features. They're all based on a collection of unverifiable stories of undocumentable people, that occur in places that either no longer exist or that can't be proven to have ever existed, all bound together with a feelgood philosophy that is predisposed to separating "Us" from "Them".

In simpler words, Religion is the political expression of a common faith, that is used to justify discriminatory and exploitive practices.

Discriminatory and exploitative practises occur outside of religion too, fnord. Religion didn't invent human nature, but it sure does capitalize on it.

You see, I've read some books on Satanism to learn more about everything that is anti-christian, and I might be probably named a Satanist by some "clever" people because too much attention is payed to Freedom of mind and body, perhaps.
And Paganism - that's not for naming all non-christian religions, the topic was, if you remember: "PAGANISM IS OUR NATIVE RELIGION". I just tried to find people throughout the world and Wrong Planet who are Pagans even now. But true Pagans, not -neo-Pagans. I'm really glad to meet you, no matter what you feel as for being Pagan. But in Eastern Europe we had our own alphabet and writing, and our history was full of noble events and victories, hidden now by our scientists.

"All of our history is written by winners" - Blackie Lawless, W.A.S.P.

This reminds me of all the attempts to "civilize" peoples seen as "savages" in recent history, from the persecution of native North American peoples for daring to speak their own languages and worship their own gods, to the disastrous, deliberate destruction of religious and other knowledges of the tribes of sub-Saharan Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries simply because the Western European Christians felt that the "savage beasts" needed to become white in their culture. Then there's the Book of Mormon, which for most of the history of Mormonism stated that the American Indians would become "white and delightsome" when they accepted Christianity. (The language was changed in the early 1980s.) Even worse, Brigham Young, Joseph Smith's successor, taught that black skin was the Mark of Cain from the Bible. The cult had to repudiate that too in the 70s.

In the Dark Ages Christianity and Islam ran roughshod over cultures from Ireland to Afghanistan, obliterating local beliefs willy nilly and forcing the locals to believe at swordpoint. Islam may have gotten as far as the Gobi Desert before simply being unable to reach Han China. If they had, China may well have fallen to Islam. Indonesia is Muslim, as is Malaysia. The period of Christian and Muslim expansion was probably the most culturally destructive in human history, unless you want to count the Spanish and English conquests in the Americas.

I find it ironic that these two religions, forever jockeying for position, are preparing for the final annihilation of mankind that their holy books predict. They would rather destroy life on earth than step back and cool down. They want 100% domination, and if they can't have it, they'll take mutually assured destruction and an eternity in their respective heavens. The fact that the rest of humanity might not want to die is not considered. They see themselves as the absolute holders of truth, and that truth is worth global annihilation. This is a millenia old pattern. If there are any humans left afterwards, maybe they will reject this sort of virulent angry religious genotype.

Neo-paganism (the so-called revived paganism practiced in Western countries) really is not the same as the paganism of pre-Christian times and should not be confused as such. Pre-Christian peoples borrowed mythology and religious beliefs liberally from each other, so there was in some sense a very loose pagan community. Indo-European peoples derived their paganism from probably the same source but had modified it greatly over time (for example, the Greek word Zeus is cognate with Latin deus, both of which are cognate with English Tue- in Tuesday).

Before this sort of polytheistic paganism, shamanism and animism were practiced, and they are simpler still.

Celts, ironically, are genetically set up to be meat eaters. Look at the history of the transcontinental railroad-there were so many meat eating Irish working on the Plains section that all the buffalo were killed so as to feed them. Northern Europeans came late to agriculture, and therefore tend to have allergies to wheat (such as celiac disease, which in it's worse versions can kill) and cow milk, since cows largely weren't eaten. Dairies were unknown too. In contrast, cultures with long histories of agriculture, such as in the Middle East and India, tend to have religious restrictions out the wazoo on eating livestock. About the only thing acceptable is poultry and fish. But grain has few if any restrictions. Just ask a Jew about kashrut laws, better known as kosher. Most American worshippers of neo-Celtic beliefs are in fact a mix of ethnicities. They claim to be 10% Celt, in the same manner that it is also fashionable for American whites to claim to be 10% American Indian. (I've met fewer people claiming Jewish ancestry, actually. THAT doesn't seem to be too fashionable.)


A lot of modern neo-pagan belief can be traced back to Aleister Crowley, an Englishman who declared Christianity to be a false religion and turned first to Satanism before trying to reconstruct the pre-Christian religions of Britannia. Modern Wicca was founded in the 1950s and is largely related to the 1951 repeal of a centuries old English law forbidding witchcraft. The law was seen as archaic and was repealed just to get it off the books, but it turned into a big media circus in the UK and some people inevitably went on a search for the beliefs involved in witchcraft. One searcher, a man named Gardner, claimed to have rediscovered "authentic witchcraft" and his writings are the basis for most of modern Wicca. Gardner was heavily influenced by Crowley, who died in the early 1950s.

There have been reports of people who practiced the old pre-Christian religions secretly in extended families or small groups for many centuries resurfacing in today's age of religious tolerance, but I've never personally met any. I've heard secondhand reports of real bona fide Satanic worship, including human and animal sacrifice, from people on internet discussion groups. LaVey Satanism, founded by the guy who wrote The Satanic Bible, worships Satan only as an archetype for absolute hedonism and essentially narcissism. LaVey Satanism is basically self-worship or narcissism as a formal religion. I'm talking REAL Satanism, true worship of evil.

The Neo-Celts are basically a New Age offshoot, with a big dose of Hinduism and other Eastern beliefs mixed in (thus the veganism). There have been other small religious sprouts in the past few years-in the early part of this decade some New Agers converted themselves to what they THOUGHT was Falun Gong, the infamous Chinese cult that sparked a horrendous crackdown in China in the late 90s, but it wasn't really the complete faith, since the core leadership, including founding prophet Li Hongzhi, could pick and choose what to translate into English, and much of the weirder stuff was never translated.

In Quebec, a 1970s French UFO cult called Raelianism is reportedly thriving. Claude Vorilhon was a second rate race car driver who got bored with life, so he claimed that he was given the universe's true religion by extraterrestrials. The aliens said his celestial name was Rael, and told him to go forth. Surprisingly, a number of young French fell for it, and it percolated along until "Rael" was forced to flee France because of a criminal complaint. He landed in Montreal and recruited new followers. He's actually doing quite well, last I heard.

Then there's the Puerto Rican guy who in the 1990s claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus. The locals got so mad at him that he fled to Miami, where he got followers throughout the Spanish speaking Americas. Among other weird claims, he says that sin has been abolished so therefore his followers can do whatever they want and still go to heaven. His followers actually have "666" tattooed on their ankles to signify that they have no fear of sin. You can see why the Puerto Ricans were so furious at him. He also preaches materialism. It's a wonder that he doesn't have more followers in the US-his faith sounds perfect for modern America. It's weird what people will believe, even if it has no relation to reality. I heard that some Mexicans are trying to reestablish what they say is the true religion of the Aztecs. No word on whether they'll practice human sacrifice.

will someone be good enough to introduce me to the fundamentals of paganism, possibly neo-paganism?

(without being a dork and telling me to google it. the internet can be wrong. I'd like a first-person perspective on it)

How did you come to that conclusion?