“i just want to have some common background with people that have a common intrest”(From the Unicycle for Christ thread)
I guess unicycling isn’t a common enough interest that we couldn’t all just revel in it’s uniqueness, we must devide the camp into various metaphysical and secular groups as well.
Not that this is an unusual methodology in Christian practice, having hijacked the winter solstice and vernal equinox from much older belief systems.
But let them have their fun.
In the long term, it doesn’t matter really. Those who must cling to a mono- theist belief system will… Those who will scream themselves hoarse that there is no divinity will continue to do the same.
Those of us who believe it is ALL sacred; the very earth we trod, here is our space.
Indulge.
i am not pagan myself, but i feel it is important for anyone with the intent of bashing other people’s religions (which is often what happens with these threads) ought to know more about the religion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paganism
hmm i dont see why it bothers you that some unicyclists might want to find other unicyclists who share their faith as well as their interests but i guess if you are really a pagan and just want to meet other pagans in unicycling thats cool also but it just came across to me that you wher having a go at the christians, i know it seems a bit exclusive and mean but i doubt they meen it like that. i personaly am not part of any of these religious groups but just let them ber and they wont bother you…
also if you are a pagan i was wondering: do you really get many pagans around anyway cause i was at this “pagan” fire festival the other day and it seemed to be a bunch of students who wanted to get drunk and a few “Pagans” (tho i doubt they where) that seemed to have come straight from work at the games workshop. it was fun i dont doubt that but i just wondered if ther wer many.
Actually, the Pagans are a REAL motorcycle club, as are the Hell’s Angels. I suppose that riding motorcycles wasn’t enuf to hold them together as a group, so they added their various religious affiliations to the back of their jackets to find greater brotherhood…
Pagan - “rustic” - being a name given by the Christians to the people who followed earlier countryside and village practices. Much as the Romans called the natives of what is now Britain, “The Picts” from “picti”, meaning “painted”. They didn’t call themselves “picts”, and pagans didn’t call themselves “pagans”.
The idea of “a religion” implies a fairly unified whole, like the Christian religion, or the Muslim religion. However, “pagan” includes everything from the Norse gods (Odin, Thor etc.), the Roman gods (Jupiter etc.), the Greeks (Zeus and friends), the ancient Egyptians (Isis, etc.) and so on. Some would include Baron Samedi or even the Hindu gods under the general term, “pagan”.
Although there are similarities between ancient pagan religions (Jupiter is very similar to Zeus; Woden, Wotan and Odin had many similar characteristics) there are also differences.
The good thing about pagan religions generally is that they don’t claim a universal truth. The idea of many gods, with their own agendas, alliances and feuds, each with a lot of power over a limited area is unlikely to be literally true, but it is a damn’ fine explanation for the state the world’s in.
Some people believe the world was designed by a single perfect all knowing and benevolent creator who could do no wrong.
Pagans believe the world is the product of a whole bunch of megalomaniac gods feuding and making short-term alliances, like a bunch of middle managers in a big double glazing company.
Look at the world around you... you decide which explanation fits the facts...
While opinions vary today, people call themselves Pagans (even the motorcycle gang) and neo-Pagans. The unifying feature is that they are “Earth” or nature religions–they celebrate the equinox and solstice. They say GOD is in everything. there is NOTHING BUT GOD. The Sun is actually a GOD, bearing wonderful gifts.
While opinions vary today, people call themselves Christians, and kill other people who call them Christians. Ditto Moslems, and Hindus, etc. The point being not that religious people kill each other, because atheists sometimes do that too, but that all labels can be applied to suit any agenda.
Not all pagan religions (neo or otherwise) are earth or nature religions. I know people who profess to worship the Norse gods, and people who have professed to worship the Graeco-Roman Gods.
In Greek theology, there were cthonic cults and Olympian cults. The cthonic cults were cults in which gods/spirits from the underworld were worshipped. A typical sacrifice would be the pouring of the blood of a sacrificial animal into a trench or pit. By contrast, the Olympian cults would tend to raise their sacrifices high on altars, and burn them so that the pleasing smells rose to the gods.
Although many pagan gods from Graeco-Roman theology and from Norse/Saxon theology had power over nature (e.g. Thor, the thunder god) the forces of nature were not worshipped per se. Neither was “Nature”.
In fact, it is primarily the development of monotheistic religions that makes the worship of nature per se more likely.
The modern idea of the omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient God raises a very real theological question: is God the same as Everything, or is He in some sense parallel to Everything, or is He in some sense “in” Everything. Older views of the single all-powerful God did not raise this question. The old idea of God as king on his heavenly throne, able to do and see anything, but not everything at once, did not raise the same complex logical problems.
And once the widely accepted concept of God as absolutely omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient became the standard view, some brave (and heretical) thinkers took the next logical step of equating God with Nature. (I suggest Spinoza’s ethics as an example fo sailing very close to this particular wind.)
With this line of thought, God became a principle or a force, rather than a being.
And it is a small step from this to worshipping Nature, or attempting to anthropomorphise nature.
From there we get several developments. One is the birth of neo-paganism - a romanticised version of paganism, without the extremes of human and large scale animal sacrifice, and somehow fitting very nicely with modern preconceptions. Mix and match: a bit of native American here, a bit of Norse there, a liberal dose of Tolkein. Another is badly thought out nonsense like the Gaia theory.
My objection is to those who use religion as a reason to tell other people how to behave, or to control or manipulate other people. If people don’t do that, then they can choose to believe whatever makes them feel comfortable with the world.
