Thursday, May 17, 2007

You know when I talk about religious persecution I am not talking about Christianity.

Wiccans worship the divine in nature. Some practice it privately in their homes, and others worship with large congregations. Most people do not grow up Wiccan but come to it from another religion.

“It’s a very open religion,” said Helen A. Berger, a sociology professor at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. “Each person can do what they want, and they don’t have to belong to a group. They take things from a number of different sources, like Eastern religions, Celtic practices. You are the ultimate authority of your own experience.”

But its symbols and practices elicit suspicion from outsiders, Wiccans and religion scholars say.

Many Wiccans practice some form of magic or witchcraft, which they say is a way of affecting one’s destiny, but which many outsiders see as evil. The Wiccan pentacle, a five-pointed star inside a circle, is often confused with symbols of Satanism. (The five points of the star represent the elements of nature — earth, air, fire and water — and the spirit, within the eternal circle of life.)


Christianity is really to blame for the horrible connotations associated with Wicca and other pagan religions. The extremely aggressive campaign waged by this upstart religion in its infancy against the other established belief systems, which grew even more fierce as Christianity grew, is the very definition of "religious intolerance".


Christian missionaries went into countries with indigenous people who worshipped a different God or perhaps some form of animism or spirituality, and essentially told them they were worshipping the devil and were going to be punished for it. The devil is not a Wiccan concept. It is a Christian symbol used to label and denigrate the beliefs of other religions.


When Christians argue for religious tolerance you can bet your ass they are thinking only of their own belief system and would not lose a second of sleep over the religious persecution of an alternate religious belief.


In the secular world we call that hypocrisy.

2 comments:

  1. I helped teach a class in alternative religions once and we stressed that Wiccans are not only NOT "Satanists" but don't even believe in Satan.
    A good book for anyone interested in paganism is Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler.
    All in all, a MOST inoffensive bunch of people!

    ReplyDelete
  2. And you know what? They rarely, if ever, eat children.

    They consider them fatty and not very nutritious.

    LOL.

    ReplyDelete

Don't feed the trolls!
It just goes directly to their thighs.