It's a problem with gay men?? Or men? Just all men? Men are the only pedophiles.
So it's still legal in Greece, I didn't know that.
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Is halloween _pagan
- Thread starter Riders
- Start date
It's a problem with gay men?? Or men? Just all men? Men are the only pedophiles.
So it's still legal in Greece, I didn't know that.
IndigoChild5559
Loving God and my neighbor as myself.
No, I should have said ancient Greeks. sorry.
If I'm sitting here discussing with you the pederasty int eh catholic church, how can I be blaming it on pagans?
So what that's got to do with Paganism? And the reconstruction of those faiths. I'll let you know, nothing.
IndigoChild5559
Loving God and my neighbor as myself.
You are incorrect. The psychology of pedophilia is quite different from that of pederasty. A pederast is sexually aroused by secondary sex characteristics. It is not a problem with attraction, but with respecting who is off limits.
IndigoChild5559
Loving God and my neighbor as myself.
I have no idea what you are talking about. This discussion has not been about paganism.
They are the same.
A pedophile is sexually attracted to children.
A pederast has sex with male children. (ie, Acts on it)
It was with LD. All the pagan ****ting on is the only reason I'm in this stupid *** thread.
IndigoChild5559
Loving God and my neighbor as myself.
I understand that some people use those definitions, but I am using a different set of definitions.
Pedophilia is sex with children who have not yet entered adolescence. These children do not have secondary sex characteristics. Thus, the problem is one of inappropriate attraction.
In contrast, it is perfectly normal for men to feel sexually attracted to people exhibiting secondary sex characteristics. But our society has determined that a teen does not have the maturity to consent, and thus are out of bounds. Most men respect this boundary. Pederasts (which refers to sex with teen boys, although the more general term of ephebophilia can be either girls or boys) have these normal attractions, but do not respect that teens are out of bounds.
Guitar's Cry
Disciple of Pan
Where's the fun in that?!
Halloween is a fun secular holiday. It is also a spiritual observance for some people. In both ways, Halloween serves to help us deal with the difficulties of life and death.
Bear Wild
Well-Known Member
I will try and find it.
Augustus
…
Of course not, the point was that this was a society where such rituals happened and made sense.
Yes, that’s what I said and supports the idea that modern people would find ancient paganism alien and that it would not be preferable to their modern sensibilities.
This is self-evidently true.
That you even see these practices as “barbaric” shows why what I said is correct.
Your value set has developed in a society profoundly influenced by Christianity for 1500 years.
You can’t entirely escape your cultural conditioning no matter how hard you try. None of us can.
You can’t unlearn what you already know.
Even your railing against Christian imperialism shows your modern worldview.
The pre-modern and pre-Christian world is so alien to the modern Western mind that you can no more recreate the paganism of the past than an Amazonian tribesman can recreate the Judaism of Jesus by reading a few articles by Kent Hovind.
Even the Catholic Church can not do this with 2000 years of unbroken and very well documented tradition.
There’s nothing wrong with new religious movements, and whatever helps people gain meaning in the world is valuable, but they are not recreating anything that resembles the old religions.
Even the idea that there are “religions” that are distinct from secular culture is Christian.
The culture is dead, the society and its context no longer exists, it’s way of seeing the world is gone, some of its myths remain, but recorded by Christians and thus we don’t really know how accurately.
The enchanted world of the past is gone, and without that we are living in profoundly different realities.
Bear Wild
Well-Known Member
Thus, the European pagans could not unlearn what they already knew when they became Christian and therefore paganism endured in Europe.
Bear Wild
Well-Known Member
This is totally incorrect and indicates your unawareness of what is happening in the pagan community. I do not blame you though if you are not participating how would you know. No one believes we will return to the "old" days no more than Christians can return to the days when Christ lived. But so much has changed as the community has aged. It is so much more than reading articles or pretending. It is real reconnecting. The Amazonian does not need to reconnect Judaism but for those of us that do want to reconnect with our heritage can do so and are doing it. First process is to free ourselves from the Christian Colonial mindset. Then it takes experiential time to reconnect, and we are reconnecting.
Bear Wild
Well-Known Member
Please explain what you mean by this.
Halloween is not pagan, but it dresses up as a pagan for Halloween. I saw this on the History Channel, so it must be true.
Bear Wild
Well-Known Member
Who could possbly argue with the history channel. It is all knowing. Isn't it?
IndigoChild5559
Loving God and my neighbor as myself.
LOL right. I remember how the History Channel used to be quality when it first came out. Now it has stupid stuff about aliens.
Ancient Aliens too!
Augustus
…
People didn’t immediately change everything they knew, but 1500+ years is a very long time for beliefs and practices to be diluted and changed beyond all recognition.
Mass scale society can unlearn things over time, but individuals are far more limited by time and place.
Of course there were influences of pagan culture on Christianity too, but these are not really reflected in modern Christian (and post Christian) holidays.
Why would the Christian heritage be "colonial", yet the Germanic or Norse Pagan one not be? If you take Britain you have invaders spreading Norse, Germanic and Celtic paganisms as opposed to more indigenous traditions. Conquest, subjugation and might were admirable.
We all create our sources of meaning in the manner which makes most sense to us personally, so if people want to feel they are reconnecting to a long lost past then good luck to them.
In my opinion, an inclusive, tolerant, anti-colonial, post-Christian paganism is a product of modernity, it is not reconnecting with anything from the past. It is creating a vision of the past that never existed and projecting values derived from Christian/post-Christian society on to it.
19th C Romanticism and early 20th C neo-paganism were educated middle and upper class nostalgia for a rural past that was being destroyed by industrialisation and rationalism. Every era has its own nostalgic longings, as it seems to be a common part of the human condition.
The idea that there are different realms, the secular and the religious, that can (and often should) be kept separate from each other emerged out of Christian theology and medieval and early modern European social and political developments.
Now we say things like "religion should be kept out of politics", and often think that this is a kind of neutral stance, rather than being a highly culturally contingent view of what religion is.
In most pre-modern societies, there has been no such distinction, the idea that something called "religion" could be abstracted from a social and cultural context is again much more of a modern thing.
IMO, the culture, environment, worldview, economy, knowledge, mythos, mindset and ritual of the pagan past has been lost as it was dependent on the society in which it made sense.
"Our" heritage can only be understood through the culturally acquired values, worldviews and knowledge we have developed in the many centuries since paganism died out and most of it's rich veins of meaning died out too.
Our heritage is primarily Christian and post-Christian, and these are the ancestors who have done most to shape our worldviews, even those who try to reject them are self-consciously doing so, and they are rarely rejecting the values of those societies, just a Christian context for those values.
If early Christianity was a form of Hellenised Judaism, neo-paganism is a modern Christianianised reimagining of whatever fragments of historical paganisms can be recovered without the proper conceptual framework to really make sense of them.
This isn't meant as a criticism, it's just I don't think is is meaningfully possible to see neo-paganism as anything other than a modern religious movement rather than a recreation of an old one.
There's nothing wrong with that. It doesn't mean neo-pagans are not sincere, creative, wise or knowledgeable, or that their practices are any less meaningful or worthy than anyone else's, just that I don't think it is possible to create enough meaningful continuity to see them as proximate traditions.
You may disagree of course