Why are all Pagan's and Witches looked at as evil?

Great Debates
101

Sqrl, I do not feel I am being deliberately obtuse. I understand that words have more than one meaning, and of course we all share the language, it is not my personal property, it belongs equally to you, and I am not deliberately being insulting, I am just trying to understand what you are saying but failing. Yes, I could have taken your earlier explanations at face value, but I think that’s too easy.

So, I understand if you say that when you say magick you really mean fantastic, etc. But then you go on to say that you really do believe in spells, except you don’t. Can you see how this might be confusing? I didn’t mean to imply that your philosophy is less coherent than a christian’s, far from it. But I can see that my sentence wasn’t clear. What I meant to say is that since there are so many christians we can pretty well categorize them after a while. We can categorize people as fundamentalists, catholics, deists, etc, since there are so many of them we can sort them out better.

But of course it is much more difficult with pagans, since every pagan has a different set of beleifs. When you say that you are a pagan it could mean that you beleive in the literal existance of various deities, or that you worship nature, or that you believe in a non-personal spiritual force, or any number of things. So if someone identifies themselves as a Christian it tells me a lot more about their beliefs than if they tell me they are a pagan.

And perhaps I am obtuse, but I still don’t exactly understand your religious beliefs. OK, you don’t believe in fireballs and curses and turning people into frogs, sure. But I believe that the various forces that exist in the universe are impersonal. Do you? Do you feel that, say, an ocean, or a lightning bolt has a personality of some kind? Do you believe in an extra-material component to human consciousness? If you do, then it might make sense that other things besides humans are conscious as well.

See, this is why I complained about the word magick. Perhaps if you used it in Pagan circles it would be clearer, but of course I’m not a pagan. Although I have a better idea what you mean NOW after much back and forth, I’m still unclear, since your views on spells and such are not quite understood. I think you mean that spells and prayer are simply ways to focus your mind and concentrate to achieve your goals. But is that all? If you pray to a personification of a tree, does that personification exist outside your mind? Or is it merely a convenient way of speaking? And of course after asking all this and understanding you, we must realize that the answers only apply to you, not to any other particular pagan, since there is no standard pagan world-view.

So, you may use magick in a way that does not offend my sensibilities, but I can only determine this after asking you extensively about it. If magick merely represents your attitude towards life, fine. But I imagine that most pagans believe that it is more.

And I’ve got to ask: why do your feel that these ceremonies and such are important? Perhaps it’s just that you like them, like I like christmas celebrations even though I am an atheist. But…why not call yourself an atheist rather than a pagan? Ok, you could be a pagan atheist, or a pagan agnostic, but…

When I talked about magical thinking being limiting and petty, what I was trying to get across was how silly it is to ascribe human personality to impersonal forces. Does thunder happen because some entity is angry? Or does it just happen? Is it accident or conspiracy? I’m trying to get you to turn around the common assumption that a scientific viewpoint robs the world of poetry, and to show you that to me, a “magickal” viewpoint robs the world of even more poetry, it obscures the real poetry of electrons and radiation and gravity and stars and galaxies and mitochondia and evolution. I’m saying that magic superficially appears more exhalted, but it is not, the real universe is so much more interesting and incredible than the ones our ancestors imagined, and I feel that by using the word “magick” you are trying to invoke that ancestral world. And that’s why I’m having a hard time accepting it.

102

Lemur, I am sorry. I have explained what I meant well and you are the only one who doesn’t bother to try. My ideas make sense to me and others. After the first paragraph I have stopped reading because you are still being deliberately obtuse. Have a nice life.

Ptahlis, there are things in my religion that an athiest would find unbelievable. I do believe in an afterlife which according to myth is basically an otherworld. I don’t know what it is really like, of course, but my religion dictates that there is a seemless transition from this world to the next with fantastic creatures (like bright red and white dogs, according to the Mabinogean) there that usually indicate that you have crossed over. I relate this more to the dream world in my personal life. I find that the dream world contains most of the possibilities that are afforded into the afterlife. I don’t know what happens when one dies. I figure that our magick slips into the dreamworld where it stays until we want to be reborn or something like that. If you believe that matter and energy can not be created or destroyed then one could follow that the energy would eventually make it into a similar body eventually through decomposition or some type of transference. I just don’t know but that is what I believe. I also believe in divinitory tools; however, I don’t believe they can tell the future. It has been my experience that fortune telling is a money making game. I use tarot, runes, etc as a focusing tool in spellwork (using my earlier definition). I can do readings for myself and others but it is typically a situational reading. A skeptic would call it coincidence if it is accurate. In tarot, I would say that knowing the question and also knowing that the cards have multiple meanings would translate into having a decent reading. In other words the cards have such a diverse set of meanings that a reading with most any card can mean almost anything situationally speaking. There are many other things as well, but those are the most basic.

HUGS!
Sqrl

103

Thanks for the info Sqrl. Your approach to paganism seems to be one of intuition and reason blended in measure. As a fairly pragmatic guy I don’t rely much on intuition as a guide to reality, but it is preferable by far to be around than dogmatism. While I won’t pretend to share your views, I can at least say that I am glad to find out that pagans aren’t all as nutso as they are portrayed to be in some circles. Like every other group, it seems that the extreme elements are the ones whose characteristics seem to be misapplied to the whole group. While I already new that pagans didn’t drink babies’ blood and sacrifice virgins, I was under the impression that they all believed in spells as shortcuts around the laws of the universe, and that intelligent nature spirits were everywhere meddling in our day to day affairs. While I am sure that there are some folks out there who believe these things fervently, at least now I know that there are other types of pagans who do not.

104

Lemur, if I started talking about how “Jesus saves,” I presume you would grant me the right to use the traditional language and not assume I thought that He, being thrifty, had started a Money Market account.

IMHO, the term Magick, with the nonstandard ending, is a traditional use among the “nature religions” (in the anthropological sense) including the greater share of Neopagan groups. Sqrl is attempting to picture to you a worldview in which each animate thing has the added dimension of having a spirit as well as structured matter and energy, and how he operates in that worldview. To ascribe “magick” to those dealings is little different from Platonic terminology, in which that tree is not a tree by virtue of being an Acer saccharum but by having a nature that “participates” in the Form of the Ideal Tree, held in the Mind of God.

I would suspect that every other “materialist” (in the philosophical sense, persons who hold that there is no evidence of “stuff” other than matter and energy detectable by our senses as amplified by the devices of scientific investigation) would understand Sqrl’s sense of an additional phenomenon investing all of nature. They might consider it superstitious nonsense, but they would accept it as a hypothesis which he holds “by faith” and which is not scientifically provable or investigatable.

If you are a SF fan, Larry Niven’s Warlock-world “mana” may very well be a workable parallel that clarifies what Sqrl has been saying.

(Sheesh, when I started being an activist Christian, the last thing I figured on doing was defending the worldviews and life choices of gay pagans! The next thing I know, I’ll be posting advocating Esperanto and dulcimer music. :rolleyes: :D)

105

“A frog, sir? In which bidet?”
-Gratuitous Red Dwarf Esperanto Reference

:slight_smile:

106

Please note that to the best of my knowledge the use of the term “frog” in JDeMobray’s post is not intended to cast any aspersions on La Belle Provence! :smiley:

107

Right, Polycarp, but what confused me is that Sqrl also said that spells and such are merely aids to concentration, and that gods and spirits may be only aspects of ourselves, not external entities.

If one beleives that there is some extra-material component to human consciousness, then it is reasonable to think that perhaps there are consciousnesses that are not human.

Anyway, my main point wasn’t to try to define magic one way or another, but to argue that magical thinking closes our minds rather than opens them.

Sqrl, I’m sorry I offended you. I realize that you have no obligation to answer my questions or defend your views. But I keep feeling like I’m not getting the answers I want…maybe a reasonable person would have given up and left you alone, since you don’t seem willing to believe that I’m not just being an asshole. Oh, well…

Perhaps I’m just a little too angry about the general sorry state of thinking on this planet, and I took it out on you. I know you’re not responsible for theraputic touch being taught in nursing schools or astrology columns in the newspapers, but I can’t help but to see the link between religions of whatever stripe, and pseudoscience and craziness in general. It seems like we just crawled out of the dark ages, and people can’t wait to hop back in. What is wrong with people? I don’t understand it!

Anyway, Sqrl’s probably not reading this…maybe Polycarp can explain it to me…

108

Were you talking to me? The only mind that is closed hear appears to be Lemur’s. I would offer more information but the closed mind does not listen.

Hugs to everyone!
Sqrl

109

I have printed out this whole thread, but haven’t read it yet.
So let me start by saying I believe in intuition.
I could always tell when something bad was going to happen; I just felt a foreboding.
I turned out to be correct too.
MAgical? I dunno.
I tried twice when younger to cast spells, but they sure didn’t work.

110

Or, alternatively, Japanese kami or Celtic sidhe, my preferred metaphors.

Kara, kiam tio okazos, vi bonvenos.

111

I’m not going to comment on SqrlCub’s specific beliefs, but I wanted to say, as one materialist, that I certainly consider “superstitious nonsense” to be scientifically investigatable, and potentially, though not necessarily, scientifically provable (or disprovable). Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you, and I realize that the sentence I’m commenting on wasn’t the main point of your post, but if your of the belief that stuff people believe in due to faith shouldn’t be subjected to scientific scrutiny, I couldn’t disagree more. Which, generally speaking, is fine; obviously people are free to think what they like. But since you were speculating on what a materialist might think, I thought I’d partially chime in as one.