(humor… or something….)
Dear Friends, and Pagani,
I am writing to you on behalf of many, many, of your fellow Pagans and (I would like to think) many of our Elders.
From now on if you expect us to take any of you Pagans out there seriously you will have to start studying your own faith, and other Pagan and Non-Pagan faiths in depth. You will have to demonstrate a reasonable willingness to study and learn and grow. You will have to show a reasonable grasp of History. Your public statements about Paganism and your conduct as Pagans should have NO trace of “Take that Mommy and Daddy!” or “Take that Jesus!” about them. You will not mistake, in words or action having an axe to grind against your parents or Religion of origin for being a proud Pagan.
If you are working in a community organization you will ESPECIALLY work to be knowledgeable, informed, and professional in your conduct within and on behalf of your community!
You will also look into the fact that there are more Christians (and other folks mono and poly theistic) involved in Interfaith work trying to protect and defend Religious Freedom and Separation of Church and State than there are Pagans, both in the Parliament of Worlds Religions and in organizations like the Interfaith Alliance.
Furthermore you will at least explore the idea that good folks like the gentleman interviewed below are AT LEAST AS ~IF NOT MORE~ representative of Christianity than some of those jerk-off talking head types that some folks love to rant about and to try and equate every Christian with…
Please take this post under advisement or So Holy Powers Help Us, we may have to start Gibbs-smacking folks upside the head, or something….
Thank you,
Pax and many, many, many of your fellow Pagans
PS- we really mean it!!
Chrysalis 
:nods:
It is part of the reason I began examining all things Christian at age 40. My paganism was motivated by “take that, peers who rejected me” and “take that, you people who hurt me but whom I was supposed to trust” and whatnot.
I’d also add this caveat: make sure, pagans, that you don’t make the error of mixing up your political positions with your religious walk. I must say that a lot of feminist pagans fall into that trap. Have the honesty to say “my politics are not dependent upon my spiritual path – I would hold my political views no matter what spiritual path I walked, and vice-versa.”
Give it some thought, folks. Just go off alone and do some serious ponderin’.
Oh, and yes…brush up on American Government or Civics 101. Folks should find and bookmark the text of the U.S. Constitution, and even keep a hard copy of it somewhere. Know how our government works and know how to participate in it; being an American is not a spectator sport. LOL
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Great post!
It would be nice, wouldn’t it, if pagans and witches (and atheists for that matter) would stop behaving like junior high school kids who have just escaped from curfew and read a (one) book.
Been a pagan all me life, me. Okay, since I was eleven. My parents and grandparents, atheists, shrugged about it. But I certainly remain grateful to the Christian monks who preserved so much of classical paganism (Homer, Euripides, Hesiod, Vergil) for me to enjoy, not to mention the glorious arts encouraged by nearly every major religion. Credit where it’s due!
The bit that made me nuts when I first encountered witches and pagans of that stripe (on the whole, a creative, inventive, courteous and welcoming crew – and brainy in quirky ways, always a plus!) was those who claimed nine million witches had been killed in The Burning Times (a figure for which there is not the slightest justification) and even if forty thousand or so executions could be traced, who justified their religion on the grounds that people had been killed for it. People have been killed for all sorts of reasons; that does not justify the truth of their spirituality (even if any of them had remotely a Wiccan spirituality, and they didn’t). Either a spirituality is apposite on its own or it is not; bloodshed will not justify it any more than courage justifies the causes armies fight for.