Dear Friends,
Fire Lyte, of the Inciting a Riot Podcast and Blog, has started a marvelous new project that is weaving it’s way through the Pagan Internet! Project Pagan Enough seeks to encourage tolerance and build community within the Pagan movement.
So, Project Pagan Enough is a movement, a cause, a Harmonious Riot that includes bloggers, podcasters, pagans, non-pagans, me, you, and the whole pagan community. It is my hope that the Project Pagan Enough logo becomes a beacon of progress and change for those of us living a magical life. By putting the Project Pagan Enough icon on your podcast’s site, blog, or other website, you’re making a set of promises:
- You are pagan enough, despite how you look, act, smell, dress, believe, or are.
- You recognize that others are pagan enough despite their appearance, smell, manner of dress, belief, practice, or other aspect.
- You recognize that you can have an academic debate on the finer points of belief or practice, but that it does not take away from someone else’s level of being pagan.
- You welcome, befriend, and encourage others in the pagan community despite their appearance, dress, or other physical or superficial characteristic.
- You promise to treat members of other faiths, despite the faith, with honest-to-goodness fairness, equality, and grace, not judging them or their faith based on the actions of fringe members of their same faith.
Like the points of the pentacle, these 5 tenets of Project Pagan Enough work together and will, I hope, launch our community into a new era of tolerance, love, and all of the qualities we like to think we have.You may copy the Project Pagan Enough logo for your own website – below – but please make sure to link back to this page to allow others to know what promise you’ve made to the community at large.
Rather a noble goal I think!
Peace,
Pax
Chrysalis 
It’d be neat if it works.
Well, define ‘work’.
Quite frankly I think that in the daily and eternal struggle of striving ever towards our highest ideals simply continuing to share the message and speak of joy and justice and love. I wrote recently about how each generation must wrestle with so many -isms of intolerance and anger and how each generation must have its own cross-roads moments. We never truly STOP dealing with intolerance or pettiness nor should we ever stop dealing with them.
Peace,
Pax
My faith in the death of intolerance got a rather major blow yesterday, when someone on FB made the comment that Christians (and/or Christianity) should die. It just… gets me down. Do I fight intolerance? Yes, I do. I do my best to be as tolerant as is humanly possible. I’m working hard at a 2 year program to become an Interfaith Minister, that’s how much it means to me. I’m educating the local pagans and Christians in how to act around one another, and enjoying it. Then… I read something like that comment, and it just hurts.
Maybe it’s supposed to keep hurting. After all, that means I’m not inured to it.
“Maybe it’s supposed to keep hurting. After all, that means I’m not inured to it.”
YES!!
Yet at the same time I know the sense of pain, and tiredness, and… betrayal that can come from seeing or hearing something like that. I remember the first few times I heard Anti-Christian stuff or Anti-Gay stuff from Pagan sources … I was hurt, I was betrayed, I was pissed off. “We” are SUPPOSED to be better than that, or at least trying to be so!
Don’t know the answer but I do know as long as people keep searching for it and keep a willingness to stand up and say “NO” or “STOP” when bigotry and intolerance rear themselves in our lives we can find a better way!
For me, it isn’t so much that we’re supposed to be “better than that”… it’s that we hold “them” (defined as “everything not Us”) up to a much higher standard than we hold ourselves. Or so it seems. I mean, *I* don’t… but I also hold myself to an incredibly high, sometimes impossible standard. I’d rather shoot high and miss than have the bar too low and succeed with no heart in it. In any case, when I expect a lot from my co-religionists, it’s because I also expect a lot from *me*.
What I hate hearing is, “I can be as intolerant as I want, but it’s disgusting how intolerant THEY are.” Augh. Totally. Missed. The. Point.
I’m a proud Hellenic Polytheist with delusions of Interfaith Grandeur… I believe it’s possible to live beside one another peaceably, to co-exist, and heck, even to share. Know what I’m doing on April 11th? Preaching in a Christian pulpit. I’m doing it again on May 9th, at another church local to us. Though I couch the message in Christian words, the messages I preach when I’m up there are just the same as the ones that I say when talking to other pagans or Hellenes or reconstructionists (or Jews, Muslims, Hindus, etc). I just talk truth. They know I’m HP. Heck, they know I’m in a poly family with five adults and two kids! If *THEY* (there’s that word again) can be tolerant enough to accept me, why can’t those who consider themselves my brethren do the same?
Yes, this is a much-needed project especially with some of the more ridiculous behaviors I’ve been seeing around the web lately. It’s gotten well-nigh impossible to have a conversation anywhere. Hopefully this will help.
But as to smell…well, you don’t have to soap, maybe wash off a little…
Oh! I love this!
I’ve already added the logo to my blog. I hope to do a post about it in the near future.
Rev Allyson said: “Know what I’m doing on April 11th? Preaching in a Christian pulpit. I’m doing it again on May 9th, at another church local to us.”
And do you know what I do on Wednesday evenings?
Attend Holy Eucharist at St. Joseph’s Episcopal.
Where *I* tend to get looked askance at is when I start reminding people that pagan =/= earth worship (at least, not necessarily or not for every single pagan out there). Pagans invented civilizaton itself, not the Christians or any other group founded in the years post-birth of Christ, and I’ve preached on that at a couple of UU churches.
I think this is a fact that a lot of neo-pagans forget – we invented civilization itself. Look at the Egyptians, the Hellenes, the Romans as examples of this. Just the other day, when my boyfriend Joe and I found ourselves shopping at the House of Spices (a great Indian grocery near my office, where you can get things like curry and tamarind candies and gulab jamun and hathi puri, etc), I looked at the Indian people walking around and asked Joe, “So is it a case of, the darker someone is, the more Dravidian they are?” He said yes. I said, “WOW – these people are descendants of one of the world’s oldest and continuously existant civilizations the world has ever seen – they put MY northern ancestors to enormous shame! When MY ancestors were figuring out how to pick their noses, these people’s ancestors had long since developed the Vedic tradition and were compiling the Upanishads!” It’s so awesome for them.
But yeah, I just think that too many people fall into the dualistic thought pattern of “technology=bad, rustic=good” yet I don’t see anyone willing to give up computers, cell phones, digital cameras, modern medicine and the equipment and science that supports it, modern sanitation, etc etc.
But people tend to look at me like I’ve sprouted two heads when I bring it up. :sigh:
PS: This is so typically me, but…
I’m going to create my own logo for it. I’m not overly fond of the font or the colors or the pentacle graphic on the one I’m seeing here.
Yeah, the Pentacle = Pagan thing is kind of a pain sometimes…
… although I rather suspect Fire Lyte might like a variety of logo’s for the event for the different streams of Paganism.