Neo-Pagan musings

Bizarre to say: I was at a lecture today by a Khalid Yassin, a Muslim Sheikh, who had been invited to address staff to help understanding of Islam. [He gave a not too well researched reheating of the cosmological and teleological arguments and then onto a few specific claims about Mohammed and answered a few questions]. The bizarre thing was that afterwards I ended up in a discussion with a neo-pagan who had preveiously been chatting about "paganism" with a colleague.

There was a lot of energy in their desire to make a lot of the Christian failures like the inquisition and the witch burnings and to say that the Pagans are pacific ["an it harm none..."] and have never persecuted anyone let alone killed them. But what really hit me was the strength of the need to cast pagans/witches [for which read "Wiccans"] as the victims. It seemed to me that the dynamic of this was that you win the argument if you can show yourself to be the victim of injustice/ violence.

You know how it is when there is so much wrong with something that is being said that it is just not possible to say much useful at all in the time available? That was the situation. No time to point out that pagans were responsible for torturing and murdering Christians in the first 300 years of Christian history; that pagans certainly have [and do in non-western places] offered sacrifices of animals and even of humans [this was denied]. In fact, as the article referenced shows, and as many neo-Pagan scholars are now beginning to admit, neo-paganism is a sanitised fantasy of the mid 20th century. Not that his invalidates it: clearly it is resonating with important themes in western spiritual sensibilities [hey, I was even into it once upon a time -albeit in a fairly dabbley/minor way]. But let's have some sensible discussion about facts as well. Some of it says more about rejecting things [and mostly abuses] in Christianity than real paleo-Paganism.