Wicca, Paganism and all points west!! !
That would be due to the fact that Wicca didn't exist until around the 1950s, and most of the amount of people prosecuted during the so-called burning times were not in the millions, and nearly all of them were in fact Christians. Anyone interested in the subject of witch persecutions should read this article-
http://www.crisismagazine.com/october2001/feature1.htm
While it does have a Catholic bias, it is much more historicly correct than most of Wiccan related sites online.
Yes the Catholic church trying to cover it's tracks. THEEEEEEEEEERE'S an unbiased scource of information!! !! !
Do people actually buy this history revisionisim?? It reminds me of Holocaust denial!! !!
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All hail Comrade Napoleon!! !
Correction: Nooooooooooooooooooobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!! !! !! !! !! !! !! !!


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All hail Comrade Napoleon!! !
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/76/story_7665_1.html
How can you not take something called The Belief-O-Matic?
i call BS on this. it said i'm unitarian.....i don't even believe in god.
I'm unconvinced as to the presence or absence of any supernatural forces that influence our lives. I suspect there's something, but I don't know what it is.
The fact that so many religions are similar in their beliefs might mean something. Though in all honesty it's probably due to similar circumstances and information exchange then any connection to super natural forces.
All that being said? I like Norse Mythology as I think I mentioned earlier. Loki is the greatest dude ever
I am a Pagan. Very much inspired by the Druids and the Celtic side of things. I believe inNature, and all her forces....evolution etc etc etc. I honour and.........(I hate the word worship........) all that Natural forces....the sun the wind, the changing of the seasons......the gifts she gives us.......our connection with the earth.......the passing of birth and death...........the animals and plants...........the paralels and archetypal associations between ourselves and the animals world....our place in the cycle. The fact that if we mess with Nature she will eventually kick us all up the arse so we must look after her and make sure all her processes keep running smoothly as if we dont she will one day give up on us all, stand up and sort out her own equilibrium by her self (ie natural disasters, effects of globab warming etc etc) which will cause us animal folk one HELL of a lot of hassle.........
And on the burning thing. Wiccan is an incredibly new thing and has no connection at all with the old pagan religions. The women who were burned at the stake were christian. The whole thing was one misguided, fear borne "witchhunt" where people who were slightly different, looked a bit strange and 'witchy' or practiced herbalism and other traditional pagan type crafts, were hunted down, accused of evil worship and were well and truly buggered. There may have been one or two women who harked back to 'old ways', there are allways the free thinkers out there even in the most surpressed societies, but the vast majority were simply misunderstood christians who may have been a bit weird.
Remember......you caould have been the most faithful, normal christian woman in the world and all it got to get you burning was a neighbour with a grudge dropping some random accusation on the authorities and next thing you know you're a BBQ for the crows!
By the middle ages, the country was Christian. No doubt. Many areas still practiced ancient traditional Pagan rites and ceremonies and festivals, and still had old Pagan stories and songs, whilst people in the most isolated corners still lived pretty much as Celts but it all had a Christian gloss painted over the top. (Celtic Christianity.........research it....its a nice path) The Pagan Gods became saints, the Pagan festivals became Christain dates of note. Aspects of pagan ceremony were applied to Christianity...............for a long time the only real change was that now this God dude ruled the show..........then the Church came in and decided it was all about money and having power and control over people and it soon became quite an ugly, corrupted show of egos and power.......a weapon of fear......
When the Church came into it, it all became one big contradiction of what I believe Christianity was supposed to be.......I believe if there is a God he wouldn't have wanted these churches and stuff.......its just Man trying to rule the show and make this God dude what he wants him to be. I believe he'd have wanted you to worship him in the beautiful places he created, instead of destroying beautiful rocky areas to make some cold stone church on which some poor buggers had to labour hard to create!
After all Jesus was one cool Hippy dude, and I'm sure he'd be preaching "peace and love man" and gentle persuasion as to the idea.......not wantin us to go burning people cos they didnt agree with the church and the like!
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"I've been looking all over the place for a place for me, but it ain't anywhere. It just ain;t anywhere!"
Syd Barrett - 1969
I've been a practicing wiccan since 1986. And I agree. Let's don't start posting left-handed responses.
We are all of the earth, the universe. Our beliefs may differ, but don't we have the same needs? Aren't we all human?
With that said. I'll close and hope other will follow those words. Harm not.
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Hey I know my rights! I'm entitled to a phone call and a. . .strip search.
Last edited by whiteskunk on 08 Aug 2006, 11:34 am, edited 1 time in total.
From the time of my manifestation, the only Truth thay I have been able to deduce is "Belief". Faith, hope, optimism, and pessimism are some of its allotropes. In this world that I have become attuned to, people are born and taught that this is the way and that is the way. In earlier times this may have been a wise way to live, and still can be, on a global stage. It brought people together under a common belief "system". With shared beliefs and perceptions, people were able to be more productive, in the sense that without conflict, there was not a whole lot to disagree upon. Conflict arose when people of non associative belief systems began to intermingle. This led to argument, violence, and then wars.
As a species, we are maturing. It has been discovered through reflection and meditation that we are all one. Connected through energy, time, and space. What one does directly or indirectly has an effect on all that is, all that has ever been, and all that will ever be. This is the principle of Unification. This is not something we seek, it is an immutable reality. Believe what you will.
If one believes that a deity exists, it makes sense to believe that the deity is a part of our Universe, for the Universe encompasses all that is. Considering that the deity is part of this essense, we are also part of the deity. Without us as an observor, the deity would not exist, for we would not exist. The relationship is reciprocal. We are the deity, and the deity is us.
If we choose to associate ourselves with this philosophy, it seems that is incumbent upon us all to become as our creator. To become creators. Some believe that extraterrestrials created the human species. This leads people to assume that if this is true, than extraterrestrials would be the deity. Who created the extraterrestrials? We are all created from the Universe, and we create what is already there.
If you are a person who desires "proof" for validation, perform this simple experiment. Take an idea, invention, product, etc... that you believe should exist, yet you have never become aware of its existence. After you have deduced that this something should exist, look for it. This act of observation will tune it into your existence. It should be noted that any logicaly conflicting information may disable this act of resonance.
This experiment can also be performed with words. Look up an already pre-existent word, understand its meaning so as to become familiar with it, and note how the frequency of its use increases over time in your perceptual framework.
Another technique is to invent a word. The word must make sense in that it should contain prefixes, suffixes, or other paternal identities.
Remember, it wont work if you do not believe that it will.
You are god, I am god, we are all god. So lets quit damning ourselves.
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Any thing that can happen, will happen, has already happened, and is happening right now.
The Inquisition? Pffft. The ULTIMATE in religiously driven massacre was The Crusades. Millions upon millions of people killed, just over a belief in an invisible man who made us and his holy land. And let's not forget the most atrocious and reprehensible part of the Crusades: The Childrens Crusade.
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"...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government..."~Declaration of Indepencence
Pleased to meet you.
Ditto on that. Asatru out here in Vinland. Pretty new to it-marking the change of the seasons with blots by myself in the woods, meditation, rune reading, leechcraft, mead-making. Odin had a fever in his blood that made him wander the Earth-sounds like my kind of diety...
Jumping in... I'm Wiccan....
Hmm, sure about that? I read in a book about magick that it's as old as Hermeticism and other systems, but I guess you mean when it was reintroduced by Gardner?
A few clarifications:
1) The Burning Times sucked, but actually had very little to do with Witchcraft. Furthermore, the death count of millions is a major exaggeration. It was based on some exceedingly dodgy statistical extrapolations. The exact death count is unknown and unknowable, but is generally estimated to be a few hundred thousand. Of those victims, few had anything to do with any form of Witchcraft. Mind you, they were accused of such, but the truth is that a vast majority of them were Christians. (It is interesting to note that one of the people executed as a Heretic was guilty of the unpardonable sin of translating the Bible into English.) Some of them were even executed for pointing out that the system was a little unbalanced. Suggesting anything other than execution == guilt meant that you were saying that the Holy Church made mistakes.
2) A ludicrous number of Wiccans are a) obnoxious and intolerant, b) self-righteous, c) delusional, or d) some combination of the three. The same can be said of any religion.
3) "Wicca", as introduced by Gardner, was created in the 1950's as a patchwork of many sources, including the Golden Dawn (of which Gardner was a member). Most modern practice of the religion bears almost no resemblance to the religion described by GBG in Witchcraft Today, unless you're talking to a Gardnerian or Alexandrian.
I myself am an eclectic Wiccan, which means that my beliefs are a patchwork of "Traditional" Wicca and about a billion other sources.