11–20 of 36 posts
The problem with this article is that it seems to cherry pick the easiest examples of pagan identity to criticize and then simply rebukes them by pithy aphorism. This makes it an extremely uninformed article. The mainstream witchcraft (i.e. wiccan) movements stem from Gerald Gardner's attempt to reconstruct Italian and British witchcraft traditions and turn it into something acceptable for modern audiences. Both his…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could just be "this is in my ballpark, that is not". Also going against contemporary American megachurch Christianity would require a very different kind of focus and approach. There are deep subtleties to it on a sociological perspective that are far more interesting than its extreme fish-in-a-barrel status theologically. Maybe that doesn't interest the author?
Maybe you're right. The impression I got was that the author picked a soft easy target, but maybe that's an uncharitable take. > Also going against contemporary American megachurch Christianity would require a very different kind of focus and approach I'm not sure I agree with that though. The same method, pointing out conflict between modern espoused belief and historical reality, seems like it would be equally effe…
People don't follow religions because they're true. They follow them because they offer narratives and social interactions they personally find compelling.
Understanding the social interactions - they're not always obvious - might do more to make religions less appealing than yet another unsuccessful attempt to debunk the core narrative.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could just be "this is in my ballpark, that is not". Also going against contemporary American megachurch Christianity would require a very different kind of focus and approach. There are deep subtleties to it on a sociological perspective that are far more interesting than its extreme fish-in-a-barrel status theologically. Maybe that doesn't interest the author?
Maybe you're right. The impression I got was that the author picked a soft easy target, but maybe that's an uncharitable take. > Also going against contemporary American megachurch Christianity would require a very different kind of focus and approach I'm not sure I agree with that though. The same method, pointing out conflict between modern espoused belief and historical reality, seems like it would be equally effe…
https://athenaeumreview.org/contributor/diane-purkiss/
Diane Purkiss is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and fellow and tutor at Keble College. She holds a doctoral degree from Merton College Oxford, and an honours degree in English and History from the University of Queensland. She has published widely on the English Civil War, and on witchcraft and the supernatural in the early modern period.
She's writing about popular misconceptions relevant to her own specialty. She has no special background to bring to bear on contemporary American megachurch Christianity.
Her critique was published in the Athenaeum Review, "a new journal of arts and ideas for the general educated reader."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could just be "this is in my ballpark, that is not". Also going against contemporary American megachurch Christianity would require a very different kind of focus and approach. There are deep subtleties to it on a sociological perspective that are far more interesting than its extreme fish-in-a-barrel status theologically. Maybe that doesn't interest the author?
Maybe you're right. The impression I got was that the author picked a soft easy target, but maybe that's an uncharitable take. > Also going against contemporary American megachurch Christianity would require a very different kind of focus and approach I'm not sure I agree with that though. The same method, pointing out conflict between modern espoused belief and historical reality, seems like it would be equally effe…
Basically what you've got here is a cultural phenomenon dressed up as a religious one, borrowing some religious functions, taking over the public role of religion. But its foundations have a lot more to do with ingroup identity, shibboleths and the peculiar American take on the protestant work ethic. Trying to understand it theologically just hits a blank wall. You have to understand it as sociology.
([1] Other religions not of the same lineage shrug off this class of attacks. Disprove Shinto? Disprove what? It makes no historical claims.)
The problem with this article is that it seems to cherry pick the easiest examples of pagan identity to criticize and then simply rebukes them by pithy aphorism. This makes it an extremely uninformed article. The mainstream witchcraft (i.e. wiccan) movements stem from Gerald Gardner's attempt to reconstruct Italian and British witchcraft traditions and turn it into something acceptable for modern audiences. Both his…
I think that while there's a lot of informationally isolated pagans out there who still buy into the "burning times", hidden matriarchal religion, pagan survivals in folk customs, etc etc stuff, anyone who's well informed knows that all that has been shown to be 19th-century romanticism at work. So what is left is a contemporary mystery religion founded in the 1940s by a charismatic man, that borrows aesthetics from…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe you're right. The impression I got was that the author picked a soft easy target, but maybe that's an uncharitable take. > Also going against contemporary American megachurch Christianity would require a very different kind of focus and approach I'm not sure I agree with that though. The same method, pointing out conflict between modern espoused belief and historical reality, seems like it would be equally effe…
It's been tried. It doesn't work. It doesn't change the minds of Christian believers, just as pointing out the lack of evidence for the Burning Times doesn't change the minds of feminist Wiccans. People don't follow religions because they're true. They follow them because they offer narratives and social interactions they personally find compelling. Understanding the social interactions - they're not always obvious -…
I think that while there's a lot of informationally isolated pagans out there who still buy into the "burning times", hidden matriarchal religion, pagan survivals in folk customs, etc etc stuff, anyone who's well informed knows that all that has been shown to be 19th-century romanticism at work. So what is left is a contemporary mystery religion founded in the 1940s by a charismatic man, that borrows aesthetics from…
I heard it put this way: neo-paganism is 99% neo 1% pagan.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe you're right. The impression I got was that the author picked a soft easy target, but maybe that's an uncharitable take. > Also going against contemporary American megachurch Christianity would require a very different kind of focus and approach I'm not sure I agree with that though. The same method, pointing out conflict between modern espoused belief and historical reality, seems like it would be equally effe…
It's really not. Christianity is a rather uniquely vulnerable religion to getting rationalist holes poked in it because of its insistence on factual historicality of a particular set of events[1], and megachurch Christianity is a deeply weird, heretical offshoot that barely follows mainline Christianity, and it looks like you could blow barn-sized holes in it with a peashooter, because it's held together with ignoran…
I think you can ultimately thank Thomas Aquinas for this movement. He was quite fond of a rational basis for God and repackaged the works of Aristotle for this end. But of course once you start down the road of adding rationalism to your religion then the whole mysticism of it can start to stand out to some. So some people started thinking it must be all literal and totally rational...
Eastern Orthodox Christianity still has no truck with that rationalism nonsense.
I would have named names, too. And I’d have been especially good at intuiting what names my interrogators wanted to hear (they would not have to torture or even threaten to torture me) – sharp-tongued gossips and independent-minded widows and all kinds of people who get described as “unruly” in modern academic essays. Throw them under the god damn Witch Bus. Does it disappoint you to hear this? I never asked you to have faith in me, Goody Watson.
http://the-toast.net/2016/02/09/reasons-i-would-not-have-bee...