more from the blizzard
just some telling statements, that really bug me, and why I totally shun pagandom.
"1. Is it so incomprehensible to you that some of the gods give POLITICAL instructions to their followers? That some people have relationships with gods that require that they engage in politics? How can you blithely assume that you are one of the 'us' that puts your Gods first, but that the many polytheists that write at Gods and Radicals aren't engaged in gods-inspired work?
2. Do you think that the gods can live on a dead planet? Do you think that colonization and imperialism, in exterminating countless cultures and ecosystems, hasn't also annihilated gods? How many gods have been erased along with the people that worshiped them? And what system of colonization and world conquest has been more brutal than the last half millenium of capitalist power?
To support not only your gods, but the existence of all gods, you have to be against capitalism because capitalism is destroying the world within which the gods live."
"If there was a warning about the possibility of fascism or something else negative in any field or practice would it then condemn that field and all it's practitioners by association."(?)
comments section: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/johnbeckett/2016/03/guilt-by-association.html#disqus_thread
"Paganism in general-and apparently Devotional and Reconstructionist Polytheism in particular-have been long overdue for a reckoning. How do we differentiate our own practices and beliefs from someone whose identical practises and beliefs actually lead them to advocate for racial purity or separtism, the primacy of European gods, eugenics to prevent the birth of disabled people, and even human sacrifice? What is really the difference between the Fascism of Augustus Sol Invictus, or New Right ideology of Stephen McNallen and Alain de Benoist, and the rest of polytheist belief?"
"There are some deeply difficult questions that we need to ask. Do the gods want us to return to ‘tribal’ societies, do the gods demand we war against Muslims and Atheists and Leftists, do the gods demand we institute strict hierarchies and authority-relationships between priests and the rest of us? And did those gods happen to notice those are the same ideas of the New Right?"
"Despite the fact that there are, indeed, writers and leaders who openly claim allegiance with many of the ideas of the New Right, it is the ideas which are the problem, not the people. In fact, we must not fall into that trap when confronting dangerous ideas-that’s the tool of Fascism, not of liberation. Humans are not the ideas or beliefs they hold, anymore than they are the color of their skin, their genitals, their ability, or their sexual orientation."
"from AnomalousThracian'fb page "
“Important to remember that this same sort of document circled in the US around 25 years ago, igniting the Satanic Panic, which sent the entire country (nay, the world..?!) into a frenzy of paranoia around witchcraft, magic, delusions of baby-killing and child-ritual-trafficking, and a whole lot of thinking that Dungeons and Dragons would open a portal to the underworld and unleash a literal apocalypse.”
“And then about, what, twenty five or thirty years before that, the same thing, in the McCarthy Era. Different language, different scapegoats, same paranoid and delusional fear-mongering propaganda.”
"There is some great degree of irony in a leftist witch being declared a McCarthyist or attempting to initiate a witch-hunt."
"If you are responsible for your writing, then you are responsible for what you communicate with your writing. This was an utterly predictable response, as you proved you knew by putting that in TWICE. You knew people were going to be offended by you listing groups, and if you really are the skilled writer people say you are, you ought to have known that those would be insufficient."
comments section
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/throughthegrapevine/2016/03/the-uncomfortable-mirror/?ref_widget=gr_popular&ref_blog=grails&ref_post=pagan