What sort of issues, drama, heartaches, etc., have you encountered in your experiences with Pagan communities? Anecdotes welcome. There's a purpose behind this question, which I'll expand upon later this week.
To expand on this - like any smaller special interest group, the pagan community draws a fair number of "wounded birds" - the problems I see are several fold:
1. People craving power that they don't have in real like using what should be a spiritual organization to further their own ego trips - often hurting others in the process (and manipulating others, as redwoodmists points out).
2. People with few social skills loudly announcing "they" speak for the pagan community as a whole and making us look like fools in the bargain.
3. People who have absolutely no ability to cope in their own lives, people with three divorices, no jobs, kids they won't be responsible for - talking about how they help dead people, are spiritual sensitives, reiki masters, etc. Look folks, if you can't get your own life under some minimal control, why do you expect me to believe that you have some mastery over the spiritual forces of the universe. No, I'm not taking you a haunted historic house to "heal" the ghosts, or anything else. Failures on guru trips.
4. People who use the pagan community as they use Cons, arts groups, Pennsic, Ren Fairs, and so on as opportunities to hook up with no consequences, hide it from an SO or find some foolish person or persons who can be sexually manipulated. (this happens in churches too, and a million other groups, but it's really in the open sometimes in the pagan community).
I really don't have much to do with any community. All I do is pretty private at this stage, and I don't really refer to myself as pagan - I'm kind of a heretic, no matter what religion we're talking about.
1. People craving power that they don't have in real like using what should be a spiritual organization to further their own ego trips - often hurting others in the process (and manipulating others, as redwoodmists points out).
2. People with few social skills loudly announcing "they" speak for the pagan community as a whole and making us look like fools in the bargain.
3. People who have absolutely no ability to cope in their own lives, people with three divorices, no jobs, kids they won't be responsible for - talking about how they help dead people, are spiritual sensitives, reiki masters, etc. Look folks, if you can't get your own life under some minimal control, why do you expect me to believe that you have some mastery over the spiritual forces of the universe. No, I'm not taking you a haunted historic house to "heal" the ghosts, or anything else. Failures on guru trips.
4. People who use the pagan community as they use Cons, arts groups, Pennsic, Ren Fairs, and so on as opportunities to hook up with no consequences, hide it from an SO or find some foolish person or persons who can be sexually manipulated. (this happens in churches too, and a million other groups, but it's really in the open sometimes in the pagan community).
I really don't have much to do with any community. All I do is pretty private at this stage, and I don't really refer to myself as pagan - I'm kind of a heretic, no matter what religion we're talking about.
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