Ladies and Gentlemen I am pleased to announce the creation of a new group for the study and discussion of Pagan Matters. The name of the new group is, The Centre for Uncensored Pagan Discussions. You can find the new group at the following address: https://facebook/groups/267486070041869/?fref=nf I would like to explain to you why it is I feel this new group is necessary. The easiest way I can do that is to present you with a copy of my latest post to the new group. Here it is: Ladies and Gentlemen I would like to offer my heart felt thanks to Denyse Adolwolfa Shorocks, who has taken the shell of the discussion group I created here and has turned it into a finished and beautiful product. I hope this discussion group will grow and grow and I hope it will go from strength to strength. I must confess, that my initial inspiration for creating this group was something of a hissy fit on my part. I am bipolar and I am sometimes overcome with an almost missionary zeal. When that missionary zeal is thwarted, I regret I sometime dont handle it terribly well. I had started a discussion on another Facebook Group for Pagans, where I had speculated on the History of Paganism in Western Europe from the time of the Council of Nicea, in 325 AD, to the time of Gerald Gardners initiation, by a coven of witches in the New Forest. My speculations had been driven by irritation, on my part, by a school of thought articulated by people who appeared to think that the scholarship of people like Professor Ronald Hutton and others had told us all we needed to know and to enquire further was to commit heresy. In other words, people were making dogmatic assertions, implying that there was an authorised view of pagan history. They were also implying that to question the authorised view of pagan history, was heresy. They were starting to sound, to my ears, like Roman Catholic Theologians and Inquisitors at the time of the Spanish Inquisition ! I dislike talk of heresy, I dislike dogmatism. It is the exact opposite of scholarship. Genuine scholarship is always ready to abandon old ideas when new information comes along. Its all very well to suggest that the world is flat, that it sits on the back of a tortoise and that the sun, moon and stars are moved around for the benefit of mankind by some benevolent God or Gods. However, when our astronomical observations tell us that the world is a globe, travelling around the sun at a speed of 108,000 km/hr and simultaneously spinning on its axis at a speed of one thousand miles per hour, we abandon the idea that the world is flat and sitting on the back of a tortoise ! Dogma and the doctrine of heresy are the domain of the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church pursued their dogma, and guarded against heresy, to such a maniacal degree they considered it OK to torture people, to murder them and to burn them alive !!! All this was done in the name of God. All this was done in the name of a peaceful Jewish Rabbi, who (if he existed at all) was probably named Yeshua, and not Jesus, as the Roman Catholics assert. All this was done in the name of a man who must be spinning in his grave to know what has been done and what is being done in his name. I am very suspicious of Pagans who make dogmatic assertions and rail against heresy. They remind me of Roman Catholics and the Roman Catholic Church. I know something about the Roman Catholic Church. I have studied that sick little institution. I have had no option but to study it! They messed with my education and they messed with my head. You see, I went to a Roman Catholic School. I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, that the Roman Catholic Church is evil. Let me explain: I grew up in a nominally Christian family in a nominally Christian land. My Father was (nominally) a Roman Catholic. When I was young, my Fathers Catholicism was never a problem. This was because he was a good boy who kept in to himself ! Regrettably, when I was nine years old, shortly after my sister was born, he suddenly became a practicing Catholic. Prior to my Fathers conversion to the religion of his youth, my younger brother and I used to look forward to weekends as a time when we could play with our friends on the green down the road, in the park, in our house or in our friends houses. After my Fathers conversion, we were dragged off to Church every Sunday morning, to a Roman Catholic Mass, to listen to some ignorant peasant of a Roman Catholic Priest threatening us, along with the rest of the congregation, with the End of the World (accompanied with weeping and gnashing of teeth) with Hell Fire and with Hell Fire and damnation for all eternity. However, if I thought a Roman Catholic Mass was bad, it was as nothing compared to going to a Roman Catholic School ! I had the displeasure of going to a Roman Catholic School when I was nine years old. Even then, at that tender age, I remember saying to myself, This is a return to the Dark Ages. I might as well have climbed into a time machine and travelled back to the 16th Century, as to go to that school, that dark, Satanic little haven of ignorance, superstition, dogmatism and fear! Those may not have been the exact words with which I articulated my displeasure at the tender age of nine. Nevertheless those words definitely supply the gist of my apprehension of my circumstances at that time. At Catholic School we were subjected to Catechism classes. The Roman Catholic Church does not like people to think for themselves. The Roman Catholic Church takes children as young as it can get them and it systematically fills their heads with shit ! When one reasons one uses logic. One takes a set of basic axioms and one plays around with them in order to reach a conclusion. The Roman Catholic Church endeavours to make rational thought all but impossible by building axioms in the minds of young children that are complete and utter fabrications; complete and utter lies ! It then hammers its message home by telling its young charges that there is a vicious and angry God watching their every move, who would condemn them to an eternity of vicious torture beyond all imagining and beyond all endurance if they even as much as miss going to Roman Catholic Mass every Sunday! It is not for nothing that the Jesuits say, Give me a child until he is seven years old and I will answer for the actions of the man ! The only good thing about a Roman Catholic Schooling is that it helps one to appreciate the brilliance of the comedian Dave Allen. He also had a Roman Catholic education. He describes it brilliantly ! Fortunately for us, his work was filmed and I can therefore point you to a resulting video on YouTube. Here it is: https://m.youtube/watch?v=jxo81Ok9Urk So in conclusion people: Let us discuss our pagan heritage and let us do so, free from any dogma, free from any accusations of heresy. Let us remember Oscar Wildes injunction to his lover Lord Arthur Douglas (aka Bosie) when Wilde regretted that Lord Arthur Douglas had never acquired the Oxford Temperament as he called it, never learned to play gracefully with ideas. Let us discuss our Pagan heritage and let us do so free from the taint of dogmatism and free from accusations of heresy. Let us play gracefully with ideas ! Here endeth the lesson !
Posted on: Sat, 29 Nov 2014 11:40:03 +0000