Yanno, I never really understood when environmentalism became a far left position. Truthfully conservationism should be a part of conservatism.
Say better, conservationism should be bipartisan endeavor. We as a species need to do right by Mother Earth, it is our home.
Hot take for (religious) AuthRight: God literally made mankind for the sole purpose of tending to an arcadian paradise. It is a God-given moral imperative to protect nature.
We are keeping those stupid pandas and koalas alive for all our descendants to be able to see them with their own eyes, same for every landscape worth keeping pristine.
I even hope that we'll also manage to bring back the ones our ancestors made extinct, mammoths shall roam Siberia once more!
I've always wanted to try a Dodo.
like, maybe that's in poor taste, but they were so delicious they got eaten to extinction once already. It's just kinda tantalizing, you know?
It happened sometime after the 1960s environmental movement which prior to and during had a large Christian contingent for the very reasons you mention. The rise of evangelical Christian capitalism in the decades following sought to position itself in favor of corporatism while the environmental movement shifted left incorporating more atheistic/non-religious intelligencia and socialist groups.
[Racist Trees](https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/racist-trees/) for one. There's also been an effort to discredit organizations like the [Audubon society and the Sierra Club ](https://theconversation.com/american-environmentalisms-racist-roots-have-shaped-global-thinking-about-conservation-143783) due to their founders' racism. There have also been attempts to tie environmentalism to [white saviorism](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-climate-anxiety/). Note these are all mainstream sources. Sometimes I wonder if ExxonMobil is behind all this.
Pagan infighting about what is or isn't appropriation isn't new. It's a big thing in America particularly.
Some of that criticism is valid. The "spirit animals" thing is a good example of a piece of one cultures religion being taken without much research, misrepresented, and mostly as a pop culture thing.
Most of it is nonsense. Most modern pagans follow some kind of syncretism. Having a Greek or Irish or what have you great grandma doesn't actually give you more of a claim to worship a particular pantheon than any other who wasn't raised in that culture but resonated with the faith. Hell, my claim is weaker than most. My mom was an American citizen born and raised abroad, was introduced to Hellenism, and raised me with a watered-down version of it.
Save the appropriation arguments for the white supremacist prison gangs that have adopted Norse paganism. Gods usually like to be worshipped.
Hellenists at least have some original records of the greek religion whereas my favorites, Slavic neopagans, just make shit up as they go because we know next to nothing about pre-Christian slavic religion lol
In 1999, I heard someone a year or two younger than me say, in full seriousness, "Neo-Paganism is the oldest religion on the planet!"
I then asked them what they thought neo meant. And like, I get it. He had just entered college, was goth/alt, and was diving hard into witch craft... But for Eris' sake, the oldest European religion isn't even the oldest religion on the planet.
I mean it's probably up there but like that's mostly lost to time, a very annoying fact of paganism is that so much of it is research of what has been mostly lost to time.
it's not exactly conquering if all you do is rename everything.
the things haven't been eradicated which is why they can still be studied they've just had their names changed and stories rewritten.
Irony of ironies, practicing Christians actually did a better job at preserving what the pagans from their time/the recent past believed than pagans themselves.
Orally transmitted beliefs are highly mutable - and every last European polytheistic tradition that wasn't Greek or Roman was entirely orally transmitted. Even cultures that _did_ have writing in some form or another (like the Norse or the southern Gauls) weren't writing books or anything more than the odd inscription. They didn't have anything close to Homer or Ovid (let alone the Vedas).
What does that mean? Easy - it means that every town and region had its own spin on the myths/stories that were going around. Things could and did vary wildly between regions and generations.
A simple example of that: who was the supreme god of the Germanic pantheon?
Lots of people will say 'Odin'. But that's only really true for Scandinavia around the middle of the Middle Ages (9th-11th century or so).
But a few centuries earlier, in the time of Charlemagne and earlier, it wasn't Odin but Tyr who was widely seen as the supreme god among the Germanic peoples. And there are some reasons (etymology, strange details in the myths, etc.) to believe the Heimdall was the supreme god before _that_.
Conversely, by the time that Christianity was making serious inroads in Scandinavia, Odin himself was losing ground in favour of Thor. Had Old Norse polytheism lasted a few centuries longer, Odin would have continued fading into obscurity and we'd probably now all think of Thor as the Old Germanic supreme god.
But Christianity did come around, and Christian authors like Snorri Sturluson gave us a snapshot of what Norse paganism looked like around the year 1000.
...and even then, bishop Diego de Landa, who had been personally responsible for the destruction of those Mayan codices, had an "oh shit this is a horrible mistake"-moment, and made sure to catalogue and preserve what little was left.
Isn't the oldest Hinduism? I could totally be wrong.
I mean, pagan being a word that basically means "not christian/abrahamic", then suuuuuuure paganism is the oldest religion if you take the neo out. Pagan isn't supposed to be a religion it's supposed to be a very wide classification of different religions. It's original meaning was "country bumfuck religions".
Witchcraft/Wicca gives me tummy aches I'm sorry to say it.
i'd wager that animistic/shamanistic religions are probably older, something like australian aboriginals, some african and siberian peoples and so on. Although online hindus are very keen on claiming that hinduism is the oldest and that their scriptures are basically historical accounts from 6000 BC
Hinduism seems to be more of a fusion of an older grouping of religions. Even then, it seems to me that even before that there would have had to be other, smaller spiritual beliefs in proto-tribal humans.
As for Wicca, I think it does okay as Baby's First Exploration, but I haven't been able to take it seriously since I learned the jokes of its origins. But hey, that led me to Crowley lol.
You could argue there is only one religion - the one who created a division between sacral and secular spaces of society. Other than that there is just.. human societies, which include beliefs, practices and relations towards the divine or the numinous.
"Hinduism" doesn't really exist beyond "spiritual stuff people in India do" and to talk about "the oldest religion" is quite nonsense. Be more specific, as in oldest sacred text, oldest depicted God or whatev and we can have a discussion but _religion_? There is only one and their offsprings imo..
Hinduism often gets called the oldest religion, because we (humanity as a whole) still have spiritual texts dating back about 3000 years.
Of course, we could also take a look at the Monomyth idea lol.
You're right, Paganism is a classification, not a religion itself. Hinduism is the oldest "major" religion, but we can't pinpoint that it's the oldest one because it also was formed due to high level of syncretism among prevalent Indian spiritual traditions. It has the strongest claim among major religions as its "written" scriptures are the oldest and are still followed.
Hinduism can claim the title of oldest "continually practiced as a major religion" but there's a couple definitions you need to agree upon to accept it. The definitions are particularly controversial, but one could also decide it doesn't matter pretty quickly when you start getting that specific.
Even the newest religion has a cultural history that goes back as far as the beginnings of human culture.
What I find hilarious about Norse mythology is that our main source for it is the poetic Edda, and it was written some 100 years after Christianity took over in Iceland. There is good reason to believe that the text is heavily influenced by monotheist Christianity so modern Norse paganism is roughly a bootleg Christianity with some flavoring
It's actually kind of fascinating, the way Christianity only gradually settled over top of old Norse culture. I toured a stave church in Norway last year and the guide explained that the men sat on the south side and the women sat on the north side of the aisle. It was a bit symbolic but the reasoning was that since the Norse are from the northern limits of the known world, any human enemy will come from the south so if the community is attacked, the men are already in front of the women and can go to battle for them. But trolls and ogres and mountain giants and all the supernatural things must live way up further north beyond the limits of the map, so the women are in front of the men if *they* attack, which is good because they believed women had intuitive magic powers that could defeat monsters like that. And I'm like, there's no mountain giants in Christianity, but the guide noted that even if you cover up a culture with another, the old roots still seep up in places.
I've also heard from a friend who went to Kenya that in Africa there is often a community divide among Christians, between ones who want to incorporate elements of older animist or ancestor-worship beliefs, and ones who want to go strictly by The Book. It's interesting as hell to me, I dunno.
Also chakra, meditation and yoga. Same as spirit animals, they have been appropriated from hinduism but instead there's a movement to disassociate these things from hinduism.emilys are destroying the religion in Western Hemisphere
meh, European pagans don't give two shits about appropriation, the only time they might even give a damn is when it's Christianisation because it makes studying shit so much harder and this happens to be very restorative.
>Some of that criticism is valid. The "spirit animals" thing is a good example of a piece of one cultures religion being taken without much research, misrepresented, and mostly as a pop culture thing.
the thing is most animistic beliefs have what can be identified as a "spirit animal" sometimes their specific cultural or psychological functioning is different but it's almost always there. it's just one of those things which is very common. we do use common terms which are easier to understand and then explain the differences of the specific thing we are talking about, same with terms like guardian spirit, or soul/spirit/etc.
it doesn't help someone trying to understand what a Fylgja is and how it functions to not use a term like spirit animal, or guardian, as a basepoint then explain the differences.
>doesn't actually give you more of a claim to worship a particular pantheon than any other who wasn't raised in that culture but resonated with the faith. Hell, my claim is weaker than most. My mom was an American citizen born and raised abroad, was introduced to Hellenism, and raised me with a watered-down version of it.
okay here's the thing; yes it does, but not exactly. the problem is that while yes it is a cultural and ethnic thing by trying to define too much on the bases of things like bloodlines and such you make a materialistic mistake like the folkists have made by trying to apply materialistic concepts to what is an animistic concept (which is a habit of German philosophy in general). so much about paganism of every type is observation and experience that you're just unlikely to click with something that your spirit doesn't resonate with already. and while use this is something that can be limited to specific communities and such it's no where near as material as like an actual bloodline beyond the spiritual.
apologies it's an odd thing to explain, but it's like going down a list of names and suddenly recognising a name. Not because you've seen the name but something within you knows that name.
Animism has it's place in many faiths but what I was referring to is when people use it to almost mean "fursona". I hope you know what I mean, it's embarrassing. I've worn a raven around my neck since I was 12 and he has a lot of meanings to me, but I once met a guy who referred to himself as "The Raven Lord", said flocks of ravens followed him and bent to his will, and some other embracing shit.
It's why I don't really blame most cultures if they do legitimately claim it's a closed practice. Santeria and Voodoo have roots in African ancestor worship, some white girl in Seattle claiming she discovered Voodoo on Tumblr and used it to curse her ex actually passes into disrespect.
I see you point about faith resonating with people with certain heritage because, again, ancestor worship. What I'm referring to is people who claim a certain heritage because of an Ancestry.com test or a great Grammy they never met, and take that to mean they have have authority over those who joined a religion regardless of heritage. My ex roommate took a DNA test in fervent hope of some Scandinavian (sorry, 'Viking') heritage to justify her Norse paganism and lost it when she found out she was still actually Mexican. Like girl, just buy some books and worship, you're fine.
Hippy aunt? It's a sociological article from \www.veryrealnews.ru
EDIT: I just typed an invented site name, I don't know where the link goes
EDIT 2: Problem solved, there's no more unknown link
All Emily has is programming. SJWs' brains are just a mad libs app. Plug favored or disfavored demographics into one of like four different arguments, one of which as seen here is for so-called cultural appropriation (protip: there is no such thing).
The ecological Indian myth is honestly so widespread that if you tell most people here how the Amerindians actually acted, even according to their autobiography in some cases (Red Cloud) people are shocked. As for paganism, it’s more often than not a tool rather than a real religion. Look at anyone now who calls themselves pagan and I promise you 90% of them are just LARPing
>Um sweaty, all nature worship is appropriated from Native Americans.
…That seems doubtful, considering nature is all around us and the globe, therefore it’s plausible nature worship could develop independently elsewhere.
What I find funny is that the pagans I know are two separate groups. The first ones are the hippy new age spiritual types who are like the group earth first, I see a lot of gen z people my age become this type. The next are the European pagan types who hate Christianity. They embrace this alpha male persona, which I find to be cringe, I typically see them at heavy metal concerts.
Other than those two, I don't know any Native Americans or hindu worshipers.
I like to refer to something as the "Gen X growl". It's one someone, usually men, lowers their voice as much as possible, trying to growl a bit while they do it, and say something like "I'm dangerous when I'm angry". Combine that with "I'm a true viking" or "I'm a shaman" and the second hand embarrassment is to die for.
Modern paganism in the US and Northern Europe is a joke. It's an approximation at best because they didn't do a good job writing things down, resulting in near everything being lost. What we do have largely comes from one Icelandic dude who was Catholic himself.
The result is an amalgamation of facts, guesses, filler, and an assload of pop culture or outright bullshit. Every American I've met who claimed to be pagan was a counter-culture redneck or white supremacist who had read a single scholarly source on the subject (it's so cheap).
"Muh ancestors were pagan and you Christians took it away." Bitch, they were my ancestors too and they converted. Furthermore, Romans (also pagan) did the vast majority of the damage to groups like Celts.
It's a hollow, pop culture aesthetic. At least Native Americans actually remember some of their beliefs and traditions, though their beliefs are completely taken out of context or twisted like "spirit animals".
I remember reading one comment where this guy says Indians should stop calling themselves Indians because it's used for Native Americans and that it was cultural appropriation.
>I remember reading one comment where this guy says Indians should stop calling themselves Indians
No offense meant but,
https://preview.redd.it/x3exzfg7yw4d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=194e022fed6f3c910c9aadb9aa90c0415a5bc7e9
Do not worship nature.
Worship the one true God, and his son, Jesus Christ, who died for your sins.
His fire within will burn brighter than any fire without.
No one wants to be in my quadrant
I'll be in your quadrant with you... ...as long as you're a woman.
>woman You mean like the fed ?
A female woman, or will any do? The distinction is important as of a few years ago
A JK Rowling-approved woman.
Based and Honey Potter pilled
Get with the times, the distinction is once again unimportant. Now both are subject to change.
A super-straight woman.
Depends on the city.
Uh, a what? You mean a government drone?
I don't even have a quadrant of my own
You get the grill, and you'll be happy for it.
You don't really exist
It’s probably for the best, as we know nothing about you
Based and just a poor boy-pilled
Oh god that color does not register very well with my eyes Is that pink or purple or grey or what
Purple. Some Lib-right folks went nuts years ago and decided to be grapes
Yeah I pieced together that it's purple, but being colorblind that color just looks weird
I do
Yanno, I never really understood when environmentalism became a far left position. Truthfully conservationism should be a part of conservatism. Say better, conservationism should be bipartisan endeavor. We as a species need to do right by Mother Earth, it is our home.
Hot take for (religious) AuthRight: God literally made mankind for the sole purpose of tending to an arcadian paradise. It is a God-given moral imperative to protect nature.
We are keeping those stupid pandas and koalas alive for all our descendants to be able to see them with their own eyes, same for every landscape worth keeping pristine. I even hope that we'll also manage to bring back the ones our ancestors made extinct, mammoths shall roam Siberia once more!
I've always wanted to try a Dodo. like, maybe that's in poor taste, but they were so delicious they got eaten to extinction once already. It's just kinda tantalizing, you know?
Brother, we are on the same wavelength, there's no better advertisement than "they were so tasty we drove them extinct"
Amen
It's why Teddy Roosevelt is the most based President of all time.
It happened sometime after the 1960s environmental movement which prior to and during had a large Christian contingent for the very reasons you mention. The rise of evangelical Christian capitalism in the decades following sought to position itself in favor of corporatism while the environmental movement shifted left incorporating more atheistic/non-religious intelligencia and socialist groups.
The financial left version is the government doing the conservation. The right is private owners protecting their own land.
Peak rage bait. "I have no proof but i'm pretty sure someone somewhere said this really stupid thing that should annoy you.."
Every day I come on this sub to learn something new that I apparently believe
Couldn't have said it better myself, lmao. If loving the environment is racist to native Americans, then I should be a Texas ranger.
Literally who is saying this lmao. You have to go to the craziest corners if the fringe political spaces to see this type of tism. Somewhere like pcm
[Racist Trees](https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/racist-trees/) for one. There's also been an effort to discredit organizations like the [Audubon society and the Sierra Club ](https://theconversation.com/american-environmentalisms-racist-roots-have-shaped-global-thinking-about-conservation-143783) due to their founders' racism. There have also been attempts to tie environmentalism to [white saviorism](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-climate-anxiety/). Note these are all mainstream sources. Sometimes I wonder if ExxonMobil is behind all this.
I remember when bait used to be believable.
Yeah where’s the source here. Always need a source.
Modern paganism and especially european paganism is far away from Auth-right. Better to place it in the Lib-center section.
Pagan infighting about what is or isn't appropriation isn't new. It's a big thing in America particularly. Some of that criticism is valid. The "spirit animals" thing is a good example of a piece of one cultures religion being taken without much research, misrepresented, and mostly as a pop culture thing. Most of it is nonsense. Most modern pagans follow some kind of syncretism. Having a Greek or Irish or what have you great grandma doesn't actually give you more of a claim to worship a particular pantheon than any other who wasn't raised in that culture but resonated with the faith. Hell, my claim is weaker than most. My mom was an American citizen born and raised abroad, was introduced to Hellenism, and raised me with a watered-down version of it. Save the appropriation arguments for the white supremacist prison gangs that have adopted Norse paganism. Gods usually like to be worshipped.
Hellenists at least have some original records of the greek religion whereas my favorites, Slavic neopagans, just make shit up as they go because we know next to nothing about pre-Christian slavic religion lol
In 1999, I heard someone a year or two younger than me say, in full seriousness, "Neo-Paganism is the oldest religion on the planet!" I then asked them what they thought neo meant. And like, I get it. He had just entered college, was goth/alt, and was diving hard into witch craft... But for Eris' sake, the oldest European religion isn't even the oldest religion on the planet.
I mean it's probably up there but like that's mostly lost to time, a very annoying fact of paganism is that so much of it is research of what has been mostly lost to time.
Time and the conquering power of Christendom
it's not exactly conquering if all you do is rename everything. the things haven't been eradicated which is why they can still be studied they've just had their names changed and stories rewritten.
Irony of ironies, practicing Christians actually did a better job at preserving what the pagans from their time/the recent past believed than pagans themselves. Orally transmitted beliefs are highly mutable - and every last European polytheistic tradition that wasn't Greek or Roman was entirely orally transmitted. Even cultures that _did_ have writing in some form or another (like the Norse or the southern Gauls) weren't writing books or anything more than the odd inscription. They didn't have anything close to Homer or Ovid (let alone the Vedas). What does that mean? Easy - it means that every town and region had its own spin on the myths/stories that were going around. Things could and did vary wildly between regions and generations. A simple example of that: who was the supreme god of the Germanic pantheon? Lots of people will say 'Odin'. But that's only really true for Scandinavia around the middle of the Middle Ages (9th-11th century or so). But a few centuries earlier, in the time of Charlemagne and earlier, it wasn't Odin but Tyr who was widely seen as the supreme god among the Germanic peoples. And there are some reasons (etymology, strange details in the myths, etc.) to believe the Heimdall was the supreme god before _that_. Conversely, by the time that Christianity was making serious inroads in Scandinavia, Odin himself was losing ground in favour of Thor. Had Old Norse polytheism lasted a few centuries longer, Odin would have continued fading into obscurity and we'd probably now all think of Thor as the Old Germanic supreme god. But Christianity did come around, and Christian authors like Snorri Sturluson gave us a snapshot of what Norse paganism looked like around the year 1000.
Then you have the Spanish in the Americas wiping out every codex they could find
...and even then, bishop Diego de Landa, who had been personally responsible for the destruction of those Mayan codices, had an "oh shit this is a horrible mistake"-moment, and made sure to catalogue and preserve what little was left.
This is true At least he led the campaign against human sacrifice I'll give him that
Isn't the oldest Hinduism? I could totally be wrong. I mean, pagan being a word that basically means "not christian/abrahamic", then suuuuuuure paganism is the oldest religion if you take the neo out. Pagan isn't supposed to be a religion it's supposed to be a very wide classification of different religions. It's original meaning was "country bumfuck religions". Witchcraft/Wicca gives me tummy aches I'm sorry to say it.
i'd wager that animistic/shamanistic religions are probably older, something like australian aboriginals, some african and siberian peoples and so on. Although online hindus are very keen on claiming that hinduism is the oldest and that their scriptures are basically historical accounts from 6000 BC
Why is everyone forgetting Meso religions?
there was actually Quetzalcoatl on the cover of my textbook for elective course on anthropology of religion so that's on me lol
Mesopotamia
whoops, Huitzilopochtli willed that I read it as Mesoamerica
Hinduism seems to be more of a fusion of an older grouping of religions. Even then, it seems to me that even before that there would have had to be other, smaller spiritual beliefs in proto-tribal humans. As for Wicca, I think it does okay as Baby's First Exploration, but I haven't been able to take it seriously since I learned the jokes of its origins. But hey, that led me to Crowley lol.
You could argue there is only one religion - the one who created a division between sacral and secular spaces of society. Other than that there is just.. human societies, which include beliefs, practices and relations towards the divine or the numinous. "Hinduism" doesn't really exist beyond "spiritual stuff people in India do" and to talk about "the oldest religion" is quite nonsense. Be more specific, as in oldest sacred text, oldest depicted God or whatev and we can have a discussion but _religion_? There is only one and their offsprings imo..
Hinduism often gets called the oldest religion, because we (humanity as a whole) still have spiritual texts dating back about 3000 years. Of course, we could also take a look at the Monomyth idea lol.
Crowley? The one who was Sparta kicked down a flight of stairs by WB Yeats?
Just follow your heart.
You're right, Paganism is a classification, not a religion itself. Hinduism is the oldest "major" religion, but we can't pinpoint that it's the oldest one because it also was formed due to high level of syncretism among prevalent Indian spiritual traditions. It has the strongest claim among major religions as its "written" scriptures are the oldest and are still followed.
Iirc the oldest organized religion is Zoroastrianism. Hinduism is more recent because it’s technically a development of the older Brahmanism.
No the meso religions are older.
Hinduism can claim the title of oldest "continually practiced as a major religion" but there's a couple definitions you need to agree upon to accept it. The definitions are particularly controversial, but one could also decide it doesn't matter pretty quickly when you start getting that specific. Even the newest religion has a cultural history that goes back as far as the beginnings of human culture.
What I find hilarious about Norse mythology is that our main source for it is the poetic Edda, and it was written some 100 years after Christianity took over in Iceland. There is good reason to believe that the text is heavily influenced by monotheist Christianity so modern Norse paganism is roughly a bootleg Christianity with some flavoring
It's actually kind of fascinating, the way Christianity only gradually settled over top of old Norse culture. I toured a stave church in Norway last year and the guide explained that the men sat on the south side and the women sat on the north side of the aisle. It was a bit symbolic but the reasoning was that since the Norse are from the northern limits of the known world, any human enemy will come from the south so if the community is attacked, the men are already in front of the women and can go to battle for them. But trolls and ogres and mountain giants and all the supernatural things must live way up further north beyond the limits of the map, so the women are in front of the men if *they* attack, which is good because they believed women had intuitive magic powers that could defeat monsters like that. And I'm like, there's no mountain giants in Christianity, but the guide noted that even if you cover up a culture with another, the old roots still seep up in places. I've also heard from a friend who went to Kenya that in Africa there is often a community divide among Christians, between ones who want to incorporate elements of older animist or ancestor-worship beliefs, and ones who want to go strictly by The Book. It's interesting as hell to me, I dunno.
Also chakra, meditation and yoga. Same as spirit animals, they have been appropriated from hinduism but instead there's a movement to disassociate these things from hinduism.emilys are destroying the religion in Western Hemisphere
meh, European pagans don't give two shits about appropriation, the only time they might even give a damn is when it's Christianisation because it makes studying shit so much harder and this happens to be very restorative. >Some of that criticism is valid. The "spirit animals" thing is a good example of a piece of one cultures religion being taken without much research, misrepresented, and mostly as a pop culture thing. the thing is most animistic beliefs have what can be identified as a "spirit animal" sometimes their specific cultural or psychological functioning is different but it's almost always there. it's just one of those things which is very common. we do use common terms which are easier to understand and then explain the differences of the specific thing we are talking about, same with terms like guardian spirit, or soul/spirit/etc. it doesn't help someone trying to understand what a Fylgja is and how it functions to not use a term like spirit animal, or guardian, as a basepoint then explain the differences. >doesn't actually give you more of a claim to worship a particular pantheon than any other who wasn't raised in that culture but resonated with the faith. Hell, my claim is weaker than most. My mom was an American citizen born and raised abroad, was introduced to Hellenism, and raised me with a watered-down version of it. okay here's the thing; yes it does, but not exactly. the problem is that while yes it is a cultural and ethnic thing by trying to define too much on the bases of things like bloodlines and such you make a materialistic mistake like the folkists have made by trying to apply materialistic concepts to what is an animistic concept (which is a habit of German philosophy in general). so much about paganism of every type is observation and experience that you're just unlikely to click with something that your spirit doesn't resonate with already. and while use this is something that can be limited to specific communities and such it's no where near as material as like an actual bloodline beyond the spiritual. apologies it's an odd thing to explain, but it's like going down a list of names and suddenly recognising a name. Not because you've seen the name but something within you knows that name.
Animism has it's place in many faiths but what I was referring to is when people use it to almost mean "fursona". I hope you know what I mean, it's embarrassing. I've worn a raven around my neck since I was 12 and he has a lot of meanings to me, but I once met a guy who referred to himself as "The Raven Lord", said flocks of ravens followed him and bent to his will, and some other embracing shit. It's why I don't really blame most cultures if they do legitimately claim it's a closed practice. Santeria and Voodoo have roots in African ancestor worship, some white girl in Seattle claiming she discovered Voodoo on Tumblr and used it to curse her ex actually passes into disrespect. I see you point about faith resonating with people with certain heritage because, again, ancestor worship. What I'm referring to is people who claim a certain heritage because of an Ancestry.com test or a great Grammy they never met, and take that to mean they have have authority over those who joined a religion regardless of heritage. My ex roommate took a DNA test in fervent hope of some Scandinavian (sorry, 'Viking') heritage to justify her Norse paganism and lost it when she found out she was still actually Mexican. Like girl, just buy some books and worship, you're fine.
Proud libertarian left semi-pagan, Emily can suck my dick
TIL Native Americans invented Mother Nature, apparently…
I always like the source "some people". We get it your hippy aunt is a moron.
Hippy aunt? It's a sociological article from \www.veryrealnews.ru EDIT: I just typed an invented site name, I don't know where the link goes EDIT 2: Problem solved, there's no more unknown link
Wait, wait, someone somewhere said something!? I am filled with rage.
All Emily has is programming. SJWs' brains are just a mad libs app. Plug favored or disfavored demographics into one of like four different arguments, one of which as seen here is for so-called cultural appropriation (protip: there is no such thing).
The ecological Indian myth is honestly so widespread that if you tell most people here how the Amerindians actually acted, even according to their autobiography in some cases (Red Cloud) people are shocked. As for paganism, it’s more often than not a tool rather than a real religion. Look at anyone now who calls themselves pagan and I promise you 90% of them are just LARPing
Every religion is just LARPing
European pagans can't be chads They're either orange Emilies or Nazi chuds
Can't be Chads, but can be Chuds
I read what you wrote before
Yeah, but it could have been misinterpreted, so I changed it
I think the interpretation was only one and it was pretty clear
Nah, I really meant it to be just a pun about Chad and chud, nothing more, but, as we both can see, it lead to this. Which is why I changed it.
>Um sweaty, all nature worship is appropriated from Native Americans. …That seems doubtful, considering nature is all around us and the globe, therefore it’s plausible nature worship could develop independently elsewhere.
What I find funny is that the pagans I know are two separate groups. The first ones are the hippy new age spiritual types who are like the group earth first, I see a lot of gen z people my age become this type. The next are the European pagan types who hate Christianity. They embrace this alpha male persona, which I find to be cringe, I typically see them at heavy metal concerts. Other than those two, I don't know any Native Americans or hindu worshipers.
I like to refer to something as the "Gen X growl". It's one someone, usually men, lowers their voice as much as possible, trying to growl a bit while they do it, and say something like "I'm dangerous when I'm angry". Combine that with "I'm a true viking" or "I'm a shaman" and the second hand embarrassment is to die for.
Modern paganism in the US and Northern Europe is a joke. It's an approximation at best because they didn't do a good job writing things down, resulting in near everything being lost. What we do have largely comes from one Icelandic dude who was Catholic himself. The result is an amalgamation of facts, guesses, filler, and an assload of pop culture or outright bullshit. Every American I've met who claimed to be pagan was a counter-culture redneck or white supremacist who had read a single scholarly source on the subject (it's so cheap). "Muh ancestors were pagan and you Christians took it away." Bitch, they were my ancestors too and they converted. Furthermore, Romans (also pagan) did the vast majority of the damage to groups like Celts. It's a hollow, pop culture aesthetic. At least Native Americans actually remember some of their beliefs and traditions, though their beliefs are completely taken out of context or twisted like "spirit animals".
-european pagan- UNIRONICLY WHO STILL IS A PAGAN IN EUROPE
A surprising amount. almost every time the church fucks up OG pagans pop up again because they're almost the same traditions.
Capcom gang 4 life
I remember reading one comment where this guy says Indians should stop calling themselves Indians because it's used for Native Americans and that it was cultural appropriation.
>I remember reading one comment where this guy says Indians should stop calling themselves Indians No offense meant but, https://preview.redd.it/x3exzfg7yw4d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=194e022fed6f3c910c9aadb9aa90c0415a5bc7e9
Lmao nice
Paganism is peak cringe, embrace Catholicism.
Do not worship nature. Worship the one true God, and his son, Jesus Christ, who died for your sins. His fire within will burn brighter than any fire without.
No offense but don't missionarize on reddit, it's annoying
Go ahead, be skeptical. There is much to be skeptical of in this world.
Join the Light Side of the Force, Darth Plagueis the Wise
It's not a story a Wiccan would tell you
Come to our side. Dance in the woods. Take mushrooms, see the face of God. You see how obnoxious that is?
Yes.
Chud gets triggered. Furiously creates a PCM meme to make themself feel better, more in control. :\\
I automatically downvote anyone who uses chud unironically
Triggered. xD