Actually, IIRC, Hitler professed to be Lutheran. Doesnt really change the "atheists are evil" thing, but kinda interesting, nevertheless. [/QB]</font>[/QUOTE]Bah, after fifteen minutes, the TOS has trumped every response to the "evil" thang that i can come up with. Guess i'm going to Hell. :rolleyes: Shall i grab some road beers?

As for Atheists banding together, wouldn't that make us a religion? I'll have to invent my own if that ever happens...

Nah, you could just be a social club.

<font color=8fbc8f>These guys did not belive = period. To them hell was just a four letter word with no meaning! In memory, they never spoke as such either.
Respectfully, they did not have some of the same sayings that the majors had, things were never damned when they, or the Pagans and Wiccans for that matter, were involved.</font>

As an atheist, my ponderings of the unknown are governed only by what i choose not to believe in. If i say i'm going to Hell, it's to be taken with a pinch of salt at the behest of the overwhelming majority who believe that i am, indeed, going to Hell. Apologies if my use of the four letter word caused offense.

I have always thought "pagan" to be merely a slightly derogatory term for anyone who does not follow the mainstream religion. Like heathen or infidel.

<font color=8fbc8f>Ahh. I see through it now! None taken and I'm sure none were intended, I just totally missed it, and to add insult to injury, you even put a emoticon in there! Doh!
IG; did you by chance catch RTBs description? That makes it a very easily understood explanation.</font>

That's ok felix. If it makes you feel better, it took me several read-throughs before i'd gotten the correct jist of yours. [img]tongue.gif[/img] :D

I'm blaming it on Easter drinks. :D

In my reckoning, you're both right, yet both statements are incomplete. Pagan was a label given to a large variety of non-Christian religions. This is an important part of the term, because it gets at the violent past of the eradication of peoples and religions. What it doesn't do is seek to understand those religions. It only understands them as what they're not - Christian. Nor does it seek to understand them as differing belief systems. This is where I find the latter statement incomplete. The goodly Bard's understanding is one example. There are many others, much of which we'll never be able to know much about, others of which are newer and idiosyncratic - which is not to say they are any less valid. Any attempt to understand a single pagan belief system misses these truths. In this spirit, Felix, it sounds like you did right by your men's belief systems - understanding what each called himself to actually mean - surely you can readily appreciate the multiple meanings attributable to any of those labels. Also, I was sorry to read your edit. :(

As an interesting aside - to try to find a spring/moon = female trend is one thing - but as a rule is another entirely. I don't mean to identify anyone with having this goal, but this was a world-wide social science project in the 50's and 60's. In my anthropological training thus far, reading up on the discipline's history has shown me that our previous efforts to find global structures of belief were misguided and did nothing to help us to actually understand each particular belief system. Read up (ie, wiki [img]smile.gif[/img] ) on structuralism (Ferdinand de Sassure, early, Claude Levi-Strauss, later and most influential) if you want to know how this system was to work, and where it broke down.

As another interesting aside, consider the diverse pagan influences on some religious holidays, like the painting of colored eggs. Sometimes we speak of entities as though they have clearly defined edges, where one religion ends and another begins. Sometimes we need to recognize what we miss when we do that (like, for example, that not everyone who calls themselves X understands X to mean the same things). Atheism/agnosticism are particularly good examples of this, because these are often very individual. My atheism has different origins, attributes, and emphasis, I'll wager, than Sever's or Kyrvias's.

My "definition" was intended to explain my beliefs. Paganism does indeed have many variations, just as there are several "versions", for lack of a better word right now, of Christianity. Pagans can be dumped into a large category in the same way that Christians can. More in line with the "they don't follow this path", than the actual path they follow. Baptists are different from Catholics, for example only, but both are Christian. They follow the same book, and the same teachings, but in different ways. This isn't just a random thought either, as in my youth, I was associated with both branches of the Faith.

Edit: Sorry to single this out, but I haven't finished my first cup of coffee yet. Pagan is used as more than a slightly derogatory term, to this day. While it's not as likely to lead to being burned at the stake today as in days past. I believe it's due to a lack of understanding, more than malicious intent, in most cases though. I came up with the quarter idea while discussing this with a person that said I was a Satanist when I said I was Pagan. While I do suppose that Satanism could be dumped into the stack with Paganism, the reverse cannot apply.

[ 04-08-2007, 08:01 AM: Message edited by: robertthebard ]

You're a little off.

Agnostics and Atheiests are indeed what I described. What you are describing are agnostics who are also athiests, and it is possible to be both. That last paragraph refers to athiesm, agnostics simply believe that the existence (or lack thereof) of God is unknowable and irrelevant.

Here's a reference from Wikipedia.