_wicca_ [sheherazahde]

""Our approach is very new-school," says Edler. "It's about shattering stereotypes. A lot of people assume that anything pagan is associated with the devil. The whole genre gets a bad rap, like you have to wear a cape, have some missing teeth or dress like Stevie Nicks to be into it."

Although the band loves to indulge in "creepy-cute" Wiccan rituals while on stage, the members say their personal approach to paganism is much more modern and simple and not as "out there" as people might assume. It's about believing you can have whatever you want in life, as long as you create it.""

""Most of us are Christian and you're not, so why don't you go away" isn't the Christmas message. It's not close to the Christmas message, but unfortunately, it's becoming the message in some parts of some communities.

It's hard to imagine what could bring someone to use the birth of Jesus as an excuse to harass Jews, but that seems to be what's happening in at least one case.

If the only way to counter that is to shut down Christmas observances for a time in those schools, so be it.

Peace on earth, goodwill toward all is more important than presents under a tree."

"The confusion surrounding the nature of God is due to the difference between the Universal concept of an unknowable God vs. the nature of man’s “Institutional God.”

Judaism speaks for Jehovah suggesting that Jews are God’s chosen people but lacks an objective symbol, such as Jesus or Mohammad of Christianity and Islam fame. All claim to believe in the One God, but each is a construct to serve a particular political purpose.
[...]
In 1598 Juan de Oñate established the first Spanish colonies in New Mexico and was successful in converting the Pueblos to Catholicism. But in the 1670s unfavorable natural events occurred that shook the faith of the Indians in the Church and enticed Popé to attempt to return his people to their native Kivah-religion.

Spaniards accused him of witchcraft [the exercise of magical anti-Catholic influence] and jailed him for awhile which did not improve his disposition. On August 10th 1680 he led a revolt that killed many Spaniards and drove the remaining colonists to sanctuary in El Paso del Norte below the Rio Grande. Popé’s “reformation” seemed complete.

But in 1692 Diego de Vargas began the re-conquest of New Mexico, and by 1696,Spain was again in control, but only by allowing the Indians to practice their Kivah- religion. Today, Kivas and the Catholic Church are found in all New Mexico Pueblos in much the same way as Catholicism and Protestantism co-exit.

But in the Zuñi Village pagan deities are painted on the interior walls of its Catholic Church; how many others we can only guess, Ácoma did not let me enter its Church."

_wicca_ [sheherazahde]

"Some families are living in constant fear as their neighbours call them witches. Some are also forced to go as far as possible from their villages in search of jobs as no one who knows them will offer them any work. Witchcraft remains a deeply rooted issue within the community and the elderly are portrayed as custodians of witchery. Every ailment, misfortune or trouble is blamed on sorcery. Some say even success is attributed to witchcraft. Lobby groups for the elderly have set up shop here to try and stop the targeting of senior citizens, spreading the message that burning of suspected witches is not an answer to sorcery."

"Basically, it comes down to this: Society has created this "perfect box" and if you don't fit in that box, you're a social outcast. Employers need to realize that just because a person has tattoos or piercings, it doesn't mean he/she is incapable of performing the task at hand. Ink does not drain brain cells!"

"The 39-foot-tall statue, representing Mago, which in Korean means the "Soul of The Earth," has captured the interest of motorists who have passed the Bill Gray Road area, where the Mago Earth Park stands across the road from the new Immaculate Conception Catholic Church.

The name Mago, according to Tao Fellowship, derives from ancient East Asian tradition. "Ma," a nearly universal sound representing "Mother," is combined with "Go," meaning "eminent and ancient origin." This is an ancient respectful name for "Mother Earth."

According to the Tao Fellowship news release, "This event will celebrate respect and love for Mother Earth. We believe Mother Earth's greatest desire is for all of her children to recover their original connection to nature, to rediscover their true selves, by nurturing Earth's bounty and safeguarding its precious environment."

Related Stories:
• Letter: Mago Center imposing obtrusive eyesores on entire community
• Letter: Mago statue to be symbolic landmark of peace for Cottonwood
• Letter: Mago Earth Park a welcome addition to Verde Valley
• Letter: Statue is obnoxious, repugnant, offensive
• Letter: Message is fine; messenger is too big
• Letter: I’ll be there to support the Mago statue
• Letter: Let’s not turn Cottonwood into another Sedona
• Letter: Park provides positive image, but the statue does not
• Mago Park dedication ceremony set today
• Tao Fellowship dedicates Mago statue and Earth Park
• Gallery: Mago Earth Park Dedication
• Mago zoning matter draws a huge crowd but no resolution"

_wicca_ [sheherazahde]

"Not being pagan or Christian, myself, I don't have a dog in this hunt. Burn your yule log or sing your Christmas matins – more power to you.

But, as noted in a recent Slate article, some Christians don't appreciate a level playing field. One spokeswoman at a conservative Christian group was displeased when a clothing company gave equal time to various holidays in a television ad.

"As a Christian, I don't put Christmas on the same plane as winter solstice," noted Carrie Gordon Earll, a spokeswoman for Focus on the Family. "It kind of felt like a poke in the eye."

I suspect pagans know the feeling."

"Tarot cards and Magic may sound like a moments fancy to many unbelievers but in the hands of a skilled practitioner they provide pathways to a better life. Swati Prakash is a Wiccan and an M.D. in Alternative Medicines who has channeled her entrepreneurial energies to create Tarot India Network. Her entrepreneurial mission is not just to convert the unbeliever but to give them the benefits that an alternative lifestyle can endow."

"As to Kelly’s claims that the sign mocks religion, foundation co-President Dan Barker said: “He’s kind of right, because the last couple of sentences do criticize religion, and of course, the beginning is a celebration of the winter solstice. But that kind of speech is protected as well — speech that is critical and speech that is supportive.”

Protected, yes; but not necessarily hosted. If the FRFF wants to put up a sign on private property proclaiming the falsity of Christianity and Judaism — or of Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Wicca, though those other religions never seem to provoke such Vesuvian eruptions from the FRFF, the ACLU, or the United Separators (sorry, I meant Americans United for the Separation of Church and State) — let them.

But if they want to express themselves in a display in a public space devoted (for a time) to celebrations of religious faith, then let them simply state what they believe without mocking, attacking, deriding, or spitting on other faiths."

"A Canadian woman is to appear in court on Christmas Eve for posing as a witch in order to defraud a grieving Toronto lawyer in a case that invokes a century-old law, police said Thursday.
Vishwantee Persaud was charged under a very rarely used section of Canada's criminal code with allegedly pretending to practice witchcraft to convince a man that she was the embodied spirit of his deceased sister.
She did so, say police, in order to defraud him of tens of thousands of dollars.
[...]
The bogus witching law was enacted in 1892 when witchcraft was no longer a punishable offense in Canada, but fears persisted that it could be used as a cover for fraud.
It makes it illegal for anyone to fraudulently pretend to exercise witchcraft or sorcery or enchantment.
Jones conceded the law is "obscure... but it's still on the books," and it captures what he believes transpired -- "preying on a man's sensitivities" to commit an "absurd" fraud.
"The law is not directed at witches, but rather at using the pretence of witchcraft to separate someone from their money," he noted."

"In Saudi Arabia, last month Lebanese TV personality Ali Sabat was detained as he traveled to perform his Hajj pilgrimage.

He was sentenced to death for witchcraft, after he became famous for giving mystical predictions about the future.

Amnesty International called on Saudi authorities to lift the sentence. "Saudi courts are sanctioning a literal witch hunt by the religious police," Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement at the time.

"The crime of witchcraft is being used against all sorts of behavior, with the cruel threat of state-sanctioned executions."

In the United Arab Emirates, and Dubai in particular, authorities take a more liberal stance. However, because of the large number of scam artists posing as sorcerers and exorcists in Dubai, police have set up a special task to crack down on so-called "magic-related crimes.""

"In Tanzania, East Africa, at least 50 albinos (people with a rare genetic disorder that leaves the skin, hair, and eyes without pigment) were murdered for their body parts last year, according to the Red Cross. An albino's arms, fingers, genitals, ears, and blood are highly prized on the black market, believed to contain magical powers. People with albinism anywhere often stand out because of their distinctive features; in a continent of dark-skinned Africans, albinos are often the subject of fear, hatred, and ridicule.

The belief and practice of using body parts for magical ritual or benefit is called muti. (Science fiction fans may recall that muti was featured in the hit South African film "District 9," in which the hero's body parts were sought after by a local warlord who believed that the limbs would give him magical powers. That horrific scene was based in fact, not the screenwriter's imagination.)"

"Dozens of villagers in the Kenyan district of Kisii are falling prey to superstitious groups accusing them of witchcraft.

The poverty-stricken western district, known as Kenya's sorcery belt, has seen an increase in mob attacks on individuals and even killings.

The poor and elderly in particular are being targeted"

_wicca_ [sheherazahde]

"Saturn (Latin: Saturnus) was a major Roman god of agriculture and harvest. In medieval times he was known as the Roman god of agriculture, justice and strength; he held a sickle in his left hand and a bundle of wheat in his right. His mother's name was Helen, or Hel. He was identified in classical antiquity with the Greek deity Cronus, and the mythologies of the two gods are commonly mixed. Saturn's wife was Ops (the Roman equivalent of Rhea). Saturn was the father of Ceres, Jupiter, Veritas, Pluto, and Neptune, among others."

"In the Alexandrian and Renaissance periods Cronos was interpreted with the name Chronos. Another theory holds that it may be related to "horned", suggesting a possible connection with the ancient Indian demon Kroni or the Levantine deity El."

"In Greek mythology, Chronos (Ancient Greek: Χρόνος) in pre-Socratic philosophical works is said to be the personification of time. His name in Modern Greek also means "year" and is alternatively spelled Khronos (english transliteration) or Chronus (Latin spelling).
Chronos was imagined as an incorporeal god. Serpentine in form, with three heads—that of a man, a bull, and a lion. He and his consort, serpentine Ananke (Inevitability), circled the primal world-egg in their coils and split it apart to form the ordered universe of earth, sea and sky.

_wicca_ [sheherazahde]

"Distaste for Christmas's pagan residues led Oliver Cromwell's Puritans to ban the celebration in England entirely between 1642 and 1652. Even after royal restoration, the Dec. 25 observance remained in bad odour among British Protestants - an attitude the Pilgrims carried with them across the Atlantic. Around 1660 the General Court of Massachusetts even passed a law banning Christmas observance: "anyone who is found observing, by abstinence from labour, feasting, or any other way, any such days as Christmas Day, shall pay for every such offense five shillings." Christmas wasn't widely celebrated in the English-speaking Americas until massive nineteenth-century immigration by Irish Catholics and Germans.

Many Christmas traditions have pagan origins, including the tree (Roman and Egyptian tree-worship); mistletoe (Druidism); exchanging presents (Roman Saturnalia); and evergreen decorations (Teutonic-Norse paganism). There's nothing essentially Christian about pigging out at gut-busting turkey dinners."

"Today I’m going to break that rule and talk about religion. I come from a not very religious country, but in the corner of it, Northern Ireland, they were fighting religious wars only a few years ago. There’s a story about the foreigner who arrived in Northern Ireland during the conflict. The taxi driver from the airport asked the crucial question which was put to all visitors: “Are you a Protestant or a Catholic?” The visitor replied “Neither, actually I’m an atheist”. The taxi driver said “No, you foreigners don’t understand. You have to choose your side. Are you a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?”

I remember my first trip to Peru. It was interesting to see the churches of the Spanish conquerors built right on top of the sacred places of the natives. You could still see the massive cyclopean stones of the ancient builders under the even blocks of the Spanish church. It clearly helped conversion to Christianity to take over some aspects of the local religion. In Europe most of the Christian festivals were held at the same time as the major pagan festivals – especially the mid-winter festival which became Christmas. One of my heroes, Oliver Cromwell, when he ruled England four hundred years ago, decided that the pagan festivals had to be stopped and he more or less banned the celebration of Christmas together with dancing on Sundays. These bans were very unpopular, not because of religious beliefs, but because he was trying to ban drinking and parties."

"As president of the Black Hills Unitarian Universalist Fellowship’s board, Bach found her spiritual home seven years ago in the liberal religious community that “focuses on love and respect for all human beings … and the responsible search for truth and meaning,” she said.
She arrived at Unitarianism after growing up in a divorced family with a father who was an evangelical Christian and a mother whose nature-based pagan religion found God in the mountains, the desert and the natural world.
“Really, our church was hiking in the mountains and having picnics in the desert,” she said. “My mother taught that nature is a gift from God for us to respect and enjoy.”
[...]
For Bach, all of the world’s major religions lead to the same place – the shared values of loving one another and caring for the less fortunate.
One of the reasons she’s a Unitarian is because the group emphasizes spiritual-based activism and draws ideas from many different religious traditions. A Unitarian service is just as likely to feature an informative program on Quakerism or Mormonism as it is on Islam or Buddhism.
To her, the best expression of religion is charitable giving and doing good works.
“For us, expressing spirituality is about relieving suffering right here in our own community,” she said."

"Just 40 kms away from the capital Kathmandu, in Thasingtole, Lalitpur District, Kalli Kumari B.K., 46, a local Dalit woman, was mercilessly beaten up. She was accused of being a 'witch', imprisoned in a shed and forced to eat her own excreta
[...]
In Sunsari, 650 km south-east of Kathmandu, Jabrun Khatun, 26 was dragged out of her house and beaten in the middle of the village. "They said I was a witch, that because of me a lot of children were falling sick and beat me for hours. Then they stepped on my chest and forced me to eat human excreta," said Khatun.
[...]
In Kalilali, far west Nepal, Jugu Kumari Chaudhari was accused of practicing witch-craft when a close family member died. Chaudhari was beaten up and her husband had to come rescue her. "We went to the police station to file a complaint but they said it was a personal matter and we should resolve in the community," said Chaudhari.

Gender activists have been fighting for years to end this extreme form of violence against women, but the problem is still common in the Tarai, the southern plains of Nepal, and in areas where there's high illiteracy and poverty.

"An educated woman from higher-income family and higher caste never gets accused of practicing witchcraft," said Indu Pant, gender advisor at CARE Nepal. Urmila Bishwakarma of the Dalit media group Jagaran Media Centre has been documenting cases of Dalit women who have been accused as witches and tortured. She said that Dalit and other minority women are the most vulnerable because they are socially, culturally, financially and politically backward.

Pant says that the problem is exacerbated because the state is often missing in these regions, so the victims have nowhere to go for help. "Even when they try to seek help from the police they are often turned back because the police says it is a personal matter and must be solved in the community. This culture of impunity lets the perpetrators off the hook."

Spokesperson of the Supreme Court Sri Kanta Poudel said that there is a legal vacuum when it comes to punishing those who are involved in such crimes. "There are no provisions of compensation or reintegration of the victims into the society, that is the weakness of our justice system," admits Poudel."

_wicca_ [sheherazahde]

"Patricia Crowther is one of the nation's most revered High Priestesses of the Craft of the Wise, or witchcraft to the uninitiated.
[...]
Patricia, now 82, was ordained as High Priestess in 1960, and set up the Sheffield Coven in 1961. She is now referred to as a Grand Mother of the craft - primarily because of her age. "We respect the old in the Craft," she says.

This year she published her tenth book, Covensense, a reference book for followers of the Craft of the Wise, or for the curious-minded. Topics include the significance of the magic circle, herbs, flowers, initiation, ritual and spells - and all are addressed as answers to questions Patricia has been asked over the years.

"Some celebrate the winter solstice, also known as Yule, as the start of both the solar and calendar year.

The solstice is the official start of winter and occurred at 11:47 a.m. Monday. The word solstice comes from Latin and means "sun stands still," referring to the sun appearing to rise from the same point on the horizon for several days in a row.

Today, as in years past, it is celebrated over several days and nights, said the Rev. Selena Fox, senior minister for the Circle Sanctuary, a Wiccan Church based in Barneveld.

Many Christian holiday customs are based on pagan traditions, so celebrations are similar, Fox said. Pagans celebrate winter solstice by kindling candles and other lights to represent the sun, burning a yule log of oak representing the new year, celebrating around large bonfires, decorating homes and other places with holly, mistletoe and evergreens, gift giving, sharing with others through food drives and charity work, singing and eating."

"Spiro Marcetic had travelled to the Wiltshire monument from Birmingham with his wife, Alison, and their children – Evie, four, and Hector, two – to get away from it all for a few days. They stayed in a Travelodge down the road (not very druidic) and pushed the children under the subway and up to the stones in a double-buggy.

"We're here for an anti-religious reason, if any," said Alison. "Pagans seem to have more fun so we'd thought we'd give it a go. We'll be celebrating Christmas but this is about showing the children that this season isn't just about getting presents. What goes on here is more basic, more tangible."

Jill and her 10-year-old daughter Jasmine are Stonehenge regulars. But this year they brought along Jasmine's classmate, Ifu, and her father, Ken, who are not pagans, to show them what it was all about.

Ken said: "I think we found it very spiritual, very moving. It's a great experience."

Jill added: "For us this time of year is about starting to come out of the dark. It's a very positive time of year. I think people who aren't pagans come here to enjoy that feeling too.""

"In Celtic tradition, the Oak King, the Lord of Summer, is the baby that is born to the Mother Goddess. He will reign until MIdsummer, when he loses his life in battle to the Holly King. The hollies of Tower Grove are very beautiful this Solstice Day, as always. The oaks are dormant and still. Life waits at their roots.

I return home for my own midwinter ritual. I’ve spent the weeks since Samhain going through my shelves and closets. I have filled many boxes with things that are still good, but no longer serve the person I am becoming. I’ve cleaned, rearranged furniture, repurposed some rooms.

It occurs to me that I’m nesting."

"Santa Claus, Last of the Wild Men: The Origins and Evolution of Saint Nicholas, Spanning 50,000 Years: A long title for a short-ish book; one not trapped in the pale of academia, yet lacking in the vibrant writing of a popular creative non-fiction; a book that won’t please your Christian Grandmother, but might get smirked at by the hardcore folkies as well. But the late Phyllis Siefker’s tract on the origins of Santa Claus – tracing this folk figure from, she posits, his initial existence as the “Wild Man” of pan-European paganism – is a wonderful excursion into our own mythologies, regardless of its faults. And, in fact, Last of the Wild Men has become one of the prime movers in getting my personal interest in Christmas back in gear.
[...]
In The Mad Pranks And Merry Jests Of Robin Goodfellow [by John Payne Collier], a book existent from 1628 that probably predates that by quite some time, in a section entitled “How Robin Good-Fellow Was Wont To Walke In The Night,” Robin is described as a chimney-sweep whose practical jokes would be followed by his traditional cry of, “Ho, Ho, Ho.”

As one can guess from the, umm, less than modest portrayal in this portrait, Robin hangs onto many of the Wild Man’s jobs as fertility symbol and cloven-hoofed central figure of the circular merriment of May Day. But as Siefker might point out, that beard and mustache look familiar – slap a red hat over those horns and put the feet on a reindeer before him, and we’re starting to see something..."

_wicca_ [sheherazahde]

sbcpanuru

"Avatar 2 will be three minutes long and will consist of the corporation detonating tactical nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, extinguishing all life on the surface while leaving the precious underground minerals intact. Which leaves me wondering, what exactly was the point of that two and a half hours? "Aggressive imperialism is bad?" I knew that already; I didn't need to watch Dances With Wolves In Space to tell me that."

"What pissed me off about the film was that I really wanted to like its politics. Sure, it had an extraterrestrial species that has a language that is actually learnable by humans (everybody fudges that), uses intelligible body language (Star Trek set a really bad example for everybody), and doesn't have any pathogens to speak of (um, there's no real excuse for this one). But I'm usually pretty excited to see "Might doesn't make right" stories, and even though it's a few miles beyond asinine to design a freaking alien species around stereotypes of Native American culture, whatever.

Except there's this part when they find out about the trees actually functioning as a collective mind, and Grace's line is that it's not just some pagan voodoo, it's real. And suddenly the argument that it's not okay to exterminate a culture just so we can steal their resources falls apart, because now it's only morally indefensible if the funny things they spend time talking about are detectable in a lab. Way to throw freaking everybody under the bus there, jackass.

But mostly what irritated me was the film's dishonesty toward its own premise. When civilizations clash, the ones with guns, germs, steel and nukes accomplish their objectives. Nobody really wins, but the ones who will be writing the history of the Pandora conflict fifty years down the road are not the ones holding the victory party at the end of Avatar."

"“Avatar” is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.

In Cameron’s sci-fi universe, this communion is embodied by the blue-skinned, enviably slender Na’Vi, an alien race whose idyllic existence on the planet Pandora is threatened by rapacious human invaders. The Na’Vi are saved by the movie’s hero, a turncoat Marine, but they’re also saved by their faith in Eywa, the “All Mother,” described variously as a network of energy and the sum total of every living thing.

If this narrative arc sounds familiar, that’s because pantheism has been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now. It’s the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he went dancing with wolves. It’s the metaphysic woven through Disney cartoons like “The Lion King” and “Pocahontas.” And it’s the dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose mystical Force “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.”

Hollywood keeps returning to these themes because millions of Americans respond favorably to them. From Deepak Chopra to Eckhart Tolle, the “religion and inspiration” section in your local bookstore is crowded with titles pushing a pantheistic message. A recent Pew Forum report on how Americans mix and match theology found that many self-professed Christians hold beliefs about the “spiritual energy” of trees and mountains that would fit right in among the indigo-tinted Na’Vi."

"Let's start with the problem of evil. As Douthat states it, the problem is actually far more serious to his monopolistic transcendental monotheism than it is to pantheism. Karl Rove-like, he takes one of our strengths and tries to make it a weakness, one of his religion's greatest weaknesses and tries to make it a strength.

If you have a deity defined largely by his power, and his claim that he also happens to be good, the problem of evil is all but insurmountable. This is the reason many Christians have become agnostics or atheists. Bart Ehrman the noted religious scholar and Biblical expert was able to handle his discovery that the Bible was in no way literally true. But Ehrman finally lost his faith over the issue of evil.

The problem of evil is far more tractable from a pantheistic perspective. First it removes us from center stage. We two leggeds are one part of the glorious reality that is this beautiful world. We may or may not play a central role in the drama of life, but the world was not created as our little cupcake to consume as we see fit. (If it were, as folks like Douthat seem to think, evil again becomes a problem. Why create such a world unless you are a very bad designer? Or a sadist?)"

_wicca_ [sheherazahde]

"We are not asking Africans to return to the old and rather crude ways of our ancient spiritual practices and faiths. We have modified our ancient African spiritual ways, cleaned the faiths up, modernized them, to make them as attractive as any other modern religion in the world, without our spirituality loosing its well known superior spiritual potency. We now focus our faiths on science and scholarship because our African spirituality is the highest level of science known to mankind. We are using our spirituality to challenge White ideas of the world from Einstein's E=mc2 to Darwin's origin theory. Out theories have already begun to numb the critical thinking world. What all races of the world did was take aspects of the African faiths they could understand and modernized and simplified these into Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and so on, to help their respective races to ascend in the world. They changed Black images of the original African spirituality and mother of all the religions and racial spiritual movements of the world, to their native images.

Kabbalism is the most successful of all the adaptations of African spirituality. Kabbalism achieved about 30% of the African spiritual potency which the Jews used to conquer the Arabs and to ascend in the world. The Secret Societies of the West and all the other racial groups of the world, but particularly that of the West, acquired less than the 30% that Kabbala derived from the Mystery System of the Africans. And we all know that they along with the Jews rule the world today. African spiritual mavens can do anything. They are Gods in the affairs of man but they are derided by their own children who have been captured by the spiritless alien religions of Christianity and Islam. We have refined our mavens' methods to make the practices attractive to the modern, young African, and release the power for the good of all of mankind. That is what Myk is about.

Myk is the Mystery System all over again, but refined, modernized, rendered friendly, open, extremely adaptable and no less potent and reliable as our ancestors Mystery System of old. Myk relies totally on psyching the human self, withdrawing into the self to draw on the god within us, the sixth sense, our spirit essence and twin, to unleash the power of imagination to re-order and straighten out civilization and rule the world. It is share brain power I am talking about. Nothing fetish, nothing demeaning, just pure science at the highest level of scholarship and members can choose to be atheistic Pagans.

Any black African individual can start a Myk/Pan-African Movement branch in his or her neighbourhood, school, workplace, street the same way you start a Church. Apply to us and we would put you through how to set up your Myk/Pan-African Movement branch. A well run Myk/Pan-African Movement centre is expected to become a successful, efficient and highly respected hub of social, spiritual, cultural, political, intellectual and economic activities in its community within a short time. Three to five years at the most, buying up manufacturing companies, large farms, housing estates for members, office complexes to let, schools, investing in the stock exchange etc., and turning members into millionaires and business tycoons. Members are entitled to receive priority employment advantage in their Myk businesses as long as the applicants are qualified for the jobs."

"Dec. 25 is popularly known as Christmas, and the Winter Solstice arrives a few days earlier. The holiday symbols of virgins, births of gods, evergreens, yule logs and the old jolly man all originated from ancient Pagan beliefs. Many people across the world still celebrate this old pagan winter festival called Yule.

I am not trying to insult Christians who celebrate Christmas by any means, but only have them acknowledge there are many winter festivals celebrated during this time that are older than Christmas and shouldn't be insulted if someone prefers the holidays under a different name. Wiccans and other Earth-based religious followers gather in groups this time of year to celebrate the Winter Solstice as the New Sun god is reborn of the Virgin Goddess; Jesus and his virgin mother, Mary, is just another incarnation of the Sun god born to the Virgin Mother Goddess on the Winter Solstice. There is only one God, but God is called different names by different cultures.

But one main thing is that on this day, we (all faiths) are celebrating the rebirth of our God as he promises of spring and renewed life for all. Happy Solstice, Merry Yule, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Merry Christmas and happy holidays!"

"If we were to discard all things pagan, I should think we'd plunge ourselves back into the Stone Age. We walk on concrete, record our knowledge with letters, and designate our months with names originated/invented by the pagan Romans. We steer our boats with rudders invented by the pagan Chinese; make calculations with numbers invented by pagan Indians; and create computer graphics, medical imaging, and designs for buildings and bridges using geometry formalized by pagan Greeks. And much of our philosophy (and much of that drawn upon by early Christians, mind you) was generated by pagans such as Aristotle and Plato. Should we "go Taliban" and burn all their works -- and other books thus influenced? A pious Christian must believe that pagans could not have had the whole Truth, but only an ignorant Christian would believe they had no Truth."

"The pagan traditions in place before Christianity's arrival in Ukraine in 988 A.D., are still around, enmeshed in the holiday celebration. In pre-Christian times, this was time to celebrate the winter solstice, or as it was known then, the birth of the sun, Wolynetz said. The 12 dishes associated with Christmas Eve can honor either the 12 apostles or the 12 full moons of the year, depending on the perspective.
[...]
Since Ukraine broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991, its traditions have experienced a resurgence, according to Wolynetz. Soviet rule repressed religion and introduced the Russian Grandfather Frost to replace the Santa Claus-like St. Nicholas and the Christian winter holiday, she said.

Dinner is followed by caroling, which can involve costumes and disguises. Traditionally, the carolers are accompanied by someone dressed as a goat, who dies and is brought back to life in a skit the carolers perform. This has its roots in pagan beliefs, symbolizing the death of winter and rebirth of spring, according to Wolynetz."

_wicca_ [sheherazahde]

"The Gaia hypothesis proposes that the biosphere and the physical components of the planet form a complex, interacting system that maintains the climatic and biogeochemical conditions on Earth.

This hypothesis was proposed by research scientist James Lovelock in the 60s, firstly in a series of journal articles and then in a book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth
[..]
The Gaia community - an online space for individuals to encourage each other and to “follow their hearts” - describes its vision as:

“Of a world where each of us is supported in realising our highest selves, discovering our own individual gifts and strengths, and each contributing, in our own way, to a harmonious, diverse, creative, and collaborative future.”"

"Picture a cheerful figure from the North Pole, heavy in build, dressed in red with a long beard, riding through the air on a chariot drawn by animals and coming down the chimney — who is he?
His name is Thor.
Thor?? Yes, Thor, the Norse god of thunder. Both Thor and his father Odin (also called Wodan), were very popular Scandinavian gods who also gave presents to children."

"Good pagan that I am, I don't darken the door of my local church from one end of the year to the next. But Christmas is different. You need the little bit of religion at Christmas time. There's something about going to church on Christmas morning that makes the day complete, even for us atheists and agnostics.

For my teenagers it's a glimpse into a weird world of ritual, of men in frocks and old folk on their knees mumbling strange incantations. At least that's how they see it. It's like stepping into Harry Potter, one of the teens told me last year.

But for me it's a nostalgic journey into the past, evoking deep memories from boyhood days in a small country town, memories of the way we were way back when everything was simpler and somehow more alive."

_wicca_ [sheherazahde]

"John Satawa is fighting to return the Nativity scene his father built in 1945 to the median of a public street. The Thomas More Law Center, a Michigan firm that promotes Christian values, filed a suit on his behalf last week, charging Satawa's rights to free speech and equal protection under the law have been violated."

"1. Is the display on government-owned property?
2. Is the scene located inside or at the entrance of a core government building, such as a city hall or courthouse? The Supreme Court has ruled that the government may not display nativity scenes at the entrance to core government buildings (see legal summary below), even if a Christmas tree and menorah are nearby.
3. If located on the lawn in front of a government building, is it in a “high traffic area” i.e., a busy street or intersection, or in front of a main entrance to public land?
4. Is the crèche the only symbol displayed, or the predominant feature of the display?
5. What is the proximity of the crèche to any other parts of the display? If the crèche is standing alone and other figurines, lights or signs that are part of the overall display are not located nearby, or are not within view of the crèche, it is arguably a sole display.
6. Do any signs surrounding the nativity scene contain patently religious messages such as “Gloria in Excelsis Deo”?
7. Is the manger scene on public property as part of an announced “public forum”? If the display is sponsored by a private individual or entity, is there a disclaimer identifying the owner, or a sign properly alerting the public that the government does not endorse the religious message embodied in the display? Is there a written policy and a permit process for the public forum that is content-neutral? Are there reasonable time and place restrictions? (In other words, allowing a group to put up a religious Christmas display that lasts from before Thanksgiving until Easter is a problem-and that has happened!)"

"Besides the constitutional questions, the 8-by-8-foot Nativity scene poses a practical problem. The leader of the group that complained called it a traffic hazard.
"You can't see around it," Freedom From Religion Foundation Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor told Fox. "I can't understand why they can't put the scene on their church grounds.""

_wicca_ [sheherazahde]

"Meanwhile, the only way that Majority Leader Harry Reid was going to fail to get 60 votes was if a member of his caucus didn't show up to vote.

And that's exactly what Republican Sen. Tom Coburn said he's "praying" for.

"What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can't make the vote tonight," he said on the Senate floor Sunday afternoon. "That's what they ought to pray."

Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin was taken aback. "I don't think it's appropriate to be invoking prayer to wish misfortune on a colleague," he said. Durbin invited Coburn to come back to the floor and clarify his remarks."

"A caller named "Abraham" got through to C-SPAN during an interview with Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), and asked Barrasso if Coburn's call to prayer had backfired on Republicans--on Tuesday it was Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), not Sen. Byrd that failed to appear at a health care vote.

"We got our vigil together and took Sen. Coburn's instructions and prayed real hard that Sen. Byrd would either die or couldn't show up at the vote the other night. How hard did you pray, because I see one of our members is missing this morning. Did it backfire on us? Did one of our members die?!""

_wicca_ [sheherazahde]

"Yuletide arsonists have once again successfully set the Gävle goat ablaze. Police received a call around 3am on Wednesday that the Christmas goat in the eastern Swedish town was on fire."

_wicca_ [sheherazahde]

"Before I forget. Those that follow the Wicca religion warrant a mention in my religion- quilt- blog several blogs back. They adore nature. They are worthy folk and have contributed squares decorated with birds and butterflies."

"Hundreds of people have celebrated the winter solstice at Stonehenge, braving snowy travel conditions and a morning fog.
About 700 people - including pagans and druids - saw the sun rise at the ancient rocks near Salisbury, England."

"the book focuses on five pagan observers who offered a barrage of criticisms of the young religion. The five critics in chronological order were Pliny, Galen, Celsus, Porphyry and Julian, and each critic was more sophisticated and devastating in his critique than the one before.
[...]
It is striking to learn that few of the intellectual criticisms thrown at Christianity are altogether new. Questions about our belief in special revelation, the incarnation, the resurrection, the divinity of Christ, the trustworthiness of the Bible, our relationship with Judaism and the relation of faith and reason are not at all new."

"In truth, the modern Christmas holiday is a hodgepodge of cultural traditions, secular festivals, pagan practices and religious rites. It was not inspired by the biblical account of the Christ-child. Instead, it is an accommodation made by the early church to appease pagans, in hopes of converting them to Christianity. This makes it difficult to put Christ back into a celebration he was never really a part of."

""Paganism" is a funny word. Originally a Christian Latin term referring to rural people and their earthy, non-Christian religions, it now refers to everything from out-and-out witchcraft to folks who like to dance in church. That covers a lot of ground - often literally, since paganism is usually connected to the Earth, sexuality, and the cycles of time.

But paganism is not separate from Christianity or Judaism - it's part of them. Traditional Jews put an egg on the Passover Seder plate, pray for rain in October, and celebrate a new year of the trees. Even the menorah, symbol of Hanukkah, has been linked both to specific plants indigenous to the Land of Israel and to sexual symbolism that, in Biblical times, was associated with the highly pagan goddess Asherah.

Really, despite the shrieks of the orthodox, paganism is an essential part of monotheistic religion. It's dark, sexual, primal and primitive. It can be unethical, orgiastic, ecstatic. But it's also an essential part of who we are as embodied human beings. It's a common ground that underlies Western and Eastern religious traditions, it connects us to our own unconscious, animalistic, and highly embodied natures, and I think it's worth reclaiming.

Luckily, we don't have to look far. "

"Number 10 - Sacrifice a Human!
Number 9 - Meditate on the Eightfold Path!
Number 8 - Visit Neolithic sites across the pond!
Number 7 - Watch the Pros Sing and dance international folk!
Number 6 - Family dinner!
Number 5 - Celebrate Community with feasts and flames!
Number 4 - Sing songs and read stories of hope for the future!
Number 3 - Burn the Yule log and roast marshmallows!
Number 2 - Dress up in Costumes!
Number 1 - Celebrate Christmas!"