There's this new ad that shows people being turned away from a church by club bouncers and the tagline is along the lines of "The Universalist Church: We don't turn anyone away." I think a better slogan would be, "The Universalist Church: Why bother joining at all?" Same deal with pagans. What's the point of joining at all? They're not Satanists and they don't sacrifice babies, but if your own personal religious journey leads you to Satanism and sacrificing babies that's cool, man.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

Today one can't actually be pagan one can only pretend to be pagan.

I don't think the old pagans were free to choose their gods. Nor do I think that they weren't bound by any rules and institutions. These people are just frivolous.

Carter has it rightly. These clowns don't even know the correct names of many of the demons the pretend to worship. What they are playing with is a kind of "cafeteria" paganism, wherein they select this or that detail of legend and imagine that they are "pagans" now. If they really understood what they were about the Judeo-Christian consciousness that pervades the culture of which they are a part would make them recoil in horror.

--No rules,’ he said. ‘Being a pagan is about being free from institutional rules.--

Oh, a boomer.

This isn't really a religion - it's a hobby. These guys treat their pagan "gods" as though they were the object of a fan club. Now that Jerry Garcia is dead and the Grateful Dead are no more, why not go on the road with Isis?

Traditional paganism was about appeasment of primal forces of nature: Zeus who hurls the thunder, Posideon bringer of earthquakes, Teshub the Hittite storm god. Those religions were built on fear - if you didn't keep the gods happy, they'd stomp on you. Judaism was the first religion which suggested that humans could negotiate with God on an even playing field, and Christianity was the first religion that insisted that God loves us.

These guys are clueless.

That pagans had no rules would come as a great surprise to Homer. That pagans had no institutions would be amazing to Julius Caesar or, for that matter, Julian the Apostate. Being Pontifex Maximus was pretty high up the Roman political food chain.

How exactly does 'not being bound by rules and institutions' make them different from Christian Reconstructionists like Rushdoony or Eric Rudolph? Our agreement to be bound by certain rules and institutions is what makes us civilized. In a civilized society, the arguments are about what rules and institutions we need not whether to have them at all.

I'd say pretty much all the other posters have the spoiled-brat boomer cluelessness of these 'pagans' nailed just about right.

Pagans can't have rules or institutions.

Last year my wife and I went to see Riverdance, which was one of the biggest letdowns of my life. Boring as heck and essentially a drawn out celebration of paganism. A dance to celebrate the sun, then the moon, then woman's power followed by a politically correct effort to celebrate masculinity (nice buns, but oh-so-sensitive), etc. etc. I remember wishing they could all go back in time to live the real thing, as I couldn't imagine better-looking sacrificial humans.

Last words by a drug-addled UMass student as he plunged off the 17th-story dorm room window to his death: "I am a god; I will fly!"

How I love my great grandfather for taking his family out of England.

oj,

Before you make such an asinine statement, you may want to reread Livy or ask yourself about the Founding Fathers' fascination with the Roman Republic.

Bart:

Why? Rome was a statist tyranny precisely because paganism can't be a foundation. It was a problem Virgil recognized:

http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/1365/

The Romans, Kelts and Goths will be surprised
to know they were not really bound by any
"institutional" rules.

J.H.:

How did you think Rome ended up a dictatorship?

Mr. Judd;

I think we're failing to see how a fascist dictatorship isn't an institution or doesn't have rules.

A fascist dictatorship is an institution with rules. It rises because paganism can't provide countervailing rules and institutions, which is my point.

Do you really want to compare the governmental systems of the Classical world with those of Christendom until July 4, 1776? Take my advice you really don't.

The Roman Republic and Empire were both light years better than the Christian kleptocracy that was feudalism.

Bart:

Sure, let's compare. Romanism proved completely incapable os sustaining itself while the future belonged to Christianity. Or, as Chesterton put it:

"I take in order the next instance offered: the idea that Christianity belongs to the Dark Ages. Here I did not satisfy myself with reading modern generalisations; I read a little history. And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations. If any one says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple: it didn't. It arose in the Mediterranean civilization in the full summer of the Roman Empire. The world was swarming with sceptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun, when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast. It is perfectly true that afterwards the ship sank; but it is far more extraordinary that the ship came up again: repainted and glittering, with the cross still at the top. This is the amazing thing the religion did: it turned a sunken ship into a submarine. The ark lived under the load of waters; after being buried under the debris of dynasties and clans, we arose and remembered Rome. If our faith had been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight, and if the civilization ever re-emerged (and many such have never re-emerged) it would have been under some new barbaric flag. But the Christian Church was the last life of the old society and was also the first life of the new. She took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch and she taught them to invent the Gothic arch. In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the Church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them."

A fascist dictatorship is an institution with rules. It rises because paganism can't provide countervailing rules and institutions, which is my point.

Which accounts very nicely for all those South American fascist dictatorships. Save for the inconvenient fact they were all heavily Catholic countries.

It is not surprising that a crypto-fascist English aristocratic Luddite of no importance should love the Dark Ages. The Renaissance arose in spite of the Church, not because of it. The Industrial Revolution arose in spite of the Church not because of it. And the Church that murdered Girodano Bruno, locked up Copernicus and Galileo, and drove DaVinci underground cannot be said to have supported independent inquiry.

Jeff:

They rose in response to pagan movements among the intellectual elites and preserved the Church.

Bart:

That's a whole pile of ignorance there, the most obvious problem being the assumption that there's a value to independent inquiry.

OJ:

They were fascist dictatorships from the git-go, and stayed that way for hundreds of years.

Also, you should note that Bart had nothing to say about the value of independent inquiry, only that the Church was frequently hostile to such a thing.

When Gutenberg invented the printing press, the cat was out of the bag. And for those of us who don't prefer to be sheep for the powers that be, that has been a very good thing.

Jeff:

Where? No modern fascist dictatorship has lasted more than a couple decades before handing power back to the citizenry peacefully or being deposed by the Communists they were fighting violently.

Bart, of course, was saying that independent inquiry is of value, a position for which there's no evidence, as witness that the inquiries he cites were done by Churchmen.

There is inherent value to virtually all independent inquiry. Most everything we consider to be modernity from the Germ Theory of Disease to Logarithms is the result of it. The notion that a group of bead-twiddling scientific ignoramuses of dubious sexuality should have the power to dictate to the rest of us what to think, do, study and research is an obscenity. The economic supremacy of England and Holland over the continent throughout the 17th century should pretty much show this.

That one may have had a clerical education does not make one a 'churchman' unless you are willing to take credit for Josef Stalin.

Bart:

Yes, it's precisely modernity that is of little value.

OJ,

So I guess you'd be content if your and your family's medical insurance amounted to going down to the barber once a year for a good bleeding. Sorry, I like my air conditioning, refrigeration, pasteurization, computers and all other accoutrements of the modern world. And I think I speak for about 99.99% of all Americans when I say this.

No modern fascist dictatorship ...

Which has nothing to do with hundreds of years of fascist dictatorhips in South America, the existence of which refutes your notion of how such things come to be.

I don't use doctors.

Jeff:

Name one.

Paraguay had a succession of them.

Hmmm. Argentina rings also rings a bell. And comparing the 70+ year reign of Mexico's PRI with a fascist dictatorship is a classic example of distinction without difference.

So none of them had fascist dictatorships of much duration except for mexico which had a dictatorship of the Left, not the Right?

No duration at all, except their entire history from colonialization through roughly 1990.

What preceded the PRI?

Whatever it was wasn't fascism either, so basically Mexico has never had a fascist dictatorship.

Argentina, Paraguay ....