Don't you wish you were an Arab woman too?

[Snowman]

Actually Manx itself is being tought in several primary schools in wales and ireland, noteworthy enough to appear over here on both country file and the news, it was funny to see a six year old teaching jhon craven how to speak it when he didnt have a clue. for a number of reasons, one such being the reintergration of old but not forgotten or lost identity. it's a tricky thing to get round your toung but the children enjoy it and it's moving into later schools as well.
if you havent been on any pagan celebrations then i feel sorry for you, perhaps you want to vist Glastonbury outside of the music festival where you will find a horad of such events and peoples. that said the pagan federation meetings are pretty large here in the north east and you canrt turn around for finding witchs of all ages. But then again Easter is actually a pagan celebration that the christians effectivly stole, the name refers to a celtic goddess as does the date which is exactly the same date that teh celts celebrated it...heck even the germanic faiths and the slavic which became russia held egg ceramonies of rebirth. MOST christian celebrations are pinched from other faiths....so when you practise them.....your actually doing what the ancient celts and pagans did. i know hundreds of people who stick to the seasonal celebrations of the equinoxes and beltane was only a couple of days ago. In fact over briton i hear and meet more people who attend and do pagan celebrations than i do christian ones. but everyones entitled to pray to whoever they want to.

of course you have to bear in mind that when the romans came to invade briton they went on a massacre of not only assimilatig it's peoples but they burned, raped and killed untill they annihalted the druids. due to celtic society we didnt write recoreds, we told our storys and lives in song and words, the druids did teh same, the fact that the mabinogion and other celtic tales, even that the romans cept very detailed records of boudica means that they werent "broken", tell me how unbroken christianty would look if they were besiged in such a manner. that said you could hardly claim that the pope and bishops etc actually hold true or belive in god. reliogns dont require an unbroken line of worship the same way bloodlins to royalty do. if so then the whole point of converts would be moot.

[Mikztsu]

Don't blame the Islam itself. As far as I've understood, Qur'an says that men are to respect and honor women. It doesn't tell to beat the crap out of them.

Also, according to the laws of Islam a man and a woman have the right to choose their partner and they should not be forced into marriage. So, it's just cultural thing. Not religious.

[DocFrance]

Yep, the reason women are "forced" to wear a burqua is because women are "holy" and "untouchable," according to the Qur'an. A man is not allowed to see any part of her body unless he is given that privilege.

Of course, there are some followers of Islam who, like some followers of other faiths, who choose to twist the words around to their own advantage.

[Snowman]

im not blaming islam Mik.....like most relions which wish to assimilate the world, people will use them for what they wish. it's sad that many people claim they follow these faiths and then contort them to equal death. but then isnt it islam who says that if you leave the faith you will be killed?

[DocFrance]

but then isnt it islam who says that if you leave the faith you will be killed?

No.

[Snowman]

hmmmm. well i honestly carnt remeber. but it was one such faith....this chap who was jewish, im sure he converted to islam, just like cat stevens. and he stated and accepted that if he ever left teh faith, he would be killed

[DocFrance]

I don't think you know what you're talking about.

[Besimudo]

"Actually Manx itself is being tought in several primary schools in wales and ireland"

Irrelevant! The pronunciation would be terrible without a native speaker... Have you heard the phrase: text-book French?

Gaelic is legitimate as 30% of Ireland speak it, but Manx is dead.

"if you havent been on any pagan celebrations then i feel sorry for you, perhaps you want to vist Glastonbury outside of the music festival where you will find a horad of such events and peoples."

We have similar Chinese Dragon festivals in Australia, due to the Chinese "gold rush" heritage... But we do not hold to ancient Taoism! Celebrating these pagan festivals is quite fun and entertaining, but they do not reveal and religious truths.

"But then again Easter is actually a pagan celebration that the christians effectivly stole, the name refers to a celtic goddess as does the date which is exactly the same date that teh celts celebrated it"

I insinuated this rudimentary fact in my last post... The fact is that it does not matter. These celebrations have been Christianised so the European with his ailing native faiths (pagan) could ascend back into a full religious environment. What you are suggesting is Paganism can be fully restored, and people will reach enlightenment through this forgotten road. This is false as Paganism has not produced any avatars (saints) since the B.C. times before writing... Not to mention the priest cast (Druids as you know) are extinct!

Christianity would cease if the priests disappeared and anyone who attempted to resurrect the religion would be engaging in the same fallacy.

"In fact over briton i hear and meet more people who attend and do pagan celebrations than i do christian ones. but everyones entitled to pray to whoever they want to."

We are not saints so we have to conduct our faith within an established living tradition e.g. Christian, Islam, Buddhist, Zen...
Paganism and its practice can be researched but unless it is passed down in an unbroken line then it is irrelevant. But the stories and myths are still informative though.

I might add that religion is serious stuff, the best paganism can do is to compliment a tradition. Sure, I read the sagas and the pagan texts but having doen so I dont pick up a staff and run around in robes talking about Ye olde mystik magikes... Thats just for sad euro-goths. You’re kidding yourself if you believe people can live as the Vikings or ancient celts, today.

"of course you have to bear in mind that when the romans came to invade briton they went on a massacre of not only assimilatig it's peoples but they burned, raped and killed untill they annihalted the druids. due to celtic society we didnt write recoreds, we told our storys and lives in song and words, the druids did teh same, the fact that the mabinogion and other celtic tales,"

Yes, It is sad and occurring in Africa as we speak. You must remeber that Many Irish converted willingly as did the Vikings. Christianity spoke the truth as they heard it...Paganism was to abstract for the modern world. I can be a Christian, go work, go to school, and operate in this society. To be a Pagan, I would need to abstain from these things and live in the wild and actually see the gods in the forms of nature. One could argue that these older religions were in fact closer to the divine as the divine was everyday... For the Christian society, we can only relate spiritually at given times, however, Christianity is a more robust religion for this reason.

"tell me how unbroken christianty would look if they were besiged in such a manner. that said you could hardly claim that the pope and bishops etc actually hold true or belive in god. "

Address your own faith first.

"if so then the whole point of converts would be moot."

Well, they are adopted into the living tradition. They can see it, and experience the pain of Christ and then repent. Tell me how a young man today can attain the natural state of "berserker", getting up the next morning and eating crumpets with honey is hardly the experience of the pagan. Pagan religion was similar to that of Indigenous Australia and Africa... very pure and very naturalistic. These are wonderful remnants of our heritage and they won’t be forgotten at all. I just hate to see them trivialised by modern people who wish to escape their religion and replace it with a tradition they cannot communicate with.

[DocFrance]

Note to self: Never get in an argument over religion with Besimudo. It's like fighting a land war in Asia.

[Snowman]

just because a langauge is not spoken in public useage in schools, librarys, newspaper periodicles, doesnt mean teh language isnt spoken in particuly the older generations, in house to family, to frineds, in front of the fire, where their dialect stays teh same. However dialecyts can change, come and go in a language, and it's still viable, as proved by teh queens english, yorkshire, liverpuddlion, brummy, all of which is the same british language, just spoken differntly. so it matters little if at the end of the day thye are speaking textbook french or a dialect french, as long as they all understand each other the meanings are the same.

there is only one religus truth, how you live and how you die. and the rest is up for interpretation.

druids arent extinct...my mother is classed as a druidess, theres a number of druid orders which she isnt a member of and as for iconic figures in modern paganism try mentioning the names alister crowly, alexander sanders and many other such stalwarts of the new pagan order and you will find that they are idolised as saints and great people of the day. we create our own saints, and always have done. Because gods real saints are just getting on with it.

Who's vertion of christianty, christs vertion, the diciples vertion, the vaticans vertion or our own unique english vertion...what would continue would be the next generations vertion, full of all it's faith and flaws and richesness that it's always had.

i dont follow anyones established line, just like the tree's dont, the animals dont and teh winds dont, no one directs me, but me, and i talk directly to my gods, not through someone who's apointed themselves too. And if you dont want to count that as paganism, then you can go and argue that out with all the people who have persecuted those of uswho have not toed the line since time began.

Of course you carnt go jumping at your roman antagonisers in your class, shaking and threatening to punch them....oh wait you werent at the last wednesdays broadsword class i teach where someone who's clearly roman sparked my celtic blood off enough to teh point i crushed him into teh floor and walked out so that i didnt kill him. Of course celtic, roman feuds are long buried beneath euro goths.
Everything is ment to evolve, if we were meant to stay stagnent the dinosaurs would still be discussing this.

Christianty is more robust, only because it kills other belifs. Strangely enought i dont need to live in the woods all my lifes, which by teh way have only been planeted recently to be able to know which direction teh wind is blowing from, where teh sun rises and sets and when teh tide is coming in and out. if i wanted to sit on my arse all day, on my sofa, reading a book, i could still know that because the weather man told me. and should i choose to communicate with any of the deitys, which i may or may not belive exist, i dont actually need to wander down to a huge manmade eddifice, called a church, to be able to hear their response, dont you have a garden ?

"address your own faith first"
thats the point, we dont need to rely on anybody else, whos drawing a salary, to remind us that teh sun comes up every morning and teh moon comes up afterwards. likewise theres no well payed religous fanatic telling us we are going to hell, yet we still do the right thing on this planet, which includes not putting others down.

are you trying to say the ancient warrior who became a berserker hadnt had supper the night before or breakfast. maybe you should try going out and finding a coause thats worth fighting for, and see how hard it is to become a berserker while defending innocents even tho youve had a breakfast. It does useually help. maybe youve never faced down shotgun weilding thugs who were killing rabbits, maybe youve never been in the depths of your own territory, run by shotgun weilding thugs and have to survive, mabe if you did youd find how easy it is to become a berserker, no matter what your faith is. *snip*

to each his own

Snowman, that language is considered flaming and flaming is not permitted here. Watch it. ~ Leeza

Also, please do not double-post. Use the edit/delete button if you wish to add something to what you've already posted. Thank you.

[Vaan]

Violence against women, treating them as inferior has long been humanity's shame - no culture is innocent of it.

Women weren't inferior to men in Hawaiian culture.

[Snowman]

nor egyption

[Vaan]

Amen to that.

[Besimudo]

"So it matters little if at the end of the day thye are speaking textbook french or a dialect french, as long as they all understand each other the meanings are the same."

errr... NO. The Germanic and Celtic traditions rely on complex alliteration for there delivery. This is why worship and songs varied from tribe to tribe. Accent and dialect were CRUCIAL in which God you worshipped and where you even conducted your rite. This is what annoys me about anybody who claims to practice Paganism - they barely know the rudimentary let alone the interpretive modes of discovery within the tradition. And I can promise you these modes are lost...

"there is only one religus truth, how you live and how you die. and the rest is up for interpretation."

No, the whole of Europe is primarily Judaeo-Christian, with a minority of Muslim. The fact that our traditions have similarities to Pagan tradition is merely to make the Christian worship more accessible to the early pagans, who in most cases had become detached from the older naturalistic worship. Christian religion is more succinct than Pagan and is therefore more suited to the civilised world. Paganism is ideal in the primal world of Vikings and Celts, where Thor as the wolf is a living identity... Where do you see a lone wolf in its element these days? Usually wolves are found scrambling around trash cans, scavenging human refuse and this is certainly not the Thor the pagans worshipped! Thor was top down… he gave gifts to humans form nature e.g. the wolf as a guide at night or the bear (in some myths) as the delegate for honey used in traditional medicine - not bottom up … as in taking human refuse from rubbish. This is why animal lore is dead.

Jesus on the other hand is less obvious in nature, and more esoteric in sanctified worship. Jesus loves you, therefore you have meaning... We can find truth in the urbanised decay of the modern world... Pagan traditions cannot. Rome had become so polluted with modernism that it had lost all meaning from the ancien regiem. Christianity (treaty of Milan) brought a new age of spiritualism to Rome and hence Romans became aware of the eternal truth again.

"druids arent extinct...my mother is classed as a druidess"

You need to read your history... Druids went extinct - its just that many people today seek a new identity in the old traditions. My late mother was considered a white witch as she could predict events and astral project... But she did not make this her religion! she still had reverence for the Catholic living tradition. To her magic was just an illusion of this world... it did not contain the unchanging religious truth.

"Of course you carnt go jumping at your roman antagonisers in your class, shaking and threatening to punch them....oh wait you werent at the last wednesdays broadsword class i teach where someone who's clearly roman sparked my celtic blood off enough to teh point i crushed him into teh floor and walked out so that i didnt kill him. Of course celtic, roman feuds are long buried beneath euro goths.
Everything is ment to evolve, if we were meant to stay stagnent the dinosaurs would still be discussing this."

Europeans are mixed, only Icelandic people can claim "purity" these days. The fact that you beat up a student over racial tension, puts into question your ability to instruct courses in swordsmanship. I would never kick the crap out of a guy in martial arts class based on his heritage.
However, I am sure the Euro-gothz would admire such actions.

"dont you have a garden ?"

Yes I do, and I often ponder about Guan Yu when I see the Gingko Biloba, Or of Thor when I plant Digitalis Purpurae BUT I do not take this as my own mode of worship as it is not a valid path. I do not reject the pagan myth, I just reject those who believe it is a valid course of salvation... This does not mean you cannot glean religious ideas from them. Many Christian myths are derived from Greek ones.

"are you trying to say the ancient warrior who became a berserker hadnt had supper the night before or breakfast."

It was an analogy! People today eat Bradshaws honey baked crumpets with Mickey Mouse Jam... Hardly the stuff of a true Berserk! Agree?

"maybe youve never faced down shotgun weilding thugs who were killing rabbits, maybe youve never been in the depths of your own territory"

A wild weekend; though if these “thugs” were shooting rabbits for game (which is what most “thugs” do in their spare time) a shotgun is hardly the choice weapon.

[Vaan]

You know you play too much FF when you use ellipses in excess.