TO ALL PROSPECTIVE NEW FRIENDS:
PaganBitch! will no longer honor any add request from a private profile not accompanied by a personal message containing a brief explanation of who you are and why you seek a place among the notables and luminaries on our list. Sorry, that's the way it's gotta be.
WE'RE PAGANS, and we’re free, right? We resist, resent, and rebel against any attempt to tell us how to think and act. We mistrust authority. We refuse to be defined. We have no use for thou-shalts and thou-shalt-nots. We think for ourselves. Right? Not only that, we are tolerant of each other’s differences, and we are inclusive, autonomous, and non-judgmental, and our religion has no dogma. We constantly seek to improve ourselves, our craft, and our lives, for we are only interested in truth. Right?
So what if there were people trying to tell you what to believe, how to behave, what you could and could not call yourselves, and what kind of magic you could and could not perform? How would you feel if they were rewriting history, redefining words, and passing magical misinformation in order to seize and keep control, indulge their own prejudices, or enjoy the perqs and privileges of being the official Leaders of a government-approved, -controlled, and –sponsored Church, at the expense of your precious autonomy?
We pagans have been fighting the forces of oppression, hypocrisy, and prejudice in the form of xenophobia, gender bias, social morés, and religious orthodoxy for thousands of years. We won’t put up with these shenanigans, not from the Catholics, Fundamentalists, Government, or any other gang of do-gooders bent on limiting our freedom. Right?
So why are we putting up with it from within our ranks? Why!?
Because we’re sheep. We don’t really think for ourselves, that’s too hard, and someone might get offended if we disagree. We would much rather have somebody tell us what’s what. As long as it’s somebody who dresses like we do and is close to our own age group. As long as they don’t come right out and call themselves our "leaders." As long as they tell us what we want to hear and make us feel special. As long as they don’t actually expect us to live up to our ideals, and we don’t have to insist that they live up to theirs either...
Because we’re lazy. Too lazy to find out for ourselves what real Magic is. Too lazy to ferret out the real, hidden History of our world. We fill our heads with superstitious nonsense because learning the terminology and techniques of real Magic is just too complicated. Just give us the recipe, tell us what to do, keep it simple, and we’ll be on our way in a jiffy, casting circles, drawing air-symbols that we don’t understand, and calling ourselves Priestesses, without having to be bothered by what it all means and where it really comes from. Just keep it down to common three-syllable words (max) so we don’t have to look anything up in the dictionary or read anything written before we were born. Or (shudder) have to admit that there’s something we don’t know that’s actually worth knowing...
Because we’re starving for recognition and respect, but we don’t want to have to do much to earn it. We’d have to admit that we’re not “already there.†It’s much better to be looked up to as a teacher by a bunch of kids who don’t know any better than to admit our mind-numbing ignorance and just be students. Real students. Doing real work. It’s just too hard, and it takes too long. But if all we have to do is repeat what we’re told by our favorite NP celebrities, we can start out being superior to somebody else almost immediately (especially those mindless christians!), and all we have to do is put in our coven-time. That’s why we pretend to knowledge we don’t have, and let our “leaders†and “spokespersons†tell us how free we are, how wise, how noble, how autonomous, how different from the rest of the world. (And we’re soooooo humble about it, too...)
Because we’re afraid. Oh, it’s easy to stand up to your enemies, as long as you make a united front—there’s safety in numbers, after all, and they stopped killing us for it a long time ago. But it takes real courage to stand up to your fellow pagans and self-appointed “leaders.†Just because we say we have no dogma doesn’t make it so—we have plenty of unwritten laws—but we’re too scared to point them out to “our own†("hey, that's dogma!") and we're even more scared to point out when they're being violated ("hey, you're being a hypocrite!"). That wouldn’t be nice. It wouldn’t be friendly. It might be considered “authoritarian†or “arrogant†or “manipulative.†And besides, they might just turn around and tell everybody that you’re not a "real witch." In our town, we’ve seen an HPS (who prides herself on her successful interface with the local police and purports to speak for all Wiccans) exclude solitaries from the Wiccan fold! Just what the officials wanted to hear, and they manipulated her into it masterfully. Now they don't have to minister to the solitary Wiccans in prison!
As we speak, the Current Resident of the White House is soliciting definitions of NeoPaganism from various self-styled “leaders of the movement,†chosen by gods-know-what criteria, in order to formalize a codified dogma by which all those claiming to be pagan will have to abide in order to be considered official. Everyone else will be left out in the cold. This especially impacts anyone who calls hi/rself clergy. And you are swallowing it all—wine, wafer, and chalice. In fact, you encourage it by insisting that you are part of a government-sanctioned Church, by insisting that your handfastings be legally binding (what happened to separation of church and state?) and in countless other little, but ultimately significant, ways. The self-proclaimed leaders of the NeoPagan movement are only too happy to avail themselves of the temporal power and prestige that will inevitably come from being the sole High Priests, or Governing Council, or Elders, or whatever, of the “Church of Wicca†or any other bunch panting after faith-based goodies from the gov. Once they’ve convinced you of their authority to tell you what’s what, they can then be the sole judges of who is IN and who is OUT. There goes your cherished autonomy, and you with it, right back into the broom closet.
Oh, hell, maybe it's for the best...
I edited my profile with Thomas' Myspace Editor V4.4
