Kassiana

How about if they wanted to claim they were a pope?
--You've really never heard of Discordia?! Wow. http://www.fnord.org/

Heathen Dawn

Amazing, just amazing, the frenzy of people for bashing such a beautiful, sweet, healing and harmless religion as Wicca. So many more religions deserving of bashing, but people choose to bash the one that really doesn’t—Wicca. This bespeaks nothing but the lowliness of the people who engage in that pastime. If I were the u=1 of a board, one of the rules would be “No bashing Wicca”.

I end my participation in this thread. Prolonged exposure to such wholesale desecration of what is dearest to me can only serve to damage me.

Shven

Oh right. Forgot about them. And yes I am a proud owner of the Principia Discordia.

Replace pope with member of the Knights Templar, Catholic Priest, OTO member, Mason, etc - you get the idea.

brighid

I would strongly suggest you get out a bit more if this is what you honestly think. The "goth" individuals you speak of may not be Wiccan, nor do most Wiccans I know (and certainly not a single one in my coven) are teenage girls having some identity crises, who feel guilty over sex and yadda, yadda, yadda. These are simply the ones you can quickly identify at "Wiccan."

As an individual who has been in the movement for quite a while now I can assure you that these types of people do not even begin to account for the majority of individuals, both men and women, participating in the Craft.

There is not a single member of my coven under the age of 30. We are not a group of morbidly obese women, lesbians, or individuals going through any sort of identity crises. Including myself, we even have a fair portion of secular pagans aka atheists. We come from all different walks of life and socioeconomic backgrounds. Only one of our 13 is unmarried (divorced), we all have children, and are all educated and most did not come to Wicca until much later in life. There are even "conservative" witches in our bunch.

We have school teachers, a retired state trooper, a successful real estate agent, a horse trainer, a network administrator, a professional belly dancer ...

Some certainly come to Wicca because they want to remove the guilt of femininity and sexuality taught to them by Judeo-Christian culture. Many women come to Wicca because they desire a sense of empowerment and feel that the ideal image of womanhood is not the submissive, barely existent, virgin Mary placed on some fragile pedastal of worship. They want archetypes of warriors, mothers, healers, philosophers, queens and something beyond the blandness of Judeo-Christian feminine imagery.

Many want to reconnect with the creative, the intuitive, the life giving force of Nature, a force many women feel intimately connected to because of our ability to bring forth life.

They come to Wicca because they are sick of being told they are inferior, worthless, weak, subservient, and unworthy of the same rights and responsibilities as those born with a penis. They are sick of the Divine being exclusively male, especially when one can simply look to nature and see that this is simply not the case. They are sick of being slaves to a destiny they did not create and want to feel empowered by the strength they know is their femininity. They are sick of being called "bitches" for being strong,intelligent and capable, instead of docile, dumb and merely "pretty." And many certainly want to reclaim their sexuality as the beautiful, creative, life giving power that it truly is rather than succumb to the ideas implanted in our heads as little girls that "good girls" don't enjoy sex, that sex is dirty, and women aren't allowed to enjoy it.

There are few outlets for this exploration and Wicca is a modern day stepping stone for the exploration of the feminine, the Divine feminine, and the archetypes of old that demonstrate the strength of the female.

It certainly isn't "Celtic" in origin, although Celtic myth, folklore and history provide us with many great archetypes for the feminine ideal we aspire to embody. It is simply a popular and more easily accessible branch of American neo-paganism.

Wicca is a neo-pagan religion. It is not ancient, even if we look to what we can find of the ancients to develop our religious imagery, archetypes, and rituals.

Are their fluff-bunnies and those who embrace it for shock value or because it is a fad? Certainly. However, so what? These people will relinquish it as quickly as they embraced the fad of the Craft when a new fad comes along. As a practitioner I care not, nor should you. It is all part of the journey each individual must take in their exploration of what this life has to offer. Hopefully they will come away with something positive.

Brighid

Crucifiction

Boo hoo.

Seriously; you don't have to take everything personally. As I said before; I have nothing against Wiccans and Wicca in general, although I DO have things against the people that think it is Celtic in origin, or that their religion is valid without presenting a shred of evidence. Equally, I find the Wiccan Reede obnoxious and absurd; as I've said before, it's impossible to harm absolutely nobody.

If you weren't Wiccan, I'm sure you'd hold a much different view than you do now.

Shven

Define religious validity

Crucifiction

The belief that ceretain Gods actually exist, of course. It almost never has evidence to support it; and oftentimes goes AGAINST the evidence we currently have. I don't mind someone believing their faith is true; but if they publicly CLAIM it is, then they must be prepared to back that up with evidence.

Shven

So are you saying Wicca is less valid than any other religion?

Kassiana

it seems that everyone who follows this "religion" is just a gothy teen girl going through an identity crisis.
--I'll have to tell my fifty-plus year old friend, a Wiccan priestess, that she's just a gothy teen girl going through an identity crisis. I'm sure she'll get a kick out of it. Heck, so should the male Wiccans I know. Thanks for giving such an outmoded and inaccurate stereotype, MAG! You're fodder for more amusement than any Christian I've met.

4th Generation Atheist

Hm. You know what this complaint sounds like?

I have a moderate Catholic friend whose frustration in philosophic life is that all the news about Catholics involves pedophile priests, Opus Dei (you can guess she has issues with The Da Vinci Code) and the conservative pro-life stance of the Vatican; she is a Catholic by family tradition and like her family attends the Masses regularly and gets a great sense of meaning about her religion, without endorsing these more visible and highly noticeable elements. For this some other Catholics call her "salad bar" (hm....sounds like another charge often leveled at Wicca.....) and non-Catholics assume she is this >< close to being a fundie.

Maybe your problem isn't that there are "so many" Goth teen girls with issues in this (and show me a teen girl without issues and I'll show you someone who isn't going through a major passage to growing up!) but that they are so visible. Since they are a market with mamma's credit cards in tow, a large portion of the products/services/literature is aimed at them, just like with athletic shoes. (One of my criticisms of Llewellyn is that they are snatching so much money that would be better off in someone's college fund). Their visibility, and the horde of marketers going after them, make it look to outsiders as if that is the prototype of the "Wiccan"; meanwhile, 50-year-old priestesses with some dignity tend to go unnoticed.