I was over at Starweaver's Corner this morning reading his article "When one God just isn't Enough" and I began wondering, what do I call on gods for? What do they do for me? and more importantly, what do they do for any of us?

I guess this is on my mind right now because I was reading some Christian sites this week and it seems that all over the internet is plastered, "What Christ can do for you!" I imagine this is because they're pretty evangelical and they want people to come to Church, but to do that you have to answer the eternal question most people have, "What's in it for me?" If you're going to attempt to convert someone, you have to give them reason to change, some positive benefit they'll see in their life to justify the effort. Advertisers have known this forever, as well. Geico will save you money! Well, you get the idea.

Paganism is not evangelical. We do not convert or preach. But we do often have to justify ourselves to our Christian friends and families. "Why did you leave the Church??? Don't you know you're going to Hell??!" I never had a reaction quite that extreme from most of my family but many of us do. Instead I heard, "Have you lost your mind? You worship trees?!?" It was the height of insanity, rather than evil.

When faced with these attitudes, many pagans fall into the trap of comparing Christianity and Paganism like a bad Taco Bell commercial. Taco Bell often touts itself as the better alternative to the evil, or worse boring, burger. They put down their competition to show you why you should change your habits. Pagans often talk about all the things they see wrong in Christianity when justifying their beliefs to relatives who ask why, "Well, did you know your Bible was deliberately mistranslated when King James didn't like what scholars came up with?" That sort of thing. Instead of talking about our positive benefits, we're just illustrate the saying, "The worst kind of fundamentalist is a new convert."

To be fair, this is a phase similar to adolescence that many new converts really need to work through, the pushing away of the old authority in the new effort to develop a new, autonomous identity and most come out the other side realizing that they don't need to put down the mainstream regime to feel good about their new path... eventually. It took me personally almost three years to work through all of this myself and I'm sure it was very hard on my still Christian friends to have to listen to my diatribes every time the subject of religion came up.

So what do the Gods do for me anyhow? What positive benefits do I gain from not being a member of the mainstream religion in any of its forms? Let's take a look.

1) The Gods love me - unconditionally and forever - no matter what I do. This is especially important to me as I do not have that from the usual source, my parents. I no longer speak to my parents for reasons I'm not going to detail here. To have access to something that loves me, really loves me, and will keep on loving me and accepting me for who I am, no matter how badly I screw it up, is very important.

2) The Gods guide me, in so many myriad different ways. Prayer isn't working for me today? Let's take a look at the cards. Or runes. Or crystals. Paganism has no written text so we very much need ways of receiving guidance - not so much about what is right or wrong - but to help us through those tough times where we're not certain about where life is going or worse, how we're going to get there.

3) The Gods do not treat me like a child. I think this is the thing that attracts most pagans. If we screw up, we're going to fall on our faces but the Gods also don't tell us we have to be in bed by nine or that we have to wear a white shirt to a meeting or that we can't watch that cool new movie. We're expected to be adults, making adult choices, and then taking the consequences like adults when we make the wrong ones.

4) The Gods have seen to it I do not have to fear Death. This is most important if you're critically ill or have lost a loved one. Not only is Aunt Jane still out there somewhere, but you know she's not suffering and is happy and one day will be back on the Earth, trying again. The Summerlands (or whatever you want to name the realm after this life) is waiting for all of us and is not someplace we need to fear, for ourselves or someone we care about. What's better is that it doesn't matter how guilty we feel about what we've done in life, we all get this rest from the efforts of living no matter how badly we did at it.

5) They give me the tools I need to be able to deal with the challenges of life. We as pagans are almost unique in this that we get to take a pro-active role in solving our problems through ritual. Ours is not a passive faith, and while things like meditation and listening for the "voice of God" is important to it, we have so much more we can do as well.

6) The Gods want me to be happy. This is very likely the second most important principle to pagans. The gods want us to celebrate our lives and laugh and dance and sing and enjoy being who we are right now. We have eight Sabbats where the whole point is to celebrate the cycles of life itself. Eight times a year we're encouraged to take the time to look at how life moves and enjoy it.

So the next time you feel a need to justify your faith, or even just explain it to those who care about you but fear for you, take a look at these reasons to be Pagan and instead of putting down their faith, celebrate your own and show them how much you get out of it.

Image from WikipediaHrafnkell over at A Heathen's Day wrote about the growing tendency of legislature to play parent to the community by enacting laws about pornography (my words, not his). It's an interesting article, I recommend you go read it, and I find myself much in agreement with his conclusion that the best way to deal with things you find offensive is merely avoidance rather than write laws to regulate them. What made me stop and think, though, is a comment made to that post by Un[Censored] where she says,

Obscenity cannot be defined nor can morality. What is moral to one person is not to another.

This is true. Morality cannot and should not be legislated. What can be defined are the rules under which we all agree to live together as a society, and obviously we do need some of these. Society needs a system in place to deal with those people it cannot abide, such as murderers, rapists, child abusers, etc. but has long ago gone too far down the road into playing parent to an increasingly adult population but I'm more and more afraid it's unavoidable. Steven Pinker of the New York Times wrote,

Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings. We seek it in our friends and mates, nurture it in our children, advance it in our politics and justify it with our religions. ... The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. ...The other hallmark is that people feel that those who commit immoral acts deserve to be punished. Not only is it allowable to inflict pain on a person who has broken a moral rule; it is wrong not to, to “let them get away with it."

So if a person considers pornography to be immoral, they're going to attempt to make a law regulating it, since even the most idiotic of judgmental people is going to realize they can't ban it altogether. Since this is a country often ruled by the "majority" (in quotes because sometimes that's just another word for a very vocal minority), what we need are more activists for freedom and responsibility and choice.

The problem is how to get the message out there. My daughter was allowed to look at pornography any time she chose, at any age she wished. Her first look was at about four or five years of age and she asked some questions about it, which her father and I answered frankly, if not always without embarrassment. This openness on our part contributed directly to her wish as an older teen to avoid sex until she was both ready to deal with all the implications, physical and emotional, and was protected as best she could be from the consequences of pregnancy and disease. She's now 23, holds a full time job making a decent if not stellar wage, is buying a car, in a steady relationship where she avoids both alcohol and drugs. My daughter won't make the news. And she doesn't go to Church, ever.

Those of us who espouse personal responsibility and freedom need to be more vocal because many of the traditional outlets for "getting the word out" are just not going to work for us. We're too tame, too quiet and the results of our philosophy is just not going to sell advertising space in papers, magazines or the 6 o'clock news because it just works too well.

Source: WikipediaStarweaver wrote today on the question of pagans and vegetarianism, asking should pagans be vegetarian. He comments on several concerns, mainly ethical but this is the one I'd like to talk about,

And, if one somehow gets past the gruesomeness of killing animals, there remain serious ecological and economic issues. ...It takes something like 10 times the resources to produce a pound of meat than it does to produce a pound of grain or vegetables. Most of the grain farmed today goes to feed animals for slaughter, not to feed people directly. When you start to contemplate the wastefulness of this - not just the land, but the water, the fossil fuels used to run the operations, and the pollution produced - it becomes hard to see meat eating as a wise and responsible choice. Most Pagans claim to be quite concerned about what we are doing to the Earth, whom we regard as mother and goddess. ... if you work the numbers, eating meat undoes all the good we achieve with these Earth-friendly practices.

I think he left out a point that has really driven my own journey down this road, as he talked about the economics of the meat industry. I just cannot afford it any more. My family has three people but less than two full incomes, we cannot afford the $2+ a day to keep us in beef, the $3+ a day for chicken. That is $60-90 a month. Our current food budget is only $80 a month so adding fresh meat to every meal could double the amount of money we have to spend on food. Since food costs are only continuing to go up, if you and your family have been considering the vegetarian lifestyle, this might be the time to give it a test run.

To this end, I've been exploring some alternatives recently, such as home-made tortillas as I rather enjoy refried beans in store-bought burritos. Here in Georgia, tortillas are expensive but flour is cheap and they only use flour, water, a very little oil and baking powder. It's well within my budget to buy flour. And every dollar I save buying food is a dollar I can put towards my faith.

If you do choose this road, go to CNN and read this article. No diet you choose these days is going to be "wash and wear". The mainstream high-fat diet isn't good for you, but being a vegetarian won't be either if you don't pay attention to what you eat and work to make it balanced and healthy.

I am curious as to the path that led you to wicca. I know the starting point ... and your current beliefs but what was your motivation???

Many pagans, and I can't say I was much different, start out in Christianity, usually being raised in one variety or another. As they grow older, they begin to ask questions and often aren't satisfied with the answers. Christianity makes no sense to them, for one reason or another.

In my case, I cannot and probably never will accept the concepts of ultimate good or ultimate evil as active forces in the universe. Ultimate good could well have given us free choice, without suffering or evil; ultimate evil usually isn't evil at all when examined from its own point of view. I call myself a Gray Witch because good and evil are only an infinite variety of shades of gray.

I was reading an interesting article today quoted over at A Bird's Eye View. The original story can be found at The City Journal. He quoted:

Not only is no one asking that today’s twenty- or thirtysomething become a responsible husband and father—that is, grow up—but a freewheeling marketplace gives him everything that he needs to settle down in pig’s heaven indefinitely.

I read the whole article and in the end kept asking myself, why does this author equate responsibility and adulthood with being married and having kids? That sentiment comes through again and again. Now, I agree that promiscous sleeping around isn't responsible (for either sex), but if the "SYM" (Single Young Male as she calls them), is really finding that many partners, then it's not just young men being irresponsible in that regard by anyone's definition of the word. So why do these people have to get married and create families before they're going to be seen as responsible?

Many of the traits she mentioned, such as game playing and enjoying the single life, are things I do myself, and I've been in a committed relationships for over four years now. I don't indulge myself in some of the extremes she mentioned, but then neither do 90% of the 20-30 year old males I know. Sure, their humor is coarse, but my dad's was, too so that's certainly nothing new. They drink occasionally, but since when is that limited to single people? They make jokes about girls and moan about the ones they find to date, but have you listened to a group of women in the bathroom lately?

The author of A Bird's Eye View says,

we should be very afraid of what the new child-man will make of our society.

Why? Because they'll espouse freedom of choice? Should we fear that these gentlemen will vote to de-regulate the gaming industry or somehow with no warning begin exhibiting the traits of a gorilla? Well, some girls would say they already do that last one, I suppose. But I think these girls are looking for an ideal. Instead of loving the person they find, they try to mold the person into what they love and complain when it doesn't work.

I suppose if you really fear what young men will make of society, if you really think being a single person who enjoys the fruit's of his labor is that dangerous, and if you really fear a person who doesn't make commitments until he's sure he can keep them, you should start voting for more women for public offices.

I found out I cannot edit the CSS of blogs hosted by Wordpress without paying them 15$ a year. Since all I wanted to do was see how many people read the blog, this seemed expensive to me.

I did some research and found that Blogspot allows editing for free and it's such a nice look now! Let me know what you think of the new layout.

Lisa over at Feminist Mormon Housewives posted today on small sins with, “It’s easy to condemn the simply evil, but most people aren’t. Our motivations are complex and our sins are small or necessary or thoughtless or convenient. I’ve never sewn a tiny military uniform, but I’m sure I own things that were produced by child labor. I know I have habits that contribute to global warming.”

In my continuing journey of exploring Christianity and Wicca, this struck a cord in me and probably would in many pagans, since one of the most common reasons for leaving a church and converting to Wicca is how that faith deals with sin. In Christianity, we are forever reminded of how imperfect we are, how we’ll never measure up, how we have to keep striving no matter how tired we are or how hard life has gotten lately. I often feel like the child of over-achieving parents since nothing I do will ever be good enough.

In Wicca, we’re taught that everything we do will come back to us threefold, possibly even in this lifetime, that punishment could be immediate and severe and yet… pagans tend to obsess over their faults alot less than Christians. Since punishment for Christian sin is delayed until after death I had to ask myself why the difference in outlook, logic says it should be the other way around.

The answer seems to lie in how pagans view humanity in general. In Wicca, people are not inherently bad even if imperfect. In fact, in many ways we view our imperfections as opportunities to be individuals. We do try to do what’s right, and self-examination is a huge part of the faith, but we know we’re not going to be perfect and we don’t even try. We just do the best we can, accept responsibility for our faults and the results of our actions (even the unintended ones) and move on.

Given what Christianity often does to self-esteem, I think the Wiccan viewpoint is alot healthier. But going back to Lisa’s post, I agree that we all need to strive to improve and not let apathy or general “busy-ness” keep us from doing this.

I was reading an article today by Wendy Ellison where she said, “What if we wore labels like that? We are like fabric, cut from the same cloth, God’s children, created in His image. And yet we are different, part of His grand design. We all have traits that make us unique—complete with physical attributes that we might perceive as flaws. Upon closer examination, perhaps it is those distinctive qualities that make us who we are.” And it made me wonder, is this really true?

If the flaws in a person make that person even better, more distinctive, more… them, then why do organizations shun people? She is only referring to physical beauty but I think ti applies to alot more than just outward appearance. Get any five people together and there’s a better than even chance that any two of them won’t get along. They’ll get along just fine with everyone else, just not with each other. Does that make them flawed? No, of course not.

She goes on to say, “We can all recognize beauty in diversity and accept ourselves and others as we understand that our differences make life more interesting and only add to the richness and texture of God’s fabric canvas.”

I completely agree. While there are always going to be people I don’t get along with, things that people do that I dislike, I do my best to get past it, continue to socialize with them, find some ground on which we can meet as colleagues, if not friends. If I can to this effort reach out as an individual, why don’t more organizations do it as groups? Why excommunicate? Do they really fear “contamination” so much? I doubt it.

I think there’s a deeper reason I just haven’t figured out yet. But I will!