I was trying to explain to a Christian friend why forms of paganism are radically different from his religion. It isn’t the one god/many gods that makes a difference – for one thing, not all pagans are theists. It isn’t due to cosmology or theology or liturgy – we all have those. Paganism may have many, but they are, at bottom, still those things.
It is, simply, that we are not people of the book. So the emphasis placed on the Holy Text by those of Abrahamic faiths merely goes over the head of most pagans. Oh, there are such things as “loremasters” among pagans, mainly in the reconstructed faiths. That is, the pagan religions that pre-existed Christianity, that are now reconstructed by followers in a different millenium. But many loremasters – those who read every available text in the original language(s) and who study the cultures of the periods in minute detail, is that they often miss the point and end up attempting to re-enact the religion as it was when it was embedded in a whole society. That’s impossible to do without jettisoning everything we know about science and abandoning modern life to recreate the lives of the last society to live that religion as a whole community.
Leaving such re-enactors aside, pagans do not really have any holy texts. We have some texts that mean a lot to us, but nothing actually sacred in the same way as the Tanakh, the Bible or the Q’ran. What we do have, what we rely on, is our experience. yes, the same sort of experience that the people of the Book also have. And, if religious experience is valid at all, then it is valid for us, not just selected religions.
So the only way Christians seem to be able to get round that as an organised religion is to rubbish our experience and to demonise those gods and spirits we talk with. We are all deluded. Our experience is untrustworthy. It is only trustworthy if the church says it is. And the church is right because of the Bible.
Back to the sacred text.
But the Christian Bible cannot be trusted by pagans. Why? Because those of us pagans who do have relationships with gods know that the Christian ‘God’ cannot be right if he claims there are no other gods at all, and only he rules. If he is wrong, then (logically) he’s either lying to Christians or he’s deluded himself. And no pagan wants a relationship with a god who does either of those things. 😉
Now, I have no desire to be offensive. That is not my intention. Indeed, if I wished to do that, I would phrase things very differently. This is simply part of the discussion I had with my Christian friend, and I am putting it here in the same terms – using the same phrases – as I put it to him.
What it comes down to is this: if a Christian tells me I have to deny my own experience in order to be saved, then what value is it to me to be saved? How might I trust any experience I have as a Christian, if I am told that, for the rest of my life, I may ONLY trust the words of someone else, and not my own judgement or feelings? How then, can I ever know whom to trust? I am being told I cannot trust myself. So, then, how can I arrive at a sane and proper judgement at all about whom to trust?
I think I’ll stick with what I experience, thanks. 🙂
Leaves from a Book of Shadows 