Here is your chance to make arguments that monotheism or mainstream religions are fundamentally better.

Take your best shot.

I grant you victory on all counts! Congrats!

What's the difference, your imaginary friend, my imaginary friend, their imaginary friend. They're all the same thing, namely Imaginary.

Having personally been in the wild wood late, late at night, I can completely understand the impulse of pagan naturalism and other spiritualism. But when I shine my light on what is going bump in the night, it's usually just a frog.

Not that I haven't seen some strange stuff. But you're all either just making it up, or taking seriously someone who made it up a long time ago.

I think they're all mostly bunk. Pagans just make easy targets. Sorry, law of the playground and all that stuff...

Iirc, in one of the Vedic Hymns, the priests claim to have created the gods. This isn't that different from the claim in the Dinsendas (sp?) that the Druids created the world through human sacrifice.

My view is that there is a difference. Indo-European gods generally represent highest ideals that we discover in ourselves, then personify, and such. However, is this incompatible with the idea that those concepts can manifest and that the gods *can* walk on this world? I don't think they are fully incompatible.

So, I guess I would have to wonder how far we go with the definition of "imaginary."

Lumpy_the_Great:

Having personally been in the wild wood late, late at night, I can completely understand the impulse of pagan naturalism and other spiritualism. But when I shine my light on what is going bump in the night, it's usually just a frog.

I used to twitch every time the motion-detector lights in the back of my house would flip on in the dead of night. In my case, though, it wasn't a frog. It was a cat. Damn cats. :) The only yard on my block with no dog in it and now it's an informal cat sanctuary.

Pagans just make easy targets. Sorry, law of the playground and all that stuff...

Based on minority status?

Have Norse pagans ever considered coming up with a better name for it than 'Norse pagan'? Definitional dodgeball aside, by common meanings of the word 'pagan'...

S: (n) heathen, pagan, gentile, infidel (a person who does not acknowledge your god)

S: (n) pagan (a person who follows a polytheistic or pre-Christian religion (not a Christian or Muslim or Jew))

S: (n) hedonist, pagan, pleasure seeker (someone motivated by desires for sensual pleasures)

...looking at the first two (the third I'm not so sure about), calling oneself a 'Norse pagan' is not so much an identifier -- like 'Hindu,' say -- but identifying something you are not, or something you are in opposition to.

And I realize what the word originally meant in Latin, that's cool. The point is, nobody means 'country dweller' anymore. We understand what the common meanings are. In this case, you're not saying 'I'm a Hindu' but 'I'm not like you.'

Happens a fair bit with the term 'atheist' (not a theist, not like you) too...probably why I prefer 'skeptic.' So my point is, maybe a different name would help. I have heard of one, 'Asatru'...is there some reason you don't use that name, einhverfr?

Most people don't know what Asatru is :-)

We've all had them. True, some of us stopped having imaginary friends before the age of ten, but that's only because we understand that the stuff that's in our heads doesn't get out and run around. Have you ever considered rationality in lieu of just making stuff up? You know, like if I can't detect it, and no one can't detect it, it doesn't exist? That sort of thing?

Well, technically, if someone thinks that what you believe is silly, shouldn't their argument be that their mainstream religion (or lack thereof) of choice is, by comparison, not silly, as opposed to "fundamentally better"?

I mean, really, Australian aboriginal spirituality and religion could be fundamentally better in any number of ways (mythology wise, human relationship to nature etc.), but that doesn't mean it's any less silly. ;)

Here is your chance to make arguments that monotheism or mainstream religions are fundamentally better.

So, suppose that someone came up with an objective silliness scale. And let us suppose that the unit on this scale is the bennyhill. One might assign 2 kilobennyhills to, say, Answers in Genesis and 3.5 kilobennyhills to Jack Chick.

Now, suppose we concede that your paganism isn't any sillier than Christianity, and that maybe it's a lot less silly. What if your average American Christian rates 1.2 kilobennyhills, and your paganism rates 300 bennyhills - where does that get you?

Your goal shouldn't be to be somewhat less silly than something which is known to be very silly, like the weird version of Christianity promulgated by Jack Chick, but to be not silly at all. There's always something less silly: Unitarians might rate only about 100 millibennyhills, for example.

If you tried, you might be able to find something which only rates 1 or 2 millibennyhills, or even a microbennyhill! Now wouldn't that be something?

Yeah, I recall reading another post of yours recently where you talked about what fun it is to (rhetorically) beat up those weaker than you. At the risk of revealing who was the pickee and who was the picker on the playgrounds of yore, I have to say that strikes me as a fairly appalling idea of fun – especially when your foe is “weaker” largely because his or her ideas are unpopular or unconventional.

It’s easy to be scathingly dismissive – especially when the crowd is on your side – but it’s seldom commendable except perhaps as a last recourse. You’re free to do as you please, of course. I just can’t quite understand why anyone would gloat over being a bully, that’s all. Maybe it’s me.

Carry on.

anxious, your post is pegging my megabennyometer...this thread is full of win now.

/cue Yakety Sax

"True, some of us stopped having imaginary friends before the age of ten, but that's only because we understand that the stuff that's in our heads doesn't get out and run around."

But I am not sure they can't. I suspect that is exactly what happens with everything from sightings of the Virgin Mary to alien abductions.

"Have you ever considered rationality in lieu of just making stuff up?"

Personally I don't make stuff up. I study philology and theorize about the beliefs of the Vikings and earlier. It is all evidence based and very interesting. I have just written an article (to be published soon) on Eddic childbirth charms and the specific and probably conscious reference to the Rune Poems.

"You know, like if I can't detect it, and no one can't detect it, it doesn't exist? That sort of thing?"

How do you detect beauty?