- Dec 14, 2002
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From David Mills of Touchstone magazine:
I have never understood the appeal of nature religions, which Wicca and its cousins are supposed to be. Nature being, as Tennyson observed, "red in tooth and claw," is not the sort of thing one would want either to worship or to blend oneself with. Nature isn't butterflies and bunnies, it's birds gobbling the butterflies and hawks eating the bunnies alive.
The pagans I've read talk a lot about achieving harmony with the cycles of nature and that sort of thing, but these cycles are completely impersonal and indeed inhumane and inhuman. The Black Plague is part of the cycle of nature. Just thinking purely in terms of self-interest, I would think a religion that says a loving Person lives behind nature and will correct and heal all the wounds it gives us, is a vastly more attractive religion.
I suspect that many neo-pagans actually rely, psychologically, on the comforting sense of personal immortality that two millenia of Christianity have produced. They don't actually think they're going to go out of existence and be merged in impersonal nature. In other words, they do not pay the emotional costs of real paganism.
And for that matter, I suspect that they also rely, psychologically, on the sense of the ultimate goodness of the universe that Christianity has also produced, and the astonishingly comfortable and affluent society they live in has encouraged. The ancient pagans knew the spirit world included devils as well as gods, and the gods themselves weren't to be trusted. They were wise enough to see that what the world suggested about itself was not encouraging.
Which is why Christianity came as such a liberation, and still comes as such to people in some societies. (A man who had lived in Nepal once told me some heart-rending stories about the fear of the spirits that characterized popular Nepalese Buddhism.) But the neo-pagans, supported by the Christian sense of the world, do not see the world as the real pagan sees it, and therefore do not see the Lord as he is.
I have never understood the appeal of nature religions, which Wicca and its cousins are supposed to be. Nature being, as Tennyson observed, "red in tooth and claw," is not the sort of thing one would want either to worship or to blend oneself with. Nature isn't butterflies and bunnies, it's birds gobbling the butterflies and hawks eating the bunnies alive.
The pagans I've read talk a lot about achieving harmony with the cycles of nature and that sort of thing, but these cycles are completely impersonal and indeed inhumane and inhuman. The Black Plague is part of the cycle of nature. Just thinking purely in terms of self-interest, I would think a religion that says a loving Person lives behind nature and will correct and heal all the wounds it gives us, is a vastly more attractive religion.
I suspect that many neo-pagans actually rely, psychologically, on the comforting sense of personal immortality that two millenia of Christianity have produced. They don't actually think they're going to go out of existence and be merged in impersonal nature. In other words, they do not pay the emotional costs of real paganism.
And for that matter, I suspect that they also rely, psychologically, on the sense of the ultimate goodness of the universe that Christianity has also produced, and the astonishingly comfortable and affluent society they live in has encouraged. The ancient pagans knew the spirit world included devils as well as gods, and the gods themselves weren't to be trusted. They were wise enough to see that what the world suggested about itself was not encouraging.
Which is why Christianity came as such a liberation, and still comes as such to people in some societies. (A man who had lived in Nepal once told me some heart-rending stories about the fear of the spirits that characterized popular Nepalese Buddhism.) But the neo-pagans, supported by the Christian sense of the world, do not see the world as the real pagan sees it, and therefore do not see the Lord as he is.
