{"id":228,"date":"2009-02-07T15:02:31","date_gmt":"2009-02-07T20:02:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/?p=228"},"modified":"2009-02-07T15:08:44","modified_gmt":"2009-02-07T20:08:44","slug":"i-get-fascinating-email","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/2009\/02\/07\/i-get-fascinating-email\/","title":{"rendered":"I get fascinating email"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s a couple of emails I received recently, both from the same eddress:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>i find your attempt to christianize paganism laughable. the first time i heard your name i knew you were one of these blasphemous hippie idiots trying to destroy paganism and turn it into some pacifist sterile PC bullshit. and i saw a video of you wearing the star of david. thats why i serve morrigan. there is no way you can soften her, and turn her into the joke that you have turned the rest of the old gods into. i also think it&#8217;s funny how you promote letting n***ers and f***ots in and then call people like me, who&#8217;s ancestors worshipped these gods &#8220;fake&#8221;. i always like to listen to people like you when i need a laugh. and you jews are really arrogant nowdays. you dont even try to hide what you are doing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>i find it interesting how you take up for your filthy jew ancestors, claiming to be a pagan. ANY pagan who knows history should hate jews. it was the jews who bribed\u00a0constantine to enforce christianity, and thats why rome got it&#8217;s ass kicked. and here you are trying to do the same thing. like i said, it&#8217;s obvious wether you try to deny it or not. you&#8217;re just another filthy judeo-pig and nobody with half a brain would give you a second thought.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is just so wrong, on so many levels.<\/p>\n<p>1) The family name is German-Wendish. A lot of Jews came to the USA from parts of Europe with Wendish names, but so did a lot of Lutherans, such as my great-great-etc.-grandfather, Adam Bonnawitz in 1749. My direct father was Presbyterian, my mother Roman Catholic. (I could post a scan of my baptismal and confirmation certificates, but the writer, like the crazed Obama-phobes, would probably insist that they were forged.)<\/p>\n<p>2) As for ethnicity, I have about a dozen different ancestries, mostly Celtic and Germanic, plus some Native American. To the best of our geneological research, I don&#8217;t have a single Jewish ancestor \u2014 not that I would care much if I did. I probably have more &#8220;aryan&#8221; ancestry than the writer has, and I don&#8217;t care about that either.<\/p>\n<p>3) I&#8217;ve never worn a Star of David in my life. I frequently wear a pentacle, which ignorant fools who can&#8217;t count often mistake for one.<\/p>\n<p>4) Since I&#8217;m not Jewish by either tribal ancestry or religious ancestry, the anti-Semitic raving against me is entirely off-target, not to mention nonsensical and historically ignorant. The early Christians made a concerted effort to infiltrate and subvert the Roman Empire. They started killing Jews, along with the Paleopagans, as soon as they had the power to do so.<\/p>\n<p>5) Creating <a href=\"http:\/\/www.adf.org\"><em>\u00c1r nDra\u00edocht F\u00e9in:<\/em> A Druid Fellowship<\/a> as a public Pagan &#8220;church&#8221; does not &#8220;Christianize&#8221; Paganism, except to those who equate all organized religions with Christianity. It just makes Paganism more accessible to those who need it.<\/p>\n<p>6) As for the Morrigan, I&#8217;ve been a worshiper of Her for forty years and even wrote a popular <a href=\"http:\/\/www.neopagan.net\/IB_Songs_Irish.html#HymntotheMorrigan\">hymn<\/a> to Her that I use in ritual. I think She would find idiots like the writer far more objectionable than myself.<\/p>\n<p>7) Of course, I &#8220;let&#8221; African-Americans join ADF. Most of them have more Irish ancestry than I have. Most Irish-Americans whose families have been here for more than a few generations have some black ancestry (and vice versa), because freed slaves and indentured Irish servants frequently married. I don&#8217;t have any AA ancestry that I know of. I might through the French Canadian side of the family, but it wouldn&#8217;t bother me if I did.<\/p>\n<p>8) We have a lot of GLBTQIZ members in ADF because we&#8217;re not using the Wiccan yin-and-yang energies to generate power for our rituals. So gender and orientation are irrelevant to participation in ADF, as they should be in all religions.<\/p>\n<p>9) No, we don&#8217;t hide what we&#8217;re doing, either in ADF or in my career as a whole. We&#8217;re creating <strong>Neo<\/strong>pagan movements for people who want to live and pray in the 21st century, not the 17th. We actively discourage racists, homophobes, anti-Semites and other ignorant bigots from joining us. So I&#8217;m not at all upset that the writer doesn&#8217;t want any part of what we&#8217;re doing, and that makes me very happy.<\/p>\n<p>I <strong>am<\/strong> an old hippie and my politics <strong>are<\/strong> extremely liberal. That doesn&#8217;t mean everyone in ADF or the Neopagan movement as a whole shares those characteristics, though I suspect the vast majority do. This is yet another area of life where Oberon&#8217;s Principle of Non-Choice prevails: &#8220;If you don&#8217;t like it, you can&#8217;t have any!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I thought about posting this jerk&#8217;s eddress in this blog, but decided against it. Losers like him thrive on attention and wilt when properly ignored. Feel free to discuss him in your comments, however.<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s a couple of emails I received recently, both from the same eddress: i find your attempt to christianize paganism laughable. the first time i heard your name i knew you were one of these blasphemous hippie idiots trying to &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/2009\/02\/07\/i-get-fascinating-email\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feedback-loop","category-personal-happenings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neopagan.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}