pagan religion

I don't think true objectivity is possible. Indeed, I don't even think it exists. It's just a human idea, after all.

What does exist, however, is change, and flux. Nature never stays still, and everything evolves, including relations between humans.

The modern cult of globalism seeks to destroy our traditional values and distinctive cultures, and turn us all into mindless consumers and automatons. But it is already on the way out, I think. Or at least, has already hit its peak. Brexit is a good example of a succesful popular movement against globalisation.

Maia wrote:

I don't think true objectivity is possible. Indeed, I don't even think it exists. It's just a human idea, after all.

Like I said, the objective is idealized....so objectivity is an approach to nature's indifference.
We, as mortal beings, remain subjective....but not equally so.
To approach the objective is to approach the ideal.

Maia wrote:

What does exist, however, is change, and flux. Nature never stays still, and everything evolves, including relations between humans.

In nature inferiority, unfitness, is not protected. If it were no species would ever survive.

Maia wrote:

The modern cult of globalism seeks to destroy our traditional values and distinctive cultures, and turn us all into mindless consumers and automatons. But it is already on the way out, I think. Or at least, has already hit its peak. Brexit is a good example of a successful popular movement against globalisation.

Yes, and Globalism is founded on Abrahamic ethical codes - all inclusion, open borders, open markets, elimination of all ethnicity - but one - all races, all genders....all natural identifiers.
Identity will be a consumer product - an idea one can pick up and then throw away at will.

Can we destroy a child with too much love? Overprotectiveness.

Is nature kind, benevolent, loving? Is this how you understand this "goddess". Mother nature.
A motherly figure that protects her children from suffering?

I'm not sure that it's possible to quantify if one opinion is more subjective than another. All attempts to do so are, after all, subjective. Perhaps it's better just to embrace this fact.

Nature is all things, both cruel and kind.

One way is to eliminate, as much as possible, your personal interests, desires and needs.
So, when speaking of killing, we must look to nature and see if killing occurs, how and when it occurs.

When I analyze beauty I don't do it because I am beautiful. I don't adjust my analysis to my desires.
When I analyze morality I don't do it because I claim to be good, or decent... I analyze it as indifferently and coldly, and rationally, as possible.

Maia wrote:

Nature is all things, both cruel and kind.

Give me one example of nature's "kindness".
Is not kindness a human behaviour based on the social instincts of a species that adopted cooperative survival tactics?

Cruelty is also a human reaction to nature's indifference to our plight.

Nature is neither kind nor cruel.

She ain't Lyssa, that's for sure.
All we can do is try.

+++So, when speaking of killing, we must look to nature and see if killing occurs, how and when it occurs.+++

Humans are not wild animals, though. The fact that we can analyse the situation like this proves this to be so.

+++Give me one example of nature's "kindness".+++

Providing the bounty of the earth for us to live on.

+++Is not kindness a human behaviour based on the social instincts of a species that adopted cooperative survival tactics?+++

Yes, an innate behaviour given to us by nature.

+++Nature is neither kind nor cruel.+++

In the sense that these are human words with value judgments attached, I agree.

You're some kind of New Age Pagan. Common in the postmodern, post-60's west.
Spirit stones carved with runes - the stone for the physical the rune for the mind, focusing the human's energies - incense and exotic melodies, beads, Indian shawls, gems, eye-brow rings, tie dyes and braided hair, hena tattoos; some smoke a bit of weed to "release the spiritual energies".
Hippies.
Study how paganism was practiced before Abrahamism emerged - when it was a way of life not a pastime.
There were sacrifices and orgiastic events...and even a glorification of violence.
Paganism was about earth and blood.

Humans are animals...they are of nature.
Don't know what "wild" means. It may mean they aren't civilized, have no moral codes no traditions.
I don't see indiscriminate violence in nature.
Humans are more violent than animals.

So, nature is kind because it provides a bounty?
Are you serious?
Natural environments are not bountiful. This is why we crave sugars and fats...because they aren't readily available.
Nature is frugal forcing life to endure hardships.
If we exceed her bounty we die.
Nature just is. It has no motive.

Abrahamism took pagan concepts and corrupted them.
Primordial sin, for example, is based on pagan shame, for having to destroy life in order to preserve it.
Pagans, across all variants, showed this shame as a reverence towards the sacrificed.
The hunter gave thanks to the "spirit" of the deer he killed.
This went as far as to honour the enemy you were about to slaughter in battle.

The reverence is towards the mystery of nature - the unknown.
This produces self-discripline. Respect is founded on fear/anxiety.
No fear no respect.

Who and what do we respect?
That which we fear will withhold from us what we need and desire.
People showed reverence to appease the brutality of nature - hoping to avoid it. This is why they anthropomorphized nature, imaging it as a "her" - a goddess, in your case. There's even a reason nature is always imagined as female.
Some imagined natural forces as gods. Gods that could be tricked, seduced, bribed.

Natural environments are harsh. Animals competing for the same scarce resources.
There is no bountifulness - there is frugality, naturally electing those that can endure.
Man creates artificial bountifulness, safety..."correcting" nature's ways.

+++You're some kind of New Age Pagan. Common in the postmodern, post-60's west.+++

I would definitely not describe myself as New Age, and find New Age writings very tedious.

+++Spirit stones carved with runes - the stone for the physical the rune for the mind, focusing the human's energies - incense and exotic melodies, beads, Indian shawls, gems, eye-brow rings, tie dyes and braided hair, hena tattoos; some smoke a bit of weed to "release the spiritual energies".+++

I find runes to be a powerful magical tool for directing energies, which are very much physical in nature.

I don't use incense, beads, or wear Indian shawls or whatever. My hair is not braided and I don't have tattoos, henna or otherwise. I don't use drugs of any kind and am currently teetotal. (I've tried weed in the past, once or twice, who hasn't? It did nothing for me.)

+++Study how paganism was practiced before Abrahamism emerged - when it was a way of life not a pastime.
There were sacrifices and orgiastic events...and even a glorification of violence.
Paganism was about earth and blood.+++

And it was also about a whole load of other things too. To concentrate on those aspects is to distort it.

+++Humans are animals...they are of nature.
Don't know what "wild" means. It may mean they aren't civilized, have no moral codes no traditions.
I don't see indiscriminate violence in nature.
Humans are more violent than animals.+++

Humans are unique among animals for all sorts of reasons, chiefly by possessing innate feelings of right and wrong, given to us by nature.

+++So, nature is kind because it provides a bounty?
Are you serious?
Natural environments are not bountiful. This is why we crave sugars and fats...because they aren't readily available.
Nature is frugal forcing life to endure hardships.
If we exceed her bounty we die.
Nature just is. It has no motive.+++

As I said, kind is a human word. Nature provides the earth for us, not out of any motive, it just does. It may indeed require hard work to extract a living from, which has made us what we are. But it's better than having no earth at all.

+++Abrahamism took pagan concepts and corrupted them.+++

I'm certainly no fan of monotheism.

+++There's even a reason nature is always imagined as female.+++

The giver of life.

Maia wrote:

I find runes to be a powerful magical tool for directing energies, which are very much physical in nature.

I don't use incense, beads, or wear Indian shawls or whatever. My hair is not braided and I don't have tattoos, henna or otherwise. I don't use drugs of any kind and am currently teetotal. (I've tried weed in the past, once or twice, who hasn't? It did nothing for me.)

Could your blindness be a factor....because all of these are visual stimulants.

Out of curiosity when you dream, do you see images or do you only feel, sense?

Maia wrote:

And it was also about a whole load of other things too. To concentrate on those aspects is to distort it.

No, to ignore them is to distort it.
You seem to be focused on the lovey dovey....spiritual connectivity.
It's a feminine thing...and your blindness may make you more inclined towards it.
Females are dependent and handicaps make one even more so. This makes one unable to believe in anything that would decrease external connectivity, external aid, support.  

Paganism was about the hearth, the home, the fire....earth and blood.

Maia wrote:

Humans are unique among animals for all sorts of reasons, chiefly by possessing innate feelings of right and wrong, given to us by nature.

No, nature gives nothing.
These develop, evolve, to cope with nature.
Humans are the wildest animal of them all.
The current domesticated version is related to over two-thousand years of Abrahamism.

Maia wrote:

As I said, kind is a human word. Nature provides the earth for us, not out of any motive, it just does. It may indeed require hard work to extract a living from, which has made us what we are. But it's better than having no earth at all.

There is no providing. We aren't separate.
We are of the earth.
We weren't given the earth.
No earth, no us....no sun, no us.
This sun/earth necessity is the beginning of paganism.
We are solar energy interacting - germinating - in the earth's soil.

The sun is our first god. It is who and what we are.
It is what we feed on - solar energy.

Sun = male
Earth = female

Maia wrote:

The giver of life.

Not only.
Female is nature's agency.
Female chooses which male is worthy of reproducing.

Female is a genetic filter.
Female is natural selection.
Harsh, unfair, unforgiving...intuitive...and chaotic....something to be tamed.
But when she chooses she changes. Then she becomes comforting, nurturing...when she yields she becomes bountiful.

+++Could your blindness be a factor....because all of these are visual stimulants.+++

My blindness is always a factor.

Incense is not a visual stimulant though, and I find it cloying and disgusting.

+++Out of curiosity when you dream, do you see images or do you only feel, sense?+++

I don't have any visual element to my dreams but all the other senses are present, usually in equal measure.

+++It's a feminine thing...and your blindness may make you more inclined towards it.
Females are dependent and handicaps make one even more so.+++

I would say that being blind has made me more determined to become independent, rather than the reverse.

+++Paganism was about the hearth, the home, the fire....earth and blood.+++

Hearth, home and fire, yes, definitely all those things.

+++There is no providing. We aren't separate.
We are of the earth.+++

Yes, I fully agree. We are all part of nature. But language allows us, nevertheless, to talk about nature providing.

+++Sun = male
Earth = female+++

That's actually what the Wiccans say, too. Not that I'm a Wiccan, by the way.

What do you think of Ihaveshitforbrains challenge on ILP?
I mean the "context" of the two versions of pagans dealing with the moral dilemma of abortion.
One a postmodern, liberal "pagan", the other a religious fundamentalist conservative "pagan".

Are these theoretical pagans considering abortion to be moral or immoral in line with paganism?
Does morality have anything to do with this choice?

How about killing, in general?
Is killing abhorrent only if it is immoral and only if you were raised to think so?
What about sex with infants?
What does upbringing have to do with it? What does culture have to do with it?

I think I am a decent guy...never abused anyone. I go out of my way to show respect to others, but change only when this is not returned.
I don't need morality to tell me when and why to be kind.
I don't need a moral cultural code to tell me not to torture animals. It's not in me. I recoil form it, not because I was raised to react that way.

Why do you waste your time on trash?
Discrimination is part of nature. So is intolerance of what is beneath us. Dignity.
When you enter a trash bin you become part of the trash. Are you hoping to find a lost treasure there?

When you say you don't need morality to tell you not to torture animals, abuse children, and all the rest, I would say that it's exactly morality that makes you not do these things. So perhaps all we have here is an argument over words. I'm not in any way committed to the word "morality" so call it something else if you like.

Abortion is a form of killing, which I oppose. Except for reasons of self-defence or defending others.

Correction...I don't need ethical codes.....cultural norms...an upbringing to make me find torturing animals abhorrent to me and my nature.

I was raised in a household where Communism and Christianity were part of my upbringing...and I am the opposite, having found the common source for them both. Humans are not blank slates raised in social bubbles.

Abortion is worse than killing. It is killing a foetus of your own blood. It's killing your own child.
So, the circumstances are important.
For example...was it a product of rape; is the foetus deformed?
But to maintain a lifestyle, or to correct a mistake is ify.
With no cost then mistakes repeat. The individual never grows because it doesn't have to.
There's no severity to bad judgment calls so reasoning stagnates, self-discipline atrophies and degeneracy is cultivated.

There's a reason why females are sexually picky.

Indeed. The feeling that such things are abhorrent is innate.

Yes, killing one's own child is certainly among the worst types of killing, and the fact that modern society encourages it is probably its single most sickening aspect, among many. As for the question of whether abortion can ever be justified by circumstances, I would say, possibly. Perhaps rape is among those possibilities, as it gross deformity. But here we're treading on thin ice I think, and getting into the realm of designer babies.

Ihaveshitforbrains believes all morality is a human construct...for me, and you, morality is innate, inborn, a product of natural selection....my nature.
So, by abortion being immoral I meant unethical according to a socially engineered norm. This is how this piece of trash thinks.
All is a manmade social construct - a power game.

So pagans are either moral or immoral because they were raised that way.
There's no emotional, biological, factor at work. It's all ideology.
All up there on the clouds, as the turd would say.

Let's put it in a "context" the piece of shit will understand:
If Jane was raised in a culture that worshipped animal torture than she would consider animal torture moral.
Bob, on the other hand, born and raised differently, considers animal torture immoral, but thinks having sex with infants moral.

A basic component of paganism: accountability.
A spirit of philotimo, lover of honour.
The man of honour begins by evaluating his own responsibilities in all events, foreseeable, and unforeseeable, good or bad.
This is crucial in a natural setting where there are no institutions to complain to or to protect you.
In the wild you can blame the other all you like, it will not prevent you from suffering the same consequences in the future, unless you accept your own role, take account of your own errors, failings.

There is no overcoming no adaptation without this accountably.
It's called experience.
If the other fooled me then it is I who was gullible.

@Maia
Am I Satan trying to corrupt your pure spirit, Maia?

Are you being held here against your will, or is someone forcing you to return to this evil place?

Do I want to take your soul with my trickery?
Ha!!!

There's a very simple truism underlying paganism...not the authoritarian "there is only one way", like the imbecile insists in constructing his bogeyman - representing his youthful naive, more idiotic self - but that you can choose - freely - to do and say what you want, but you ought not to expect a collective to intervene to protect you or share the negative consequences.
This is basically what natural selection is.

If Mary wants to go out to bars where she may be raped, or in order to pick up and have sex with random men, or if Mary is easily fooled by smooth talkers and she constantly wants abortions, because she is an imbecile or weak, or simply degenerate, then she ought not expect some collective to step in and share the consequences of what she chooses to do.
If, on the other hand, Mary expect the collective to share the negative consequences of her poor judgements, then she ought to reciprocate by abiding by the collective rules.
This is what morality is and out of this ethical systems develop.
Its a covenant between individuals and a collective.

But collectives can also suffer from poor judgment because in the end nature, i.e., world, reality, the cosmos, is the final arbiter of who and what is fit and who and what is unfit.

Absolutist simplistic minds are trapped in ideology/dogma, unable to discern where it end and where the greater world begins.
They can only imagine it as a god, a consciousness, a willful agency because they are imbeciles and because they've been easily indoctrinated, as many simpletons usually are.
Simpletons are natural followers. Their goal is to find the strongest, biggest, authority and surrender to them - the feminine strategy.
They easily become indoctrinated and immersed in whatever pleases them, or flatters them - seduces them with grande promises of peace, prosperity, abundance, unity...it's the psychology of children and females, for obvious reasons.
All that they expect - demand - from the one they surrender to is that they are protected and taken care of - that they are raised over their own limitations.
This is how they approach philosophy, as a discipline that will save them from their own inherited inferiorities.
Chicken soup for their ailing psyche - mother's broth, in daddy's home.

The "my way or the highway" comes from this. They rebel, but have nowhere to go because they cannot survive on their own, using their won wits, so they quickly fall prey to the first guru they meet, and when they discover that they've mistaken the relationship they are like scorned females, seeking vengeance against those who failed to be what was expected of them.
They never blame themselves, for being gullible, weak, easily seducable....no they blame the other for not living upon to what they expected from them.
Their own misunderstanding become the others lies, or self-contradictions. Their assaults are usually projections expressing what they think of themselves.

Satyr wrote:

"Can you show me one singularity to inspire me to convert?"


Can you ever change a psychopath's mind?

Paganism worships a natural oasis in the midst of a vast ideological dessert of nothingness; a tangible, perceptible, world populated by all forms of life.
Each finds himself within it and though he may roam into the deserts of the real, to be lost, some return to it, despite the chimeras the desert heat produces.

There is no one path to the oasis, each returns to it from whatever direction he manages to return to it, as his strengths and weaknesses determine.
There is no escaping the oasis, even those who choose to roam in the deserts of their mind do so circling around what they dismiss as a mental fabrication, an illusion; dying of thirst they hear its waters in the distance, they smell its flowers in the hot air, triggering memories of a time when they lived in what is now lost to them.
at some time they ventured into the deserts of the real, hoping to find something better, but they found nothing but sands in the hour glass.
What does it matter to the oasis if they never find their way back?
Who has lost; who is lost in the uniform nothing?

The "god(s)" of nihilists require believers to come into existence – the amount of followers they could muster determining their power.
But the pagan gods require no believers. Whether men believe in nature and its manifestations or not, they persist to have power over unbelievers as well as believers – acknowledgment and convictions are not necessary because the forces they refer to, with anthropomorphic forms, remain independent from subjective human brains.

Cuddihy in his book The Ordeal of Civility, reminds us of the distinction between herd psychology and pack psychology, reflected in a distinction of spiritual outlooks and representative divinity.

Ghetto mindset expressed in ghetto chick dress, 'life is with people', the absence of politeness, of privacy, where the member's business is common knowledge...rather than a private affair. Feminized gossip, undermining reputation, competing over the moral high ground signaling one's in-group qualifications, measured by popularity, quantities of maintained relationships - social networking, etc.
Sex and degeneracy publicized and normalized - pulled "out of the closet", exposed for all to see.

Natural selection is dependent on what parents you are born from in the sense that this determines the traits, disposition potentials that will subsequently determine the probability of your survival and success.

Postmodernism adopting an Abrahamic/Marxist model proposes collectivization of such individual survival probabilities so that the survival of every individual is linked to the survival of the collective, where its size theoretically increases this factor of probability.
There's a flaw in this reasoning based on a misunderstanding of how and why survival of the fittest was established as nature's method of filtering out unfit mutations.
Sexual selection streamlined the process, through the free-willed agency of females.

Herd versus pack strategies ought to be considered within the contexts of these evolved applications of natural and sexual selection, in regards to their efficiency and effectiveness not only in increasing survival probabilities but also in producing particular kinds of mindsets, i.e., psychologies, later developing into particular worldviews.

The struggle of paganism has always been the maintenance of a balance which preserves antagonists to ensure survival of the fittest doesn't become an autocracy of a collective of unfitness using feminine tactics to increase their survival probabilities.
But this would not lead to an end since collectives become breeding grounds of degeneracy which brings any collective down - imploding due to tis own sheltering cesspools.
Technologies were a source of some hope that such collectives of Dutton's "Spiteful mutants" - my desperate degenerates - would thrive once technologies advanced to the level where they could compensate for any accumulating unfit mutations, and any degree of linguistic detachment from reality, given that machines would become mankind's caretakers, raising the theoretical dominance of machines over man, as expressed in various Hollywood films. But even in these scienfe-fiction scenarios a desire to self-annihilate to give way to another form of life, representing man's idealization of himself, is expressed as a desire to revert to a state of infancy taken care of by technological - systemic - parental agencies.
Asimov pre-empted arising concerns by formulating a set of laws - Robotic Laws - that would ensure the continuance of such a relationship. Man would essentially give his power away to machinery - Techniques and Technologies - outsourcing his connection with reality so as to regression back to a state of infantile inwardness, i.e., eternal play, experimentation, fantasy, carefree and carless, a state where every individual could pretend to be anything he/she so desires, at any given time - role playing.

Quote :

Asimov’s Three Laws are as follows:
1-A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2-A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3-A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Psychology of adolescence that gradual discovers how brutal and indifferent the world is and desires to return to the parent's abode without his ego being shamed.
Adolescence is a perfect way of describing postmodernity, after the debacle of Marxism and its modernistic techno-utopian fantasies.

The power of paganism - so called - is that it requires no evidence. It is empirical.
Its basis is observable phenomena, that may develop metaphysical foundations but does not require them.
The gods powers are experienced daily, not imagined.
Laymen may require an anthropomorphic allegorical narrative to explain how these forces interact and what they demand from the simple man, but its references are accessible to all.