Ripples of Thought

"In time we hate that which we often fear."

Now, this quote struck something strong, mainly because, it felt sort of personal to me, mainly because of my religious beliefs. Let me explain;

Long ago, when Paganism was the mainstream faith, well, life was good. Then, one day, and I say that figuratively, Christianity came along and well, the followers of such began converting Pagans into Christians as well.

Now, fast forward from that time to the early to mid-nineteen hundreds, and you are introduced to Mr. Gerald Gardner. This man brought Paganism back into the mainstream world and out of hiding.

Well, needless to say, this was a bit frightening to the common public. A religion, not necessarily new to the world, but new to the time, coming along, seemingly to the uneducated person, against the belief structure of the common public would frighten anyone. That is along the same lines as somebody today, in our modern world, trying to introduce a new governmental system to the United States. This governmental system, although different from democracy, may be better or worse. However, the general public would have the mindset of, "Why try to fix something that isn't broken.", then, they would fear it, just as they had communism.

So, back to the main subject. After Paganism came into the mainstream category of religion, at least, for the most part, people still feared and fear it, but now, I personally have met people that straight up hate me because I do not follow their line of belief.

Granted, Paganism is still causing fear, more than likely because, as known as it is, it is still pretty unknown, and hell, Pagans like me, all over the United States are still trying to get it classified as a real religion, congress does not buy it. For instance it took somewhere over five-thousand signatures to get a Pentacle (A five-pointed star inside of a circle, one of our religious emblems) engraved on a headstone at Arlington Cemetery for a Pagan who was killed during his combat tour to Iraq.

So, you can see that we are not only misunderstood, and feared, but, like I have previously stated, there are some people out there who hate us as well. And, it all started out with a fear. I have to agree with Mr. Shakespeare here.

~ by Jonathan Cockrum on Thursday, October 4, 2007.