[Dialogue] Seious Objections

[aiseayew]

I'm a bit slow catching up/keeping up with my e-mail; it overwhelms me on a 
regular basis and then I go through indiscriminately deleting.  It is how I 
got from 273 to only 133 messages in the last couple of days.  I think I 
lose some of the threads, so now I need some help to reconstruct.

>From the excerpts on Dubya's Christianity there were several references to 
the "very thin veneer over idolatry".
Then if I have followed the conversation Karl wrote to recommend Wallis and 
then I believe said.
" For most people, it seems to me, their 'religion' is a very thin
 veneer over some form of idolatry (i.e. paganism). I first learned
that at the Bayad consult from an Egyptian sociologist."

I seriously object to the thin veneer over idolatry being equated with 
paganism.  I need some serious explication here.  For starters what 
definition or historical understanding are people working with regarding 
paganism?  What was the insight of the Egyptian sociologist?

Since the time I spent in Rome (where at the hospital when Naomi was born I 
was listed as a pagan because I said I wasn't Catholic and they only had two 
boxes) my understanding of pagan was literally "people of the fields."  In 
the history of the Catholic church it was largely those people who lived too 
deeply in the valleys and were too busy tending their fields to respond to 
the bells in the churches on the mountain tops every three hours.  In 
Zambia, while nearly everyone identified or aligned with a Western faith, 
there was a belief system underneath all of that which was far more 
powerful, but even that I identify as animism, not paganism.

I am fascinated by what definition of "pagan" is operative here and how it 
informes in any way "idolatry"?

Thanks for any help anyone can give,
Margaret