[Dialogue] Seious Objections

[opossum2@att.net]

Margaret,

I think you are right on the spot with your construction of the word "pagan" which is basically synonymous with "heathen", (neither of which, by definition, has anything to do with idolatry.  It's more a matter of not worshipping what is considered by whomever to be the "right" god, rather than worshipping the "wrong" god, or any god for that matter.

I appreciated your note, and I empathize with you in the struggle to manage your email!

Regards,

Steve Rhea
Houston, Tx.  (where it's hotter than most hells, either Christian or pagan!).


-------------- Original message from "aiseayew" <aiseayew at iowatelecom.net>: -------------- 


> 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 
> 
> 
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