h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Howdy Math. It's been a quiet day, so I just thought I'd tell you that I absolutely detest that full stop after your attractive glyph. May we occasionally see it in its pristine purity?

toxx

... the glyph, that is; not the full stop!

Hi Echo

"HS, Math, how similar are your religions to Wicca? I'm afraid I know so little in this regard, but I certainly would like to broaden my knowledge."

Well I can't speak for my friends the Heathens, but I'll give it a go for druidry .

Way back in the fifties a chap called Gerald Gardner decided to invent Wicca (though some claim he reinvented it) to bring some order and consistency to the practice of witchcraft. He drew heavily on the lore held by his friend Ross Nichols, a wise and practicing neo-pagan druid.

What Gardner couldn't find in the history of witchcraft or the lore of druidry he pretty much made up. No-one can deny that he was successful, in fact very successful. Just about every Wicca group tries to trace a path of teaching to Gardner or his friend, and later rival, Alexander.

Because Gardner, his descendants and collaborators wrote everything down, Wicca is pretty much as he first envisaged it. Even down to the particularly ridiculous 'Wiccan Rede'.

Druidry though has moved on considerably. Through scholarship and practice we have discovered so much that the druidry that Ross Nichols practiced then bears little resemblance to what we have today.

OK boring history lecture over, now down to the simple identifiers:

Wiccans generally believe they can alter reality by force of will, and have the right to do so. They do this through ritual and spells. Most do this for reasons many would agree is good and moral. A number do not and cannot see that the very act of imposing your will can be interpreted as assault or even, in the case of love potions and spells, as rape.

All Wiccans are, by definition, witches. Most witches, however, are not Wiccans.

Wicca is a Goddess-centred, some would say 'obsessed', path. Some see it as a religion, many as a path to personal control over their own destinies.

Druidry, for many of its practitioners, is not a form of religion. It is a philosophy and a way of life. Thus we are accepting of people who are of a specific recognised world religion and also claim to be druids.

Druids work with the sacred land in order to bring peace, harmony and healing. We do not generally cast spells ot create potions. We are bards, seers, craftsmen and teachers. Our practice is entirely earth-centred.

Such rituals as we carry out are celebrations of the turning of the year and the key points in peoples' lives. Some use their skills as herbalists to heal.

We do not use sex or blood in our rituals and 'sacrifice' to us means bread, mead or food for the native animals of the land.

I hope that this helps. I have also got an Edited Guide Entry called 'Druidry, Yesterday and Today' if you wish to read more.

Blessings,
Matholwch /|\.

Hi Toxxin

I have found that on many fora if I don't put a full stop after the final element of the glyph it can confuse the text editor, it thinks that there is a html error and trashes or refuse the message.

Blessings,
Matholwch /|\.

moke

>>Although I do remember listening to a Radio4 program on some pagan festival. They interviewed a whitch.<<

Ah. And which witch would that be, I wonder???

Very few sane pagans will appear on programs any more, as they are pretty much always treated as freaks.

Of the few that will appear, many are people who are about as representative of general pagan thought as an escaped parrot is of garden birds...

Jez

Sceptic

>>I have heard Jesus was represented as a sexual deviant, which he was not. <<

He was portrayed as saying he was a little bit gay. That would probably have done it.

And the protestors were probably sufficiently ignorant of clothing not to recognise any form of loin cloth.

It's a good job they didn't portray Ghandi...

Jez

Jesus may or may not have been a sexual deviant whatever that is, but I reckon there's a pretty good chance Paul was.

OK, Math. I'll test it for you on this forum completely free, gratis and for nothing. If it works, will you please lose that awful stop?

toxx

/|
Hmmmm. Seems cool ter me.

Dammit, Math. You were right. It was fine on the preview and then .....

Let's try this /|\

And this /|\

OK. Cool. I followed yer glyph with a space and I also tried Alt+255 [blank that isn't quite a space]. They seem to have worked, so ya have no excuse now!

"Don't you agree that it's as interesting finding *why* someone thinks as they do, as what they think?"

Oh, my goodness. But what do you mean by 'why'?

just take my situation regarding applying to the Beth Din:
(a) would I be sufficiently rigorously honest with myself to admit to what my motives were?
(b) if i the answer to (a) is yes, how far would I disclose them to others?
(c) assuming I was both honest and open, readers would find a number of options of 'why', but how would they know which to pick? they could pick the material - I had a Jewish boyfriend. But did I have a Jewish boyfriend because I wished to be jewish, or vice versa, or was his presence simply serendipitous? His mother was a personal friend - so did the boyfriend matter. Or did she matter? Or neither? I had been actively searching for a spirituality I felt comfortable with among organised religions, so was this simply the latest? Or should we dig deeper and ask why I bothered about spirituality at all? Would the explanation for any of this come from my environament or my upbringing or my genes, or is that paradigm totally irrelevant?

You see, 'why' is a very slippery concept when you begin to unpick it. There are ultimate and proximate causes, mixed motives and various paradigms to use. What do we mean by 'why' and how far do we go in 'explaining'something? or are we simply explaining our own personal view of the world when we 'explain'?

"I must say that my knowledge of the BBC is limited to the (few) TV programmes NZ TV bothers to show (mainly drama) and the World Service on radio, but the above is certainly not the impression I have got!"

Ah, I like the world Service because a lot of the Christian bias gets stripped out. World Service output is nothing like what we get here in Britian on Radio 4! I speak as an avid R4 listener for the last 30 years, but who much prefers WS which I only recently discovered due to our digital radio set in the study.

There are about five kinds of 'why?' and more than one kind of explanation. But try telling this to a three-year-old!

azahar - first, why di *I* have to justify their actions?
Second, there's nothing wrong with flooding the BBC with emails! Expressing an opinion isn't wrong, and whoever said on that thread that it's "just a matter of hitting send" and implied that doing it that way somehow makes their complaints less genuine than if they got paper, an envelope and a stamp is just weird.
Third - did the death threats actually happen? I haven't seen any news stories about it...

<>

Where on earth do you get that bizarre assertion from Bouncy?

HS, by why, I didn't really mean your innermost motives, I was thinking of something more like, casually autobiographical... Because I wouldn't want to pry. It is interesting, though...

<>


"Guards were last night protecting the homes of two senior BBC executives as complaints from Christian groups at Saturday's showing of Jerry Springer - The Opera escalated into threats of violence."

http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1386564,00.html

"The recently appointed controller of BBC2 and Ms Bennett received a number of abusive calls after their numbers were printed on the website of a prayer group, Christian Voice, one of a number that have organised campaigns against the show. Threatening calls were also made to several BBC governors."



Nice, huh? Some of the threatening phone calls were actually directed at the *children* of these BBC employees, who just happened to pick up the phone.

I agree that there is nothing wrong with expressing an opinion, Della, but how could these people have had an opinion on something they hadn't even seen?

Anyhow, Noggin and I watched it last night. It was good, quite funny in parts, a bit draggy here and there (imo) but in general a well-done musical-comedy production. Jesus was *not* shown in a nappy. And I didn't see anything that could seriously be called 'blasphemous'. In fact, it was a total p*ss-take of Jerry Springer and what he represents and the final message was quite a postive one - about loving one's fellow man.

I wonder why Christians are so insecure about their religion that someone poking some fun at it makes them get defensive to the extent that they start issuing death threats to children. Any ideas?


az

Thanks for the link, azahar... I am so interested to read that, and see what a smug unpleasant bunch the executives seem to be! (Just an observation.)
<>
It seems unlikely that the organisers of 'peaceful vigils' are the same people issuing death threats, doesn't it?
<>
No need to comment...
<>
So, which is it? Directed at the children, or the children just happened to pick up the phone?
<< but how could these people have had an opinion on something they hadn't even seen?>>
I seem to have ended up making the case for these people, when I don't even really agree with them - simply because someone's got to, and because of your extreme hostility about this issue. Don't you think there'd be considerably more reaction if the same sort of thing, only attacking Islam was being shown by a state funded broadcaster? You bet your sweet patootie there would! Personally, after what I have heard, mostly from people such as yourself who have seen it, and think it was fine, I'd never watch it myself - and I don't have to, to know that it royally sucks.
The whole point is that the BBC is funded by a licence fee. In the USA cable channels can make and show programs that denigrate Italian Americans (Sopranos) Arabs (any offering from Fox) and any other group they choose to disrespect, and that's fine, only people who have a high opinion of their own cleverness and their earning power, and who choose to pay $$ to get cable, are paying for this slander. A publicly funded TV channel gets $$$ or £££ from everyone, and so people help pay for their own denigration! That's the point! It's simple to undertsnd - HS gets very cross at what she sees as the Beeb's insulting of pagans, and you don't deny (neither do I) that she has the right to be cross.
<< And I didn't see anything that could seriously be called 'blasphemous'>>
All due respect, but would you know what's blasphemous to a Christian? Some people on other threads have indicated that they've be diasppointed at a show that wasn't sufficiently blasphemous!
<>
My first idea, is that there are one or two sweeping assumptions in there. The first is that 'Christians' in general were in favour of the death threats, and not that it was a mad and manic few.
Second - what makes you think the Christians are "insecure"? Wishful thinking? Say someone staged a play that insulted your family - or a member of it. Then if you objected, someone asked why you're so "insecure" about your family? (I'm trying to find something comparable that you might understand and care about to the same extent.)
<>

Says volumes that...

An article on h2g2 can take many forms. The Edited Guide consists of informative 'encyclopaedic' articles on many topics, some more serious than others (A320275; A3327149). But articles can also appear about all sorts of stuff, some of which rather stretch the definition of the word (A516647; A3411316). If you feel that an article meets the standard of the Edited Guide you can submit it to Peer Review (A3421289 (shameless plug)). h2g2 is not a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxey fan club, but there are many referential articles, even in the Edited Guide (A18541; A68555).

This quick cross-section of the wealth of h2g2 might give you some ideas of what the site is about.

TRiG.

Why thankyou for that info Trig,much appreciated ..Pinky x