Pete G wrote:
a shamelessly plaigarised quote from
"The president of the Association of Greek Clergymen, Father Efstathios Kollas, has described the followers of the Olympic gods as a handful of miserable resuscitators of a degenerate dead religion who wish to return to the monstrous dark delusions of the past."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6283907.stm
If you read your Roman history you will find the ancient British Druids practiced inflicting a lethal wound on a prisoner so as to divine the future from his death-struggles, along with other horrors that modern day druids dare not practice.
Seems a pretty degenerate and dead religion to me.
Sorry if it pissed you off.
I'd suggest a look at revivalist and reconstructionist approaches to Druidry before making such assumptions about our motivations.
The implication that modern-Druids only refrain from such practises because we "dare not" is quite an unpleasant one.
Those practises were of their time, in the same way that, at the precise time Christians were building beautiful cathedrals, it was a common Christian practice to burn other kinds of Christian, with whom one disagreed, to death.
It is worth stepping a little out of the box when considering such things. For example, what if the prisoner (That's PRISONER) was to be painfully executed anyway? Does the divinatory element really make such an execution worse?
Compare this with modern execution practice. The quickest way to kill someone is probably a bullet to the brain. Anything more than this is ritualised behaviour. Hence we have the firing squad BEFORE the coup de grace, and, in the US, ten year appeals before (a few years ago) a man would be electrocuted to death in a seated position (Just about the most ridiculous way to do this).
Are we really so far away from the mind-set of the Pagans of old? I think not.
Oh...I'm against the death penalty by the way (Probably best to add that)
