Posted by deirdrehbrt on March 12, 2006, at 9:24:04
In reply to Re: Interesting peice about Wiccans and the military » deirdrehbrt, posted by Bobby on March 11, 2006, at 22:27:04
Hi Bobby,
Wicca is a religion that comes under the body of religions called Neo-Pagan, or New Pagan. (Similar to how Catholic and Anglican come under the broader 'Christian')
It is an Earth Centered religion, having reverence for nature in that we believe that deity and spirit exist within all living things. Some believe that deity exists in all things, including the rocks, water, etc.
Some Wicca believe in a 'universal source', an ulitimate deity or godhead figure. This 'source' is incomprehensible, so we worship aspects of this godhead as individual Gods and Goddesses. In that sense, we are polytheistic.
In my tradition, it isn't really "mother nature", as we believe we need both God and Goddess for fertility, but the Goddess could roughly be interpreted as what some people call "mother nature". We revere the cycles in nature, the cycle of the moon, the death and rebirth seen in the seasons; the waxing and waning in the length of days. We respect that life is dependent upon death; those of us who eat meat respect the life of the creature that was taken for our sustinence; likewise with plants.
Some of us are the tree-huggers; and can feel the energy of deity flowing through these majestic beings. We're all over the board, just as are the unique natures of Mormonism, Fundamentalism, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, etc.
If you'd like to see a place that shows what we're all about, you can go to http://www.witchvox.com It's not a course on Wicca, Paganism or Witchcraft, but more of an information clearinghouse with lots of good articles. Lots of people write here, from teens on up. They have a real nice RSS feed for newspaper articles dealing with subjects that affect us.
Anyway, that's a bit about who we are. Our claim is that, contrary to our what our president says, we are a legitimate religion. Hope this has helped,
--Dee
poster:deirdrehbrt
thread:618773
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20060304/msgs/619274.html