When I was a little boy, I was a pagan. Like our ancestors who had lost sight of God, yet saw visions of him in the luminescent peace of a harvest moon, or the spine-rattling fury of a thunderclap, I believed in supernatural things. I believed there were rituals and incantations to invoke them, or …
One of G.K. Chesterton’s arguments in Everlasting Man is that the ancient pagans never really revered their petty gods and spirits and magical tree stumps nearly as much as the modern humanist, overflowing with tolerance and reverence for any belief system that distinguishes itself by not being Christian, imagines they did. They knew there was …
Believing, as Pat Robertson does, that the suffering of those you despise is inflicted by a god on your side, and that the suffering of those you pity is the result of a devil’s curse, seems to come awfully close to paganism. Which is ironic, because the source of Robertson’s conclusion about the Haitian curse …
This news from the BBC, about a rise in the number of pagan winter solstice celebrants in the UK, is disturbing. How could people raised in the Christian West miss the point that Christmas is about shopping until your debt rivals that of a Wall Street bank, gorging yourself for a month straight, salivating over car and …
The Columbine killers, a new book says, weren’t twisted little psychopaths who intended to kill dozens. They were one twisted little psychopath and his pathetic sidekick, and they hoped to kill hundreds. But otherwise they were regular kids. USA Today reports this as if it’s news, though the article is strikingly similar to Slate‘s breakdown in 2004. …
