PaganCentric

By Christian Purefoy, CNN

Just after midnight, the pastor seized a woman’s forehead with his large hand and she fell screaming and writhing on the ground. “Fire! Fire! Fire!” shouted the worshippers, raising their hands in the air.

Pastor Celestine Effiong’s congregants are being delivered from what they firmly believe to be witchcraft. And in the darkness of the city and the villages beyond, similar shouts and screams echo from makeshift church to makeshift church.

“I have been delivered from witches and wizards today!” exclaimed one exhausted-looking woman.

Pastors in southeast Nigeria claim illness and poverty are caused by witches who bring terrible misfortune to those around them. And those denounced as witches must be cleansed through deliverance or cast out.
As daylight breaks, and we travel out to the rural villages it becomes apparent the most vulnerable to this stigmatization of witchcraft are children.

A crowd gathered around two brothers and their sister. Tears streamed down their mother’s face as she cast out her children from the family, accusing them of causing the premature deaths of two of their siblings with black magic.

Read Complete Article @ CNN >>

by Wes Isley

True spiritual leaders never wish to be known as such, often preferring to downplay their contributions or laugh them off. This certainly seems to be the case with Isaac Bonewits, Neopagan priest and author who passed away last week of colon cancer at age 60. One memorial says Isaac, displaying what appears to have been a characteristic sense of humor, wished only to be known as one of the Neopagan movement’s “better-known, unindicted co-conspirators.”

Who was Bonewits and why should you care? If you’re not a practitioner of modern Druidry, Wicca or various other spiritual paths that take their inspiration from pre-Christian times, it’s unlikely you’ve heard of him. But it’s even possible, I believe, to be a practicing Witch, Druid or some other adventurous spirit and never have heard the name Isaac Bonewits. I don’t know if he would’ve taken delight in that notion or if his ego would’ve taken a hit, but what I do know is that for those of us who fall into the Neopagan camp, we all owe Bonewits a great deal of gratitude whether we’ve heard of him or not.

Read Full Article @ Huffington Post >>

There are a number of good reasons to be outraged by a leaflet that’s being handed out by Christians, but I’ll leave you to make up your own mind about it by reading the article.

The first thing that bothered me is that the leaflet came to light because a young girl in Bristol, Virginia, who was working in the drive-through at a burger joint called Hi-Lo Burger, was handing the leaflet by a customer. She wasn’t standing on a corner or bouncing through the local mall with her goodies half hanging out. One would assume that if she was working in a fast food burger joint, she wasn’t exactly dressed like a skank.

More than anything, though, what bothered me most was the unimaginable contention that a woman who dresses in a manner which the American Taliban believes is “ungodly” is partly at fault if she is raped. Think about that. Isn’t that the old mentality that a lot of women are familiar with from our unrelenting Christian neighbors? If a woman is raped, wasn’t she asking for it in some fashion? Shouldn’t she have taken better precautions? If someone smashes down her front door and rapes her as she tries to flee in the bathroom, shouldn’t she have installed better locks on her house? And if she works in a public place and ever wore anything the least bit suggestive, wasn’t she responsible for that man wanting to come there and rape her in the first place?

All you need to know about this leaflet can be summed up by the following quotes;

“Scripture tells us that when a man looks on a woman to lust for her he has already committed adultery in his heart. If you are dressed in a way that tempts a men to do this secret (or not so secret) sin, you are a participant in the sin.” It also states. “By the way, some rape victims would not have been raped if they had dressed properly. So can we really say they were innocent victims?”

I think all victims of rape who read those words will find a knot twisting up in their stomach. We’ve all put ourselves through that self-recrimination game, wondering what we might have done to deserve such hatred from another human being, that they would do such things to us. Reading such filth as the “Women & Girls” leaflet makes most of us feel like we’ve not only been raped, but we’ve been spit upon by those who we thought might empathize with us.

Read The Original Article >>