By Lady Saoirse
Bright Blessings.
Most of you have not seen my writings besides here at The Green Egg. My current paid job is for Spiritual Blossom, an online psychic company, and I do submissions each week to them. I worked for their sister company, Mysticsense for years as well.
One of the things I write about for our clients, of course, is love! There is never an end to what can be said about love and relationships and recently, something dawned on me when I was yet again doing another love article. The Bible says a lot about the selflessness of love and how everybody should be loving. Yet, growing up Christian, I did not experience that. What drew me to Pagans and Witches was their deep concern for the wellbeing of all of creation. Do Pagans embody love better than Christians do?
The first Pagans I met did. Growing up, I was taught that love was conditional. If you did everything you were expected to, you were shown love. If you didn’t, you were treated mercilessly. This was done by the Christian family member who raised me. There was at least one other family member of mine who was the same way. They said there was only one way to believe, their way of course. Their god was the only god and everybody who disagreed was going to hell. It was as if their God existed only to send their enemies to hell
When I started to break away from that, a church member of one of those congregations visited me. They condemned me to my face saying that I was not honoring a parent and that I would go to hell for that. Sometime after that, I broke away from that denomination and attended in another church for a year. I started going to Bible studies at the associate pastor’s house and got my head ripped off because I asked if they thought that God was too big to fit into one religion. I have countless stories about how I was treated with cruelty by Christians because of their religion.
I noticed that “religious Christians” spent a lot of time bragging about what good Christians they were and what better people they were than other people who didn’t do certain things. They criticized people for their clothing. They criticized people for what they ate. They looked down on other people’s sex lives and yet they had extramarital affairs themselves. They did give money to charity but that was to their own churches, and that money stayed within their own personal congregation. So they were basically giving money to themselves and their own friends. They beat their children, cheated on their spouses or were in and out of marriages constantly, condoned spousal abuse, and drank too much or took too many drugs.
Pagans who I met behaved differently. They respected everyone’s beliefs. They had their own gods and goddesses and they didn’t condemn anybody else for worshiping differently from them. They gave money, resources, and their time to those who were less fortunate than them. A lot of Pagans who I met called themselves solitary practitioners and they tended their own personal relationship with what they felt the divine being was instead of watching how everybody else did. They were uplifting, supportive, and smart. They didn’t take people’s word for things. They did their own research and found things out for themselves. This is what drew me to Pagans and Paganism.
That was more than 20 years ago. Since then, I have met some Pagans who were just as bad as the worst Christians who I met growing up. I’ve met Pagans who shame sick people, saying that they have willed themselves to be sick and all they had to do was cure themselves with positive thinking. I have met Pagans who said they were polyamorous but were actually predatory swingers who sexually harassed people at gatherings constantly. I have met Pagans who abandoned their children, abused their spouses, and used too much alcohol or drugs. In the meantime, I have met some Christians who are decent human beings.
I have not seen humanity suffering on a large scale due to large groups of Pagans persecuting them. That’s what Christians do. I came to the conclusion that our religion does not make us a good person or a bad person. We find a religion that supports what we already believe. The vicious Christians who I met growing up were just people who chose to behave viciously. Their religion and their god did not make them do it but they hid behind their god and their religion instead of accepting responsibility for the way that they were. I have met far more good-hearted Pagans than Christians over the years, though.
I don’t know if Christianity itself is the problem. I think the problem is that they are the majority. Anytime a group of people wields power, corruption seeps in, ruining them. So, do Pagans embody love better than Christians do? I can’t answer that. I just know that the Pagans I met during my spiritual transformation were some of the most loving people. I think as Paganism grows and becomes more mainstream, our numbers increase and it’s important to learn from the majority faith’s vice of arrogance and resist becoming that way.
Blessed Be.
Lady Saoirse has studied magic and lore for most of her life but started walking her own magical path after being spiritually reborn in the desert. Today she is a High Priestess for The Temple of the Goddess, she is a psychic advisor and spiritual counselor, she is a member of the spiritual family at the Magical Druid in Ohio, and she shares her gifts as a Psychic and Content Writer for Spiritual Blossom. She has written for Mysticsense and PaganPages.Org emag.