1.
Poor Christian, discovers Satanism at a Christian venue.
2. I will never see “Antichrist,” but damn, I feel like this picture is true in some way. (Um, maybe NSFW)
3. So, the dude throws treasure into the river as a votive to the town… Ha, ha, ha. Even Christians love pagan rituals, huh?
Tiny Cat Pants 
“Bankhead said it also is possible that Ramsey threw the items into the waters because of his Christian belief that a person enters the world with nothing and leaves it with nothing.”
Oh, my doubt meter just went off pretty loud…
I know! Yes, Christians believe that and yes, that might compel someone to do something with his belongings. But for a Christian to throw them in the river instead of giving them to the poor or the Church of disposing of them in some way that use might be gotten out of them? I’m not buying it.
I could see a Christian with senile dementia doing something like that.
Loonytick, I already had to suffer through the disappointment of discovering that I don’t have a relative briefly named wamelep. Don’t ruin my joy at a pagan Archbishop.
Ha.
Christian could read my post from EIGHTEEN MONTHS AGO about Rocketown’s more dubious bookings.
Paganism is one thing, Satanism is another altogether. And the pro-hate, pro-murder death metal bands that preach cruelty, human sacrifice and hate have far more Satanist overtones.
I kind of fall into the old school of thought that many rituals can be repurposed into Christianity with little or no harm to the faith. (Christmas trees, wreaths on doors, candlelight ceremony, hanging of the green, harvest festivals, certain Halloween rituals, etc).
But things that are purely of Satan’s dark nature–murder, hate–have no place in a Christian.
Oh, oh! Don’t forget the giant pentagram the State Department of Agricultre gave Clarksville $4,000 to build! Mercy me…
http://www.nashvilleistalking.com/2009/10/state-grants-4000-to-clarksville-for-giant-pentagram/
oh, is that what their lyrics are about? me, i could never make out a single word from all the growling and distortion.
i meant to say, given what i remember of Sepultura (i grew out of my metalhead period a long time ago), they could’ve been
singingmoaning and groaning about puppies, kittens and fuzzy baby rabbits. or even just making fart noises with their lips, would’ve sounded about the same through the mixer set-up they were using. i never could tell.these days i tend to listen to — well, maybe not more sedate music, Warren Zevon isn’t that, but more intelligible music at least. B. might perhaps be interested in Heather Alexander and/or Alexander James Adams; there’s a pagan connection there, although they don’t press such themes very heavily. i like ’em for the fiddling.
Well, I kinda think “kill the faggots” and “kill the pope” and whatnot….yeah.
Oh, oh! Don’t forget the giant pentagram the State Department of Agricultre gave Clarksville $4,000 to build! Mercy me…
Oh Noes! It’s just like the 50 pentagrams on the US flag.
Or that Pentacle building where the government does all its work.
Next please tell us about the barcodes that all have 666 hidden in them.
We live in a pagan world with innumerable pagan influences. But just as a person can wear a cross and not invest it with meaning, so can a person have other symbols.
Symbols have NO POWER of their own. They are like flour in a recipe. By itself a symbol just is. It is only when blended with other ingredients–a believer and the tools of that believer’s engine of faith–that the symbol becomes something more.
My personal faith symbol–the triquetra–has piles of meaning across at least 5 faith traditions. What it means to me as a Christian Mystic is a bit different than what it means to a Wiccan or a NeoDruid. There is some overlap, but no identical parsing.
It’s not the pictures you need to fear, it’s the ideas. And as religiously tolerant as I am, I do not tolerate hate or human sacrifice. That’s my line in the sand.
Damn. forgot to close my tag.
Kat, those are just five pointed stars on the flag and government buildings. This thing in Clarksville is a complete pentagram – five pointed star in a circle – probably built by druids. I read up on the Wikipedia.
I know. But unless I know for sure that it is being built FOR neodruidic observances, I don’t care.
If it is built for the Druids I’d have to see how much the same government allocated to other faiths practiced in the area. I’d rather no faith get govt $, but I don’t think it’s right to cry foul on someone else if we aren’t up in arms about everyone. And even though it is a full pentagram and does have 40 trees–a number of significance–I’ll reserve judgment.
per your own link, it’s built by the City of Clarksville, TN.
but so what if it were built by druids? it’s a grove of trees. big frickin’ deal; come visit my town, i’ll show you enough trees to run a lumberyard or three…
(times like this i’m so damn glad to be an atheist. if nothing else, it lets me see the forest for the urban greenspaces.)
Christian, I can never tell when you’re actually outraged and when you’re just trying to anticipate what other people will be outraged about in order to get ahead of the curve.
Rocketown has some issues, to be sure, but I’m baffled by this idea that, because a place claims to be a Christian venue, parents can just turn off their brains and send their kids there willy-nilly. I think it’s hilarious that Rocketown has death metal bands playing there, don’t get me wrong.
But they list what bands are playing when on their website. A parent can’t go there, see the name of the band, and google it?
I don’t know. I’m just not seeing how Rocketown is somehow steering people wrong. They’re completely up front about what they’re up to.
Playing with fire, sure, maybe. Booking bands I wish didn’t even exist? Definitely.
But their desire is to get kids where they are, not to become yet another place kids in trouble avoid like the plague.
If you don’t have death metal shows, how do you get kids who only listen to death metal through your doors?
Yeah, but Nomen, think how much fun it will be when WKRN comes to investigate the herb garden planted in my front yard by a heathen. OooooOOOOoooooOOOOOooo.
Scary.
Christian, I can never tell when you’re actually outraged and when you’re just trying to anticipate what other people will be outraged about in order to get ahead of the curve.
I can tell.
I’m mildly socially retarded, so I don’t wink or half smile my way through jokes, so I can see why I’m hard to read, but I’m serious about Rocketown. There are plenty of “death metal” bands that sing about darkness in a completely archetypal way that Rocketown could invite. I’m with Kat on this.
That ginormous pentagram in Clarksville on the other hand… at some point you have to ask yourself at what point does the intended purposes supersedes the practical ways people will use a space. I mean, if AuntB crocheted a ginormous vagina and called it an umbrella and gave it to school children, at one point do you think parents will finally say, “OK, that’s a vagina.” If you wanted to go howl at something on Samhain, or chop a bunny’s head off on Halloween, are you going to the Federal Post office and stand under the pediment, or are you going to that park in Clarksville?
No one chops bunnies’ heads off on Halloween. Please. The Devil and talented witches can turn into hares and not one wants to risk nicking the boss.
Ha.
Anyway, I’m kind of stunned that you are up in arms about this and I will have to file it away in my “things I don’t know what to make of about Christian Grantham” file.
wait, i thought samhain was halloween. was i mistaken?
that said, if you’re sick enough to actually want to chop bunnies’ heads off — for any other reason than to harvest their skin and meat, in which case you do it in a slaughterhouse of some sort — you’re may well be too far gone to much care where you do it.
in any event, trying to never build anything that might be attractive to bunny-head-chopping sickos is a bit like trying to build a suicide-jumper-proof bridge; an epic fail to understand the mentality and motivations of your feared Other. which will inevitably mean that the Other wins, even if only by default. just sayin’.
OK, then. Just replace the bunny with a Chupacabra. Not so sick, but still. I may have used to distractingly cute a symbol like the Democrats did with those cute petri-dish babies on that 62nd District mailer.
What I mean is if you are serious about your rituals, a star on a federal postal building probably won’t be as much an altar as, say, a 300 foot pentagram made out of trees.
i still don’t see your point. if somebody wants to hold their religious rituals on public land — and they can do so without disturbing the peace, obstructing access by others, or breaking any laws — why should i give a damn how much they like what’s been done to the landscaping on the public dime?
should that spot have been paved over and strewn with broken cinderblocks just so that any druids who might’ve been tempted to hold a ritual on it would’ve been made properly miserable by the ugliness of the surroundings?
granted, holding a great big umpteen-dozen-people sabbath there might count as blocking public access to what is effectively a public park. i’ll take it as agreed that any group that wanted to do such a thing would have to make a reservation and pay any applicable fees before they could do that, same as with any other park, or any other religion.
(Digs back into the memory hole for a previous version of this conversation….and there it is…..)\
What about that other public money spent on expensive pagan symbols that nearly any pagan could feel at home in rituals at? You know. The Parthenon.
I’m with others. I can’t ever tell whether you’re stirring the pot or summoning discussion on an issue that concerns you. I’ve given up trying to differentiate and am therefore treating all your entreaties the same way…with a sort of detached but incredulous bemusement.
I can understand you being upset about public money spent on a worship area. But I’m still not convinced this was primarily intended as a pagan worship area.
Nomen, technically what we know as Halloween shares some roots with the celebration of Samhain, but they are not interchangable. Despite what many fundamentalists will tell you.
I really just love it when he says “Oh Lordy Mercy!”
Christian: really? Clarksville TN as a hotbed of pagan activity?
….
I know that you guys like to use witches as a scare tactic to whip up your flock, but could you at least make it believable?
Sidetrack aside, I’m not a fan of the black dahlia murder, and I don’t really care what you call a church/ministry/whatever… that’s an inter-denominational argument I have no stake in, but really … “hoochies” ? Blah.
Nomen, I don’t know. If skyclad witches and warlocks want to use the ginormous Clarksville Pentagram, then I guess I’m ok spending $4,000 in tax money doing it. But if the state decides it wants to construct a gigantic lower case letter “t” on a hill somewhere claiming it stands for “Tennessee” instead of what you know very well everyone will take it for… then will you see the problem I’m having here?
keep in mind i’m not a Tennesseean; i really have no clue what a giant lowercase letter “t” might symbolize to y’all. i’ll just state for the record that if those forty trees had been planted in the shape of a cross, i’d not be giving a damn about that, either. as long as nobody tried to claim they had been planted primarily for the purpose of christian worship, at very least.
Nomen, I think you’d love one of AuntB’s specially crocheted umbrellas.
Hold up. Are we really supposed to be outraged that a park near a military base would have a stand of trees shaped like a star within a circle?
Whew, this is a strange conversation.
Christian, I think this whole problem with the Clarksville star has, in part, to do with the fact that you don’t seem to know anything about paganism. Druids are not the same as witches who aren’t always the same thing as Wiccans and warlocks, in general, are not a real thing. No pagans use symbols, not even the pentagram, in the same way that Christians use the cross, unless they’re new to it and haven’t yet kind of made the paradigm shift in their heads.
A grove of trees shaped like a pentagram would probably not actually be conducive to worship in because it puts a lot of trees right where you’d be trying to move around.
And no one in Tennessee is worshiping naked in a public park, where they’d be open to prosecution and persecution.
Plus, unless you were above the trees, how would you even know it was in the shape of a pentacle anyway?
i really think the only reason i might be disappointed with a crocheted cooter umbrella would be that a crocheted anything would be unlikely to keep the rain off of me. other than that it’d be hilarious, for seeing who’d get all shocked and outraged at it alone.
ok, i just now watched that video. let me just say, putting a stripper pole in the pulpit? might just get me into church. and hey, it’s got long, traditional, historical precedents to fall back on; we can call it some REAL old-time religion.
Hey have you guys seen the freaky shit all over a dollar bill? The Pagans founded America!
Christian,
B has you beat. The clear purpose of the star is to look like the World War II era US Army insignia. Not very pagan.
You know this is all going to end with Christian trapped in a giant burning wicker man outside the gates of Ft. Campbell, right?
Thanks for creating this video. You nailed the issue that I raised.
Im the guy in the black shirt that was interviewed by News channel 2.
It was my son who wanted to attend this concert, and my wife and myself did some digging online and discovered what these bands were all about.
Again, thanks for your balanced assessment of this situation.
Casey, just think how your research would change if you were to discover a gigantic pagan conspiracy within the military to… um… plant trees.
Okay, maybe it wouldn’t change that much.
Sarcastro, true enough.
AuntB, you’d be surprised what I know about Paganism, but you’d have to divine what I know from what I do and not what I say. What I say to draw attention to things can sometimes be distracting, but what I do is draw attention. And attention … is magic.