[Arthur Gordon Pym]

Originally Posted by Gnist

I believe that brother Consolmagno makes a mistake in positing paganism as the scoundrel in a drama that has nothing to do with paganism, but is a score to settle between creationism and the Catholic church. I guess someone will want to bring up the fact that neo-paganism has won a lot of ground in the protestant sphere, but that is, in my opinion, telling of the state of protestantism rather than of the merits of neo-paganism. And it still doesn't link creationism and paganism together bilaterally by a long shot.

Consolmagno was being metaphorical in this issue. I guess he did not want to say that creationism is directly deduced from some form of paganism, he just wanted to stress some similarity in the core principles of these two worldviews.

But there is something else to it. I am usually surprised and even angered when some "good Christians" attack some imaginary new paganism as source of certain major ills of the present-day society. I am angered because, in may opinion, they are hitting the wrong target, they are attacking the strawman. There is no larger body of neo-pagans influential enough to impose their worldview on states and on the whole world.

The worldview of modernity has its origins in Christianity. All ideals of the modern world can be traced back to some secularized form of Christianity, which rejected God and anything supranatural, but retained and even reinforced to the outer limits some kind of (pseudo)-Christian (pseudo)-morals. And there is some logic in that. It is called corruptio optimi pessima, corruption of the best is the worst imaginable thing. So the modern day pandemic of abortion, to take an example, has no origin in some Wicca cult (such cults are very marginal and have no influence on the society), but precisely in the very Christian idea of free choice, ie. freedom, which is understood as freedom to "dispose of one's own body". It is a Christian idea (we could say satanically) distorted. I want to say that many of the forms of modern depravity are in fact distortions of the originally Christian ideas and concepts.

So instead of attacking some imaginary "neo-paganism", Christians would do better to see the reality for what it is, to separate the wheat from the chaff, to come to understanding that Christianity is not a system of ethics solely (although ethics is important part thereof). To see the ills of the modern world as a distortion of the original Christianity would surely help many Christians to understand what their faith really is and to purify it.

But, yes, it is easier to blame it all on some resurgent cult of Gaia or similar nonsense...