If You Worship The Goddess The Terrorists Have Won

I would say this is a “surprising” article but I have been seeing this sentiment around lately on the social/religious right. Jewish news magazine Forward has an editorial from David Klinghoffer author of several religious tomes and an Orthodox Jew.

The Piece starts out of the gate with a full-on smear against modern pagans.

“The [Olympic] games, which got started in 776 B.C., were banned by the Christian emperor Theodosius in 393 BCE on the grounds that they were an offense to the God of biblical monotheism. It’s precisely that fact that endears them to contemporary believers in the ancient gods.”

So we don’t like the sports or pageantry, we love the Olympics because Christians used to hate it! Klinghoffer then rails against modern [non-pagan] authors who coddle us pagans!

“Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code,” 72 weeks at the top of The New York Times best-seller list and counting, a book notable for its admiring treatment of pagan goddess worship. Goddess spirituality, in Brown’s celebratory view, is coming back. “The pendulum is swinging,” his fictional hero, Harvard “symbologist” Robert Langdon prophesied. “We are beginning to sense the need to restore the sacred feminine.”

His real ire is for fellow Jew Jonathan Kirsch author of “God Against The Gods” a look into the rise of monotheism and a book that posits that maybe polytheism wasn’t so bad after all.

“The Hebrew prophets railed against polytheism, but in a painful irony, it’s often their biological descendants of the Hebrew prophets who take the most aggressive stand in defense of heathen religion. Jonathan Kirsch, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, has now brought forth a solemnly praised book extolling the virtues of ancient paganism”

Guess he hasn’t heard about Starhawk yet. I hope he is sitting down when he does. But now we come to the climax for this article!

“Why should you care? American polytheism is, of course, simply the religious face of the cultural relativism that has undermined our former certainties in other areas. Since in classical paganism everyone can pick his own personal god, or his own personal pantheon, that means you also may pick your own personal moral system. It follows that no culture’s conception of right and wrong can be definitive. When Wiccans worship their gods, they are only giving an explicitly religious cast to an idea that is accepted by the vast majority of those Americans who consider themselves to be sophisticated and urbane. We are, in this sense, all pagans now.”

An interesting theory. One I don’t really agree with but that is his opinion. But wait here is the money quote.

“You should care because a country like ours that doesn’t regard its norms as absolutes ? as good and true, and therefore worth defending ? will lack the will to defeat those who would terrorize her. The United States is challenged by radical Muslim terrorists whose victory would be an unmitigated curse ? say, in the form of a portable nuclear bomb detonated in lower Manhattan. We hear this threat discussed as if the only defense against it were not moral but purely technical ? technology to detect radiological traces in cargo containers unloaded at our ports, and that sort of thing. The biblical prophets, by contrast, saw the best defense as moral, centered on rejecting the worship of false gods. If the curse comes to pass, I’m afraid we will recall Jerry Falwell’s much maligned admonition, after the September 11 terrorist attacks, to American polytheists and other moral relativists: “You helped this happen.”

You hear that folks! Worship the old gods and the terroists have already won! If they manage to detonate a nuke in a major city it’s because America didn’t cast out false idols!!! I expect you all to convert to the monotheist faith of your choice right away (unless it’s Islam} lest this tragedy befall us!

Tags: Neopaganism