Conservative religious groups try to legally deny Paganism is a religion

They won't win...

Why stop there, build a full teir system based on race, education, wealth, religion, or even sex. Oh wait, that sort of already quietly exist...

These people need a real hobby.

Freedom as worship is freedom of worship, and as a Christian who fundamentally DEMANDS freedom of worship, I don't see how they have any chance of winning: who is going to determine or define which 'tier' any religion is?

The STATE? (meaning the prison systems or the courts or the government that locks folks IN prison?)

The STATE is going to determine RELIGION?
Right there is where the Constitution rules out the State's legal right to 'establish' (in the sense of DEFINING a 'tier' or a validity of) any religion.

I don't fault their effort as having anything to do with Christianity.

They're simply Constitutionally off course and mistaken.

It sounds to me that these people don't understand or haven't even read the constitution. People like that scare the crap outta me. If they get their way then there is no telling who's rights they'll trample on next. That said, I don't think they will get their way.

Not defending them in any way, but I think a lot of fundamentalists have a hard time thinking of Paganism as "a religion" because, well, darn it--it's pretty vague when you think about it. Ask 12 pagans to define paganism, and you'll probably get twelve varying answers with a few common threads. Ask twelve Christians to define paganism, and who knows what you'll get. Not because there aren't any Christians who care understand, but honestly because they just don't understand.

Of course religious freedom should extend to every individual. But this is asking people whose families, often times, for generations upon generations have had a set of tenets for their faith that everyone just knows. This is asking people who have a map for how to live, whether or not they actually live by it, to accept that paganism, in all its many forms, is a religion in itself. To many, maybe it's an oxymoron to label many varying beliefs under one.

I might have my facts wrong, but haven't Wiccans won more than a few battles to have their faith recognized? I think that is because their beliefs are able to be categorized in a way that others can process and understand.

Again, I don't think it's right. But I do think it's hard for some people to process, and so it's easier to take the opposite route--denial and refusal.

Freedom of Religion, is, Freedom of Religion

In the prisom system sometimes things are a bit clouded. When my good friend was doing 8 years, he joined an american indian tradtion in order to smoke tabacco once a week or whatever the schedule was. No I'm not making that up.

I'm not defending them in anyway, but there probably trying to draw a line.

I'm not familiar with Jains but out of all the "second tier" pagan is the only one that isn't definible. It includes a huge amount of belief systems.

A pagan priest, never heard of one, but a wiccan priest in Maryland can legally marry you.

i probably didn't make much sense, but here is some food for thought that does http://freethought.mbdojo.com/foundingfathers.html

Don't these same people, for their own purposes, try to define atheism as a religion? How many ways do they want to have it?

Every way that will suit their own agendas at any given time.

*sigh*
where do these fools come from.?
and why, when I'm too tired to fight them?

I'll send him a note of support, hopefully some of them will decide to stop
shaming my Saviour by these machinations.

Mark
Coracle Ministries

Some religious associate religion with institution: bricks and mortar, clergy, rites, symbols and dogma. But a lot of world religions lack many or most of those things: forms of Buddhism, Taoism, and animism being examples. The word originally meant literally 'read again', and was also connected to the Latin words for 'bind fast', and 'careful'. But the meaning 'system of faith' has been around since the 14th century, and 'worship of higher powers' from the 16th century.

In short, the people who object to paganism being considered a religion are ignorant and narrow-minded.

I appreciate that this controversy about 'first tier faiths' etc is his view on the court case - but is the quote in the original post actually accurate?

Is it possible that he doesn't understand the actual issues himself ?

If you read the court judgement, the issue before the court had absolutely nothing to do with whether Paganism is a valid religion. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

Yet he claims that the Dept of Corrections actually went to court and argued that 'Pagans are not deserving of equal civil rights' - when it is totally irrelevant to the case.

Does that sound plausible ?

It seems that what happened is that someone totally unrelated to the case
sent in an argument to the court: Document here

Yes - this was the view of someone. But it certainly is a bit a porky-pie to claim that this means that :

.. the CDCR, other related defendants, and the Assistant Attorneys General who represents them have argued before the court that Pagans are not deserving of equal civil rights

Click to expand...

Here are the basic facts:

1. He was already chaplain for Wiccan inmates.
2. The issue was that he wanted the state to pay him for it.


To quote the outcome of the case:

Wiccan inmates themselves have standing to assert that the CDCR’s failure to hire a Wiccan inmate violates their free exercise of religion rights as well as the Establishment Clause. ...

The Court’s holding here is merely that McCollum, who is not a CDCR inmate, does not have standing to insist that the CDCR apply neutral criteria to determine if it should fund a salaried Wiccan chaplain position to served CDCR

Click to expand...

The system (when the case was started) allowed for five different classifications of paid chaplain. Rev McCollum argued that the classification scheme wasn't neutral.

For the sake of the court case, they used the term 'Wiccan' as a generic phrase for faith groups consisting of “Wiccans, Goddess worshipers, Neo-Pagans, Pagans, Norse Pagans (and any other ethnic designation), Earth Religionists, Old Religionists, Druids, Shamans, Asatrus, and those practicing in the Faery, Celtics, Khemetic, Gardnerian, Church of All Worlds, Reclaiming, Dianic, Alexandrian, Iseum of Isis, Reconstructionist, Odinist or Yoruban Traditions, and other similar nature-based faiths.”

I have a bit of sympathy for the poor bureaucrat who has to figure out who to pay with those classifications !

Mac
(BTW: If anyone interested in the issues, I heartily suggest this: http://www.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/usccr/documents/cr12r274.pdf )