Thoughts?
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
When we were discussing in class how the best politicians use enticement instead of force to get their points across, it made a lot of sense to me. I also can see how that would work religiously to gain a following. With the world evolving, it seems to becoming harder and more time-consuming to devoutly follow all of the rules any religion may have. I feel that perhaps one of the things that may draw so many to Wicca is that any practitioner can choose when and how they worship, and the rest of the time, they are free to live their lives as they see fit. In a way, I feel like Wicca as a religion entices people to practice in this way instead of telling any potential followers a list of rules they need to follow. I'm not trying to say that having many strict rules in a religion is a bad thing (it was actually very disconcerting to me when I began practicing that Wicca didn't have strict standards on how to live), I'm mostly thinking that perhaps it's becoming harder to find a balance between strictly obeying those rules and living in a modern world.
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I agree. I think enticement works better than force because people do not like being told what to do especially in America were we have this notion of freedom and I can do what I want. So, we have to get people to do things differently. Wicca, as you said still requires worship but it's flexible, you worship whenever and however. I think this enables people to have their freedom yet keep religion apart of their lives. Some people in the modern world still obey strict rules so I wouldn't say its hard to find a balance between the modern world and obeying strict rules, I think its hard to make the choice of which life you want to live.
ReplyDeleteThe real problem comes about when any given set of rules that has existed for a long time comes up against social changes that have occurred since the given set of rules was written. Maybe it is more about updating the details of the rules for a given religion than having conflict over not following one rule that might have become socially out-dated.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Kaz; the risk of having a set of strict rules is forgetting that they must be reinterpreted now and again.
ReplyDeleteI think that, therefore, having no strict universal rules benefits Wicca, as you said because it allows adherents to practice in whatever way works for them, but also because it provides a framework on which a practitioner can build their own standards for living (based on my preipheral, somewhat limited knowledge of Wicca; please correct me if I'm off at all).