Path: shell.portal.com!svc.portal.com!sdd.hp.com!swrinde!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.msfc.nasa.gov!bcm.tmc.edu!news.tamu.edu!news.io.com!io.com!not-for-mail From: ix@io.com (Lupo LeBoucher) Newsgroups: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.pagan,talk.religion.misc,alt.religion.christian,alt.satanism Subject: Re: CHLow: Dark/Light Neopaganism (Was Re: Dark roygbiv Light) Date: 22 Jan 1996 18:09:08 -0600 Organization: IX Corp. Lines: 38 Message-ID: <4e18v4$kuc@pentagon.io.com> References: <4c11rt$g9e@uucp.intac.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: pentagon.io.com Xref: shell.portal.com alt.magick.tyagi:6426 alt.pagan:142299 talk.religion.misc:201489 alt.religion.christian:87203 alt.satanism:33759 In article , Dave Ondrejko wrote: > Clifford Low wrote: >>That depends on your feelings about the Christian concept. Many folk have >>noted the fact that despite renunciation of Christianity, people >>unwittingly revert to Xian behavior/thought, especially if they rejected >>Xianity for ethical reasons (and these people got their ethics from Xian >>traditions in the first place). > >Not sure what you mean here. I'm not sure if I got my ethics from "Xian >traditions" unless you want to say that culture as a whole is a Xian tradition >-- which you could, defensibly, do. One point that might be made; An awful lot of what we view as "christian moralities" actually seems to originate from various Roman sources. These Roman traditions were certainly not the exclusive morality of the empire; perhaps certain sets of ethics were magnified in hindsight by the christian monks & philosophers who preserved the old Roman works -but they certainly existed. Various late-Pagan Roman philosophers, such as the Emporer Marcus Aurelius, write in a style not unlike that of the Christians & the Stoic/Neoplatonist fundamentals of their philosophies generally overlap. In fact, church fathers were fond of referring to some of these as "holy pagans" or some such rubbish. Personally I like the distinctions Tani/Phil makes in the philosophies; I find Marcus Aurelius as repulsive as a Constantine (one of the things I find useful in their ideas -rather than making a _symbolic_ distinction, they make a more fundamental philosophical distinction). Give me Heraclitus or Diogenes over humorless drones like Plato or Seneca anyday. Walter occasionally posts an amusing conspiracy theory asserting that Xianity was actually a plot to subvert Judaism from within in order to instill it with more "Roman virtues." -Lupo