On Fri, 16 Mar 2001, Andrew Alston wrote:
The use of hymns to impose psychological tramour on someone else cannot indict the hymns themselves, that is total and utter bullshit, is that not the same as saying that when someone uses a steak knife to stab someone, the person who did the stabbing is responsible as well as the knife? Total utter crap.
Perhaps. On the other hand, it is clear that people attach connotations to expression based on their experience of where that expression is used. Think of Carmina Burana after it was used in the Omen, or the associations carried by heavy metal. E.g. both sorts of music can be used in a movie as a leitmotif to satanistic themes. Similarly a Goth attire and a suitable amount of group aggression will likely be as efficient on a child with a Christian fundamental worldview as a direct threat. And as time goes by, such connotations may well subsume the original meaning. A good example of this is what being a skinhead is today and was in the sixties. If the community at large embraces religious intolerance, Christian chant may well be the ultimate threat to a young Wicca. If it has a significant part in an incident leading to teenage suicide, this lends credibility to the claim that what in other communities might be a legitimate form of religious self-expression, is in this one used to taunt the misfit. This gives Christianity the bad face the writer talks about, and gives the majority an incentive to silence the story.
They claim persecution due to belief, but at the same time Ive been around wiccans, and I would be very very interested to know just how much pushing of her beliefs she did on other people, because Ive heard the ridicule of Christians that come out of wiccan mouths.
While the few Wiccas I know are introverted enough not to even try. 'Guess they come in all shapes and sizes, like people tend to.
but Im interested to hear what she did to incite this, because I seriously doubt kids singing hymns at her without either provocation from her or alternatively pushing from their teachers/parents.
Huh? Apparently you've never had the treatment; children can be intolerant as hell. Primary school gave me the most frightening examples of herd behavior I've *ever* seen. Sampo Syreeni <decoy@iki.fi>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university