response 1 of 45:

Jan 2 05:25 UTC 1999

THanks for opening this discussion!
Certainly, I've had the experience of wishing I could understand or do what
seemed easy to someone else- usually body stuff, sometimes mental or
occasionally spiritual issues.  Bet we *all* wish we could come at something
gracefully, effortlessly.
Honestly, I don't really believe in "conversion".  For most people who have
a religious epiphany which results in real and permanent change, it's a
"coming home", a sense of having found what they always believed/knew, of
"coming home".  Now, this may be more common among paganfolk, with whom I've
heard it almost universally, but I suspect not.  Somehow I think that, even
among "born again" Christians, those who settle into a deep, fulfilling and
inspiring faith (as opposed to the militant and fearful ones, who seem to have
to fight constantly to preserve their position safely "within the fold"), it's
a deep knowing as if they were just awakening to what they always knew to be
true.  So I guess all I can say to you is to keep looking, keep your eyes and
heart open and be patient; eventually (one hopes) someone will say something-
or you'll read it- and you'll just feel "oh, of course, *that's* right".  It
might be a philosophy, it might be a form of Buddhism, which is not actually
deistic at all, it could be something really surprising like a reframing of
one of the paths you already considered; mystical or reconstructionist
Judaism, a branch of Christianity, a different pagan path.  Or just your own
quiet sense of connectedness with divinity, even if it doesn't give you the
comfort of a like-minded community.  Have you talked to the Quakers?  They're
pretty diverse and really cool.
Good luck to you.

response 3 of 45:

Jan 2 14:46 UTC 1999

Cool item.  If you want to start the way the real pagans start,
go outside and spend lots of time with Nature.  Learn the names
of things, because "with knowledge of the name comes better
knowledge and appreciation of the thing itself."  (Thoreau.)
If you're standing in the middle of the woods some day and 
suddenly this very weird feeling comes over you, don't shrug 
it off.

response 5 of 45:

Jan 2 20:29 UTC 1999

#3> "real pagans"? *cough*

#0> Actually, you DO become a pagan by wishing you were one, ingeneral,
because paganism isn't a cohesive religion or spirituality, it's a term of
negation: you're pagan is you have spiritual or religious beliefs that aren't
Christian, Jewish, or Muslim (or atheist).

Now, Michael is presumably talking about Neopagans, which I'm assuming you're
talking about as well, although THAT's not really a cohesive group either.
"Neopagan" tends to be strongly associated with spiritual or religious paths
developed (predominantly) in the last two centuries, which are pagan and
focussed on nature and/or the earth (Gaia), and which emphasize tolerance,
non-violence, and ecumenicalism (sharing between religious and spiritual
paths).

There is really no definitive response to "what pagans believe" or "what
neopagans believe"; there are responses to "what Wiccans believe" or "what
Druids believe," but even those are debatable.

response 7 of 45:

Jan 3 01:05 UTC 1999

Thanks, Happyboy.

Jazz, almost the *definition* of "faith"- of religious belief/knowing is that
a certain sense of the divine/sacred feels right, at a really deep level, in
*spite* of its cultural roots, inspite of any debunking, inspite -even- of
logical inconsistency.  More, someone who has spent a great deal of time
meditating, from a place of faith, on those inconsistencies and anachronistic
bits, ends up with a fundamentally mystical, mystery-based sense of things,
where ends of a paradox can be in the same frame, if not tied up together.

response 9 of 45:

Jan 4 06:40 UTC 1999

Happyboy, I gather that the word "paganus" was originally derived from the
same word as "patria, patritius", etc.--it's not so much people of *the* land,
as people who worship the gods of *this* land.  As Rome absorbed more and more
foreign cults, they became a minority and sort of out of fashion.  When the
cult of Jesus began to overtake the state cult (Constantine's doing), then
being "pagan" became *really* unfashionable, such that those old conservatives
who kept the old gods either moved out, or already were out in the boonies,
and thus became associated with country living- so pagans became the people
of the land/country, where they worshipped the gods of *that* land/country.
To some extent, that's kind of ironic, since we, as neo-pagans, are mostly
worshipping the gods of *that* country- not this one- except for the Native
Americans and NA wannabes...
But certainly in modern usage, it's not a paradox to live in urban Ypsi and
follow the gods of the land- esp. the spirits of this land- and to call
yourself therefore a pagan.

response 11 of 45:

Jan 4 17:10 UTC 1999

        Kami, understand that I'm not passing judgement on anyone else's system
of beliefs, merely explaining how I got where I am from a set of events very
unlikely to lead anyone into spirituality.

        I do believe in inconsistencies;  one of the most obvious is the dual
nature of light as a particle and as a wave (and as neither until it is
measured by an intelligent observer, exhibiting properties proving it could
not have had existence as one or the other before observation).  I do accept
this as a mystery of sorts - I believe it is an inaccurate model, for
something we currently have no accurate model for, and is indicative of a lack
of understanding.  But this does not change the way light appears in our
current model.

        I tend to strive for what I find myself respecting in others, and,
religiously, I find something above faith admirable.  It's difficult to
describe.  It's a willingness to see inconsistencies, and accept them, without
ignoring or quickly glossing them over, as many with faith are wont to do,
or refusing to think about them.  Wonderful debates can arise from those who
are willing to accept the existence of inconsistencies in their own beliefs,
and that they might have a portion of the picture wrong - or that the other
party might. :)

response 13 of 45:

Jan 4 17:27 UTC 1999

pagan and patri- are etymologically unrelated. Not even close.
pagan comes from pa'gus, village
patri- comes from pater, *patr, father
The ONLY similarity in the roots of the two words is the p... even the vowel
is different (long in pagus, short in pater). There are NO g>t or t>g
consonant shifts that I'm aware of, and *patr is so universally Indo-European
for "father" it's not even debatable (in English, p>f and t>th shifts are well
known and justifiable; German is Vater (fater); French pere shows the
t-deletion; and so on).

A pagan is, etymologically, a villager. Fatherhood and deity are entirely
irrelevant to the original concept.

response 15 of 45:

Jan 4 23:50 UTC 1999

Sources are doable.
Webster's New Universal Unabridged (Dorset and Baber 1983, 2ed.) 
Pagan Latin paganus, a peasant or countryman, from pagus, country

Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press
1971, 1ed.) (This is the beast.)
Pagan. Latin pa'ganus, originally 'villager, rustic'; in Christian Latin
(tertulian, Augustine), 'heathen' as opposed to Christian or Jewish;
indicating the fact that the ancient idolatry lingered on in the rural
villages and hamlets after Christianity had been generally accepted in the
towns and cities of the Roman Empire; see Trench "Study of Words" 1-2 and cf.
Orosuis "Ex locorum agrestiem compitis et pagis pagani vocantur."

Origins, by Eric Partridge (Greenwich House, 1966, 4ed)
Pagan derives from Late Latin pa'ga'nus, a heathen, from Latin pa'ga'nus, a
civilian, earlier a peasant, originally a villager, from Latin pa'gus, a
village, a rural district, originally a boundary post stuck into the ground:
probably from pangere, to stick (something) into (especially the ground), to
fix firmly, and therefore akin to pa'x (something firmly established)

Three of the most reliable sources on English etymology, if not *the* most
reliable sources, and NONE of them even HINT that "pagan" is related to
patri-.

Partridge lists the following words as being etymologically related (under
the heading "father"): father, fatherhood, fatherless, fatherly, fatherliness,
godfather, grandfather, Vaterland, padre, pere, compere, pater, paternal,
paternity, patrician, patristic, patron, patronage, patronal, patronize (which
is, incidentally, what I'm doing right now), pattern, Jupiter (from Jove
Pater), perpetrate, perpetration, perpetrator, impetrate, impetration,
impetrative, impetrator, repatriate, repatriation, repair, expatriate,
expatriation, paterfamilias, paternoster, patter, patriarch, patriarchal,
patriarchic, patriarchy, patricide, parricide, patrimony, patrimonial,
patriot, compatriot, patriotic, patriotism, papa, pa, poppa, pop, papacy,
papal, papish, papism, papist, papistic, papistry, pope, popedom, popehood,
popery, antipope.

So it isn't like Partridge wasn't being exhaustive or anything. For that
matter, reading the four-column two-page entry on "father", I see that
Patridge goes so far as to link "father" with "abbot" (by a string of
etymological links only a linguist could understand or love: "father" >
"pater" > "papa" > "tata" > "atta" > "abba" > "abbey" > "abbot")... but nary
a pagan in sight.

On the issue of Constantine, by the way, most historians seem to be of the
opinion that Constantine was himself a pagan, and used the Cult of Jesus as
a political leverage to get himself into office, reunite the fragmented Roman
Empire, and maintain power. His major role in the history of Christianity,
besides legalizing the Cult of Jesus, was to syncretize the Pagan Yule customs
into Christmas (whish was placed on Dec. 25 not because anybody at the time
thought that it was actually Jesus' birthday, but because Jesus, being a Saint
among Saints, needed a Saint Day, and Dec. 25 suited because of its proximity
to Yule; Coinstantine's God was a Sun God, and so it made sense to the church
founders -- who had been given permission by Constantine to set up all sorts
of official days and documents -- to place Christ's Mass on the major Pagan
Sun God Holiday). Main sources: History Channel's "Christianity: The First
1,000 Years" and "History of Christmas"; my father; nearly every other history
I've read on the subject, which has been a handful but not a bushelful.

response 17 of 45:

Jan 5 02:19 UTC 1999

I *think* I'm remembering a bit of discussion in a book called _The Last
Pagans_ or something like- about the period of transition between Christianity
and the State pagan religion toward the end of Rome.  Don't own the book,
sadly, or I could be more sure of my reference.

response 19 of 45:

Jan 5 15:43 UTC 1999

sounds good...i would say that to the donut seller lady
next time i see her, but she would prolly punch me in the head.

response 21 of 45:

Jan 6 15:57 UTC 1999

my god!

response 23 of 45:

Jan 7 22:11 UTC 1999

Pascal sez (in the Pensees) that if you have trouble converting to the One
True Faith, all you have to do is *pretend*. That is, you go to Mass, you get
Baptized, you take communion, you go to confession, and after a while, you
discover that you really *believe*. Vous vous s'abetrez, or something like
that, you make yourself stupid, you brainwash yourself. I don't think he's
right. I went to a Presbyterian Sunday School for years and discovered that
I didn't believe a word of it. I took kids in a summer camp to church every
Sunday -- I was the only "Protestant" on the staff -- and I rapidly got sick
of it. I was a minister for a while and found it totally empty. Excommunicated
for not contributing enough to the local church. But a Pagan ritual was
wonderful. It was what I'd always wanted, and what I really felt. It's the
most beautiful thing that ever happened to me. You just have to wait, and
it'll come to you when you're not expecting it. And you'll love it.