Well, this story is a bit old, as it’s not past Halloween and somehow I missed it on the first go-round but it still makes me roll my eyes. It involves a Halloween decoration which was hung… or rather hanged in the yard of a home in Chicopee MA. The decoration shows a witch hanging from a noose on a tree. It’s goolish and might seem to make light of the history of Massachusetts, but it is Halloween and morbid and somewhat grotesque decorations are part and parcel of the event.

 

Given that out society seems to be full of people looking for something to be offended about these days, what happened next isn’t that surprising. A local “witch” as in a member of the Wicca religion got all pissy about it being a display of hatred and violence against her religion and at that a hate crime.

I’m going to try not to go into a rant about my feelings of “hate crime” laws here, but I’m generally of the mindset that if you threaten or harm someone you should be punished severely and equally severely if you do so because you want their money or because you don’t like their race. But for this kind of “hate crime” there’s not much that can be done anyway, because no matter how many communities pass laws against hate speech or display of hateful images, there’s a little thing called the First Amendment which pretty much invalidates those. And really… if you don’t want to have people hanging swastikas in your town the best way to address the problem is not to outlaw it but to give the guy hanging it the finger and tell him he’s not welcome at your BBQ and he can’t come over to borrow ice cubes. That sort of community-based shunning of hateful messages generally gets the job done fine.

Kelly Lynch is all offended. Yes that is her real last name.

But back to this “witch.” First I’d like to point out the obvious: Members of the Wicca religion are NOT witches – at least not in the sense of the witch being hanged there. They may like to go by the title of “witch” but they don’t actually wear pointy hats, have green skin or long pointy noses and they sure as hell don’t have brooms which can be used for airborne transportation. They also aren’t “witches” in the sense of what the Salem trials accused people of being. They’re not agents of Satin who are enabled by demonic spirits which have entered their body. They don’t have magical powers either, but they may say they do.

Hence, a “wicca” witch is no more Salem witch or fictional Halloween broom-riding witch than they are vampires or Frankenstein-like creations.

In reality Wicca is just an invented, contrived psuedo-pagan religion for people who feel like they need to be different and want attention. It’s something of an amalgam of hippies, dungeons and dragons, high school goths and general new age attention-neediness. Okay, the whole “Invented” thing could be said of other religions, but it’s not quite as blantent as Wicca, which was actually created in the 1950′s. And according to the offended lady:We’re not casting spells against people, we’re just worshipping the moon, the goddess, the Earth. Just like the Christians, Muslims, people have their own religion.”

Well sorry if I’m insulting your religion, but that’s even dumber than the most of the others (well, perhaps not Scientology) – and that’s saying a lot. The ignorance of that statement almost floors me. The universe is pretty damn large, do you honestly think the stuff like the trees and plants on earth have a really significant role? And the moon, FYI is a rather small ball of rock; we even sent some guys up there to scope it out. Turns out it is indeed a ball of rock.

Okay, I suppose that the later part of this post might seem a bit offensive to the “Wiccas” out there, but if it is, seriously, get over yourselves! First of all I’ve known enough of them myself to realize they are indeed all newagy, wacky, self-obsessed attention seekers. And secondly, while I don’t grant a pass for any religion being stupid, at least with most others they have a large enough following to give some sort of illusion of credibility, and they’re old enough that you can’t actually historically “prove” how they were founded. Here though, it’s even dumber. And ontop of that, since almost noone is raised in “Wicca” it implies that the follower actually decided that this was an accurate image of the world, as opposed to having it hammered into their head all their life.

Oh yea… I also dated one… a while ago. That… might make me a little biased.

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 4:35 pm and is filed under Culture, Politics, religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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