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Originally Posted by Bill O'Rights
It could be that it was also in the way that you phrased the question. Hmmmm? 
And I may be wrong (Hey, it happens), but isn't Wicca, albeit a fairly "new" religion, based upon tenents that are thousands upon thousands of years old? |
It could be but its not.
Anyways, no Wicca is not based on thousand year old tenants. No one knows any of the 'old religion'. All we really have is pieced together Roman or early Christian accounts. There are tales of mass human sacrifice, (aka the burning man where prisoners were stuffed into a life size wodden 'man' and set ablaze) which may or may not be true. One thing that is true is that human sacrifice was part of the religion as the victims have been found, but why/were they prisoners or volunteers etc is not known.
My guess is the true 'old religion' would horrify most modern day Wiccans.
This is a very interesting and long review of the subect of the 'age' of Wicca.
http://paganwiccan.about.com/gi/dyna...d_history.html
Here is a snippet, (and I think the author IS a Wiccan)
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However, the stories woven around Wicca can only hurt the religion from both inside and out. What followers may gain from false stories can certainly only be temporary. On the outside there is little gain at all. Not only has Wiccan history not been accepted, it has been disproved again and again. This accomplishes exactly what Wiccans attempt to avert: the image of an invented religion followed by people imaginative and uneducated. It makes Wiccans appear to be provocative and uncompromising, and as these are the same accusations Wiccans are making toward others, they look to be hypocritical as well
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It would certainly help if the world was more tolerant to new ideas: to at least let new religions be if not embrace them. However, people like the Scientologists and the Branch Davidians have made this all but impossible. New religions have a bad reputation in general because of what has come before them. But instead of attacking society for this inflexibility, Wiccans must simply accept it, not be antagonizing, and wait out the storm. One day Wicca will be accepted if it can manage to conform with society. As it is now, as it strains to be different, to outright attack Christianity, and to identify the feminist feelings of its members as being part of the religion, Wicca will not be taken seriously. As it stretches to find legitimacy it only manages to shoot itself in the foot because quite simply the historical basis does not exist, and the search for such makes Wiccans appear very simple, uneducated, and provocative.
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