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i have quite a number of pagan friends--most of whom are also involved in one or another type of magical practice (these can be different from each other)--the core of the practices is meditation/visualization, which can then be directed in various ways as a function of the framework within which that practice is situated and the intent of the practioner.
i say this because i think itis from this viewpiont that the most basic distinction between the types of practices grouped together under the label paganism and more abramic (i guess that's a word, though i am spelling it wrong, i am sure) religions---there is no requirement that one impute a particular status to the images/entities that one uses primarily to focus one's attention via a meditation practice. so the question of "truth"--or more exactly, the logical register of truth claims---is unnecessary. i would imagine that the mode of evaluating the elements that one uses in the context of this type of practice would vary person to person.
for most of the folk i know, these practices are a type of devotion that may be a mode of expressing/articulating/developing a sensibility that is inclined toward what might be broadly termed religious----but is not itself a religion in the same way.
it follows, then, that the same kind of relation would be duplicated when statements about the practices as a whole are presented--that one would not use truth claims. they are unnecessary.
in policophile's post above, it seems that there is a blurring of types of "truth claims" and a confusion about what constitutes a "truth claim"---it looks like the core of teh reaction is directed at "relativism"--which is the inverse of "truth" in many varieties of discourse informed by "the history of western metaphyics" (to use anoutmoded buzzphrase)....from this, politcophile's post moves into the evaluation of linkages/ consequences of particular patterns of belief...and from that back into the register of truth claims, coming down in the end to what i take to be the following: if you are notinvolved with the register of truth claims,if you reject it, then you cannot evaluate linkages between types of belief and undesirable social or political correlates.
to argue forcefully that a particular outcome is wrong or undesirable does not even allow logically for a shift into a statement like "therefore the belief is false"---it seems to me that the arguments are stronger if they stay within their own logic--a cluster of beliefs (which may or may not be religious) may result in or be linked to undesirable outcomes and so are problematic. you could argue that the linkages between clusters of belief and outcomes render the beliefs ethically problematic. but it si quite another thing to say that they are "false"---which is the style of argument particular to partisans---from whom, typically, claims of the "falsity" of one system is linked to (explicit or implicit) claims as to the "truth" of another.
as for my own position on the question of paganism---i am sympathetic but do not myself work through any of the range of possibilities the term groups together--mostly because the naming of entities does not appeal to me aesthetically. and because the main practice i engage in, which works toward the same end, is music and so is abstract--for some reason, this is symmetrical with my more general understanding of what is out there. but the reasons i do not myself practice do not go beyond the aesthetic differences i have with my comrades--i sometimes do performances shaped by ritual, which, while i do not myself do them, i find to nonetheless be excellent as ways of jacking up the focus in/of the space (this in all sense of the term).....
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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