>> they constantly assure me that I am on the right track and that the trolls who inhabit these pages are unbelievable.

oh, nonsense. you're simply using "troll" to refer to all the people who write in disagreement. people like pericles and david f and bushbred are still writing long, considered pieces. given you never ever ever ever address such criticism with the respect it warrants, god knows why they bother. most, like me, who now respond trollishly do so because we're sick to death of your smug, unresponsive, insulting manner of lording it over us pagans.

>> It does not seem to occur to you that one can be a successful scientist and still entertain theological ideas.

huh? doesn't surprise me at all. i'm fully convinced you have the intellectual ability to reason. i'm just also convinced you're so wrapped up in the glory of your rightness and righteousness, you're too damn arrogant to bother.

Peter,none of us have the answers,not even you.If we did have them, as most religions pretend to have,then there would be no point to life.The challenge and the anvil of life is what moulds us into better people,albeit not perfect.

Once the human bean is defined Peter,it cannot germinate or grow.

My children and I have just returned from an Interfaith Network meeting. The main speaker was a catholic priest who had lived and worked in Pakistan for the last 30 odd years. The crux of his message lay in the word ‘faith’, ‘the commonwealth of believers’ or ‘searchers of the truth‘.

He naturally assumed that the small gathering was made up of people of faith, wrong in my case but less so with my kids. Why did I go? Because I felt they would benefit from supporting those good folk who saw as I do great importance in interfaith dialogue.

There was a further potential benefit, namely they would be able to recognise those intent on creating division and fanning religious hatreds.

So when Peter Sellick writes “While the gods of paganism were remote and cruel and perfidious” and “For paganism, individual human beings had no faces, they were resources, wives were incubators, slaves were non human, soldiers were fodder for battle.” it is probably important to know exactly how he defines paganism. Is it all faiths outside Christianity? Or all faiths outside the Abrahamic three? Or anything pre-Christian?

Is he a fanner?

To be fair we would probably have to ask davidf how interchangeable he sees the terms pagans and gentiles?

When Peter writes “In short, we are in danger of losing the human.” I get the sense what he really means is we are in danger of losing God. God is indeed fading though still looming large over us all. If we accept that a historical part of the human condition is a propensity to gather deity/ies then he might just have a point.

I’m happy as a non-believer to say that religions certainly make up that ‘rich tapestry’ of humanity as well as being one of the supreme examples of our creativity and I for one would be sad to see the back of them.

Now that is very interesting, Sells.

I can't actually be bothered to check, but I suspect that this may be the very first time that you have felt it necessary to defend your article within the first twentyfour hours of its appearance.

>>There is one thing that you all seem to forget and that is my main career was as a scientist. Go to Google scholar and enter Sellick, P.M and you will find out that my scientific reputation is firmly established.<<

Is this you, Sells?

http://en.scientificcommons.org/p_m_sellick

Your burst of scientific actiity in 1973 is quite interesting, and probably quite impressive to other scientists.

But how does it lend the slightest scintilla of weight to your statements about religion?

It's like suggesting that Pol Pot's scholarship to the École Française d'Électronique et d'Informatique qualifies as a counterweight to Year Zero.

Your arguments for Christianity and against logic need to be able to stand on their own two feet. Attempting to defend them by pointing to your credentials via a thirtyfive-year-old study into hair-cells in the mammalian cochlea is, to be blunt, slightly pathetic.

I have often appreciated your articles here, albeit only faintly, and only because they encourage me to try to understand more about what sort of people are susceptible to religion, and why they feel it to be important.

But this one I find ever-so-slightly offensive. It is gratuitously and pointlessly insulting, on a level that your previous efforts merely hinted at.

“The (atheists) who are most likely to go in front of an audience to proselytize their atheism seem to fall into two camps. One group are Brits. What is it about being raised in Britain that turns so many people vehemently against religion? The other group are those who have rejected a faith ...&#8232;I get the feeling that they are desperately trying to distance themselves from roots that they feel somehow embarrassed by, to try to fit into what they see as the mainstream—if not the mainstream of popular society, then at least the mainstream of the “scientific” society they desperately want to fit into. ... I’m not saying this is why they are atheists; there are plenty of good reasons to be an atheist—or not to be one. But this may be why it is so important for these proselytizers to be aggressively public about their lack of belief.&#8232;

We can all recognize that, of course, as the flip side of religious fundamentalism. It’s when you fundamentally lack faith in God’s salvation that you insist on saving yourself by following the minutiae of the law. ... It is exactly when you are insecure about your own holiness that you most feel the need to parade it, aggressively, in front of everyone else. That is what motivates a few of our more publicly outspoken co-religionists to heap abuse upon science, even as they show how little they understand it. Sadly, they are trying earn brownie points with God by scorning the study of the handiwork God loves.

Likewise, what I find in many of the proselytizers of atheism is a very naive understanding of religion. If religion were anything like the rigid brainwashing it’s often caricatured as, I would have no part of it either. ... People don’t want debates full of fireworks; they want an understanding of the complexities of good and evil that we all struggle to live with every day.&#8232;Clearly, the atheists aren’t providing that. But just as clearly, most of our pastors aren’t, either.“ [From “The Heavens Proclaim: Astronomy and the Vatican“ by Guy Consolmagno, 2009]

"Human nature"

As paganism describes nature religions, it is more human nature than anything else.

Thousands of years ago, when humans first made religion, it was paganism, a religion entirely based on nature - the seasons, the sun, the moon.

"Human nature" literally is paganism. christianity took much of its ideas from older ones, and even those were sometimes older. Even the old testament can be found in earlier times - noah's ark being a good example. It actually is from a much older tale, part of the Sumerian 'epic of Gilgamesh', where the gods sent a flood and a man, Utnapishtim, and his wife are told by the god Ea to build a boat and take all creatures of the land on to it.

All the pagan holidays were covered by becoming xian - yule or bruma became xmas; samhain became hallowe'en and all saints day; oimelc or imbolg became candlemas; and so on. The old gods became the saints and the idea of god as three in one comes from old ideas of the goddess as three - maiden, mother and crone.

So, in a way xians are pagan, so they can't say paganism is wrong, when paganism is "human nature".