me--

(May I call you "mini-me," for your diminuitive lower case "m"?) :-)

Those purveyors of toxic Christianity whom you see as "sources of danger, dismay and despair?" Me too. To them, for all my nature-centered, gender-neutral, nonjudgemental christology, I might as well be pagan.

And maybe by their definitions I am pagan. The labels matter less to me than you might suspect; if someone breathes Unity, they are my brother or sister through Yeshua in a way that I simply don't fully understand yet, regardless of the label they put on it. If I am pagan in the estimation of some and Christian to others, it matters little. But as much as I share your sensible impulse to avoid toxic individuals, at my core is also the knowledge that they are all my sisters and brothers, and entitled to my love: toxic Christians, toxic Moslems, toxic pagans, toxic Atheists. Children of the Universe all, for all their sins and foibles.

And for me, it's not "someone else can die for your sins." For me, it's that this particular person's death gets my attention and shows me the path to the Light. And it might interest you to know that "Abwoon," the Aramaic word Yeshua used in what's called the Lord's Prayer that is usually translated as "Father," doesn't necessarily have to carry any gender connotation, and can mean Mother, Father, Divine Parent, Birther, Creator, or all of the above at once (which, with Yeshua, you can usually bet on layers of meaning). So to me, Alaha isn't a "skyfather"; I put no more literal stock in myths of Yahweh than I do in myths of Astarte. For me, the Divine Mother and the Divine Father are all one, a knowable metaphor for the unknowable, ineffable source of Creation.

White-haired, vengeful patriarchal figures on mountain thrones need not apply.

As for your immortal soul, I part with many of my brethren and sistren in the church on the necessity of my seeking to "convert" or "save" you. In creation spirituality, there is only one true being, of which you and I are both small and equal parts. We are already one even as we differ, and your "immortal soul," whatever that even is, is already a part of the Great Unity without any intervention on my part. What you do with it is the business of you and the Great Mother, and none of mine, except to acknowledge and embrace its unity.

Your revulsion at the evils committed by the church is shared by MMario, obviously, and by me. Imagine how you would feel if large number of pagans took it upon themselves to act in such a manner in the name of the Great Mother--that's how we feel about it. Their path is not our path, and to us not the path for which Yeshua died, though they use his name. Yet it would be hypocritical to say of them what they may say of us, if they knew: "they aren't Christians."

Huston Smith put it very well: to the atheist there is no god; to the pagan or polytheist, there are many gods; to the monotheist, there is only one god; to the mystic there is only God.

I'll be over here in the corner with the mystics.

So I'll sign off with a word that comes from neither of our traditions, yet envelops all of what we both are:

Namaste*,

Chris

*from Saskrit, roughly: "I honor that place in you where the whole Universe resides--that place where, when you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us." As easily said to the Divine Parent as to each other....