Friday, June 3, 2011

What About the Pagan Values Project

This is a new concept to me. While I've been a casual, personal blogger for a few years, I've never been active in the blogging communities. I'm slowly breaking in by reading some blogs and reaching out and commenting. Putting my thoughts out there, challenging opinions and being challenged right back. The philosopher in me is in heaven. Recently I heard about the Pagan Values Project. I did a little investigating and found that this is the third year from the project. I also found while there are many people who have embraced this project as a great discussion forum to share beliefs and opinions, challenge their own thoughts and inspire others, there is a population of people who disagree with the project and feel it's intent is to put a border around "Pagan Values" and define what "Pagans" should believe. I personally do not believe this is the intent of the project at all.

To me, this project is about communication. Communication is a personal value of my own, and I also think this is a value of every religion and spiritual path in some way or another. As my own personal value, I look at communication the way to help others understand each other. Whether that be understanding what we need done, how to work together, expectations, expressing feelings; we need communication and this is why I value it so highly. There is an art to communication, sometimes simple as in communicating our basic needs, other times more complicated, such as communicating how depression affects us. As a value held by religions and spiritual paths, communication may be the value people use to identify with communicating with the Divine. Through prayer, ritual, meditation, observation, or any other method. We communicate with the Divine to express our needs, our gratitude, our love, our desires, our celebrations and any other connection we make with the Divine. To me, this project is a great example of a value held by many, Pagan or not. Communication is just one value this project promotes, but there are other such as community, differences, tolerance, Deity and many more.

I do not expect that every Pagan conforms to every value another Pagan has. Rather I look at values as belonging on a continuum. At one end is where a person finds little value to the attribute, on the other end is where a person finds great value to the attribute. There will be some values that many, if not all, Pagans identify with. I do not think that there should be a boundary placed around these values, but it is a great starting place to help answer the question of "what do Pagan's believe?" I also acknowledge that because we are not placing boundaries around what "Pagan Values" are, it means we know that we are ever evolving. There will always be growth, and this project helps to promote this growth, both on a personal, individual level, as well as growth among the Pagan community itself. Personal growth is another value that I hold higher up on the continuum of values, and I'm sure there are many people who feel the same way.

Defining values as belonging to "Pagans" or "Christians" is another argument I've noticed as I browsed through some discussions of values. My view on this is that a value by definition is an attribute or belief held by a specific culture. There is Pagan culture and there is Christian culture, as well as hundreds of other religions who have their own culture also. When someone identifies something as "XXXX Value" it does not mean they are laying ownership to that value, only that it is found within a grouping of values held by many of that culture. This means that the same value can overlap among several different religions or spiritual paths. It is important to understand this designation because there may be some values that are shared, but some values that are not shared. This is just another way to categorize things. For the blogging world, you might compare it to tagging. One blog post may be tagged with 1, 2 and 3. And the next tagged with 2, 4, and 6. Both blogs hold the tag of 2, but the other tags are a difference between them. It doesn't mean one is better than the other, just that there are similarities and differences. This is another value I hold, celebrating the similarities and differences among all people. Multiculturalism is a great thing and it is being more widely accepted everyday.

These are just a few of my points supporting this project and I think it will be a great forum for discussion to build and celebrate our similarities and differences.

Bright Blessings,
~Ava

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