One of my secret informants sent me a snippet of a Facebook conversation that Ryan Smith, Amy Hale and their buddies were having back in 2014 which puts what’s been going on the last couple months in perspective. Word of advice to the godless & radical crowd: you might want to do some house-cleaning as you clearly have a mole problem. Of course, correcting your fucked up ideologies should probably take precedence.
Amy Hale
I just posted this on someone else’s FB page and needed to repost it here. I have been very bothered by this for the past day and to say I have strong feelings about this issue is putting it mildly. Regarding the “hip new trend” in animal sacrifice among “polytheists”: I think dedication of an animal you are going to eat to your deity is fine. I think hunting and *responsible* community slaughter practices done by a trained practitioner are acceptable. I eat meat and I think that sanctifying all we eat is a good practice. But I think if your Gods are telling you you need to kill something, you need to have your head checked. To quote Bill Hicks, that’s a judgment call and I’m making it. On the whole, contemporary Pagans actually do not understand the traditional and community contexts in which animal sacrifice occurs. I think this opens the door to massively irresponsible behavior and animal cruelty, and a bunch of impressionable young people potentially killing animals because they think it makes them more hardcore Pagan–I’ve already seen this with Vodou wannabees. Our community needs to take a *sophisticated* position on this now, and sorry, not some sort of Traditionalist crap. I don’t give a F*** what the ancients did because mostly they were pretty awful and cruel people. We cannot be fetishizing this behavior. Period.
Ryan Smith
There’s a VERY good reason Asatrufelagid (Icelandic national org) explicitly denounced the practice in their statement that primarily denounced racists and far-right extremists trying to hijack Heathenry. Nevermind the logistical problems called, “Do any of those people have ANY CLUE what it takes to support your own livestock so you can slaughter them for food?” If you actually live on a farm, raise your own animals, and feel so moved to give some kind of blessing or ritualize humane slaughter that’s one thing but I’m willing to bet the vast majority of these folks talking up sacrifice are suburbanites who have never actually SEEN a cow or horse up close in their lives.
Ryan Smith
I, for one, am an enormous fan of these incredible modern concepts called sanitation, medical technology, the Internet, human rights, feminism, and 3D printing. I’m sure the ancients would have been too, once you got them past the, “WHAT SORCERY IS THIS?!?” moment.
Amy Hale
Yeah, there is some bullshit going on here and I am none too happy about it. We tolerate a lot of abuse and bad behavior in Paganism, most of it is people being shitty to people, and no one wants to rock the boat to make any fundamental changes to how business gets done. Well…whatever. But when we are talking about beings that CAN’T speak up for themselves we must be morally motivated to speak. When are we going to draw the line in our community? When? Because I don’t see it happening and it seems to be getting worse daily.
Ryan Smith
We get organized and push back.
Good thing I’m in, and have been a part of, unions and other such assortments of cantankerous rabble-rousers
Amy Hale
Ryan, we we do need to thin the herd somehow…
