All those pagans have been bashing Melanie Philips of the Daily Mail for writing a bigoted ill-researched piece of drivel about Druidry last week, but the fact is that she actually came with a good idea amongst her nonsensical ramblings.
I refer to her suggestion of having “Stones of Praise” as a Television programme.
Just imagine – in all seriousness – what such a programme would involve. It would be half an hour of a load of pagans having a good old sing-song, intercut with short interviews of individual pagans showing what they get up to in their daily lives, the kind of work they get up to, etc. We could have featured guest musicians in each programme, such as Julian Cope, Ian Read, Damh The Bard, etc.
I think this would actually be quite fun! Quick – call the BBC! 🙂
Sol Ascendans - The Website of Alex Sumner 
Daily Mail Attacks Pagans – Again
The appalling threat to today's society ... an unguarded flame in an enclosed space.
Slow news day at Nazi propaganda rag the Daily Mail, so they trot out another article about Paganism. Samhain, if you will recall, was twelve days ago … so basically what the Beaverbrook press have done is rehash a lot of what they did about a fortnight ago. It is obvious by the sting in the tail that the article is meant to leave the reader with the impression that Pagans are actively threatening Christianity (the journalist spoke to a supposedly-naughty pagan who conveniently “would not be named.”)
Yet despite trotting out various alleged Christian rentaquote people as well, the article is in fact surprisingly well-balanced – for the Daily Mail it is, attempting to give equal voice to both Pagans and the nay-sayers. They even try to be fair to paganism by asking Ron Hutton for a quote, so this might be a bit of a left-handed compliment after all 😛
IMHO, the Daily Mail is clearly secretly fascinated with something it doesn’t completely understand. I really think that Pagans, instead of reacting to every banal piece the Mail comes up with should instead aspire to remain aloof from its brand of journalism. One can no more expect the Daily Mail to produce a piece wholly uncritical of paganism than one can expect a dog not to bark. In that sense the Daily Mail does not deserve Pagans’ anger or hatred, but rather compassion instead, as one would show compassion to a wayward child. 😛
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Tagged as Daily Mail, Druidry, pagan, paganism, Ronald Hutton, wicca, Zoe Brennan