Okay, weighing in on this discussion from another viewpoint, that of a person who is old and has a fairly wide life experience, and who is a lifelong Pagan coming from a large and diverse family that encompassed several kinds of Pagans, several kinds of Christians, Buddhists, Jews and even a Quaker, plus atheists and agnostics. I am also a person who is curious about and interested in everything, including how people think, why they think or believe as they do and how that relates to the people around them.
To further complicate my viewpoint, I was homeschooled, largely by some of the older adults of my family, until my teens, in a multilingual, multifaith environment with access to a large and multilingual, many generations deep family library, (the internet was not yet invented) as well as access to the family farm and several different wild environments. As an older child I moved, with a small part of my family, from Europe to a farm in country Victoria, Australia. My mother had died when I was a small child, in a tuberculosis epidemic, and for much of my childhood I was lucky to see my father at intervals of several months, if even that often, because he was, like my grandfather, an army field medic. Then he was on active duty overseas, then a prisoner of war who suffered badly from the experience, after which my older brother and I, as well as several older relatives cared for him as we could in between his frequent hospital stays. I also began at that point in my life to attend a formal state school, and then to win scholarships to university, which my family could not otherwise have afforded. I did what nowadays would be called STEM subjects, while working several part time jobs to help support my family. I was in my teens when my dad remarried to a cousin of my late mother who was a Christian, and a widow with one child.
So I set myself to learn all I could about Christianity so as to be able to have a civilised dialogue on the subject with her, (being curious about everything) and hopefully not to give offence to her. My brother and I had not expected her assumption that once we were shown the One True Way we would of course convert instantly, nor the tactless, heavy handed and downright rude proselytising that we suffered, but we coped and in the end settled down to a civilised and mutually respectful family arrangement in which all parties came eventually to respect one another. I grew to respect her, and was grieved by her death.
Anyway, I grew up. Married. My first husband was a Pagan like myself though of a different kind. We gave the kids their own choice, having both understood early in our lives that religious faith was a matter between the individual soul and its god or gods, and both felt that this relationship was nobody else’s business unless it led to actions that intruded on other people.
I was widowed young, years later married an Anglican Christian, and am still happily married. Both of us retain our own faiths. He used to proselytise when he was young, but outgrew the tendency, and his proselytising probably did more good than harm, because it took the form of bearing witness and doing good. He and a group of his Young Anglican friends used to do what they called Beach Missions, where they would join the families and most particularly the surfers at seaside campgrounds and just be Christians. This suited Star, as he was a keen scuba diver and underwater photographer and was quite ready to share these skills with other people. They would have their Christian symbols around their camp, and the usual tracts and bibles, and would happily talk about their faith with anyone who wanted to, while they handed out water and sunscreen, and the members of their group who had training in those areas volunteered as surf lifesavers, first aiders, or did shark watch. I consider that a reasonable way to go about things, agreeing that ‘faith without works is dead’, and that loving and caring for one’s fellow man is a part of the Christian contract, at least the version of it inspired by the Christ.
There are a few other things I would like to talk about, but this is turning into a wall of text, so more later.
