I'm rather amused by this story Pagans angered by temporary Homer next to Cerne Abbas giant. I fear some of my amusement my be due to Paganphobia. To be honest, I'm most amused because the Cerne Abbas giant seems to be a prime example of the pagan vice of insisting that rituals, object, places etc. are ancient despite all evidence to the contrary. (Obviously there are lots of Pagans who don't do this and are happy to admit that their religion is less than 200 years old.) There are no references to the Cerne Abbas giant prior to 1694. Medieval writers referring to the hill that it's on just happen to not mention the fucking great sexually aroused giant. Pagans might claim that there has been a great Christian conspiracy to keep the giant secret but I find that doubtful given that the earliest reference to it is a payment for its recutting in the Cerne Abbas churchwarden's accounts. According to wiki (OK possibly only marginally more reliable than Pagans) it's quite likely that it was created during the English civil war as a rude parody of Oliver Cromwell. So to this very day, otherwise sensible couples think that they'll be more likely to conceive if they have sex on top of a rather rude political cartoon. Surely they could be a lot warmer if they just stayed at home and 'got jiggy' on top of a copy of Private Eye.

I've realised that I'm very ageist when it comes to mumbo jumbo. Talk to me about 16th century kabbalah or the sayings of Sufi prophets or Aborigine cosmology and I'll be rather tolerant about it, possibly even saying something about how we shouldn't mistake our own perspective on the world for objectivity. Talk to me about the kabbalah centre or neo-Paganism or Scientology and I'll roll my eyes. Iranian Baha'is fine; English converts to Baha'i, bit of an eye roll.

Part of it is the way modern mumbo jumbo has an irritating habit of claiming older origins than it actually has but old mumbo jumbo does that too. The Zohar, for example, contains 13th century Spanish syntax and idioms, despite Orthodox kabbalists claiming that it's about 1800 years old.

I think a more reasonable objection is that modern mumbo jumbo has a nasty habit of cultural appropriation. New age types have a habit of tacking ideas from various religions and cultures without paying much attention to the context in which they originated. It's sort of religion lite. A bit like getting a packet of bourbons and only eating the filling. It means they get it all wrong. You can't expect to understand the Zohar if you don't have a thorough knowledge of the Torah and other Jewish texts. You can't understand Eastern philosophy without completely immersing yourself in a system of reasoning that is foreign to the way a Westerner has been taught to think since birth.

I suppose I also have a problem with the kind of people who say things like "How could you possibly believe in the existence of G@d ... but homeopathy must work because it's never been disproved." I could misquote Chesterton at this point.

I'm not sure what the point of this post is. Probably work avoidance.