CFLarsen said:
Completely irrelevant. It isn't a question of when the reward will happen, but that a divinity rewards the believer, period.
And if the divinity doesn't reward the Voodoo believer, he may well punish the divinity by witholding the sacrifices or even changing to worship a different god.
Even Catholics can give up their faith, if they are not satisfied.
But then they are no longer Catholics. A Voodoo believer who changes his god remains a Voodoo believer.
The same can be said of the any god: Would the Christian God exist if nobody believed in him?
I don't think that Christian God exists even though a billion people believe in him. But according to the Christian belief, the God is eternal whose existance is in no way dependent on his believers. So, a Christian would answer that "Yes, the God would exist even if nobody believed in him." But if you ask a Voodoo believer if his god would exist if no one believed in him, the answer would likely be: "No, since all spirits have a personal existance only for as long as somebody remembers their names". (Though what happens to spirits that are forgotten is not so certain, they may either "die again" and cease existing or else become one of the great host of anonymous inpersonal minor spirits).
And I am also speaking of Catholicism. You don't get to decide what I can bring in. You bring in Voodoo, I bring in Catholicism.
Sure, you can drag in everything you wish. But I still don't understand why you did it. My point about Voodoo was and still is that are religions that don't have any official doctrine, no formal organization, and whose beliefs are impossible to describe in detail because they vary so much from area to area and from believer to believer. And then you throw in the religion with the most precisely defined official belief structure in existence.
I am not either. But you bring up the number of gods, to show that one such belief is not a religion. So, I ask: How many gods does it take, before a religion is not a religion anymore?
Why wouldn't you try reading what I write, not what you think I write. I haven't at any point claimed that either Wicca or Voodoo is not a religion.
You see, I think that Wicca is a religion. And I think that Voodoo is a religion. I thought that it would have been clear from my text that I think so, but it seems that I was wrong in that.
You have claimed that Wicca is not a religion.
When you look at any religion over time, you will invariably find a shift in focus.
Egyptians were quite unique in the sense that while they obtained new influences all the time, they didn't throw away the old ones. Thus, you get texts like the Book of the Dead that contain very conflicting accounts on what will happen after the death and a whole soccer team of Sun Gods. These contradictions didn't bother the Egyptians a bit.
What is that which binds Wiccans together, religiously?
Read the links posted by Zaayrdragon.
You probably noticed that I didn't address all your points. This is because I know that after you have made your mind on some subject, no amount of discussion can make you change your position (or, more precisely, make you publicly admit that you have changed it, I don't know what happens inside your mind) so I address only points that I find interesting.
