Welcome to Gaia! ::

I find it incredibly annoying when some Wiccans claim that they are true Wiccans because it's in their family. It's not a majority. But I've seen it happen. Wicca is a very recent religion based on older Pagan beliefs. It is merely a century or so old. There is no basis for family lines to interfere with religion yet. Somewhere down the line, someone converted to Wicca. So by above argument, that converted person is not a true Wiccan. Therefore the whole line is not true Wiccans, therefore proving arguer wrong. There are problems with people in every religion.

I'd like to dedicate this thread to false impressions and common mistakes made about religions, any religions, and/or hypocrisy displayed by any religion, in hopes that we will become more well-informed.

I'm not speaking for all Wiccans, of course, but isn't it interesting how many converts call themselves Wiccan because of 1) the fad factor or 2) their hatred of Christianity? It's just interesting how many people (especially teens!) say, "What, Wicca? That sounds like a good idea. Church was boring anyways."

Agreed. I consider myself pagan, because I am searching in my spirituality and ancient ways, and also have an interest in magick. However, even those things are kind of nebulous for me at the moment, making me barely even pagan. Even though I practice magick, I definitely don't call myself Wiccan. I have a group I'm involved with, but they're not a coven. They're all ecclectic practioners. Some are into chaos magick, and all are into responsible sex magick, with the explicit intellectual intent of offering up the greatest source of sacred human energy we each have (sexual energy) to the Divine. However, the founders are getting older (in their 50s) and are moving away from so much of the constant interaction with people. They've gotten burned a few times from people who did not understand things. Other people burned them when they were not ready and responsible, yet still got involved with a very mature subject (more mature than even most grown adults can handle).

I'm not sure where I was going with this, but suffice to say I think a lot of this comes from people wanting to have exact definitions of labels or people misusing labels (or also semantics). That often seems to be the source of great rantings in countless threads throughout the internet and the world at large in any field of interest.