Who is a pagan?

Question

Who is a pagan and who is authorized to decide who is who?

Answer 1

A pagan is a person who believes in one of the earth based religions. Often somebody who believes in multiple gods, spirits and divine beings. A definition I really like is:

When one defines oneself as Pagan...

...it means she or he follows an earth or nature religion, one that sees the divine manifest in all creation. The cycles of nature are our holy days, the earth is our temple, its plants and creatures our partners and teachers. We worship a deity that is both male and female, a mother Goddess and father God, who together created all that is, was, and will be. We respect life, cherish the free will of sentient beings, and accept the sacredness of all creation. "

by Edain McCoy

The only person authorised to decide who is what - is everybody for themself. If one defined themselves as a pagan, then a pagan they are. Nobody else has the right to call them anything.

Answer 2

I'm a pagan and all pagans know that paganism is not orthodox (meaning organized) in any way, shape, or form. The only group that falls into organized paganism is the sect of Wicca (yes I did say sect...I say the same for every denomination that has split "sect"ions)

There is no direct group who says who is who and what they are or who they report to. Paganism is nonorthodoxed for that very reason. To organize paganism, would be to remove anything about the nontraditinal format of worship and completely rip it apart into nothing recognizeable.

However, if you are talking about some sort of organization that oversees pagan groups int he area....that is left solely up to the pagan groups in the area and whether they sign on with this religious overlord-like idea.

For example, Austin, Texas has a group known as the Council of Magical Arts (CMA) that oversees all of the groups within their charter. It is a way to patrol their own but is not taken seriously by the community at large.

Answer 3

The term pagan is from Latin paganus, an adjective originally meaning "rural", "rustic" or "of the country."
As a noun, paganus was used to mean "country dweller, villager."
In colloquial use, it would mean much the same as calling someone a 'bumkin' or a 'hillbilly'. paganus was almost exclusively a derogatory term. (It is from this derivation of "villager" which we have the word "villain", which the invading Christians called the Pagans of Northern Europe/Scandinavia) From its earliest beginnings, Christianity spread much more quickly in major urban areas (like Antioch, Alexandria, Corinth, Rome) than in the countryside (in fact, the early church was almost entirely urban), and soon the word for "country dweller" became synonymous with someone who was "not a Christian," giving rise to the modern meaning of "pagan." In large part, this may have had to do with the conservative nature of rural people, who were more resistant to the new ideas of Christianity than those who lived in major urban centers.
So if we look at this Pagan is an atheist or an heathen.

the people that do believe or have an other religion than the atheist/ heathen, decide that those people are what they say they are.

Answer 4

I'm Pagan and I've got about 200 contemporaries in my immediate area. I'm not sure what you mean by the rest of your question. Folks don't need authorization to decide who gets to be Pagan, it's purely voluntary.

Answer 5

I define a "Pagan" as "someone who follows a religion with an immanent (non-transcendent) and/or polytheistic concept of divinity and rites & ceremonies based on or inspired by pre-Christian indigenous religions, Western occultism, feminist spirituality and/or nature-based spirituality."

Which doesn't tell you much--but it does explain why there's no "authority" about who is or isn't pagan. Paganism isn't one religion; it's a term that refers to a lot of very different religions and sects or denominations within those religions. (These are often called different "traditions.")

Some traditions or some individual groups have specific rules about what it takes to join that group, but others don't. Many groups have "rules" about joining that are difficult to test--just like someone may be a Christian if he believes Christ is his savior, but you can't prove whether someone really believes that, and people disagree on what "savior" means.

Answer 6

I am a Pagan. Not sure what you mean by "who is authorized to decide who is who".

Answer 7

Paganism (from Latin paganus, meaning "a country dweller" or "civilian") is a blanket term which has come to connote a broad set of spiritual or religious beliefs and practices of natural or polytheistic religions, as opposed to the Abrahamic monotheistic religions. "Pagan" is the usual translation of the Islamic term mushrik, which refers to 'one who worships something other than God'. Ethnologists do not use the term for these beliefs, which are not necessarily compatible with each other: more useful categories are shamanism, polytheism or animism. Often, the term has pejorative connotations, comparable to heathen, infidel and kafir (كافر) in Islam.

Answer 8

Whoever uses the word is authorized to use the word. Pagan generally means more than one God, but has no specific meaning.

Answer 9

Anyone who takes a a devout Jewish Rabbi and makes him a god with a lot of nonsensical stories around it..

Anyone who believes in people who had lived hundreds of years ago and told their own private dreams or visions of meeting a god, or an angel who spoke to them about concocting a new religion.

Who decides? Common sense. Can Paul, Muhammad or Joseph Smith all being right? Use your head.

Answer 10

a pagan is someone who worships another form of god or goddess besides the judao-christian-muslim god