what does it mean when someone says they are pagen?

Answer 1

It means they need to learn how to use the spell-checker.

However, when they say 'pagan', it means that they believe in many gods. There's much more to it, of course, but that's the starting point.

Answer 2

Pagans typically believe that all things have a spirit embodied in them. There are many branches of paganism, some choose to revere the Norse deities, others the Celtic deities. There are eight high holidays in the pagan calendar with specific celebrations for each one: Imbolc (Feb 1), Ostara (March 21), Beltane (May 1), Midsummer (June 21), Lammas (Aug 1), Mabon (Sep 21), Sawhain (Oct 31), Yule (Dec 21). Many pagans also celebrate the full moon.

Answer 3

The word "pagan" originally meant "peasant" or "rural person". Christians used the word to describe those outlanders who weren't with the Christian program and still practiced their superstitious agricultural magic rituals and rustic false god worship. "Heathen" was the image they wanted to create.

Neo-paganism is a reaction to organized religion, particularly Christianity, which is seen as too dogmatic and authoritarian. It often borrows or reconstructs old nature rituals, celebrating the seasons and the cycles of the moon, as it is assumed the ancient pagans did. Some of it might be considered "synthetic", although one might contend that ALL religions are invented and adapting. Practitioners are nevertheless sincere and pursue an alternate spirituality from the dominant culture.

Answer 4

Paganism is a nature based faith. Pagans are usually polytheistic, but some feminist pagans like to leave out their male counter part.

Most of their celebrations are nature based. Lunar, harvest, trees, animals. Stuff like that.

Answer 5

Mostly it means they want you to think they are different or trendy...I know a whole lot of people who claim they're pagan, but only one truly is. Try asking them to name some pagan deities (should be easy!), and they'll likely choke or make something up.

Answer 6

Well, a pagan is a person that follows a Multi-theistic faith. The one I'm most familiar with is Wicca.

Answer 7

It's pagan. There are lots of different beliefs, it depends on who you ask. Bottom line is that it is not a mainstream religion and it is very peaceful.

Answer 8

This is the definition webster gives of Pagan:
one who has little or no religion and who delights in sensual pleasures and material goods : an irreligious or hedonistic person

Answer 9

It means they should buy a dictionary and learn how to spell

Answer 10

Wikipedia says:

Paganism (from Latin paganus, meaning "a country dweller" or "civilian") is a term which has come to connote a broad set of western 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 The God of Abraham'. 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.

Pagan
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 'bumpkin' 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 expanding 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."[1] This may, in part, have had to do with the conservative nature of rural people, who may have been more resistant to the new ideas of Christianity than those who lived in major urban centers. However, it may have also resulted from early Christian missionaries focusing their efforts within major population centers (e.g., St. Paul), rather than throughout an expansive, yet sparsely populated, countryside (hence, the Latin term suggesting "uneducated country folk").

"Peasant" is a cognate, via Old French paisent. (Harry Thurston Peck, Harper's Dictionary of Classical Antiquity, 1897; "pagus").

In their distant origins, these usages derived from pagus, "province, countryside", cognate to Greek πάγος "rocky hill", and, even earlier, "something stuck in the ground", as a landmark: the Proto-Indo-European root *pag- means "fixed" and is also the source of the words "page", "pale" (stake), and "pole", as well as "pact" and "peace".

Later, through metaphorical use, paganus came to mean 'rural district, village' and 'country dweller' and, as the Roman Empire declined into military autocracy and anarchy, in the 4th and 5th centuries it came to mean "civilian", in a sense parallel to the English usage "the locals". It was only after the Late Imperial introduction of serfdom, in which agricultural workers were legally bound to the land (see Serf), that it began to have negative connotations, and imply the simple ancient religion of country people, which Virgil had mentioned respectfully in Georgics. Like its approximate synonym heathen (see below), it was adopted by Middle English-speaking Christians as a slur to refer to those too rustic to embrace Christianity. Additionally, a lot of rural parts of Europe were the most resistant to forced Christian conversions, militarily resisted Christian Europe and stubbornly held to their natural religions reamplifying the medieval use of the term.

As mentioned previously, the post-Christian usage of "pagan" came to mean rural folk holding to pre-Christian polytheistic beliefs in the face of the new, and predominantly urban, Christianized Roman society. Ironically, it is now the rural peoples of Western culture who are more typically aligned with Christian beliefs (e.g., the bible belt or red state within the U.S.), whereas urban areas are now more secularized.

Neoplatonists in the Early Christian church attempted to Christianize the values of sophisticated Pagans such as Plato and Virgil. This had some influence among the literate class, but did little to counter the more general prejudice expressed in "pagan".

While pagan is attested in English from the 14th century, there is no evidence that the term paganism was in use in English before the 17th century. The OED instances Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776): "The divisions of Christianity suspended the ruin of paganism." The term was not a neologism, however, as paganismus was already used by Augustine.

The urbanity of Christians is exemplified in Augustine's work, The City of God, in which Augustine consoled distressed city-dwelling Christians over the fall of Rome. He pointed out that while the great 'city of man' had fallen, Christians were ultimately citizens of the 'city of God.'

Many Slavic peoples, especially Eastern Slavs, use the word "pagan" as an insult in their language; translating roughly as a "conniving brute." The etymology of this meaning lies in the fact that after their forced conversion by western Christians, much of the Slavic lands took a dim view of the remaining non-Christians in their midsts.

The first person to apply the term pagan to a worshipper of a nature religion was Discordian co-founder Kerry Thornley (Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst), according to The Prankster and the Conspiracy by Adam Gorightly.