I feel like this is a “dog wets firehydrant” story. In other words: nothing new. It’s no big surprise that the Christian Broadcasting Network maligns Neo-paganism at every oportunity. Today they did a full article of it.

The article, Neo-Paganism Re-Captures Ancient Heresies, is all of the same old stuff put into an incoherent mishmash of an article. It has the “paganism = nazis” stuff, “Wicca is endangering our children” line, a bit of “Da Vinci Code” bashing, “it’s destroying family values,” a token Pagan-turned-Christian, and a bit of Star Wars for good measure.

One of the many perplexing comments is about Star Wars — something that one would think was enough of a cultural icon to avoid strangeness like this:

In Revenge of the Sith the following exchange takes place:

Anakin: The Jedi use their power for good…
Emperor Palpatine: God is a point of view, Anakin.

Now, putting aside the typo in the Emperor quote (I’m sure the writer meant “good,” not “God”) this quote from a Star Wars movie can serve only one purpose: to point out the dangerous Moral Relativism found in the “Jedi Religion.” But, of course, anyone even passingly familiar with Star Wars would know that a) the Emperor is Super-Evil and b) the Emperor was corrupting Anakin to make him Darth Vader. In other words, this quote is really a condemnation of moral relativism and there is very little moral ambiguity in the Star Wars universe.

Then there is my nit-pick with the title of the article itself. “Heresies?” Technically, you have to be a member of a religion to commit a heresy against it. Only Christians can commit heresy against Christianity. And while the DaVinci Code might qualify, most of the stuff trotted out in the article surely does not. We are not heretics. We are heathens, maybe (and some are capital-’H'-Heathens), but not heretics, thank you very much.