PANTHEON
Pagan Spirit Gathering registration closes this evening, so if you’re still wanting to attend you still can. Note that you can opt to just come for the last weekend. I understand a high turnout is expected, and I’m pulling my hair out as I try to do the gazillion things I need to do before hitting the road. I will be there hanging out with bloggers, podcasters and journalists. Feel free to stop by Media Camp and say hi! I’ll be the one with the pink hair.
Patrick McCollum has given a statement regarding the 9th Circuit Court’s decision. I’m quoting a snippet here but go to The Wild Hunt for the full statement:
The defendants admitted that the inmates’ fee exercise rights were not criteria for the five faith chaplains; there were no criteria. Yet the court ruled that the only way I would be able to apply for a chaplaincy job is if the Pagan inmates proved that their free exercise rights require them to have a chaplain. But the five faith inmates never had to prove that their first amendment rights require them to have chaplains.
American Gods is coming to HBO, and Tom Hanks’ Playtone Productions, which produced Big Love, will be producing 6 seasons of it. I’m a big fan of Big Love and think if anyone will get to the meat of American Gods it will be Playtone. I’m excited!
The series-in-development, revolving around the question “are you a god if no one believes in you?” is executive produced by [Gary] Goetzman and Hanks, with Bob Richardson, and Gaiman on board as executive producer and writer.
Each of the six seasons will be of 10-12, hour-long episodes with a budget of around $35-40 million per season, targeted to debut on the cable powerhouse in 2013 at the earliest […] American Gods will be effects-heavy to do justice to the awe-inspiring power of the divine beings. “There are some crazy things in there. We’ll probably be doing more effects in there than it’s been done on a television series,” said Goetzman.
I am enamoured with Cicero. Without actually having time to sit and read it properly, I find myself skimming and cherrypicking through his treatise On The Nature Of The Gods at odd times. It’s so strange and exciting to read ancient Pagan apologetics.
XXVIII. Do you not see, therefore, how, from the productions of nature and the useful inventions of men, have arisen fictitious and imaginary Deities, which have been the foundation of false opinions, pernicious errors, and wretched superstitions? For we know how the different forms of the Gods — their ages, apparel, ornaments; their pedigrees, marriages, relations, and everything belonging to them — are adapted to human weakness and represented with our passions; with lust, sorrow, and anger, according to fabulous history: they have had wars and combats, not only, as Homer relates, when they have interested themselves in two different armies, but when they have fought battles in their own defense against the Titans and giants. These stories, of the greatest weakness and levity, are related and believed with the most implicit folly.
But, rejecting these fables with contempt, a Deity is diffused in every part of nature; in earth under the name of Ceres, in the sea under the name of Neptune, in other parts under other names. Yet whatever they are, and whatever characters and dispositions they have, and whatever name custom has given them, we are bound to worship and adore them. The best, the chastest, the most sacred and pious worship of the Gods is to reverence them always with a pure, perfect, and unpolluted mind and voice; for our ancestors, as well as the philosophers, have separated superstition from religion.
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