Redneck Pagan (pic)

[SteppingRazor]

Spotted at the Vet's office parking lot some weeks ago. I took the picture specifically to share with y'all. Seems like the sort of thing the Lounge tends to dwell on.




Just in case you can't read it, the top bumper sticker says "Keep it Flying" next to the stars and bars.

The bottom-left sticker says "Christianity has Pagan DNA," while the bottom right one says, "Born Again Pagan."


I did not know the Redneck Pagan existed. Truly, more things in heaven and Earth...

[MrScorpio]

1. That's Florida for ya

Anything is possible

[no name no slogan]

2. best FL license plate

And yes, it's real

[lightningandsnow]

3. They allowed that?

Oh my god...

:rofl:

[no name no slogan]

5. Yup, they did

here's the story:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/assorgy1.html

only in Florida

[LeftyMom]

4. Awww, he was jes out pickin up the RC Cola and Moon Pies fer Cakes and Ale. nt

[_testify_]

7. RC Cola!!

:9 That's the goooood stuff! It's what they used to serve at Mets games when I was a kid and it always tasted so much better than it did at home. Part of me would like to think it was the experience of being at the game, but I know they were just using extra syrup to make you buy another one...

Diet RC Cola is friggin awesome though!

[Ivan Sputnik]

6. In this context

"Born again pagan" probably just means "I'm not a church goer".

[xchrom]

8. so then the question becomes --

does this driver GET how these things don't fit together?

and if they do -- then do they have a really warped sense of humour -- or are they just that offensive?

[YankeyMCC]

9. Ah...no offense but ...

in what way are they incomputable? I mean not knowing exactly his brand of paganism or how he interprets the tenets of pagan beliefs is there something about being pagan that precludes also being a confederate flag waiver?

Disclaimers: I'm not deeply versed in the many pagan faiths, but I do know there are many different brands.
I find confederate flag waiving distasteful to put it mildly and for the most part people I know who claim to be pagans would not generally support that for much the same reasons I don't...but I don't know that it has anything to do with their pagan beliefs. Certainly pagan cultures and people in history have done horrible things, including keeping slaves just as pretty much most human groups have done at one time or another.

[xchrom]

10. well -- it's not a stretch to associate confederate flag wavers

with racism -- that's pretty exclusionary isn't it?

people who have a real heat for a kind of sameness.

i'm guessing that few -- {and this may be the only} -- ''confederates'' would accept much of anything past fundie churches and white baptists.

[Flaxbee]

11. for a lot of people in the South, the Civil War

wasn't so much about slavery as about economics and the overreaching (as they saw it) of the federal government. States are supposed to be able to secede, but the North couldn't survive without the South's economy, so (as many Southerners see it) they violated the Southern states' Constitutional rights and invaded.

Plus, the Union really destroyed the South; it did take parts of the South almost a century to recover. I think individual human beings found slavery abhorrent and were doing whatever they could to stop it, but I don't think the federal government really gave a shit - it was best if the country stayed cohesive for many complex reasons, and the federal gov't just used the issue as a rallying cry.

So while that flag symbolizes slavery to many, to a lot of Southerners it means taking a stand against oppression (ironic, I know - but their OWN oppression).

I grew up in California, and never understood the nuances of the Civil War - it was always taught as an issue of absolute right vs. wrong, when it was much more complicated than that (as, really, is any war; it seems the basis of all wars in history has been an economic one, often dressed up with a plausible moral issue).

So if I saw those bumper stickers, I'd think "idiot" and then I"d probably also see that to that person, federal government and centralized religion are oppressive and doctrinal.

[zabet]

13. ...

Yes for a rare few, it is
about Heritage, not Hate.
:thumbsup:

[RainDog]

14. not really so complicated

I grew up in the south, y'all, and tho the deal over the last decades has been to say that the civil war was about self-determination - if you were a freakin' slave it was about slavery. and if you were an abolitionist it was about slavery - and stopping the spread of slavery to other and new states.

Lincoln was about saving the union.

The people in the south now who fly a confederate flag are, I can generalize with quite a bit of experience, ignorant rednecks who think they were somehow not such ignorant rednecks in their family history... tho I'd bet you their ancestors were the tenant farmer whites working plots of land for slave owners. It's like people who say they lived past lives and everyone, it seems, was a queen or some such b.s.

Paganism can also be part of the aryan belief system - the nordic "white" gods - and these are the "gods" that the neo-nazis/klansmen like. So this is probably a stupid redneck neo-nazi wannbe who is so stupid even they don't want him. so he gets fucked up and drinks until he's blotto and gives out the rebel yell and votes for repukes who continue to screw him economically, but that's okay because this pagan redneck is allllll about independence.

/snark

[Flaxbee]

18. hadn't thought about the pagan /neonazi connection...

I live near Asheville, where almost all the pagans are Mother-Earth kinds of pagans, not racist idiots. Usually they're just against the strangling Bible Belt religious uniformity one can find in this area, and are environmentalists. I see pagan stickers side by side with organic food / save small farms / W = Worst President Ever, etc. stickers more often than not.

I'm not so much talking about the flag, I guess, as about Southern history. There are some symbols that are just too potent, obviously, such as the swastika, though it meant something very different before Hitler got hold of it. The Confederate flag is too potent, too. So maybe the Southerners who are proud of their heritage in a complicated, educated way should come up with another way of expressing that. There really is no way to retrieve that flag, just as there is no way to retrieve the swastika and restore its former symbolism. Because the Civil War sure as hell was about more than Knights in Shining Armor from the North fighting to save the slaves from the evil Southern Oppressors.

It's interesting, though, that Nazism grew out of a destroyed Germany; perhaps the instances of it in the South - the pagan part of this person's bumper stickers - arose from similar circumstances - the victors in a war leaving a place in ruins and expecting the vanquished population to just take it w/o resentment. It may be that if there hadn't been such grinding poverty in the South after the war, imposed by Northerners who had also made use of slaves for their own enrichment, that the horrible ugliness of deep South racism might never have been born, or perhaps not with such murderous consequences.

Revisionist history isn't always bad, you know. Or perhaps, going back to wade through the victor's propaganda and self-congratulation can be enlightening. We see the revisionist tendencies of our government, of Japan, etc., as bad, but the first or second writing of history isn't always correct. Not saying it isn't, not saying it is.

There really are no absolutes. The person with the bumper stickers is probably an idiot, or just hasn't thought any of it through. The mix of the flag plus the pagan stickers might be saying something awful that hadn't occurred to me.

So, I've opened a can of worms, and am not going to write any more about this subject - didn't mean to hijack the thread.

[RainDog]

22. no, no problem

I was just spouting off, as I can do from time to time about...things like the confederate flag and rednecks.

You're near Asheville? I have people (see, I am southern...) or rather, my sister and her hub have a place near Sylvan, but it's not year round. I really do not understand, tho, why some people buy land in the mtns and then build subdivisions in them for a second home. (their place is not in a suburb.) however, my bro and my b-i-l's 2 sisters have also bought places there.

I am, obviously, the black sheep poor child who never amounted to anything. that redneck has my car, in fact. he's the one who put the confederate flag decal there. :)

peace.

don't pay too much attention to my rants. if it weren't for the southern baptists and rednecks I wouldn't have anything to bitch about.

[Marrah_G]

12. Yup they do exist-

[sasquatch]

15. He might be a member of a hate group

I read on the southern poverty law center website that many hate groups are going to pagan religions and Odonism. Maybe he's part of one.

[YankeyMCC]

16. I remember reading that now that you mention it nt

[conscious evolution]

17. I saw a rebel flag

modified to look like a peace symbol the other day.
That was a wierd one to see.

[graywarrior]

19. This is all wRONg Paul's fault.

[sasquatch]

20. And Rev-Acts

:D

[graywarrior]

21. Her's too, the pagan wench.

And SPK's.