I honestly wasn’t going to comment on this again until the show. Honestly. But then I came across the further commentary of Taylor Ellwood and Aine and the real pièce de résistance which I’m going to be addressing from here on out (the other links were just a special kind of special so I wanted to share them) this post called Sippin’ On Dat Haterade (Or: Why Pagans Can Be Worse Than Fundamentalists).

Yup. I’ll let that one sink in for a second.

No, you did read that right. Polytheists making a bunch of blog posts saying, “I don’t think honoring comic book characters is really the same thing as ancient hero worship,” and maybe a couple fed-up “Oh my god, I can’t believe how stupid these people are being!” screeds is worse than fundamentalism.

Look, we all know in the post 9/11 world that when you drop the f-bomb you aren’t talking about some red-faced Southern gentleman letting his mad oratorical skills fly from the pulpit or a Chasid sporting curls and a bitchin’ fur hat as he hurries home for Shabbos.

No.

When you call someone a fundamentalist you’re suggesting that they’re of a type with folks who set off shrapnel bombs in crowded discotheques and board buses full of children with dynamite strapped to their chests. People who beat their sons until they’re unrecognizable because they have the taint of Sodom in them. People who cut off their daughters’ clitorises. People who riot in the streets over Hollywood movies. People who make other people disappear in the middle of the night to send a message to all those uppity minorities that are encroaching on and assailing them.

You think we’re actually worse than those people because we have said that we don’t believe in your imaginary friends?

Fuck you.

No, seriously. Fuck you.

Learn to debate without resorting to ad hominems and other conversation-derailing tactics. Get over the fact that people are going to disagree with you, especially if you hold unconventional beliefs. Just because we think you’re wrong doesn’t necessarily mean that you are. If you were secure in your beliefs it wouldn’t matter to you what we believed about your beliefs. And lastly, don’t insult the actual victims of such evil men by throwing that word around so casually. You aren’t being persecuted because someone else refuses to validate your existence.

Grow the fuck up people.

Or don’t. I don’t really care.

Once everyone’s done bitching about this some of us are going to go back and offer cultus to gods and heroes and some of us are gonna go back to writing sigils in our cum on glossy photos of Justin Bieber or whatever passes for pop occulture and chaos majik these days. (I may be mistaken on the specifics — all I know about these practices come from the pages of Grant Morrison and Alan Moore comics. Good thing comics are full of all kinds of magical and mythical truths, huh?)

I’d say that there are already clear winners and losers here, but when some of us can’t tell the difference between this:

And this:

This:

And this:

There are no winners.