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From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: news.groups,talk.religion.newage
Subject: Re: Poll results on newsgroup name
Message-ID: <9020@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 20 Nov 89 03:01:14 GMT
References: <982@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <50495@oliveb.olivetti.com> <1989Nov10.023949.17957@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu> <20752@ut-emx.UUCP> <21086@ut-emx.UUCP>
Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney)
Organization: Eclectic Software, San Francisco
Lines: 47

It is ridiculous to call a poll decisive when, of 30 votes, no opinion
came close to achieving a majority, only a weak plurality (10 votes).

The decision to rename talk.religion.newage is probably a good one.
When the newage mailing list was created years ago, by me, "new age"
was taken as a broader and more inclusive term.  Since then, it has
come to mean only a single thread in the network of esoteric mystical
systems, and as such, many potential participants have come to feel
alienated by it.  But it would be foolish to replace this with another
term which has the same problem, such as "pagan", a term which hardly
embraces the eclectic group of esotericists which the original group
was aimed at.  It smacks of intolerance, a desire by one group to be
heard at the expense of all others.

What is even more ridiculous is that *all* the proposed alternatives,
pagan, neopagan, earth, wicca, and nature, are terms co-opted by this
same group, terms which explicitly exclude the sorts of wide-ranging
interests we had on the original mailing list, such as Freemasonry, Sri
Aurobindo, Thelema, Buddhism, and so forth (as well as Neo-Paganism, of
course).  The people behind this attempted act of exclusion do not
even pretend to want a wide, eclectic group; they want to hear
Neo-Paganism and nothing else.

So, as the founder of the talk.religion.newage group, I protest very
strongly the attempt to narrow its scope to Neo-Paganism exclusively.
However, I do understand and respect the idea of renaming it to some
term which more accurately reflects the originally inclusive intent of
the group.  I suggest that any of the following would be good
alternatives (ranked in the order of my preferences, from best to
worst):

talk.religion.magic
talk.religion.esoteric
talk.religion.eclectic
talk.religion.occult
talk.religion.ritual
talk.religion.mystical

But in any case, let's hear the end of this nonsense about ten votes
out of tens of thousands of people on the network defining the proper
direction of discussion.
-- 
Tim Maroney, Mac Software Consultant, sun!hoptoad!tim, tim@toad.com

"As I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of
 Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity.  I collected some of
 their Proverbs..." - Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"