Before Nightingale came out of the Broom Closet (cheering for the Hollyhead Harpies at the time, probably) most of my experience with neo-Pagans came from a few friends who dabbled in it in high school and gave it up, and one girl in college who.... My God. I mean, where do I start?
She almost burned down a dorm building at our college trying to do a ritual, and then ran around the building outside trying to blame other people for it. She would yell at professors, yell at students, ignore any one's dissenting opinion, and if you disagreed with her on anything (anything. No matter how polite or well reasoned you were) she would claim religious intolerance. She also stalked several people I knew, for good measure, and did a whole bunch of smaller annoying things. Mainly she was just one of the most arrogant insufferable people I've ever met. I tried to be nice to her for the longest time as at first I felt bad she was so disliked.... But that was also only met with disdain and cruelty from her.
Needless to say, I got off on the wrong foot, and there were many things I said about Paganism in front of Nightingale that I felt I needed to apologize for later, but which all stemmed largely from this one example of a completely hellishly annoying human being.
So I thought it would be interesting to start a thread to hear stories about one individual who muddied your view of a religion before someone else changed it. If you still hate that religion, well, not quite what I'm talking about here.
So, has anyone ever given you such a bad view of a religion that you made a judgement about it before learning it could be different? How so?
She almost burned down a dorm building at our college trying to do a ritual, and then ran around the building outside trying to blame other people for it. She would yell at professors, yell at students, ignore any one's dissenting opinion, and if you disagreed with her on anything (anything. No matter how polite or well reasoned you were) she would claim religious intolerance. She also stalked several people I knew, for good measure, and did a whole bunch of smaller annoying things. Mainly she was just one of the most arrogant insufferable people I've ever met. I tried to be nice to her for the longest time as at first I felt bad she was so disliked.... But that was also only met with disdain and cruelty from her.
Needless to say, I got off on the wrong foot, and there were many things I said about Paganism in front of Nightingale that I felt I needed to apologize for later, but which all stemmed largely from this one example of a completely hellishly annoying human being.
So I thought it would be interesting to start a thread to hear stories about one individual who muddied your view of a religion before someone else changed it. If you still hate that religion, well, not quite what I'm talking about here.
So, has anyone ever given you such a bad view of a religion that you made a judgement about it before learning it could be different? How so?
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