@snacks What a pointless thing to say. Your philosophy is a joke. You pride yourself on something as insignificant as riding a bicycle or as random as having been in a near miss traffic accident, yet your actual lifestyle is the same as everyone else on here. You are not meaningfully distinct from the rest of us, or more courageous than the rest of us, because of minor differentiations in your modern lifestyle.

Furthermore this has absolutely, literally, nothing at all to do with religion. Do you seriously think being a pagan is about braggadacio? It's about having an anthropomorphicised pantheon. That is what makes it meaningfully distinct from animism. The point is that the many gods express a range of archetypes that encompass the plurality of the human experience. Some of them are real tough guys, yeah. Others are maidens, or physically weak magical twinks, or passionate musicians, or serene maintainers.

How fucking dare you accuse me of strawmanning you after what you have said?

@snacks I have a bike too you moron LOL I just don't labour under the idiotic delusion that it's a viable option as my only means of personal transport.

@snacks Fuck you, you retarded ape, you literally called me a little bitch and belittled my religious experience. You don't get to gaslight me about whose fault this was.

@snacks Because your """"argument"""" is that a person can be disqualified from being a TRVE pagan if they aren't sufficiently athletic. Again have you ever actually ridden a bike in the darkness on a country road? It is very difficult, much more so than in daylight. I used to do it to make physical training more challenging, but stopped after I almost got hit by a car - another hazard of night cycling. It's meaningfully distinct from regular cycling for a reason lol

@snacks And I thought you were an intelligent person? Go on then, tell me how to transport a rabbit on a bicycle without bracing it against either your back or (if the bike has room) the rear bar. You think that's meaningfully distinct from putting it in a backpack?

Have you ever actually transported a pet? Have you ever taken an animal to the vet before?

@mia @snacks This approach has never fixed anything!

@snacks

> Or when you are transporting a pet?
You really assume you can't carry more than a backpack on a bicycle or what? Public transport allows pets too btw

@snacks more like why do you think it's acceptable to PUT A PET IN A BACKPACK LMFAO

@snacks You do realise that you have permanently destroyed a friendship over nothing but being butthurt, right?

But if you want a real answer to your posturing, I don't know WHAT you think paganism is about. Do you think a disabled person doesn't qualify as a pagan?

@snacks Holy fucking shit you are ABSOLUTELY SEETHING and everything you said here is a nonsensical cope or a highly dependent personal anecdote ("I live next to a Christmas tree store" is the ULTIMATE one though, but "you'd need a boat" is more of a non-sequitur.)

You really straight up called me a "little bitch" over MAKING THE CASE THAT A CAR IS A BETTER WAY TO TRAVEL IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. Jesus wept.

I'm so disappointed in you. You're being absolutely pathetic.

@snacks No, you just moved from the motte to the bailey.

Actually, pacifism is a good analogy. It only keeps your own hands clean. Technologies should not be partisan issues.

@snacks So what? It doesn't change the fact that you need them, does it? What about when you need to move something like a Christmas tree or a desktop PC, then? What about when you need to travel hundreds of miles at a second's notice? Or you need to go somewhere in the middle of the night? Or you need to go somewhere in the middle to a storm? Or you need to go somewhere outside of the public transportation network? Or when you need to rush someone to hospital? Or when you are injured? Or when you are transporting a pet?

I have done every one of these things multiple times in my life, often multiple times in a WEEK, and every last one of them hard requires a car. The only one that can be whatbouted is long distance travel and only so long as you are covered by the rail network.

It's a fucking fantasy bro, it's just as bad as people who argue that they "don't need" to own their own things because they happen to exist in a momentary bubble where being a Netflix dependent pod living rentoid is enough, or "don't need" to take control of their tech and stop being dependent on proprietary ecosystems. That's WHY I brought up trucks, because of the old trucker maxim "if you bought it, we brought it." I can't begin to count the abuse I received while trucking from both unthinking normies who think a truck is just a big car AND privileged ecocels who are wilfully blind to the fact that trucks brought them their iPhone. It's effectively the same fallacy as Manicheism where they think picking fruit is a sin so they just have other people pick it for them.

@snacks Okay, when you need to move house and you have to call a big boy with a truck to move all your shit for you, why don't you just strap it to your bike and ride there instead?

Face it, our species needs almost every vehicle type we have ever invented, the idea of living life in single shopping bag loads is an urbane fantasy

@snacks

Unless they are soy euromutt bikecel Germans

YEAH SEE, GERMANS GET IT

@zonk I unironically wish you luck.

>Christians castrated Europeans, so I had to look elsewhere for the gods to undo the curse of my baptism.

I would, however, like to amend this to point out that Odin is a very, VERY strong exception to this, as a god of human sorcerers.

I just had a lovely walk in the woods for the first time in months. It was so nice to get back to nature and to take in the birdsong, the absence of human noise and the vibrant, wet greenery.

It brought to mind my days as a desperate neopagan, after I'd had my first spiritual experience but before I had cultivated myself and become attuned, back when I was desperate to feel "it" again, chasing a spiritual high that I couldn't get back to. Back then I would leave small sacrifices deep in the woods - food that the animals could safely eat/that would biodegrade properly. I would also make small sacrifices of my own blood.

Things are very different now, and it was illuminating to see and feel those same woods again through new eyes. Christians castrated Europeans, so I had to look elsewhere for the gods to undo the curse of my baptism. I had got used to looking past the timeless gods of the forest.

Tens of thousands of years ago, my ancestors were walking those same woodlands. Their understanding of the spirits of the woods was far beyond what I can hope to attain. They threw sacrificial objects, mostly metal tools and weapons, into bodies of water to give them to the spirits. I am a modern man and I can't hope to recapture their mindset fully, but today, I was able to feel the old gods again.

@emsquared