Hellenismos and the Young

It's been awhile since I took up blogging, but things are a bit chaotic and up in the air here.

I'm a member of a Hellenismos forum. Recently, we've acquired a few new members that are younger practitioners, and while I personally have no problem with them, there are a few things that I hope time and experience will address:

I feel that blaming all modern Christians for the past centuries of tyranny under Christian leaders is wrong. It serves to further alienate our very small religion, and does not allow the healing that is needed to return to a state of balanced grace (kharis) with the rest of humanity and the Gods. The fact of the matter is that there are many good Christians, especially now at this point in history. Calling for us to hinder and attack Christianity head-on is not only extremist, but also damaging to our own individual spirits. I hope that experience teaches these young practitioners that practicing a certain path does not have to mean you must be against other paths.

There is also no need to proselytize our religion. While for the young it may seem important to feel that you're not the only one practicing a certain path, coercing those who may not be suited to the same path is rarely a good idea. Hellenismos is not a religion that you can just shut your brain off and follow. It requires a lot of study, and more importantly a lot of daily household practice. These should be our driving force, not the quest to "fill the pews". If we focus our efforts on increasing our numbers, we lose focus on what's important about our spirituality.

We also have no need for a symbol. Many new practitioners want a symbol to rally behind, or to show off their spiritual path to others. The ancient Greeks did not have anything like this. They had no word for religion, because they believed that their daily lives and their spiritual lives should be one and the same. We also could not condense Hellenismos enough that any one symbol would work for its entirety. Ancient Greece was not a unified nation, but a collection of individual city-states with their own patron deities and subcultures. The Gods that made up the pantheon of Athens were not necessarily the same Gods in the pantheons of Sparta, Crete, or Thrace. There was also about a thousand years worth of ancient practice that grew and evolved between the Minoan Age and the Roman conquest. No single symbol could possibly define our diverse religion, not that having a symbol is particularly important anyway.

Well, I'm going to have to cut this post short because other things are going on now. In conclusion, I would just like to wish the best for the young Hellenists and hope that experience gives them the wisdom to practice with reason and grace.