The whole thing of religious `Them & us’ has come up elsewhere on my wall. It relates in part to the old Witches being persecuted by Christians. So am writing this post (*1).
The inference is that modern wiccans who practices Wicca & Witchcraft as a religious / neo pagan path.. are carrying some old `racially’ suppressed trauma of their ancestors being persecuted..and have an inherent `fear/ dislike/ apprehension/ animosity (take your pick’ or some similar feeling) against Christians!.
Truth of the matter is.. many modern witches and wiccans actually can’t prove their own lineage extends that far to the witches of the old.. I argue that there is no such `racial memory’ and that it’s just a fad..a presumed feeling.. because people love to have just historical clues and reasons for carrying causes.. (we can just believe in a cause and carry it.. we don’t’ need a historical justification or reason or validation).
Being an initiated Wiccan & Witch ( now pushing past 21 years of it..) sometimes I get the feeling I am expected to carry these `party lines’ of the `persecuted witches’.. a feeling of `them and us’ against Christians.
Am sorry to disappoint all.. but as Hindu I grew up not just going to the Temple with my family in my boyhood days, but also to adjacent Christian Churches. In fact we’d pick and choose what Gods we went to to pray for.. One example would be, when i had a strange mole on my finger, i was advised to go to the St.Anthony’s church for 7 weeks and pray, take a bit of salt & pepper, and crawl under the stand where a certain St.Anthony statue was. I did that and the mole disappeared long before the 7th week, though I completed the 7 weeks. It can be said that was my first practice of self delusion, prayer or heaven forbid.. Magic!(*2).
If anything I should have a prejudice against Buddhists..because it’s the Sinhalese people who were majority Buddhists who have caused racial violence against my Tamil / Hindu people..and murdered thousands.. back in Sri Lanka.. I’ve lived through not one but two of those episodes…running for our lives each time.
Yet I do my best to educate myself and weed out any hidden prejudices that may have developed as a result of those direct personal life and death episodes…which in theory should make me hate every Buddhist on the planet. So moral of my personal tale is.. enough of this `them and us crap’ !
I now don’t give a frack about what religion did to what other religion way before my time..
None of the `Witches’ living in our times have ever been persecuted to death enmass for their religions by another.. (save for a few individual harassment cases) .
As someone who actually has been persecuted for his religion, I think my perspective and aspirations should stand higher than these petty them-us arguments. As such, I do not ever want to see it or hear it in my presence from my open minded friends..
If I can be a hybrid of so many beliefs and not explode or go insane…then there is no excuse for anyone else(*3)!
-Mani Navasothy
Footnotes:
*1: Am NOT a Ph.D in English, and nor do i have to worry about composing a thesis here that’s gotta hold water.. These are just my simple human sentiments.. typed in one go without editing (Thank you Mercury direct!). So please do see beyond the specifics and to the message I am trying to convey..
*2: There are other incidents of Hindu priests advising the family of rope & water magic for finding out lost family dog, and one drunken father cursing someone with water ..and many a sessions with my grandmother who did all manner of potions, lotions, wafting of incense, flames and shamanic spitting to ward of evil eyes, o the local soothsayer lady who went into a trance and channeled Goddess Kali.. and advised devotees.
On the harsher side, I have as a boy just about sneaked a peep at a new Kali temple being consecrated with many animal sacrifices..and seeing their blood run in a small stream past me! (This is why it makes me extremely concerned when people purport to worship Goddess Kali in the west as if she’s some pussycat in their pocket.. Would they do so with the terrible Sekhmet who had an equal bloodthirsty mythical origin in Ancient Egypt? I think not.
*3: Am sadden to hear that there’s even a divide of `Them & Us’ …from a Hereditary Witch’s point of view, towards rets of the Wiccans.
QuantumPhoenix 
I am the same as you. There is valid philosophical criticism of religion with no animosity, and then there is the ones who attack with much venom. The witches killed were likely not witches at all and they are certainly not Wiccans. I wish it would die, but Western culture is still working out it’s kinks.
I am glad you mentioned Kali ma. She is one of my favorite goddesses and she is definitely not a benevolent mother goddess that many try to make her out to be. (She does have that side, but it’s not her only side.) She devours time, so she can be very dangerous.