What now?

Well, the contest is finally over!  You won't have to deal with me telling you to vote, yet again, haha!

The Pagan Moms in the final spots are:

#1 - Confessions of a Pagan Soccer Mom

#4 - Pagan Mom Blog

#7 - Witch Mom Blog - Parenting by the Light of the Moon

#8 - Tales of a Kitchen Witch

#9 - Hearth-N-Home

#10 - Witchy Mama

#11 - The Teflon Cauldron

#12 - One Witch's Wonderland

#13 - Earth Mother Musings

#16 - Pagan Presence: Staying current with the Witching World

#22 - Something Oddly

#25 - Aoibheal's Lair

This contest was...something else, wasn't it?  Angela at Pagan Mom Blog does a great job of describing the feelings in the aftermath, and asks an important question.  What now?

We have all, in recent weeks, looked to what connected us as opposed to what divides us.  I'm not just talking about Pagans.  I'm talking about the Christians who voted for the Pagan blogs in the protest of intolerance.  I'm talking about the Pagans who voted for Christian, Jewish and Muslim blogs in the contest because they deserved it.  We looked past ourselves; and suddenly we saw a whole new community becoming possible.

A community made up of different faiths.

What does that say about us?  That perhaps, we can truly all get along with one another?!  *Gasp!* Heresy!

Over the mast few thousand years and probably more, there have been in general two kinds of wars fought:  Wars of Expansion and Wars of Religion, and sometimes the two were intertwined.  No one needs to remind Witches of the perils of being different, and no one needs to remind Christians or Jewish people or Muslims.

Before the Christians burned people as witches for Heresy, the pagan Romans threw them to the lions.
The pagan Egyptians enslaved Jewish peoples.  Christians and Muslims have slaughtered each other for centuries.  People of all religions have held on to these very things for all these centuries!  We shouldn't be looking to what certain peoples did to our ancestors.  We shouldn't be acting like children poking each other in the back seat, "He touched me!" "She touched me first!"

We truly need to preserve this feeling of community we have found; the interfaith community.  We have so much in common, and we need to look to those commonalities instead of our differences.  We are all people, we all deserve fair treatment, and we all deserve respect.

So, thank you to the people who voted for the blogs on merit - regardless of faith.

Goddess Bless,

Stacy