Suppose you're strolling across the meadow on some nice moonlit night and you encounter a bunch of naked people dancing around a bubbling cauldron. Weird, you say? Well, perhaps. Now change the scenery. We're in a magnificent edifice richly festooned with ornate carvings, statues, and stained glass windows portraying all sorts of mythical figures. The ritual begins with ponderously vestmented dignitaries carrying awkward ceremonial gadgets up the aisle, while we're all singing some far-out fantasy song to the accompaniment of a slightly out-of-tune pipe organ with the stops set to Heavy Groan. About halfway through the ritual we'll all stand up and recite some creed about a ludicrously convoluted mini-pantheon that some poor unsuspecting virgin somehow found herself hopelessly mixed up with. The Grand Climax of the ritual will be the part where we all line up at the altar to be served tasteless tidbits of stale bread and cheap wine while listening to a pompous pronouncement that these miraculous morsels are the body and blood of some dude who got executed a long time ago. Now we're talking Weird! I don't know of any other religion that's got Christianity beat for Total Weird.

I don't know whether witches do strange things with eye of newt and toe of frog. I'm sure my misconceptions are probably as erroneous as Shakespeare's, so I'll let the witches tell their own story via the links at the bottom of this page. Whatever they do, I'm sure I've got no room to call them weird, because I'm a hard core Christian and I probably can't be reformed. I attend the Episcopal Church more or less regularly, sing in the choir, and participate in various other church activities. The rest of my family is just as bad as I am, if not indeed more so. My late father-in-law was a bishop in the Episcopal Church, my wife is church treasurer (in fact I almost think she runs the whole church), my son is an acolyte, and sometimes I think we spend more time at church than at home.

From my visits to various witches' web sites, I get the distinct impression that most of them are trying to promote loving kindness into a world awash in hatred and cruelty. If that is true, then I embrace them with open arms as fellow Believers in the One True Faith regardless of trivial details of their theology. I wish I could embrace some of my fellow (so-called) Christians the same way. The purpose of a theology and the associated ritual is, as I see it, to bring us together in fellowship, so that as a group we can promote more loving kindness than we could do individually. If I should ever encounter a group of witches doing whatever it is that they do, I hope I shall have proper respect for what they're trying to accomplish.

Let's see if I can dream up a ritual as weird as Christianity. Maybe we could have the congregation stand at attention in ranks, saluting a basket of belly-button lint and reciting a creed about how God is really a three foot tall hunchback with green teeth and purple antlers and a nose so big he needs a periscope to see around it and he's wearing a pink polka-dotted polyester leisure suit and hanging upside down from a phone wire in Omaha and playing five rubber harmonicas at once and ... nah, that'll never do. Sorry folks, I just don't have the imagination to match those great minds at the Council of Nicaea back in 325 A.D.