(question author's name removed)
unfortunately some people are very hard-headed.. particularly when it
comes to religion... and technically under the strictest of Christian
beliefs, it doesn't matter what you do/worship... if it's not the
Christian god it's the devil in disguise... This can make the life of
any non-Christian hard, but it becomes doubly hard when you are fighting
a misconception.
The first thing I've learned is not to use a strong approach. If you
aggressively snap at someone calling you a satanist "Am not!" it escalates
into a shouting match which goes nowhere fast, and it makes you look all
the more hateful and hate worthy in their eyes. This makes a calm,
relaxed, composed approach very necessary, which is INCREDIBLY hard when
someone is screaming at you, but not impossible. If they start screaming
at you and you remain calm they will sooner or later wind up looking or
feeling foolish for such a rash reaction.. this can tend to take 15
minutes though....
The second tip I have is not to attack the person or their beliefs, at
least not directly. If you tell someone that they are just spouting
Christian BS they will dismiss you very rapidly.
I find that the best way of getting a person to realize they are
believing something which isn't true is to question them about why they
believe that, and carefully debate some of the smaller points without
making them look stupid... then working up to the larger picture.. the
only problem with this is that it requires an awfully large amount of
knowledge on your part in order to be able to make very educated
responses to their misconceptions.. which you don't have.
Entering into a debate which you are inadequately prepared for can often
do more harm than good, as they will most likely be able to out-debate
you and wind up justifying their own beliefs to themselves by "winning"
the argument. This is also not a good option, so I would recommend not
getting into a serious debate unless you really have the knowledge base
for it.
However, since you yourself are not Wiccan you have an option we
don't... you can take a position which makes it so you don't have to
outwardly defend Wicca ... you can take a stand similar to "Well
they do have laws in their religion prohibiting harm to others, so they
can't be all evil, but they are going about their worship in a way which
I don't wish to practice"... It's better to win an argument which makes
us look "not-all bad but a little misguided about god" than to lose one
which tries to make us look "all good" and wind up justifying the view
that we are evil... the weaker argument may not make us appear as we
truly are, but it does help soften the rough edges.. study some of our
ethical laws and always try to ague well inside the edges of your
knowledge, an argument may rapidly get past your knowledge level if you
argue along the outside edge of your knowledge.
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