When I studied for a degree in Coventry, England, I spent a short time talking to a girl who claimed to be a white witch. Unlike the traditional image of witches she was as fair to look as woman could be. At the time I was involved in Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, still 6 - 8 years after the event, trying to find an end to pain and mental turmoil induced by events in Denmark.

She was just as pleasant and welcoming as the best in any of the other faiths I came across.

Martin Luther King said that he believed people should be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. If you apply that logic to modern Pagans, Wicca practitioners and White Witches then you would be hard pushed to find a reason not to treat them with the same respect you give to your family, race or followers of your religion.

Some might argue that you don’t know what they are actually doing or get worked up into a frenzy like Luther over a people’s revolt, urging death be brought down on them and of course in doing so, rather strangely justifying the ancient Roman spitefulness to Christians.

Even if you believed anybody not believing in your God must by definition be a perpetrator of evil, you could equally say, looking at child soldiers and the horrors they have committed, like cutting off people’s lips etc, that they should be killed before they kill you. However, it has been shown that child soldiers can be brought back to school and live gentle lives. Thus there is never justification for attacking others because of their religion. people must always be free to pursue their faiths.

Sadly both Jesus and Islam seem to damn apostasy, the leaving of their faiths. In being as this they demonstrate an evil born perhaps of ambition or paranoia.

If God threw Satan out of heaven, as is claimed, for being rebellious then he has shown far less compassion than those who work with child soldiers. Satan is after all, if God created all things, his own creation. Having done that casting deed it is almost impossible to see how God can recover since he is now always to be seen as an abuser of his child, Satan, who may have only had a thought like the founders of the USA, that all religions should live in freedom. At worst, his needs may only be the kind of treatment that perhaps a television super nanny might come up with for children with whom parents have lost the battle with and cannot control.

The Judao-Islamic  attitude to the family is either still entrenched in uneducated manners or will never escape it since it clings to proven unnecessary methods such as “Spare the rod and spoil the child”

A contemporary of Darwin and also developing ideas on evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, like Isaac Newton, was as well as a scientist also interested in spirituality. My own opinion is that Darwinism in the worst case could transfer to the spiritual world and indeed God may in fact be the human idea of the ultimate alpha male. That is why I advocate Buddho-Darwinism, since it concerns survival in the material world but transfers compassion to the spiritual world. The spiritual world may not be the world of Victorian gentlemen scientists that Wallace may have considered. It may be as violent as a war between religions or kings.

We should be optimistic and look to evolution of civilisation, (as a solution to the spiritual world), where we do not constantly force ourselves on others.

Witches and Pagans appear not to force themselves on others and I have little evidence to suggest they feel they need to.