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fallacy, i believe bifurcation. by saying we fall short of what the past druids were/did, i mean we don't qualify for the title. not that they were 'perfect', although one could argue that the 'perfect' meaning to the title would be what the past druids were/did. it does not inherently imply however that they were perfect.

again, the doctor analogy. i could call myself a doctor. but because i didn't go to med school, let alone graduate, it would not be accurate or justified. so then, to say that i fall short of the title of doctor does not then imply that all past doctors were perfect, just that i don't meet the requirements to claim the title.

strawman. nowhere do i say they knew everything. nowhere do i say that they knew 100% of everything there was to know. i'm saying they had specific functions in the society they were in. they were priests, lawgivers, judges, mediators, philosophers, bards, etc. they were the intelligista. they also had a specific training they had to go through, orchestrated by a Druid who had gone through somewhat the same training.

due to the fact that there are no longer any Druids, as they all died out or converted and their training program was lost, as well as the fact that one would have to meet all their statuses, how accurate are we to call ourselves by what they were known? we just don't meet all the requirements, and that's not a bad thing.

i hold us to the standard of, did we go through the training? do we meet the roles the druids had in their society?

again, nowhere do i say they knew everything. and i don't expect us to know everything either. what i expect is that if one is to claim a title, that they go through the necessary steps to aquire that title as to not insult the hard effort of those before us. i expect one to have respect for the work that is associated with the title they are assuming. by not going through the process of gaining that title, it insults those who have attained it by saying that their effort was pointless as one didn't need to go through their training to earn that title.

that's just it. because we don't know everything that qualified for being a Druid, we can't label ourselves as they did. so much has been lost that it's impossible now to validly claim their title.

essentially, what the Druids did/were is what the title encompasses. anything less than what they were/did is not living up to the title.

i don't think every one of them knew everything about being a Druid, but it's hard to escape the idea that they were taught, trained, and perhaps initiated by a Druid. something which we definitively lack as they are all dead.

so are Hellenic Recons, but of the ancient Greeks rather than the Druids. they don't claim to be of the Eleusinian Mysteries or Vestal Virgins however. if they did, i'd have the same argument with them, but in a different forum.

true. given how we don't know too much on what the Druids believed, my natural recourse is to rely on their job roles.

however, upon further thought, can we extend that the opposite way? was one really a Druid if they didn't play the part of intelligista? were they really a Druid if they didn't advise kings and queens? were they really a Druid if they weren't philosophers? it wasn't just that they qualified for those titles, but they played a part in their community.

regardless, i consider their jobs as important as their beliefs and practices. they are all interconnected. one without the other still does not meet the title qualifications.

as a side note. being a warrior in this specific culture didn't necessarily dictate 'who' one was, but rather what they did, which is essentially the same argument i'm attempting. i'm not saying the title is who we are, but rather what we do.

i'm not saying they do know everything they should. but can one claim being a doctor without that process? legitimately?

and knock-offs still cannot legally claim the brand of what they are trying to imitate, no matter how close they come to the original. i look at it as being truthful, to myself and to those i am dealing with, as well as respect to those who did go through the process. Caesar reports the 'schooling' as 20 years. to an extent, we could compare that to our educations system, adding 7 more years of college. i'm not going to claim to have a bachelor's degree if i haven't gone through college. that would demean those who have gone through college to get that degree, saying to them that their effort was pointless as i got it more simply.

that's just it. as with most of the information regarding the Druids, we don't know. we don't know everything involved in their training, in what precise qualifications they had other than the job functions. and we won't know until we develop a time machine. that information is lost to us.

i honestly don't know enough about the Celtic culture and Gaeilge as a language to come up with a title that would encompass what we do today. personally, i just refer to myself as a polytheistic pagan that makes active and physical sacrifices to the three kindreds.

one could argue then why is it some persist in holding it if titles mean so little.

and that is exactly why i question people using this title, or at least one of the reasons. it leads to confusion.

in the event that you switched some roadsigns, it would be inflicting confusion and frustation on another individual, because you would be using a 'system' that the world was not brought up on to understand. language is just a way to communicate and understand what another is attempting to say. if you're using a word a different way than what others were raised to believe in the meaning, there will be confusion.

again, i will also say that it can be an insult to those that did go through the process. it's telling them that they didn't need to go through that expended effort to gain the title, and that essentially their energy was horridly spent on something so frivolous. it's saying that the time and energy they spent was meaningless, a capricious waste of time.

how can it change/evolve when it's been dead for centuries? if there was no 'original' to derive and evolve from, there is no evolution then.

what's so bad about calling oneself a Celtic Recon? an Eclectic Pagan? a Celtic Pagan?

due to the fact that we no longer have druids who had the tradition passed down, as it was outlawed and stamped out, that is why i say 'nothing to derive from'. because the original is long dead, it can't evolve.

consider the Do do. because it is extinct, we can never know what it might have evolved into. there is nothing there to change. while we might have research to know what they looked like, some of their habits, and their general place of residency, we still wouldn't be able to have a bird that exists that would be an 'evolution' of this species. the original died off.

the information we have gleamed from the Celts and their scholarly class is minimal, especially compared to what we have on the Romans and the Greeks. because the Celts were not fans of writing anything down but the most obvious to them, we will generally only have an ethnocentric 'review' of their culture, i.e. Caesar's accounts, Tacitus', Pliny the Elder's, etc. an outside interpretation can change, but it can never be considered the original, thus cannot be an evolution of the original.

i agree that we are trying our best to recreate the specific class of the Druids, and attempting to fit it into modern day standards (no public blood sacrifices and the like). but because we are nowhere near being what they were and likely won't ever be due to the lack of information that has been passed on, i believe calling ourselves something we have not achieved would be like putting the cart before the horse. it just doesn't work.

personally, i have struggled much with what to call myself. i've attempted to come up with a succinct name that brings understanding to many on what my beliefs entail. because we don't have a full and detailed catalog of what the Druids believed, using that word to describe our practices and beliefs would not work as we would still have to describe them seperately. so then, i figure, what is the point of using a title to describe ourselves if we still have to describe ourselves in detail?

the above is exactly why i eventually just put it down to, "i'm a polytheistic pagan (depending on my audience, i might say 'hard polytheist") that makes active and physical sacrifices to the three kindreds; the ancestors, the nature spirits, and the shining & cthonic ones." yes, it doesn't cover most of what i believe, but it takes the most important and describes it in a short manner.

my contention to the use of the title also extends to those not practicing a Celtic heritage/culture/religion. because ADF extends itself to other cultures that fit into the Indo-European mold (Celtic, Norse, Roman, Hellenic, Slavic, Vedic), there are a number of individuals who do not practice with the Celtic deities. the Druids were exclusively Celtic, although the Vedics did have a similar role met in the Brahmans (as an aside, however, they had their own exclusive name).

a tittle is just that a tittle. each group uses different tittles for different positions....or ranks. just because in one group you have been made a priestess does not mean you really are on the same level of understanding as another priestess of another group. priestess means different things to different people just like druid. it is only a word. just because (lets call them neo-druids) neo-druids want to call them self that it does not make them less druid then the next. in your group that is the name you have chosen to use. unless they are doing baneful things then what is there to worry about really. i personally used term eclectic Pagan but what does that mean really? it means what i and my group make it mean.

I appreciate the point you're tryign to make, but I must say that I think it's unfair to compare a religion, a thought, a philosophy to an animal. Things like religion and philosophy are things that are always in peoples minds. They just choose to resurface at different times, in different way, in different words to different people. It's something that grows within. In cases like the Do-do's, outside forces were effecting it and causing iy yo become extinct. I guess oyu could argue that Druidsm is extinct, in the sesne that you're talking about, but not compleatly. There is still that inner idea in some persons mind somplace waiting to resurface. Perhaps this resurfacing is the type of Druadic religion that is practiced nowadays. It's still the same meat it's just got a different skin on it. I hope that made sense...

why? how is that unfair? the argument being made was that Druidry evolved. how can it evolve if the orignal died off before it had the chance to evolve from the inside?

except dogma and practice define which religion someone belongs to. i could say i worship a three headed goddess, sing to the moon, regularly place my mentrual blood on an altar made of cat bones, claim Yeshua was a figment of an overactive imagination, and claim to be a Christian. am i one? certainly not, because i don't believe in the defining dogma of Christianity; to believe that Yeshua died for my sins and to accept his sacrifice.

my point is that all religions have established dogma, beliefs, or practices that characterize the believer as a follower of that religion. since we don't have the defining features of Druidry to examine (as many of the features observed were also prevalent in other religions), how can we define ourselves as followers of that relgion?

if they don't meet the defining features, they have no claim to a title.

same thing happened with Druids. it was explicitly outlawed in Britain. due to outside forces, they were forced to either convert, or die.

while i admit there might have been practices that overflowed into Celtic Christianity, we don't have the resources to pick which ones they were and if they were defining features.

we have no way of showing that the meat under the skin is the same. therein lies the problem and much of the debate.

one could say Mithraism isn't dead because people know about it. the fact remains that that cult died off long ago without people passing on the knowledge. same principal really.

unifying beliefs and practices make a religion. i think you're confusing it with the belief itself.

and what if we have no record of what there was to follow? specifically, what distinguishes it as a seperate entity from other religions that share many of the same concepts?

belief does not inherently mean religion. one can have a belief with no religion.

the logic of this argument is not based upon the definition of religion.

and all the dna we have is damaged. we don't have a full source to pull from (in the dna or the religion), thus anything we create will be a cross-species, fully creating a new species, thus, a new name.

and if they keep the defining characteristics of the previous religion, then they get to keep the name. they just become a different sect/branch of that religion, ie Catholocism and Protestantism from Christianity, Shiite and Suni from Islam, Hasidic(sp?) and Orthodox from Judaism, etc.

1. fallacy. there are more factors than just the religion that would get a person from today stoned way back when, assuming we can gauge the reaction to them correctly.

2. Christians in 28 AD were being stoned/executed.

3. Christians weren't considered Christians until 30 AD. in all sense, they were just heretical Jews. until Paul and others insisted that to follow Yeshua one didn't need to observe Kosher and Leviticus, it wasn't considered that seperate because it wasn't that different. it still had most of the defining features.

Christianity broke away by declaring that the savior of the Jewish religion came, that Kosher was no longer needed, the laws of Moses and Leviticus were now null, excepting those that fit into the Law of Agape, and that they must preach their word to all who would hear.

and if the distinquishing qualities of whatever is left is vastly different from the original, it's something completely different, thus, a different title.

i haven't said that i would wish Druidry to still be in existance as it was. straw man. quit putting words in my posts that i didn't type.

we actually know precious little about what Druidry entailed. while we know more about it than 2 decades ago, it's still not enough to find distinguishing traits that differentiated them from other Indo-European religions, other than local.

if it were still around, we would know more about what it entailed than we do now. i don't understand how you can come up with the opposite of that statement... confused

that's just it though. memorization was key. one was "graded" on their memorization skills.

Druids had to know at least 100 legends/stories/lores. they had to know the geneology perfectly. they were schooled for years to memorize every word, every inflection.

then it was outlawed in some areas. there was forced conversion, or death. the passing on of their exact lore was put to a halt and it was adapted to a Christian nature in some places.

because they didn't write any of their religious/spiritual practices down, we have no clue what they did, except if one were to believe outside sources, as that's all that exists detailing some of their practices.

it's not just that people stopped passing it down. it's that there was only one way they did, and that was fully clamped down on. in Britain in 50 AD, people had the legal right to kill a Druid on sight.

even more support to my argument then. being as how much of what we've gathered is ethnocentric sources detailing certain practices, including their own commentaries, we still have less information than if Druidry had continued to live on.