Asatru Folk Assembly - February 01, 2021


Focus on the Folk part 3 October 2007


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

145.62103

Word count

1,267

Sentence count

64

Harmful content

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 I think networking is important. If you've been given the gift of speech, if you've been
00:00:10.280 given the gift of being able to teach others, then take advantage of your gifts. Hold workshops.
00:00:20.680 We all have our daily nine to five that we all have to do, but we also need to pay service
00:00:26.860 to the gods and the goddesses and the folk.
00:00:29.260 So if you have a library in your town
00:00:33.360 or a, I hate this, a New Age bookstore
00:00:37.480 where other like-minded, open-minded individuals
00:00:43.020 will come and attend, hold a workshop.
00:00:47.460 Get literature from, if you belong to an organization,
00:00:51.680 take literature.
00:00:52.380 Take literature on Osatru itself.
00:00:55.160 Have a number of books available so that people can come there and say, how's this book?
00:01:00.660 Or is this the book that I should start out with?
00:01:03.100 Be teachers.
00:01:04.540 And we've got to all be AsaTru Ambassadors.
00:01:08.360 And by doing so, we will spread this religion of ours and let people know that we're out there.
00:01:13.760 But it's important.
00:01:14.640 It goes back to networking.
00:01:16.100 We have the ability now.
00:01:17.200 We've got the tools to network.
00:01:18.800 And by networking, we can bring people to us. 0.99
00:01:22.780 And we've got to stop searching in places like Pagan Pride days for Osachruers. 0.95
00:01:36.360 Because, this is my own opinion, I'm going to preface it with that, 1.00
00:01:42.820 but the people that you find at Pagan Pride have already found a path.
00:01:47.360 and to take them from that path into Asatru,
00:01:52.020 they may come over, but they're also going to be bringing a little of that baggage with them.
00:01:56.880 We want to attract people who have been looking for us,
00:02:01.080 didn't know what we were called, didn't know what the religion was called,
00:02:04.000 but they're sincere and they are looking for a solid family-based, community-based spiritual path
00:02:14.000 that reflects their ancestry and their own culture.
00:02:18.600 And we can do that.
00:02:20.440 We can do that by holding workshops and networking more.
00:02:25.300 And it's important that we do so.
00:02:27.740 Mr. McNeil, and let me kind of base it off of that answer.
00:02:33.100 Who should we target ourselves if we're going to try to bring in more people?
00:02:38.640 Who should we target, do you think?
00:02:40.220 I think we should target people who are family friendly, people who understand the importance
00:02:50.260 of having family and transmitting on our culture and our way into the future. That doesn't
00:02:58.460 necessarily mean that everyone's got to personally have children, but they need to be supportive
00:03:02.140 of those who do we need to attract people who understand the importance of tradition people
00:03:10.700 who do not dismiss the past and thereby who do not automatically dismiss the ancestors which of
00:03:16.460 course is the the trend in modern life you know the ancestors don't matter the ancestors don't
00:03:21.740 sell enough refrigerators the ancestors are not marketable we need to attract people of intelligence
00:03:29.660 people who are open-minded we need to attract people who essentially share
00:03:37.700 many of the better values of our Christian neighbors as you ride into
00:03:44.300 this place where we are today you see a series of signs and these are the the
00:03:50.120 all the the principles that lie behind being a Boy Scout you find
00:03:54.340 trustworthiness and loyalty and all of these list of virtues not entirely unlike our own nine noble
00:04:02.740 virtues a couple of differences i'd tweak a couple of those yeah obedience yeah we would need to
00:04:09.760 stress i think the difference between obedience and duty yeah but you know these are quote
00:04:17.000 american values these are what americans used to believe before we became cynical overly urbanized
00:04:24.320 atomized cut off from each other these still resonate I think strongly in in
00:04:32.000 the hearts of our people we need to nourish this to cultivate this and
00:04:39.260 there's a lot of those people out there people who are burned by the way that
00:04:43.280 life is going the way the the global culture is developing and who wants
00:04:47.560 something with roots with foundations and we've got it what do you think who
00:04:52.880 should we target? I think that traditionalists would be the word that comes to my mind that's
00:05:00.280 one of the least loaded in modern political speech and such. People who are looking for
00:05:04.160 something deeply rooted. People who are looking for an alternative to the worship of convenience
00:05:10.680 and profit that seems to be the primary motivation of your average middle American. Someone who does
00:05:18.240 respect their family and their ancestors and the ancestors of this country and our culture
00:05:22.720 as a greater forefathers. I don't know what group we would find those in, but I agree that a lot of
00:05:34.360 the best Christians I've known exemplify a lot of the same values and things they're looking for
00:05:43.160 As us. The best people I know of any faith, of any economic sector or any location, I think, are looking for something deeply rooted and something that has a tradition that they can hook into.
00:05:57.080 And I think those are the people that we need to attract.
00:05:59.540 Stephan, what do you think?
00:06:00.860 Well, when I first got into Asatru, it was always stressed to me that Asatru was the blue-collar man's religion.
00:06:07.120 that it was the carpenter and the plumber
00:06:11.060 and the guy that drove the garbage truck.
00:06:14.500 And it was really, really, it was emphasized to me
00:06:18.140 over and over and over again.
00:06:20.060 Well, I'm a professional stand-up comedian.
00:06:22.720 And I was thinking, wait a minute, how does that apply to me?
00:06:25.520 I'm not blue-collar, but I'm a worker.
00:06:29.860 I'm working, I'm doing what I do.
00:06:32.240 And I think that whole blue-collar thing stemmed from the fact that it was more rural people who were beginning to follow Osage War.
00:06:44.640 But now that's changed, and I think that we should be seeking out professional people, lawyers, doctors, college students, retirees.
00:06:54.400 I talk to elderly people every day, and they'll say, oh, what does that pendant mean?
00:07:01.660 And I'll tell them about that, they go, I've never heard of that.
00:07:04.020 And they're truly, sincerely interested in this.
00:07:07.780 Because I found that as we get older, you have a tendency, you've perhaps raised your children,
00:07:17.000 you've had a big taste of life, you've got a lot of life experience underneath you,
00:07:21.960 and now you're beginning to look more within yourself.
00:07:26.720 You go spiritually deeper than you did in your 50s.
00:07:31.440 You're going to go spiritually deeper than you did when you were in your 20s.
00:07:34.900 And things are going to have more meaning to you.
00:07:37.700 So the retirement community is a place where we need to also put our efforts.
00:07:44.200 But we need to have professional people.
00:07:47.140 We need people with money.
00:07:48.840 We need people with money who are saying, you know what?
00:07:51.600 I've got enough money to fund a community center or an information center on Ossetru.
00:07:55.760 I've got the money and the land to build a Hoff, to build a temple, because that's what we need.
00:08:02.580 Hoffs and temples and buildings give us credibility.
00:08:06.820 They make us valid, because people can say, wow, that's a neat building.
00:08:11.120 I mean, I was a Mormon.
00:08:13.200 When I go up to Oregon, I see the Mormon temple as I drive by on the freeway.
00:08:17.960 It's impressive. It is impressive.
00:08:21.020 There's a lot of marble. There's a lot of gold.
00:08:23.920 There's a lot of beautiful landscape lawn and everything.
00:08:28.120 And we need that.
00:08:30.160 We really need that.
00:08:31.960 We need to have temples and stuff.
00:08:34.680 And so by attracting professional people who are making money,
00:08:38.460 these are the things that we can attract to us and gain,
00:08:40.820 and we'll get those things.