For the last several classes we’ve been doing the Jigsaw readings and Thursday’s was the first one where they didn’t really tie in together. The rest of them had, had an underlying theme that were all tied together from reading to reading and fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, but I couldn’t really figure out what tied them together thus time. I read the “Fluffy Bunny Syndrome” article and just reading the title at first, I was very confused. I genuinely had no idea what religion it would talk about or what bunnies had to do with it. As I read I quickly learned that it was talking about the Pagan religion. “Fluffy Bunny” is a derogatory term for some Pagans who just kind of practice the mainstream stuff and don’t really get the deeper sense of paganism. It was interesting to see it this way because to me the pagan religion seemed to be smaller and community oriented, like a tight knit group of people. But even then, they still have their own problems within each other and don’t always see eye to eye on how to practice.

When reading the article I found the Pagan Fairs to be most interesting because there were multiple sides to the people. There were some who wanted to stick to authentic Pagan ways, some who were just “fluffy bunnies”, and then there were the ones who “pretended” to be a fluffy bunny in order to make Pagans more attractive to others. This is interesting because most people in society  want to be accepted by others and may change their image in such ways, but I never really looked at it from the perspective of religion. In order to attract people to a certain religion or to make it more appealing, people do give somewhat of a “false” representation. It’s not just Pagans, it’s many religions we’ve looked at. We’ve seen it in the congregations we’ve visited, with the signs and encouragement to join and welcoming new people, most religions are seeking to grow and will figure out how best to do that. Religion can be very personal or community oriented, but each religious structure is going to display themselves in a way that will most strongly connect to people because the goal tends to be to continue the religion.