Challenging the notion of Pagan "cultural appropriation."
I was thinking about some recurrent threads and thoughts I've noticed here, and one came to mind.

Lots of Pagans, online and elsewhere, complain that Pagans engage in misguided or unethical forms of "cultural appropriation"--the word "strip mining" has been used recently to talk about this. The idea seems to boil down to two points:

1) Deities are essentially "bound" to a particular cultural essence. Conversely, it follows from this that they are themselves incapable of changing, adapting, or morphing to changing conditions.

2) Pagans, in engaging with relations with "other people's deities" violate a boundary, as if deities were a form of capitalist commodity that could be owned, bought, or sold.

This to me seems sheer lunacy, for the following reasons:

1) Deities can and do regularly "strip mine" humans from other cultural traditions every day. Its called "religious conversion." Its been going on as long as there have been religions of any kind, and the more connected people across the world are, the more it happens, since traditions, followers, and deities seem to be in closer contact all the time. Sometimes deities aren't nice about it, either. They can be quite demanding. When Pagans criticize behavior in humans that deities get away with every day, it seems to me we need to think more deeply about religious ethics, and make sure we aren't substuting liberal guilt and so-called "political correctness" for actual ethics.

2) Cultures aren't "bound." In fact, cultures (even supposedly 'dead' ones) are constantly in contact with one another. The Mayan gods are supposedly dead and all that, since Mexico went Catholic, but I can tell you from my own experience in the Yucatan that Ixchel, Chaab and Itzamna have certainly survived, albeit transformed, in the religious experience of Yucatan Latinos and Mayans to this day. The history and nature of the Native American Church, as well as Afro-Carribean tradtions such as Santeria, Candomble, Regla de Ocho and Vodoun should be remembered here as well.

3) Deities aren't zero-sum capitalist commodities. If I worship a deity, that in itself has no bearing on whether You can engage in worship of the same deity.

4) Putting limits on deities (by delimiting them to a particular time and place) strikes me as an act of extreme Enlightenment secularist hubris and arrogance. Unless you are omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, I would be very careful as a human being in expounding on the supposed limits of deities. And shouldn't that cause us to think even more deeply about criticizing the way humans (and deities) practice religion?

Peace.