23rd February 2009, 02:48 PM
Quote:quote:Originally posted by Oddie
(we have NEVER claimed to speak for anyone else. This is very different from 'discounting research'.
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You may gather from my user name that I have some sympathy with the pagan position. Yet, I have never and can never claim to speak for the dead from many millennia ago. We have about as much knowledge of their belief system as a we do of life on exo-planets. I appreciate this may be seen as trolling or being deliberately argumentative, but the CoBDO speaks only for itself and their beliefs. The appropriation of the long dead and their assumed beliefs by the CoBDO is nothing more than cultural theft. Respect for the deceased is something, in my experience, that all professional and amateur archaeologists and curators, and pagans, is something that has never been in doubt. If, for the sake of argument, we did discover the Neolithic/Bronze Age - Iron Age equivalent of the Rosetta Stone that enabled to have insight into the belief system(s) of the past, will the CoBDO support the disinterment and reburial of skeletal remains that they are requesting to be reburied?