Talk:Church of All Worlds

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Is it worth adding to this page about the real-world CAW, since they seem to be defunct on a national level these days? Just seems somewhat unlikely that it would be tagged with "Fictional religions" as a category. -- nae'blis _(talk) 23:58, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Good question. The "Fictional Religions" tag seems to mostly apply to "religions which appear in works of fiction." Although there was a "Church of All Worlds" which appeared in Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land", and although that CAW was part of the initial inspiration the real-world CAW, the real-world CAW afterwards evolved into something quite different. So some disambiguation would seem to be in order here. In any case, it doesn't seem appropriate to have this tagged as a "fictional religion", since it actually exists; there should probably be a separate page describing the SISL version of CAW, with that tagged as the "Fictional Religion". (I suppose that one could argue the same thing about the Jedi religion, except that I don't believe it was ever as organized or had as many actually serious adherants as CAW).

To address the first part of your question, I do believe that it would be worthwhile to expand this article. Even though the official national CAW organization is now defunct, there continue to be a number of functioning Nests that I am aware of, still practicing the CAW philosophy and identifying it as such. Furthermore, since CAW was the first Neopagan church to receive governmental recognition, published an influential pan-neopagan Magazine (Green Egg), and in general was one of the stronger influences in the development of Neopagan philosophy and culture, I think that it would be of historical interest if nothing else. Skybum 00:18, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

I just spent some time reading at [caw.org] and they claim to be undergoing a "third renaissance"; in other words, their own claim is that they are not in any way defunct, and have kept continuous registration as a corporation in the State of California. Rpresser 15:47, 1 November 2006 (UTC)