It can't be that hard, surely? I mean, fer f*ck's sake, the concept is not a difficult one to grasp. Or perhaps I am expecting too much of people. Perhaps it is not apparent that there is a big difference between generic and specific. Perhaps people just can't see the difference between say Asatru, which follows the Norse pantheon and embraces the concept of nature red in tooth and claw, and a bunch of people in robes meeting every full moon to call upon a reconstructed idea of the bipolar Deity paradigm and who believe that doing harm is the ultimate wrong.
I'll try to make this simple. I can see that paradigm is quite possibly too complicated a word for the sort of people at whom I am aiming this. Now pay attention. There is a possibility that you may have to use the grey matter that purportedly resides between your ears.
I am about to embark upon a course of action that requires the use of something called "extended metaphor". This means I am going to pretend that abstract things like Wicca and Pagan are concrete things, or at least things that are easily visualised (I hope that's not too many syllables for you) in the hope that this will make it easier for you to understand. You can even draw a picture and use coloured pencils. You'll see.
Now I want you to think of apples. That's right, apples. You know, Eris had a golden one she used to cause a fight, Eve nicked one from the tree and got her and her bloke into a lot of trouble (although I happen to think she made life more interesting), you can see them laid out in giant eggbox-type things in the supermarket (and why are they always bloody foreign? English apple orchards are some of the finest in the world). Apples. Imagine yourself standing in a large branch of Tescos or Sainsburys, in the fruit section, which is always the first aisle you come to, and you are looking at all the apples. There are all those varieties lying there, some shiny, some matt, some red, some yellow, some green. All of them different, even down to the individual apples. No two apples are ever the same, but you can separate them into things like Granny Smith and Braeburn and Cox and Jona Gold and all those other types.
This is where the metaphor comes in. Don't be scared. I'll be gentle.
I want you to think of religion as apples. There are lots of religions, and each one corresponds to a particular variety of apple. The individual ways of expressing each religion, of following each religion, correspond to the individual apples within the variety. There are as many different but similar ways of expressing a religion as that religion has followers. A religion means slightly different things to different people. A religion that demands conformity of its followers might correspond to one of the standard, homogenised (look it up, it just means that as much variation has been ironed out of the type as is possible) varieties like Granny Smith or Golden Delicious, or Red Delicious. A religion that allows its followers a lot of leeway would be one of the more "natural" varieties, perhaps an organically grown russet red.
Are you with me so far? Can you see where I'm heading yet? Take a deep breath, this is the difficult bit.
Now Pagan isn't an apple. It isn't a fruit at all. It's a colour. It's the colour red (I could equally have been green or yellow, but I have chosen red). You know that some apples are red, just as some religions are pagan, but there are all sorts of apples that are red, and there are quite a few other things that are red as well. Paganism is the name for all those things that are red, not just apples, but all the other things that are red as well.
Wicca, being a religion, whatever particular branch of Wicca you practise, is a type of apple. It's a red apple, as opposed to a green or yellow one, because it is a pagan religion, but it is only one sort of red apple, and there are other kinds of red apple as well, and they all have their own distinctive flavour, smell, texture and appearance. Then there are all the red things that aren't apples, and a lot of them bear no resemblance to apples at all. Some of them, like tomatoes, do look kind of similar, but some, like car brake lights, are totally different. They are all red. Just because they aren't apples, you can't say that they aren't red. This is because red is a colour and apple is a fruit.
No apple is inherently better than any other apple, not as far as the individual apple is concerned, although some apples taste nicer to some people, and some keep for longer, and some are grown in larger numbers and have better advertising campaigns. Equally, you can't say that one red thing is better at being red than another red thing, although obviously pink and orange are only related to red, and some apples have both red and green in them (you don't have to get pedantic and point out that all apples start off green. That's taking the extended metaphor just that little bit too far). Pagans are people who prefer the colour red, and, as a pagan, you might prefer the red of a traffic light over the red of a ladybird, but someone else might feel differently. That's okay. It's fine. There's no problem with that. Currently it seems that the vast majority of pagans seem to prefer their red to come on apples, and for some reason this has led to a widespread laxity in remembering that red colours other things besides apples.
I DON'T LIKE BLOODY APPLES!!! OK??? I know lots of other people who don't like apples too. Is it so difficult for all those apple fanatics out there to remember that there is a world outside the orchard? For pity's sakes, you would have thought that the occasional ingress by the odd scarlet insect, or people wearing red t-shirts would help to remind them. But no. If they are in the orchard, they must be interested in apples. Look, they might have just wandered in by mistake. Hey, they might be there to pollinate the flowers or talk to the trees or eat the grass or even eat other insects. Well I HAVE ONLY BEEN IN THE ORCHARD ON ONE BLOODY OCCASION, AND I WAS THE SECOND BEETLE ON THE LEFT. I don't like apples. I don't like it when people automatically assume that I do, or, when hearing that I don't, assume that it must be some other sort of fruit. No one has any right to dictate what counts as red. Red is a colour, it is a subjective thing. If a person sees a colour as red, then no one has any right to say that colour is not red.
So, a person can be pagan even if what he does bears no relation to Wicca, has none of the same attributes, and isn't even describable as anything other than red to anyone else. The Wiccan Rede is for people who like at least one thing about apples - perhaps they like apple crumble but not the raw fruit. There is no obligation for the non-apple eaters in Paganism to have anything to do with apples at all. And if one more person says that if I don't subscribe to the Rede I am not pagan, and am a nasty and horrible person, I will take their damn apple and shove it where your average heterosexual male deity does not usually put his phallic half of the Great Rite in the fertile half. And I'll make sure it's a big apple.
Right. I hope that has cleared that up and I won't have to use that thing about Wicca being to Paganism what non-Euclidian geometry is to mathematics ever again.