I came to find my path at 13.  It wasn't out of rebellion, I rebelled by mismatching socks.  No, for me it was about the feeling I got from attending services.  The "church" we used was an old Christian church in my hometown.  The previous congregation had long since left the building.  So, I came to wicca inside of a church.  Seemed a bit odd to me, but many of my sisters and brothers had an interesting mingling of faiths.  I think it was the medium priestess that really made the difference to me.  Having her before us describing auras and speaking of our guides that were present, well, it connected me and moved me for the first time ever.

As I've grown older, I've not had many good experiences with Christians.  Those I tell of my faith want to discuss issues of faith only to "save" me (current roommate).  Others simply stop talking to me and back off quite extensively.  The worst are the ones who be little me and my faith and attempt in every way possible to kick it out of me (college roommate).

I don't consider Satanists as pagans. Rather, they are ultra-reactionaries who need one "truth" in order to invert it & obtain another. So they end up with two ridiculous untruths. The worst kind of dualism.

I find that a lot of "evangelical atheists" - the kind who rail against all religion as absolutely evil - fall into the same category. Most have had minor or major squabbles with religious authority figures or fundamentalists in their past, and concluded that all religion is Bad.

It doesn't serve us well as we attempt to look at history from a viewpoint other than that of the rich white male to lie and distort. We can't ever entirely escape bias, but we can avoid the out and out lie, I should hope.

Here is a good overview provided by ReligiousTolerance.org.

To add further historical perspective on goddess religions and the persecution of their adherents, here is an excerpt from the introduction to a scholarly work on the history of goddess worship When God Was a Woman by Merlin Stone:

In prehistoric and early historic periods of human development, religions existed in which people revered their supreme creator as female. The Great Goddess - the Divine Ancestress - had been worshipped from the beginnings of the Neolithic periods of 7000 BC until the closing of the last Goddess temples, about AD 500. Some authorities would extend Goddess worship as far into the past as the Upper Paleolithic Age of about 25,000 BC. Yet events of the Bible, which we are generally taught to think of as taking place "in the beginning of time," actually occurred in historic periods. Abraham, first prophet of the Hebrew-Christian god Yahweh, more familiarly known as Jehovah, is believed by most Bible scholars to have lived no earlier than 1800 BC and possibly as late as 1550 BC.

Most significant is the realization that for thousands of years both religions existed simultaneously - among closely neighboring peoples. Archaeological, mythological and historical evidence all reveal that the female religion, far from naturally fading away, was the victim of centuries of continual persecution and suppression by the advocates of the newer religions which held male deities as supreme.

The reason that you would have been told that "goddess worshippers" were persecuted during the burning times is that the Christians were burning at the stake those people they viewed as a threat to their authority and those whom they believed to be witches. It was usually women practicing the old ways who were believed to be witches and therefore a large proportion of people who were persecuted during the burning times were women.

Traditionally, it was women who were practiced in how to use herbs to cure, how to do be a midwife and many other things that were construed as magic. In fact many people of Wiccan and other pagan faiths view the folk magic traditions practiced by the healers and mystics of early European peoples as the basis for their faith.

As far as Glastonbury Tor is concerned, I don't know enough about it even to speculate, but just a cursory glance at this website about it suggests that in the context of early pre-Christian religions there is enough evidence to suggest that it certainly is an archeologically important site, whether it is the oldest religious artifact or not.

It is not "neo-feminist pseudo history" to talk about the persecution of women throughout history because there is no disputing that fact. And it seems to me that you missed the point entirely of the discussion of early goddess-worshipping cultures. On a site where we are learning about and celebrating each other's religions in the contect of coming together as a community of people who care about what's happening in our world, I find your comments bordering on offensive.

What is known, however, is that every polytheistic culture did have Goddesses, some major, some minor.  And when the monotheists came in, many of these Goddesses were transformed into saints, heroines, etc, because the desire for the Divine femminine is unquenchable in many.  

As for the persecution...yes, most, if not all, of the people murdered during the Burning Times were ostensibly Christian.  Many practiced pre-Christian folk beliefs, but were unlikely to have been card-carrying Pagans.  The inquisition was definately misogynistic, however, and part of that was most likely because the Priests feared the power of women.

Between the extremes, we can find truth.

Blessed Be