The organization's name was the result of a day-long passionate debate. The words "pagan" and "heathen" were rejected because of their perceived cultural associations with immorality, violence and backwardness. The word "polytheistic" was also rejected as an oversimplification. "Indigenous" was seen as satisfactory on a linguistic level, but was voted down with regard to its established use by groups distinguished from European colonizers. Other suggestions were terms along the lines of "old religion" and "ancestral religion". "Ethnic", the Greek equivalent to the Latin "paganus" in early Christian sources, was eventually agreed on. The word's history and the connection to ethnology were things that appealed to the majority of the participants.