On Becoming An Atheopagan
What is a religion?
Is a religion what you believe?
Is that what people in churches and temples and mosques throughout the world do on their appointed sabbath days? Believe?
I found myself pondering this question after I fell out of love with Paganism , in 2004, following a series of experiences wherein dysfunctional and unethical behavior on the part of leaders in my Pagan community was excused as having been “directed by the gods”.
This was simply intolerable to me. It flew in the face of science, of reason, and of ethics. It was wrong.
I grew up an atheist. I believe in science and reason. In facts, and critical thinking. And I passionately love the natural world. This has driven my career in environmental activism and land conservation.
Though I became a Pagan in 1987, I have never believed in literal gods. Rather, I have seen them as metaphorical stories and archetypes.
Until about 2000, I felt I was in good company. Until then, in the Pagan community what you believed was private. People rarely even talked about their cosmologies; it was generally understood that everyone had a different way of looking at the world, but it didn’t matter: we could all circle together and be a community.
Several prominent voices in the community at that time were clearly in the gods-as-metaphors camp, and I had no reason to feel that my membership therein was strange. I found deep meaning and joy in celebrating the changing of the seasons, in the ritual circles I shared with community and loved ones, and in the egalitarian and environmental values that were the community norms. I was a devout Pagan: an atheistic one.
But as I said, around 2000 something changed. A new brand of Paganism that insisted on the literal reality of its gods arose: the folk who now call themselves devotional polytheists. Within a few short years, believing became a hot and contentious subject in the broader community.
And with this, the suggestion that you had to believe in order to be a “real” Pagan, combined with the events referenced above, I quit. I stepped back from the community and abandoned my practices. It was a spiritual crisis and it coincided with the reelection of George W. Bush. I fell into a deep depression.
But it didn’t take long before I realized how deeply I missed my Pagan practice and community. My life felt flat and empty, meaningless, colorless.
I didn’t believe. I had never believed. Yet somehow, I had achieved deep pleasure and abiding sense of connectedness and meaning through Pagan religion.
So what is a religion, really?
I think the answer to that question has been perverted by centuries of Abrahamic religions’ obsession with faith, belief and theology.
Because clearly, religion isn’t about belief. Or not only so, anyway.
I thought long and hard about it. I read a lot. And I concluded that religion isn’t one thing: it’s three.
A religion, yes, does contain a description of the world: a cosmology. It explains where things come from and what the purpose is in life. For theists, that typically includes an invisible, ephemerally tangible dimension wherein reside gods, spirits, and so forth. For naturalists, it is limited to the Universe we can see and verify through science.
But a religion also describes a value set: a description of what is important in life, and instructions for how to live a moral life according to the religion.
And finally, it includes practices: Observances. Holy days. Sabbaths. Rituals. Contemplative practices. Rites of passage. Sacred music and recited liturgy. All the things that people do in the course of belonging to a particular religion.
Understanding this, it became clear to me that atheism and religion were not the opposite ends of a spectrum. That atheistic religion was a possibility. That science could provide the cosmology, Pagan values the moral framework, and Pagan rituals and observances the praxis.
And that is when I began to craft the path that I now call Atheopaganism.
I’m back to my practices, though they have evolved such that I no longer use the names and concepts of gods even as metaphors. I’m celebrating holy days around the wheel of the year. My Focus (a word I use instead of “altar”, which to me implies worship and sacrifice) is an actively maintained presence in my home.
I also moved into a segment of the Pagan community which exhibited very high integrity, humanity and love, and didn’t demand that I believe anything in particular: the Fire Family community. That made a big difference.
And I discovered that on my own, I had invented something very much like what others like Jon Cleland Host and John Halstead and Rua Lupa did before me: naturalistic Paganism. I discovered that there are more like me. A lot more.
And so I’ve begun to foster that community, with writing and resources at atheopaganism.wordpress.com and a forum where we can meet and discuss our religion on Facebook. We have an aggregated blog site at NaturalPagans.com.
Naturalistic Paganism isn’t new. It’s been here since the beginning of the Neopagan revival in the 1960s (and arguably earlier). But we didn’t feel a need to talk about it until what you believe became an important topic of discussion, with the advent of an element in the community who insist that believing in gods as literal persons is important.
We’ve been circling with theists and a part of the community from the outset. The only difference now is that many of us are stepping forward to publicly declare that the equation of Belief with “real Paganism” on the part of some devotional polytheists is a mischaracterization.
We are not believers, and we are Pagans.
There are leaders in the community who are among us. They invoke gods as metaphors, not as literal persons. I won’t name them here because they may not want their names dragged into this discussion, but an example would be the late Margot Adler, author of the groundbreaking Drawing Down the Moon.
We’re not here to tell people they shouldn’t believe in literal gods…although we will bristle if it is taken as a matter of course that Pagans naturally do so. We’re not here to convert anyone. We just want our space in the Pagan tent, and to be allowed there to express our cosmology as readily as may any other sector of our diverse community.
Our values are as sacred to us as are the values of any other Pagan path. We are every bit as fervent in our devotion to what we revere, which is the mighty Cosmos itself: the natural world in all its wonder and awe-inspiring beauty.
It doesn’t matter to us that the Universe is not listening. We are here, emergent manifestations of the properties of matter, energy and the laws of physics. The world feeds, shelters and nurtures us. It is worthy of reverence: of love, and care, and service.
Even prayer…
Praise to the wide spinning world
Unfolding each of all the destined tales compressed
In the moment of your catastrophic birth
Wide to the fluid expanse, blowing outward
Kindling in stars and galaxies, in bright pools
Of Christmas-colored gas; cohering in marbles hot
And cold, ringed, round, gray and red and gold and dun
And blue
Pure blue, the eye of a child, spinning in a veil of air,
Warm island, home to us, kind beyond measure: the stones
And trees, the round river flowing sky to deepest chasm, salt
And sweet.
Praise to Time, enormous and precious,
And we with so little, seeing our world go as it will
Ruing, cheering, the treasured fading, precious arriving,
Fear and wonder,
Fear and wonder always.
Praise O black expanse of mostly nothing
Though you do not hear, you have no ear nor mind to hear
Praise O inevitable, O mysterious,
Praise and thanks be a wave
Expanding from this tiny temporary mouth this tiny dot
Of world a bubble
Going out forever meeting everything as it goes
All the great and infinitesimal
Gracious and terrible
All the works of blessed Being.
May it be so.
May it be so.
May our hearts sing to say it is so.
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Somehow, I’m happy to say, the whole arrival of Pagan Fundamentalism completely escaped my notice, and the concept makes me shake my head with wonder.
It was clear, thirty-five or forty years ago, when we were inventing our own version of Paganism back up in the hills, that sooner or later someone would come along and try to take all the fun out of it by organizing it; that’s what usually happens. I didn’t think it would gain much traction, though, and as far as I can see it hasn’t. For a religion to really enforce its doctrine, it has to have the power of the state behind it (see Constantine, for example, mid 4th c.)
Lacking policing powers, all that doctrinal leaders can do is fulminate and dream of the auto-da-fes they would celebrate, if only they could. That’s fine. Everybody needs a hobby.
The rest of us, though, are free to believe or doubt or firmly not believe or just wonder at the splendidness of it all. Personally, I think one of the best things to happen to religion in centuries is the Flying Spaghetti Monster, who was boiled for our sins. When you can’t laugh at the sheer absurdity of believing with certainty in that which can never be known… well, then it’s time to re-examine your belief system- or, so says I.
Like you I’ve been an “atheist” really all my life. Well really since the age of nine when I got kicked out of vacation Bible school for asking the preacher the why question and proclaiming loudly that doesn’t make sense. (A nine year old hasn’t learned to be PC.) Some relatives I was staying with forced me to go. They got a call mentioning I was a disruptive influence and I never had to go again. BTW my father had protected me from indoctrination until I was old enough to think for myself. I think this told him that I had learned to think for myself. (To answer a question I am usually ask. NO he didn’t try to force me into any belief system he just helped me to learn to think for myself.)
I really like the way you use focus instead of altar. Using the word altar has always bothered me in my celebrations. I really confuse my mystical pagan friends because I read tarot for myself as a meditation tool.
Thanks for this great personal history, which sheds a lot of light on the changes in the broader community before I came along.
I’ve been an Atheist since age 4 or 5 when a little neighbor girl tried telling me god was everywhere and in everything.
I adopted an agnostic position late in high school simply because it felt good to have the “live and let live” attitude, which also garnered some level of non-judgmental respect. That was short-lived as I felt I became a magnet for the neo-christian lunatics of the 80’s who felt that it didn’t matter how messed up their actions were, as long as they asked Jesus for forgiveness Sunday morning, they were handed a guilt-free slate by brunch.
It took me another 20 years to figure out how to define my understanding of reality, and myself as a
“Pantheistic/Einsteinian Atheist with Agnostic tendencies toward Deism”.
I know, its a mouthful, but fortunately I’ve only had to vocalize it 3 or 4 times ever.
I share this because of a couple things you mentioned; Depression and Community. One I have and one I don’t, and they are respectively mentioned.
I really want to feel a sense of community, but in a tangible sense, not through blogs.
Virtual community has become completely unsatisfying. Its great to have this medium to be made aware that like-minded people are out their, but after years of being ‘virtually’ saturated, it carries no solace.
Professor Dawkins was probably the first public figure that really gave me a connection to another person regarding religion. Of course, the zealous Atheist fervor that emerged post “God Delusion”, and during G.W Bush’s second term seems to have led to the same kind of division that created the >30,000 Christian sects around the World.
I get that Christians get to enjoy community simply because there are so many of them in any given population, that group congregation is easy to come by. Its as if Baskin Robbins was 31,000 flavors of Christianity and all the buckets are full of enough like-minded people for each flavor for community to flourish. I just wish there were easier ways for the more ‘thoughtful’ population to congregate or aggregate.
Personal note: I’m 52, with a 4 year old daughter whom I love more than the Universe itself. I’ve worked for 30+ years in a very specialized area of healthcare that has now been so greatly diluted by either training unqualified people and paying them less than half what I was making, or eliminated by hospitals pushing the task onto nurses. So, I went back to school and just graduated with 2 Associate of Science degrees in Electronic Engineering and Industrial PLC Automation. I’ve put out 50+ resumes/applications since December, but haven’t even gotten a phone call or interview. One of my former classmates, who still hasn’t finished the program, got hired for a job that I too applied for. He had no prior experience (sold shoes) and even has a lower GPA. He got this because of his church community, where a fellow parishioner forwarded his resume to the right person.
Community = Belonging
No Community = No Belonging
This, along with not being able to provide for my family, has me in a well of depression.
Sorry for the egregious “their” > “there”
I am fortunate that I have Pagan community around me which includes quite a few atheist or agnostic Pagans. I wish you well both with your depression and your job search–I know only too well how hard it can be when contending with both at the same time.