Atheopaganism: An Introduction
In recent months, hundreds of new Atheopagans have joined the Facebook group and followed the blog. Lots of folks viewing our path with new eyes, and many wondering how to get started. Accordingly, I thought I’d provide an overview of this Pagan path.
Today I posted a video, “An Introduction to Atheopaganism”, to the Atheopagan YouTube Channel. This is a talk I will present at Pantheacon next month. View it below!
Mark Green
Author of ATHEOPAGANISM: An Earth-Honoring Path Rooted in Science, Mark Green is the initiator of the Atheopagan path and editor at the Atheopaganism blog. With co-host Yucca, he records the weekly podcast The Wonder: Science-Based Paganism, makes YouTube videos, and creates materials and resources for practicing Atheopagans. He volunteers as a staffer to the Atheopagan Council to support the growth of Atheopaganism throughout the world. In his home of Sonoma County, California, in the occupied ancestral lands of the Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok peoples, he is best known as an activist and founder of Sonoma County Conservation Action, the largest environmental activism group by membership on the North Coast of California.
15 Comments
Yewtree
This is great, and I agree with most of it, however…
Wicca has the eight Wiccan virtues, not just the rede.
My belief in gods is a working hypothesis to explain my experience. It’s also compatible with science.
Mark Green
If you believe in God’s as literal, self-aware, invisible persons, that is NOT compatible with science, sorry.
Yewtree
What we know from science is that the consciousness that inhabits our brains is an emergent property of the complex biology of our brains.
What I think is that therefore it’s possible that gods/spirits are emergent properties of the complexity of the universe. They are not supernatural, i.e. not separate / distinct from nature, but preternatural, emergent identities. Not necessarily persons or entities. Just as people shape each other’s personalities by social interaction, so we can shape the “personality” of a place by interaction with it. Hence the concept of the numinous, the genius loci.
So whilst I totally agree with your value system of reason and love and stuff, I’d prefer it if you didn’t oversimplify theism by describing it all as irrational supernaturalism.
Your argument is strongest when you describe what you believe, without creating straw versions of other people’s views.
Mark Green
Consciousness is an emergent property of a biological neural net.
The Universe doesn’t have one of those.
Yewtree
Well yeah but what if other networks could produce consciousness (e.g. the internet)?
I don’t have an emotional investment in belief in gods. I do have an emotional investment in not being dismissed as irrational.
And I don’t really want to have a big argument because I like you and support your efforts. Please consider me a flying buttress to your (metaphorical) church. I’m just over in a neighbouring building doing my own thing which has many similar aims and values.
Mark Green
That sounds great! Thanks for that.
Mark Green
Atheopaganism is meaningless if it leaves room for personal gods. They don’t exist, and I won’t say they might.
Yewtree
That’s okay, I’m not trying to claim to be an AtheoPagan. Just waving at you in a friendly way from next door.
Mark Green
OK. I appreciate that. Waving back!
Yewtree
🙂
Yewtree
Oh and fwiw, I will reiterate, of course atheists can be Pagans. Like you said, there have always been atheist Pagans.
However, I wrote my MA dissertation on the relationship between Pagans and science, and I can tell you, Pagan theologies are pretty diverse, hypothetical, and nuanced. (It’s up on academia dot .edu if you are interested.)
Mark Green
Agreed. But ours is assiduous. Unlike most Pagans, we don’t just cherry-pick what confirms our faith-based belief.
Yewtree
Well I’m not most Pagans 🙂
I was happily trucking along being an atheist Pagan until a significant thing happened. (Which I’m not going to discuss here.)
Yewtree
Actually I’m not sure that any Pagan is “most Pagans”. Academic studies of Pagan beliefs suggest that most people have come to belief from significant disbelief and that they shift about on the belief spectrum. It’s also been suggested that the US experience is very different from the UK, because there’s a much higher level of religious beliefs generally in the US. Hence why devotional polytheism has hardly gained any foothold in the UK. And Canada is different from both.
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