Mark Green's Atheopaganism Blog

Goddesses and gods. Fairies and ghosts. Magic spells and hexes. Dragons and griffons and mermaids.

Epic. Mythic. Heroic.

Awesome.

Well of course they are. We are story-telling creatures, and who doesn’t love a good story? If these were pedestrian tales, and boring, why would we listen to them? Why would we long for them to be real?

It’s all very human.

I can’t blame someone for wanting to live in a world where such things are real. A childlike* world of magical beings and epic wonders.

But…

But.

Reality is. We can imagine many things that are wondrous and beautiful and yet which do not exist. And fairies and hobbits and elves and ghosts and gods and goddesses are among them.

Or so the scientifically credible evidence suggests.

Woe be unto us, right? Our world is stripped of wonders. Cue sad trombone.

VVRRRRRTTTT scratching needle sound

What???

I’m sorry, but please.

We are intrinsic parts of a spectacularly beautiful planet in a Universe that showers us with gifts and wonders on a second-by-second basis: oxygen burning in our cells, leaves alchemically converting sunlight to sugar and breathing out that oxygen for us to consume, soil bursting with food…auroras and glaciers and deserts and mountains and rivers and sunsets and rainbows and oceans and all the magnificent creatures. The pleasures of food and drink and art and music and dance and love and flesh.

…And that is just this world.

Beyond, so much. SO much. A Cosmos filled with enough beauty and strangeness to stagger even the coldest heart.

How can this not be enough? How cannot all the worship, all the reverence, all the transported joy a person can possibly muster not be engendered simply by looking around and paying attention?

My Paganism is the spirituality of reality. Just this: just what is here.

Because it is enough. It is more than enough.

If there’s more, it will have to either stop playing hide-and-seek and show some real evidence of its existence—at which point I will begin to marvel at it, the way I do everything else—or it will have to go without my attention.

Because there is already so much—SO much—to revere that we know for certain exists.

Questionably factual stuff will have to wait in line.

*NOT childish. I am not saying that.

Image: Migrating manta rays