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I’m Off to See the Atheists!
This weekend, I will attend the Freedom From Religion Foundation‘s annual conference, held this year in San Francisco. FFRF is the largest freethinker/atheist organization in the U.S. It advocates for strict separation of church and state, and for atheists’ rights where they have been violated. This year’s conference will include speeches and presentations by such luminaries as my Congressman and friend, Jared Huffman, who founded the Freethought Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the eminent novelist Salman Rushdie. Regrettably, Adam Savage of “Mythbusters” withdrew due to a family emergency. I’m able to attend the conference because of the generous support of two members of our community, and I’m deeply…
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A Reminder: Atheopaganism Has a Patreon!
Providing thoughtful material and useful resources for Atheopagans and managing our growing community on Facebook (1,139 members as of today!) takes time, reflection, and work. I do it because I truly feel called to the task, and gratified that so many are gravitating to our Pagan, atheist path. It is a privilege to support and serve this community of fascinating and diverse folk. That said, I can use some help as I do so. Ensuring that I have the time carved out for Atheopagan work (even after I find a job again, which will be soon, I trust) is assisted by having some income directly from the community to subsidize…
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A Deep and Meaningful Hallows to You!
Just a short note for the folks here who aren’t on the Facebook group: I wish you the most potent and meaningful of Hallows celebrations, and may your reflections on your ancestors and Death bring you wisdom. I am about to head off to my circle’s annual Samhain/Hallows gathering, which I’ve described here. It will be a particularly powerful year for it, because my father died last year. I look forward to putting to rest that horrible relationship, and to seeing my circle brothers and sisters. See you on the flip side!
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Visions of the Crash
We are warned now that we may have only a dozen years before global climate change reaches the 2 degree C. tipping point that will render Earth’s climate so unstable as to create ongoing crises in health, agriculture and, fundamentally, human survival. Our population continues to climb, ocean fisheries are crashing, extinction mounts worldwide. Something is going to shift. It is shifting, and fast. The question is how quickly, and how it will happen. To start with, let’s be clear: however big a tragic gouge we cause to be scraped from the biodiversity of Planet Earth, life will survive and go on to evolve for billions of additional years. The…
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Contrasts
Saturday night, I was dancing around a cauldron ablaze with candles, with drums thundering and voices lifted high in song, at the monthly Spark Collective gathering. Sunday morning, I attended a Unitarian Universalist service. Tellya, there are differences. Paganism is fundamentally an ecstatic practice: it’s about living in the body, embracing physicality both of ourselves and of our existence as creatures of the Earth, cultivating joy and intensity of emotional and meaningful experience. UU is more about a calm and gentle cultivation of wisdom on the personal level, and activism on the societal. The service I attended incorporated some quasi-Protestant elements such as singing (rather tepid) hymns with a five-minute silent…
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Ritual Tools I Find Useful
Ritual tools are physical objects with which one performs symbolic ritual acts. In more formal “occult” systems there are prescribed sets of these tools, but in Atheopaganism, we’re strictly practical about them; we use what is useful to us. The items below are things I use in rituals, in combination with objects symbolizing the qualities and attributes I wish to include in a given ritual: Focus cloths: I like to have cloths I can put down on a table or other surface, upon which I build my Focus. They vary in color by the season (bright pastels for High Spring, e.g., or spider web-patterned black fabric for Hallows). Asperger: Asperging is…
