In the United States, this is the week of the annual secular holiday Thanksgiving, coming up on Thursday the 22nd. Originating with the Michaelmas harvest celebrations of England, the American Thanksgiving is rooted in the mythologizing of a harvest feast shared by colonizing “Pilgrims” in the New England region…
Our Story Thus Far
In 1987, a friend invited me to an autumnal equinox circle with his Pagan coven. I had been an atheist all my life: a rational, naturalistic believer in science and reason. But I went. I still don’t entirely know why. It was…odd. There was drumming. The standing-in-a-circle-holding-hands was a bit…
Inclusiveness Starts with Your Ideas
One of the ways Atheopaganism differs from many other Pagan paths is that we don’t have to go through endless parsings of “what gods are” or “what gods want”, nor seeking to overcome biases baked into traditions that arise from times and cultures where bigotries of various kinds were the…
A Gift from the Dying
I’ll cut to the chase: we’re all dying. It’s the only guaranteed fact of our lives: we die. Atheopaganism doesn’t promise an afterlife. There really isn’t compelling evidence to support the idea of one, and so we conclude (tentatively, at least) that it is unlikely that there…
Starting Fresh: Imagining a New Paganism
What if we were starting today? If, here, 18 years into the 21st century CE, we were to invent a new, Earth-loving, progressive, reality-based religion? Imagine a practice, a cosmology, a set of values rooted in what we now know about the Cosmos, about Nature, about ourselves. If we were…
Naturalism, Monism, and the Philosophy of Atheopaganism
Atheopaganism is a naturalistic religion: that is, we believe that all that exists is a part of the natural, material Universe, and is subject to its laws. We revere this material Universe—the Cosmos—as Sacred and magnificent. As naturalistic Pagans, we do not subscribe to the…