Atheology
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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 uncomfortable. There was talking to Invisible Presences, though that seemed much more like symbolic action than people actually believing they existed. But on the other hand…it was the autumnal equinox. That’s a real thing, a real event in the natural world. When was the last time I had noticed that? How connected was I to the reality of what was…
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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 norm (be they ancient Greece or Britain of the 1950s). I’m seeing much soul-searching in the Pagan community about this sort of thing recently: concern about the heteronormativity and gender essentialism of mainstream flavors of Wicca, for example. When you assert the existence of a (fully able-bodied, typically white, slender, young, heterosexual, cisgender and conventionally attractive) Goddess and a (similar) God as…
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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 is one. This is the life that we have. And it ends. Personally, I no longer fear death much. I don’t want for it to come any time soon, but I was dead for 13.7 billion years before I was conceived, and I don’t expect it to be any less pleasant when I am dead again. I simply will not be; there will…
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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 starting just today. What would it look like? What would draw people in, make them want to be a part of it? Well, I have some ideas. To begin with, I’d think we would start with a cosmology that doesn’t fly in the face of what we’ve learned through science over the past few hundred years. Our sources would not…
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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 idea that there is an Otherworld within which reside magical and/or disembodied entities such as gods, spirits, ghosts or fairies. We expect scientifically credible evidence in order to support a proposed idea with our belief, and there simply is none for this Otherworld and its supposed residents. A part of this naturalistic approach is monism: the idea that the body and the consciousness are not distinct, that there…
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Innovation Versus Tradition in Paganism
The mainstream current of modern Paganism has made much of celebrating “Ancient Ways” and “Old Gods”. This creates an inherent tension between old (or putatively old) practices and beliefs and the innovations and achievements of modernity. Elements of the broad Pagan umbrella range widely across this expanse. At one pole, you have Reconstructionists, for whom ancient ideas and practices are pretty much everything, and those of other paths who choose to continue to believe (despite much scholarship to the contrary) that today’s Paganism derives from an unbroken lineage of tradition stemming from medieval times or earlier. At the other, there is Atheopaganism, which draws forward some traditional activities, but contextualizes…
