Community
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Presenting Ourselves to the World
It is not a surprise that as it was being founded, Neopaganism looked to an imagined pastoral and pre-industrial way of life as an inspiration. Modern Paganism’s inaugural moment in the United States, about 50 years ago in the late 1960s into the mid-1970s, occurred at the same time that the Romantic idealizations of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Dungeons and Dragons and Renaissance Faires and the newly created fantasy genre and the rosy aspirations of the “back to the land” movement were taking over the aesthetic and emotional landscape of young people: particularly smart, geeky college students of the exact demographic which eventually became the Neopagan base. After…
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Join Us for a Harvest Celebration!
If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area in the United States, we welcome you to join us for a potluck Harvest celebration on Sept. 22! It will be held from 2 to 6 pm at the Orchard Picnic Area in Tilden Park, Berkeley. Bring a potluck dish to share and something to drink*, your own plates, cups and cutlery, and any items you would like to place on the group Focus to represent your harvested achievements for this year. One of the lessons we learned from Moon Meet this year is to hold events that require less of a time and logistical commitment, so we’re doing Harvest this year in…
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A Virtual Hug
A little more than two years ago, I wrote a celebration of the feeling of “coming home” that has so frequently characterized people’s responses as they join the Atheopagan community. Since then, the Atheopaganism Facebook group has doubled in size. We have had amazing, informative, stimulating and heartfelt conversations, which have generally remained civil even on fraught subjects. We have supported each other in difficult times. It’s been awhile, so I just want to say how appreciative I am—and how proud—of the community of folks who have gathered around these ideas, this blog and the Facebook group. It helps me stay motivated to continue writing and creating, to continue strategizing ways we can…
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What If We Are Screwed?
John Halstead very eloquently and thoroughly puts the question to us in his post “’Everything is Going According to Plan’”: Being an Activist in the Anthropocene”. Take time to read the whole thing. It’s well worth it. So really: what if it’s simply too late for any kind of peaceful transition to a sustainable post-disastrous civilization, and a messy and bloody collapse of industrial capitalism and Earth biodiversity in the context of skyrocketing global warming is now firmly set on course? It could be true. It may very well be true. What does this mean to us as Atheopagans, when we state explicitly that it is a part of our ethos to…
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Moon Meet 2018—Some Lessons
Our second annual Moon Meet gathering was not what I expected it to be, but it was still wonderful. A cascade of last-minute cancellations brought our numbers down radically, to a core group of six, all of whom had been at the gathering the previous year. I was disappointed not to meet new Atheopagans who had registered for the event but had to cancel, but so it goes: things happen. Moon Meet 2018 was more of a retreat, rather than a community gathering. We discussed it, and we think there are multiple reasons for this. Asking for a three day block of time is a lot, and the logistics of reaching…
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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…
