Personal Reflection
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On Freedom
In the United States, we lionize “freedom”. We make much of how “free” we are, boast of it. Our national narrative is filled with reinforcing stories about liberty and the struggle for freedom. But what is it? If freedom means anything, it must be the freedom not just to believe as one wishes, to think as one will, but also to act as one will. To be treated as an equal. And that freedom is in danger in this country at this time. We are, in reality, one of the most authoritarian states of the developed world. We have a higher rate of incarceration even than China or Saudi Arabia…
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Visions of the Future
As I’ve written before, Atheopaganism is inherently political. It isn’t possible to revere the Earth as Sacred, to hope for a world where love and kindness and justice are far more widespread without having a political agenda to match. Many Pagans are political, in varying ways. While most lean to the left, some do not. And a significant number identify as anarchists, viewing the root cause of human suffering and strife as being institutions such as governments. I am not one of them. I simply do not see examples of anarchism having worked successfully in groups larger than a hundred or two. With the world’s population well over seven billion…
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What’s Wrong With Joy? A Rant.
You can ask me what is wrong with Trump voters, with the manbaby himself, with the terrifying sociopaths in the Congressional majority. You can ask me what the hole is in the world. And if you have the patience, you will hear me go on, for an hour perhaps, about every wrong policy position, every cruelty, every coldness and dismissiveness, every bigotry. But that won’t answer the question. I have been watching Sense8 on Netflix. I just finished the beginning of the second season, a two-hour episode. And after crying a lot, I come back to this most basic of conclusions about those who make war on their own people,…
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Atheopaganism and the Future
For thousands of years, since the very advent of human existence, there has been an evolving trajectory of religious history in Western societies. The story passes from the earliest animism and ancestor worship to the rise of belief in gods, the consolidation of authoritarian power under monotheisms, and the complete domination of Western societies by Christianity. It continues through the Enlightenment, the steady gains of science shattering the cosmological monopoly of the Abrahamic monotheisms, the increasing tension between orthodoxy and individuality splintering these monotheisms into thousands of sects, and finally, most recently, to the rise of the Nones: those who describe themselves as having no religious affiliation at all, which…
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Why is Naturalism Radical?
One of the hottest points of contention between Atheopagans and both theists and hard-antitheist atheists has to do with naturalism. Naturalism is a philosophical position which holds that there is nothing which is not of the physical Universe: that there is nothing which is supernatural, and that such claimed supernatural phenomena as gods, spirits, souls, ghosts, and magic are fictitious. Theists dispute this out of hand, of course. It makes sense that nontheist Pagans have friction with theists over this point. But adamant antitheists like David Dennett and Richard Dawkins have conflict with it, too–because they insist that if you are a naturalistic tradition, you’re not really a religion. This is frankly…
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Once Upon a Time in the Eighties
A memory, for May Day/Beltane… It wasn’t really a fabled time. There was a lot wrong with it. That said, there were things about it that were golden. It was a moment in Northern California, in the Pagan community. It mostly took place in wild places, in woods and deep forests. We danced naked under the full moon. We celebrated our rituals around a blazing fire. We made love in meadows. We took drugs: psilocybin mushrooms, San Pedro cactus. MDMA. And in that golden, loving space, alive with the joy of living, the world singing around us, we grew. We evolved. We healed. Again, to be fair: there were those…
