John Halstead has published a characteristically provocative piece in which he calls out John Beckett about the advisedness of the so-called “polytheist revolution”. Please go read them both; this post won’t make a lot of sense without them. I agree with Halstead completely on this matter, but for somewhat different reasons. The first is cultivation of an appropriate sense of scale. Pagans generally and polytheists particularly are a handful of people on a multi-billion-person planet, and their so-called revolution is, therefore, mostly in their minds rather than in fact. I think it would behoove all of us to stop talking about world transformation as if it’s a thing we can actually do–it…

John Beckett at Patheos has responded to my blog post, The Religion That Dares Not Say Its Name. His response is frankly disappointing. Beckett takes issue with my suggestion that theists preface their claims with “I believe”, and that atheists do the same. While acknowledging that beliefs can be wrong, his claim is that by saying “I believe”, theists would undermine the confidence communicated in their expressions of faith; that, by admitting the possibility that they may be wrong, they are opening the door—albeit just a tiny crack—to admission of the chance that what they so fervently believe is factually untrue. “In the atheist-influenced reaction to this culture,” he writes, “that…

The provocative John Halstead has kicked the hornet’s nest again with his posts critiquing elements of modern Paganism, and defending the legitimacy of doing so while still identifying as a Pagan. This sort of thing foments much unhappiness on the part of some theist Pagans, and in response, John Beckett has penned something suggesting that you can’t both be a Pagan and “look down your nose at it” (the second Halstead piece is a response to this). I suggest you read all three of these pieces. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Increasingly, my experience of Pagan theists in relation to Pagan atheism is no longer that they want to kick us out…

It’s never going to be a completely comfortable fit. Just as the suggestion of religious ritual and other symbolic, poetic, metaphorical practices will always be dismissed by some in the atheist community, Atheopaganism is always going to be viewed by some in the Pagan community as not rightfully belonging. Let me stop there and say that in my experience, that is a distinctly minority position. Most of the Pagans I have come out to as Atheopagan have been curious and interested in talking about the details of what I believe and do, but they have shown no interest in showing me the door. So let’s start there: this appears only to be an…