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Imagining Ancestors
Much as the Christian Overculture has made it its business to erase, co-opt or appropriate pre-existing religions in the West–as well as to eradicate and supplant other cultures and traditions throughout the world–archeology presents us with treasures now and again that remind me of a different world that existed prior to the imposition of the angry sky gods of the Levant. One prominent such example was discovered buried 13 feet deep in a peat bog in Russia in 1890. It is now known as the Shigir Idol. Made of larch wood, it is 17 feet tall, towering more than three times the height of the people who built it. Now,…
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Talking with Atheists Who Dismiss Your Atheopagan Practice
Existing in both the atheist world and in the Pagan, Atheopagans have the unique “good fortune” of fielding criticism from extreme elements of both. I’ve written before about Pagan fundamentalists who dismiss our religion as “not real Paganism. ” Today, we take a look at the atheist community’s counterpart: the so-called “anti-theists”. A vocal subset of atheists, the anti-theists start with the position that there are no literal gods. So far, so good. But… From there, many of them overreach, arguing not only that theism is destructive and irrational, but that all religion and spirituality are fraudulent, pointless and harmful behaviors that humanity would be better off without. Anti-theists can…
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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…
