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Mysterious Impulses
It’s a big subject, what it means to be human. We ask it in science, and in art, in literature. We get some answers. Neuroscience and anthropology have identified many facts about our species. But I’ve been thinking a lot about the mysteries of human nature lately. Like: what’s up with music? Why do we make it? Why is music a thing that is so important to us? And dancing? A completely unproductive expenditure of energy. Yet we love it. It’s ubiquitous. Perhaps just as mysteriously, why do we gravitate to bodies of water? Particularly to moving water, like waterfalls, the ocean, large lakes with tidal effects? Yes, we must…
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Does Truth Matter?
Eppur si muove. —Galileo Galilei Recently. a friend posted to the Atheopaganism Facebook group, describing a conversation she was having elsewhere in which accusations of “classism” and “colonialism” were being leveled at those who express what is almost certainly the truth: that gods and magic do not exist, except as ideas. And you know? That accusation may have a point…if that message is directed at indigenous practitioners of native spiritualities. For those people, cultural preservation is important—and threatened—no matter how out of step with objective reality their beliefs might be. They have reasons to steward and preserve their cultures which have nothing to do with how factually accurate their…
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The Miracle of Dirt
Of all the many factors on planet Earth that enable us to live and thrive, there are two which border, in my opinion, on the miraculous*: the conversion of sunlight into sugar through photosynthesis, and the mysterious alchemy of microbes and nutrients and water that makes dirt into the life-giver to us all. Yet we take dirt for granted—even denigrate it. It’s “dirty”, after all. We walk on dirt; we scrape it off our shoes and sweep it from our houses and porches. It’s gray, or brown, or yellow, or red, but generally not the popping, pleasing colors we are hard-wired to find breathtaking, like sunsets or flowers or bodies…
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Unpopular Ideas
On this day in 1809, Charles Darwin was born. 50 years later, he would publish “On the Origin of Species”, which pretty well blew the doors off the scientific world, outraged the contemporary religious culture, and established the key scientific foundation of the field of biology for all time. Darwin knew what he was doing. He sat on “Origin” for years, aware that the core implication of his work—that no God was necessary to explain the diversity of life on Earth—would bring him a deluge of hatred and ridicule. He was right. 159 years on, Christian fundamentalists still rail against Darwin’s discovery. Their entire worldview is threatened by his simple…
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Miracles of Reality: Reflections on the Impending Solar Eclipse
It’s spectacular. Seriously. When I was a little kid, my parents took me to North Carolina to view a total eclipse of the Sun. I couldn’t have been more than six, but I remember those 2-1/2 minutes of totality vividly, right down to the taste of the chives growing in the field where my father set up his camera tripod. A total eclipse of the sun is one of the great astronomical experiences. Like viewing a comet, except that it only lasts for a couple of minutes. When totality comes, an eerie darkness falls on the land. Animals are disturbed; I heard dogs howling throughout the total eclipse period. That…
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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…
