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Welcome Home
I’ve written on this subject before, but I want to say to the hundreds who have joined our Atheopagan online community since: welcome home! Welcome to a place where deep spirituality of Nature meets reason and critical thinking. To wild, naked dancing around a bonfire (real or imagined), and the wonders of science’s understanding of our Sacred Earth and Cosmos. To ritual, and meditation, and cognition and analysis and art and music, and the fullness of what we can be, we humans. It happens every week, online. It happens every year, in person at Pantheacon. People—strangers, yet family—come to me and say, I had no idea. I thought I was alone. I…
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Burgeoning
It’s definite now: the light is stronger, the days are longer. Here in the northern hemisphere, winter is passing, and spring is coming on. Where I live, in coastal Northern California, the very first wildflowers are the milk maids, and they are already gone now, faded to buttercups and hounds’ tongues and shooting stars: the survivals of what once was a landscape carpeted with flowers in the spring. European grasses have forcibly taken over our hills, but the native flowers yet persist. And the introduced species, the narcissus and daffodils and acacia; they, too, are daubing the green carpet of the winter hills with gold and white. They speak of…
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Reflections on Pantheacon 2019
I have just returned from Pantheacon, where I work as a volunteer staffer and have made presentations on Atheopaganism every year since 2015. I had a lovely time connecting with friends, making new ones, and meeting folks I’d only known before through the Atheopaganism Facebook group. Pantheacon 2019 was significantly smaller than in previous years, but it still had 1,800 attendees. That’s still the largest indoor gathering of Pagans in North America. It ran very smoothly, from my perspective working in the reception room for the presenters. Very few crises or miscommunications. And I received exceedingly generous words of praise and thanks, for which I am humbly grateful. A priestess…
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FACING FORWARD: A talk on nontheist Paganism
This talk was originally delivered at Pantheacon 2019. Let’s start with a question: what’s happening with religion today? It’s an amazing time to be involved with religion, because in the developed world, the Abrahamic religions are collapsing. As philosopher of religion Eric Steinhart says, this may be the most exciting time to be studying religion in two thousand years. According to the Pew Research Center in 2014, fully 24% of Americans now identify as “nones”–having no religious identity. Some of these still describe themselves as “spiritual”, but they do not identify as a part of any religious movement or sect. Nones are the fastest growing religious sector in the country,…
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Abuse, the Pagan Community, and Our Commitments
Sarah Anne Lawless, who published these two revelatory articles on her experiences of being sexually harassed and abused within the Pagan community (mostly in Canada and the Pacific Northwest), has now published a third piece. In it, she reports the truly horrifying blowback she received for daring to name this problem. Lawless has suffered financially, psychologically, and even legally simply because she had the unmitigated gall not to remain silent about abuses up to and including rape.* I wrote on this subject awhile back. It’s one of my most-read articles from this site, and engendered passionate arguments both pro and con my thesis: that Paganism must root out the baked-in…
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Your 2019 Community Chosen Charity: PLASTIC OCEANS INTERNATIONAL
The votes are in, and the Atheopagan community has selected the 2019 Atheopagan Chosen Charity. Plastic Oceans International (plasticoceans.org). POI raises awareness of the impacts of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans, and works with communities and nations to reduce their oceanic plastic impacts. We will advertise for POI on this site for the balance of 2019, and encourage Atheopagans, their friends and anyone who cares about the Sacred Earth to donate by clicking on the banner ad to the right. Thank you!
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Approaching Pantheacon
So, next week I will go to Pantheacon 2019. I am a volunteer on staff, which is how I am able to afford to go. I always have mixed feelings about going. Part of me is excited to see friends, meet new ones, and share Atheopaganism with others. Part of me is anxious: will people show up for my events? Will I be challenged or heckled? The usual brain chatter, honestly. We all have it. This year, though, I come at Pantheacon at a somewhat different angle. In previous years, I have thought of PCon as “encountering The Pagan Community”. But now I realize that there is no such singular…
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The Moment of Brightening
There comes a time in the winter when, finally, you realize: the days aren’t so short any longer. That point may coincide with the first sprouts of Spring peeking up from the ground, or the first buds on the trees. Or not: maybe it’s just snowing and freezing and wintering like hell, and Spring seems the farthest thing from possible. Still, the light is growing. It’s not December any longer. That brightening (thanks to Kendra Hicks of the Facebook Atheopaganism group for this term for the season) is the entire point of the seasonal Sabbath that is upon us now. It goes by many names, and that is apt, because how…
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Mainstreaming, Pt. 2
Some weeks ago, I wrote about how Paganism is having a moment in the sun, and mainstream culture is noticing us. If nothing else, take as evidence the eternally fluffy and pop-culturey Huffington Post’s article about encountering Pagans. Seems pretty clear that between sugary media offerings like The Spooky Adventures of Sabrina and the explosion of “witchy aesthetic” material on Tumblr, plus the steep decline of Christianity and rise of “none” or “other” as a religious identity, Paganism has tipped—for the moment, at least—over the edge from obscurity into the public eye. As I wrote before, I think this is a good thing. But there are certainly some considerations for Pagans…
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Contemplating a Red Moon
Last night, 2019’s only lunar eclipse took place: a spectacular “supermoon” eclipse. We watched it from our back yard, watching the Moon slowly darken into a ruddy ball, and then, dramatically, the bright edge of ordinary Sun-lit surface burst into being and steadily reclaim it. Lunar eclipses are really cool. Astronomical events as a whole are really cool: meteor showers, eclipses, transits, and particularly that extraordinary rarity, a prominent comet visible to the naked eye. Whenever possible, I take the opportunity to experience these phenomena, as they bring home in a visceral way that we are on a planet, in space, and there’s a lot of other stuff going on…
