Personal Reflection
-
Autumn
In the coastal Mediterranean climate where I live, September and October are times of hot days and clear, cold nights. The sun is no longer strong enough—nor are the days long enough—to drive the cycle that draws ocean air inland during the height of summer, blanketing us with cooling fog. It is a somewhat eerie time, typically windless, with wan sunlight and hard blue skies as leaves turn, children return to school and adults to work after the playful season of summer. The scent of fermenting grapes often fills the air as “The Crush” of the grape harvest proceeds and the vineyards turn autumn colors. Summer gardens crank out vegetables…
-
Why Naturalism? Because This.
Yet another example of a Pagan in a leadership position using that position for sexual misconduct, citing woo-woo “spiritual” reasons involving disembodied entities and “magical bonds” as “explanations” for his abuse. How far would such hokum fly in a naturalistic Pagan community? Not. At all. Willingness to take someone’s word about supposed supernatural processes and invisible beings is a formula for being abused. Healthy skepticism would have tossed this creep out on his ear long ago, but the conventions of many Pagan communities which take at face value highly improbable assertions about the nature of reality create safe contexts within which abusers can operate. Say what you like about naturalistic…
-
What If It Really Is the End of the World?
You know you’ve been thinking this. I have, too. These are times that make hopeful optimism a serious challenge. The effects of global warming and climate change are accelerating, and it is becoming less and less credible to believe that we are going to policy-and-technology our way out of them. Meanwhile, fascism and authoritarianism are on the rise even in the places that have historically been most resistant to them. Atheopaganism is, more than anything else, a religion of reality. We don’t tell ourselves reassuring stories about gods bailing us out of our problems or having a plan for us. We don’t pretend that we have magical powers which will enable…
-
When the World Feels Icky
It’s particularly bad where I am right now. We are experiencing a heat wave that will drive temps up over 110° F today, and even higher tomorrow. In addition, smoke from the wildfires in the northern part of the state has been blown down here, casting a pall over everything and bringing a sharp, unpleasant taste to the air. The sunlight itself is a nauseous yellow, pounding down heat in a creepily still, hotbox environment of smoke. We even had a little earthquake yesterday morning. All in all, it feels like disaster is everywhere. Of course, that’s kind of how it’s been ever since November 8, 2016, when the worst…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…
