Personal Reflection
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It’s On Us Now
As an Atheopagan, I have Principles. They are a set of values about what is Sacred and how we should conduct ourselves in the world. Those values are about to be severely challenged as the far-right government of Donald Trump threatens the world with environmental, economic and military cataclysm and gives tacit permission to racists, sexists and homophobes to assault, threaten and intimidate people of color, LGBTQ people, religious minorities and women. The last is happening already with disturbing frequency. Those of us with a naturalistic worldview already understood that our world is under deep threat. We knew that creating a better future wasn’t going to be easy. It just didn’t seem…
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On the Edge of Darkness: Hallows Reflections 2016
It’s a gray, dim day here in Sonoma County, under a foreboding blanket of low and heavy clouds. Forecasts are for showers throughout the day; it’s one of those Halloweens where parents crane their necks and scowl at the sky throughout the day, wondering whether they’ll get away with a dry window during trick or treating. Which seems like a pretty good metaphor for this entire year. I’ve been scowling at the sky and wondering just what kind of fresh hell may be coming along a lot, this year. Now with a week left until possibly the most important U.S. election since 1860, there are still no clear answers, but one…
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The Beauty of Home
I live in a spectacular place: Sonoma County, California. I have for a long while, and especially since having to move back into an urban center after nearly two decades in the country, it’s been hard for me to remember sometimes how blessed I am, how remarkable it is here. Still, there is a reason why people come here from all over the world, and it isn’t just to get drunk and call it “wine tasting”. Nestled in soft valleys against the Pacific Ocean, this region is home to soaring redwood forests, rolling oak-and-grassland hills, the (mostly) placid Russian River, and locations of historical interest ranging from Native village sites to…
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The Ecstasy of the Mosh Pit
I love punk rock. I was in high school at exactly the period that disco became a popular genre (which means that it was already dying in the gay bars and minority clubs where it had been born; by the time straight white people took it—because there was money to be made—it was pretty well wrung out). Those years–1975-79–saw some of the most godawful popular music that had been seen to date: lush, overproduced orchestral rock anthems with pretentious lyrics, whiny love ballads, the Eagles (enough said) and ubiquitous disco enjoinders to dance and screw, the soundtrack of the Seventies Bacchanal that set the table for the AIDS epidemic. There were exceptions, of…
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A No-Bullshit Religion
A week or so ago, when I published “Is Atheopaganism Political?“, I expected some pushback. I suspected that there might be some who have embraced—even subconsciously—the dualistic idea that religion/spirituality lives in a separate realm of human experience from that of pragmatic matters such as public policy. So I thought there might be some commentary along the lines of “well, that’s okay for you, but I don’t concern myself with such things.” Or some such. I doubted you, friends, and I should not have. There was no such response. Feedback was nothing but positive. And this tells me that the Atheopagan group and the readers of the blog get it: that our pursuit of…
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Is Atheopaganism Political?
People’s relationships with the world of public policy, elections and world affairs vary widely. For some, they are background noise, irrelevant distractions to the matters of their own lives, beliefs and practices. There are many Pagans like this. While they may espouse political opinions or share memes on Facebook, they’re not doing much to change the world through political or activism channels. Some of them don’t even vote, expressing the bizarre idea that by refusing to take a stand in an election, they are somehow taking a more important stand in a larger context. (Personally, I don’t get it. I don’t see how one can believe that doing nothing is…
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Crickets, Time, and Paying Attention
This time of year, the chorus of crickets is a nightly affair. It’s evocative. It speaks of every summer evening there ever was. As it turns out, there is more to cricket’s song than the equivalent of “Hey, baby!” in High Cricket. Think about the speed at which a cricket lives: at room temperature, its heart beats many times faster than that of a human being. It lives only about 90 days. So slow it down. Slow it down until the sound is at the relative speed of a human life. And what it becomes is angelic. The cricket’s song reminds me to slow down and pay attention. Life is fleeting. There are…
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My Favorite Ritual Tool
Ritual tools are personal things. They are objects that we find evocative, meaningful, symbolic. They whisper stories to us, and those stories are folded into the meaning of the rituals which we perform with them. Atheopagans vary widely in the kinds of ritual tools they use, including those who don’t use tools at all. The use of tools in rituals—typically, ritual knives (“athames”), wands, patens or pentacles, chalices and incense burners and so forth—is one of the threads of Western occultism that was woven into the fabric of Neopaganism as it arose in the mid-20th century, and it persists today in most of the Wicca-style Pagan traditions. I use tools…
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Accountability: a Pagan Missing Piece?
There’s been some discussion of the concept of “sin” in the Pagan blogosphere lately: here, and here, and my own contribution some time ago, here. Now, I should say: that’s a freighted word for many people, but not so much for me. I was never a Christian, nor a Jew nor Muslim. So I don’t feel the oppressive weight of the concept of sin that those religions transmit. Please bear this in mind as you read the following. I’ve been involved with the Northern California Pagan community for a long time–30 years next year. And in that time, I have seen a deep imbalance between the community’s orientation to pleasure-seeking…
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Some Language I’m Not Going to Use Any More: An Apology
This post is an apology. It has now been more than two years since I waded into the broader online Pagan conversation on behalf first of myself, and then of what has turned out to be the many Pagans who do not believe in literal gods. In those early days, the posts of myself and others like John Halstead and John Cleland Host were received in some quarters with bitter hostility. As a result, I became defensive. And when I’m defensive, I’m often acerbic. “Hard theists” and I aren’t going to agree cosmologically. We have fundamental disputes over the nature of the Universe itself, and those cannot be reconciled. However,…
