Happy Atheopaganism Day!

Remember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com.

S4E25 TRANSCRIPT:

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Mark: Welcome back to The Wonder, Science Based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark,

Yucca: and I'm Yucca.

Mark: and today we are celebrating Atheopagan Day, which is the anniversary of when our community first started.

Yucca: Online community.

Mark: yes the the founding of our Facebook group, which is where most of our engages online was on August 5th,

2012. So as we're recording this, it's the 11th anniversary of the founding of that community. And so we're going to talk a little bit about the history and how things have changed, what we're doing now and what we're looking towards in the future.

Yucca: that's right, and it's been a lot,

Mark: Yeah, it really has. It's it's, it's been, and it's been such a beautiful ride. I mean, obviously there have been setbacks and frustrations and all the rest of that, but. Mostly, it's just been so heartening to see and feel this community come together in all the wonderful ways that it is.

Yucca: Yeah, and it's 11 years is really hard to believe. That's, that's a lot. So,

Mark: I was saying before we started recording, in neopagan years, that's even more. It's like dog years or

Yucca: yeah,

Mark: Because the culture evolves really quickly you know, in, in the time that I've been involved in, in Neopagan Circles which started in 1987, we've had at least three distinct phases Thank you.

of development within the community in terms of changes in perspective and paradigm just really transformational things that have happened from the sort of loosey goosey still, you know, not very clueful about things like consent late 60s all the way up to today.

Yucca: Right

Mark: pretty, pretty cool. 11 years, a lot can change.

Yucca: yeah. And I think a lot, really, in the last four years, five years, at least, that I've been witnessing it seems like there's been such a shift in a lot of, not just within kind of our smaller subset of the pagan community, but the larger pagan community, and also a little bit of the, the general cultural attitude towards something like paganism. There's definitely been a big shift since, you know, since I was a kid, you know, thinking back on, it's just, it's a normal, in a lot of ways, it's a very normal thing now. I know there's a lot, definitely areas of the country that that's not the case, but on kind of a big scale, it's, it really has the, Level of acceptance has grown.

Mark: Yeah, and I think there are, I mean, there are certainly entities and figures that that are not us, that we, that contributed heavily to that. I mean, like the Lady Liberty League, for example, which pressed The U. S. military to recognize Wicca as one of the symbols you could put on a gravestone in a military cemetery.

Getting them to recognize any pagan religion was really like pulling teeth, and they pushed on it for about 20 years before they finally got it.

Yucca: Yeah, right,

Mark: And more representation in mainstream media, all that kind of stuff has really helped.

Yucca: yeah. So I think it's fascinating to see, or to really reflect on, the changes within our community and how those are influenced from outside sources and, you know, the influence that we've had as well and all of that is, I mean, somebody should do their somebody should do their dissertation on that. I think that would make a fascinating one.

Mark: yeah, me too, me too. Yeah, there's just, there's so much to say about it, but why don't we go back to the beginning,

Yucca: Right.

Mark: And start there, and just kind of, you know, work our way forward. So, atheopaganism started out as an idea that I had for myself.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: I had had, I'd been involved with the local pagan community for a very long time, had some really off putting experiences in the late 90s, early 2000s that reinforced to me how much capital B belief had become important

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: in the pagan culture, and which had not been true when I first joined.

Yucca: hmm.

Mark: And as an atheist pagan, I was feeling really oppressed by this and then it got to the point where I was offended by it because there were a couple of circumstances that I saw where the will of the gods was used as an excuse for some really horrible behavior.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: And I left.

Yucca: Mm

Mark: But within six months, I mean, I was depressed.

I, I missed my rituals, and I missed my altar, and I missed my friends, and, you know, I missed celebrating the seasons, all that kind of stuff. So I started thinking, well, what is a religion really, and what do they do for us, and how can I get that stuff without having to subscribe to a bunch of supernaturalism?

Yucca: hmm.

Mark: And I started working on an essay, and this was in 2005. And the essay was done in 2009, and that was what eventually became my book that came out in 2019,

Yucca: Mm

Mark: about, first of all, about kind of my journey through this and the science You know, the neuroscience and the confirmation bias, the various fallacies, apophenia, and, you know, all those phenomena that tend to make us fooled by our senses.

Yucca: hmm.

Mark: And then the second part of the book was laying out, okay, well, taking as a given that the value that, for me, is going to be about revering the Earth. How can I practice a pagan practice around the wheel of the year that doesn't involve anything supernatural or culturally appropriated?

Yucca: hmm. Mm hmm. Mm

Mark: And so I wrote all that up, and it was a 40 page essay, and and I was ready to happily go trotting forward, you know, using my little model for myself.

Yucca: hmm.

Mark: But I had conversations with friends,

Yucca: So the essay had been just more of a way of you to, to clarify your thoughts, right? And work through those ideas and you just, just the writing of it was how you worked through these ideas.

Mark: That's right. I mean, I'm a writer and that is the way that it's like having an internal narrative, you know, as I explored these ideas on paper or in bits

Yucca: as you explored in

Mark: in, in, in writing new ideas would occur to me, new connections would occur to me. And so that's just the modality that I use in, in kind of framing my, my thinking about things.

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: And so, as I said, I was ready to go trotting forward with my, my little practice that was for me, but when I had conversations, and so I re engaged the local pagan community. Understanding that I was going to be myself, and not to be rude about it, you know, if I go to somebody else's ritual and they're invoking gods, I'm not going to say anything about it.

Yucca: Sure. Yeah.

Mark: But the rituals that I conduct, that I invite people to, were going to be, you know, godless, non supernaturalist kinds of rituals.

Yucca: Mm hmm.

Mark: And in the course of these conversations, I started having people say, well, don't tell anybody, but actually, that's really kind of what I believe, too.

Yucca: Yeah,

Mark: and you really ought to put this essay up on the internet and, you know, have, get some comments on it, have, get some discussion started around it.

And in 2009, I did that. I put it up on Scribd.

Yucca: Remember that.

Mark: remember that? It still exists. But there was a time when Scribd was a place that you went for papers and documents and

Yucca: Yep. It was the place for a while. Yeah. Okay.

Mark: And started getting some feedback and stuff. You know, having more of these conversations where people were confiding in me that, you know, a non theist or non literal theist way of orienting to paganism was, was theirs.

And this particularly skewed towards people who were scientists, who were educators, who were engineers. You know, a lot of folks that had that grounding in the scientific method and critical thinking, they were the ones that were not subscribing to supernaturalist myths so much, interestingly …