Atheopaganism

An Earth-honoring path rooted in science

Mark Alexander Green

• Publisher: Green Dragon Publications
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780578571980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Atheism

Every human culture has evolved religious practices. Clearly, there is something inherent in humanity about religiosity: it must fulfill certain needs that evolved with us as our modern brains developed.

ATHEOPAGANISM explores how the evolution of proceeding brain systems contributed to the belief systems, value sets and religious practices that characterize cultures all over the world. And then it implements this understanding of the nature of religion in a science-consistent religious practice that fulfills the human need for meaning, connectedness, inspiration and purpose.

PART I: A LONG, STRANGE TRIP

My Journey to and Through Modern Neopaganism

PART IV: SO WHAT?

What’s the problem with people believing religious fiction?

So…What’s the Problem? Who Cares if People are Kidding Themselves about Gods?

At this point, it’s fair to ask why any of this is a problem. The role of religion through time has been far more than simply to answer questions about the nature of the Universe. Religion has also served to instill and reinforce values, to define what constitutes acceptable and moral behavior, to build a sense of connected community and mutual loyalty among its adherents, to inspire creation of works of art, music and architecture, and to reduce fear through communication of the “knowledge” that some part of the believer remains in existence after death.

At a social scale, it has served as an organizing principle for entire societies; in fact, there is a strong push today to reestablish this as the norm, as has happened in Iran and is desired by American dominionist Christians.

From my standpoint, the values of the mainstream religions are simply unacceptable. They are authoritarian, arbitrarily repressive and rule-bound, discourage individuality and encourage the association of pleasure with guilt. If constrained by the pluralistic and secular democratic political framework originally envisioned by the writers of the American Constitution, however—claims by said dominionists notwithstanding—many of religions’ social and personal functions can be beneficial. There are exceptions, mostly related to the lack of tolerance for diversity that is sown into the religious texts followed by these religions and emphasized by their most extreme adherents.

But the Pagan community, by and large, is less that way: more libertarian, more pleasure-positive, less obsequious to authority. And they don’t have a never-updated book of dusty frowny rules and threats. So long as we go that way, what’s wrong with a little delusion?

My answer to this question is twofold: one personal, one societal.

Personally, I just can’t overcome my allegiance to The Truth Matters. It’s as simple as that. However challenging it may be, it is in my nature to try to become as fully aware of the true nature of the world and of humanity as I am capable. Romanticism is an obstacle to this impulse. The world is beautiful, terrible and everything between; indeed, such value judgments don’t mean anything in the broad context of the Universe’s steady, entropic unfolding, uncaring and incapable of caring about how we feel about any of it. Embracing all of this, and looking for the very real beauty, wonder and joy that the realities of life’s experience can offer should be enough, I think, without having to make things up.

At a societal level, I believe that superstition is deeply harmful. Delusions based in wishful thinking and an unwillingness to consider the implications of available evidence have consequences. In London of 1854, to give one of countless examples, thousands died as a result of well-intended wishful thinking on the part of sanitation planners.

What I see happening around me is that deterioration of reason and the return of religious zealotry is leading us into a renewed Dark Age which will be increasingly characterized by the excesses of violence and conflict which are inevitable when ignorance, superstition and self-righteous extremism are high. Pluralistic tolerance, which was on the rise in the world until the 1960s, is plummeting, and it is doing so as ignorant belief in the face of available evidence becomes a primary driver of public policy and social movements throughout the world.

I believe this phenomenon arises as a result of two drivers: growing dissatisfaction with the failure of reason to address the other human needs which have been traditionally met by religion, and the development of mass broadcast media: first radio, then television and now the Internet, which have collectively enabled mass distribution of crackpot ideas at a greater rate than at any previous time, and have changed the primary modality by which people receive information from the written (processed by the linear, rational parts of the brain) to the visual (processed by the emotional, irrational parts of the brain).

I’ll address the former driver in the following section. As to the second, the surging return of fundamentalist evangelical religion in the United States has closely paralleled the rise of radio and television. We are now at the point where no differentiation is made through these media between the real and the fictional, and a majority of citizens are unable to distinguish between the two. “News” sources like Fox News and right-wing talk radio spout hate speech and logically inconsistent, evidentially unsupported ideological nonsense which is taken as verbatim truth by their listeners, who are culturally habituated to believing things that make no sense. Supposedly factual media outlets such as the Discovery Channel carry “documentaries” about "ghost hauntings" and supernatural "unsolved mysteries" such as “mummies’ curses”. It hasn’t always been this way: in the United States, at least, far fewer people embraced such supernatural belief fifty years ago, though more reported believing in God.

The power of these media is fundamentally different than that of the print media of past centuries. Words on a page have never had the level of penetration, immediacy and emotional punch that radio and television deliver. Seeing is believing, and now we can see anything that can be imagined, in riveting detail, through the miracle of digital imagery. And belief has consequences; for those who believe that they will be “raptured” at any given moment, for example, the implications of global warming become unimportant.

In this regard, suspension of critical thinking on the part of Pagans simply worsens the problem. This is a time when bright, creative people need to be more realistic, not less. The kinds of people who are willing to strike out into new territory should do so, rather than wandering parallel to the mainstream highway and thinking they’re in unexplored realms.

As far as I am concerned, modern Paganism gets half of the equation right: the tolerant, Earth-caring values and appreciation for joy and pleasure in living are unquestionably the kinds of values that will promote less conflict and greater happiness in the world.

But Paganism, like the religions that preceded it, is built on a foundation of willful denial of what we now know with high degree of confidence to be true about the nature of the Universe. By deriving from religions of the past, it fails in many of the ways these other religions fail: it encourages credulity instead of critical analysis in questions of cosmology, and frames the world for its adherents in ways which promote insularity, self-importance, and the incorporation of the fantastic and irrational into its communities’ decision making.

Which sounds as though I’m making an argument against religion generally.

But I’m not.

Let’s talk about science for a minute.

PART V: SAVING THE LIZARD AND PETTING THE DOG

How religions serve fundamental human needs that science cannot.

Where Science Fails

Science’s modality of cognitive, reasoning evidence-based analysis has racked up so many triumphs of discovery and innovation in the past four hundred years that many of its leaders have come to conclude not only that science has or will eventually lead to all the answers, but that any questions to which it will not eventually find the answers are not worth asking.

In this, these leaders are completely and profoundly wrong. While they are correct that religion can no longer be looked to for credible explanation of the cosmological and phenomenological nature of the Universe, this has been only a relatively small part of religion’s human function. Religion continues to perform valuable functions which science cannot possibly fulfill.

Science and critical thinking are the best tools we possess for answering questions about the objective nature of the Universe and, indeed, about our nature as humans—as products of our evolutionary history, our cultures and our times. These are "thinky" questions, and cognition does the best job in attacking them.

But questions about how to live, what to value, and how to be happy aren't "thinky". They're "feely", and this is where science falls flat.

Proponents of the purely rational as an approach to living, in fact, are themselves ignoring current scientific understanding of our very nature. In the next section, I will examine why proselytizing atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher and Stephen Weinberg will never win their argument, so long as they frame it as against religion rather than against superstition.

The social and psychological functions of religion meet innate, inherent human needs. We will not move beyond supernatural credulity and its damage until we have something with which to replace it in performing these functions—something that is not focused on the thinking mind.

Protecting ...