I am very open about my religious beliefs with people. That is not to say that I am not private in aspects of the way I practice my beliefs, but it is no secret to people that I follow a pagan lifestyle and pay my respects to the pagan gods. This blog post is the furthest I’ve ever gone in explaining what I really think to people about my religion. Perhaps I am being evangelical, I don’t know, but people often ask me to explain what I think at any rate and it has always been such an effort to put everything that I think into words for people so that they can understand. Perhaps in future I should just send them a link to this. At this point in writing I have nothing other than this introduction. I have no idea what the experience of baring my thoughts about this to an official record is going to be like but I have a feeling that this is going to pan out in an interesting matter.
This is going to sound ridiculous but in a way I am at once an atheist, an agnostic and a theist. Got your attention? I should hope so. It’s certainly a bizarre enough and self contradictory sentence that you should be paying some sort of attention by now. If you are not yet then perhaps its because you have just scurried off to Wikipedia to find out what these terms mean and still haven’t entirely understood. I’ll explain this over the coming post.
I’ll start with the question that seems to be at the heart of every religious scholar’s work. The question is the existence of God. My solution is that this question simply doesn’t matter. I’ll sound like every agnostic thinker that has ever existed and point out that there is no way for us to tell whether there is a God or otherwise. It’s a simple statement and it annoys the living hell out of me when I hear it and I never knew why until I decided to consider why it annoyed me so much. I considered that the history of religious debate is two or more parties all throwing in their two cents about whether they think a God exists. After thousands of years of this happening, still nobody is any closer at all to finding an answer. When people consider this, these men of words and wisdom decide in all their pomposity and scholarly greatness to call off the whole debate. This is moronic. They have ended the debate on grounds of it not having any chance of progression. How ridiculous. In this instance you simply look for a different attacking point. So instead of debating the existence of God, why don’t we debate God on a morality basis. But not like this is usually done, the normal ‘God and morality’ debates are ‘evil and suffering… bad things… therefore God doesn’t exist’. This is followed by the counter argument ‘However good things… evidence and testimony… therefore God does exist!’. Just like that, once again, the argument has returned to an existence based one. Just like that, once again, Philosopher Fucknut Mc Gee and Thinker Mc Ethics-Muppet are debating until they are blue in the face. Going NOWHERE. Well that’s just dandy, is it not? So I began to look at the alternatives, and I started to consider the morality argument as a means to debate whether God would be worthy of worship if he did exist. Lets put aside his existence, after all; his mere existence is not in and of itself worthy of worship. If we can prove that God is definitely worth worshipping then that is when his existence becomes truly a matter of importance. As I am disregarding God’s existence here then it might be concluded that I am an agnostic, however this only gets more complicated here, fasten your mental seatbelts ladies and gentlemen, some turbulence is expected.
The God I am discussing here, by the way, resembles a monotheistic, Semitic sort of God. My reasons for doubting the existence of a God who is worth worshipping are as simple as the evil and suffering argument. Yep. Basic thus far is it not? It is just evil and suffering. The whole inconsistent triad of Epicurus too. Oh, and the Euthyphro dilemma as well. I have thus far said nothing revolutionary. Maybe you’re wondering why I have written this then. Why I think that my views are important enough to warrant readership if they are simply a reiteration of what every average joe atheist says. Also the problem with this is that some observant theist can jump in here and immediately debate these issues in the way that everyone else has debated them for centuries. This is why I don’t explain myself to people very often as by this point I’m normally cut off by a believer in religion who just has to get their point in before they’ve even heard my case. Much to my annoyance. Anyroad, the difference between what they are saying and what I am saying is that with these issues they conclude that the existence of God is impossible. I am not saying this. I am not denying that a God who allows humans to suffer, who is necessarily either a capricious legislator or a being independent to an external morality and who has to be either be not totally loving, knowing or powerful, can exist. Maybe he can. What I am saying is that if a God like this exists then I don’t want to worship him. By these measures he is not worthwhile of my homage because he is not perfect. If he is not perfect then he is just like me – a self-centered, arrogant bigmouth. Magical. Maybe he’s a good being then, but if I worshipped all good beings then Jonah Lomu, Father Christmas and Johnny Rotten are all also Gods to me. Conceptually I’d love that to be the case purely in order to see what a temple to the Sex Pistols looks like. But in all seriousness I don’t think God is worth my time and effort. Even if he does exist. To every dickhead religious person who cut me off after having explained the Euthyphro dilemma to the person who was trying to listen to me: that was the point I was trying to get across. Wankers.
Of course people are going to say at this point that they disagree with the actual reasons why I don’t believe in God myself, or maybe in fact they’ll accept what I’ve said but say that they still find God to be an object worthy of worship. Fine. The size of the toss that I’m not giving about what you believe is truly astounding. The point of arguing the credibility of God and not his existence is so that people can’t say that I’m wrong. They could if I was writing about why God doesn’t exist as that is a matter of debate (not ‘opinion’ as people always say, wrongly). However I have simply given an account thus far as to why I don’t believe in a perfect God. That’s not something anybody can really argue with. Though by all means try to. So now doesn’t this agnostic sound ever so slightly atheist? You might not be wrong to say that, I’m not sure that I’m in a position to say. If you notice, I have entirely disregarded belief. How can I possibly be a theist like I said?
I’ll show you. As I have disregarded belief as a valid way of evaluating God, would it not make sense that I would try a different way of evaluating him? I think so. I have always been drawn to paganism. I think that it is possibly a cultural thing. I am a Devonian, a Brit, a European… there are lots of things you can call me determined by the place I am from. Devon, Britain and Europe are all rooted very strongly in paganism. Before the Christianisation of these places we were pagans. So there must be something about our culture and behaviour that attracts us to the way pagans behave. These myths of big, bearded men who ruled impulsively over men and cohabited our world is totally ridiculous on a scientific level. Did Zeus really make Cronus vomit out the children he had eaten, the children miraculously having survived years of being in his stomach? Is it true that Hathor danced with her sex organs on display in order to pull Ra out of a depression? Is there a Valhalla for dead warriors when they die? Absolutely not. Well, maybe. Oh hang on, yes – it doesn’t matter. That again would be a discussion of belief. Do the stories have meaning? That is a more important question, the answer for me being yes. In the stories of the ancient pagans there are always huge epic accounts of action and hyperbolic characters, but with cosmic realities woven throughout the story. These stories all have meaning, for me at least. For example the myth of Heracles killing his family in a haze and having to work for the king, doing 12 labours of ridiculous proportion is incredibly meaningful. It has endowed me with a sense of recognising that I have done wrong and that in order to correct it I must go out into the world and atone for my mistakes, with actions and not words. Would you call that a good worldview? I do certainly. I don’t believe in Heracles, but I believe in the importance of the myth. After all this is the reason these myths were told in the first place. They aren’t meant to be scientific accounts of what happened. Like children’s stories with a moral these stories have a lesson to be learned. If I looked at these as factually true stories I could also only take one culture’s paganism into my worldview e.g. Greek paganism. However as I take truth from these works of folk fiction in the form of cosmic truth it surely is valid to look at a variety of culture’s truths. One does not deny the other, which is a problem for many monotheistic thinkers. So as I accept the importance of gods in my life, does that make me a theist? If so then I am certainly a polytheist. I’m a theist who does not believe in God but sees that as irrelevant to the argument. So now you see how I am at once atheistic, theistic and agnostic all to some extent. Or maybe I’m not. I don’t really care, if the problem you have is with how those terms have been applied then I’m guessing you haven’t understood entirely what this article is getting at.
So I’m a pagan, and now you know why. In a world where natural disasters occur, we can clone sheep, children die of starvation, scientifically many things don’t make sense and car insurance is sold with the lure of cuddly meerkats in the very same way one might sell a happy meal, is there not an argument for saying that the pantheon of bickering, uncaring and over the top gods are more relevant than one all caring one. Regardless of whether they exist or not. So this is why I see paganism as the most accessible religion today, and am proud to consider myself a part of that belief system. Thank you for your patience in reading this.
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