#the weird 19th and 20th centuries anti christian or anti capitalist subcultures

[greyriversands]

Philosophical difference isn't religious trauma

I wanted to bring this up because there's a post going around that conflates certain things (such as not having a hierarchical theology, not believing the gods send demands to worshippers, not believing in the concept of blasphemy) with both disrespecting the gods and with religious trauma from christianity. In my opinion this is both wrong, and creates an unhealthy and performative religiosity.

Here's the thing that must be acknowledged: we live in (post)modernity. A part of modernity in Europe and the Americas (cause let's face it, that's where the modern Pagan community largely resides) was a philosophical decentring of religion. The Enlightenment questioned many of the old beliefs and dogmas of religion, and birthed ideas of secularism and scientific rationalism as the way to view the world. Marxism heavily emphasised religion as being a tool of control by the upper classes and a way for the lower classes to cope with their alienation. Postmodernism has delegitimised the grand claims and stories of traditional ideologies in the eyes of many, including religions, and made many people skeptical of truth claims.

And religions have not escaped this influence. Some have re-entrenched in tradition to ignore the world or to try to reset time (evangelical christianity for example.) But others have adapted. My childhood catholicism had all but shed concepts of sin and hell in favour of a theology of Jesus as a moral teacher and an emphasis on social justice. We didn't do confession, we did collections for food drives. The reform judaism I hung around questioned the value of a lot of its traditions, and equally had a larger emphasis on social action than on piety.

These are the ideologies prevalent in many of our societies. If we are on the left they're the ideologies that birthed our social and political spheres.

Paganism cannot and will not be immune from this.

People will come into these spaces with these beliefs and with these values. They will incorporate them into how they approach the gods, how they view cosmology, how they implement their values. There will be people who don't regard gods as authorities. Who believe the concept of blasphemy is a shitty mechanism for social control. That the gods don't speak to humans easy and quick much less send demands, and that if they do we don't automatically need to follow them.

Will some of them have religious trauma? Sure. So what? That can give you a good sense for what's healthy and what can be easily exploited for abuse or make you internalise bad ideas. It's not any worse of a bias than having grown up areligious or with a positive view of religion.

But many people won't. Many people just, y'know, looked at the evidence and came to those conclusions. Or agree more with the ideologies listed above than, idk, fucking Plato.

Because here's the thing. We don't know if the gods are real. We don't know if they communicate with us. And piety is a cultural construct, not an innate thing human beings have. Otherwise we wouldn't have so many atheists!

And you can't blame people for thinking that insisting that the only respectful, pious form of religion is one where we submit ourselves to beings we can neither see nor hear (unless you use divination, which hasn't been proven to work, or you use highly epistemologically doubtful methods like identifying instincts or feelings as the gods), and do whatever they say to do (demands which are, again, epistemologically very doubtful), and if you don't agree you must just be traumatised, you poor thing, but certainly not to be taken seriously... that that is maybe kind of toxic and unhealthy.

So whatever positive claim anyone makes about divinity? Cosmology? Ethics? People will dispute it on reasonable grounds. And you can yell about piety and blasphemy, but it won't change the fundamental fact that people aren't going to agree with you. And people will build a praxis around these thoughts and nothing will privilege your vision of the gods and religion over theirs.

Gods forbid people engage in religion in a way that's not performatively talking about how cool and great the gods are and making photo collages for them on tumblr.

And like, of course, you're also allowed to disagree. The gods gave each and every one of us the right and ability to think for ourselves and disagree with whatever someone else says.

But have the guts to admit the other person is a rational being that can form their own thoughts. Not some poor little lamb driven away from the light of their gods by their irrational feelings.

If you don't want 'traditional paganism' (whatever that means) to be compared to christianity, stop pulling from evangelical and tradcath playbooks.