And thanks to Jason and his brilliant and lovely wife Ari for encouraging me to get out to Pantheacon this year, and for hospitality after the con. My next scheduled events are the Free Spirit Gathering<\/a> (my home event, where I\u2019ll be Mastering the Ceremonies once again) in June in Maryland, and Starwood<\/a> (where I\u2019ve been invited to present, details TBD) in July in Ohio.<\/i><\/p>\n Pantheacon shout-outs also go to the friendly folks I met from OBOD and ADF, Clifford Hartleigh Low and the Green Fairy folks, Sabrina, Jesamyn, Angus, Chris Chandler<\/a> (now that was an unexpected meeting), and everyone who came to my workshop or bought my book<\/a> or applauded my music at the Bardic Circle. And the hard-working con staff. Thanks all for making me feel welcome.<\/i><\/p>\n And thanks to Mark Green and John Halstead and the other folks at the Atheopagan talk which inspired this week\u2019s topic. And now, on with the show\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n I have been confidently identifying myself both as an \u201catheist\u201d and a \u201cPagan\u201d (among other labels) since at least 1997. Maybe longer, but that\u2019s as far back in my e-mail archives that I can find myself stating it explicitly.<\/p>\n In the spaces that I frequented in those days, it was not a controversial stance. My real-world Pagan community was my own eclectic circle where we had Christo-Pagans and self-initiated Wiccans and folks into Druid stuff and I was throwing in bits of Taoism and Zen \u2014 who was going to argue?<\/p>\n On-line, we had the net but the web hadn\u2019t become a big thing yet. Most of us were still on dial-up and blogs were still years away. We didn\u2019t even have MySpace yet, let alone Facebook and Twitter. USENET newsgroups and private mailing lists were where the important discussions happened, and regularly posted FAQ (\u201cFrequently Asked Questions\u201d) documents were important works of the on-line culture.<\/p>\n And that culture was still weighted towards programmers, engineers, and scientists. We were still griping about \u201cThe September That Never Ended\u201d<\/a>, when AOL suddenly let a bunch of non-technical people into our party.<\/p>\n So the \u201cFrequently Asked Questions about Neopaganism\u201d written by hacker<\/a> Eric S. Raymond had some authority with on-line Pagans. It stated: \u201c[M]any neopagans are philosophical agnostics or even atheists; there is a tendency to regard `the gods\u2019 as Jungian archetypes or otherwise in some sense created by and dependent on human belief, and thus naturally plural and observer-dependent.\u201d[Raymond, \u201cNeopagan\u201d]<\/sup><\/p>\n (Raymond \u2014 or ESR, as we hackers know him \u2014 was a Wiccan priest at one point, and also a devotee of Zen, so his 1995 essay-length spiritual autobiography \u201cDancing With the Gods\u201d,[Raymond, \u201cDancing\u201d]<\/sup> is an excellent<\/b> read for Zen Pagans. Unfortunately he sort of went nuts after 9\/11, falling into paranoid conspiracy theories, Islamophobia, and climate change denialism; [Raymond, \u201cWhy\u201d; \u201cEric S. Raymond\u201d; \u201c#1054\u2026\u201d]<\/sup> my citation of his older work here is most definitely not an endorsement of this more recent batshit craziness. May he be healed.)<\/p>\n I got no push-back on my \u201cPagan atheist\u201d identification more severe than an occasional raised eyebrow \u2014 and even those mostly came from Christians upset at my double heresy.<\/p>\n \u201cPagan\u201d and \u201catheist\u201d have both been part of my presenter bio<\/a> for about thirty-five events (counting each year\u2019s edition of annual ones separately) spread over a decade and a half now. Neither the Pagan Police nor Atheist Agents have yet come to take me away.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know if times are changing, or if it\u2019s an east coast\/west coast thing, or something that\u2019s mostly in the Pagan blogosphere. Or maybe also including \u201cZen\u201d and \u201cTaoist\u201d and \u201cDiscordian\u201d in that bio have made me seem non-threatening to people so I haven\u2019t been drawn into the conflict. But when I made it out to PantheaCon recently and heard from such prominent atheist\/humanist Pagans as Mark Green (of Atheopaganism<\/a> fame) and John Halstead (The Allergic Pagan<\/a> next door here at Patheos), I was surprised at some of the travails they related, people telling Pagan atheists that they are not valid Pagans.<\/p>\n In fact the intersection of atheism and Neopaganism goes back centuries. One root of the Neopagan movement was the poetry of British Romantics. Percy Bysshe Shelley was part of a social set that sought a replacement for Christianity and helped shape our Neopagan notions of the deities;[Hutton 23-25]<\/sup> he wrote of the \u201cSacred goddess, Mother Earth \/ Thou from whose immortal bosom \/ Gods and men and beasts have birth\u201d,[Shelley]<\/sup> and once raised an altar to Pan and wrote of such worship as the \u201ctrue religion\u201d[quoted at Hutton, 25]<\/sup>. But he was also a devoted amateur scientist and was expelled from Oxford for writing a tract titled The Necessity of Atheism<\/i><\/a> (He was also a vegetarian and an anarchist. I love this guy!)<\/p>\n As happy as I was to meet some other atheist Pagans, I was struck by something about the language that Mark Green uses. He speaks of a distinction between \u201cbelieving\u2026gods to exist in a literal sense\u201d and seeing them as \u201cmeaningful metaphors\u201d.[Green]<\/sup><\/p>\n With all respect to Mark, I think that doesn\u2019t quite catch it. Metaphor is a literary device, it\u2019s something that we recognize intellectually. It seems to me weak tea for discussing the Shining Ones.<\/p>\n I think we need to look deeper and do some philosophy. To answer the question \u201cDo the deities exist?\u201d, we need to answer two questions, just two trivial little matters:<\/p>\n We have here two fundamental questions of theology and ontology that have had philosophers quibbling for thousands of years.<\/p>\n So, what the heck, there\u2019s already so much gibberish on these topics that I don\u2019t think I can make the problem any worse!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Imagine that we could grab a sample of typical citizens off the streets of various civilizations throughout history, from the Sumerians to today, and quiz them about ontology \u2014 the branch of philosophy that studies existence. I think we would get a naive sort of realism. This brick? It exists, our subject replies, what a stupid question. The unicorn that the town drunk said he saw behind the tavern? It does not exist, it\u2019s a fiction or a delusion or a lie. A good story, though, the bit about that unicorn and the blacksmith\u2019s daughter is true even if it\u2019s not, you know, \u201cfactual\u201d. The number three? It exists \u2014 see, I have three coins in my pocket. (You think I can\u2019t count or something?) People like you and me? Of course we exist, we\u2019re standing here talking to each other.<\/p>\n And if we also asked them about theology, if we asked them to describe the primary deity of their culture\u2019s pantheon, I think the picture that would emerge is that of a king but even moreso \u2014 a super-king, a magic king. Indeed, in some cultures a king could be promoted to godhood.<\/p>\n The idea of kings is central to the hierarchical social structure that has been with us since we became farmers and city-dwellers. Every citizen controls some bit of land, from the peasant\u2019s plot to the lord\u2019s realm; and each man has power over some number of people, from the head of the peasant household ruling his wife and children to the chief of the whole nation. The kings are the ones on the top of their various heaps, the ones who rule the most land and the most people.<\/p>\n And even though I\u2019m a Zenarchist<\/a> who looks forward to Universal Enlightenment and the subsequent abolition of the state, I have to acknowledge that a lot of people find that hierarchy very comforting. Someone is in charge. People can know their place in the social order.<\/p>\n But why stop there? It\u2019s an obvious extrapolation to follow that curve upward: there must be a ruler of the whole world and everything we see, the sun and the moon and the sea and the rains. It would take power far beyond what any mortal has to rule all that. Magic power. And this ruler would have a royal court, of course. There\u2019s your head deity and your pantheon.<\/p>\n And that heavenly king is comforting to a lot of people too. There is not just a social order but a cosmological order. God is in his heaven and all\u2019s right with the world.<\/p>\n Even most citizens of the nominally democratic United States believe in the heavenly King of Kings \u2014 and we\u2019ll leave for another time the problematic implications of spiritual monarchy in a democracy. (The Athenians at least had Zeus\u2019s kingship of the gods be subject to limitations.)<\/p>\n The point I want to emphasize here is that there is a common and unsophisticated notion of deity which I think at least in part comes from projecting hierarchical social structure upwards. As below, so above.<\/p>\n And it\u2019s worth pointing out that only as that agricultural social structure has started to fall apart the past few centuries \u2014 starting with the humanism of the Renaissance and moving through the birth of modern science in the Enlightenment and the whole-scale social change of the Industrial Revolution \u2014 has atheism been able to find any sort of social opening. It would be interesting to trace the parallels between the rise of philosophical atheism and the rise of philosophical anarchism. Maybe as we\u2019re figuring out that we don\u2019t need kings on earth, we don\u2019t need them in heaven. Again, as below, so above.<\/p>\n Put this \u201ccommon sense\u201d ideas of deities and of existence together you get the gods \u2014 and goddesses, but let\u2019s be honest, the power dynamic in religion has historically been as sexist as it is in politics \u2014 as super-powered super-royalty. Kings (and Queens) and Princes of the Universe, Lords (and Ladies) of All, possessed of the power to bend and shape the world to their liking, as real and as independent of human beings as bricks are (at least according to our common sense), but made of a more rarefied sort of substance not subject to the constraints of normal matter.<\/p>\n Under that set of definitions, I confidently assert that reason leads us to conclude that no gods exist, that they are like the town drunk\u2019s unicorn: fiction, delusion, or lies, perhaps useful as metaphors, but not real. Not only that, but not being a big fan of kings I\u2019m downright glad to say that no such gods exist. Ha! I thumb my nose at the empty heavens!<\/p>\n But these are not the only notions of \u201crealness\u201d or of deity out there.<\/p>\n I want to look at some alternative ideas, but I want to be clear that I\u2019m just pointing out a vast range of possibilities, not claiming that I have the True Understanding of the nature of existence and of the gods. (Not yet, at least.)<\/p>\n Existence is a weirder thing than we think of in our day-to-day life. Let\u2019s consider for a moment the existence of a subject near and dear to my heart: me. According to the teachings of Buddhism<\/a>, in a sense I do not exist.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t mean that there\u2019s some conspiracy to present a fake author, or that everything we experience is a dream or a simulation a la The Matrix<\/i>. The teaching called anatman<\/i> (Sanskrit) or anatta<\/i> (the Pali equivalent) says: okay, your physical body exists, you have emotional reactions and senses like sight and hearing and touch and time, and you perceive the world and you have memory and intellect. But nowhere in these piles of stuff, these skandhas<\/i>, is there a self that\u2019s separate from it all, an atman<\/i>.[Keown, 734-738; Hahn, 9]<\/sup> If you take me apart there\u2019s no self in there, any more than if you disassemble an old style mechanical watch you\u2019ll find the \u201cwatchness\u201d in there somewhere.<\/p>\n The \u201cwatchness\u201d of the watch exists only as a relationship of the pieces and of the external world \u2014 mostly the owner who keeps winding it and uses it to tell time, but also the watchmaker, the owner\u2019s wife who gave it to him as a gift, and so on. The \u201cme-ness\u201d of the thing we call by convention \u201cTom Swiss\u201d exists only as a relationship of the pieces \u2014 body, memories, perceptions \u2014 and of the world, both physical and social. \u201cDependent arising\u201d, as the Buddhists say.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u201d exist only as a set of relationships that includes the food I eat, the air I breathe, the sunlight that powers the photosynthesis that makes all that possible; and also all the other humans with whom I participate in the social interaction that makes thought possible. (No interaction, no language; no language, no thought as we usually understand it.) The Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hahn often speaks of \u201cinterbeing\u201d.[Hahn, 3]<\/sup><\/p>\n It\u2019s like the punchline of a famous Mullah Nasrudin story: \u201cI am here because of you, and you are here because of me.\u201d[Shah,2]<\/sup><\/p>\n If \u201cmy\u201d existence is so conditional on the world around me and on other people\u2026what should we expect about the deities?<\/p>\n And if that\u2019s a puzzler, consider for a moment the Ouija board. Or any sort of automatic writing controlled by more than one person at the same time, but Charles Kennard\u2019s good old \u201ctalking board\u201d (a brand originally made in Baltimore,[McRobbie]<\/sup> hometown pride) is probably familiar to American Pagan readers. Odds are good that you played around with one a little when you were a kid, or at least knew someone who did.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re using a Ouija board solo and holding a conversation with some sort of Other, from a skeptical perspective it\u2019s easy to say that the Other is an aspect of your own subconscious mind, that you\u2019ve worked yourself into a disassociative state. It\u2019s weird and tells us some interesting things about the mind, but doesn\u2019t bring up any ontological issues.<\/p>\n But if you\u2019ve ever experimented with using one with a partner (or several people, a Ouija-a-trois) and you\u2019ve been able to have some sort of sensible conservation with some sort of something\u2026what was it?<\/p>\n If, as skeptical atheist types, we discount supernatural disembodied spirits, and if we assume our fellow Ouijaers weren\u2019t engaged in some conspiracy to fool us, what was on the other end of the line? It seems that these conversations were held with a mind whose physical correlate was not a single brain, but a shifting collection of the neurons of two or more brains, linked not only by the usual synapses but by non-conscious verbal and non-verbal communication between the people holding the planchette. A weak sort of group mind \u2014 \u201cweak\u201d in the sense of not absorbing the participants. Not a mob, not a Borg.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t mean that this \u201cgroup mind\u201d is anything supernatural or paranormal or telepathic, just more subtle than we usually encounter.<\/p>\n So, consider: what sort of weak group minds might arise in the subconscious minds of an entire society over a long time? Could the right sort of ritual function as a talking board to let them communicate?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When we asked our hypothetical typical citizens about the existence of various things, we went from bricks to numbers to people. The discussion of anatman and group minds shows us that the question of the existence of personal \u201cselves\u201d is blurrier than we thought, but surely we can put our faith in the existence of numbers. Mathematics is the purest of the sciences. Right?<\/p>\n Actually there is a long-standing debate here.<\/p>\n In general philosophy, there are two sides (more or less, not counting some fringe positions) on the question of the reality of abstracts. There are the platonists who take the position attributed to Plato, that abstract ideals exist, that in addition to (for example) coins existing, there also exists the universal of circularity, which exists independently.[Hawton 21-22]<\/sup> And there are nominalists like Thomas Hobbes[Duncan]<\/sup> and John Locke [Hawton, 67-68]<\/sup> who believe that what exists are particulars, and that general, universal terms are just convenient names.<\/p>\n The debate found its way into mathematics in the 20th century, and so we have platonists who argue that numbers and the other entities of mathematics objects really exist, though they do so outside of space and time; and nominalists who say that numbers are just conventions of thought or language, not real things.[Bueno]<\/sup> It\u2019s important to understand that this is a contemporary controversy, not something belonging to medieval times or classical antiquity.<\/p>\n If we can\u2019t agree on whether numbers exist, how can we say anything about the gods?<\/p>\n Well, numbers are for egghead mathematicians anyway. At least we can say with 100% solid certainty that the brick is real. Right?<\/p>\n Well\u2026<\/p>\n Richard Feynman was one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, a Nobel prize winning physicist often said to be the greatest mind since Einstein. He was a man of broad curiosity, and as a graduate student tried to see how far he could get in various fields. He once dropped by a seminar on Alfred North Whitehead\u2019s Process and Reality<\/i>, where the students were discussing the idea of an \u201cessential object\u201d. The professor asked Feynman whether an electron was an essential object, but Feynman hadn\u2019t read the book and no more idea what an essential object is than I do.<\/p>\n So Feynman asked the philosophy students, \u201cIs a brick an essential object?\u201d He explained:<\/p>\n What I had intended to do was to find out whether they thought theoretical constructs were essential objects. The electron is a theory that we use; it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can almost call it real. I wanted to make the idea of a theory clear by analogy. In the case of the brick, my next question was going to be, \u201cWhat about the inside of the brick?\u201d \u00ad\u00ad and I would then point out that no one has ever seen the inside of a brick. Every time you break the brick, you only see the surface. That the brick has an inside is a simple theory which helps us understand things better. The theory of electrons is analogous. So I began by asking, \u201cIs a brick an essential object?\u201d[Feynman, 70]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Here we have a Nobel Prize winning physicist saying that we can almost<\/i>, but not quite, call electrons real. And saying the same thing about the inside of a brick. According to Feynman both are theoretical constructs which should be distinguished from reality.<\/p>\n (The philosophy students, as in all good stories about philosophers, proceeded to vigorously disagree and could reach no conclusion on whether a brick was an essential object.)<\/p>\n If we can\u2019t agree that bricks are entirely real, what do you want from the gods?<\/p>\n My own answer to this puzzle is contextualism: we can only say that a thing \u201cexists\u201d in a certain context. There is apparently a philosophical name for this (what a disappointment to learn that I\u2019m not the first to think of it!): \u201contological anti-realism\u201d.<\/p>\n Philosopher David Chalmers has an explanation of that, but first hang tight for some philosophical jargon that we\u2019ll need to decode it.<\/p>\n With that, we can handle Chalmers\u2019s explanation:<\/p>\n For example, the ontologist may ask: Do numbers exist? The Platonist says yes, and the nominalist says no. The metaontologist may ask: is there an objective fact of the matter about whether numbers exist? The ontological realist says yes, and the ontological anti-realist says no.<\/p>\n Likewise, the ontologist may ask: Given two distinct entities, when does a mereological sum of those entities exist? The universalist says always, while the nihilist says never. The metaontologist may ask: is there an objective fact of the matter about whether the mereological sum of two distinct entities exists? The ontological realist says yes, and the ontological anti-realist says no.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n Ontological anti-realism is often traced to Carnap (1950), who held that there are many different ontological frameworks, holding that different sorts of entities exist, and that while some frameworks may be more useful than others for some purposes, there is no fact of the matter as to which framework is correct. [Chalmers]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n So to deal properly with the gods, perhaps we need several different ontological frameworks. Or \u201creality tunnels,\u201d as Robert Anton Wilson would have called them[Wilson, vii]<\/sup>. When we ask \u201cDo the gods exist,\u201d we have to ask, \u201cIn what framework? In what context?\u201d<\/p>\n Within a ritual, the gods invoked exist \u2014 not as metaphors, but in the same way that Hamlet exists during a staging of the play that bears his name. If your Hamlet is only a metaphor, I don\u2019t think your play will be very good.<\/p>\n But if I\u2019m working out a physics or engineering or programming problem, or trying to understand a biological process, the gods do not exist.<\/p>\n The gods do not exist when I make my personal budget, and praying to them won\u2019t help my checking account, as much as I could use a miracle. But when I try to figure out how to lead my life along lines that bring prosperity to all, maybe I can use a little divine guidance.<\/p>\n If I am doing healing work<\/a> and the person I\u2019m working on wants me to pray for them \u2014 their gods exist. For purposes of that work, I\u2019m a believer, and I will call upon whatever deities work for them: \u201cI am of all faiths in my fashion,\u201d as Neil Gaiman\u2019s Morpheus remarked.[Gaiman]<\/sup><\/p>\n On the other hand, when I found myself doing CPR on a friend<\/a> (he\u2019s fine now), while I was deeply aware of the gravitas and even the \u201cenergetics\u201d of the moment, of the intimacy of my lungs being the breath of life for another, I was not praying. Reductionist biomedicine was the call of the moment.<\/p>\n But when I went to Japan a few days later while he was still in a coma, I made it a point to visit a temple of the Medicine Buddha and pay my respects. Not because I thought Yakushi is a super-king who could reach out from some other dimension to heal my friend, but because it seemed the aesthetically best thing to do<\/a>; and because doing so could change my own mind a bit, and telling others about it could change their minds just a bit, and so create a change in our actions: the subtle way that magic works to produce change in the world. And it\u2019s natural (in the sense that our brains are wired for it) for us to put a human-like face on that subtle flow of attention, intention, and energy \u2014 a flow that exists as more than metaphor.<\/p>\n Some might call this approach cowardly or wishy-washy, but I like to think of it as abandoning a futile quest for an non-existent singular, ultimate, and final truth.<\/p>\n I believe that we can keep multiple views, and build a sort of \u201cdepth perception\u201d that can give us a much richer life. I\u2019m an atheist and I\u2019m also a Pagan, and there\u2019s no more conflict here than between my right eye and my left eye.<\/p>\n Wow, you made it though all of that? Thanks! If you found it worthwhile please drop a note in the comment section below.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Zen Pagan\u201d appears every other Friday. You can keep up by subscribing via RSS<\/a> or e-mail<\/a>.<\/p>\n If you do Facebook, you might choose to join a group on \u201cZen Paganism\u201d<\/a> I\u2019ve set up there. And don\u2019t forget to \u201clike\u201d Patheos Pagan<\/a> over there, too.<\/p>\n To answer the question “Do the deities exist?”, we need to answer two questions, just two trivial little matters: 1) What is a god? 2) What does it mean to exist?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1860,"featured_media":8251,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[330,1077,187],"tags":[597,1427,1426,25,422,264],"class_list":["post-8237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-the-zen-pagan","category-theology-ethics","tag-atheist-pagan","tag-ontology","tag-pagainsm","tag-pagan","tag-philosophy","tag-theology"],"yoast_head":"\n
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Pagan Atheist???<\/h3>\n
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Super-Kings With Special Substance<\/h3>\n
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What Does It Mean to Exist? Anatman\u2026<\/h3>\n
\u2026and the Ouija Board<\/h3>\n
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And, What About Numbers?<\/h3>\n
And, What About the Brick?<\/h3>\n
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Questions Need Context<\/h3>\n
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\nReferences<\/h3>\n
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