What do atheists think of pagans and wiccans

[The Grand Nudger]

Pagan jewelry and craft supplies are a nice little hustle. I've pitched the better half a plan to set my kids down making pendant necklaces and selling that shit on etsy - multiple times. She thinks I'm joking.

So, I remember this being the case back through the nineties and early 00's, that for alot of people paganism was a sort of stepping stone - and to atheism, specifically. I wonder what that transition is, from being pagan to being an atheist as (in any sense) other-than. What are the essential parts of a genuine pagan belief as you see it, and to what extent do your current beliefs differ from or are opposed to those parts?

[Silver]

So, I remember this being the case back through the nineties and early 00's, that for alot of people paganism was a sort of stepping stone - and to atheism, specifically.  I wonder what that transition is, from being pagan to being an atheist as (in any sense) other-than.  What are the essential parts of a genuine pagan belief as you see it, and to what extent do your current beliefs differ from or are opposed to those parts?

That was roughly the time period I first got interested in paganism. Paganism is a belief system that genuinely practices love and peace, as opposed to the hatred and violence evident in christianity. That was the appeal at the time, the need for something comforting, even if its conceptual roots are as unrealistic as other belief systems. In the end, atheism will win for me because I simply cannot forsake reality for the fantasy that a belief system tries to impose. And I don't need the comfort anymore, not like I once did.

[The Grand Nudger]

Well, that's what I'm wondering, what are the conceptual roots you grew to see as unrealistic and common with other belief systems?

[emjay]

Sorry I indirectly called you both Hippies It's just associations, you know? Looking for a definition, pagan seems pretty vague, but to the extent it's about being connected with nature etc, which seems to be the rough way you're talking about it, I can understand the allure of all that. Like when I was younger I was very much interested in all things Native American, including their oneness/balance with nature, and had that as a kind of identity phase, wearing earrings with feather designs etc. So I can understand it - that oneness with nature - as a kind of ideology, but not as a religion.

[The Grand Nudger]

You probably couldn't call it religious unless it served as a framework for your ethics, and how you interact with community.

[emjay]

You probably couldn't call it religious unless it served as a framework for your ethics, and how you interact with community.

I suppose it did at the time, inasmuch as I wouldn't shut up about it, but ultimately it's not as if I believed in any Great Spirit or whatever, but it was nonetheless a nice and inspiring idea.

[Silver]

The problem with magick in film: The ritual won't work unless Neptune is directly overhead, but hey, that's exactly tonight in just a few short hours.

[Fake Messiah]

What I think about pagans is what I generally think of other people of other religions: that they are delusional and brainwashed.

For example, it reminds me of the book about the existence of faeries, "The Middle Kingdom" from 1959.

This part is about is rather sentimental about the old times when people lived with nature, as with any religion it has its Golden age - when people were primitive and uneducated - and how we today are actually the ones who are primitive because we are not in touch with nature.

It is a commonplace to call primitive peoples 'children of nature' and to apply the same term to youngsters unspoilt by conventions or city living. Surely this is the key to everything.
Are we not all born clear-sighted, and is it not our artificial surroundings and upbringing which destroy this ability? Children are much better able to make psychic contacts than grown-ups are, for their natural powers have not yet been atrophied by artificiality. In the same way, on the purely physical side a city dweller can neither hear nor see nor smell with the keenness of a jungle tracker who has never left nature nor been unfaithful to it in any way but has kept his powers in constant use. From the very beginning until modem times the vast majority of the human race has been steeped in the country and has lived close to nature in a way that is very difficult for people in this mechanized age to appreciate.
Today the country is merely the adjunct of the cities, and in these the balance of power entirely lies; the dwindling rural districts have been degraded into a mere food factories to supply the teeming millions of the towns.

And, as every religion (snake oil), it blames that pesky materialism on why people are not in contact with faeries and why we don't see them anymore

And as materialism comes in, in many lands, so the old contacts with the spirit world of nature go out. Even in Ireland the materialists in the towns, with their newly acquired superficial education without wisdom, are attacking vigorously. But contacts with the spirit world have not yet vanished from Ireland and please God they never will, and this book shows that they are still here. The more universally town rule and factory regulations are brought into the country, the more materialistic the country must become and the more divorced from beauty and from the spirits of nature.

In ancient times, and almost up to this very age, this world of 'faerie' has been as much an accepted reality to the country people as has the normal material world around them. But today, though belief still remains widespread, the old knowledge of the organization, of the ordered hierarchy of the classes and castes that compose the spirit world has almost disappeared.

[Angrboda]

That being said, not all of the things we've adopted in our modernity are an improvement over the way things had been.

[Fake Messiah]

That being said, not all of the things we've adopted in our modernity are an improvement over the way things had been.

That's why I said that he makes a sentimental plea and there is some truth in that sentiment, but that doesn't mean that faeries exist.

But it is also absurd that he makes a plea to the times when people lived in villages as some sort of genuine human experience because people who lived in villages did so because they ran away from living in forests and other wilderness, just as people of "today" ran away from villages to live in cities (or modernized villages). And they all had good reasons for running.