I was never a pagan, but I was for a number of years a "cultural pagan" (see my much-neglected pagan blog). I still retain an anthropological interest in paganism (as part of the texture of the past) and a kind of "outsider affinity" for Shintoism.
As a young person, Christianity always disgusted me and, what's worse, was obviously fake. With time, my views of Christianity have not changed. Indeed, they have become even more trenchant. But when I was young, paganism stretched out before me, like an enticing fabric of the historical world, an endless area to be explored, which could unlock the secrets of the past, and give heightened meaning to the dusty parchments of the historian.
I could never "believe" in any of the odd pagan gods with their obviously anthropomorphised attributes, although I sometimes imagined myself "beholden to Pan" and even today there is an almost genuine trace of my philosophy-and-aesthetics-driven dalliance with Zoroastrianism and Mithraism, which was largely based on frequent visits to the British Museum, when I lived in London in the 1980s and 90s.
My default position was that paganism had been killed or "culturally genocided" by the Abrahamic faiths, but I, at least, thought we should show deference to the ruins and fragments, and I saw myself for a number of years as a "cultural pagan," in the same way that some people claim to be "cultural Christians" and just go to church because they like carol singing and stained glass or don't want to be lonely. But, over the years I have increasingly turned against my "cultural paganism" too.
My default position was that paganism had been killed or "culturally genocided" by the Abrahamic faiths, but I, at least, thought we should show deference to the ruins and fragments, and I saw myself for a number of years as a "cultural pagan," in the same way that some people claim to be "cultural Christians" and just go to church because they like carol singing and stained glass or don't want to be lonely. But, over the years I have increasingly turned against my "cultural paganism" too.
What has driven this general anti-religionist tendency in me is my belief in the principle of anti-extraneity, namely a tendency I have always had to demystify, declutter, and get rid of extraneous things. It has also become clear that religion, like certain schools of philosophy, politics, mysticism, is only ever used to dominate people in dishonest "cultish" ways or to infiltrate ideas and modes of thinking that otherwise would be rejected out of hand.
I have nothing against people being dominated, of course, I just insist that it should be done honestly and in the clear light of day. This mindset is guaranteed to make me hate and despise anyone "sailing their ship" under the colours of religion, be it pagan, Christian, pseudo-political, or otherwise.
As humans, we have a limited bandwidth and a limited time on this Earth. When one is young, this is much less apparent, so you don't mind wasting much of your apparently endless time and mental energy on the various facets of Apollo or the symbolism the Phrygians used to "worship" Diana. Likewise for those who get drawn into Christian theology, it's all an exciting labyrinth at first.
I have nothing against people being dominated, of course, I just insist that it should be done honestly and in the clear light of day. This mindset is guaranteed to make me hate and despise anyone "sailing their ship" under the colours of religion, be it pagan, Christian, pseudo-political, or otherwise.
As humans, we have a limited bandwidth and a limited time on this Earth. When one is young, this is much less apparent, so you don't mind wasting much of your apparently endless time and mental energy on the various facets of Apollo or the symbolism the Phrygians used to "worship" Diana. Likewise for those who get drawn into Christian theology, it's all an exciting labyrinth at first.
But, later, after a certain amount of time, clutter, and bullshit has passed through you, you start to (or should start to) prioritize time and the allocation of thought on "higher matters," by which I mean areas that can lead to clearer, more sensible, conclusive, and actionable results.
Of course, logic, science, and data have their limitations, and we should not totally ignore those facets of life and experience that we cannot easily place under a microscope or a mass spectrometer. For this, I recommend taking a Fortean approach.
But the most compelling reason to be anti-Pagan for me is from a metaphor:
Paganism is to Christianity (and now Post-Christianity and Post-Religion) what petty nationalism/ tribalism is to a relatively sane global system.
If the world order was dismantled and nations, states, tribes, and drug gangs were left to decide their differences and disagreements on their own, is there anyone who sincerely believes they would be able to do so peacefully?
Likewise, dissolving the Post-Pagan order and bringing back actual paganism, would lead us into an age of endless, pointless, and debilitating strife between petty cults and sects with no real means to demonstrate their supposed "superiority" over one another, except through an endless cycle of lies and psychological abuse of all brought withing their orbits -- the effective death of human civilisation, except for its phosphorescent bacteriological glow of decay.
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