toxicstrawberries:

Of course this would happen.  I’m a closet Pagan in a Christian household, whose sick of trying to be someone she’s not.

I’m making everyone tea, and he storms into the kitchen asking me, “Why don’t you want to go to church tomorrow?”

Here we go again.  “Because I’m tired of trying to understand why God ignores me.  I don’t expect the warm fuzzies or miracles 24/7, but why is it that everyone around me has some amazing ‘relationship’ with him, and I don’t?  Why is it that I pray, and pray, and read, and talk to others and get absolutely nothing?  I don’t want to go, because I’m done.“ 

And then he looks at me like I’m some rapist.

“If you go down a path that doesn’t follow God’s will, know that you’ll get no support or help from me for the rest of your life.”

Hold up a sec there.

You are definitely being abused, but you are not being “persecuted.”  Persecution happens on an institutional level.  Please read my post, Persecution vs. Maltreatment.

First, she walked into the room LOUDLY saying “bewitch the judges with desire.”

When asked what she does for a living, she said, “I’m a witch.”

She LOUDLY and DRAMATICALLY called upon the elements and the goddess:

“Air, water, fire, earth, Goddess now your magic birth!”

No, she did not make it past the audition.

Edit: She appears (pretty briefly) in the second episode of this season.  You can view it on Hulu if you like.

pagannews:

“Gods are real.

And these gods are everywhere, in all aspects of

existence, all aspects of human life.”

- James Hillman

Call for Submissions

Minneapolis writer is compiling an anthology of modern, polytheistic experiences, tentatively titled Return of the Gods: The Varieties of Polytheistic Experience.

Seeking thoughtful, original, and previously unpublished non-fiction essays recounting first-hand encounters with Gods, ancestors, spirits, disembodied intelligences, and sacred presences in nature.

You may hail from a Hindu tradition, an indigenous tradition, a Pagan tradition, an African-based tradition, another tradition, or no tradition at all.

Electronic submissions only. Please submit only final, proofread copy, double-spaced, maximum 5,000 words. Please send your story as an MS Word attachment to williammcgillis [at] gmail [dot] com with the subject line: Return of the Gods. Please refrain from submitting if you are not open to edits.

Please ensure that your story file includes your (less than 75 word) bio along with contact details, including postal address and email address.

Compensation: All selected contributors will receive a complimentary copy of the book upon publication.

Deadline for submissions: June 21, 2012

From Cambridge Centre for Western Esotericism

pagannews:

It is now the 21st century and scholars, scientist, and anthropologist now agree that humanity started in Africa. In fact, everyone in the human race can trace his or her lineage back to our mitochondria mother in Africa. This mitochondria mother is known as Yemaya in Santeria. She is known as Yemoja in Yoruba. She is also known as Yemanja in Brazil and many other parts of Europe.

There are thousands of stories, great myths, and legends about the African goddess. In Yoruba, she was known as the river goddess. However, she became the Yoruba deity of the ocean during the Mid Atlantic Slave Trade when millions of captives appealed to her for guidance and support. Slowly, she became the Orisha who presided over the oceans.

…

You know, I think this is actually sillier than Christians trying to claim “mitochondrial Eve,” as we white people call her, as their very own Eve of Eden.  At least it’s reasonable to assume Eve had human mitochondria, since she was, well, human.  But to claim that our mitochondrial mother was really a river goddess takes it to a whole new level of absurdity.

Contrary to what many people seem to think, ME wasn’t anything special in her own time.  She was one (human) woman among many.  Although it was her mitochondria that became the ancestor of all human mitochondria, her offspring were having children of their own with the offspring of ME’s contemporaries.

I don’t believe that the universe was divinely created.  Here’s why.

Mountains of evidence for evolution; poor “design” of the human body

There is no evidence that humans - or anything, for that matter - was created in any sort of divine plan.  Biologists have discovered that the human body is not at all “intelligently” designed, but kludged, jury-rigged, and modded from older parts.  The spine, for example, is a piece of equipment developed for a horizontally-aligned creature, not a vertical one.  Animals with horizontal spines do not experience the horrible back pains that humans experience.  Our wisdom teeth, developed for an ape with much larger mouths, can fail to erupt properly and cause fatal infections.  While are appendixes hold a reservoir of our gut flora (useful of the rest of our gut flora gets wiped out), they have a habit of getting infected and exploding (always fatal) instead of digesting matter that gets into them as it does in other animals.  Humans are prone to choking on their food because the ability to speak left a “glitch” in the system that made it absurdly easy to choke on one’s food.

Bugs like this would be annoying enough coming from a human engineer, but are utterly intolerable coming from “perfect” and all-powerful gods.  This would be like an expert auto mechanic with unlimited access to every part your car could ever need fixing your busted headlamp by duct-taping cellophane over it, or a master craftsman using cardboard tubes as legs for a marble-topped table.  In other words, from an engineering standpoint, the human body is as ridiculous as something you might see on There, I Fixed It.

The human body also contains THE smoking gun of evolution: endogenous retroviruses.  Retroviruses operate by writing themselves into the genetic structure of a cell.  Sometimes it goes wrong, and the part of the virus code that allows it to reproduce and makes more viruses gets broken.  When this happens in a reproductive cell, the non-functioning remains of the virus will be in the offspring’s own DNA, and in the DNA of approximately 50% of their offspring, and so on.  We can trace ancestry by finding ERVs in the exact same spot on the genome - if you and a woman in, say, China share an ERV on the same spot in your genome, then you have a common ancestor who had a reproductive cell invaded by a retrovirus that wrote itself into his or her genetic code improperly.  The chances of an ERV landing in the same place twice is less likely than going to Wikipedia, clicking “Random Article,” and getting the same article twice in a row.

We share ERVs with every great ape on the exact same spot on our genomes.  Therefore, humans and other great apes evolved from a common ancestor.  (Of course, humans and other great apes have ERVs they don’t share with each other - these were picked up after they diverged on their separate paths.)

Even if we never found a single fossil, ERVs would prove evolution beyond all doubt.

These and many other reasons are why I conclude that humans were absolutely not created by perfect divine beings.

I am aware that some religious systems have incorporated evolution into their beliefs, but in every case so far it’s either a Voodoo Shark and/or it’s that whole Evolutionary Levels nonsense.  Either way, I see no compelling reasons to think that a divine force had any hand in the creation of life on Earth.

The gods act TOO human

Human behavior and emotions arose through the process of evolution.  Every virtue and every vice stems from a survival instinct designed to keep us alive long enough to pop out the next generation.  Sometimes it goes wrong - our instinct to hoard for a rainy day can become greed, and our instinct to improve ourselves and our living conditions by imitating those around us can become destructive envy and/or jealousy.

Death, of course, drives evolution.  Mother Nature weeds out the unfittest lifeforms - those who for one reason or another fall short of the prize of ensuring that their genes (or the genes of their close relatives, in the case of eusocial and semi-eusocial animals) make it onto the next generation.  The winners, those with the best survival strategies, pass their behaviors and traits onto the next generation and the race begins anew.

Gods today are generally supposed to be immortal and eternal.  This means they don’t need to compete with each other for resources needed to simply survive - they don’t need food, they don’t need shelter, and they don’t need livable territory.  In other words, they have nothing to compete over.  Therefore, the spirit of competition should be nonexistent among the gods - and yet, jealousy is a very common trait amongst gods, which makes about as much sense as oars on a Studebaker.

I see only two conclusions.

1. The gods are some type of nonhuman lifeforms, and they’re lying about their origins.
2. We somehow created the gods - IE, the gods are highly sophisticated thoughtforms.

Personally, I believe that all gods are thoughtforms created by us. To me, it’s the only sensible reason why they look and act so much like a bunch of apes.

Power proves nothing

Many people assume that because their god/gods have exhibited mighty powers that mortals are incapable of, they must also be responsible for the universe and everything in it.  Rubbish.

This is like seeing a person lift a 200-pound weight, then concluding that this person is also fully capable of lifting the Empire State Building.  It’s like assuming a person has memorized all of Shakespeare’s plays because xe recited one quote.  It’s like concluding that because a computer can solve a difficult match problem in the blink of an eye that it’s also capable of taking over the world - a fairly common trope in fiction, actually.  Not so long ago, computers with the functionality of a 486 were depicted as becoming cyber-Stalins.  Of course, we regard these shows as ludicrous, if not quaint now.  Yet it’s clear that we haven’t yet given up on it entirely - we simply push the cyber-Stalins a little farther into the future, setting ourselves up for embarrassment when the future gets here and the computers of the day still haven’t managed to spontaneously gain sentience and take over the world.

Thus, assuming that because a being perceived as a deity performs miracles means xe created the universe or is connected to a being that does is actually pretty illogical.

Dreams and visions prove nothing, either.

You’ve probably heard the tales of someone who had a near-death experience, went to Heaven, and saw Jesus and Grandma and angels and all that.  Assuming that it isn’t some kind of hallucination, who’s to say that the NDE isn’t an elaborate hoax concocted by the godform known as YHWH (or one of the godforms known as YHWH; I suspect there are several) to encourage people to pay attention to it and feed it their energies?

Just about everything in the universe is deadly to us.

As a general rule, most people who believe that the being that created the universe is anthropomorphic (if not in form, then in mind) and humanity is the crown jewel of its creation.

The trouble is, 99.99999999999999999999999% of the universe is deadly to us - and to life in general, in fact.  Most of our own planet is lethal to us - too hot, too cold, too dry, or too wet.  It’s full of parasites and viruses waiting devour us in the most gruesome and horrifying manners possible.  Our very sun is threat to us, too - aside from causing sunburn, one day it will completely destroy our planet.

Furthermore, if the divine cosmic plan was to create a habitat for life, then I think it would be reasonable to expect a far bigger life-to-universe ratio - that is to say, more planets with life on them, or a much smaller universe.

Finally, the universe is a mess.  It’s not so much cosmic clockwork as a celestial slurry.  Space is full of objects that could kill us all at a moment’s notice if they got too close - comets, meteors, and even worse - rogue planets.  And that’s only the tip of the cosmic insanity-inducing iceberg of doom.

This covers my biggest reasons for not believing in divine creation, though not all of them.  In the event that a reader thinks xe has some clever reason to consider divine creation that I haven’t thought of… I’ve probably heard it already.  (If it can be found on this list, I’ve definitely heard it.)