Thursday, October 20, 2022

Neopaganism

There are aspects of neopaganism, some of them lurking in the background of the idea as it connects with other ideologies, that overlap with Christianity more than some Christians might initially think.  In one sense, this should not be entirely surprising: both of them hold that nonphysical spiritual entities exist, and both of them prioritize spirituality highly.  Neopaganism is perhaps the largest but most diverse "movement" in which moderners express a deep desire for spirituality outside the context of adherence to any major religion.  As conscious beings, with the existence of one's own consciousness as one of the only self-evident truths (the presence of the external world itself is far from self-evident), people will never be able to escape the nature of the mind no matter how much they attempt to.  As long as they perceive, as long as they exist as a mind, humans are conscious, and consciousness (or spirit, not that it follows from the existence of consciousness that it outlives the body) is immaterial, so any deep introspection, especially in an intentionally theological sense, is spiritual.

Exploring spirituality through introspection and even experiences with nature, as is part of many pagan worldviews, is not automatically irrational unless someone has access to the evidence for Christianity but rejects commitment to it, if they think that a religious theology like Christianity is logically impossible (which would only be the case if it contradicted logical axioms or something that follows from them), or if they make assumptions about theology and spirituality or deny logical truths about them; recognizing the immaterial nature of one's consciousness and having the desire to focus on and express spirituality cannot possibly be irrational on their own even outside of Christian life, and so what I say about neopaganism does not in any way contradict this.  Given that the core of reality, the laws of logic, the uncaused cause, and one's consciousness (which is epistemologically part of the absolute core of reality at the very least) are all immaterial and each of them is among the only things that can actually be proven to exist instead of just assumed by fools, paganism is still closer to these truths than the falsities of metaphysical naturalism, which has an even greater popularity today than neopaganism does.

Belief in neopaganism, a contemporary revival/continuation of pagan ideas ranging from the vaguest kinds of animism to broad pantheons of polytheistic entities, of course has the same epistemological problems as "old" paganism.  First of all, the uncaused cause which exists by logical necessity [1], pagan pseudo-gods like Artemis or Odin that are created beings according to their own stories, and animist spirits, spirits that pagans believed reside in seemingly inanimate objects/environments like trees or rivers, are far from being categorically identical, with the uncaused cause being necessary to bring a physical universe into existence and the latter two kinds of spiritual beings not having the status of existing by sheer logical necessity.  The impossibility of an uncaused cause not existing as long as anything that came into existence does establishes that at least one true deity that brought the cosmos into existence is there, and there is nothing to lend even evidential support to paganism.  Only emotionalism of some kind lies behind it on a psychological level.

Beyond the sheer stupidity of believing things that neither are logically provable nor have any evidence suggesting they are even probably true (though evidence proves only that evidence exists and thus justifies only commitment rather than belief in an unproven concept), the syncretism and pluralism of some kinds of paganism already exclude this type of spiritualist worldview from so much as being possible but unproven or even possible in the sense that they could have been true even though they are not.  Contradictory pantheons cannot all exist at once irrespective of whether any of these individual pseudo-deities or pantheons were real.  However, even the pagan ideas that are not self-contradictory or mutually exclusive with others, again, have any sort of evidence in their favor at all, whereas even the unprovable parts of Christianity often have historical or extra-Biblical evidences that are consistent with them.

An arbitrary love of indigenous worldviews, which is an idiotic and introspectively detectable bias (like all biases) if it in any way influences a person's worldview, or a desire to cling to something just because it is more obscure or fringe in modern times are possible reasons why someone would become a pagan--there is not even any evidence to justify commitment, much less a way to logically prove that paganism is true by necessity in light of some other logical/metaphysical truth, so since there is nothing rational about belief in or commitment to any form of paganism, it would have to be because of assumptions or preferences that anyone comes to paganism in the first place.  Any form of paganism that does not contradict logical axioms, itself, or the fact that there is an uncaused cause is indeed logically possible, but there is nothing at all to give it any sort of epistemological weight.


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