For those who struggle with anti-pagan prejudices and stereotypes, Humanist Paganism might be a powerful educational tool. It can show that a pagan can be a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and enlightened person, and that a pagan culture can be artistically vibrant, environmentally conscious, intellectually stimulating, and socially just.

Brendan Myers

Categorized in : Stereotypes Culture Struggle Powerful

Magic underlies the relationship between us, and the greater immensities of birth and death. Thus the experience of being in the presence of something magical is an empowering, uplifting experience. Magic, understood this way, contributes meaning to life.

Brendan Myers

empowering magic uplifting

I do not bow. I do not obey. I do not worship.

Brendan Myers

bows worship

The philosophical spirit is not satisfied to simply accept what it is told, no matter how much prestige the teller seems to have. This is true even if the teller is a god.

Brendan Myers

philosophical spirit matter

The gods, if they exist, are just the people who happen to live on the other side.

Brendan Myers

sides happens people

It's clear to me that anyone, anywhere, can experience loneliness, isolation, solitude, and estrangement; and most people probably do encounter these things at some point in their lives.

Brendan Myers

me experience loneliness people

Our world is utterly saturated with fear. We fear being attacked by religious extremists, both foreign and domestic. We fear the loss of political rights, a loss of privacy, or a loss of freedom. We fear being injured, robbed or attacked, being judged by others, or neglected, or left unloved.

Brendan Myers

freedom political fear world

All our relationships are person-to-person. They involve people seeing, hearing, touching, and speaking to each other; they involve sharing goods; and they involve moral values like generosity and compassion.

Brendan Myers

generosity moral compassion people

Call it a case of observer bias on my part, but Humanist Paganism seems to be an emerging option for those who want to be part of the Pagan community, but who want to be a little more intellectual about their practices, and they really don't care about the 'woo' anymore.

Brendan Myers

care community intellectual want

The sacred, I shall say, is that which acts as your partner in the search for the highest and deepest things: the real, the true, the good, and the beautiful. The name I'd like to give to the kind of relationship that gives us a chance to find such things is a 'circle of meaning.'

Brendan Myers

partner good beautiful relationship

We immerse ourselves in escapist mass entertainment, such as 'reality T.V.' programs. We support fanatical politicians and preachers. Our politicians, in turn, support dictators and tyrants in other countries, all in the name of 'security' and 'stability'. And we arm ourselves to the teeth, and pray to God to be saved.

Brendan Myers

name support god reality

There is nothing natural, inevitable, or necessary about the labyrinth of fear. We can liberate ourselves. There are better ways to live. Someone has to take the initiative to love and trust her fellow living creature and set us all free.

Brendan Myers

better trust fear love

People in minority religious communities, like Paganism, often feel isolated and even marginalized by others because of the lifestyle differences associated with their spiritual path.

Brendan Myers

feel path spiritual people

At the risk of sounding like a spoilsport, I'd say that pagans have about the same experience of otherness and isolation as anyone else. We're not special in that regard. But this is because the problem of loneliness is almost universal - and that, to my mind, makes it much more serious.

Brendan Myers

experience serious loneliness mind

If loneliness is part of our essence, that is, our essential nature, that is only because of the way, in practical terms, we actually exist; that is, the way we move and work and live in the world.

Brendan Myers

nature loneliness work world

Complex astronomical instruments like the Antikythera Mechanism and the Nebra Sky Disk were made by Pagans. Our Pagan intellectual heritage includes poets and scientists and literary intellectuals of every kind, especially including those who wrote some of the most important and influential books in all of Western history.

Brendan Myers

heritage important sky history

Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras, Plato, and Cicero, just to name a few, all lived in pagan societies. Some of the greatest political and military leaders of all time, such as Alexander the Great, Pericles of Athens, Hannibal of Carthage, and Julius Caesar of Rome, were all pagans, or else living in a pagan society.

Brendan Myers

name great society time

Perhaps this is one of the last remaining strands of my Catholic upbringing, but to me the word 'worship' means absolute unquestioning affirmation of the authority of the deity. I'll not have that in my life. If you are wise, neither will you.

Brendan Myers

my-life me you life

The point of a philosophical spirit is to rely primarily upon one's own thinking.

Brendan Myers

point own spirit thinking

No one is served or benefitted by believing in false or faulty ideas.

Brendan Myers

false believing served ideas

Relationships do not happen in abstraction. They need a place; they need a centre, even a home.

Brendan Myers

happen need place home