From: wolfe@wolves.uucp (G. Wolfe Woodbury)
Newsgroups: alt.pagan
Subject: Re: any atheist pagans out there?
Date: 7 Nov 92 13:27:26 GMT
Organization: Red Wolfe @ The Wolves Den
X-Md4-Signature: 97f2483405e2b288a792ae58d4c2c8e6

<pvanheus.720875240@frodo> pvanheus@frodo.cs.uct.ac.za (P A van Heusden) writes:
><1992Nov4.060711.29018@wolves.uucp> wolfe@wolves.uucp (Wolfe Woodbury) writes:
>>In <Bx03M2.GDI@well.sf.ca.us> jrussell@well.sf.ca.us (Jerry Russell) writes:

>>	I'm enough of a skeptic to withhold committment on saying that
>>these things *do* exist, but I'm not able to say that they don't.
>
>Agreed, but from the other side. I'm not saying they DON'T exist, but I am
>inclined not to believe they do.

	It is a well known logical principle that its practically
impossible to prove a negative outside of formal mathematical systems.

	The inability prove or disprove the existence of the "soul"
leaves all the other phenomena in the same state.

>[I've deleted the stuff about prayer. BTW. Do you mean prayer, or ritual? 
>And how do you define influence?]

	Sorry, my theological bent intrudes here.  The two are mostly
indistinguishable for the purposes of this discussion. :-)

>>	Forget not Clarke's Law:  Any technology sufficiently advanced
>>is indistinguishable from magick.
>
>Forget not the Clarke's Law is bunk. Technology: Works by physical forces.
>Magick: Works beyond physical forces. Clarke was basically saying that
>to a primitive human, a piece of technology (anything flashy) looks like 
>magick. Maybe, but still, it isn't. Magick and Technology are 2 different
>things. I'm not saying magick doesn't exist, but I don't think it does.

	Consider this:  Magick is the application of a "spiritual" or
"psychic" technology. :-)

>>>(4) The value of occasional ceremonies, song and dance, especially to
>>>mark life transitions.
>
>>	Joseph Campbell wrote: "Myth is metaphor, and ritual is the
>>enactment of myth."
>
>>	Celebration is also one of the keys of "pagan" religious systems
>>(as opposed to fall/redemption/guilt cycles of certain religions. :-)
>
>The physical structure of the brain comes through in archetypes. To balance
>everything out, the best way is to get back to roots, back to archetypes.
>The best way to do this is in terms of communal celebration of particularly
>natural based things. (We are after all animals, and thus our most basic
>impulses are of the animal kind. The way to rebalance is to work back through
>the animal (or natural, that's what I mean) impulse.) I feel this is the
>heart of neopaganism, or at least from what I've seen.

	There is certainly the recognition in neopagan thinking that man
is NOT a seperate entity, but is specifically and explicitly the product
of the natural order.  Some of the newer philosophical efforts attempt
to get around this by creating the "Anthropic principle" that does
nothing more than to re-introduce "man" back into the center stage of
the universe.  IMO it is just as bad as having the Creator "make man in
his own image."   I've taken to calling it the "Anthropocentric
principle" when debating.

>OK. I'll just quickly put my views: There is no world beyond the mundane.
>Our brains have physical patterns in them. Jung percieved these as archetypes.
>We must interact as communal organisms to survive in a balanced way. The 
>way to that is through our communal mythic and archetypal heratage. Finally,
>we must base this upon an aesthetic. Your choice of aesthetic, mine is the
>aesthetic of Tech.

	Certainly, the "flesh" has a bunch of neural network processors
all acting in a highly parallel fashion.  The models (archetypes) do
probably arise from the signature of evolution on that "wetware."  But I
don't believe that "creativity" and "spiritual experiences" are merely
"bugs" in the programming.  I'm not content to believe that all we are
doing is an extended equivalent of "tossing random numbers around and
making new combinations on the basis of the results."  (paraphrased from
Heinlein in The_Moon_is_a_Harsh_Mistress.)

>Oh, I nearly forgot.  Wolfe, the Campbell quote says it all. Swallow this:
>In the 20th Century we have tons of info. We also have the emergence of the
>first studies of Comparative Mythology which search for a common goal (people
>like Campbell - though Graves does do some interesting (though flawed) work
>in 'The White Goddess'). So, because of the tons of info, we try and get
>knowledge out of synthesis of information. Ultimately, we try and synthesize
>all knowledge to find the basis of humanity. This is the root of neopaganism.

	Not bad, if you think that all that is knowable is already
sitting around for fodder in the input process.  I'm definitely
interested in the synthesis more than in analysis.  Neopaganism as a
*religious* movement is also facing the fact that there may be
"esoteric" or "paranormal" effects at work.  One of the chief complaints
about the "neo" in neopaganism is that it plays too much with the "New
Age" fluff and stuff that is easily discredited, and too little
attention to the traditional "deep" questions and knowledge.

	There is much of a trend to look for "easy" answers, and the New
Age fluff and quackery is full of such easy answers.  The folk involved
latch on to some theory and over-apply it, not bothering to really think
about the places that it can't explain.  Having just struggled through
Ecco's "Foucalt's Pendulum" I can understand an accquaintance's complaint
that the book "doesn't answer the questions!"  It does, of course, but
it's not an answer that some folk will want to accept. :-)
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