Warning: This post is not comprehensive. A better title would probably be something like, "Why I gave up on Christianity."
Anyway, here we go.
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| Jemez National Forest, NM Lynne Cantwell | July 2025 |
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John Beckett, a Druid priest who I've been following online for several years, is offering a new online class called, "Unpacking Your Religious Baggage So You Can Live a Magical Life". The class is two weeks in -- the second module dropped this Thursday -- so there's still time to get in on it if you're so inclined. (Or take it later. The classes are on-demand.) I wasn't going to sign up -- I didn't grow up in a specific religious tradition, and I think I've done a pretty good job of exorcising from my head whatever Western religious thought I've picked up by osmosis. But then I thought, what the heck -- maybe I'll learn something.
I have several friends who did grow up in religious traditions but who later turned atheist, and I thought the class might help them, so I've posted a time or two about it on Facebook. On one of those posts, I got into a discussion with a friend who has been following the Rev. Karla, an ordained interfaith minister who has made a name for herself on TikTok. My friend posted a link to one of the Rev. Karla's Substack posts: "The Kindness of Atheists and the Intolerance of Christians". In it, the Rev. Karla says she has been surprised at the number of Christians-turned-atheists who have told her they're following her. Here she is, busy helping people "heal from [their] religious trauma" and "deconstruct[] from the toxic theology of [their] religious heritage" (according to her website), and she's attracting atheists who appreciate what she has to say. (Her biggest target right now appears to be the patriarchy and attacking it from within the structure of the church.)
So I read the post. One thing she wrote caught my eye: "[I]ntolerance is not inherent to religion, but it is deeply embedded in the systems that insist their truth is the only truth." I told my friend that I agreed with the statement -- but in my opinion, it didn't go far enough.
The Rev. Karla -- just like nearly everybody else in the Western world, including atheists -- operates from the assumption that monotheism is the only possible religious framework. The only correct religious framework. Either God exists or He doesn't.
Let's call it the "God/no God dichotomy" for short.
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Growing up outside of organized religion (save a couple of summers of vacation Bible school, courtesy of the well-meaning parents of friends) led me to spend some time in my late teens and twenties investigating various denominations to see where I might fit. In addition to several Christian denominations, I also looked into the Baha'i faith. But eventually I rejected them all and called myself agnostic.
At the time, I had a subscription to a magazine called Free Inquiry, published by the Council for Secular Humanism. They ran a column every month (and may still) that deconstructed some discrepancy or other in the Bible. It was always great fun to read.
But it eventually occurred to me that they were always fighting the same battle. Yes, a lot of Christian theology doesn't pass the sniff test. Yes, you can be a moral and ethical person without being a member of a church. It was all very rational: science good/religion bad (or if not bad, precisely, then misguided). The God/no God dichotomy.
But I knew there was more to the world we live in than science could explain.
And I have since known a lot of atheists who reject all spirituality. They pay lip service to the idea that science doesn't know everything, but they dismiss ESP, Tarot, and so on as preposterous -- even when they've seen the woo-woo work. They know that trees are alive, but they're only grudgingly admitting that they communicate with one another, and they refuse to believe that trees have consciousness, aka a soul -- without recognizing the irony that for centuries, the same argument has been used by the Christian church against Black, brown, and Asian people; Native Americans; and anybody else who isn't "us". That argument is what spawned the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, by which the Catholic Church gave the conquistadors and missionaries permission -- nay, the duty -- to capture, enslave, and "civilize" members of nonwhite societies.
I'll go further: Monotheism foments patriarchy. It encourages the control of ideas, especially those that conflict with religious doctrine (much of which was written centuries ago by powerful men). It puts fear into those who are tempted to believe that the paranormal is real: miracles are okay, but any other unexplained phenomena are scary because they could be the devil's work. (I once pissed off a Russian Orthodox guy of my acquaintance by observing that what his church called miracles, Pagans call magic.)
The God/no God dichotomy is the bedrock of Western culture. It's so deeply ingrained that a lot of the time, we don't even realize it's there. Why does the horror genre work? Because the villain is often stereotypically evil. What's the framework by which society defines evil? I'll let you work that out on your own.
Many atheists define their beliefs as no-God. That's fine, as far as it goes, I guess, but it seems to me it's a position in which it's easy to get stuck. You could keep poking holes in the Bible or your prophet of choice -- or you could do the work to define your own belief system, in which the Bible and its prophets are irrelevant.
I am here to tell you that the God/no-God dichotomy is bullshit. Quit fighting Jehovah and move on.
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Anyway, that's why I'm Pagan.
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These moments of bloggy dichotomy have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!
2 comments:
That’s an excellent explanation of your journey to paganism. I can’t agree more with your “patriarchy” comment - Christianity, Judaism & Islam all consolidate power in the patriarchy. Our 2012 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is one of the pieces of work that highlighted this and it was working on that and a great many other matters at the time that led me to my own journey out of organised religion. It is clear that institutions like religious institutions particularly close ranks to safeguard perpetrators (who are predominantly male) rather than provide support to victims of child sexual abuses (who are predominantly female but also include male children & youth). This closing of ranks and circling of wagons around male perpetrators was a fact I had not seen in significant incidents all at once to really question previously what was happening. Looking back such organisations are generally almost entirely male-based, male-run with limited & often oddly curated roles for women in leadership or management positions. Some institutions went so far as to establish Sexual Assault Helplines which you could be forgiven for thinking they’re creation was to assist victims of sexual offences but nay - they were to alert patriarchal leadership of incidents of abuse with connections to litigation advisers to mitigate the organisations legal exposure. In fact ignorant of such nuance, victims or families of victims were not assisted by these mediums at all .. in fact they were not helped at all but counseled to remain silent & exercise Christ-like forgiveness. Indeed some of these institutions (one I have spoken of many times) actually held church courts in which victims (usually 12-26) were interrogated as to their contributing behaviours to the assaults against their person’s. Anyway - long story short - yes you are right. And as an atheist or agnostic (I oscillate from one to the other with regular monotony) I know trees, plants communicate and there are scientific explanations for that but not so much for these living things having souls. I don’t know about souls. I think sentience doesn’t necessitate a soul, as that seems a matter in the purview of religion and spiritualist ideologies .. but why wouldn’t flora possess sentience as I am convinced fauna does. But is there something beyond the purview of science at work? I honestly don’t know but there are authoritatively a great deal that science has not yet grasped nor can fully explain. Its funny cuz I’ve mentioned before I am from a paganistic Celtic culture where communities celebrate changing seasons and have a finger on the pulse of what we may regard as the unexplainable … in my own family my mother regularly conversed with the spirits of the long dead and did so conversationally and no one ever questioned such things .. cuz in those communities that was just an extension of life experiences. That those who have gone are still with us and some seek to communicate as they did with my own mother & grandmother. To this day I have difficulty satisfactorily explaining any of that. I remember tho walking cobble stone paths as a child and a feeling of ancient connection in the air, the atmosphere of those places - that I have never experienced here. I miss the smells and feelings of such places but cannot unpack their meaning or what they may imply. Or to be completely honest if I currently possess the emotional & intellectual wherewithal to reconcile such incongruences. Thanks for the thought journey - very much appreciated xxxoxxx
I'm so glad you found this post, Sky. <3
Do not get me started on Christian forgiveness. I have a very different take on that from most folks. I even wrote a blog post about it - here you go, if you're interested: https://www.hearth-myth.com/2017/11/on-forgiveness.html
As for whether flora have sentience? I have sat with my back against a tree and gotten glimpses of the world around the tree in different time periods. I know that's not any sort of proof, lol. But put your hand on a tree sometime and be still and listen. You might be surprised. :)
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