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S2E21 TRANSCRIPT:

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Yucca: Welcome back to The Wonder Science-Based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts Yucca.

Mark: The other one, Mark.

Yucca: And this week we are. Continuing our conversation on the atheopagan principles. So we talked about the first four last month, several weeks back, and we're going to get into the middle ones into the next five now. 

Mark: Yeah. And to start with, we should give a little background on where these come from. As we mentioned in the previous episode that we did addressing these principles, these are principles that I developed based around the four sacred pillars of atheopaganism, which we did an episode about a little while back They are basically guidelines for living well for being a good person and having a good life.

And There are non theist pagans who don't consider themselves atheopagan and they may subscribe to other ethical structures, but generally these are pretty common sense. Pretty progressive modern values as opposed to say bronze age values that you find in the Bible.

Yucca: Exactly we, and as always, we certainly are not presenting these saying, you should believe the way that we do or anything like that. But, but th this is really talking about these values is really important and brings up the opportunity to really think about what we believe and how we want to be and behave and act in this world. 

Mark: Yes. Yes. The. I've talked about this before, but I'll, I'll touch on it a little bit. Now, one of the things that has always struck me about modern Neo paganism generally is that it is a little scant on ethics. There's a lot of emphasis on I have my rights and I I'm free to do whatever I want. If it's my will, I'm going to do it.

But there isn't very much on associated responsibilities or on guidelines for what to do and what not to do. And a religious framework really benefits it's practitioners by having that kind of guidance. Now we're all free beings. We can all make decisions for ourselves in any given situation about what to do and what we think is right.

But these guidelines, I think provide a useful illumination of what's most likely to work out well for ourselves and for the people around us.

 

Perspective 

Yucca: exactly. So let's, let's get into these, the first we'll be talking about today, but the fifth on our list of 13, I mean is perspective, one of the things that you did that I really appreciated was you wrote a little sentence, a little explanation afterwards, and for perspective, you have have perspective.

I laugh a lot. Including myself. 

Mark: Yeah, because. There is such a danger in taking ourselves too seriously. I mean, life is both a comedy and a tragedy, but more than anything else, life is absurd. The, the various ironies of things that happen to us and the, just the general weirdness of, of. Of living this life is something that we can either weep about or we can laugh about.

And I think that it's a part of that fourth principle of humility to be able to look at ourselves in our behavior and get a good chuckle out of there I go again, meet me doing the things. And it's just funny. It's funny. And I don't mean that in a mocking way. I mean, it, in a kind way, I think that the ability to laugh at ourselves and to gain some perspective about the human story, the human condition is really important as a part of our, our ethics as we move through life.

Yucca: Yes.

Yes. And also another. Another way to come at. This is being aware of different perspectives. When it comes to interpersonal relationships, being able to recognize that somebody is coming from another perspective and that perspective can also be valid. Now, this may be hu