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S2E26 TRANSCRIPT:

 

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

Mark: And I'm the other one. Mark. 

Yucca: And today we are coming back to the Atheopagan principles. So we've done a few episodes before, and we're going to tackle the final four today, although it's not like they're the last ones or the end, it's kind of cyclical, like probably all things and cycles.

Mark: Yeah, these are principles. Just to remind listeners, or maybe you haven't heard the previous episodes about the atheopagan principles, these are the 13 core kind of operating how to live your life principles in the atheopagan path. And. So they are virtues they're things to be pursued and aspired to; adopting the atheopagan principles doesn't mean that you're perfect at them.

It just means that you think that they're important and that you want to live your life in accordance with them to the degree that you're in. So, we've done two previous episodes, one about the first four. What about the middle five? And now we're doing the final four and we just want to talk about what they mean to us and why we think they're important. 

Yucca: Yeah. 

And 

as always, this is not us saying you should believe what we believe, but we're talking about, we're talking about them because they are important to us and we think they're valid.

Mark: Yes. I think they provide they and the four pillars, the four sacred things of atheopagan is and provide a sort of roadmap for. How to proceed a good set of tests when you're in a situation and you don't know what to do. Well, here are some, here are some guideposts that can kind of help you to decide what the right thing to do might be.

So, we, we present them in that spirit, not in a vowel shelter sort of thing. There are no commandments in a non theist paganism and So I think we'll just get started. 

Yucca: Yeah. So the first one is one that I think many forms of paganism share, but it's something that definitely sets paganism apart from. Modern religions. And that is that we are pleasure positive.

Mark: Yes. There is a great deal of shame and doubt and self self harm associated with simply enjoying pleasurable things in the over culture. You know, and, and it manifests itself in many, many, many ways. In classic horror films, you can tell that the people that are going to get killed next are the ones who just had sex. Because they have to be punished. They did something pleasurable and now something bad has to happen to them. And in, 

Yucca: deserve bad things happening to them because they were indulging too much in life or any of those things.

Mark: right, right. You know, people this, the so-called victimless crimes where You know, we've we put people into prison for doing a mushroom trip, for example, which, you know, is a non-addictive substance that has zero record of people, you know, going crazy and killing people or doing anything harmful people generally just sit in one place and go wow for six hours.

And, and yet we put people in prison for it. Simply because it's something that's enjoyable and there's a deep. History of this, going back to Calvinism and the Protestant reformation, and it is certainly heavily sewn into American culture, which of course was brought over by puritanical Protestant, Christians. 

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: So in the pagan world, we think pleasure is good for you. 

Yucca: Yeah,

Mark: Obviously not at someone else's expense, obviously not without consent of any participating party. 

Yucca: right. That's 

big. That's huge. If it's, if there isn't consent, then, then that's something completely different.

Mark: that's right. It's not okay. That's that's violence in victim ization. That's not that's, that's not enjoying something. 

The the, the pagan community has generally been very laissez Faire around these so-called. Victimless crimes. Sex