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S2E16 TRANSCRIPT:

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[00:00:00] Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-Based Paganism. My name's Mark. And I'm one of your hosts.

Yucca: And I'm Yucca.

Mark: Yeah. And today we are going to talk about non theist pagan values. And specifically we're going to be exploring the value framework within atheopagan ism, which are called the four sacred pillars.

But first we're going to have to talk about what is sacred mean.

Yucca: And that's a big one. So. One of the things that pagans often get asked is, well, how do you know what's sacred? Or how do you decide what's sacred? If you don't have a book to tell you that, or if you are part of a tradition in paganism that doesn't have a set, defined belief around that, how do you do that?

Mark: Right. And one of [00:01:00] the criticisms that has been leveled at modern Neo paganism, mostly by, you know, conventional monotheists, but also by some other people who are closer into that community is that it doesn't have a robust ethical framework. There is. You know, w we're accused by conservative Christians of having no values and no morals and therefore, you know, being able to be rapists and murderers because there's no God to punish us and threaten us with hell.

Now as a skeptic, just on the face of that, that's a pretty remarkable set of claims that I would love to see some real evidence for, but beyond that I think that it's fair to say that because the modern neopagan movement grew in association with counter-cultural movements, that there has been a real emphasis [00:02:00] on rights and freedoms and not nearly as much emphasis on responsibilities. And what what an ethical framework outlines for you is what are you responsible to? What are you responsible for doing what is a value? What deserves service what kinds of behaviors are acceptable and what kind of behaviors are not? And pagans, to be honest, don't have much of that. There is the three-fold law, which is roundly rejected by many pagans.

The idea being that whatever you put out into the world comes back to you times three, which. It's very loosey goosey to begin with. I'd be real interested to hear an explanation of what the mechanism of that is supposed to be. And more than that, it's still doesn't really hold you accountable for specific kinds of behavior and specific responsibilities to other beings.

[00:03:00] Yucca: There's also the do no harm, you know, and if you do no harm, do you will something along that?

Mark: Right. And every action creates change and some of that change will be negative to some actor involved with it. So the idea of not doing harm becomes almost irrelevant because it's meaningless.

Yucca: Yeah, well, you get into the, what is harm and to whom, right? What are, who are you talking about? What you've got to really start defining what you're talking about. So something like that is just so broad that it, as you're saying becomes somewhat meaningless

Mark: Yes. And of course there are many pagans who simply reject both of those rules to begin with and their whole deal is I'll do whatever I want, according to my own value judgments in the moment. And. There's nothing inherently wrong with that [00:04:00] necessarily, except that situational ethics without any kind of guidelines can really get you in trouble sometimes because all of us have confirmation bias towards what we really want to do in the first place.

Right. Desire is a thing. So it's it becomes problematic that if you haven't actually explored this question of what's important. What kind of person should I be? How should I interact with others? What is my broader responsibility to the society I live in to the ecosyste