Amerika

Our modern society will never understand the pagans because the essence of paganism was contra-modern. Moderns like universalism, so that the individual feels the world is his factory and he can manipulate it the same way everywhere; pagans like a landscape with particular areas which each have their own rules.

Moderns and Christians prefer a single god, but the pagan as part of the texture of complexity that overlays the world worships a process in which gods are fellow travelers, bound to its fate like humans, animals, and plants.

In that view, maintaining the health of the balance of this process, or keeping its patterns out of repetition or disorder, assumes central importance; the individual is given a quantum of Will to do this, which is how individuals sort themselves: good do good, bad do bad, others are NPCs.

Paganism also adopts an ends-over-means calculus which terrifies people. When we bring up the trolley problem to a pagan, he suggests acting as seems appropriate for his situation in the order, which we might see as trees on a landscape, with each area having ranks both vertical and horizontal.

In the pagan view, life constitutes one whole pattern; everything fits within that and serves its goal, which is to perpetuate itself while gradually becoming more complex, which means that it uses the same parts in new ways, a type of information efficiency.

This takes religion out of the zone of worship of anthropomorphic gods, and more into a naturalistic observation of patterns in reality and how they manifest repeatedly. The pagan gods exist as symbols of our subconscious and the mirrored similarities to it in the world; this celebrates intuition.

As we look to rediscover the precursor to faith, which is a belief that life is fundamentally good and therefore that death is not the end, it makes sense to explore the pagan outlook and see what come can come of it and be transferred into other belief systems.

Tags: cosmicism, paganism, religion