Fate

[leo9]

So once again it's a matter of faith.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

But if she doesn't "leave footprints in the material world" how can you know what she wants? Does she speak to you? Is it just an urge, or a feeling? How can you differentiate, as my sig implies, between her voice and your own insanity?

How can you differentiate between your rational materialism and your own insanity? None of us can prove by self-analysis that we're not crazy or deluded: unlike Voyager's computerised Doctor, we don't have self-diagnostic subroutines to call on. We get by, most of the time, by a combination of concensus (if a reasonable number of people seem to agree with me, it's not just in my head) and pragmatism (if my ideas don't put me dangerously at odds with the world, they can't be that irrational). In Robert Anton Wilson's immortal words, only the madman is absolutely sure.

And if indeed she does not interact with our world, why should anyone worship her? Even more importantly, if she is a supernatural being, why should she need or even desire our worship?

Like most modern Pagans, I don't see my gods as being so weak or egomaniac that they actually want people to spend hours chanting about how wonderful they are. But... have you ever been stunned by something so vast and so beautiful that you could only stare in awe? That is worship, and it's not something you put on in order to beg for helpful miracles: it's something you can't help but feel.

Hey, I don't waste my time on small delusions.

These are the questions which have led me to abandon faith as a hopeless exercise in futility. If the gods don't show themselves, then they either do not exist or have given me no reason to worship them if they do.

Absolutely reasonable, and I can't fault you. That works for you, so it's right for you.

I was right where you are once, apart from a nagging feeling that there ought to be more to it than that. I spent a while calling myself a Buddhist, which means an atheist with spiritual yearnings. But the things I heard from neo-Pagans gave me that feeling which another religious writer has described as "wishing that it might be so". I studied, here and there (this was before the days when every bookshop had a shelf on the subject), and attended rituals in the spirit of trying to see if it would work for me. I saw a cartoon, once, of an intellectual-looking character kneeling in prayer saying "Testing... Testing..." That was me.

And then I got an answer, and the world would never be the same. But I am perfectly well aware that, like the ghost that terrorised everyone who visited a house I stayed in once, it could all be explained away as subjective and unproveable.

The behaviourist pioneer Skinner, in his later years, decided that the conditioned reflex was the only mechanism needed to explain all human behaviour. Therefore, the conscious mind did not exist: all behaviour was a product of reflexes, and if you claimed to be conscious, that was your conditioned reflexes speaking as they had been conditioned to do. And the wonderful thing about this theory is, nobody could prove him wrong: your conscious mind only exists for you, you can't show it to anyone else. We all know he was wrong, but we can't prove it except by agreeing between ourselves that we know it to be true.

Paraphrasing some much more intelligent people than myself:

We are all atheists. I just believe in one less god(dess) than you.

You're quite intelligent enough to see that that's a contradiction. To paraphrase: all our glasses are empty, your empty glass just has more in it than mine.

When you can explain why you don't worship any of the thousands of gods which have plagued humanity, then you will understand why I don't worship yours.

I can and I do. I don't worship any of the others because my Lady is the one who appealed to me when I was studying the subject: so I reached out and found Her (or created Her in my head, if you wish). None of them appeal to you, so you've neither made the effort to find them, nor been seized by one against your will (as happens to some). That's fine: I'm glad it works for you. I have no intention of spoiling it by preaching how much happier you would be with a religion, because, apart from anything else, you might well not be. The mahamantra of eclectic Paganism is "Whatever works," and that includes atheism.