I Believe - Or Not: A Pagan Journey of Belief

I came from a religious path that prioritized doctrine and belief above all. Now I see belief differently.

In my Christian past, I believed that God knew and cared about me. But whereas I'd always spent considerable anxiety on exactly which path He wanted me to follow, I made my peace within paganism by assuming the God and Goddess were content as long as I followed a pretty good one. There was no predestination, no perfect path to fit myself to. So the Divine was present in the world and would listen and speak, but not to tell me what to do or about the rules I was in danger of breaking.

Still, having just come away from Christianity, literal belief made sense to me. It was a natural swap, trying to use Wicca as a sort of stand-in faith. Whereas there had been a God, now there were two. The more literal of the pagans had a kind of apologetics for this, saying that obviously it makes sense- why would the Divine be only half of what we are? But as I went further in, I became less certain about a lot of things. I wasn't sure about the deities or that magick was real. I was full of doubts and, it turned out, I wasn't alone.

I found the humanistic pagans during my days of obsession with pagan blogs. I would follow along with all the little debates and controversies that rippled through the pagan community, realizing just how simultaneously vibrant and fickle that community could be. The humanist pagans stood out because when it came to belief - that thing we all cling to in order to feel secure and certain? They didn't think it mattered.

And maybe that was because they were unsure. Or sometimes because they were fully atheistic. But either way, they were pagan. These people still gathered with the pagan community. They still followed pagan mythologies and wrote pagan rituals and had experiences with pagan gods. Despite their views on belief, all of this clearly still meant something. They might not have seen the gods as literal beings, but there was something powerful about this path that was still very real to them.

It's sometimes said that paganism prioritizes orthopraxy over orthodoxy, "right practice" over "right belief." That we're bonded together by the things we do together more than by what each of us separately believes. And having been around a lot of pagans, this seems about right. Because while there are some common threads that a lot of us share, there are also many different paths and ideas. And I've seen people voice their unique beliefs or ideas only to be met with unquestioned acceptance time and again. Are you here? Cool, you must be one of us.

In times when I was struggling with whether I could come to terms with literal deities or with any purpose beyond the natural existence of the planet, humanistic paganism kept me grounded. It meant I could still be here on this path and it could still be good and meaningful. I could believe - or not - and neither meant that I needed to come or go. This religion, this spiritual path, was resilient enough to contain me in my disbelief or my uncertainty. Whereas in Christianity this doubt was seen as a necessarily temporary way-station, in paganism it didn't matter if I ever believed again.

While I don't hold the beliefs of the humanistic pagans, I'm not sure if I would have stayed a pagan had I not found those schools of thought. If so, I would have forced myself into beliefs I wasn't comfortable with, desperate to belong, to my detriment. In my own time, I've come to my own beliefs. Some I see as a lens I look at the world through because the lens works for me, acknowledging that I have no way of knowing if the lens is an objective reality. My views are something of a compromise between the extremes of belief and disbelief. I am a person who likes some sort of landing place, a concrete place to live, even in a changing and amorphous world. My beliefs are flexible, but they are not atheistic.

The gods are real to me, but what that means may be different from what it means for someone else. I see the Divine is all-inclusive, containing everything, and therefore necessarily containing all that lies within any given personality which makes up a deity. Ceremonial magick philosophies teach that when we collectively pour energy into an idea, the idea becomes more real, more alive. Does that mean we create the gods? I don't think so. What the gods are made of was always there, but we piece some of it together to make it recognizable and easier to interact with. We take the blinding diffuse light of the Divine and concentrate it into a pinprick, more clear and graspable.

Maybe you disagree - that's okay. And maybe I'm wrong. One thing I love about pagans is that we don't tend to be very phased by the question "What if it turns out that the things you believed weren't real?" What if there is no Summerland, no Hecate, no magick? What if we won't be conscious after we die? What if we're wrong?

So what if we are? Then we lived good lives, and the things we believed helped us on our way. Either way, we'll fade into this beautiful majestic earth we so adore, and that would be a beautiful way to land anyway.