Andrew is a senior in social studies education at USU, and has worked with SHAFT as an officer in the Religious Studies Club and USU Pagan Alliance. His personal blog can be found at A Ticin’ Viking.

I was inspired to become a skeptic by the writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky, who’s wonderful fan fiction, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality pointed out to me that my beliefs aren’t that far from many positions commonly held by atheists. I believe in science, and that logic is a good thing. I basically only disagree on one point. That was the value of religion. As I kept reading the SHAFT blog and the blogs I was introduced to through it the reasons for these differences in opinion became less and less important. I was finding that I held two different perspectives that most would call incompatible; a Pagan one and An Atheistic/Rational one. Add to that my increasing certainty that I would never be certain about the nature of magic and the gods, and I’m left with an interesting muddle of views. To add confusion to that I happen to be ethnically Mormon, and don’t want to leave that behind while I leave the Church behind. This adds Mormon to the Pagan and Atheist, making things more confusing for me.

So to begin with, I am an atheist. Specifically I am a strong Atheist concerning the claims of the biblical god. There is no All-powerful, All-knowing, All-good paternal figure who created the universe. In that claim I join most SHAFT member’s. It has taken me almost 5 years since leaving Mormonism to become willing to openly make that statement of belief, and to admit that I still has belief in belief of “God”. Even as a practicing pagan, I never really said, “you’re wrong,” just, “I don’t agree, and we should agree to disagree.” Having made the most difficult move for most post-Mormons; a serious and open break with the church. I was quite hesitant to take a further step and call the church wrong.

I know quite a few atheists, and often debate and argue with them with them on the most common reasons for being an atheist. Most of their arguments didn’t apply to the way I saw the world, before I joined them. They were arguing against a universal god, the kind of being that if it existed, everyone ought to worship. That wasn’t what my gods are like. The gods I experience are deeply personal, and I relate to them was I would my kin; aunts, uncles, grandparents etc. They aren’t all powerful, just more powerful than me. Not all knowing, they just know more than me. And they aren’t all good, they’re beings, with goals and objectives of their own, sometimes they are cruel and merciless, sometimes kind and benevolent. Saying that God, the guy in the bible, doesn’t exist, doesn’t really make any claim about the gods. I was perfectly free to agree with atheists about god being, and monotheistic religions being bad. Steal their best arguments to tear down a god and system that I didn’t really believe in anymore and dodge the ridicule and vitriol that seems specially reserved for those who would deny that God, and Religion are GOOD THINGS.

Then, unexpectedly last February I had a deeply moving spiritual experience, my the priesthood holders in my family were giving my grandmother a priesthood blessing, and I saw, literally, a void as a negative space, exactly “drew sized and shaped” and had the powerful feeling that I NEEDED to be standing in that space. I knew however that this was a ritual of a religion that I was no-longer a member of, and that if I stood up to join them there would be hell to pay, and that the price in added strife in what was already a terrifying and difficult time for me and my family, would not be worth answering that prompting. So I sat, and a stewed, and I went home and re-read the Book of Mormon in about a week. At the time I was in an amazingly fragile emotional state, in the middle of a divorce, with my opa in the hospital and most of the family thinking privately to ourselves, “do we need to be thinking about funeral arrangements.” I noticed something though, I was getting similar kinds of “warm fuzzy” from LDS experience as from Pagan. I actively enjoy some aspects of LDS culture, and have always been conflicted about my deep respect for my pioneer ancestors and my paganism.

I spent most of my summer exploring Christianity and it’s myths in various forms, and posted over my my personal blog, when I came to the conclusion that it was okay to openly identify myself as an ethnic Mormon, something that has been quite confusing to my home teachers. I also concluded that I was totally unable to support the LDS Church because of their positions on proposition 8. About the time I was exploring that observation I began to read the mentioned fan-fic and reading the articles over at lesswrong about examining my own beliefs with the same rigor as I do others, and towards the end of the summer concluded that I am agnostic concerning both the truth claims of the LDS Church, and the one’s I have previously made concerning the Supernatural.

Specifically I noticed, that for every argument in favor of God(With the notable exception of the tautological argument which just seems silly to me) can be re-purposed to argue for polytheism. Given that I find value in spiritual experience, and even more in a religious community I found myself needing to define what I believe more closely and arrived at a few conclusions:

1. I have, and value religious experiences.
2. The diverse nature of both my own and others experiences suggests a few things: (a) The God of the Bible doesn’t cause all of them; (b) Because of 2, it is much more likely that, IF spiritual beings exist, there are many of them.
3. I am not likely to ever find good evidence for a spiritual being.
4. My “Talent” for divination is really a good imagination and a solid instinctual ability for cold reading.
5. Given 2, and 3. I am an agnostic.
6. Given 1, I don’t want to abandon the Pagan Community.
7. Placebos work even if we know they are placebos.
8. Since I’m honest about 5, and 7 is true, it’s okay to still participate in the Pagan Community despite 5.

That last one was particularly important because in fall I began serving the USU Pagan alliance as their secretary. I had many good discussions with the group concerning belief, and how sure we are about the existence of the gods. I wound up on a few people’s bad side for calling them out when they made easily falsifiable exceptionally woo-laden claims. I developed a coherent philosophy concerning the use of divination as a tool for self improvement; the provide random input to stimulate creative thinking about your current situation. I also started showing up, unfortunately fairly rarely, to SHAFT events. I kept reading skeptical, atheist and pagan writing. I started following Blag Hag much more closely, and added the God Delusion to the my reading list(if I keep reading at the rate I am it’ll get read sometime before I die). I sat down and watched “The Atheism Tapes” on Netflix.

As I did this I noticed a few correspondences between my ideas and beliefs and the ones expressed in these venues. I believe that morality can be determined without a supernatural parent frowning down at me to tell me what is wrong and what is right. I noticed that my choose ideal afterlife is basically orientated back to this life. If I could pick any afterlife described in the Sagas I would choose to remain as either an ancestral spirit, or as a land-wight tied to a particular home or piece of land that I has a connection to. I agree that we should focus on this life that we have now, and if there is an afterlife I hope I can spend it helping my loved ones. I realized that there were various degrees of atheism and agnosticism, and that I am; a “Weak agnostic” about most supernatural claims, a “Strong Atheist” about the God of the Bible, a “weak atheist” about gods I don’t know much about, and a practicing polytheist who enjoys ritual and drama and the community bonding that happens at religious events.

The biggest difference between me and most atheists of my acquaintance is that while we both agree that religion is created and changed by humanity to meet some needs. I think it is valuable, and worth participating in. In my experience the value of religion lies primarily in community and in the pleasure of ritual and the utility of ritual as catharsis. I should choose a religious group to affiliate with based on how closely their values. I am an agnostic because I do not know who or what the gods I worship in my paganism are, and more than that I do not believe I can know with any certainty what they are. I am a Pagan because I find that even in the worse case of the Gods I worship being nothing but figments of my imagination, the people who I mark the seasons with are an amazing community. The rituals I perform to mark the season are meaningful to me, and a spell is still cheaper than a sugar pill when I need a placebo. I am a Mormon because my family is, because I am unwilling to allow a corrupt and hateful church own my family history and the immigration stories of my ancestors. Because I like Green Jello with carrots in it, Funeral Potatoes, and Ham. I am atheist I do not believe in any kind of god that can come in and bail me out with blessings. My actions matter because of that fact. I am responsible only to myself and my fellow humans. I must create the kind of world I want to live in. The only cosmic justice is the impartial laws of nature, the interplay of cause and effect I name Wyrd, because it is so much bigger than I can understand.

• February 12, 2011 -- The loneliness of atheism
• December 10, 2010 -- An old email to my priesthood leader
• November 10, 2010 -- My bishop: “Masturbation leads to homosexuality”