This is the positive account to Paganism and my religiosity, which is missing in the previous part from 2020. These two parts are logically unrelated, which means that should my positive account lack persuasive power to the reader or to my future self, my negative account in the previous part stays unaffected.

Historically speaking what has separated Christians from Pagans where that Christians believed in the following things:

Pagans did not sign up to this, but also did not negate the existence of a creator entirely. Platonism teaches, for instance, that, even though the world was created, it was neither created out of nothing nor will it ever end. Of course, that Jesus was himself God in any sense of “being” was not granted by any Pagan. It is hard to see how anyone who is not fully committed to 1–3 can count as a Christian and does not lose their specific Christianity by blending into a jam of European culture. The latter is of course already Paganism in my understanding from the previous part from 2020. But I am sure there are a bunch of Christians who would take 1-3 metaphorically and still demand to be recognised as Christians.

Hence, I will approach this differently. I will start by a rhetorical figure Christians used in Late Antiquity to separate themselves from us Pagans. In their view, Pagans value or worship the creation more than the creator. I take this as factually true. Not even Platonists worshiped their concept of Unity personally, even though they called it sometimes a god. I think this is also approximately true for all the Neo-Pagan movements. It certainly is for me, as I said in the previous part, even if I might start to believe in a creator or higher Unity, i.e. God, I would not become a Christian, because I would still value the creation more than the creator. However, as an Atheist, in the modern understanding of the word, I do not believe in the existence of such a God. But since the creation is to have a greater value than the creator anyway, there is a positive account of valuing the creation, even though it is not even a creation. This is a natural thought. For me, for instance, as a gay millennial, I love the music of pop divas. But even though I enjoy their music a lot, the personal life or the individual being of Britney Spears or Lady Gaga is of no interest to me. I am not a superfan, so to say. Even stronger than this: I can enjoy the nice colours created by car oil on a puddle, while being deeply devastated that the spill happened at the first place and condemning the humans who created it. Of course, if one does not believe in a creator, the beauty of an accidently occurring colour pattern on a surface is worth adoration even though there is not creator. 

So here is an account of my atheistic-pagan religiosity which should be comprehensible by at least two groups: by those who believe in a creator, as worshiping the creation more than the creator and by those calling themselves unreligious because they dismiss the existence of a creator, as worshiping the world for itself even though it is uncreated. And this religiosity is no contemporary fashion trend, but a well-established option in the debate for at least 1700 years. 

The obvious critique on such an account is the supposition of supernatural forces or consciousness of beings. Some might say that Egyptian astral-religion or late antique sun-worshipping assumed consciousness and eternal being of planets and the sun – or at least some magical influences. But why should the exploration of nature, which disproves such claims, affect our religiosity towards such beings, when this very religiosity was the reason that we attributed those things consciousness or magical influence at the first place? This mixes up the sequence of consequences. It was the spirituality we felt towards these heavenly bodies that made us ascribe a magical effect or consciousness. It cannot be the other way because we know now that they never affected us more than through gravitation and planetary temperature. 

In my opinion, worshipping nature, the sun, the moon, and the stars, without assuming magical effects, supernatural forces, or their consciousness is a reasonable reaction of pagan theology to the findings of the natural sciences. As the sciences got rid of occult forces in their explanation of natural phenomena after the scholastics, Paganiam can also prevail and grow by dismissing the idea that the higher beings are conscious, alive, or supernatural. After all, the sun is impressive alone by the fact that it is a place of nuclear fusion inducing gravity so that we were able to develop as a lifeform. Why should we add consciousness or extra powers to it to allow ourselves to acknowledge this fact by worshiping it? Well… except if one is already a Christian and wants the claimed creator to be worshiped instead.