Hawk's Cry

On Destiny

Prison Inmates, Ex-Felons, and the Pagan Community

As many of you know, my wife and I serve our Gods through prison chaplaincy. Together, we carry Light and Joy into the dark and barren places to lift the hearts and spirits of those who are lowest. It is a mission that normally is never thought about in the larger Pagan community, but one that is slowly rising in the community conscience. Recently, Nels Linde of the Pagan Newswire Collective was kind enough to interview me about this topic. I’ll be leading a discussion at Paganicon on Saturday, March 16, 2013 about the role of ex-felons in the Pagan community, as they are released from the prison system. If you’re able to attend, I highly recommend it, as there are thousands of Pagan prisoners who will be released within the coming years into our community.

I also invite you to comment on this topic below. How do you feel about the role of ex-cons in Paganism in general? Is your group open to those who were formerly incarcerated? How do you screen visitors and those who request to become a candidate for membership in your group?

I’d like to use your comments in my discussion, so please indicate if you do not want them used.

Against Humanism

There is a war being waged against Pagans. But it’s not waged by Christians, as many believe. It is a war against Humanism, an enemy we actually have in common with Christians. It is a religion that is officially promoted by every western government, including the United States. Its churches are government-funded schools and universities designed to teach children to think as a Secular Humanist, all the way down to the subconscious level. Though it has only existed since the early 1930s, it has rapidly grown to be the dominant religion in all of western society.

Humanism denies being a religion at all, declaring itself instead as the scientific truth of the universe. However, I argue that it indeed is very much a religion, regardless of what it calls itself.

Religions provide a few core benefits to their followers, including:

1. A mythos, or overall story followers fit into, giving their lives meaning, including a cosmology of the universe and their place in it, and a cast of divine characters.
2. Divine protection from harm
3. The providing of people’s needs from the ultimate provider(s)
4. A moral compass for followers with which to guide their actions and choices

Let’s see how Humanism offers these benefits to its believers. Humanism has a few primary tenets that frame everything within it. These include the following:

1. Humanism cosmology says the universe is essentially random, governed by physical laws that were designed by random chance. It was self-existing and not created. Humans themselves are divine and there is no higher being. Therefore, the only mythos is the story of humans achieving human goals. Since there is no universality of human goals (as humans only exist on Earth), the Humanist mythos is shallow and focused on the short-term.
2. The physical world is all that exists. There are no non-material, subjective, or spiritual planes of existence.
3. Since humans are divine, and there are no higher entities, protection must be provided by human-organized collections of humans, also called government. Social safety agencies, physical, financial, mental, medical, etc. are how the divine human collective provide for divine protection. This leads to thousands and thousands of rules and restrictions, all in the name of “safety.” There is no higher power to protect us, so we are told that it’s critical that we follow every human-decreed safety restriction or Very Bad Things are sure to happen.
4. The divine providing for our needs is done through other government programs, such as employment programs, government subsidy of specific businesses and industries, welfare, food stamps, and other similar human-engineered and implemented means. There is no higher power to provide our basic needs, so we are told that if these programs weren’t there, Very Bad Things like starvation and mass death, are bound to happen.
5. Our moral compass in Humanism is not the will of a god, like in Abrahamic religions, or our own True Will, as Pagans use, but instead it’s the will of other humans. Laws, regulations, and rules are written and decreed by  politicians, political advisors, lawyers, judges, and other Humanistic “higher beings.” Though these rules change, sometimes in opposite directions, they are the rules used to determine morality and ethics used for the daily life of Humanists. As a result, ethics and morality is situational and autonomous. This leads to an “anything goes” attitude that leaves people living in the moral and ethical worlds of their own creation.

Let’s look closer at the Purpose of Life. In Christianity, the overall purpose of life is to unite with their god in heaven. This is achieved by living according to their god’s will. In Paganism, the overall purpose of life is to grow and evolve oneself into a higher being. This is done through study, magical practice, and devotional acts done in service to one’s gods over the course of many lifetimes.

In Humanism, however, the purpose of life is simply to work toward the “fulfillment of human life.” Everything a person does is to enhance one’s personal life and promote cooperative effort to social well-being. Because of this, the entertainment industry is among the largest in the developed countries, and in the developing world, they aspire to be able to focus on entertainment. Humanists worship the gods shown on the oracular television.

The physical world is a finite world of limited resources. As a result, efficiency is a very important part of Humanism. Our food is efficiently made in the Humanist fashion, with industrial agricultural practices controlled by machines and covered in chemicals. To ensure safety, everything is killed in our food through pasteurization, radiation, and other sanitization practices. This results in tons of food that have virtually no useable nutrients or energy (Qi). Instead of nourishing our bodies, this efficient and pleasurable food depletes our bodies.

Humanist cosmology only recognizes the material plane, the “real world.” Anything else that is not physically manifested does not exist at all and is outright denied at all levels as a childish superstition or worse, a psychological disease that needs to be cured. There is a whole industry called “mental health” that exists to force people to be devoted followers of Humanism, through manipulation, coercion, or the force of chemicals.

You can see that Humanism is essentially the antithesis to life. It claims to enhance human life, but without a cosmology that involves the higher beings bigger than ourselves, it is empty. As a result, rates of addiction, depression, psychosis, suicide are all very high in Humanist parts of the world, including all developed countries. Additionally, those who don’t have a clinical problem still suffer from a general malaise of purposelessness.

All this wouldn’t be so bad except Humanism has an explicit mandate to spread and kill all other religions, replacing them with itself.  The Humanist Manifesto states that, “Religious humanism maintains that all associations and institutions exist for the fulfillment of human life. The intelligent evaluation, transformation, control, and direction of such associations and institutions with a view to the enhancement of human life is the purpose and program of humanism. Certainly religious institutions, their ritualistic forms, ecclesiastical methods, and communal activities must be reconstituted as rapidly as experience allows, in order to function effectively in the modern world.” (http://www.americanhumanist.org/Humanism/Humanist_Manifesto_I)

So we are at war with Humanism. Humanists desire to replace all types of religion and spirituality with a secular, human-focused religion of its own. A religion that is controlled by humans, such as politicians and other politically powerful people. They wish to remove all true spirituality from our lives and sever the connection to our Gods using the knife of disbelief.

Our job, as people of faith, is to intensify the war against Humanism. We need to raise our children in as Pagan a house as possible, so they understand the role of the Gods, spirits, and other true higher beings in our lives. They need to know in their hearts that there is value to life beyond feeling good and avoiding pain in the moment. There is a larger process at play, a process of growth and evolution involving realms beyond what is seen and felt.

So go forth and devote yourself to your Gods every day, study your path, and take your place in the war against Humanism.