Today, criticism of Christianity and other monotheistic faiths has become commonplace, the primary agenda of many atheists and other critics of religious faith. Such commentators, however, have paid little attention as of yet to polytheism and even Christians have often limited serious opposition to accusations of Satanism. At first glance, it may seem strange that an anarchist would bother critiquing a minor religious movement with next to no impact on politics and little in the way of prejudice often seen in more dominant religions. Nonetheless, I fear that paganism may represent a step backwards in many respects, into fuzzy and ambiguous thinking that leads to logical contradictions and mythologizing tendencies. This, I think, poses a distinct danger to reason and modern understandings of ethics, politics, and science and warrants a critique.

Theologians have spent centuries doing all they can to prove the existence of a single god, without as much success as they would like when one considers the modern state of religion in many parts of the world. Many forms of Neopaganism up the ante by introducing not just one, but a dozen or so gods and goddesses. Unsurprisingly, such religions run into the same questions that monotheistic faiths have had to contend with for centuries, of how to prove the existence of their gods in the face of scant evidence and the ever-sharpened blade of Occam's Razor. After all, can anyone tell me how to detect Zeus or where Asgard is located?

I am well aware, of course, of the difficulty involved in any attempt to completely disprove something. One can never entirely rule out the existence of gods, no matter how improbable they may seem or how little evidence they have left. This does not mean, as some have apparently asserted, that anything we cannot disprove does exist after all. Rather, it implies that the burden of proving the claim of gods (or anything else) lies with the one proposing their existence. If we accept the validity of a claim simply because we cannot completely refute it, then nearly any belief, no matter how silly, potentially entires the realm of the plausible and that simply does not lead to a better understanding of the world.

The questions do not end with lack of evidence and burden of proof, however, and many branches of Neopaganism face a further objection, that of the nature of the gods themselves. A quick perusal of the mythos behind any of the various reconstructionist religions or their ancient antecedents illustrates the distinctly anthropomorphic and even ethnocentric nature of the gods. If the gods created and rule over the whole universe, it seems exceedingly odd that they so closely resemble humans in thinking, sharing the same kinds of emotions, motivations, etc. and ruling over specifically human concerns such as war and agriculture. Even less plausible is the way they parallel specific cultures, with the Norse account of the gods suspiciously resembling Norse culture and even its language in the form of the gods' names, and so on with the Greeks, Romans, Celts, etc. Of course, one could argue that the god of the Abrahamic religions falls into the same trap, but that is a question for another page entirely.

Aware of the philosophical issues brought up by polytheism, various Neopagans have proposed a number of solutions to explain how the Gods can bare this uncanny resemblance to Earthly cultures. Perhaps the most common one I have seen involves a system of metaphor and expansion on fundamental archetypes, often joined with theories from Carl Jung and concepts of soft polytheism.

Basically, followers of the allegorical model tend to consider the imagery and myth associated with the gods a means for humans to understand and interact with the divine. Thus the model does not deny the existence of the divine nor the validity of our conceptions of it, but eschews the more naïve notion of "flesh and blood" gods. Although a distinctly modern notion, the allegorical model resembles the ancient practice of interpretatio graeca in which the Greeks and later the Romans identified the gods of foreign peoples as equivalents to their own.

By and large the Neopagan religions seem to show more tolerance for leftist or progressive politics than established faiths such as Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism. Indeed some branches such as Wicca have famously allied themselves with feminism, environmentalism, and gay rights even as such policies remain disputed at best among mainstream churches. Of course this progressive mindset derives primarily from the impact of modernism on Neopagans and not the essential core of the Pagan thinking. Paleopagan religions as practiced by the Romans or Celts, for example, firmly upheld the status quo while early Christians were a radical new element with some progressive ideals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretatio_romana

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