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SLOGG Holiday Episode: https://thewonderpodcast.podbean.com/e/holidays-1610325700/#more-16200342\n\xa0\nIntroduction to SLOGG: https://atheopaganism.wordpress.com/2018/01/03/introducing-slogg-the-winter-demi-sabbath/\n\xa0\nRemember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com\n\xa0\nS3E02 TRANSCRIPT: ----more----\nMark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm your host Mark. And today we are going to talk about do it yourself, religion, because that's really what our naturalistic science-based pagan paths are about. It's really about tailoring a set of practices and activities and observances to your own personal needs.\nAnd we're going to unpack all that in this.\xa0\nYucca: That's right. And a good place to start. Is talking about, what's the point? Why, why are we doing this? We're white humans, not just us, but why do humans do this religion thing in the first place? And what need is it filling? Because it certainly is. We're all doing it in some form or another.\nMark: Right. Or at least certainly many of us in the modern world, many of us are doing it. But when you look all over the world, you see that every culture historically has had religious traditions of one kind or another. And not all of those have been pointed at the same purpose. So we wanted to be really clear about what we see as the appropriate purposes for a naturalistic pagan.\nThis, for example, in Christianity, the goal is to reach salvation, right? Your stained by original sin and whatever sins you've accumulated. You have to get those all washed out of your soul and then you go on and hopefully you go to heaven, right? That's that's the whole end. You do that through the intercession of Jesus and so forth.\nThat is not at all, even remotely related to what our religious practices are about. So, another example is in most kinds of Buddhism the idea is that you want to balance your karma so that eventually you can step off of the wheel of time. Into something else. And I'm sure that there's a definition of what that is, but I don't know what it is, but the idea is to leave material reality, you keep coming back to it in reincarnated forms until you've balanced your karma and then you leave. right.\nWe don't want to do that either. We don't really believe that that's what's going on here on planet earth.\xa0\nYucca: sure. Yeah. So that's not our goal, right? Our goal isn't enlightenment or. Going to heaven or things like that. And you know, we're saying our, but it is also very personal. So we can talk about in general paganism, we can talk about naturalistic paganism in general, but it really also comes down to the individual.\nSo although mark, you and I have a lot in common what each of our. Practices are going to be like, are going to be slightly different because we have different goals, different values, different experiences in the world.\xa0\nMark: Sure.\xa0\nYucca: And that's a starting place.\nMark: But I think that the commonality is what I would focus on in terms of the purpose of naturalistic paganism, which is to enhance happiness.\xa0\nYucca: Agreed. Yeah.\nMark: And what makes a given person happy will vary from person to person. But what we want our practices to do is to contribute to the happiness of the practitioner and those around them, and to contribute to making a better world. And I mean, I think that we can say that in, in a general sense, right.\xa0\nYucca: Think so. Yeah. And those second two are almost requirements for the first time.\nMark: It is. I mean, if you make everybody around you miserable, it's very to be happy.\xa0\nYucca: Yeah. Right. And, and, you know, we do have a choice about how we respond to things, but it also is really hard to be happy if you're starving and everyone around you is starving and everything is, you know, burning and all of that. So, you know, we're, we're part of a larger system.\nMark: And part of what we acknowledge as science-based pagans is that we are social creatures. We fi