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b"Remember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com.\\nS4E25 TRANSCRIPT:\\n----more----\\n\\xa0\\nMark: Welcome back to The Wonder, Science Based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark,\\nYucca: and I'm Yucca.\\nMark: and today we are celebrating Atheopagan Day, which is the anniversary of when our community first started.\\xa0\\nYucca: Online community.\\nMark: yes the the founding of our Facebook group, which is where most of our engages online was on August 5th,\\n2012. So as we're recording this, it's the 11th anniversary of the founding of that community. And so we're going to talk a little bit about the history and how things have changed, what we're doing now and what we're looking towards in the future.\\nYucca: that's right, and it's been a lot,\\nMark: Yeah, it really has. It's it's, it's been, and it's been such a beautiful ride. I mean, obviously there have been setbacks and frustrations and all the rest of that, but. Mostly, it's just been so heartening to see and feel this community come together in all the wonderful ways that it is.\\nYucca: Yeah, and it's 11 years is really hard to believe. That's, that's a lot. So,\\nMark: I was saying before we started recording, in neopagan years, that's even more. It's like dog years or\\nYucca: yeah,\\nMark: Because the culture evolves really quickly you know, in, in the time that I've been involved in, in Neopagan Circles which started in 1987, we've had at least three distinct phases Thank you.\\nof development within the community in terms of changes in perspective and paradigm just really transformational things that have happened from the sort of loosey goosey still, you know, not very clueful about things like consent late 60s all the way up to today.\\nYucca: Right\\xa0\\nMark: pretty, pretty cool. 11 years, a lot can change.\\nYucca: yeah. And I think a lot, really, in the last four years, five years, at least, that I've been witnessing it seems like there's been such a shift in a lot of, not just within kind of our smaller subset of the pagan community, but the larger pagan community, and also a little bit of the, the general cultural attitude towards something like paganism. There's definitely been a big shift since, you know, since I was a kid, you know, thinking back on, it's just, it's a normal, in a lot of ways, it's a very normal thing now. I know there's a lot, definitely areas of the country that that's not the case, but on kind of a big scale, it's, it really has the, Level of acceptance has grown.\\nMark: Yeah, and I think there are, I mean, there are certainly entities and figures that that are not us, that we, that contributed heavily to that. I mean, like the Lady Liberty League, for example, which pressed The U. S. military to recognize Wicca as one of the symbols you could put on a gravestone in a military cemetery.\\nGetting them to recognize any pagan religion was really like pulling teeth, and they pushed on it for about 20 years before they finally got it.\\nYucca: Yeah, right,\\nMark: And more representation in mainstream media, all that kind of stuff has really helped.\\nYucca: yeah. So I think it's fascinating to see, or to really reflect on, the changes within our community and how those are influenced from outside sources and, you know, the influence that we've had as well and all of that is, I mean, somebody should do their somebody should do their dissertation on that. I think that would make a fascinating one.\\nMark: yeah, me too, me too. Yeah, there's just, there's so much to say about it, but why don't we go back to the beginning,\\nYucca: Right.\\nMark: And start there, and just kind of, you know, work our way forward. So, atheopaganism started out as an idea that I had for myself.\\nYucca: Yeah.\\nMark: I had had, I'd been involved with the local pagan community for a very long time, had some really off putting experiences in the late 90s, early 2000s that reinforced to me how much capital B belief had become important\\nYucca: Mm hmm.\\nMark: in the pagan cul"