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Remember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com.\n\xa0\nS4E31 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 fortunate to have with us Susan, who is a new member of the Atheopagan Society Council, and we're interviewing the new members of the Council over the next... A couple of months or so the ones that, that want to be interviewed, just to get to know them and find out what their thinking is about all this stuff we're doing.\nSo welcome, Susan.\nSusan: thanks for having me on.\nYucca: And some of you who watch the YouTube channel may recognize Susan from there, who's been, who's part of the media team, and has been making excellent videos.\nMark: Yes, yes. Susan is the glue on of the media team. She holds us all together.\nYucca: which is not always easy appreciated with all of the emails that have been chasing us down to make all our schedules work, and yep,\nSusan: I try to balance it so that everybody doesn't think I'm super annoying, but helpful, not annoying.\nMark: So far, so good. So, Susan why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and what brought you to atheopaganism and, you know, all that good kind of stuff.\nSusan: Yeah. Well, the short answer like it seems a lot of people is COVID brought me to atheopaganism. I, and I do have a short video, I think it's the first one that I did on the YouTube channel if anybody wants to check that out of my, my non theist upbringing and, and this kind of channel, so I'll, I'll make it a short version, but I live in the Midwest, in Ohio, and I've lived here my whole life, and I was raised without religion, but also not specifically atheist either.\nIt was just sort of, we didn't talk about it. I didn't know the difference between a Republican and a Democrat until I was in high school because it was just, you know, I was left to my own devices. And I appreciate that for, for some things. There's definitely parts of me where I'm like, well, it'd be nice to have a little bit more direction.\nAnd I, we're kind of taking that track with our, with our daughter. I am, I'm married and I have six, soon to be seven year old, and kind of navigating that that space. My husband was raised Catholic, so we're kind of marrying together. He, he likes to call it ethnically Catholic, because he doesn't believe any of the stuff there, but so yeah, we, I, from a, Medium age started dabbling in stuff about the time when I was, you know, I'm an 80s baby.\nSo by the time I was in high school, it was late 90s. And all of the witchy stuff started showing up all over the Barnes and Nobles. I'm like, Ooh, what is this? And especially the tarot card section with lots of stuff to touch and play with. So I I explored that area and the pagan, which at that time, at least, you know, Wicca was the super dominant thing in, at least that was publicly available.\nAnd so I dabbled in that for a while, and I kind of got It's like, this is fun, but I also don't really believe in this whole, you know, people try to rationalize it with, oh, it's the energy, and you're affecting the energy, and I was like, yeah, yeah, that, that makes sense, sure, and I, you know, doing the little, the little lie to yourself thing for a while.\nAnd then I kind of walked away from it for a while and just didn't, didn't bother with my, my spiritual life for a while until I got married. And we wanted to have a community for our child to grow up in so we joined a UU congregation, Unitarian Universalist, and they have, in our particular one, a fairly decent showing of pagan folks.\nAnd so I kind of picked that back up and we had a little bit of a range from full capital W witch to people who I think, you know, if I talked to them long enough about atheopaganism, that would be more up their alley but didn't, you know, know the words for it at that time. So it kind of came through there and then