A few years ago I wrote about my disdain for the tendency of pagan/wiccans to adopt relativism. Peace activist and pagan Starhawk provides an excellent example of just how nutty this view is if it is taken seriously.
The title of her op-ed says it all, “Pagans reject the idea of evil — how do we respond to terrorism?” To Starhawk, the idea of evil is simply an artificial construct that pagans avoid using,
Evil is a construct Pagans try to avoid. Our theology, or rather, thealogy, (Goddess-knowing) teaches us that dark and light, life and death, creation and destruction exist in balance, and to cut off or condemn one aspect opens us to the imbalance that leads to cruelty and horror. We might say that the simplistic formulation, “They are evil; we are good” leads to its corollary, “We are justified in destroying them by any means whatsoever.” And that is the very ideology that motivates the bombers, as well, and which throughout human history has led to the worst atrocities.
But if we reject the concept of evil, how do we respond to horrific acts? Is there a specifically Pagan response to such violence? There is no central Pagan authority, no Pagan Pope to issue bulls, no Pagan rabbinical authority to say who does or does not have the right to interpret for us. We have no sacred scriptures to interpret, anyway. As Pagans, we are each our own spiritual authority, each with our own connection to the Goddess.
In one respect, this is a very conservative ideology. The view that the balance between life and death should not be interfered with is, after all, partially the motivating factor of ultra-conservative traditionalists who reject modern medical practices. In another respect, however, Starhawk’s rejection of the idea of evil is extremely radical.
In order to defend this view and simultaneously appear to reject things that the rest of us might call evil, she falls back on empty assertions and intuitions,
From that authority, I offer one PaganÂ’s response to the bombings. While we have no Bible, no set of commandments, we do have nature as our teacher, and a set of rough ethics that value life, balance, and interconnection. We feel an immediate, intuitive horror at the taking of life, and at the randomness of this death. To die because I chose to fight in the military, or to take a particular risk, or even because I incurred a particular enemy, at least has some sense of cause and meaning.
This is a sort of fluffy bunny view of nature. I take the other view that nature, if it were alive as Starhawk believes it is, is a mass murderer. The way each of us came to exist, after all, is at the tail end of an enormously long train of violence and destruction. Just ask people in New Orleans how they feel about nature carrying out its balancing act.
We rightfully reject and condemn those tactics. Death may be a part of life, but inflicting it on others breaks the fabric of interconnectedness and assaults the sacred embodied in each one of us.
How does violence break the interconnectedness of nature? After all, interconnected creatures are killing themselves all the time in Starhawk’s exalted nature.
Anyway, what exactly is wrong with breaking the interconnectedness? After all, doing so cannot be evil by her reckoning. So perhaps Starhawk merely finds this to be unpleasant, whereas other people feel differently.
She does try to address this at the end of her essay, but again just demonstrates the moral emptiness of this sort of ideology,
A Pagan response to violence might say thereÂ’s enough death, enough drama inherent in nature, in the course of life and the changes of the seasons and the cougarÂ’s pursuit of the deer. LetÂ’s not add to it. As human beings, weÂ’re put on this earth to develop those things the cougar does not have: compassion, gratitude, conscious appreciation and wonder at the beauty and mystery of life. LetÂ’s stop killing each other, and get on with it.
. . .
We are all interconnected. Perhaps that simple, Pagan truth could lead us to reject murder as a way of resolving our issues with each other, whether the killing is done by opposition groups or by the state itself or by a ruthless and unjust economic system. We are all part of the circle of life. That understanding must lead us to create a world in which the fabric of life is cherished, in the individual and the whole, and violence is transformed by love.
Presumably if Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong Ill had just realized that they are interconnected with every living being, they woul have seen the errors of their way and gave in to love.
This is every bit a silly utopian ideology as the view shared by some Christians of an end times where Christ will return and rule over an enlightened Christian community.
Moreover, Starhawks solution for getting there is simply not to resist evil. In her world, Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, Baathist Iraq — none of which was evil — would not have been resisted at all, except perhaps through trying to transform those societies with love and criticism of Western efforts to end those regimes.