On the Point of Nature-Based Spiritualities
Something I see a lot among heathens and pagans of various flavors is that the overwhelming majority of them completely miss the point. It only takes a quick sojourn into places like Reddit's r/paganism, r/heathenry, r/asatru etc. to see many absolutely lamentable examples of this. Nature-based spirituality isn't a marketing identity. It isn't just an aesthetic. It isn't something to "geek out" about. (In fact, this is inappropriate for many things frequently thought of as "geek out" material, such as The Lord of the Rings.) It definitely isn't a self-insert fantasy to act out your post-modern political ideologies (Yes, this applies to most right-wing and left-wing pagans alike.) It is a commitment not only to nature and humanity but also to do your absolute best to embody your ideals any way you can.
Frankly, I cringe when I see someone wearing a hammer pendant without doing their best to be their best self. Heathenry is not like Christianity in this aspect. A Christian can basically act in any way he pleases, knowing that all is eventually forgiven. A heathen knows he must deal with the orlay (something like karma) he has wrought in this life and the next. That isn't to say a heathen is a lost cause after one mistake (far from it) but heathens are expected to comport themselves a certain way in this life.
I read once that orlay is like water dripping into a vessel. The best deeds are like pure water and the most evil deeds are like black ink (there is of course a gradient between the two). One drop of ink isn't going to turn a large vessel black, but that drop isn't going away. It must be forever dealt with and made up for. In Christian theology one can basically have a large vessel entirely of ink that can be transmuted into pure water at the pronouncement of a word. In this way Christians are not held to any standard. Yes, I know they are encouraged to comport themselves in certain ways but at the end of the day, one well-placed sincere apology will undo all of it. While I can see the appeal of this, we differ from them here.
I see a lot of people who call themselves heathens simply using their misinterpretations of heathenry to justify their already-existing biases and post-modern ideologies. Isn't it interesting that when you talk to a hard-line right-winger or to a wokie, the ancient heathen past embodied all of their ideals perfectly and reinforces all of their biases? Curious. The truth is that ancient Germanic peoples (really all ancient peoples) were neither a perfectly diverse melting-pot of ethnicities and gender identities as something like a Google AI would imagine them, nor were they a perfectly homogeneous group of perfect right-wing ideologues as lots of internet and pre-internet weirdoes like to imagine them. They were their own people with their own issues of their own time. However, I digress. This is a point for another article.
The point of nature-based spiritualities (paganism, heathenry, etc) is to be truly human. The point is to be the best mortal humans we can be in the here and the now. The point is to excel and be better without infringing on that which makes us human (as transhumanists would advocate for.) This means it is fundamentally incompatible with a lot of post-modern ideology.