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If you are gathered with friends or family for New Year’s Eve, here is a light ritual you can do that isn’t interruptive of festivities but can add some meaningful heft to the launch of the new calendar year.

Place a dollar coin, for luck and prosperity, into the bottom of an iron cauldron or Dutch oven. Pour in 2″ of fresh water (rainwater if you have it). Add a handful of kosher salt or sea salt, for strength and patience, and stir until as much salt as possible has dissolved into the water.

There has always been something about the Wiccan Rede that has bothered me, and I've finally figured out what it is.

The Wiccan Rede, for those new to the community or coming into Atheopaganism from atheist/skeptic circles, is the only widely (though far from universally) adopted moral precept in the Pagan community. It reads: "An (if) it harm none, do what thou wilt."

My final wish for you all this Yule season is that you be surrounded with love.

We are social apes, we humans, and loneliness is a terrible burden to us. Here at the dark and cold time of year, we can feel even more isolated, even more as though we must face life's trials on our own. It is quite likely that this was one of the main drivers of the creation of our Winter Solstice traditions in the first place.

My second hope for you at Yule is that you engage the season with bravery.

This is the time when we stand up to darkness and cold and the prospect of much more of it, and we do so with a combination of brazen silliness and real strength: the kind of strength it takes to deal with difficult family members and multiple obligations and inclement weather and looming deadlines and planned projects and lists and unsnarling the bloody lights and figuring out where we put the tree stand last year and deciphering Grandma's 40-year-old spider-scrawl on that recipe that simply MUST be made.

One of the hottest points of contention between Atheopagans and both theists and hard-antitheist atheists has to do with naturalism. Naturalism is a philosophical position which holds that there is nothing which is not of the physical Universe: that there is nothing which is supernatural, and that such claimed supernatural phenomena as gods, spirits, souls, ghosts, and magic are fictitious.

Theists dispute this out of hand, of course. It makes sense that nontheist Pagans have friction with theists over this point.

For thousands of years, since the very advent of human existence, there has been an evolving trajectory of religious history in Western societies.

The story passes from the earliest animism and ancestor worship to the rise of belief in gods, the consolidation of authoritarian power under monotheisms, and the complete domination of Western societies by Christianity. It continues through the Enlightenment, the steady gains of science shattering the cosmological monopoly of the Abrahamic monotheisms, the increasing tension between orthodoxy and individuality splintering these monotheisms into thousands of sects, and finally, most recently, to the rise of the Nones: those who describe themselves as having no religious affiliation at all, which is well established in most of the rest of the developed world and advancing quickly in the United States.