>I can't say I believe in gods, but I think of them as laws of nature personified, without a will.
>How are the gods viewed in asatru? I get they are not meant to be buff men sitting in the sky but, after being a fedora for son long I struggle with believing a concept of gods other than physical laws personified (like gravity, or orbit around the sun with changing seasons) or ideal archetypes to strive towards, not physical free will entities.
The fedora vector towards heathenry is usually Sagan's logic on the matter.
>Our ancestors worshiped the Sun, and they were far from foolish. And yet the Sun is an ordinary, even a mediocre star. If we must worship a power greater than ourselves, does it not make sense to revere the Sun and stars? Hidden within every astronomical investigation, sometimes so deeply buried that the researcher himself is unaware of its presence, lies a kernel of awe.
The difference is you apply this logic a bit more broadly than just the sun. You can't live without the forest, or the sky or the field so a reverence of the spirit of those things is important too. Where a lot of post-christians get it wrong is they just swap "god" for "odin" and resume their old religion. You don't just "dear Odin please help my sick mummy and help me get closer to you amen" like you did to the semitic santa klaus.
Generally your relationship is first and foremost to your fellow denizens of midgard, mortal, immortal, spiritual and otherwise. A lot of neo-heathens neglect to leave offerings for the various wardens, spirits and so-on because they're too busy praying to Odin… Sometimes they even neglect all the other GODS for that matter.
That is also another vector to belief, people who themselves are paranormal investigators, mediums, occult tinkerers or outsiders who tend to bump into the spirits and "others" whom exist outside the christian ability to explain, fit into scripture or even acknowledge outside of "they iz demons n shieet". First you understand there is more to reality than either the church of fedora of latter-day marxism or the church of semites can explain and so you have to unravel it all from there. In my case I was a (barely/officially) christian boy whose family didn't care much so I basically grew up in the woods (I tend to joke the forest is my mother and the sky is my father, considering how much more they did in my upbringing than my actual parents). When you're left to your own devices in nature without a strict regime of modernism or semitism you tend to just take things as they come and not try to fit them into anything.
I'd advise you to go out and try the same but the problem with fedoras is that they can't believe in anything that doesn't slap them right across the face… Yet, to experience some things you have to be open to them. It's akin to refusing to open your eyes and only believing what touches you because if you never use any higher senses you're never going to sense anything higher. You would have to go out there as a child does, just being in the forest and not disbelieving anything could happen. You can be your own "meme magician" to a degree. The relative effect of belief and disbelief tends to be much higher when you're around less sapients, even if other spirits are near you then I'm strongly theorising that you can push them away from yourself unless they're much more powerful or much more numerous than you. So spiritual perception/spiritual stealth is a "stat vs stat" in that regard, you can want to see or be open to seeing something far more than it doesn't want to be seen. Or maybe some things want to be seen by humans but only humans who will treat them nicely and respect them (some varieties of fae/dryads/hulders/"tailed-and-sometimes-horned-and-sometimes-animal-legged-humanoids"). All of this weighted by how much a society believes in things, the number of people who believe in them, the number of people around and so on. I've no doubt in ancient scandinavia when there were less people and all those people believed it could happen then troll-women with tails and sometimes horns coming out of the forest to spend time with people and sometimes even help them with their tasks in exchange for the company or a shared meal was an actual and relatively common occurrence.
I guess I'm rambling but my point is you're caught in a negative feedback loop. Relativity/Magic/Memes or however you prefer it is an actual and I would argue primary force in the universe. Whether we're in a simulation that aims to meet our expectations or if thought is an energy that reverberates through other energies (matter being dense energy) I can't say. I really prefer not questioning it too much. If it's a simulation then I'm going to log out when this character of mine dies and go back to my "real life" having played a very interesting game on my day off, or, I lead a very interesting life in a very interesting universe.