If you're talking about my old blog, I don't recall making that statement about pity vs love, but it's plausible. Aesthetically, the talk of love is nauseating because it's such a palpable cliché. Any poem that uses the word "love," for instance, should automatically be discarded, in my view. Some words just end up dying from overuse. It's the same with "spirit."

It would be better to specify what we're talking about, without that outdated abstraction. So there are the different kinds of love: romance, camaraderie, friendship, self-love, charity, and so on. I think camaraderie is perhaps most consistent with the kind of existential perspective I explore in my writing (and I've written about that somewhere).

That polytheistic paganism would indeed be much more consistent with scientific naturalism, especially if we understand that the gods would be metaphors and the myths fictional stories.