As time goes by, evolution happens (unless you are a creationist then evolution just passes you by). This is true, not just for species, but for societies and cultures as well. Let’s face it, the code of Hammurabi in its time was a cutting edge document (or crushing edge since it weighed several tons). Urban societies were in their infancy and some form of universal rules were needed.
But in today’s cultures, it is useless. We have progressed so far beyond its simple dictates that it now takes hundreds of thousands of lawyers to do what it did.
Our religions too have evolved. It no longer suffices to sacrifice our first born on a mountain top alter. Even animal sacrifices have gone the way of the dodo. Incomprehensible ritual and dogma have taken their place and in their turn given way to loving relationships with God’s son.
So too has Original Sin lost its relevance, replaced by the new and fanatically popular concept of Original Debt.
This new and exciting concept is based upon ever expanding needs. Once upon a time a person’s needs were few: food, shelter, and the occasional mind altering substance. But time has increased our needs as it went along.
Original Sin goes something like this: because the first woman ever created suffered from curiosity every person ever born is doomed to hell unless they spend their lives atoning, and hey, those questions sound suspiciously like curiosity. Are you trying to add to the collective guilt?
Original Debt is a little more straight forward.
New people are born all the time, but every piece of the earth and everything on it is already owned by someone or some organization. This can make survival pretty tricky. Especially since the total population is expanding exponentially. Parents are expected to provide for their kids until the age of 18. This often costs them well over $100,000. And that is just to get the new person to where they can provide for themselves at a basic level (i.e., working two service jobs so they can either pay their rent or eat). To be competitive requires another 4-10 years of education at a cost of another $100,000 plus.
Then one needs a place to live. But a house costs another 100k +.
Where does the money come from? It has to be borrowed. So you better get a job. But for that you need a car. Borrow another 20k. Don’t forget insurance and utilities. And with all this money going to pay these loans you better get some credit cards so you can buy food and furniture. Time for a second job so you can keep up on those interest charges. And start trying to save for retirement, because by the time you get all those debts paid off you will be too old to work.
(WARNING: The following may be found offensive to the easily offended, so if you are one of those please do us both a favor and do not read it. Thank you and God bless.)
According to statistics provided by the department of Religions, Cults, and Crackpots, the number of people who worship humanity is on the rise.
The worship of humans is an ancient practice codified by the Catholic Church during the first few centuries of their existence. Their dogma dictates that their followers must pray to human saints because “God doesn’t want to talk to you.” And because of some fancy liturgical foot work that this reporter was not on the proper narcotics to comprehend, Jesus, who was apparently human, is also God, so “he doesn’t want to talk to you either.” Therefore all requests should be addressed to the appropriate saint, each of whom oversees a particular department.
Care must be taken however since prayers addressed to the wrong department will not be returned. “It’s a big problem” declared Catholic spokesman Father Muhammad bin Arafat. “The whole reason so many people can’t find love is because they are addressing their prayers to Saint Valentine who only handles communication between established lovers. St. Raphael runs the dating service.”
Over the centuries many Christian religions have splintered from Catholicism. These splinter groups fall into one of three main categories:
1) Jesus may be God, but he’s human enough to pray to.
2) Jesus is not God, so we can pray to him.
3) Hey, if Martin Luther could do it, so can I.
A fourth category is reserved exclusively for Cults: If I start my own religion I can require conjugal relations from my entire flock and acquire all their material wealth as well.
When asked what the Jews think of this growing phenomenon, Rabbi Robert O’Reilly replied, “Hey if you’re not one of God’s chosen people, what else can you do? I mean there are always cows, but Baal moved to India to work in tech support.”
Many people are moving the worship of humans out of the churches and into their daily lives. Rituals include viewing hate spewing bigots on pseudo-news shows and the application of bumper stickers. Mary Worth, a long time practitioner, proudly displays the backside of her SUV which claims on one side that what Jesus would really do is drive a 9MPG luxury vehicle and vote a straight republican ticket. On the other side it proclaims that “All Human life is Sacred” until the moment of birth when they can be safely ignored once they’re pushed into the crushing poverty of an inner city ghetto or beyond the walls of a national border. The rest of God’s creation can be exploited and abused for humanities pleasure, since the rapture will save those of us worth saving before we are killed by our own filth. Those worth saving are basically “Me and my friends,” explained Mary, “You probably voted against banning gay marriages, so you are going to hell.”
At last count the number to be saved was 144,000. Since the number of people to be saved in the rapture is set, the more babies saved from abortion, the more people will be condemned to eternal damnation and hell’s fire.
In recent decades, secular worship has exploded in popularity. Ever since the advent of mass media, millions of otherwise allegedly intelligent people have worshiped media icons and musicians. Apparently anyone who can convincingly pretend to be someone else for up to two hours at a time is worthy of devotion, as well as anyone who can lip-sync to pre-recorded music tracks and dance at the same time. The liturgy for these idols can be found in checkout lines around the world.
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Ethan Rose is a theologian dedicated to the worship of Fern, the god of noxious plants. He is also a Senior Correspondent to the New York Times, Silly Department, but they have yet to print any of his articles. Oh, and he’s also an author.
This is the end of a very, very rough week, and I hope, the beginning of a new way.
I was raised Catholic. Yes, with the guilt and ritual and dogma. All of it. However, I haven’t been a practicing Catholic (or Christian, for that matter) for about 15 years now. I almost forgot it was Easter this weekend, as I celebrate the wheel of the year at Ostara and Beltane, especially since we aren’t spending this Easter with family.
I was reminded of the holiday by suffering my own symbolic crucifixion and resurrection.
On Thursday, I learned that our book, Rowan of the Wood, was suddenly unavailable to bookstores and to the community at large. Since we’re in the middle of a national tour, you can imagine why this caused us to tailspin into chaos. We were receiving several concerned emails and cancellations from scheduled book signings because they couldn’t get the books.
Everything else stopped.
I mean, everything stopped. Everything I was working on from accounting to marketing to blog tours to interviews stopped. After all, we had invested thousands into this book tour, into this marketing plan, and suddenly we’re faced with the possibility of having to cancel it.
Not okay.
Because of this, I missed the most important interview of my career thus far because I was too preoccupied dealing with something we, as authors, should never have to deal with: people want our books and they can’t get them.
Our publisher assures us more books are on the way to the distributor and warehouses as I type.
Tragedy averted.
Still, this tailspin lasted throughout Good Friday and the failure of #tweet4loan.
I was broken. Truly. I felt crucified. I felt as if all my effort and work was for nothing.
Also on Friday, I had a very good conversation with a literary agent about marketing and the future of our books. She’s not interested in representing us because she does YA and she said our book was really MG (middle grade), but she did say that we really knew how to market ourselves. Through her suggestions, it looked like our plans for the remaining four books had to be altered significantly. Basically, leaving Rowan of the Wood behind and beginning anew with Witch on the Water, the true beginning of the story. Rowan would become more like a prequel to the actual series.
Saturday. I was a zombie. I saw the last 3.5 years of our lives as wasted time. We had traveled down the wrong road, in more ways than one, and this road was getting rockier and more precipitous. It seemed as if we had crossed the point of no return.
Sunday. I awoke to a lukewarm review, and just went back to sleep. Enough.
Then it hit me.
The epiphany.
My own symbolic resurrection.
A new path on this rocky road revealed.
The problem is not the book. The problem is the target audience. Rowan of the Wood is not a YA novel. It’s not a MG novel. It has a dual protagonist: Cullen Knight (12 yr old) and Rowan (40-yr-old) the wizard who has been trapped in a magic wand for fourteen centuries. The antagonist is clearly Fiana, Rowan’s wife who took the long, hard road through those fourteen centuries, descending into deeper, darker magic to do so.
But the truth is in the conflict.
Whereas there is the conflict between Rowan and Cullen, since they’re forced to share a body, the real conflict is between Rowan and Fiana. The tragic love story of two people split apart by time and space.
This is an adult book that kids will also enjoy, not the other way around.
So. New marketing strategy. New focus for the sequel, which, also upon a closer look, is more about the adults in the story than the kids.
This is an adult book. This is a dark, tragic romance of which these kids and other people from Fortuna, CA are trapped in the middle.
Have you ever wondered what eggs and bunny rabbits had to do with the resurrection of Christ? The answer: not a thing.
So why then are stores and homes are filled with images of painted eggs and bunnies during the Easter season?
Good question!
It is another example of pagan traditions spilling over into modern Christian practices, left over from the conversion times.
Today (or perhap last Friday) is Ostara, aka the Spring Equinox. It occurs somewhere between the 20-22 of March each year. I always celebrate it on the 22nd because it’s my favorite number.
Ostara (in Old German or Eostre in Old English) is the Anglo-Saxon Goddess of fertility whose symbols are, you guessed it, bunnies and eggs, as they both symbolize fertility!
Even look at her name: OSTARA. EOSTRE. Isn’t it very similar to the word EASTER? The modern English word “Easter” is derived from the OE word EOSTRE, goddess of fertility.
Here is a nice video about the feast day of Ostara:
1985. I was a Sophomore in High School, and my favorite band was Duran Duran. I wore two-toned tight jeans and feathered my hair. I sang along with “Sussudio” on the Q Zoo in the Morning on KKBQ Houston. I was a good Catholic girl. Well, a Catholic girl, anyway.
I remember going into the library during school. At the time I was reading books by Stephen King and V. C. Andrews for fun. Homework was a chore. The library (yes even the HS library in the Death Penalty Capital of the World: Huntsville, Texas) had books on the Occult. I remember them being huge and black and seductive. Every so often I would chance it and open one, but before too long I would close it again.
Devil worshippers! I would surely burn in hell just for looking!
I was afraid to even look at books on the Occult and Supernatural, but I was secretly fascinated by them. I wanted to learn about the unexplainable. I wanted to read everything I could on those forbidden pages, but I didn’t. Fear and guilt, the cornerstone of the Catholic Church, won.
I met my first Pagan at the Texas Renaissance Festival in 1987. He was my friend before I discovered he was Pagan. Remember: the word Pagan was synonomous with “devil worshipper” to my sheltered, Catholic brain at the age of 17. When he told me he was a Pagan, I was a little scared. But he was such a nice guy! He couldn’t be a devil worshipper.
And, of course, he wasn’t.
It was when I was 25 and in graduate school for English Literature that I finally left Christianity, gave in to my curiosity, and began studying many different spiritual paths. What I found (and continue to find) was awe inspiring. The sordid, power-hungry history of Christianity in the Dark and Middle Ages. Its violent spread in contrast to the peaceful path of Buddhism. Earth-based religions that date back millennia before Christianity. Native American animal totems and dream journeys. Wiccan. Neo-Pagan. Druidism. Rich mythologies from all over the world. All, including Judeo-Christian though, have remarkably similar messages… only their path is different. Except, of course, I have not found any trace of “The Devil” outside Judeo-Christian thought.
I lament about all the time wasted during those early, formative years. Wasted on fear. Wasted on guilt. I listen to amazing podcasts and stories of people who were much braver than I, and they speak to my soul. To the very essence of my being. I think of where I could be today if I had been brave enough to read those tomes at 15.
So for all of those out there who are curious, don’t let your fears prevent your growth. Pusure knowledge wherever it leads you, and trust your ability to recognize the relative worth of what you find.
(to be continued with my introduction to Druidry in a few days)
or How All Catholics Must Become Peace-Loving, Bush-Impeaching, Corporate-Boycotting, Tree-Hugging Vegetarians to Save Their Immortal Souls
L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican Newspaper, reported the new “deadly sins” after an interview with Bishop Girotti on March 9, 2008.
What is known as the “original” seven deadly sins (lust, greed, wrath, gluttony, sloth, vanity, and envy – defined by Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th century) has been the inspiration for countless works of literature, especially in the Renaissance, as well as some modern fiction. One can buy little plaques depicting each sin from places like Design Toscono. Or one can read about them in Dante’s Inferno and watch them on DVD in Fincher’s Se7en.
But what of these new deadly sins? The BBC called these social sins the “greatest sins of our time” (Willey). In his interview, Girotti mentioned these seven specifically as having a great impact on our society due to “the great phenomenon of globalization” (Thavis):
Environmental Pollution
Genetic Manipulation
Obscene Wealth
Infliction of Poverty
Drug Trafficking
Morally Debatable Experiments
Violation of the Fundamental Rights of Human Nature
To start by pointing out that the Catholic Church itself has been guilty of most of these sins over the past 1,000 years would be blasphemous, so let’s begin with taking them each in turn.
1. Environmental Pollution.
Over 1/6th of the world population is Catholic. That is over 1 billion people. With half of the world’s Catholics residing in the Americas, and with the fact that the USA is the #1 environmental pollutor in the world, this new papal decree could single handedly reverse global warming and solve the world’s environmental dilemmas! (Zenit)
As a twenty-year veteran dirt worshipping tree-hugger (and former Catholic), I would be honored to give some pointers to all those Catholics out there now looking at their disposible Starbucks coffee cup (with the disposible sleeve) in a new divine light.
Go Vegetarian. There is nothing more polluting to the environment or this planet than the meat industry.Today in the Boston Globe, Jackson wrote, “with the planet being at stake, you must eat less steak” and pointed out that the “the simple act of eating less meat could help slow global warming.” Jackson goes on to reference a study that claims that 1/3 of the land is occupied by livestock and that “agricultural greenhouse gases are about 22 percent of all emissions around the world.” Just to get these agricultural gases under control, the world must cut its meat consumption by 10%, something that could easily be done by all the Catholics who will be turning vegetarian to honor these new papal decrees.After all, PETA’s slogan for the past decade has been, “Think you can be a meat-eating environmentalist? Think again!” or as the Pope may soon say “Cook an animal…roast in hell.”
Reduce – Reuse – Recycle, in that order
Drink Coffee? Get a reusable coffee cup. Reduce your intake of disposible items, especially shopping bags and coffee cups. Carry with your reusable coffee cups and wash them in biodegradable soap when you get home.
Carry reusable shopping bags. Many stores are now (wonderfully and finally) carrying reusable shopping bags…even Wal-mart and Target have jumped on the bandwagon. For about a dollar, one can purchase one of these earth-friendly bags and keep them in your trunk or purse (as some zip up to wallet size) for those unexpected shopping trips. No more is the time when you will get a plastic sack to carry that one item! Whole Foods has completely done away with using plastic grocery sacs. Now they use only the recyclable paper ones and resuable ones. They, too, have some very nice, sturdy ones for just $.99.
Recycle! Many, many, many communities now have curbside recycling! For a few dollars a month, you can throw all your recyclables into a reusable, green bin and have the recyclers pick them up. For those of you who do not yet have this option available, suck it up! Isn’t a trip down to the nearest recyclers after washing out your recyclable plastics, glass, and aluminum cans worth your immortal soul? We’re talking the difference between a few extra minutes in your week vs. an eternity in the fiery damnation of hell!
Reuse paper. Only print on one side? Time to change that habit! I keep a stack of reused paper next to my stack of new paper. When I need to print something for my own use, I use reused paper (paper only printed on one side). When I need to print something out formally, I use my new paper. When finished, I recycle ALL my paper products: office paper, post-its, junk mail, newspapers, cardboard, and paperboard (like cereal boxes). Yep – they are all recyclable. So recycle, recycle, recycle! This is especially important at the office, spread the welcoming love of heaven around your work place by insisting that everyone recycle. Talk to your manager about getting recycle bins if your office doesn’t already have them.
Compost. You can purchase a comercially manufactured compost bin for your backyard (made from 100% recycled materials) through several online sources. (Google It!) This is the place to put your kitchen scraps and yard waste, not in the landfill. These composters do not smell, so you can even have them on the porch of your apartment. Or, alternatively, look into vermicomposting (composting with worms), an even speedier way to turn your waste into rich, dark compost for your garden.
Drive Alternative Fuel Cars. Seriously, there is absolutely no reason on God’s Smog-Filled Earth that anyone should be buying anything else in today’s world. Toyota’s Prius is by far the best option available to most of the USA, but there are other options (both more economical and more pricey). No one should be driving any vehicle that gets less than 30 MPG, period… or else you’ll be driving that SUV straight to hell!!
Walk or Ride Your Bike. Don’t drive at all! When you need to run to the corner market, walk or ride a bike. It’s better for your heart… and your soul!
2. Genetic Manipulation. This is a tough one. Since corporations like Monsanto have genetically altered corn to include pesticides (nearly demolishing the population of Monarch Butterflies a few years back), it’s nearly impossible to find pure, God-given gifts of food. We now live in a world where fish genes are fused into strawberries and tomotos to make them look more ripe. Cloning and human DNA put into pigs for hopeful transplant success. Where one cannot plant the seeds from produce bought or grown (even organic) because the genetics have been so manipulated that the seed wouldn’t produce the vegetable/fruit it came from. This is a world where corporate interference has pollulted our source of food.
3. Obscene Wealth.
Okay. Define obscene. Is it obscene that for every one person living in the United States (regardless of economic situation), ten people need to live in abject poverty somewhere else in the world just to sustain our way of life?The USA is the richest country on the face of the planet, in the history of the world. They are not only obscenely wealthy (or at least were before Bush bankrupted us), but they also insist on being the greatest polluters of the world (see #1) and still refuse to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. They are world leaders in Genetic Manipulation (see #2), and they certainly …
4. Inflict Poverty on their own citizens as well as those whose countries they imperially occupy and bomb into oblivion…. and don’t even get me started on …
5. Drug Trafficking in a country where pharmaceuticals are pushed via commercials like corn flakes and prescribed just as readily.
Which brings us to… (Yes, I know this is running long, so I’m trying to be more brief!)
6. Morally Debatable Experiments. Morally debatable. Whose morals? Mine? Yours? The Church’s? Animal Testing certainly can be considered “Morally Debatable” by anyone who recognizes the sentience of non-human animals.
The Washington Post reported that “Allergan Inc. injects mice with Botox until it finds a dose at which half of the animals die — a rough gauge of potential harm to humans” (Gaul). This is Botox. Something that feeds one of the original seven deadly sins: vanity. Is this morally debatable?
Gaul writes that in the absence of federally regulated alternatives, despite the fact that Europe has approved 34 alternatives, “hundreds of thousands of mice, rabbits, hamsters and dogs continue to suffer and die unnecessarily in tests for pesticides, household cleaners, sunscreens and other products.” Cherished corporations like Procter & Gamble still test on animals despite the availability of more reliable, and certainly, more humane alternatives. These alternatives are kept at bay because “we have a comfort level with the process . . . not because it is the correct process, not because it gives us any real new information we need to make decisions” (Gaul).
For a complete list of those corporations that insist on torturing animals in morally debatable experiments, please visit the www.peta.org website because, if you monetarily support the companies that are doing such things, you are in essence doing them yourself; and Morally Debatable Experiments are now a mortal sin.
7. Violation of the Fundamental Rights of Human Nature.
George W. Bush. Guantanamo Bay. Abu Ghraib. Violation after violation of civil and constitutional rights. Even with less than a year (Thank the Almighty!), it’s time to impeach and demand our voice back!
In addition to these seven new deadly sins, Girotti said that the church was also still “concerned by other sinful acts, including abortion and pedophilia” (AP)
After being questioned about the “violations” so prominitely reported in the Church over the past few years, Girotti stayed perfectly in character with the Church’s uncanny ability to exclude themselves from any sin, deadly or otherwise, and dismissed the pedophelia scandals as being “overemphasized” by the mass media to bring “discredit upon the church” (Thavis).
Mais, bien sur!
Since it was blasphemous to start with the suggestion that the Catholic Church, itself, is guilty of most of these sins, I’ll end with it in very brief statements.
Homeless, starving people sleep on the steps of the Vatican while its inhabitants dress in the finest Italian clothes and house rooms of golden chalices and platters whose worth could feed millions.
The Inquisition. Enough said.
The Crusades, again – enough said.
Moving pedophilic priests from diocese to diosese in an attempt to hide its shame rather than have them face justice.
The very public support of the Bush Administration and its human rights atrocities and wars over the last 8 yrs.
Looking the other way during the halocaust, something that wasn’t even admitted let alone apologized for until Pope John Paul II did so in 1998.
Centuries of cruel convert-or-die policies that left millions of “heathens” tortured and dead.
And burning “witches…” just to name a few…
But, do what the Church says… not what they do. After all, you have nearly 2,000 collective years of experience with that one.
So Catholics, it’s time to line up outside those confessionals. You have years of throwing away plastic bags, styrofoam coffee cups, and compostible kitchen scraps to confess. It’s time to atone for eating those McDonald Hamburgers and supporting Morally Debatable Experiementations such as those conducted through Procter & Gamble and other animals testers.
Although the hypocrisy of the Catholic Chruch still shines like a guiding star in East, to officially recognize these items as important in the modern world is beneficial. After all, I’ve been actively fighting against these issues for the past twenty years, all of my adult life. Whaddya know! I just might be a good Catholic girl after all.
I recently began attending a Universalist Unitarian Church in Cedar Park (North Austin) on Sundays. It has been a real treat to go to a ritual community service again. I was raised Catholic, but left both Catholicism and Christianity over a decade ago. It proved to be a long, hard road to shake off the dogma that was so deeply instilled from 25 yrs of brainwashing, but I was able to leave that behind me and begin to appreciate and respect all forms of spiritual beliefs and paths. And although I had harbored some resentment toward the Christian Church for a quarter century of lies, half-truths and intolerance, I have also gotten past that.
My family is still Christian, and I respect them and their beliefs, of course — I never did blame them for my lack of diverse spiritual knowledge, as they were also taught that the Catholic Church (or at least Christianity) was the only TRUE religion. There simply was no alternative. Nothing else existed. After all, go into any bookstore in the country, and you’ll find that books on Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism and other non-Judeo-Christian religions are not found in the religion section… but rather the “philosophy” section or, in the case of Paganism “New Age” section. As a culture, we don’t consider non-Judeo-Christian spiritual paths as valid choices. Correction: not only invalid … but rather non-existant as choices.
That didn’t work for me.
I respect Christ and his teachings, but I do feel that the Christian Church as a whole has truly fallen short of following and being an example of those choices. Where today during church services they preach not The Word, but rather who to vote for…. support for the war… etc. Where people who consider themselves “good Christians” are leaving nooses out to intimidate a race different from their own. Seriously, what century are they living in? Me? I’m living in the 21st century. There is no longer a question of race in my reality… there is no hatred toward a group of other people just because their skin is a different color than my own. Then again, for me, there is no hatred for another person because they happen to choose another spiritual path than I have. I don’t tell them they will burn forever in some unknown hell dimension, as I don’t believe in hell… but that’s another blog.
I truly can go on and on… but I won’t. Basically it comes down to this. NO ONE KNOWS. What we judge as “right” or “wrong,” “good” or “bad” are just that: judgments. Judgments dictated by culture and upbringing. What a white, middle class Christian American might label “wrong” is different from what an Indian Hindu living in India would consider “wrong.” And THE ONLY difference between that white, middle class Christian American and the Indian is that the first was born into a white, middle class family in a country that is predominately Christian… and THAT’S why they’re Christian. If that same person had been born into a family in India or Africa or Asia… they probably wouldn’t be.
So, my sister just got home, so I must end my tirade here. So I’ll leave you with this.
Follow the path that works for you. Always question and keep learning. Don’t judge another for their path — because they are different than you — what works for you might not work for them. After all, we are all trying to figure out the meaning of this gift called life, and we’re all trying to survive (mentally and physically) in varying degrees.
Have you ever wondered what eggs and bunny rabbits had to do with the resurrection of Christ? The answer: not a thing.
