is the sort of brain-twisting exercise in frustration that doing blacksmith's puzzles is for most of us, even without migraines, chest colds, work craziness, back pain and s forth. But I do have a mostly-finished excursion into Sacred/Profane Time/Space from a rational-humanist-yet-Mythicness-respecting angle, which just needs a little more ( Read more... )

Of course I'm a fanatic and a milquetoast at the same time - wave/particle, legitimate/bastard, evil-selfish-brat/goody-two-shoes, it's a wonder I even exist--My brothers were allowed to go on school and scounting trips to Canada, Pennsylvania, out West, to go rock climbing and rafting and have lives as kids because they were males and males needed ( Read more... )

Some animals just are more equal than others--

It's more important that we all suffer and eat all the shit he dishes out, than that he have to face up to his own responsibilities - because he is The Good Guy and the one who deserves protection, that nobody else merits. The last time he decided he was going to "reconcile" with me - with those ( Read more... )

When the game is rigged, the only way to win is not to play there is no way to win - or not to playIt got a lot easier, in terms of my own ethical center and sanity - not that it got any better from a day to day basis, but at least I didn't have to angst over whether I was being a Bad Kid so much. But he hated unarguing compliance even more than he ( Read more... )

Can you catch Sin Cooties by material cooperation with heretics?

I didn't know. I didn't like the ads, they made me think; but they also made me think that if I was going to insist that Catholics be free to publish anything and everything we wanted, then I had to extend that right to everyone else, too, and what was immoral about presenting the ( Read more... )

In which I take a jackhammer to the cement encasing my personal Chernobyl

"When someone tells shows you who they are, believe them."
--attr. to Maya Angelou
Whatever I said, whatever I did I didn't mean it ( Read more... )

is that it validates the very human impulse to think that we can "make up" for things - rewrite the past, undo what we have done, magic away the reality with something else - that we can fix our misdeeds and harms done by harming ourselves in some way.

And we can't. We really can't.

It's not that religions create this idea: as I stated above, it' ( Read more... )

Enough of abstractions - mere chronology instead

In autumn of 1999 I was in Barnes & Noble where my selfish restiveness often took me of nights being single and thus "having no responsibilities" when I wasn't teaching CCD (but my father had sneered at me that I didn't really have a vocation, did I? and I couldn't just become a nun because I was " ( Read more... )

Sentimentality, Envy, Vainglory Make a Toxic Trifecta All Right
(and Authority-Seeking & Prudery don't help any either)

I've described so far how, if you take seriously the teachings of the prolife movement as they have been expounded upon by all levels within it since the earliest years, it becomes not only a sane-seeming thing to do but a moral ( Read more... )

Logic is one of the most valuable self-defense arts out there, because what it does (one thing, at least) is create wiring diagrams of conversation, so that you can see what connects up and what doesn't, what verbal switch or combination of switches work to make something else work, and what breaks the circuit or is completely irrelevant ( Read more... )