Weddings legalised for Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster in New Zealand (ABC, 1 March 2016) These guys aren't just in danger of becoming an actual religion - they already are one! Check back in twenty years and see if there hasn't been at least factional in-fighting.

I really, really, genuinely hope that Craig Stephen Hicks' militant atheism turns out to have had nothing to do with the murders for which he awaits trial. Believe me, I won't be gloating if it does. I would much rather the New Atheism remained a minor pain in the bum than something that motivates actual violence. But we may never know for sure.

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.. always full of interest, particularly when it comes to what we may reasonably call my religion, which is Eclectic Wiccan with a Mesopotamian and Ancient Egyptian influences and a large dose of Zen Buddhism. I like to observe my spontaneous responses to religious and philosophical questions raised by the letter writers ( Read more... )

Like The Old Testament: a Very Short Introduction, this clear and interesting little book left me much enlightened. It puts the New Testament into the context of thought and literature at the time it was written - over five decades, rather than over centuries or millennia, like the Hebrew Bible; as the author, Luke Timothy Johnson, explains, this ( Read more... )

The introduction to Melissa Raphael's 2000 book Introducting Thealogy naturally talks a lot about the body and the embodiment of experience, by contrast with the disembodied abstractions of traditional religions for which the body and especially the female body are profane: "the female body is sacred; it incarnates the Goddess to such a degree that ( Read more... )

IOU a refugee update. In the meantime, here's some random stuff.

a tale of tattoos, zebras, and the importance of context - on that oft difficult task, the tracking down of the original source of a popular image on the Internet

The significance of plot without conflict

Home-made custard recipe

Taking the Jesus story back to basics - an old ( Read more... )

While sitting around in the ER a few weeks ago, waiting for my swollen tootsies to be triaged (a harmless if alarming medication side effect, as it turned out), I did a little triage of my own - reading some of Kitsch (edited by Gillo Dorfles - translated from the Italian by person or persons unknown). Skip it? Keep it? Extract its knowledgy ( Read more... )

"This study's findings suggest that the [Invisible Pink Unicorn] critique of religion is mostly misdirected. The belief commitments of religious people usually have less to do with beliefs than commitments, as evidenced by the overwhelming lack of theological understanding that characterizes a typical congregation. Stephen Prothero [in Religious ( Read more... )

"The second criterion of a carpet's beauty is as elusive and whimsical as the first is concrete. Once a dealer is done scratching and mauling the carpet to determine the density of its weave, he will flip it over and inspect the pile itself. He will not be appraising the elegance of the design. No. He will be looking for proof of human fallibility ( Read more... )

A fellow Pagan, annoyed by some online twerp who thought the use of masturbation in sex magick was hilarious, invoked an Egyptian creation story (the Heliopolitan Cosmogony) in which the entire universe got started that way. While I share my co-religionist's disdain for that immature poster, I can't help wincing a little at their parting shot ( ( Read more... )