Ogling

I think I ogled today.
At Subway, getting a six inch veggie on wheat, there was a problem with the cash register and the manager had to be called up to the front to fix it... and I kid you not, "call in the big guns" was furreals. I hope I wasn't obvious. I'm quiet and non-obtrusive by nature, but found I was having a hard time focusing on the transaction, instead just trying to fathom the diameter of those biceps.

And then feeling slightly ashamed about the snarky way I have rolled my eyes at male counterparts caught "looking" at some superb specimen of female physique.
(Actually, I find I ogle superb specimen's of female physique too.)

Muscle bound is not my type.
But it was interesting to find myself in a situation where I was disinclined to look away from some guys' arms.

332 days left (and trying not to be a bitch about it)

I'm on edge lately.
It started out as ambition; a challenging set of goals for this new year. Things to accomplish, things that stretch me. But I'm only on day 33 and mostly I just feel sharp and tense towards my husband and son, and distant from my friends as I try to squeeze it all in.

Perhaps I just haven't found the grove yet (the right balance, the right schedule).
Perhaps it's just a phase (even without ambitious goals I can be sharp and distant).

I keep thinking of 50's era advice to housewives
Also about that article that showed that women are more powerful but less happy than they once were.

But whatever.
I just had to write this down, get it off my mind. Don't have the energy to ponder deeply and come up with something profound.
Time to hit the books again (because for one of my goals I'm taking a few online courses in computer programing. Working through pseudocode and flowcharts right now.)

This Sucks

[yah, this is another rant. Pay it no mind]

From a thread about Interfaith Marriage (specifically, LDS to non-LDS), a commentor comes on to say such things as :

"If you choose both a non-member spouse and the believing LDS path for your family you should know that sooner or later your child will feel spiritual pain that you cannot comprehend... they will be weighed down with the knowledge that [some blessings] will never be fully theirs and they will be forced to contemplate an eternity without their non-member parent by their side."

and

"[extreme pain] from conflicts between our own situations and fundamental gospel principles of eternal families sealed together in the temple... a deep pain that our eternal destiny as defined by the church we loved and believed in was limited by the non-member status of one of our parents."

That is so messed up.
It another really good reason why I think the church is anti-family.

Sry, cant say more about it, got homework to do. Just had to get that off my chest.
Seriously_Screwed_Up.

waiting to get the okay to change your mind..

[This is merely a rant.
I have to say it here, and not at the post where the discussion is going on, because I am really feeling the need to be sharp. And that blog is not a place for much sharpness.]

So you say things are the way they are because God say's so. And that's that. You believe it with every fiber of your being and you have created all sorts of explanations to help you rationalize this belief (necessary, because the belief really does fly in the face of logic).

But, you also admit that it's possible God may speak again, and change the way things are. You do prepare yourself for this. You prepare to then believe, with every fiber of your being, the OPPOSITE of what you believe now. To discard all of your carefully constructed explanations (because they no longer apply at all).

So you sit. And wait. Wait for permission to change your mind. NOT asking questions! It is not your place to question, but to wait. To wait to be told. To be given permission to think something different.

[To be fair, that's not true, the persons I am ranting about are not sitting around. They are active, intelligent, participating individuals. The topic at hand is probably one they rarely think about at all. Easily compartmentalized in a safe location, requiring little effort on their part. While, for me, it is the topic that caused the initial tearing of my beliefs. Hence... A rant.]

one of THOSE conversations...

Maybe you've had one of THOSE conversations?
One that seems, on the surface, to be very trivial, but what starts to really drive the discussion is layers upon layers of other stuff. History. History with each other, with other people, a history of hurts and misunderstandings and missteps. None of this is mentioned, though, it just lurks beneath the surface of what looks like a benign chat, digging in it's little pokers at the most unexpected places, driving the conversation awry, scratching out new little hurts.

Until both parties are hurt and not talking to each other...

And confused, because, really, what was being discussed seemed so very trivial...

the skewers of religion

[also posted at The Exponent]

"If you could take the skewers of religion, those that riddle your frame, make you aware every time you move- if you could withdraw the scimitars of religion from your mental and moral systems- could you even stand?"
-Elphaba, The Witch of the West
Wicked. pg 387

"And there was nothing save it was exceeding harshness, preaching and prophesying of wars, and contentions, and destructions, and continually reminding them of death, and the duration of eternity, and the judgments and the power of God, and all these things—stirring them up continually to keep them in the fear of the Lord. I say there was nothing short of these things, and exceedingly great plainness of speech, would keep them from going down speedily to destruction."
Enos 1:23


As I sit here writing this I am sipping a cup of green tea. Clear in my mind is the very first time I went to the store to buy a box of green tea. I was an adult; a wife and a mother. Standing in the grocery aisle, appraising the vast selection of teas, I literally was shaking in my boots. Every time someone walked by the aisle I jumped guiltily (caught in the act!!) As I put my box of tea on the belt at the check-out line I half way expected the cashier to card me (with a disapproving look upon her face no less) and when I finally got home and made that first cup of tea, fight or flight neurons where firing off in my brain. Big time.

Seriously.

Yes, I just revealed just how sheltered and naive (and goody goody?) I was. But that memory is a vivid one for me and it was simply one of many terrifying steps that was the process of asking questions I had never let myself ask before.

That terror is what I want to talk about. Doesn't that seem just wrong to anyone else??

I just found out about these Hell Houses that certain fundamentalist christian church's use to scare 12 yr olds into obeying God. Now, LDS versions are much more benign (and a lot less theatrical) but I do remember YM/YW activities where rooms in the church were set up to show the various Degrees of Glory and we were shown after-life scenarios based on hypothetical life-styles choices ("Here's what the Telestial Kingdom looks and feels like... The Celestial... The Terrestial... Outer Darkness..." etc.)

On the one hand, there is the pull between denominations as to exactly WHAT will bring salvation/damnation: (ie; my cup of green tea keeps me out of LDS heaven and my temple endowments keep me out of fundy christian heaven) and fear is used by many faiths to both control and grow the membership (anyone else get sappy scare-stories about friends in the here-after who are angry/sad that the gospel was not shared with them?). On a more general scale, the idea is put forth (ad nauseum) that without religion (and it's punishment/reward system) we'd all be running around killing each other (or some similar variant on that theme).

I'm fuzzy on the details, but I know there are belief systems that are NOT based on principles of divine reward and retribution with long lists of do-s and don't-s. And their participants seem to be pretty peaceful fulfilled individuals in spite of the lack.

Hypothetically, what do you think The Church would lose if it lost it's rhetoric of fear? What would it gain?

(Also, because it's sort of related and very funny: a Sugar Beet article about the Man Who Finished Repenting 13 months Ahead of Schedule. Awesome!)

cherry picking and making it up

Here's a page in my journal from about two years ago. I was working out my own personal Godhead. Not a trinity but a quartet: Father, Mother, Son and (female) spirit.
Desperately trying to restructure my belief system to incorporate a little divine feminine influence in a otherwise utterly male hierarchy/power structure.

Also I was re-thinking the after life: The whole three-degrees-of-glory + spirit-world-missionary-work thing just no longer working as the perfect answer I had taught about as a Sunday school teacher ("Isn't God loving? Providing a way for us to be baptized for those who died never hearing about Joseph Smith and the plan of salvation??") A version of re-incarnation, where our "essence" or "soul" or "[whatever?]" continued to be re-born again and again and again until it reached a sort of nirvana, made much more sense.

Eventually the irony of making it up as I went along dawned on me. Picking and choosing what I liked, altering what needed to be altered, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, discarding this, keeping that.

Really just making it up.

Finding myself face to face with the question: "If this is all metaphorical anyhow, what's the point?!?" (And questioning the necessity of the skewers of religion).

One of the points Dawkins makes in The God Delusion when the liberal theologians raise their re-interpreted Divinity is the problem with baggage. That term "God" and what it means in the minds of most believers is really very problematic.

That's what I started wondering about; my own hodge-podged theologies and why I bothered. The only divine entity[ies] that made any sense had not much in them to inspire devotion, adoration, or belief. (etc... )

The end result being the realization that I really didn't believe in the hodge-podged (or otherwise) theologies I was propping up for myself.

But, on a different level, I do so love the picking apart process. A few links on some of my pet topics: BiV's and Kiskilili's thought provoking questions about the Virgin Mary, Kiskilili's and Lynnette's dissection of Eve and the Creation, (BiV also takes on the Creation with an eye to science) and Lynnette on takes on Heavenly Mother. To make a quick segue into SF, have you read Parable of The Sower by Octavia Butler? LOVE Lauren and her earthseed religion.
There's so many others. This is just off the top of my head.

(and now it's outa my head and in print, so maybe I can be productive today....)

my god delusion

Just a few quick thoughts while I'm in the middle (pg 155) of reading Dawkin's The God Delusion; I like biology! Wow! And the cosmology stuff the Dawkin's just finished delving into, seriously, my son's favorite book to read at night one about the universe and it was freaky cool to suddenly have a few more interesting tidbits of information to impress my kindergartner with.

But when Dawkins gets into the scientific proofs about why God could absolutely not exist (ie, a being so complex as to have 'created' the universe is even more highly improbable and raises more questions than the creation of that universe in the first place and the problems with declaring God un-research-able and outside the realm of science etc etc etc ...) he sort of loses me. And I'm trying to figure out why.

Maybe it's because I see how absolutely futile his arguments would be, say, in a dinner table discussion with my family? Or maybe it's because I still have my own lingering theist/deist biases that continue color my thinking? Or maybe it's connected to Dawkin's tendency to be a bit dismissive of believers (believers making up the vast majority of my friends and family). Perhaps it's because my own loss of belief in God went through an entirely different route than pure scientific rational inquiry. Still thinking on it. And enjoying the read in the meantime.

Anyhoo... random but related, while doing a bit of reading for my last post I stumbled upon Answers in Genesis (a website Dawkins references several times in his book) and did a good amount of eye-rolling as they try to pander to a female base by raging against Darwin's sexism, because Christians are ALL about equality of the sexes, so poo poo to you Darwin. Yah. Whatever.

weaker vessel

Dusk had turned to dark but I still had 7 miles to ride before I was home. The bike path I was on took it's usual detour down, away from the road, into a stretch of isolated desert. I've ridden this route so many times, but this is the first time in the dark. There's two figures riding BMX bikes towards me. They are not kids. Men, tall, deep chests and thick arms. As we approach each other they see that I am a woman and begin to whoop, yell and cat call. My mind is flashing through the facts: I'm on a faster bike and have a head start, could they catch me? How far till the path comes back to the road? If worst comes to worst then what?
We pass each other in a second and they continue on their way. I ride home.

Caroline recently wrote two excellent posts on the economic vulnerability of women who are mothers and those posts really resonated with me. What has also been on my mind is physical vulnerability. I can rage and get all pissed over cultural and societal flaws that put women at a disadvantage. I must also admit I sometimes feel miffed at the biological evolution that made women smaller.

So, I collect heroes among female athletes, Mia Hamm, Paula Radcliffe, Dara Torres, Cynthia Cooper, Lynn Hill, etc. I collect them in fiction: Buffy, Black Mamba (aka The Bride), Xena, etc. I love this blogger who talks about women, risk assessment and being able to say "fuck off" with feeling. I look inside myself and cringe at how much I've internalized society's message that women should be accommodating, and I admit my own conflicted feelings about raising girls in our culture.

Meanwhile, that ride in the dark occasionally crosses my mind. What if worst had come to worst? I've started taking a bus that carries me in light and company across those isolated stretches till the days grow longer again. Also, I'm going to buy a can a mace.

I wish I could wrap up these thoughts with a nice neat "and that will solve everything".... but ya. Whatever. So instead, I will wrap up these thoughts, hit the publish button, then do a round with my speedbag. Because that always makes me feel a little tougher.

xmas

The Christmas season weighs heavy on me.
It brings out all my contradictions: A joy for giving gifts fighting against a need for frugality and a resistance to the pervading sense of commercialism and obligation. A love of celebration warring with the heavy cultural Christian overtones. Conflicted feelings about my 6yr old's adamant profession of belief in Santa (though he has informed me that he DOESN'T believe in elves) and, in particular, feeling that the time investment expected for the festivities weighs heavier upon the woman in the household. (Am I nuts for thinking this? Does anyone else feel that way?)

But... as of today, the extent of our Christmas shopping/wrapping etc is finished. (I take that back, I am putting some finishing touches on a few sock monkey's for the little guy. But still, close).

So now, I'm hoping to sit back just a bit and meditate. And read. I've done some interesting reading so far, like how Christmas is, in fact a Huge Value Destroying Hurricane (which prompted me to add Scroogenomics to my reading list). Also, regarding Atheists, eat drink and be wary about the land-mine strewn war zone that the season can be for non-believers (which prompted me to add The Atheists Guide to Christmas to my reading list). (Plus I fell in love all over again with Dar William's song The Christains and The Pagans.) Most recently, I was delighted to find an intersect of commonality where a letter from an atheist was well received at the Christian Advent Conspiracy, it was encouraging to see mutual hands of friendship extended there.

Speaking of Advent Conspiracy, since their cause is drinkable water, I'd like to point you to Melinda's Christmas wish list where you can help her reach the goal of $1000 to fund clean water projects in developing nations. I like how she puts it: "I have everything I want and need.
If you want to get me something for Christmas, please donate to my campaign for this organization. You would put a real smile on my face. :)" You're awesome Melinda!

here's the promo video for Charity:Water

and here's the promo video for Advent Conspiracy


Okay, that's all. Happy Holidays!!