What is the meaning of life in your eyes?

The ideals which give my life meaning are tenets which other people I think take for granted. Some people want more money, and others want more material possessions; some people want to be admired and some want power. Did I miss something? When did the “seven deadly sins” become the driving force of modern society? Lust, greed, gluttony, sloth, wrath, envy, pride…. they have more power in our modern society than people might credit, but every one is easily seen in the way our world runs.

No, none of that holds any appeal for me unless you consider the pursuit of information lustful.

I want knowledge. I want to explore new ideas and grow intellectually and spiritually. Maybe I am a bit arrogant in thinking that other people would do well to adopt a similar raison d’etre. If the pursuit of knowledge was our only driving force, other less admirable pursuits would fall by the wayside. I am not ambitious; I do not pursue experiences and understanding as a way to lord it over others. I only seek to better myself, better my understanding of myself, others, and the world. Money, I only want enough to achieve my goals… food, shelter, and enough to continue my self-education. I don’t need power. As little as our leaders would like to admit it, with power comes responsibility. Power might allow me to better educate the ignorant masses, but I have no real desire to be responsible for other people. 

Though I think people should take whatever opportunity presents itself to assist others in their pursuit of intellectual and spiritual excellence, ultimately everyone is responsible for their own exaltation. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. In the end, as happy as it would make me to be surrounded by people who share my desire for edification, attempting to lead them all by hand to that end would cripple my own pursuit of excellence. No one can be made to throw off the shackles of their ignorance. Dogma is the ruling meme of our modern culture. Dogma, conformity, ignorance, mediocrity, blind ambition, indifference, arrogance…. these are all symptoms of our way of life. We value nothing unless it brings with it some kind of fringe benefits.

Our current way of life has become stagnant. We do not strive in any way to better ourselves. We seek only to entertain ourselves or make our lot in life easier. The pursuit of excellence is not encouraged. People who seek knowledge for its own sake are looked at with confusion and scorn. Why spend your time in intellectual pursuits when you could watch television or work to make more money to buy more things to spend your “spare” time on. Our lives are finite, so any time spent on pursuits which do not allow us to entertain ourselves at some point must surely be a waste of time, right? How sad our world makes me.

I must admit that my spiritual beliefs do influence my views. I believe that whatever our life’s experiences, we take them back with us to enhance the quality of existence between lives. Even as we experience things which seem to damage us, how we transmute them in the course of our lives is what’s important. The experiences are powerful, but how we learn to deal with them is of the utmost importance. So the acquisition of new information and experience is not entirely the most important aspect of our lives; life is much more about how we transform our experiences into new forms. By the end of our lives, we become an amalgam of all our experiences, and the ultimate result is up to us.

If I died tomorrow, I’d have few real regrets. I would miss watching my nephew grow up, and I might wish that I had managed to get something published, but I am pleased with the person I have become in the course of my life. I have often been miserable and broken by adversity, but it has made me stronger too. Every event in life is an opportunity to learn something. Learning alters our perceptions, and how we perceive our world is very much who we are. Philosophers and scientists insist that the act of observing alters the object of our attention. I believe we are also altered by our understanding of those things which we choose to observe. If we view a puppy with love or a racial slur with loathing, if we allow ourselves to hate or choose instead to love…. our views shape us, so we must choose what we take away from our life’s experiences in the people we become through them.

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If people had told me in high school that I would some day be able to work in retail, I’d have laughed in their faces. I do at least half my holiday shopping online in order to avoid the crowds, and I do a lot of shopping throughout the year just so I won’t have to deal with shopping in stores right now. I keep a present-hoard in my closet, an accumulation of things which I will hand out for birthdays and holidays for years to come. I’ve bought things for my nephew for which he will not be ready for another seven years.

Most people would assume that I’m some kind of freak, type “A,” present-buying personality, but the truth is that it’s better for everyone if I minimize the amount of time I have to spend with the public. This is the worst time of year for an empath. For years I was agoraphobic to the point I could hardly go shopping or to movie theaters without a companion. I still sit in the back of the theater and either bolt for the door as soon as the credits start or wait until most everyone has gone. My empathy did not make me agoraphobic, that was due to several incidents that happened in high school, but it definitely exacerbated the situation.

I was always aware of the emotions of people and things around me. For a long time, I thought everyone could feel what others felt. So it confused me to no end the way people treated one another. My parents, people I met, everyone. For the longest time, I just picked up everything around me and expressed it in my own actions. Whenever my parents were in a bad mood, I acted out. Whether they were mad at me or each other or just irritable, so was I. My earliest memories are a blur. It seems to me I should remember more, but with few exceptions, I don’t remember much of anything until I was five and started school.

It wasn’t until junior high school that I seriously began to question the nature of my sensitivity. For a while, I was completely paranoid. I thought everyone else must be able to sense things just as I did, but the fact that no one talked about it and no one would acknowledge how I felt when I was always completely aware of what they felt meant that for some reason they were excluding me from their society.

My paranoia didn’t last long.

People had been harassing me for as long as I could remember, and eventually I came to the conclusion that they could not, in fact, feel what I felt. They were as ignorant to my emotions as three blind people trying to describe an elephant by feeling it. I’d always felt isolated, but after I was attacked a few times at school and realized my peers were completely headblind, I completely withdrew. I stopped trying to make friends. I stopped going out in public where people might corner me and try to hurt me. I stayed in my room where I wouldn’t bother anyone with my presence. I didn’t try to ingratiate myself with my family any more. I wanted to be as far away from people as possible, but short of running away and living in a cave (which I actually considered), there was no way I could get any further away from the world than my room. This is when I started getting sick whenever I thought about going to school and by the time I quit school, years later, I was missing at least two days of school a week. I would actually carry all my books around in my bookbag, even when I did not need to, in case I had to defend myself. I got called into the principal’s office for threatening people, even though I was the one being threatened.

For years, I felt it was best for everyone if I just kept to myself. I was safer that way, and I wouldn’t be bothering anyone with my oversensitivity to their situations. If you’re a strong empath, you might as well be a telepath or a psychic. Emotions have a language all their own. Learn to string them together, and you sometimes get motive and intent; you can predict people’s actions. My mother used to say I had no tact because I would blurt things out in the course of a conversation that other people found embarrassing. In the course of my childhood, I went from a very friendly, gregarious child to a moody and withdrawn young adult. Lots of kids end up like that, but I doubt many of them can say why.

But after a while, even being alone in my room didn’t help, and sometimes I had to go out. I filled my room with plants. I found that they helped me sleep better, acting as a buffer against the thoughts and emotions of my family and the people who lived in the neighborhood. After a while, even that wasn’t enough though. It wasn’t until we moved out of the city that I began to sleep better (but even now, we live in a little town and I’m still an insomniac much of the time). My talents keep getting stronger. I hear whispering when I’m trying to sleep. I don’t know if it’s the ghosts in the house (we have at least three) or the thoughts of my family and neighbors. I have no desire to pursue it. I use a sound machine to drown out the “noise.” I know it is not a physical noise that is keeping me up at night, but the sound machine is distracting enough that I don’t hear the “voices” as clearly as I might otherwise and so I can sleep without unintentionally focusing on them.

When I had to go out shopping, I’d try to get my mom to go with me. If I got stressed out, I’d sync up with her. Providing she wasn’t stressed, I could use her as a buffer the same way I use plants. If there’s one person I inherited my “gift” from, it’s my mom. She was mostly blocked up when I was a kid, but I could make use of her shields by syncing up with her. Don’t ask me how though. I didn’t even realize I was doing it till years later, and I don’t do it much any more. Mostly because as she gets older, she’s starting to get into metaphysical topics too and she’s not as blocked as she was when I was a kid, so it would be counter productive.

It’s still better for me if I have as little contact with large groups of people as possible, but I can’t make a living that way (unless I find a publisher who will make me rich! heh). This time of year is nightmarish. Friendly customers are the best and can go a long way towards healing my emotional bruises, but most of the people I have to deal with are impatient and irritable, and there’s only so much of that I can take in a day before I snap. I have good shields now, but the constant emotional assault of the holidays is enough to wear down a wall of obsidian. I find myself wanting to find a dark, deserted corner like I did when I first started working after I quit school.

For the past two days I’ve had a headache that goes away once I get home, and it’s not even December yet. I am tired of keeping up pretences. I wish everyone was aware of what empathy is and how they unintentionally affect their fellow beings. I wish everyone treated everyone around them with the respect they want for themselves. If everyone in the world woke up empathic tomorrow, I know it would be chaos, but if everyone born tomorrow and from here on out were empathic, what a wonderful future the human race would have.

Do you think people are inherently good or bad?

Neither… we’re inherently insane. Without a proper foundation in sanity, questions of good and evil become moot.

Hah!

But seriously, good and evil are abstract concepts. They don’t technically exist outside of philosophical or religious debates. Nothing is inherently, intrinsically evil, and nothing is “good.” It’s all a matter of perspective and social pressures. What is good or evil in one generation may not be the next. What is good for one may cause evil for another.

But for the sake of argument, there are certain characteristics which seem to define evil and those are selfishness and malice. While I think that very few people are intrinsically malicious, selfishness is another matter. Without exception, human beings are selfish creatures.We are born that way. From infancy, everything is defined by its relation to ourselves. By a short stretch of the definition, it might be that malice is just an extreme form of selfishness, a selfish desire for others to relieve our rage coupled with a disregard for anything which is different from self. 

Good and evil then, might be measured by how selfish one is. Since all creatures start out selfish, that is, self-serving, it could be argued that all creatures start out evil and it is only through our interaction with others and the development of empathy and compassion that we learn to better ourselves and become good. Good then would be defined as an absence of selfishness or evil, just as darkness defines light and vice versa. Neither good, nor evil, can be defined without using the one to preclude the other.

No one is completely free of selfishness and therefore, no one is completely free of evil. No matter how selfless someone is, they are still selfish… they still have desires. Even someone who desires only to please others is selfish in that the desire to please others pleases themselves. Those who give love wish only to receive it. Everything we do reflects on who we are. Everything we give is a reflection of what we want. With time, we learn patience and the delayed gratification of desire. With time, we forget to be selfish. It doesn’t make us less selfish; we just don’t think about what we want as much. It becomes sublimated with age and maturity.

Of course, this isn’t true for everyone. Serial killers, rapists, terrorists, despots…. these are all people who never learn or unlearn their selfish instincts. Incidentally, these are all people that society agrees are evil and always has. Such people seek only to gratify their desires, whether it is to commit violence or suppress freedoms. They are selfish and cannot bear to respect the desires of others as equally valid.

There are then greater and lesser evils. Everyone is evil in their own selfish way, but some people are universally evil and others are only evil when others catch them being selfish at their expense. Good, it seems, exists only as an alternative to evil. If selfishness equates with evil, and we all start off selfish, then evil came first before good… like the egg, before the chicken. Good is something learned and earned and nothing is intrinsically good because nothing that exists can do so without being selfish in some way. Even eating is a form of selfishness which asserts our right to exist over whatever it is we eat, not that I advocate a breathairean or anorexic lifestyle.

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OK… so, where is everyone? No one’s posting. You better not all be off shopping, because I will be sooooo disappointed in you.

OK, so maybe you’re all rehabilitating from a tryptophan overdose… see you Monday.

Internet Island Topic Post #30: 2nd Anniversary Post

30.1: Home Economics:Messiness/Cleanliness
Some people are “Oscar” and some are “Felix” when it comes to degrees of home management. I’m single, and living with another guy, so the reference to the “Odd Couple” is especially apt in my situation. (I’m Felix, He’s Oscar) “Family” is a different concept today than when I was growing up. My father didn’t clean the house. That was my mother’s “job”. I’d like to hear about Messiness and Cleanliness in your household, or your family’s, or someone you know, with comparisons. Be honest.

My chaos or order depends solely on where I am. In my own space, I am a complete slob… but I know where everything is and it’s not like I’m inconveniencing anyone. In the rest of the house, which I share with my mother and her boyfriend, I clean up after myself. In fact, I am constantly cleaning up after my mom’s boyfriend too. He is Such a slob. At work, I am very organized and everything must be straight. I share my workspace with many other people, and they must be able to find things when I am not around. It’s only courtesy to clean up after yourself when sharing space. I can’t stand people who don’t clean up after themselves. Even when I occasionally eat in a “fast food” restaurant, I cleanup all the garbage to ease the workload of the staff. They can wipe the table down with a rag, but why should they have to touch my filthy, germy napkins and half eaten food?

30.2: The Cultural Blender (just happens to be the name of one of my websites, natch):
Most of us are entertained by popular culture. For some of us this goes farther than mere “entertainment”. Some of us have been shaped as people by popular culture in some form or another. Fans of the old television show Star Trek, known as either “Trekkers” or “Trekkies” were famously derided by the star of the original series, William Shatner, who told them to “get a life”. Star Trek today has developed a life of it’s own. I’d like to read blogs about which televisor show, or movie, or book, or piece of music (or album, radio show, etc.) has most moved you and influenced your life. Which popular entertainment informs and elucidates the world about you? Type “Miley Cyrus” into a search engine and you get 18 million links. (Elvis Presley gets 66 million) The internet is fueling our worldwide passion for cultural diversions which sometimes become the focus of our lives.

I don’t think that anyone is exempt from the influence of “popular culture.” Anyone who can label themselves (or someone else) a geek, nerd, jock, princess, trekkie, freak, etc etc etc, has been influenced by popular culture. Personally, I’ve never understood why it was popular.  I do not consider myself so much a product of popular culture, as it has impacted my life whether I wished it or not. I don’t think there is a person in America who has not heard of Star Trek, or Star Wars for that matter. And as little as I appreciated Seinfeld, there are some people who lived for that show too. 

I cannot say that any one movie, television show, song, or band has influenced me positively or negatively, but as for books… what book has not influenced me? Everything I read goes down, down, down into the bottomless pit of my subconscious and reemerges at odd times in my dreams or in my writing or just gestates until it becomes something altogether new and strange.  There’s a reason I’m called The Bibliophile in some circles.  If I had ever made it onto “Who wants to be a Superhero” that would have been my alter-ego. heh I’m a comic book junkie, a book nerd, a word freak, a history buff and a religious scholar.  I gush over words the way others gush over music or television series.  There’s the rare song or show that gets me going, but give me a good book and I’ll live and breathe it. I’d sooner read than eat if the book is well written. I’d get by on only a few hour’s sleep if a book is in need of finishing. As you can see, contrary to “popular culture,” the culture I choose to immerse myself in is not really so popular. Popular culture turns people into vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry. I think of myself as butter almond.

30.3: The Big Thankful:
November brings the American holiday of Thanksgiving, which might be either an excuse to get fat on turkey and stuffing or perhaps a time for a more spiritual gratefulness. What does being thankful mean to you? What is the single most important thing for which you are so thankful you forget about it most of the time?

For the most part, I am thankful for my ability to think outside the box. I am not a cookie cutter person. I am grateful for my ability to innovate and push the boundaries of what I know. I am never satisfied with knowing just one thing; I must know everything. I believe the sole purpose of life is to learn and so I am grateful for the opportunity to learn and grow. I try to provide others with the opportunity as well, but sadly, not everyone is as eager as I am to take advantage of the possibilities. To my way of thinking, if I took everything I learned in the course of my life and kept it all to myself, that would be the supreme selfishness. There’s no purpose in accumulating knowledge and wisdom if others don’t do the same. Who would I talk to? I would be so lonely. So in addition to my gratitude for the opportunity to learn, I am also grateful for the company of others of like mind.

30.4: Time Machine:
Sometimes I think I’m on a time machine with the lever stuck fast in “forward”, and I keep going faster, and never slow down. The older I get, the faster the machine goes, and the lever can never be unstuck, stopped, or reversed. If you could slow down a moment in your life, just one single, simple moment, so that you could “go back” and learn/relive/investigate/obsess/remark about it, what would it say to you, and what did you learn? You can pick any moment. Some people might have had an epiphany during a particularly sad or bad time which actually made them a better person.

I don’t know that it made me a better person… I think possibly it made me a stronger and harder person. When I was in highschool, there was a peer support group which had an anonymous locker into which you could drop a note if you were in need of someone to talk to about a problem.  At that time in my life, I was very depressed… about as close to suicidal as I’ve ever been. I put the note in the locker on a Monday and waited. By Wednesday, I was pretty distraught.

The reason I was suicidal was because no one seemed to care how I felt about anything, and the fact that no one came to me or even made sure I was alright three days later, vindicated all the feelings I had of alienation. I resolved to wait until Friday and if no one got back to me, well over the weekend I was going to go jump down the quarry. So Friday came and went, but instead of killing myself, I got really angry. Over the weekend, I talked myself out of suicide by reason of extreme disgust. How dare they ignore me? All my life people, my peers, had treated me like crap. Where did they get off? I was better than them. I was smarter, I was more talented, I had every reason to stay in this world, and they had no right to make me feel like I didn’t belong here. They didn’t belong here.

So by the time Monday came around, I had a huge chip on my shoulder. I didn’t care any more what people thought of me or how they treated me because I had convinced myself that I was better than they were, or my higher self had talked me into a bit of righteous indignation. That was really the turning point of my life. Up until that time, every little thing that people said or did to me had a profound impact on my mental state. But I got this furious little fire going inside me and for a long time, I couldn’t feel anything but that fury. It kept me going through highschool until the day I quit.

But back to the story… it wasn’t until the following Tuesday that a teacher came to me all concerned about my obviously suicidal note. He pulled me out of lunch (I was reading… I never ate school food if I could help it) and apologized profusely that no one had gotten back to me. It seems he had been on vacation and the kids who were supposed to check the locker hadn’t done so. At that point, I was beyond caring. To be honest, I had never seen him before in my life so I don’t know if he was on vacation or not. I was seriously pi$$ed, and I was very cold to him. If I had actually gone through with killing myself, the school would have been in deep litigation. But I blew him off. I told him I was fine and I didn’t need his help or anyone else’s.  You know, if he had seriously been doing his job, he wouldn’t have taken my word for it. He would have frogmarched me off to the nearest counselor and tried to call my mother. To this day, my mother doesn’t know about this, and I don’t intend to tell her. Both my siblings tried to kill themselves. Supposedly I am the well adjusted one. I do not want her sneering at me as if I was copying them. To be fair, I went through this on my own before either of them and without any help or pity.

But this event was just another example of my extremely neglectful childhood. I still feel such loathing for most of my former classmates and teachers that it’s not even funny. It’s like this thing that lives inside me now. Whenever I am reminded of my school or contemplate my nephew or others going to school, it stretches out like a feral cat and starts popping its claws.

I suppose in some ways I should be grateful for this occurrence. If this hadn’t happened, I would still be struggling with my self-esteem. I know I am a little arrogant when it comes to my supposed “superiority,” but I try not to treat others as anything other than equal because in a way, acting that wahy would make me inferior. Truly superior people do not need to show that they are superior in any way. They just do those things which are needful and hope everyone else follows the example. I hold myself to a higher moral and intellectual standard than most people because it is the only way I can feel good about myself. It was the one thing in my teenage years that I could look at and be proud of. I don’t do it so I can feel like I’m better than others. I do it so I can feel like I deserve to be here no matter what others might say to me or about me.

30.5: Spiritual Journey:
Is humankind any more spiritual now than in the past? Has global communication spurred a revival of spiritual thought? Are we better off now than when we were cut off as individuals from others because of travel or communication restrictions? I seem to read a lot of blogs with a spiritual bent to them. Not just from Christians but from Pagans, New Agers, Muslims, Buddhists, Universalists, and a host of other bloggers who learned less well known schools of thought. I’d like to read blogs about spiritual journeys, from the personal to the Universal. (to borrow one of the taglines from my own website)

Unfortunately, I don’t think humans are more spiritual. If anything, the previous generation was less spiritual and more materialistic than ever before. However, some people in my generation and the one being born now are being born spiritual… the so-called indigo or crystal children…. born seekers.

When I was little, if the horses got out of the pen when I was visiting my father, he sent me to get them because animals trusted me. It might take him hours to get the horses to come back, where it would take me fifteen minutes to a half hour, depending upon where they’d gotten to. I was an extremely sensitive child, and I learned from an early age to hide it. My father was a terrible bully, and my mother was emotionally unavailable, so I internalized everything. I didn’t have an outlet for my emotion. I had to learn to love people without expect it to be reciprocated. It is only in the past few years that I have made any effort to open up to anyone, here online and in the “meat world.” I am quite literally a “free spirit.” I don’t let anything suppress my expression. I am supernally honest with everyone who crosses my path. I have complete strangers tell me their life’s story and then ask for my advice.

Honestly, the world makes me sad. I try to accept everyone and treat them like they have something to teach me, but most people don’t have anything to give… they just want to take. There are so many people in the world who don’t share anything of themselves with anyone for fear that it will be one-sided. Even I close up sometimes when confronted with someone who reminds me of my parents. It’s learned behavior, and we need to learn a better way of relating to one another. It may have been harder for me, or easier depending upon how you look at it, because I am an empath, but I’m not saying everyone needs to be an empath to adopt a doctrine of compassion and empathy. Hopefully the next few generations will see an end to war and blind ambition through the application of acceptance.

30.6: Accelerated Lives: Existence on Steroids
Home run record breaker Barry Bonds was indicted for “perjury and obstruction of justice” in court recently and could face prison for telling a federal grand jury he did not knowingly use performance-enhancing drugs. I suffer from a pinched nerve and have had muscle damage because of the chronic condition of my hip, and I must have looked most quizzical the first time my doctor prescribed steroids for me. Drugs are rampant in society these days, and it seems that the doctor always has a pill to prescribe for almost any ailment you can name. The drug companies are making more money than ever before. I want to know how the Islanders feel about steroids? Are anabolic steroids good or bad for us or for the people who use them? Isn’t it about time that the sports industry embraces performance enhancing drugs rather than attempting to forbid them? Should Barry go to jail, for heaven’s sake? Should the Olympic Committee give Marion Jones back her gold medals?

While I feel there is a time and place for everything, I can’t say that I really approve of any drugs in so far as the major pharmaceutical companies are concerned. They are more about making a buck from human (and animal)suffering, than they are about preventing it. Sure steroids seem to treat the problem, but they also create more, just like all synthetic drugs. They take the chemical formula from its original source without the other chemicals which balance it in its original form, and then wonder why it has side effects. I also feel that in the quest to treat the symptoms, our doctors and scientists have accepted prematurely that there is no cure. So long as they continue to treat the symptoms and not the source, there will be no cure.

Now, while I don’t approve of most medicines, if they ease the pain of the sick and there is nothing else available, then there is nothing to do but to take them. However, athletes who use these chemicals to enhance their performance, rather than for a legitimate disability, should be banned from competing at the very least. It shows that they do not have the ethics that competition requires in order to be fair.

30.7: Xanga Moviemakers: I don’t know how to make videos… and my computer is uber-slow so I can’t watch many either. :.-(

30.8: I Read the News Today, Oboy:
I like to tell everyone ad infinitum that I don’t watch news on television. In fact, I think the “news” on television has become just another “reality series”. I read the newspaper. The ever shrinking journalistic cornerstone which has been rapidly disappearing since the first USA Today hit the stands. (On April 1st, 1987, believe it or not.) Someday soon I’m afraid the newspaper is going to disappear altogether. How do you get your news? Or do you care about the state of the world because you don’t think you can do anything about it.

I don’t watch the news, and sadly I do not read the newspaper… I lived in the city for a while, and we would never get it when we did have a subscription, so we canceled it. Frankly, I find the news, as you said, to be a “reality series,” and the newspaper is so nearly a gossip rag that it’s not worth reading half the time. The news, from any source, depresses me. I get news alerts on specific subjects from my Gmail account, but even those are not worth reading most of the time. Mainly I “hear” about news online, from my Gmail account, at yahoo, from newsletters I subscribe to…. On the one hand, I am kept up to date on the subjects which concern me, but on the other, I am well aware that my sources are one sided and biased. It doesn’t matter that they tout a bias that I agree with. I simply lack the stamina to keep up with the BS the otherside is spewing.

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Sorry to all my subscribers…. I’ve been going through and tagging my old posts and I didn’t realize they’d show up in the subscriptions, even though I didn’t update the date or time. :-/

Dreams

I had some weird dreams last night… I found a kitten in my room and it told me there was a ghost under my bed, one in the closet, and one on the stairs. The one under the bed wasn’t always there, but the other two hardly ever left, so I was kind of trapped in my room.

At around 2 in the morning, I woke up with a nasty headache and went downstairs to take some tylenol pm. I went back up to bed and dreamed that I was a kid in some kind of junior superhero program. Only the best and the brightest got picked to join the Justice League. I was top in my class, which made some of the other students jealous. Then something happened and one of the teachers came and told me I was out. No explanation, just that I had to leave. So I went home but no one was there and there was dust all over everything. In the meantime, the other kids were attacked by someone and one of them came after me, thinking I had done it. But as it turned out, I had a twin with the same abilities, and she had done it. She was also the reason I got kicked out, because none of the kids could be in the program if they had a supervillain in the family. So the junior hero that came after me at home found me crying in a dark house with everything dusty and not a scrap of food in the fridge because my parents hadn’t been home in a while, tending to my sister in the asylum. Then he saw a picture of us all together and put two and two together. My evil twin attacked him though before he could call the others, and I had to intervene. Seems we both had this super hair like Medusa from the inhumans in Marvel comics, and she was trying to choke the life out of the kid that had come to catch me to earn extra points with his instructors. So I caught her in my hair and was trying to restrain her. I cared more about trying to catch her than hurt her though, and so she started choking me. Then my would-be jailor popped heat beams out of his eyes (apparently  he was the grandkid of superman or something) and cut through her hair. She screamed and ran off, and he took me to a hospital. It seemed that the instructor who threw me out hadn’t checked with the other instructors when she told me to go, and got into a lot of trouble for assuming I was out since my evil twin wasn’t technically a supervillain though she had killed our parents (which I hadn’t known about and which was why the house was empty). Technically, she was just an escapee from an asylum and not a supervillain because she hadn’t been convicted of any crimes yet. So for that reason and that I didn’t have any place else to go, I was let back into the program.

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So… Thanksgiving….

I always feel guilty about celebrating this holiday, even if I am only “celebrating” by gorging myself. In general, I often feel guilty about being a “white” American. I put white in quotations because I’m such a mutt that, while white might be technically true, it doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story.

But back to Thanksgiving…

I’m sure I, personally, have lots to be thankful for, and I am, but every Thanksgiving, I feel that a grave injustice is done by Americans who choose not to remember what was done to our Native friends after their usefulness as our saviors was done. Frankly I think what happened to the Native tribes of America is disgusting and profoundly inhuman. The pilgrims invited the Wampanoag to a celebration, but the Wampanoag provided most of the food for a feast that lasted three days because the Pilgrims ran out. These were a people whose worth was generally measured by how charitable they were to the people around them. They understood the transitory nature of ownership and did not believe that land could be owned the way European settlers did. How can you own something that was here long before you were born and will be here long after you die?

In terms of tradition, I suppose glutting ourselves on food is in keeping with our greed when it came to the lands we forcibly took from the people who originally lived here. And we didn’t just take their lands and hunting grounds, Europeans stole their cultures by demonizing their religion and removing their children to Christian schools for proper indoctrination into American (Christian) culture. They rounded up the Tribes and destroyed them with disease ridden blankets and rotten meat. No wonder depression and alcoholism are higher among Native peoples than any other ethnic group.

Sorry to be a downer when most people are just happy to have a day off from work and lots of yummy food to eat, but I feel it’s important that we not paint over the past with rosy hues. Celebrate the theme of the day, but not without remembering the past. If you really want to consider Thanksgiving a holy-day, make it holy by honoring the charitable contributions of the Native Americans and give food to food banks or invite people to your dinner who might otherwise eat alone or not at all. Share. It’s the only Thanksgiving tradition that is truly important.

Going through my Gmail account today, I came across a few colorful news of the weird articles…

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Troupes of monkeys are out of control in India’s northeast, stealing cellphones and breaking into homes to steal soft drinks from refrigerators.

“Monkeys are wreaking havoc in my constituency by taking away mobile phones, toothpaste, sipping Coke after opening the refrigerators,” Hiren Das told Assam state’s assembly. He said the primates were “even slapping women who try to chase them.” Assam’s wildlife minister, Rockybul Hussain, said the state government has formed a panel to study the problem.

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Oh noes! Monkeys gone wild…. Honestly, I think this is funny as heck. Our simian cousins and animals in general are a lot more intelligent than people give them credit. It was only a matter of time before they tried to adopt our ways… though I find the cellphone theft disturbing. Stealing food and toothpaste is one thing, picking up our bad habits is entirely another.

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Having marital problems? Have you tried putting egg in your underpants?

A woman in Cyprus is on trial for sorcery after pledging to shake off a curse apparently plaguing a man’s relationship with his wife and mother-in-law. She charged $12,195 for her efforts. “She cracked the egg into my underpants,” the 37-year-old man said in court in Nicosia. Sorcery is banned in Cyprus.

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Sorcery, shmorcery… she should be on trial for fraud. I hate articles like this. It gives those who practice magick a bad name. $12,195 for a cracked egg? Who’s cracked here? I’m all for witches and magi being paid for their services, but lets pick a realistic pay scale here! Not that I believe this woman is really a witch, but just on general principle. Articles like this make me depressed to be part of the human race.

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Whoa, man, don’t Bogart that toad.

David Theiss, 21, of Kansas City, Mo., was busted for licking an amphibian to get high. Theiss got hold of a Colorado River toad to lick its venom glands, which secrete a poison that can make people hallucinate. “People used to do it all the time, but it faded out . . . [then] came back as a fad,” said animal expert Danny Snyder. “But not a smart one . . . the toxins can kill a lot of stuff.”

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Um, yeah, like stupid people because smart people wouldn’t do this. I hope.

I had a psych teacher who once tried to convince the class that stupid people are important because if there was ever a disease that targeted intelligence, stupid people would have to rebuild the population.

………… no…I think I’d like to be extinct in that event.

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Weird things you never knew… but do now

A shrimp’s heart is in its head.

The “sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick” is said to be the toughest tongue twister in the English language.

Rats multiply so quickly that in 18 months, two rats could have over a million descendants. (yikes!)

Wearing headphones for just an hour will increase the bacteria in your ear by 700 times. (double yikes!)

If the government has no knowledge of aliens, then why does Title 14, Section 1211 of the Code of Federal Regulations, implemented on July 16 1969, make it illegal for U.S. citizens to have any contact with extraterrestrials or their vehicles? (Yeah! why? it’s a conspiracy I tells ya!)

In every episode of Seinfeld there is a Superman somewhere.

A duck’s quack doesn’t echo, and no one knows why. (Because ducks are alien robots!)

23% of all photocopier faults world-wide are caused by people sitting on them and photocopying their butts.

Most lipstick contains fish scales.

Like fingerprints, everyone’s tongue print is different.

If you sneeze too hard, you can fracture a rib. (I think I did this once) If you try to suppress a sneeze, you can rupture a blood vessel in your head or neck and die. (I warn people of this all the time.) If you keep your eyes open by force, they can pop out.

In a study of 200,000 ostriches over a period of 80 years, no one reported a single case where an ostrich buried its head in the sand.

It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky. (poor things)

A pregnant goldfish is called a twit. (so are some women)

More than 50% of the people in the world have never made or received a telephone call.

Horses can’t vomit.

Butterflies taste with their feet. (Don’t let that butterfly land on you. It’s sizing you up for dinner!)

In 10 minutes, a hurricane releases more energy than all of the world’s nuclear weapons combined. (now if we could only harness that energy…. I wonder if it could be done.)

On average, 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens every year.

On average people fear spiders more than they do death. (Poor things)

Ninety percent of New York City cabbies are recently arrived immigrants. (It begs the question, how do they know how to get to where you want to go.)

Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.

Elephants are the only animals that can’t jump.

Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older. (Two out of three of my great grandmothers lived into their 90s, so odds are good I could hit 100. 116? I don’t know. Do I want to live that long?)

It’s possible to lead a cow upstairs..but not downstairs.

Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

It’s physically impossible for you to lick your elbow. (Unless you’re in a horror movie… Oooo, bad joke. I know.)

The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.

A snail can sleep for three years. (wow, sometimes I wish I could)

No word in the English language rhymes with “MONTH.” (but once comes close)

Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing. (and our hands, or so I’ve heard)

The electric chair was invented by a dentist.

All polar bears are left handed. (does that make them more creative?)

In ancient Egypt, priests plucked EVERY hair from their bodies, including their eyebrows and eyelashes.

An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.

TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.

“Go,” is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

If Barbie were life-size, her measurements would be 39-23-33. She would stand seven feet, two inches tall.

A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.

The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.

Americans on average eat 18 acres of pizza every day. (mmmmm pizza)

Almost everyone who reads this will try to lick their elbow. (haha)

A Good Spell is Like a Three-Layer Cake….

I generally go about creating a spell or ritual the same way I go about creating a new recipe. I figure out exactly what my goal is, research the best way to achieve that goal, then gather up my ingredients and start cooking. Usually I have a pretty good idea how I should go about it even before I start researching the particulars; my “research” is more like verification of the steps I will take. Ritual of any kind serves one purpose only: to put yourself in the proper mental state to connect with the universe to achieve your goals.

Sometimes it’s very simple, as with Sigil magick. You don’t need to do any research, unless you plan to use letters or symbols from a language with which you are unfamiliar. Some people prefer to use ancient, or dead alphabets, for their Sigil, but that’s really not necessary. The only reason to do something like that is if using a dead language creates greater significance in your mind. At the risk of giving ammunition to the skeptics, most magick is all in your head. What I mean is, you don’t really need anything other than your mind. The tools don’t guarantee success, your will does.

So back to Sigil magick… this is the simplest kind of ritual. Say you wanted to make a sigil to find a better job. You write out a phrase or list the attributes the new job should have. But say you just want a job that brings more money. You come up with a phrase like: Help find job with better pay. Take the first letter of each word: HFJWBP. If there were any duplicate letters, you could discard them. For the concept of “with better pay,” you could just reduce those words to a $ sign. For the concept of help, you could use a plus sign. Then you overlay the letters, turning them and morphing them as needed, till you have a brand new symbol to be used as a focus of your needs. The main concept in the creation of Sigils is reduction. It doesn’t matter how you reduce the initial concept to letters and the letters to one form, so long as you end up with a form you like. Usually, you will not even be able to recognize the letters in the sigil you create.

Once you have a symbol you like, you can draw it on paper, inscribe it into clay or wood or paint it onto something you will handle or come into contact with on a daily basis. It is also important that once you have created your sigil, you empower it. This doesn’t have to be a big production unless you want it to be. At this point, you can focus all of your will on the charm you’ve created, or call upon whatever gods you worship or that you think would support your desire for a better job. Some people prefer to make a charm like a sigil and forget about it. I think it is better to be reminded of its existence as often as possible because the memory will contribute more energy to the idea you created, like an affirmation. You can use any kind of paper and any kind of ink or paint, but if it helps to put you into the proper frame of mind, then use whatever implements help you do that.

Now if it were me using this sigil, I would draw the sigil onto a piece of paper and then wrap that paper around a sharpie marker. Then when I was looking for a job in the want ads, I’d use the sharpie to circle anything that looked promising. Beyond that, I’d also carry the sigil on my person at all times because you never know when you might be passing by some place that hasn’t notified the papers yet, but stopping in to inquire, you get hired on the spot.

Creating sigils is so simple, it’s hardly worthy of being called a ritual.

On the other hand, the most ambitious ritual I ever performed was to dispel ignorance in the world right before Bush was reelected. I really hoped it would go into effect before he could get a second term, but no such luck. I think it worked though because all but the most hardcore, right-wing republicans can admit their dislike of the man without feeling unAmerican about it. I have an affinity for Thoth and Ma’at of the Egyptian pantheon. So I called upon them to help me dispel ignorance from the minds of people all over the world. Thoth is a moon god, but more importantly, he is a god of intellect and facts. Ma’at is his wife. Her name means truth and in the after life, she weighs a person heart against the feather of truth (her symbol). If the evil that a person has done in life outweighs the feather, then the person is devored. I drew their names in hieroglyphics on a piece of paper and on the reverse, I create a sigil to ward off ignorance. Then I anointed the paper in olive and rosemary oils and burned it to ashes. I poured the ashes into a jar with water and sealed it with wax, sealing away the ignorance of the world. Then I buried the jar so that ignorance would be resigned to the darkness where it belongs. I hope no one ever finds it and opens it. That could be… messy.

When I was little, I didn’t really relate well to other children my age. Even my mother would make me feel low by calling me grandma when I’d act concerned because she was late getting home. The one good thing she did for me though, was teach me to read in first grade. Sure kids start learning to read in first grade, but my mother read The Hobbit to me every night before bed and by the end of the school year, I took it from her because she was reading it too slowly. What I lacked in friends and confidantes, I made up for with books. I would be hard pressed to name one person that I was truly close to in school, and once I started reading on my own, my mother stopped spending that little bit of time with me. If not for my ability to immerse myself in a story, I think my childhood would have been one of extreme neglect. I can remember being four years old and entertaining myself by “exploring” the area around my home… and we lived in one of the worst parts of the city at that time. Sure I was well fed, clothed, and had a bed to sleep in, but the little time that my parents did not spend working, they spent on… other pursuits.

When I turned five and my sister was four, we moved into a more suburban setting because my mother didn’t want us to go to a school in the city (also because my stepfather was sent to prison at that time… long story). School made me happy because there were more books there. I read the whole rainbow of fairy books several times over (this was actually a series of twelve fairytale books edited by Andrew Lang, I would not mind owning them today!), Hans Christian Anderson, the original Brothers Grimm, and many other fairytale collections, and when I had read those stories so many times I could practically recite them, I started reading the ancient myths of every culture I could find.

My grandmother was Lutheran, and I am the only child that was baptized in the family, which is ironic since I am definitely not Christian. My mother didn’t really care about religion at that time, and had me baptized mainly to placate my grandmother. I went to Sunday school, and enjoyed reading the stories about the same as the fairytales I could read in the school library. I didn’t have any religious feeling though. That’s important for the sake of this story…. I mainly went to Church to make my grandmother happy too.

You know how you hear about Christian priests or nuns having a “calling?” Well, by the time I was eleven, I’d read the major myths of so many religions, from Christianity to old Sumerian, that it just struck me that I believed in the old gods a whole heck of a lot more than the Christian one. Not that I disbelieve in the Christian God, but He didn’t seem to be a very charming fellow, going postal at the drop of a hat. The old gods were a lot more personable, and while they had their failings too, they were still approachable and understandable. Call it an epiphany if you like, but it just came to me that I could be a Pagan even if there weren’t any more. At that time, I didn’t know that there were other Pagans or even that people still practiced witchcraft. I can tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing when I realized I was a Pagan… I was sitting at a table in the school library, reading a book of Greek mythology. And it just made me so happy to finally know what I had been missing.

I was actually probably a Pagan from age nine, but it wasn’t till I was eleven that I made a conscious decision that a Pagan was what I would be. But for two years after that, I operated in a vacuum… creating my own traditions and rituals. I didn’t talk to anyone about my feelings because it seemed to me that it would probably not be a good idea considering what had happened to the last Pagans.

I think it’s safe to say that I have a “rich inner world,” not only because I was so thoroughly neglected by my family and peers, but because I felt it necessary to internalize so much of my beliefs just to be safe. Obviously, I’d read all about the Witch trials and the forced conversions of Pagans when the Christianized Romans tried and mostly succeeded in taking over the world. True they eventually fell to the Goths, but much of our culture today is derived from old Rome. And the Church likes to make big of the Christian martyrs who were killed by the Pagan emperors in Rome, but not much is said of the Pagan martyrs. In fact, they usually try to insist that there weren’t any. (But I hope all my readers are smart enough to realize that history is written by the winners. From my own past life memories, I can tell you that I was martyred at least twice.) It was like living a weird conglomeration of the story of the ugly duckling with a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and I felt sure that if anyone ever discovered I wasn’t a good little Christian child, I’d get burned at the stake for sure.

It wasn’t until I was thirteen and discovered my first book on Witchcraft by a fellow named Dr Martello that I learned that there were other Pagans and witches and that I was not, in fact, alone. I came out to my mom, and it was no big deal. I almost wish she had pitched a fit or reacted in some way, but… nothing. She wasn’t overly religious at the time, though she could probably pass for a Buddhist now. My parents… did a lot of drugs when I was a kid, and they weren’t really emotionally available most of the time.

To assume that I have always been asexual, is to assume that I never went through puberty. Like all young people, I eventually matured… late. I was fourteen. Up until then, I’d been worried, though honestly, the only reason I was anxious  was because it was something that people expected to happen and it hadn’t yet. I never went through a phase where I thought boys were icky, but I never went through a phase where I was much attracted to them either. I thought I should like boys because I was a girl, but no boy ever showed any interest in me and after a while I just let it go.

Well…….. it was actually lot more traumatic than that… I was questioning my selfworth… wondering why none of the boys liked me and what was wrong with me, but at the same time, I wasn’t particularly interested in anyone so I couldn’t blame them for not being interested in me. Sometimes other girls would make snarky remarks about my hair or clothes or lack of makeup, but none of those things were me and if it came to the point where I would be (boy)friendless forever or change and be the center vapid of attention, I’d rather be alone. And stepping back from myself and my situation, I observed how boys and girls acted and the emotions involved (or the lack thereof) and decided it just wasn’t for me. There wasn’t any love in it at all, and I couldn’t imagine being physical with someone and not feeling anything but a physical response. This was years before I knew what an empath was.

But it was just so empty and meaningless. I really, literally despised my peers at that point because they didn’t even realize how repulsive they were to me. They treated me so very badly (in junior highschool, they “lynched” me), and all because I was a non-conformist. I shopped in thriftstores because it was cheap and my family was poor. My sister was always demanding the latest fashions, but I was happy enough to wear second-hand clothes, even if the other kids picked on me for it. I have always had very long, naturally curly hair, but I had people telling me if I got a perm or styled it, I’d be more popular. (This was the era of BIG hair) Why? I couldn’t see the point. I have very lovely hair; why destroy it for the latest trend. And makeup… that’s my sister’s shtick. Makeup makes me break out.

No, puberty was a very confusing time for me. It probably would have been better if I was gay. Then at least I would have been attracted to someone, and people would have seen I was at least a little bit like them. As it stands, they just assumed I was a snob because I wouldn’t join in their hedonistic ways. I’ve never thought sex equated with love, and I can’t wrap my mind around having sex with someone that I do not love.

So to get to the point of this post… I was asked in a previous post, how do I reconcile being an asexual with being Pagan when “many” Pagan rites focus on reproduction and fertility. Well, for one thing, I am not Wiccan and therefore my belief system does not center around reconciling the Goddess and God to one another with Great Rites and such. I’m a Pantheist which means I worship many gods, male and female both. Some of them are virgins, and therefore what interest would the great rite hold for them? My gods are gods of intellect and creativity, but not reproduction. They are tricksters, teachers, warriors, and peacemakers. Their needs are not generic and cannot be met with a simple sexually themed ritual, just as my needs are not sexual in nature. So there really is nothing to reconcile. There might be some conflict if I were Wiccan, but since my beliefs are much more broad than that, the question of my sexuality is moot.

Can men and women ever be completely equal? Should they?

Equality and fairness are the foundations of cooperative societies. A recent study with one of our close cousins indicates the desire for equality may be genetic. It makes sense that equality would become an environmental pressure in a pack or herd species where cooperation becomes the glue that not only holds the group together but also ensures the species’ survival. We come together for mutual benefit, mutual  being the key term. If cooperation were not beneficial, then we would not be herd animals. To establish what is beneficial, we instinctively observe the people around us. From these observations, we surmise what we ourselves might want and decide that, only if we had these things also, would things be fair and equal. Without equality, there is discord and a desire to break away from the herd. Cooperation falls by the wayside. Without equality, or the quest for it, there is only slavery as one group enforces its will on another.

Men and women are of the same species and therefore are hardwired to seek equality, to seek their fair share. Women however have been held back for generations by their physical dissimilarities to men. We are physically weaker and have been victimized for generations by our inability to compete. This victimization has also taken its toll on our evolution. Women were used as brood mares, married off young and until the advent of modern medicine, often dying in childbirth. Though I am obviously not a biologist, I’d guess that this may be why women have more neotenic tendencies when compared to men. There have been evolutionary pressures at work to keep us physically immature for thousands of years. This has also served to keep women separate from the male gender in terms of physical equality. For generations young (immature) women who reproduced had such a high mortality rate that they rarely reached an actual physical maturity. This may be why women “mature faster” than men, physically (women stop growing at 16-17, while men stop at 21) and mentally/emotionally. Though there is a great deal of physical difference between men and women, this can mostly be chalked up to their reproductive roles and does not really apply to their societal responsibilities.

For thousands of years, there have been stories of strong women. Lilith, Isis, the Amazons, Freyja…I could go on. Intellectually and spiritually, women have always known they were equal to men. Our roles may be culturally different, but it is only in one area that we are truly different and that is in the fact that women carry the baby and men fertilize the egg. I have known maternal men, nurturers who, but for their obvious masculinity, are completely gentle and sensitive with the children around them. I have known paternal women who drive their children to succeed, to be better in sports, to be aggressive. We identify aggression and physical activity with masculinity and gentleness and sensitivity with the feminine ideal, but that does not mean that the opposite sex is incapable of displaying these characteristics. It is the very fact that we are capable of displaying our opposite’s stereotypical qualities that proves that these characteristics are not exclusive to a particular gender.

There has been much made of the differences between how men and women process information as well. Men are supposed to be better at thinking rationally and women are intuitive. Men think spatially and categorically, while women are mavens of communication. That is what science says, but there is a great deal of variation in how individuals within their own sexes act and react to stimuli. I love language, that is true, but I’m not a bad artist, and I can read a map. I am quite intuitive, but that no more implies that I am incapable of rational thought than that men are incapable of intuition. Like as not, most men and women straddle a middle ground between rational and intuitive and draw on both in their daily functioning. Some individuals may be better at one or the other, but that doesn’t necessarily indicate that what one individual does well will transfer to the rest of his or her sex.

The differences between men and women are superficial and artificial. Can and should men and women be equals? I would say that we already are but for the constructs of society and culture that keep us apart. Every individual has his or her assets and faults. There is nothing in a person’s gender that makes them better for a specific role beyond whether they are physically capable of doing the work. Both sexes are able to cross the artificial boundaries of what is proper for their sex when they desire to do so. This may be by inclination or by need but easily shows that the only thing that keeps us from assuming a life of equality is our own inability to throw off the shackles of what we are taught to think of as “normal.” And one of the things that I like to say on a fairly regular basis is that normalcy is a statistical illusion. 

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

Is sex really what it’s all about?

The past fifty to one hundred years have seen an explosion of growth in human culture. It might be argued that the human race has not seen such diversification of thought since the Renaissance, or prior to that, the Mystery religions of ancient Rome. In the past few generations, we have seen alterations in religion and philosophy, in science, and in sexuality.

It is a little known secret that the human sex organs are subject to, shall we say, variation. The actual medical term is ambiguous genitalia or intersexuality, and it leads some children to have their sexuality reassigned at birth or shortly after, often without their parents’ knowledge. Boys will be boys and girls will be girls, except when the doctors step in and decide to alter the infant’s body because it is not clear which sex the child is. True hermaphrodites are rare, but not so rare is an ambiguous genitalia at birth. This often leads children to be raised as one sex, only to realize years down the road that they are actually of the opposite sex. It is only in the past few decades however that we have developed the medical knowledge to reassign gender.

Gender and sexuality are not necessarily the same thing however, and while ambiguous genitalia may account for some associative dissonances, there are plenty of people who claim alternative sexualities without having had their gender reassigned at birth. Currently there are three genders (<–an excellent wiki entry!)… male, female, the third gender which usually refers to anything else but which expands to include homosexuality, bisexuality or polyamory, and asexuality. Though polyamory and asexuality are touted as “new” sexual inclinations, they are not new at all. There have always been those who do not subscribe to the sexuality of reproduction. And again, gender and sexuality are not necessarily the same thing. Physically I am a female, but I am an asexual. Though I crave companionship, it is intellectual in nature; I have no sexual aspirations.

Some have asserted that the diversification of sexuality in this era is largely due to the increase of Pagan (pantheistic and polytheistic) religions. I fully agree that paganism supports the diversification of sexuality through acceptance, but these various forms of sexuality have always existed and are even part of mythology. In fact, it is more likely that the sexual revolution is to blame for our current sexual diversification. Patriarchal religious writers (aka Christians) assert that Paganism encourages diversity in sexuality, but to be more accurate, it would be better to say that Abrahamic religions have had a long history of discouraging diversity in sexuality, while most Pagans, providing everything is consensual, simply don’t care what someone’s sexual proclivities are.

Lots of people assume that Pagans are simply hypersexual people, and certainly I think as a whole, Pagans have fewer hang-ups about sex. The majority of people who identify themselves as polyamorous are probably Pagan. I am asexual however, so I hardly fit into that paradigm, or even the Christian one for that matter. Asexuals are very easily the odd-”men”-out no matter what religion you belong to. Even celibate Christian priests are thought to have sexuality which they (are supposed to) suppress for their religious beliefs.

It is this assumption that Pagans have more sex as part of their religious practices that leads to all kinds of misconceptions and problems. For one thing, some sexual predators and child molesters have used this view to lure their victims. The people that come to them believe that sex is part of the religion, or are willing to believe it, if they think they can learn something that gives them control of their lives. How ironic that in hoping to gain personal power, they give someone else control. While most Pagan religions contain within themselves a genesis as fertility cults, in their current incarnation, they are also about personal power. Outsiders might think that Pagans are all about the sex, but really, Paganism is a religion of respect. Pagans respect their environment, their gods, and individual choice. Anyone who identifies themselves as Pagan and tries to force someone to have sex as part of a rite is not really a Pagan. They might even fool themselves into believing it, but they are not. Sex is no more what Paganism is about than Christianity is all about drinking wine and munching communion wafers.

In short, sexuality is a personal choice. It has little to do with gender, beyond hormones, and it has little to do with religion, beyond what one’s chosen religion will support. Paganism does support alternative sexual inclinations more than the Abrahamic religions, but it does not conspire to introduce alternative sexual practices to its practitioners, or to others. No… sexual practice is as old as existence itself, and the genders identified in humanity are also found in nature. Swans and wolves (among others) can be homosexual, many fish, fowl, and reptiles are bisexual or can change sex to suit their environment, and many of the most primitive life forms are capable of asexual reproduction (that is, they do not seek outside union). None of these creatures are even remotely influenced by religion in their sexual choices however. Any pressures religion places on sexuality are entirely artificial. I am no more an asexual because I am a Pagan, than I am Pagan because I am female.