Does President Bush have Brain Damage?

Seriously, I think maybe his years of drug and alcohol abuse, combined with the stress of the job, have left him with some serious impairments. We watched some videos of him speaking and interacting recently, and his inability to keep his train of thought, his inappropriate use of humor, and his sheer lack of attention, really make him seem so. Majutsu tells me there are some people who believe he is, in fact, mentally impaired, if not mentally ill.

I remember watching Reagan all those years ago and thinking the same thing, that the man was not all there. And it did turn out that he was suffering the beginnings of Alzheimer’s syndrome.

I would love to hear from people in the medical field on this one. Doesn’t Pres. Bush seem like he’s a bit off in the head? It’s embarrassing to have this man represent the country.

Apologies for my Unannounced Absence

I just wanted to apologize to anyone who might’ve missed my posting for the long silence.

To be quite honest, I had fallen into a deep depression. I’ve changed my medicine (about a week ago) and am feeling much better.

In the process of digging myself out (the medicine is like a shovel, but you still have to do the work), I’ve been working out in the garden. Last year it was really neglected (I was just as depressed, but it was completely untreated), but this year I’ve done quite a bit more, and it’s just looking gorgeous. There’s still so much work to do, so I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be posting very often.

There have been some changes in our lives but I’m not ready to write about them yet. We’re all well, but we’re taking someone into to our family who really needs some love and support. It’s been quite a journey so far. I’m not sure where it’s going to lead. But I feel good about it.

Privacy and Responsibility

At another blog (which will remain nameless) some ego-ridden pundit who thinks using his middle initial gives him the moral high ground has decreed that my blog is somehow not valid because I choose to remain anonymous. Just like a religious person (he’s not religious, though he’s just as attached to his own ideas) he can’t accept that someone else’s choice, while different from his, could still be valid.

He reminds me of Tom Cruise dissing Brooke Shields for using antidepressants, looking ridiculous on his high horse (which looks an awful lot like a hobby horse from here — he fancies himself a writer, but I think he’s just a lawyer).

I wasn’t going to write about this, but I began to think I ought to. You see, his lack of understanding my perspective is, I’m afraid, too common. Despite the fact that one of his “authors” recently wrote about her rape, he seems to fail to recognize that things are a bit different for women in this world than they are for men.

I remember in my political science class in college (which I took before the iron curtain came down), my prof was trying to explain to us what “low-grade terror” was like, to help us understand what it was like for people living in the Soviet Union. He made a comparison to what women experience here, with the pervasive violence. We (if we’re smart) are always on the lookout for men hiding, waiting to jump out and grab us. My dad was a cop, and he taught me to check my backseat, to check under the car as I approached, all that sort of thing. He also taught me some tricks his green-beret Vietnam-vet friend had taught him. (I taught them just last night to my daughter, in fact — you know, how to gouge out eyeballs, that sort of thing.)

Men here don’t get what it’s like to live with low-grade terror. So no man is going to make me feel bad for keeping myself and my family safe by blogging anonymously.

I used to blog with my name, but nutty men became attached much more easily, and then I had the additional concern that, with my name, it wouldn’t be too hard to come find me. Not a nice thought, and it became too hard to feel free to speak authentically, to really say what I needed to say, without concern of hurting someone’s feelings.

Yes, I may hurt feelings when I write the way I feel free to do here. But sometimes hurt feelings are necessary for growth. No one ever died by having their faith questioned. But women die at the hands of mentally-ill men every day.

Reading around the blogosphere the other day I came across a young woman’s blog. She had her young, pretty, smiling face right on the front page, and used her name. She was a bit outspoken, like me, not afraid to say it like it is. And here’s the thing. One of her readers was leaving comments about what he wanted to do to her, and it was pretty horrid. (Necrophilia, anyone?) I don’t think she took the threat seriously, but she should have. There have been too many cases now of young women being found by some nutbar who’s formed some sick attachment online, and ending up dead.

It may seem cowardly to write anonymously, and sure, we don’t get the ego strokes of seeing our name up on the screen (I get enough of that, seeing mine in print), but I think more women should take their security more seriously.

And no man has any business decreeing what our choices should be.

Introducing Majutsu, My Husband

He posted this in a comment to my last post, but I thought this deserved to be read on its own:

You know what’s really funny? That this show ["The Lost Tomb of Jesus"] was widely watched and has generated a lot of curiosity and interest in jesus and his teachings. This interest has been generated in precisely those far removed from christ, such as atheists, the very nihilistic, those least reached in the last twenty or so years. If a christian cared about lost souls, they would approach this like follows, “It’s good to see you so excited about jesus the man. Don’t you wonder now what he taught and why so many base their life on his teachings? Why don’t you come to our church and talk about jesus and his life?” Oddly enough though, at a time when a couple hundred thousand to a million people, formerly very closed to god and christ, were opened up all at once and thirsting for knowledge about the teachings of jesus, how were they rewarded? By being reminded in the press and blogs that christians could give two shits about saving people. They want to condemn, to damn to eternal fire, the producer, the archaeologist, the network. . . They were reminded that christians want only to micro-control thought and other people’s lives. The proof is the opportunity for dialog that was lost — ignored. We may conclude from this that there is apparently no christian joy or close relationship with the divine to share. There really is only perpetual hatred and a false sense of self built on enjoying, with fantastic embellished imagery, the control and torment of others. Christianity is after the religion of the Roman Empire, the worship of jesus and the holy roman emperor in rome as divine. And the Romans were the Nazis of the ancient world. True to their heritage as cruel tyrants, the faithful christians walled themselves up, covering their eyes and ears, shrieking that their sole possession, their tattered rags of borrowed thoughts, was being dragged into the street, leaking out of the control of their balled little fists. Unfortunately for the christian, if there is a god, she sends rain down to the good and the evil. To wish your neighbor to be parched and dying of thirst every time it rains means that with every single drop that falls you again fail the ultimate test of faith, to be willing to be part of this one life, this being. This is the sort of sin that really matters, not violating undecipherable precepts of rotting books.

Ain’t that the truth.

Illuminati’s Plan

My husband tells me that the conspiracy theory goes like this:

After prepping the world with The Da Vinci Code, now they disclose these bodies. Next, they disclose that the bloodline never died out, and here he is, folks, the direct heir of Christ, and he’s gonna rule the world.

Of course, that would never work. If history has proven anything, it’s that neither intelligence nor nobility are necessarily inherited.

Sheepish Pope says “Sorry ‘Bout All That”

HA! As if. No, I think the Catholics are going to have the hardest time with this whole dead-Jesus thing. I said that creed over and over as a kid. It doesn’t hem and haw about the resurrection.

But it seems the protestants, or at least some of them, are being pretty flexible. My husband just came home from work, and guess what? He spoke with about ten Christians from a variety of sects and it seems that at their Wed. night sermons they were all told by their respective preachers about the discovery, and that it’s okay, that they never really believed in a physical resurrection, and they actually used the word “metaphor” (and while they were talking about things, they never said that evolution couldn’t be the process God used to make us), and they were suddenly curious about the difference between “agnostic” and “atheist,” and just what did he believe, anyway? (Just yesterday, in the course of patient management, he discovered from one of the counselors that he and I are known at the national level among televangelists to be “notorious atheists.”) He had really frank discussions, open-hearted, open-minded, and it seems a new day is dawning, at least in this town.

Of course I’m not saying he’s open-minded about theism. At some point you have to make up your mind, and we have. No, just open-minded about their ability to change and the possibility of the existence of a historical Jesus.

And I have to say that I’m really glad to suspect that he did exist (not that I think the events of the gospel are real…those are clearly ripped off from earlier myths…poetic license and all that).

When I was a girl I was in love with the man. My first holy communion was like a wedding. I was going to be a nun (until my hormones kicked in, that is). I wanted to be a saint. I’m not kidding.

And it wasn’t to get to heaven.

And it wasn’t about his alleged sacrifice (which is now being interpreted metaphorically as God having taken on the suffering of a human life, which, if you think about it, is much more painful than a quick crucifixion).

No. It was what he taught.

See, I was one of those kids who rescued bugs out of spider webs (I’m sure none of the spiders starved…I lived in Florida), painstakingly picking off the sticky bits of thread ’til the little thing could fly away. I hated suffering, other peoples’ even more than my own. I really hated injustice (still not fond of either). And I just couldn’t understand why people wouldn’t be nice to each other.

So the words of Jesus made me love him. (I’m lucky enough to have found a man just that kind.) I’m totally open to (and happy about) the possibility of once again honoring his name.

But I still do not believe that mind came before matter. One of his co-workers, when asked why she believes, even now, that there is a god, that mind was the source of matter and not vice-versa, responded that she just doesn’t WANT matter to have come first. But we know what I say about that sort of thing: wanting something does not make it so.

See, here’s the crux of the whole god/no-god thing. If you keep the god concept then you allow for magical thinking (it would be pretty magical for a non-corporeal mind to exist, outside of time, and create matter out of nothing, don’t you think?), like this thing in Jacksonville. Instead of working to erase the underlying problems that lead to crime, the city held a prayer rally.

And this sort of inaction goes on every day, everywhere, but nowhere so much and so often as here in America.

Worse, the god-concept poses the concept of god’s will, and the delusion that one could possibly know what that is. We are so easily misled by the ego or what’s even less conscious than that, our animal urges. How many people have died now at the hand of someone who imagined he was doing the will of god or allah? My husband himself saw a patient (unfortunately she didn’t accept treatment) who thought she was being tested by God (a real Abraham complex) and shot and killed her two grand-daughters.

When I say religion can be toxic, folks, I’m not kidding.

It’s also been very good medicine for some people, especially addicts.

But I don’t take my neighbor’s insulin, and I wouldn’t expect you to take my medicine.

Matter, for all we know, has always been here, expanding and contracting in an endless series of bangs and crunches. For all we know, each time consciousness arises given sufficient complexity. Or maybe this is the first time. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that we are here, we are free, and we are all suffering humans struggling to survive and cope and maybe even achieve some small measure of joy.

I know love helps a lot. Jesus taught me that. I forgot it for a while, and then my husband reminded me. (I’m pretty thrilled now that they might be friends again.)

I don’t know how long it’s going to take the rest of the world to achieve the sort of amiable acceptance my husband found at work today. I’m pretty sure most of my town at least will be following suit (they do seem to toe the line, so if this is the official story, well, cool). I’m pretty sure our lives might, in a sense, be getting better. I’ve felt somewhat like a hostage in my own home with the prevailing intolerance.

But my husband’s practice is going to be pretty busy, I think. He’s been trolling the blogosphere, taking the pulse, as it were. There are clearly a large number of fundamentalists who just can’t accept this. The level of hardheadedness and idiocy they’re displaying isn’t very heartening. Maybe they should go to church and hear what their pastors have to say about it.

Of course if they’re Pentecostal, they’ll insist the Devil planted those bones. He’s sure got a big collection, what with the dinosaurs and all.

Sex toys, the pursuit of happiness, and Christianofascism

Yesterday we got a plain brown box in the mail. We’d ordered some nifty toys before Valentine’s Day (they got here a day late). We sure had a lot of fun last night. I’m thinking tonight’s going to be fun, too.

But hubby comes home from work today, and tells me he heard something really interesting on the radio. Apparently Alabama passed a law that not only makes the sale of dildos and other genital-stimulating devices illegal, but even the possession. And there’s a potential sentence of 10 years in prison. For having a dildo. Jeebus.

Here’s a funny Mark Morford editorial about the whole business. Apparently sex toys are illegal in my state, too. So I’ve been breaking yet another law and I didn’t even know it.

This is outrageous. There’s absolutely no way they can justify this law except with religion.

I’m pretty sure that what I do with my own genitals is nobody’s business but my own. If that’s not part of my inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, I don’t know what is.

The Supremes (stacked as they are in the Christianofascists’ favor) say that they can’t deny a state the right to outlaw sexual acts, or before you know it states might make incest or pedophilia or rape legal. Right. What a crock.

First of all, as if.

Second of all, my using a dildo doesn’t involve anyone else. So how can it be compared to rape or incest or child molestation?

This is establishment of religious law, and it’s absolutely unconstitutional.

Sexism, Racism, Nationalism, Xenophobia, and the PTA

The objectification of women is just one example (albeit one of the worst) of the process of creating an Other which a person can then feel free to use, abuse, or simply hate. It’s for some reason part of human nature. Probably part of our Stone Age brain, evolved when tribes really did need to be wary of people outside of the tribe. But now it’s much less acceptable to hate people for being part of another “tribe” (read “race”). So it’s easier to make it about a person’s sex. I mean, there are some real differences between men and women, so it’s easy to justify the perception of otherness. But of course we’re all people. (The same regrettable process underlies the rampant hatred of homosexuals.)

In North America the native peoples, in their own languages, always referred to their own nation with a word that meant “The People.” (Of course, the names we’ve given the nations usually came from their enemies. “Navajo,” for example, is the Hopi word for “head basher,” because that’s how the Navajo killed the Hopi when they fought.) They recognized their own People-hood, but not that of outsiders.

Nationalism still seems to hold sway. The same sort of men who objectify women (and, in private, I’m sure, other races) have no trouble seeing the citizens of “enemy” nations (religions?) as less than human. One man littering Bloggernista’s blog with belligerent posts insists that we ought to be bombing Iran (he’s got a rooster as his avatar…you think he knows he’s a cock?). In case you’ve forgotten what bombing does to people, watch this video from Christmastime again, and please note two things: one, those Iraqi faces don’t look like evil terrorists to me; two, there’s grieving on plenty of American faces, too. (Do we really want to get involved in another war? Who in their right mind would say we ought to be bombing Iran?)

Of course terrorists have long been good at seeing enemy people as less than human. How else could they do what they do? But surely everyone knows that two wrongs do NOT make a right. An Israeli leader whose name I forget once said to the Palestinian terrorists, “I don’t hate you for what you’ve done to us. I hate you for what you’ve made us become.” I don’t want America to become (though I fear it’s too late) monstrous. I don’t want to be a bully on the global stage. I don’t know how to make our leaders understand that it breaks my heart (and makes me really angry) to have my tax-dollars spent to kill innocent people, or even to deny them their liberty. Yes, we do have a real enemy in the terrorists. But going around the globe bombing cities? How does this protect us? The only profit from this goes to the corporations that make the bombs and that rebuild afterward.

Sigh. Sometimes I get really sad for the world. It’s such an amazing place. And the role we play here could be one of responsible, loving community, community with our human and our non-human neighbors. I get juiced when I observe nature, when I share a cup of tea with a friend, when I stare into my husband’s eyes. But some people seem to get juiced when they watch planes drop bombs on our enemies, when they read headlines about atrocities, when they watch a flag wave over a pile of rubble. What has to happen to a boy to make a man turn out like that? That’s where we need to focus our attention, I think.

Before, dear reader, you imagine that I think this is only a male problem, let me freely acknowledge that there are some really messed up women, too. (Ann Coulter is a glaring example.) I’m a housewife with kids in elementary school, and I see women at school assemblies, and hear talk about them from those same friends over tea, who seem to thrive on conflict, though at a much smaller than national level. Same reason many marriages don’t make it. What makes someone feed on strife? Personally, it gives me indigestion.

The Objectification of Women and the Misogyny of the Abrahamic Religions

I was recently invited to participate again in a private online poetry workshop I used to frequent. The first poem I read there to offer critique dealt (beautifully, in that oblique way poetry can do) with the objectification of women, in this case, as sex objects. And it is a quandary for men (this was written by a man, from his perspective as a man lusting after a woman he recognizes is more than an object yet can’t help desiring), especially in this consumer culture where images of women are used to sell everything from shaving cream to cars. My family had actually had a conversation recently about this very thing, and we made some parallels with religion. My son, who’s been raised in this house to understand that women are (surprise!) human beings just like men, had trouble even understanding what we were talking about when we referred to the objectification of women, so we had to explain it to him. Because it’s not just about women as objects of sexual desire. A chauvinist will use a woman in lots of ways to stroke his ego, not just by screwing her. Sometimes he’ll boost himself up by belittling her, or by besting her, or simply by intimidating her. Of course there are some men who go even farther. Rape happens way too often, and too often goes unpunished.

The process of learning to view women as objects starts very young, when boys watch their fathers, when they watch TV, when they listen to the men around them. My son sees chauvinistic behavior already in his classmates. Some of them are downright misogynistic.

How do we change this as a society? It has to start at the family level. My husband made a parallel with religion. While our boy was still confused, not understanding how they could have such a skewed view of reality, his father reminded him that his classmates also believe that the Hebrew sky-god created the world and watches over them and gives a crap about how they do in school, or on the football field.

It’s hard to break out of a worldview that’s toxic and ingrained, but it’s worth the trouble. And speaking of parallels between the objectification of women and religion, it’s not surprising, since they’re somewhat related. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all misogynistic religions. They pin the blame for suffering and death on Eve’s alleged original sin, and so by proxy all women are evil. We watched recently a movie I’d asked for as a Christmas present. I had only seen it once before, at an art cinema in DC many years ago, when my husband was at the library studying for his boards, and I was walking home from work along M Street. It’s called Anchoress. It had been so surreal that I wasn’t sure if I’d even remembered it correctly, it was so like a dream. It deals with the clash of paganism, which exalts the act of procreation and the feminine role in it, and Christianity, which so doesn’t, in the Middle Ages. And it makes apparent the process by which men have blamed women (and the Devil) for the lust they feel (which some refuse to control) for eons.

All of this makes me think of the bad deal women get in Islamic cultures. I mean, we don’t have it easy anywhere. Might has made right for so long that women have gotten the short end of the stick in every culture. But these Islamic cultures really take the cake. Talk about objectifying women and girls. The only status they seem to have is as vessels for the honor of their fathers or husbands (or brothers, uncles, etc.). And when that honor is impugned, even just in rumor, murdering the woman is the response. Even when a girl is raped, she ends up murdered (because she had sex!) by her family. Of course this doesn’t happen every time. But even once is tragic and inane beyond words! And it happens a LOT. And many of the women in these cultures suffer Stockholm syndrome and so accept all this as the way it’s meant to be.

Recently I followed a link from my blogstats page to find a blog of someone who’d been reading mine. She’s a young Muslim woman in a western country now in love and co-habitating with a non-Muslim man. And she’s trying to figure out how to tell her parents that she loves him. My heart really goes out to her. I can only hope that her parents love her enough, the real her, not her as some sort of vessel of their honor, or upholder of tradition, but her, a real human being in love with another human being, to simply celebrate her happiness.

I can dream, can’t I?

No More Preaching, Thanks

I recently disengaged myself from a discussion when it became clear that at least one of the participants viewed the interaction as a debate (I’ll leave a discussion of the other for later…suffice to say it’s rather pointless to continue, for different reasons). And I’d recently done the same thing over at bloggernista’s blog with this homophobic nut-job who’s like a plague there, after it became clear that he was interested in the same thing.

The problem with debate is that the participants aren’t listening to their opponents’ points; they’re too busy trying to refute them.

As I said at the recently abandoned thread, I’m not blogging to get into debates. I’m blogging to vent my frustrations with the status quo, and in hopes of effecting some change on it by raising awareness of some things. The toxicity of religion is just one of them, but it’s certainly the one that gets the most opposition. I think we should look at why.

Religion is at the core of most people’s identity. When children ask each other about religion, they don’t say, “What religion do you observe?” or “What’s your spiritual practice?” They say, “What are you?” (What’s really horrible is that around here ADULTS will ask the same question of someone of mixed race.) And when people have the core of their identity challenged, they usually have a strong emotional response.

Having a conversation with someone in this condition usually doesn’t serve much point. They will make their arguments using all sorts of borrowed rhetoric, often citing bits of a book that I don’t consider any sort of authority, and then absolutely refuse to understand that they’re arguing with a diseased organ. Because religion IS a disease. It colors every aspect of one’s perception. And it’s pathological. It causes one to see oneself as incomplete without it. Preachers are no better than plastic surgeons who advertise in women’s magazines with air-brushed pictures of 18-year-old asses. It’s unethical to create your own market. People who actually offer something of value SEE a need and then fill it; they don’t create the need. Preachers convince you you need saving, just like those Egyptian priests with their stories of horrible monsters and demons in the afterlife that their costly Books of the Dead could save you from, then offer salvation with their hands outstretched for a donation.

And these preachers are crazy. Not only do a large number of them have substance-abuse issues, but sexual ones, as well. (Catholic priests aren’t the only ones, they just get more press cuz it’s a deeper pocket to sue.) And they spout their craziness to the sheeple in the pews. Right now there’s a big to-do about the seven-headed anti-Christ. Turns out Obama is the seventh head. (Hilary has been known to be one of the heads for a long time.) Sexist, racist, homophobes giving spiritual advice all across the nation. Egads. And the superstitious gullible fractured Christians lapping it up. Is it any wonder Bush was elected?

And that guy. Sheesh. A man clearly too stupid to hold the office he does who got there only on name recognition and because Americans fear intelligence. We really are on our way to hell in a hand-basket.

So here’s the deal. I don’t want to hear from anyone anymore who believes in an invisible being who created or runs the universe [about why I should entertain such a ridiculous belief]. In Buddhism they have an axiom, that there’s nothing to be gained from concourse with fools. Life’s too short, and I have a lot of work to do. If you make a post trying to argue the case for your imaginary friend, it will be deleted.