He denies it ...

 but I know this is what Damien does in his office at the university much of the day!

Me, too!

Which is to say -- Every day I think I can't get any more foolish, and every day I prove that I have underestimated my capacity once again.

Um, where do I buy one of these?

Some things cannot be tolerated!

You may recall Tea Party fave Christine O'Donnell said she had dabbled in witchcraft. My niece Rowan, as I have mentioned before, has joined a Wiccan sorority. I doubt it will do her much harm in the long run.

On the other hand, should she join the Tea Party, who knows what will happen if she confesses to having dated a liberal while in high school?

Spot and Rover have started to practice zazen

And no, Damien and I cannot tell the difference.

Time lag

Recently I have been clicking the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of all sorts of emails. Most of these  simply arrive unsolicited. A handful are from groups that I once followed and perhaps contributed to, but I no longer want to hear from them and have no intention of making further donations.

One thing I notice is that many of these tell me that it may take up to ten days for them to get me off their list.

And yet it takes a nanosecond for them to take my credit card money.

Huh. Funny how that works.

The vast majority of these sites tell me I am unsubscribed and that is that. So obviously the technology for instant deletion exists.

I have been warned, BTW, not to hit Unsubscribe indiscriminately. Some sites use that as a lure to get more info.

Just sayin'.

And a tip of the hat to Idle Eyes and a Dormy

 Click on any image to enlarge for easier reading.

Source: Atheist Moments of  Zen

It;s funny because it's true!

American politics

If Stupidity got us into this mess, why can't it get us out of it?
~ Will Rogers

Oh, my!

From here to there

I woke up this morning thinking about a scheduling error I made Friday at work. Actually, I have to check on it when I get to the office tomorrow, because I may not have made the error. I am pretty sure I did, however.

My spontaneous reaction to this realization was that this was a huge mistake that will be very difficult to correct. You know, the fate of nations hangs in the balance, that sort of thing.

Well, not so much. It may entail a telephone call and a couple of letters. And a few minutes of awkwardness as I come clean about the mistake and figure out what the boss -- who is really not my "boss" in the usual sense, since I donate my services -- wants done about it.

This little episode reminds me of a trap that I sometimes fall into. I act as if, when I come to a fork in the road and start off along one path, I can no longer change directions. I begin to think in terms of "I need to get to B, and you can't get there from here!"

Whereas, in fact, I can get most anywhere from here, even if it sometimes means going somewhere else first. The way forward does not consist of a superhighway with extremely limited access. It is more like a rustic country road, branching off here and there. merging, part of a large network. There is probably a shortest route, a more scenic route and so on. But there are actually lots of ways to get where I want to go. Including stepping off the road and wandering through the woods.

Laws

Even before I took up the study of law, I was aware that people have quite varying views about how law is supposed to work. By which I do not mean people necessarily think that specific laws are different. It is more a meta thing, or perhaps since meta is an "after", it is more a prior thing.

One might think of how different people think the Constitution of the United States, for example, should be interpreted and applied. Since even members of the Supreme Court, the highest judges of the land in this matter, can and do disagree, it is no surprise that the rest of us get tangled up.

I heard a joke once upon a whenever about how different peoples and cultures view the law:

For the French, everything is permitted except what is expressly forbidden by law.
For the Germans, everything is prohibited except what is expressly permitted by law.
For the Russians, everything is forbidden even if it is permitted.
For the Italians, everything is permitted, especially if it is prohibited.

Amusing, but a more important distinction lies in those who consider law to designate an ideal toward which one aims -- married people ought not get divorced [but many will] -- and those who consider law a minimum which must be met -- married people cannot be allowed to get divorced [and none of them can.] I chose divorce because, despite its long history as something theoretically strictly prohibited and practically rarely allowed in western Christian culture, that has shifted radically even within my own lifetime.

Surely few people would say that divorce is a desirable outcome for couples getting married -- be they same sex couples or heterosexual couples -- but almost none can deny that divorce is a likely outcome or expect that the legal system should place divorce beyond the reach of those who desire it. Having begun my own work in the law as a legal assistant in a family law office that mainly dealt in divorce, I know that the legal system does not make it easy to get a divorce, although it is a breeze compared to what it once was.

My Talmudic studies, muddied though they are in memory today, made me realize that my own religious tradition, which is frequently appealed to by reactionary politicians, has a nuanced vision of how to apply the law. It is amazing to me how few of those who seem determined to make the Bible (their Bible, that is, which is not my Bible) the law of this land have so little knowledge of how the people who first received that law (or conceived it) have interpreted it through the millennia.

Jewitchery

Damien has been teaching a course of non-traditional or non-mainstream religions and other belief systems. Because my niece Rowan, who attends Philip Peabody Horton University where Damien teaches, has joined a Wiccan sorority, I have paid more attention to the Wiccan part of his researches.

I admit I don't always pay that much attention when he is babbling ... talking about the things that interest him and that he feels compelled to share with any and all. But among the things he happened to mention recently was one that did catch my attention because of my own background: the notion of Jewitchery.

Since I thought that Wicca was basically a [reconstructed] paganism, I was surprised to hear that Jews might be involved. Seems like it would be an oil and water sort of thing. But I looked it up and apparently I was mistaken. Of course, Wicca turns out to be a very fluid thing and able to accomodate all sorts of people and beliefs. Not, I must say, the Judaism of my upbringing.

Jewitchery [according to The Witchpedia] is the practice of Witchcraft by a Jewish person or the integration of Wiccan or another Witchcraft spirituality with Jewish culture. A Jewitch may consider Judaism to be their religion and Witchcraft a non-religious activity, or he or she may identify as a Jew in a cultural context only or may combine the two spiritualities into a synchretic whole.

Jewitchery may involve the practice or witchcraft using traditional Jewish symbols, such as the menorah and the kiddush cup or it may incorporate aspects of the Kabbalah, or it may not, depending on the individual. A Jewitch who identifies with Wicca may see the Jewish view of the male and female aspects of the Divine in the Wiccan ideal of the God and Goddess or they may take a more feminist view and focus on the shekhinah exclusively.

For what it's worth, Damien pointed out to me that there are also Christian Wiccans, Christian Druids, Christian Pagans -- or at least people who self-identify as such. Since my experience of Christian groups is that they are anything but fluid, I am not sure that traditional and mainstream Christians would agree that Wiccans or Druids or Pagans can be Christian. But then, from what I can tell, many Christians don't think that other Christians are necessarily Christians either.

Whatever. "An ye harm none, do what ye will." That is a Wiccan principle, Damien tells me.

Interesting. Maybe I am more Jewitch than I thought.

Uhhh ... Now that's my kind of waterpark!

Words to live by

"If I’ve learned anything from the Dalai Lama by way of Richard Gere, it’s that suffering is a state of mind, like heterosexuality or the Midwest."

 ~ Jack McFarland