1000th post at Ship of Fools

Nearly three years ago I was led to the forums at Ship of Fools (SoF) by Kevin Iga (kiga) and ChastMastr at the forums of an online Pagan comic, Oh My Gods. I have posted more at SoF more than I have at any other fora, and today I hit a milestone of 1000 posts.

I feel, if anything, I am less Christian than when I start posting at the predominantly Christian SoF. I'm still actively serving at St. John's Presbyterian in Berkeley, trying to insure that our congregation survives its next hundred years even as its first hundred years come to a close. But SoF has made me much more aware how few Christians would consider me a Christian, and, further, how very little I care that they would do so.

In the past three years I have served on the Pastor Nominating Committee for St. Johns and, subsequently, as an Elder and the Treasurer. But, at the same time, I helped start the legally incorporated church for the Third Road where I serve as Treasurer as well. And I just completed an article on Pagan ethics which will appear in issue #13 of the Feri zine, WitchEye.

I do not understand the need for any myth to be historical fact, but it is clear that Christianity percieves itself as essentially different from Pagan religions in its insistence that at least some of its myths are literally true. Certainly, there are large sections of Christianity which now accept that some of its myths like the seven days of creation and the flood are not historical fact, but the vast majority insist that at least three myths must be true for Christianity to be Christianity: there is one and only one God, that God incorporated exactly once in the human form of Jesus, and that Jesus rose physically from the dead in a way that is fundamentally different from medical recussitation.

My faith subsumes Christianity in ways in which Trinitarian Christianity will most likely never be comfortable. I believe in one God which manifests through myriads of beings some of which are so wise and powerful relative to we humans that they can be justifiably called Gods. I believe that the Goddess did incarnate as Jesus, but that She can and does incarnate to a lesser or greater extent through all sentient beings. I believe that Jesus did defeat the powers of death and sin, and that the physical ressurection may or may not have happened, but that the historical truth of Jesus' physical recussitation is irrelevant in comparison to the spiritual Ressurection for all sentient beings which transcends the bounds of time and space.

I can understand the historical necessity for Christian to have clung to these myths, but I do not see the need to cling to them any longer particluarly since parts of what are attached to the Christian mythos are obviously evil and wrong. Women are spiritual equals to men and equally adept as preistesses. Gays are equally capable of commitment to God and to their relationships before God as those who aren't gay. The Bible is not a good science textbook.

And so I wait patiently for Christianity to grow up. It won't completely in my lifetime, and so I work towards the religion which augment it if not supplent in the next millenium. And I shall continue to participate at SoF in order to abet that process.

Dr. Pandora Love

...Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love my Pandora Shame

It's pretty much inevitable. You'll build a Pandora station, and out will come this song that you really like and you've never heard it before and so you click over to the pandora page and ... oh, my, god: Cyndi Lauper ?!? How will I ever live with the shame?

I'm being harsh on Ms. Lauper. I really don't know her oevre other than her hits of two decades ago. It's just that a cut of her's is an example of the kind of personal issue that Pandora makes you confront. Are you going to let what you know or don't know about a particular band color your opinion of a particular track?

I've had to train myself not to immediate reject a track just because it's by someone, gasp, popular (or who, at least has been popular). It's hard to resist that condidtioning and just admit that you like a track.

Of course, it'll take a bit more for me to buy an album by a popular artist I did not "discover" before they were popular. However, I'm saying right now that if I hear two tracks that I like on the same album by someone like Ms. Lauper, then I'll buy that album.

Speaking of Pandora-based purchasing I bought my first two cd's this week based on Pandora supplied music. That's $20 so far that Pandora has won for the industry from me. I'll put up a post about them when I've worked my way through them.