Changing Places

Golden Compass trailer here. Looks amazing. Box set of the trilogy here. These books were one of the things that brought me through the long dark night of my soul. Lyra’s strength and courage would be inspirational to any young girl.

The sum of all fears: organized religion

With any luck, and if “The Golden Compass” turns out to be even half as wondrous as the book, it will hopefully fuel a surge in sales of the “HDM” trilogy in America and, perhaps, inspire a new literary awakening among young readers, darker and more complex and even (gasp) slightly sexual, far beyond the clever but innocuous magic of Harry Potter – which, by the way, had its share of religious bonk-jobs calling for its destruction, as wizardry is clearly the dominion of the devil. We all know what a huge drop in sales that protest caused.

But there is another note of good news from this tale of fear and whining and outcry, and it takes the form of another delightful rule upon which your soul can happily rely, as well as a heartfelt lesson for trembling ultraconservative sects everywhere.

It’s this: If your ancient, authoritarian, immutable belief system is threatened by a handful of popular novels, if your ostensibly all-powerful, unyielding creed is rendered meek and defenseless when faced with the story of a fiery, rebellious young girl who effortlessly rejects your stiff misogynistic religiosity in favor of adventure, love, sex, the ability to discover and define her soul on her own terms, well, it might be time for you to roll it all up and shut it all down and crawl back home, and let the divine breathe and move and dance as she sees fit.

And the Pullman books are wondrous — I loved reading them. Perfect for that young adult reader looking to have the courage to follow her soul.

And I have a tiger daemon

Pharyngula: The whole book summarized in 29 words

What kind of atheist are you?

What kind of atheist are you?

You scored as a Spiritual Atheist

Ah! Some of the coolest people in the world are Spiritual Atheists. Most of them weren’t brought up in an organized religion and have very little baggage. They concentrate on making the world a better place and know that death is just another part of life. What comes after, comes after.

Spiritual Atheist 67%

Scientific Atheist 67%

Apathetic Atheist 58%

Agnostic 50%

Angry Atheist 42%

Theist 42%

Militant Atheist 25%

Via Pharyngula.

This song had me LOL-ing….

Jonathan Coulton celebrates May 1st (NSFW)

woke up this morning
I had a scone and a large house blend
And then a little conversation with my squirrel and chipmunk friends
I said I’m sick and tired of winter
And I wish that it was spring
And then a little fellow named Robin Redbreast
Began to sing

And he sang
Ooh ooh child, what’d you think the cold winter’s gonna last forever?
Ooh ooh child, now’s the time for all the people to get together
Outside…

Wow, who knew angels were trademarked? Guess the Mormons are getting as bad as the Scientologists.

No religion is not a joke, but any religion worth believing in ought to be able to take a joke. If your faith isn’t strong enough to overcome a little fun, what’s the point of it?

Salt Lake Tribune – Angel Moroni gone, but new coffeehouse T-shirt still resolutely ‘irreverent’

Coffee makers here have turned potential trademark infringement into grounds for inspiration.
    In March, the LDS Church asked Just Add Coffee to stop selling a popular T-shirt that featured coffee being funneled into Angel Moroni’s iconic trumpet. (The angel tops most LDS temples and figures prominently in the religion’s scriptures.)
    The Taylorsville store owners complied, but the spat spurred a new design, with the angel removed, that might prove even more marketable.
    It shows a giant hand from the sky pouring the java – which the LDS Church urges its members to abstain from drinking – into a disembodied trumpet.
    The caption: “The Lord giveth, and a church taketh away.”

Via Boing Boing.

My neighbor is having his big Italian stone pine removed from his yard today – this tree is huge, over 70 feet tall.

I hate my neighbor right now. I told him they should have just taken down the house, instead. I suppose I’ll get over it, eventually, but not today.

I have watched the moon rise through this tree, watched the stars and planets above its branches, and often sat in my front yard admiring its beauty, watching the hawks settle into its branches.

Oh well. Goodbye to a beautiful tree friend of mine for over 20 years. Sigh. Tears…

No real surprises for me to be Orpheus. I’ve done the whole logic and Plato thing before, been the Oracle for a while, too. Time to play, now.

Take the test here.

Via Watermark.

OKCupid! The Greek Mythology Personality Test

Orpheus

33% Extroversion, 66% Intuition, 100% Emotiveness, 76% Perceptiveness
You are an artist, an aesthete, a sensitive, and someone who has never really let go of that childlike innocence. To you, all of life has a sense of wonder in it, and the story of Orpheus was written about someone just like you.

When the Argo passed the island of the Sirens, Orpheus played a song more beautiful than the Sirens to prevent the crew from becoming enticed. When his wife died, he ventured into the underworld to charm Hades but, in his naivete, he looked back becoming trapped there.

You can capture your unique world view and relate it to others with the skill of a master storyteller. Your sensitivity and creativity make you a treasure to the human race, but your thin-skinned nature and innocence can cause you a lot of disenchantment and pain. What’s doubly unfortunate is that, if you try to lose those traits, you never will, and everyone will be able to tell that you’re putting up an artificial shell to prevent yourself from being hurt.

Famous people like you: Hemingway, Shakespeare, Mr. Rogers, Melville, Nick Tosches
Stay clear of: Icarus, Hermes, Atlas

How wonderful that something this great can come from the massive liberal funfest that is Burning Man.

Let’s see the rich religious righties ever do something this cool.

THE BURNING MAN FESTIVAL / Hot spots at the burn
– Best camp: Camp Katrina

Katrina victims who were at Burning Man when the hurricane hit last summer and the burners who helped them recover built a museum-style display of their relief mission to the Gulf Coast.

Through pictures, words, video and artifacts — water-logged bedposts, chipped picture frames and other items collected in Katrina’s wake — burners learned the story of how artists responded to the devastation.

Using $40,000 and 7 tons of food collected at Burning Man 2005, a crew from Burners Without Borders and Burning Man Temple Builders flew to Biloxi, Miss., and rebuilt a Vietnamese Buddhist temple with donated construction equipment. In Pearlington, Miss., they rebuilt a home for a 71-year-old man who was left with nothing but the Harley-Davidson motorcycle he’d used to escape the rising waters.

By the end of their six-month stint, burners had provided $1 million worth of free demolition to homeowners, knocked down 60 homes, recycled tons of lumber into new homes, and fetched an untold number of runaway boats and sheds.

“It was a life-altering experience,” said Scott Stephenson of Jackson Hole, Wyo. “We shared gumbo with shrimpers whose homes we put back on their foundations.”

The work inspired Camp Katrina to try something new this year at Burning Man. They asked burners to skip the tradition of burning the wood from their camps and structures at the end of the event, and instead bring it to their camp so they could recycle it into low-income housing in Reno.

Chris Doyle Presents – Reasonably Clever! Wasting your workday since 1995
Guided Tour

Welcome to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster! Let me show you around the place…

We’ll start off on the East side of the building – imagine that we’re walking up from the parking lot – which we would be, if Chris hadn’t run out of room and base plates. The first thing you’ll notice is the large “Touched By His Noodly Appendage” mural on the wall of the church. Other than a few blue flowers in the corner there isn’t much landscaping to get in the way of our enjoyment of this bit of artwork.

OK, you’ll probably really need to be a geek to get this one, or a Discworld fan. BUt then, those terms are redundant. Anyway, I saw this pile of turtles at ComiCon, and had to take a picture of them.

My new baby from ComiCon – isn’t he the cutest lil’ thing?!

Valentino Cthulhu…

Update:

Well, that was weird. I guess posting Cthulhu pictures messes up blogs. That figures. Anyway, we’ll try this again and see if it works a bit better…

Yup, seems all better now. I think the database was just messed up last night. Or, it was just the strange power of Cthulhu in action.

Mideast up in flames
China drowning in monsoons
America broiling

This is one of those weeks I know I’m going to hate even thinking about the news… with our California wildfires and 100 degree temperatures, most of us here are starting the week hot, tired, and irritable (plus I’ve been PMSing like crazy).

At least Comicon is this week, offering some relief. My sister-in-law and her husband will be here, so it should be fun. The kids always really enjoy the convention, and we’ll be seeing the symphony performing music from Lord of the Rings.

We had a wonderful party this weekend with our terrific group of friends, and spent tonight watching some Japanese videos with a couple of them and learning Japanese. We’re into our third session of Japanese classes and finally getting to the point where it’s making more sense and coming a little more easily – except now, we also have to learn the Chinese characters. It seems with any language there is always so much more to learn.

I feel there is nothing I can say to add any understanding at all to the world situation – it is such an insane mess this week. The attacks and escalation in the middle east – Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, and in Iraq, are nauseating and somewhat infuriating, really. Of course the U.S. is a great part of this huge problem, and does nothing to help resolve it. The G8 statement was a complete joke. And our president can do nothing more than make jokes about eating pigs, infuriating both the Jews and Muslims at once – nice job there!

Honestly, it all seems so surreal sometimes, like a really bad Tom Clancy novel. “Beyond credibility”, as he himself said about 9-11. And just when you think it can’t get worse, it does. Every. Damn. Week. Until Bush and his assinine kind are gone, this is what we get.

So hey, let’s enjoy my cute little kitty, Selena, and her affection for my sandals. At least the simple pleasures are still available to us. And let’s enjoy our friends, our family, and the good things in life that can still entertain us and help us to cope. Because it’s all so crazy, and all so out of our control. And hope, pray, meditate, chant, or whatever it is you do to help bring any tiny bit of peace to this world. Take care of yourself, and let’s take care of each other.

Dona nobis pacem – Grant us peace….

You are one of life’s enjoyers, determined to get the most you can out of your brief spell on Earth. Probably what first attracted you to atheism was the prospect of liberation from the Ten Commandments, few of which are compatible with a life of pleasure. You play hard and work quite hard, have a strong sense of loyalty and a relaxed but consistent approach to your philosophy.

You can’t see the point of abstract principles and probably wouldn’t lay down your life for a concept though you might for a friend. Something of a champagne humanist, you admire George Bernard Shaw for his cheerful agnosticism and pursuit of sensual rewards and your Hollywood hero is Marlon Brando, who was beautiful, irascible and aimed for goodness in his own tortured way.

Sometimes you might be tempted to allow your own pleasures to take precedence over your ethics. But everyone is striving for that elusive balance between the good and the happy life. You’d probably open another bottle and say there’s no contest.

What kind of humanist are you?

I met Santa Monica’s psychic cats last night and got my fortune told by Wizard, a very cute brown tabby. Wizard says:

Without a doubt, you send such magnetizing waves that everybody admires you. Make use of that. Act in the direction you want, dare, don’t be afraid., don’t worry about financial decision.

Thy cycle of frustration (in work and health) is finished. Many of your problems are behind you. Have no regrets. Be demanding, persistent, reach out and grab it. Very truly yours,

Psychic cat, Los Angeles

Wizard also added a charm:

Don’t be confused, and a lot of merriment you’ll get instead. Don’t be despondent; gladness will come to your fine personality. Creative ideas will come to you more easily now.

Psychic cat, Los Angeles

Heh. Not bad, for a cat! If you run across the psychic cat, be sure to have your fortune told. He and his partner cat, Mystic, are very sweet!

Ten rules for atheists

Have no gods.
Don’t worship stuff.
Be polite.
Take a day off once in a while.
Be nice to folks.
Don’t kill people.
Don’t fool around on your significant other.
Don’t steal stuff.
Don’t lie about stuff.
Don’t be greedy.

Woot!

Pharyngula

Via Freethought Weekly, it’s Kissing Hank’s Ass: The Movie.

This is how the human being can change:

there’s a worm addicted to eating grape leaves.

Suddenly,
he wakes up, call it grace, whatever,

something wakes him, and he’s no longer just a worm.

He’s
the entire vineyard,

and the orchard too,

the fruit, the trunks, a growing wisdom and joy

that doesn’t need to devour.

Change from Within — Jalaluddin Rumi

Pharyngula
The sacred pieties of these “God-centered Jews and Christians” reduce the meaning of a human life to equivalence with a single cell or a mindless near-corpse, and then they bestow on it only that portion of grandeur they can borrow from an imaginary super-being. His irony is a fabrication; humanists don’t regard human life as worthless. Rather, one life in the here and now is all we get, and it is infinitely valuable. Furthermore, we don’t need to boost our fragile self-esteem by deprecating everything else—dolphins are great and beautiful creatures, as are spiders and sea anemones and scrub pines and E. coli. The universe is a wonderful place, huge and complex and diverse and largely independent of my existence, and I am greatly privileged to be one small but precious voice singing in a mighty cosmic choir. Embracing the majesty of existence does not make me a smaller man.

Amen!

Fish Symbols

The pre-Christian history of the fish symbol:

The fish symbol has been used for millennia worldwide as a religious symbol associated with the Pagan Great Mother Goddess. It is the outline of her vulva. The fish symbol was often drawn by overlapping two very thin crescent moons. One represented the crescent shortly before the new moon; the other shortly after, when the moon is just visible. The Moon is the heavenly body that has long been associated with the Goddess, just as the sun is a symbol of the God.

The link between the Goddess and fish was found in various areas of the ancient world:

In China, Great Mother Kwan-yin often portrayed in the shape of a fish.

In India, the Goddess Kali was called the “fish-eyed one”.

In Egypt, Isis was called the Great Fish of the Abyss.

In Greece the Greek word “delphos” meant both fish and womb. The word is derived from the location of the ancient Oracle at Delphi who worshipped the original fish goddess, Themis. The later fish Goddess, Aphrodite Salacia, was worshipped by her followers on her sacred day, Friday. They ate fish and engaging in orgies. From her name comes the English word “salacious” which means lustful or obscene. Also from her name comes the name of our fourth month, April. In later centuries, the Christian church absorbed this tradition by requiring the faithful to eat fish on Friday – a tradition that was only recently abandoned.

In ancient Rome Friday is called “dies veneris” or Day of Venus, the Pagan Goddess of Love.

Throughout the Mediterranean, mystery religions used fish, wine and bread for their sacramental meal.

In Scandinavia, the Great Goddess was named Freya; fish were eaten in her honor. The 6th day of the week was named “Friday” after her.

In the Middle East, the Great Goddess of Ephesus was portrayed as a woman with a fish amulet over her genitals.

The fish symbol “was so revered throughout the Roman empire that Christian authorities insisted on taking it over, with extensive revision of myths to deny its earlier female-genital meanings…Sometimes the Christ child was portrayed inside the vesica, which was superimposed on Mary’s belly and obviously represented her womb, just as in the ancient symbolism of the Goddess.” Another author writes: “The fish headdress of the priests of Ea [a Sumero-Semitic God] later became the miter of the Christian bishops.”

The symbol itself, the eating of fish on Friday and the association of the symbol with deity were all taken over by the early Church from Pagan sources. Only the sexual component was deleted.