I could celebrate winter solstice. I do enjoy that it means that the days are getting longer again. Yet, i also know that it marks the beginning of winter for the rain (or snow) falls heaviest in January through March – here in the Northern hemisphere. I really celebrate the appearance of berries at the farmers’ market. That marks the end of winter. And i don’t like winter. It’s dark and cold. Yeah, yeah, time to cuddle up in front of the fire. I’d rather be outside in the warm spring sun!

This post sounds like a big complaint. In a way it is. I am just tired of holding it all in, of pretending that i like this season because everybody else claims they do (and many don’t really). I wonder what would happen if those of us who aren’t enjoying winter speak up and say so. I wonder what would happen if those of us who don’t celebrate holidays around this time would stop pretending. And i wonder what might emerge instead. Maybe there is a way of being during this season that honors all of this – after all no matter how much i don’t like the shorter days and the rain, they won’t go away! They might be easier to bear if i can say “i don’t like them and i still do something to enjoy life.” Let’s see what the something will be that emerges out of this authenticity.

Wall stressed that about 10% of the graduates of one of the major Catholic seminaries in the US have been convicted as pedophiles (sorry, I don’t recall the name of the seminary). 10%! As Wall rightly points out, if Yale had a similar disgusting track record, it would’ve been shut down! Yet, the Catholic church manages to survive. They’ve paid more than a billion dollars in fines and reparation. There are at least 100,000 victims who have come forward – this is an estimated 20% of the real number of victims. Yet, the Catholic church goes on. How can an institution not loose all its credibility when there is such an extent – both in numbers and in time – of a problem that is systematically covered up? Doyle even blames the very essence of the Catholic hierarchy for this. A priest is considered more valuable than a child, so it is logical to cover up for the priest rather than to protect the child. And if all sex is considered bad, as Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea explains, it is difficult to distinguish child sexual abuse from adult consensual sex because it’s all bad. The Catholic hierarchy had lost their moral compass – that how Frawley-O’Dea puts it. And after that, they still have moral credibility left? That seems more mysterious than the conversion of a cracker into a piece of flesh! How much has to happen before people will stop trusting sexual advice from people who have pledged not to have sex? How much has to happen before people will stop following moral doctrines from a deeply immoral hierarchy? Only if the priests lose their supposedly god-given power will they stop abusing it.

Of course, the best solution would be to do away with all those legal benefits that come with marriage and instead turn marriage into the symbolic institution that many people claim it is and stop discriminating based on marital status (or better yet based on conjugal status).

I consider it quite possible that physics cannot be based on the field concept, i.e., on continuous structures. In that case, nothing remains of my entire castle in the air, gravitation theory included, [and of] the rest of modern physics. (Albert Einstein, 1954)

Okay, never mind all that. I knew after the first few minutes that this random string of words would be nice-sounding and soothing nonsense interspersed with some good ideas. I decided to listen to the talk anyways because I figured I might learn something. And I did. What makes religions and their New Age incarnations so attractive became clear in an answer Mamas gave to a question about dealing with chronic pain. He said something along the lines that the first step in dealing with chronic pain is to realize that there is a cure out there somewhere and we just have to find it. Very interesting. The two key ingredients in this answer are: Hope and knowing.

It is frustrating to have chronic pain (or a chronic illness, as I do) and not knowing what you can do about it to cure it. The not knowing can feel very threatening and it is a lot easier to simply think that the answer is out there somewhere if I only look hard enough. Well, that answer might not be out there – accepting that would really be the simplest solution because then we can stop looking and stop focusing on the pain (or the illness). I don’t know what caused my hypothyroidism. Maybe it was the radiation that I was exposed to after Chernobyl. Probably not but it would be so much more satisfying to know what caused it rather than being in limbo. Yet, I have it that’s really all that matters (to me – if I were a scientist studying the thyroid, I’d want to dig into this). As soon as I accept that I just don’t know, I can move on instead of spending countless hours trying to find an answer that’s probably not out there anyways. Granted it might be easier to move on since I don’t have chronic pain reminding me of my condition but acceptance of not knowing what caused it or what can cure it is also important (ironically, despite several commentators’ claims that I didn’t know what I was talking about when I was critiquing the Second Noble Truth, I do agree that we can make our physical ailments worse by remaining attached to being pain-free, having a healthy thyroid, or whatever. That attachment can certainly make the pain worse. But there still is physical pain – it’s not all in our attachments… But I digress). The same is true with emotional or psychological pain. After my divorce, I was torturing myself with the question “why the heck did I marry that guy?” It took me years to realize that it’s okay not to know the answer. Sure, I had some ideas but nothing that felt like The Truth. And that was totally okay. I could simply accept that I didn’t know and move on. Similarly with death: Why did my grandmothers die when they did? Why did my friend die when she did? I have no idea! They just did. End of story. That doesn’t make loosing them any easier but at least I don’t spend time trying to figure out why god allowed it (see Act Two for someone who was desperate for an answer).

I have a hard time understanding why this not knowing is so scary but it must be. Religions and spirituality seems to revolve around answering this by replacing the not knowing with their answers: It’s because it was god’s will; or because we’re all sinners; or because of karma. Now we know. Or at least think we do. Somehow believing a lie is easier than facing the truth of not knowing. Things happen for no reason. Tough. Now move on with your life. (I guess this is why atheists are accused of being cold. But to me, it’s much more honest than to come up with some sort of convoluted answer that – ultimately – is a lie. Lying seems cold to me, especially when that lying is rather profitable).

The other piece is the hope part. Mamas talked about how we can clean the universe by purifying our hearts. Uhm, no, not really. It’s not going to hurt much if we purify our hearts but that’s not going to do anything to pollution. Changing the way we live will but we don’t know exactly how; nor do we know that changes we make really will have an effect, though we have some good reasons to believe they will but no certainty. But in the religion/spirituality world, it is clear: We can save the world if we just pray or meditate properly. Maybe this is just the flip side of the not knowing coin because hope is really a way to push away the not knowing. I could pretend as if recycling makes a difference. I suspect it does but I am not certain. But I can act as if it does.

There were times during Mamas talk when I was wondering why the extra step toward god/consciousness was necessary. We’re all interconnected (through evolution, not through fields, as he seems to be claiming – sorry, I got lost sometimes). That doesn’t require any god or consciousness to be true. But this doesn’t answer the big why: Why did this all happen? Who knows! There are hypotheses out there but ultimately, we really don’t know (at least not yet). So what? Putting a sky daddy on top of it all is only necessary if we have to have answers; if we cannot live with not knowing; if we need certainty.

If you look only at the religiously unaffiliated, the percentage of warming by human activity folks increase to 58%, or 77% of those who think there’s global warming. Looking at the chart, clearly religion has an influence on temperature perception and attributed cause. The more religiously conservative, the less likely a person is to notice the warming and attribute it to human activity. Religious influence is endangering our life support system in (at least) two ways: Ignoring the problem of climate disruption (if you think that it’s either not happening or we’re not the biggest contributor, you’re not going to do anything about it) and multiplying fruitfully without regard to overpopulation (the more people there are on the planet, the more consumption happens, contributing more CO2 to the atmosphere).

Some of her points that especially resonated with me:

In fact, what seems to be a huge step forward for lesbian and gay people, will, when achieved, extend the reach of state control over relationships. It will privilege those who are coupled over those who are single or otherwise connected. It will shore up the nuclear family model despite the fact that people live in many other relational constellations. However, if same-sex marriage is prohibited, as the 11 state referenda lost in the last election year would have it, a significant percentage of the population will continue to lose out on the 1,138 federal rights that marriage conveys. This is a classic “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.
[...]
Progressive people, and especially progressive religious people, must do better if relational justice for all—and not just more rights for a few—is to result. [...] By my lights, [my partner, my daughter, and I] are simply three people who deserve all of the rights of citizenship, but no more than my single cousin, my widowed neighbor or my friends who belong to religious congregations. Connecting rights to marriage is, in my view, an outmoded approach to the common good.
[...]
It is simply ethically intuitive to extend such privileges to same-sex couples who, by marrying, take on the various responsibilities that heterosexual couples claim justify their privilege. But what remains to be explained is why being coupled, especially without children, should result in any economic advantage. Rather, it seems fair that everyone should be able to designate survivors for purposes of inheritance, or no one should; everyone ought to be able to choose with whom they will jointly file taxes, or no one should.

Hunt argues that there are three problems with marriage that show the obvious that “the laws are written to favor a certain two-by-two lifestyle that is simply a fiction” and make marriage an undesirable long-term justice goal:

1. “[M]arriage is at best a temporary state of affairs.”
2. Marriage perpetuates “the fiction that happiness and relational goodness only come in matched pairs,” a model that does not suit everybody.
3. Marriage has created a strange alliance between religion and state where religious institutions officiate on state business.

Hunt stresses that she supports same-sex marriage – at one point, arguing that everybody should have the right to be wrong. However, she ends her article with a call to the current leaders of religious traditions “to put a wholesale reexamination of marriage on the agenda, leaving aside the same-sex distraction in order to think anew about how we envision a just society.”