Archive for October 15, 2006

Follow the money

October 15, 2006 / / 3 comments

Here’s a thing. When the Bush administration starves our school districts of cash and then makes them waste what they do have on NCLB, wingnuts are empowered to destroy school systems that don’t have the funds to fight back. “Lawsuit” is a very scary word when there’s no money in the till.

I was thinking about the art teacher in Texas. The news report say she was fired based on one parent complaining. One. After multiple approvals and winning awards and blah blah. One. Which reads to me like fear of lawsuit, and that implies things about the pressures that the school district is under and how much money it has to fight if it chose to fight.

A big chunk of the wingnut agenda has been to take over the schools. Weaken the schools by starving them of money, and they’re easier to take over. Maybe it’s just that simple.

(No cross-post left behind.)

Absence of right answers

October 15, 2006 / / 3 comments

(The following is some writing I did today for a forthcoming book. I thought it was worth sharing.)

In order to be Pagan, you have to feel comfortable with an absence of right answers. There are many right ways to do things, and there are definitely wrong way to do things, but if you are convinced that there’s one truth that overrides all other truths, and that anything that contradicts truth must be false, well, Paganism is probably not for you.

Pagans have to be comfortable with many gods, many ways, many possibilities. We have to be able to know that Wicca is right, and Asatru is also right, and Christianity is also right (although there are definitely some Christians who are dead wrong, especially when they talk about killing Pagans). We have to be able to say that Thor is the thunder god, and Chango is the thunder god, and not be freaked out by two “the”s that seem to contradict each other.

Some Pagans believe that “all paths lead to the same place.” I don’t happen to feel that way. Many paths lead to very similar places, but I don’t care to mush them all together. What’s necessary to be Pagan is simply to believe that there is more than one true path.

 
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