Computer plans for the kids

This is, after all, a parenting blog. I wanted to gather some notes while I was thinking of them.

Things are a bit in flux right now, but I've been thinking about the sorts of computer to get the kids when things settle down.

I have two kids. A male (4) and a female (7). The older has been using a Windows PC and has been enjoying the free software. She's also been extremely frustrated by how poorly it works. Her mother, however, wants something other than Linux. We're separating and this PC goes with her.

Finally, no more Windows machines in my house. But what to replace it with?

A Mac is cost prohibitive. The only reason she has a PC is because the whole thing -- with accessories -- cost under $100. (Local university surplus store.) She also has a Kindle Fire, which also cost under $100.

I have a choice to make. Another PC or go with a Raspberry Pi?

They both like games, so if it is a PC, I should at least look at a distro that makes that easy. Play-Linux is currently my favorite. If not that, I'd probably go with straight Debian or a Debian-derivative (which includes Ubuntu-derivatives).

The problem there, though, is that while it includes games, it may not include the sorts of games they want. The free Windows Store games set a really low standard for quality, though, so I'm not even sure that we need the power of a "real" desktop.

Which leads us to the Raspberry Pi.

The games she's used to playing are on the Kindle, mostly, or things that are on Android/iOS/Windows but she wishes they were on the Kindle. While BlueStacks allows folks to use Android apps on Windows and Mac systems, there isn't an easy solution for Linux. This is a negative for the Linux option, though the hope is that the native games could help offset the issue.

The thing is, though, if using a Raspberry Pi this may not be an issue. This is because Android is coming directly to the Raspberry Pi. Not available right this minute, okay, but I'm not looking for a solution right this minute. So the delay may align reasonably.

(If I were being impatient and wanted easy Android access earlier, I'd look for some sort of Android on a stick solution. These cost as much as a Pi and does less, though.)

There's a lot of popular options for the Raspberry Pi.

For NaNoWriMo (Young Writer's Program) with the kids, (the younger will be participating for the first time in 2016), we'd probably go with a general solution like Raspbian. This will also be the go-to operating system for allowing the kids to experiment with programming.

The thing is, though, that swapping out operating systems on a Pi is trivial and easy. The general purpose solution need not be the only solution.

We can get a selection of classic games by using RetroPie. Suddenly classic video games from my own youth become available.

So, one affordable device and three SD cards and you can have three distinct systems offering a wide range of games as well as all the traditional "general computing" options. The kids can experiment with programming, do their homework, play games both classic and modern, and...

If I want to do something with the systems, there's no risk of messing up the computers they need for homework. If we separate the "homework" general OS setup from the "playing games and experimenting" general OS setup, it becomes possible to pull access to the games without removing the needed computing functions... (This also removes the possibility of "but, I uninstalled LibreOffice to make room for this great new game.")

(And my personal uses for the systems may include things like OSMC for multimedia -- reducing the need for a standalone television -- or OpenMediaVault for a NAS -- reducing the need for a standalone NAS. These further drive down the total cost.)

And the core monitor and accessories? I should be able to get these at the same university surplus store that I would have gotten the PC. It might cost more than the Pi (and case), but it'll still be more affordable than the cheapest of the available HDMI-enabled televisions.

Brief overview of my spirituality

 A brief overview of my spirituality, lifted from a Facebook post (or two).

Religiously, I'm a Unitarian Universalist. That's the church I go to and best symbolizes what I'm teaching my kids. Spiritually, I'm a radical polytheist with humanist tendencies.

I believe in an infinite number of deities with an infinite number of forms and an infinite number of names. Do you want a deity that responds to the name "God" that hates pinball but loves trashy romance novels? I believe such a deity exists. Do you want one that hates all the same people you hate? That one's easy, too. (I caught an episode of "Toddlers and Tiaras" where a woman basically said she prayed until she found a God who wanted her toddler to compete. I totally believe such deities exist.) Who do you talk to when you pray? You talk to the deity that you know most clearly. A person full of rage will find plenty of deities full of rage, and plenty of those willing to be the deity they're looking for.

On a very core level, I don't believe humans are unique. This means, it isn't just humans that have spirits and deities, it is everything. The interaction between things in the form of systems and relationships also have spirits and deities. Perhaps that's the ecology of a small isolated valley. Perhaps that's your own circulatory system. Everything has a soul and deities from your individual cells through the complex interactions of your clan interacting with the environment or other clans. Of note, this means I believe that all spermatozoa and ova have individual souls (and deities) well before fertilization. I'm still pro-choice, however, because none of this is unique or special in any way. The individual grains of rice that go in to Rice Krispies have souls, too, just as Rice Krispie squares have souls. Do they cease having the souls of rice, once they become puffed, once they join together as a Rice Krispie treat, when a piece of puffed rice is cut when slicing individual squares? For me, that's a legitimate question.

And, I believe in things like past-life experiences without believing in even a separable soul, let alone a "real" past life. There's a notion that there is only One, and all of reality is just the One trying it understand itself. If everything is ultimately the same Oneness, then why would the ability to remember someone else's memories as if they were your own require actually owning that person's life? It's an implicit part of being an aspect of the One. I've also experienced a vision in dream that further elaborated upon how this is the case.

I don't believe in an "after" life, so much as I believe in multidimensional beings, parts of which transcend space and time. So our spiritual aspect can experience what we might consider an "afterlife" concurrent to our physical lives being all full of blood and poop. It goes one better, I believe that on a person's death, their reference for time becomes reset to the point of their birth. In effect, they are reincarnated to the same body. They're free to make other choices, but without knowing what happened previously, they rarely make different decisions. Then deja vu becomes a memory of a previous iteration seeping through. This has direct consequences for my views on depression-induced-suicide as well as terminal/assisted-suicide. In one case, pain can only be transcended by living, and in the other a return to a joyful childhood is nothing to spurn.

I have a simple concise reason for life, the universe and everything. It is universal and inescapable: To experience and to be experienced. If your life amounts to a repository of experiences for the universe, what sorts of experiences do you want to store? What do you cherish and cling to?

I firmly believe in a biological basis for what could be called the soul. (Technically, this makes the "soul" references previously states more accurately described as "spirit". Changing that language in myself to be more clear is still a challenge.) What is a person's soul? It is that which would still be like the person if the memories and experiences were stripped away. Two people with the same soul would be a lot alike, even if they lived in different places and times. It amounts to humans being "value engines", and the formula with which we assign value to things is our soul. I know my own formula, and it is simple enough that it could easily be encoded in my DNA, if not an expression of the DNA combined with developmental hormones.

More recently, and a bit more surprising for me, I've stumbled upon what could be a biological basis for the concept of original sin.

Some of these things are, for me, decades-old ideas that I've lived with and that have gradually permeated deeper and deeper in to my being. Even I didn't really believe some of them when I stumbled upon them. It was just a matter of, "Woah. This idea has merit, even if it is totally wrong, the fruit of it is good."

Early board gamers

It has been an on-going process to get C (now 3) to reasonably play board games.

Today I played the Ravensburger game "Rivers, Roads & Rails" with C and R (now 5).

C continues to have problems remembering to keep the game pieces together and not walking off and playing with them. At one point ze put pieces in a train.

Still, we are seeing progress. The last time I tried to play a game with C, ze ended up dumping the game on the floor. This time, while attention did wander, there wasn't any purposeful destruction.

We were playing by the official rules, but we limited it in terms of time. Once the time was up, we counted the pieces and the one with the fewest pieces won. This seemed to map cleanly to "the winner runs out of pieces first".

Two social media comments without context

Here are two comments I made to a friend's post somewhere.

I love other people because I can't not love them. It is a part of who I am at this stage of my life. It's more unconditional and less demanding. I love. Period.

Other people are either decent human beings or total jerks I should remove from my life. Love doesn't play a part in whether someone is a jerk or awesome, though.

Love is the easy part. It is like breathing. Of course, this view of things is directly contrary to how love is presented in popular Western culture. The Beatles have it dead wrong: Love is never all you need -- just as air alone is never all you need.

So... how about loving the person and seeing the potential in a person, but also remembering that neither that love nor that potential may mean anything to the other person -- and that is still totally fine. Sometimes all we can do is plant the seeds of change.

As I grow older, I find I care less and less about potential. I don't care if anyone sees the potential in a person. Potential is ultimately meaningless because it never really exists. What matters is what gets manifested, not what could be manifested. Show me a good, honest, creative person -- not someone with the potential to be good, the potential to be honest, or the potential to be creative.

Then later:

As a tender-hearted person, I embrace both the love and the pain and tears. I cry easily, but if it is the price to pay for loving the way I do then I feel it is well worth it. Love is worth it. Not for any other person so much as for me, personally.

If there's one person you should love unconditionally, it is yourself. Just like when dealing with external dangers: first focus on you, then you'll be in a place you can help others. Loving yourself unconditionally is never an excuse to put aside personal growth, as loving others is never an excuse for their behavior.

So, I love and I am hurt. I cry. I weep. I keep loving all the same.

If someone's perfume triggers an asthma attack the solution isn't to just hold your breath when you're around anyone you don't explicitly trust. Sometimes people fart and it stinks. Sometimes even dear people could forget -- or be too close to someone on a bus -- and show up wearing a stink that triggers the throat to close. Still, we must breath. Even corpses exchange gases with their environment -- there is just no stopping it.

You really have two choices: embrace love and learn to cope with the pain that comes with it, or to try to constrain and restrict love, to be less familiar with it and consequentially to be more surprised and startled when things are unexpected or go awry. -- Well, a third choice would be to entirely discount love and embrace Randian Objectivity...

(Yes, I am usually this verbose with social media posts.)

Going dark, but...

My goal of having this be a pagan parenting blog hasn't actually panned out. That might change in the future, I'm not sure.

What I do know is that among the quiet moments, I've been sketching up an outline for a book on Independent Polytheism. Probably relatively short, I'm calling it "An Introduction to Independent Polytheism" right now. It'll be a sort of how-to guide.

Anyway, it's now fairly low priority stuff, but the idea is that I'll blog the book here. Then when it's done I'll format it, release it with a Creative Commons license and make it available.

So, yeah. My goal is that when I start this back up, I have enough ducks in a row that I can have reliable regular content without interrupting my other goals until I have everything ready for the book.

I was reading Mur Lafferty's beautifully written blog post titled "Dear Daughter" <http://www.murverse.com/2012/04/15/dear-daughter/>. As I was writing a comment, I realized it was long enough to be a blog post of its own.

What we have is the worst of all possible worlds.

There are those that rejoice in having female children, because they're like boys-plus. They can wear any outfit a boy can wear as well as any outfit a girl can wear. They can be involved in activity that "boys like" and any activity that "girls like". They have every door that girls have historically had, plus every door that boys have had.

Then we have baby boys raised to be assholes before they can even speak, their onesies emblazoned with offensive (and often sexist) statements. Little boys who are insulted if they like certain colors, or toys, or activities. Little boys trained to like "boy" things and that anything outside of that restricted set is effeminate. It's a tiny little gender box that we keep our little boys in.

Oh, we have the same people trying to get girls back in their tiny little gender box. With the rise of "princess culture" some girls are climbing inside and asking for the lid to be closed with pretty pink nails.

So what are we to do? I think the most important thing we can do for our children is to allow them to know about differences in gender roles in time and place. I think as soon as they learn that what is expected "here" is not expected "there" it opens them up to finding what they want and expect of themselves -- outside of the expectations of society and their peers.

As soon as children learn that gender roles vary by culture, they can start thinking about what sort of culture they want to see when they're adults. And that, historically, is how social revolution begins. (It wasn't that long ago that girls weren't allowed to wear pants to school. I suspect a number of the people that brought about that change were women who actually enjoyed wearing pants as children.)

My children are still quite young. I intend to tell them I obey the social norms of a future society. It's a society where a little boy's favorite toy could be a yellow bean doll, and where grown men can fearlessly sob while reading a book in public. I like to think that the social norms I obey belong to a culture where, eventually, the only people that know a person's gender are that person's doctors and lovers.

We don't use a corpse to celebrate the return of life

At our house, I just got the tree up. I say up, because my wife will decorate it tomorrow. I thought unpacking it and setting it up would be easier without the kids.

We use an artificial tree. Our current tree is prelit, so it just needs assembled and plugged in and it is ready to be decorated. Being prelit does make it easier -- and a lot faster. (At least, once the tote was brought in from the garage.)

In truth, as soon as the tree is cut from the ground it becomes a corpse. Sure, it is a wet corpse that can stay green for a few weeks, but a juicy corpse is still a corpse. Besides, would it really be better to think of it as a slowly dying tree, wailing and crying to at last find release in the lost forest of its birth?

My wife wanted (and got) a "real" tree for our first Christmas together. I got teary explaining my issues with it. Since then we've had artificial trees. I think she's officially a convert, though, as they're so much easier to manage.

If you're celebrating the Winter Solstice and the end of winter and the begining of the return of life, why would you start that celebration with death and dismemberment? Why celebrate the upcoming return of greenery and the rebirth of life by prematurely ending the life of a tree -- purely for the purpose of decoration?

If you see Christmas as a celebration of Odin and Sleipnir -- discretely disguised but still Norse, complete with stockings -- why not honor Yggdrasil by decorating a live tree? The traditional Yule Log is a log -- something once needed to keep a home warm -- and not a whole tree thrown out when it becomes ready to use as firewood.

Personally, I celebrate Santa Claus at Christmas. (I really want to get a set of Rankin-Bass figurines to use as a Christmas Nativity.) Santa Claus and presents are a staple of the season. The inclusion of them in my faith helps to normalize it. In a school setting a non-Christian celebrating Christmas with Santa and presents is far more normal that a Christian celebrating Christmas without Santa or presents.

What ever you call your winter holiday, and whomever you honor with it, I hope you have a jolly, merry time filled with gaity, cheer, and mirth.

New fiction blog

Well, my fiction writing officially has a blog of its own.

S. W. Black, named after my current moniker. (I've done NaNoWriMo again -- this time with a new baby.)

I want to update this blog more but family commitments do interfere. We'll see if I can breathe some life in to it again soon.

Shifted Meaning

[Next time I'll talk more about what I mean with this.]

The universe spins around us.
Touching, singing, whispering and laughing.
We only see what we want to see,
what we hope will be, and expect to find.
Our senses trusted absolutely,
until the day they prove unkind.

The universe spins beside us.
Befriended, trusted, steady and reliable.
What is true remains true,
even if one's senses have said otherwise.
The reliability of the universe is absolute,
You need faith. Believe boy. Believe!

The universe spins inside us.
Strange, mysterious, weird and unknown.
We are alone in the universe,
touching only fragments of ourselves.
We know only what we choose to know,
disbelieving what can not be.

The universe spins behind us.
Distorting, twisting, changing and bending.
Words of peace are used to kill,
words of freedom are used to ensnare.
Lies, mistruths and misunderstandings,
meanings change, yet words remain unaffected.

The nonfiction book

Well, I've been thinking of doing it with this blog for a time, so I may as well make my intentions public.

The ultimate goal is to create a number of articles and essays on this blog which can be leveraged in a work of non-fiction related to my faith. To work toward this end, I've imported the existing articles in to Scrivener. At a later date, I'll work on importing partial drafts.

Since I'm going public with this intent, I'll probably do a little proper outlining so I make sure I cover what I want to cover. Scrivener makes this easy, and will allow me to easily tell when I have a larger article (which can be split for multiple posts) as well as allow for easy rearrangement and restructuring of the book.

The existing posts currently amount to about 10k words. Truthfully, it is more than I expected. I expect it to go fairly smoothly once I get an outline in place.

November was a success

November was a success. I wrote a 50k word YA Fantasy novel that needs a lot of editing, but does include a plot, character development and (surprising to me) a fairly solid theme.

While this blog is important, I'm going to drop to twice a month, as I had a lot of fun writing fiction and I want to make more time for it.

Other than the occasional mentions of it, this blog will remain focused on non-fiction.

I was hoping for a real post today, but alas my weekend was filled with other things. I'll have at least one real post this month, and I'll be shooting for two.

The November plans

The plan was to write double-posts during October so that I could cruise through November without care.

I've failed that pretty severely -- as one week I even forgot to write anything. (I got a post out that day, but it was an "Oops, I forgot." post, so it doesn't really count.)

I think I'm going to accept what many bloggers accept: I'm going on hiatus for the month of November for NaNoWriMo. As this is the last Monday in October, this means my next post will be December 6th.

At this point, my planned story is a YA Fantasy. The basic premise is that magic is a consumable resource that was all used up during the early days of mankind. An eccentric hermit finds a way to replenish magic in the world. He hires a family of four, and madness unfolds. Well, not madness, exactly, but certainly excitement.

It is a variation of the idea that things were somehow more magical in the past and that for some reason all of the magical creatures went elsewhere. It is nice to think that they could just go elsewhere, but it is also possible they all died off.

For the story, it means it can start off like an urban fantasy -- totally real-world with just a promise of something magical -- and as the magic unfolds around them the limits of it are less confined to the "and no one else is the wiser" thing you generally see with urban fantasy.

The core idea is one that is backed up with stories like "Sleeping Beauty" where once the spell is broken the castle itself disappeared. To last that long, it laid waste to the area where the castle once stood. As the magic dried up and disappeared from the region it drew with it the very firmament itself.

While there are fewer restrictions on what magic can do, there are still restrictions. This is a world where magic has near limitless potential, but it can't reach the potential if it gets used up on vulgar affairs. Using magic for cleaning house? It will take longer to restore the magic used than it would to just clean it up by hand. Flashy transformations are extremely ostentatious, as after you transform there may not be any magic in the area to do anything else with.

This means that in the story world, magic needs to cause the least amount of change to produce the desired results. That said, since scrying works without a particular abundance of magic, in an area with more magic it works much better.

The device I'm using to restore magic in the world is essentially an orgone transformer. It takes "orgone energy" and transforms it in to magical energy. Instead of an orgone accumulator shaped like a box and designed to focus the orgone energy inside, we have a board composed of layers of different substances. It gathers the orgone energy, transforms it, and the magical energy exits. I call these boards "magic doors" -- which is also where the (current) title for the book comes from.

So that's what I'll be doing with my November. I'm excited. It will be my first novel, so I'm going in to it as a learning experience -- I know the quality only gets better with practice.

Tis the Season (of death and heartache)

One of the things that marks a person as belonging to a modern faith is having modern concerns.

What counts as a modern concern?

Premarital sex? Back in the fabled Puritan beginnings of the United States some towns had more than 90% of their children get pregnant before marriage. The modern US tends to do a lot better than that these days. Premarital sex is clearly not a modern concern. In fact, I don't consider premarital sex a concern at all, but then this probably doesn't surprise any of my readers.

Homosexuality? This is even less of a modern concern, being that some of our nearest genetic relatives also engage in homosexual acts it seems this is something that actually predates humanity. Don't believe me? Check out some of the antics of the bonobos. Check your local zoo to see if they have them, though be warned that a lot of zoos do not have bonobos as they embarrass the zoo patrons.

Automobiles are clearly a modern concern. Some might say that all of the common well-established religions predate the automobile.

Now, this week, I'm not going somewhere weird here. This has nothing to do with whether or not cars have souls or deities. This is just the modern phenomena of driving vehicles about.

I got a driver's license specifically because I knew driving would be required living where I do. This is the case for an unfortunate vast part of the US. I was in my mid-twenties before I got my license.

This is to say, by the time I got my license, I had done a lot of work on myself. I had become the sort of person that was prone to crying both when sad as well as when happy. I think of it as being tender-hearted.

Now, my family got together (as they continue to do) several times in the fall and winter. I always had a nice quiet drive for much of the way, but what struck me was always how much roadkill I passed. It pulled and tugged on my heart to the point where at times I would be risking my ability to see the road, due to the tears.

I had to do something about it. So I prepared to pray to the dead. It is heart-breaking to see the dead. Sometimes you'll see a friend or family member to the corpse, walk up, as if to ask if the animal is alright. While I prayed, I wept. I wept for the dead, left beside the road to rot or to be gathered up to be discarded like any other detritus. No one gains with roadkill. It isn't part of some grand circle of life, with everyone eating someone else. It is a life, cut short and abandoned, to feed nothing but bacteria.

Now, I'm not a vegetarian. I understand that animals eat other animals, and you can bet most of the roadkill (except, alas for some of the poor pets) know this quite well. It's a world filled with the hunt, prey and hunters abound. This is, after all, normal and natural when it comes to the natural world. Those we kill with our cars are not part of this natural cycle. They are not killed for food, they're not even killed for pleasure. We take nothing from them but their lives. We give back nothing but pain and loss.

My compromise -- since I can't quit driving -- is to acknowledge the dead as I pass them. I say "Bless its soul." I say this anytime I see anything that could be roadkill. I say this sometimes when I think I see trash or leaves. I say this when there are animals too close to the street -- bless them and protect them so they don't wind up as more corpses on our roads.

I'm freer than perhaps I need to be with my blessings. In truth, I do this so I don't need to look closely. I've seen what I thought was a leaf in the road (that I blessed -- and avoided hitting) turn out to be a live animal. It is enough to know that it has been blessed, if I don't see it clearly then perhaps I am lucky.

How many people talk about peace and love and nature without acknowledging the pain and heartache we bring in our wake?

Remember the linden and the oak

The story of the linden and the oak is one that is retold in various cultures.

The basic premise is simple: At the time traveling was dangerous, and it was common for travelers to need a place of rest after traveling a great distance. Without hotel in a small area, the travelers would need to stay in someone's home. Culturally it was polite to accept the travelers, and it was impolite to refuse them.

So, the travelers are refused at every house in a town, and on the outskirts of town there is an elderly couple. They have very little, but they offer what they have. They are kind and polite.


The travelers, however, were not simple run-of-the-mill people. They were deities, angels, or other super-powerful forces specifically setting out to check on folks in this area.

As a reward, when the years run out for the elderly couple, instead of either one needing to bury the other, they are both transformed in to trees. However, more immediately, the rude town is destroyed. I recall reading an African variation which stated the teller of the tale would actually point out houses beneath a local lake where the doomed village once was.

Now, I never really took this as a warning until I met a disquieting individual at a pagan conference many years back.

The man was disheveled, unshaven, and unkempt. He looked like a homeless man had snuck in. I found myself in a room with snacks, and the man ate in the manner you would expect, with his fingers, leaving a smattering of crumbs.

He was, to put it lightly, the sort of person that could easily push a person's buttons.

But the real kicker was the buttons he pushed were only on the surface. He was polite and friendly. While he looked homeless, he didn't have an odor. Nothing about his attitude or his actions were objectionable to any meaningful extent.

Is it likely that he was a deity, made manifest, specifically to check out the local pagan convention? Well, that seems less than likely, given that most folks do not believe in deities with such powers. Also, most folks go to such conventions already believing in a narrow set of deities. While folks there may be warmer to the idea of a new deity, chances are few are actively looking for more.

However, could he be favored by a deity? That seems quite possible. To be favored by a deity, that deity would watch out for you. It wouldn't be the deity the folks would see or interact with directly, but if a surface excuse is used to violate a person's ethics... that deity could either directly take action or otherwise set things up so that consequences are felt.

This led me to the idea that someone that annoys you -- but does so without actually doing anything wrong -- may actually be specially looked after by a deity, and that deity is actively waiting for someone to slip up.

Would it be more or less annoying if the deity behind the test was one of the ones you consider part of your personal pantheon? Would it even matter, though? If it was a test of ethics, and you fail the test, then you get what you deserve. Hopefully, you don't deserve your entire community to be destroyed.

The Reason for Life, the Universe, and Everything (part 3): Finding personal meaning

In my previous two posts, I covered the reason for life, the universe, and everything, then explained that you really don't have many limits on what you do with it.

As for a universal meaning, it is simple and works well for both mundane and sublime lifestyles. Anything beyond that is purely personal. You're not really limited to anything. You could dedicate your life to exploring the delights of the most exotic McDonald's locations on the planet. You could dedicate your life to proclaiming the glories of a deity. You could dedicate your life to exotic encounters of food or flesh.

The Ethic of Reciprocity: This is a commonly known in Western cultures as "The Golden Rule". Treat others as you would like to be treated. Do not treat others as you would not like to be treated. This is a near universal idea. It is a good guiding principle when searching for your own personal meaning. If your personal meaning wouldn't be something you enjoyed if someone else took it up, perhaps you should try to find another one.

The Meek may have Mighty Friends: This is a simple variation of the ethic of reciprocity. Ignoring any thoughts of karma, or mystical energies finding their way back to you, there is the simple fact that folks have friends. Even folks that may seem worthless in your eyes, may have powerful allies. It pays to expect everyone to have mighty friends. More than that, if you want to increase your friends, it pays to become a mighty friend to those that currently appear meek. You just may become friends not only with the meek person, but indirectly with that person's mighty friends.

Here's something I try to live by: We start with an egocentric universe, then twist it. With an egocentric personal meaning the world, the universe, even all of existence exists for you, to test you, to support you, to add to your own personal greatness. But, what if there was a single person that was the reason for the universe, but instead of that person being you, you were a minor character in that person's life... You would encounter that person perhaps once in your entire life. What kind of character would you be in that story? Would you be the surprising caring hand, reaching out to the person just when things looked darkest? Would you be a simple manifestation of an uncaring universe, ready to say "no" and close doors just because you can?

Do I have a personal meaning? Yes. I advocate the worship of small deities. I also like to create things with my mind. I've had dreams of creating universes, and have current aspirations to be an author.


Next week, I'm going to tell a true story relating to my "the meek may have mighty friends" comment.

I missed a week!

Well, that was unintentional.

I still think once a week is realistic. However, particularly as the holidays and NaNoWriMo approaches, I may have to evaluate switching to every other week.

I'll let you know if things change, but right now I am calling the missing post an anomaly.

The Reason for Life, the Universe, and Everything (part 2): Debauchery

debauchery (from Wictionary) (plural debaucheries) n.

1. Indulgence in sensual pleasures; scandalous activities involving sex, alcohol, or drugs without inhibition

2. (archaic) Seduction from duty.

If the reason for existence is to exist, and the reason for life is to live, (which -- let's get real -- I'm basically saying here) then whatever personal meaning you have for your life is just that -- a personal meaning.

Does this mean that a life of debauchery is just as valid as a life of piety? Yes. But, really, when the length and breadth of human religions allows for both chastity and licentiousness while still being pious this shouldn't be a surprise for most people. Sure, it has been a while since temple whores have had popularity, but they have existed in the past, and humanity may well see them again. It seems that any time one group defines sexual morality there is a group somewhere providing an alternate definition.

The universe doesn't care what you do with your life -- only that you live.

What is there to prevent you from living a life of debauchery? Clearly nothing, as we see plenty of people enjoying such lives every day.

Realistically, though, lives of unfettered debauchery tend to lead to hurting a lot of people. It is not in human nature to hurt others needlessly, (most people tend to primarily hurt themselves), however it is even less in human nature to allow friends to be hurt needlessly. (To paraphrase the Christian Bible, "Vengeance is Mine, says the BFF.") Those who would use other people will eventually suffer repercussions for their behavior -- after all, you can fool most of the people most of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.

Note, though, when I speak of a life of debauchery I'm speaking of a self-centered life of excess. The implication with the term "debauchery" is that there is a moral or ethical common-ground and that whatever that common-ground is, debauchery goes below it. This is quite different than ethical hedonism. You can love the pleasures of life while still loving and caring for the other people in your life. In truth, it shouldn't surprise anyone to hear two hedonists complaining about some of the choices of a mutual friend and how that person has slipped from ethical hedonism to a simple life of debauchery.

Some might confuse debauchery with a life of orgies and free-love. In truth, some folks find open and/or polyamorous relationships work well for them. These relationships might be confused for debauchery by some, but when relationships are based upon love and communication it should be clear that they are very much not debauchery.

Now, if a relationship is one-sided and based upon either pleasing only one party or it involves degrading or debasing one partner then it bears a lot in common with debauchery even if the relationship outwardly looks like a typical monogamous marriage. Do you want further proof? Add a video camera that only one member of the relationship knows about. This instantly raises the bar in how one-sided a relationship is, but I argue that if the only thing that is missing is the camera, then the marriage may still be thinly veiled debauchery.

For another example: I was once told quite matter-of-factly that "not everything in a marriage is consensual." I was appalled, particularly when she added, "You'll understand after you get married." I'm married now. Rape within the context of a marriage is just as abhorrent to me as it was back then. At least most single-people who opt for a life of debauchery do not need to stoop so low. Sure, they may manipulate, the other party may know it was a bad idea (both before and after), they may even explicitly set out to seduce someone's spouse, but what happens is consensual at the time.

This is really just to make a point. The universe is quite content for you to have a life of debauchery (though you'll probably be happier with yourself if you opt for ethical hedonism instead), and if you do really want debauchery, you can still have that while outwardly keeping a monogamous heteronormative lifestyle.

Now, in the next part, I'll move on to talk more about personal meaning.

The Reason for Life, the Universe, and Everything (part 1)

I've mentioned before that I have a Reason for Life, the Universe, and Everything.

More than that, to be truly universal, it can't be something restricted to humanity. Additionally, it must be inescapable. If it is the reason for everything, then it makes sense that it would be something that is unavoidable -- everything always does does it regardless of personal inclination or desire.

Quite simply, I believe the purpose of everything is to experience and to be experienced.

This is inescapable: We say that something exists when it can be experienced. If something can not be experienced in any way then few would doubt that the thing does not exist.

This is universal: Nothing about this is unique to life, let alone humanity.

It is unavoidable: Neither the hardest rocks nor the folks crippled by anxiety and stuck at home can avoid experiencing and being experienced. It isn't like death and most folks avoid it most days, though they know that one day their time will come.

Are you going to fill your life with the regularity of the tides? Are you going to fill it with new and unusual experiences? In the end both are equivalent. You, like everything else, collect experiences until at last you die. Some of us have a better memory of our experiences, but we all experience and are experienced.

This reason for existence seems self-evident upon reflection, what with some religions believing that the universe exists as such specifically to experience itself. If differentiation happened specifically for self-experience, then of course the reason for existence is so that we can experience and be experienced.

I suspect the only thing that prevented it from being self-evident was my Western upbringing, and the thing that gets a lot of people: Wanting the search, but not wanting the answer. It isn't particularly an uplifting reason for existence. It is easy to see where a person might over-think the question in an attempt to find a happier (or otherwise "better") answer.

(In the next part, I'll mention where debauchery comes in.)

On unity (with the natural world and more)

I've had a lot of problems identifying myself as "pagan". The problem is that I don't see myself as particularly earth-based.

Now, when it comes to unity, I believe in that well enough. I can quiet reasonably say that I believe in an inherent unity of all things.

But note that I said all things.

I sometimes travel when I sleep. Astral travel? I'm not sure. I just know that sometimes I dream in my head -- and everything is a fabrication of my mind -- and other times I'm dreaming elsewhere. I've flitted back and forth between the two states before and they feel distinctly different. (More on this in a later post.)

I first started having doubts that I was a Christian after a dream. In the dream I was arguing with a Monotheist. In disgust, I turned and walked away. As I was walking away, I paused to worship a desk. The idea seemed pretty easy to see: God is in all things -- including desks. I accepted that I was a Pantheist. There are Christians with Pantheist tendencies, after all.

Once I started meeting other deities in dream, I elaborated my views to "God is in all things -- including other deities." I believed this while ostensibly being a Christian at first, then I realized that describing myself as a Christian made no sense so I started calling myself a Panthiestic Polytheist.

Interestingly, it was at this point when I visited the Shining Void (also known as Nirvana -- though I didn't know it at the time). There were two things to do there, lose yourself and become one with the place, and leave. I decided to leave. That was the point when I stopped calling myself a Pantheistic Polytheist and just started calling myself a Polytheist.

My time in the Shining Void made it clear there is an underlying unity among all things, and yet everything we are, and all that we are here to experience is totally unrelated to this unity. It is like having a painting and the subject of the painting pondering the unity of the paint-universe (what with it all being made of paint), instead of enjoying the colors, shapes, and textures that the artist brought forth in the piece.

That is, focusing on unity distracts us from the beauty of difference. The goal isn't to see ourselves as the same, so much as it is to relish our differences and celebrate them.  We can only fully understand ourselves when we try to understand the those that are different.

NaNoWriMo 2010 and shorter posts

I'm planning on writing a novel this November. I don't think the characters will actively be practicing any form of paganism or polytheism, but some of my ideas will definitely spill over in to the story.

It's a Young Adult Fantasy story centering around the idea that magic is a natural resource that was consumed when humanity was young. An eccentric hermit believes he has discovered a way to replenish magic in the world. The main characters are children whose parents were hired by the hermit.

It's a new way to think about magic in a story. It also allows for a very modern day setting that can get stranger and stranger as the story goes on.

We'll see how the writing goes in November. I wanted to warn people that while there will still be regular Monday posts, they may well be less in-depth than some of my recent posts. (If they get as long as some of the recent posts they'll be split up.) I plan to double-up my writing for the blog in the coming months, so part of the October and all of the November posts will all be written well ahead of time.

I'm less interested in preserving the remaining ancient natural places than I am about reclaiming spaces for nature and setting them aside for the future. Plenty of folks want to preserve. Fewer want to transform the refuse and waste of human civilization and turn that in to something that will one day be mighty, ancient, and filled with potent magics. This is really the foundational idea for my story.

Now, whether this idea is related in any form through the story is another matter... ;)