I had a conversation with one of Girl1’s friends this afternoon. It went like this:

BOY: Tomorrow’s Hanukkah

ME: I think you’re right.

BOY: Do you celebrate Hanukkah?

ME: No. Do you?

BOY: What’s Hanukkah?

Umm…I’m thinkin’ the answer to my question is no, then… Read the rest of this entry »

Karl Marx said that “religion is the opium of the people”, and I used to be inclined to agree with him. Today, though, I think we need to edit his phrase to read:

professional sports is the opium of the people.

I can’t claim credit for the idea. I first heard Noam Chomsky say something similar in an interview. But I think he’s got the right idea. You know, keep them too busy working their butts off at underpaid jobs, then give them a Gladiator show in the Forum on the weekend, and you keep the plebs satisfied and too busy to think about politics. Oh wait, did I say Gladiator show in the Forum? I meant football game at the stadium. Sorry. Wrong empire.

It hit me again full-force last Monday morning as I listened to the news. When the sports news came on, the lead story was, of course, the Grey Cup. Lots of crazy cheering Roughriders fans, and two grown men from Winnipeg, weeping because their team lost.

Weeping!

Because a team (that they don’t play for, coach, or manage, incidentally) lost a game. A game! Grown men weeping!

And then I wondered, how many of these people voted in the last election? Well, thanks to the marvel of the internet, I can tell you. Check out these numbers:

52,230 people attended the Grey Cup game in Toronto. Many of them traveled from Winnipeg (or other parts of Manitoba) and Saskatchewan to be there.

And of 450,000 registered voters in Winnipeg, 90,000 voted 2005 civic election. That’s not even double the number of people at the (just about sold out) Grey Cup game. It is also, sickeningly, only twenty percent voter turnout.

And that’s what’s wrong with our country.

Here’s where I jump off the edge and right into the deep end. Maybe I should have built up my readership first, before delving into religion and politics all in one shot, but you know, it’s more like the real me to lay it all out there and — discretion be damned — I’m gonna say what I think whether you like me or not afterwards. To thine own self be true, and all that, right? (Nod to Polonius, wisest of fathers.)

Probably I need to mellow out, grow up or mature (or quite possibly all three!) but, anyway, here goes.

Get this: there are people out there in the world, real people, living in our neighbourhoods (well, mine anyway), under the age of one-hundred-and-seven, who believe that you can choose your sexuality. To wit: earlier this autumn, a fellow mom in the schoolyard said this to me:

I truly believe gay people choose to be gay and they can be cured.

Oh, sorry. I had a momentary black-out there. It might have been a mini-stroke. Or perhaps just utter, mind-numbing incredulity. Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven’t, you can go ahead and read Can You Believe? Part One here.

So yesterday I addressed the missing link argument in Searching for the Missing “Pink” Link on Family Reformation. (As in my first post, as well, I’ll point out that all quotations of Pastor McDonald below are from the post linked here so I won’t link to them again.)

Now…let’s move on to this “pink” link of Pastor McDonald’s. He doesn’t specifically define the term, rather he cites examples of “the alleged poster women for an alternative career path” and “that ever-missing link” sought by “evangelical feminists”. By this I can only presume he means evangelical Christians who are also feminists, and not feminists who are evangelical about their feminism; these could be — and no doubt are — from all and no faiths.

I’m not going to argue with McDonald on the basis of his Biblical examples. You see, I’m an atheist, so I don’t see the Bible as the received word of god, but rather as a piece of literature (and one full of contradictions at that). I have read it – cover to cover, actually – but I don’t see it as a valid source of ethical, moral or other guidance. Therefore I cannot enter the argument on those grounds. Those who see the Bible differently may be swayed one way or the other by quotations of biblical verse, but to me, you might as well quote the Egyptian Book of the Dead, or the Niebelungenlied or John Lennon. Actually, I think more people should quote John Lennon. Now that’s something that would make the world a better place… Read the rest of this entry »

Every now and then I click on the links that WordPress features on their main page, and sometimes I find a gem of a blog that I bookmark, and sometimes I find something that shocks and amazes me.

In the shocks and amazes category, I clicked through to a blog called: Family Reformation (that should have been my first red flag; in the immortal words of Monty Python, “Run away! Run away!”) where there was a post entitled, intriguingly:

Searching for the Missing “Pink Link”

(read it here, if you dare, and note that all quotations of the author below derive from this link, so I will not link them individually.)

In Searching for the Missing “Pink Link”, blogging Pastor James McDonald takes aim at women seeking fulfillment outside the domestic sphere by comparing the arguments in favour of said expansion of women’s sphere by “egalitarians” (quotation marks his) to the evolutionary missing link – a species between apes & humans that McDonald clearly believes is a silly myth. I should point out here that taxonomically speaking, of course, we — Homo sapiens sapiens* — are already apes, as we belong to the family hominidae, or great apes, along with gorillas and chimpanzees.

*From here onwards, I’ll shorten Homo sapiens sapiens for simplicity’s sake to just H. sapiens: anyway, when you read tripe like this you question whether we deserve even the one sapiens moniker; wise indeed!

As a thinking (and reasonably educated) person, I couldn’t ignore his off-hand dismissal of evolution; as if it were a given that there was no missing link (there are many!), and so I’d like to take on Pastor McDonald first on these grounds, then (in my next post) on his real argument: that of woman’s “unique role as wife, mother, and keeper at home—the normative role for women…happily under the authority of her husband”. Join me, if you will: all that’s required is an open, questioning mind. I ask you simply to look at the evidence and make your own decision, unlike some, who would require you to believe in the – frankly – unbelievable. Read the rest of this entry »