My answers to the Pride Month questions posed by LaPelosa on Tumblr
Related topics
Believing Survivors
“Shame stops children reporting abuse in religious institutions” – The Guardian
Every group where there’s trust and closeness attracts abusers. But there are some key features which make it more likely that abuse will go unchecked.
TW: abuse survivors may find some aspects of this article triggering.
Books I read in April
Science fiction, magic, books, and landscape – my favourite subjects.
- Redshirts by John Scalzi
- Six Ways, by Aidan Wachter
- 21st century Yokel, by Tom Cox
- Bookworm: A memoir of childhood reading, by Lucy Mangan
Reblog: Where do your stones come from?
Where do your stones come from?
There is a deep irony in this. Pagan-y type folk often use stones and crystals to connect with the earth, to honour the spiritus mundi, the world-soul. Yet, frequently these stones themselves have been industrially yanked out of the earth without any consideration of the spirit of the place where they were mined, and often without any consideration of the humanity of the exploited workers toiling in hellish conditions.
Read on at wrycrow.com
Please read this very important post from Ryan Cronin, on sourcing your crystals ethically.
Plants of Mexico
Today we went on a Hidden Mexico tour to El Tuito, taking in a botanical garden, a village, a wood turning workshop, a bakery with an adobe oven, an artists’ cooperative, a graveyard, some ancient petroglyphs, and lunch in a stream.
Thoughts on Planet Narnia
Brenton Dickinson has an interesting post up about his upcoming critique of Michael Ward’s theory that the Narnia books were written to illustrate the ideas of medieval planetary astrology (one book per planet). I read a bit about Planet Narnia when it came out, but have never got around to reading it, partly because I can see that the books have planetary symbolism now that it’s been pointed out, but it is not the main point of the books.
Review: Guelph Art Gallery
There are currently three amazing exhibitions on at the Art Gallery of Guelph (until 16 December): epistemologies of the moon, 1745, and Critical Mass. It is hard to say which of these exhibitions I was the most excited about, as they all address things I care about.
The God-shaped Hole
Some psychologists have suggested the existence of a “god-shaped hole” in the mind — a set of psychological functions that evolved for some other purpose (like detecting predators sneaking up behind us), but which predispose us to believe in gods, or in God, or the supernatural, or the preternatural, or something out there other than ourselves.
![fractal by insspirito on Pixabay. [Public Domain]](https://dowsingfordivinity.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/fractal-1280081_1280.jpg?w=300&h=221)
Fractal by insspirito on Pixabay. [Public Domain]
Fictional and constructed religions
What can fictional religions tell us about real religions? Are constructed religions just as valid as ancient ones? What about real-world religions based on fictional ones? One impetus for creating constructed religions is for use in jurisdictions where religious activity is imposed by the authorities – but people often find that their joke religion then takes on a life of its own.
The landscape of gender
My preferred metaphor for gender is a scatterplot (not a spectrum). If one’s assigned gender is at point (a,b) but one’s actual gender is at point (q,r) then one needs to change to match one’s actual gender. If one’s actual gender is at point (c,d) it’s quite near one’s assigned gender, so the person is cisgender.
If we model gender as a spectrum, it suggests that male and female are at opposite ends of the spectrum, and supports the gender binary, hence positioning genderqueer, nonbinary, and gender fluid people somewhere on that spectrum, whereas they might be outside it. A line is a one-dimensional model. We have more dimensions available to us than that.
Perhaps we could reimagine gender as a landscape. The mountains of the Fierce Femmes. Little Cisgender on the Wold. The village of Enby. The river of Genderfluid. Much Genderqueer in the Marsh. The valley of the Otters, near Bear Forest.
