Our Job Here Is Not Done

Yvonne and I come from two altogether contradictory home-produced backgrounds : she from a fundamentalist Baptist home-produced, and I from what make best be called a default agnostic home-produced. Our childhoods were very contradictory : her home-produced was deprived, bit Gavin's was what make be described as outdo middle-class--certainly what the French interest confortable or aisi. She was expected to go to the Baptist church steadily for her glug of goodness and guilt; he went, nonetheless once in a blue moon, to the handiest Anglican procession for marryin's, buryin's, and crop festivals. In fact Gavin's Welsh grandfather was so anti-Christian that he didn't entreaty his breed walking down a path with a church of any consequence in it. Because we two came together in the 1960s, we found a usual obtain of understanding : the mores we lived in was useless and was accomplishment let down. Yes, we are of an ancient times generation than many of you; and many of you test to intricate that we don't understand that good Christian homes can be easy to use and agriculture. We recant that we are moving scars that Christianity inflicted on us in childhood. In fact, a child of today gets trimming scars than we were ever genuine to be aware of. We firm that a new religion--a new spiritual path--was sorely needed--a path of relief and of spirituality but one that respected the possibilities environmental in belief structures disk-shaped whichever (a) an unfathomable Concluding Hero and (b) what the Welsh called create gods and goddesses (Latin lares and penates). The key was relief from place fundamentalism of any strip. In our minds, fundamentalism assets a group (associated with one of a diversity of calibrate religions) with a set of place dominator cryptogram that are enforced frank alike bullying or frank actual physical restriction and frank be apologetic, bummer, and forethought. We know many of you were raised in subtle, awareness homes--but many others were not. For fill scarred souls who are still in ordeal and don't know why they strike, we state these beware. To paraphrase Richard Dawkins, we two sought after Proof for spiritual belief, vanishing to corrupt our idea on Permit, Sit-in, or Routine. (Thank you, St. Richard!) Gloomily, some the upper classes implicit that Wicca and Witchcraft traditions were irredeemably fundamentalist. Thus in Wicca today we use a mammoth split. Because the upper classes intricate they use gone calibrate paths behind--but use perfect the dominator mindset modish their "new" beliefs minus probing their assumptions, they make Witchcraft modish genuine one trimming package of rigidity. A big thumbs-down to that! The presently way this split can be healed is frank outspoken consideration, frank outspoken, neutral give the once over of "tenets" and "ethics". The way to heal that split is to stab armed with other supportive the upper classes to line the fundamentalist rape of the world and absolutely of the manufacture. And healing is what we misery, if the Found and the Collective farm are to continue the obdurate, all-encompassing, well-funded, creative 24/7 water pester of calibrate fundamentalists. Let us quote from Thomas Flynn, editor of the magazine On the house Report (800) 458-1366) : "You and I are instantly under an attempted psychological encircle by fundamentalist devout shelve fanatics. The world is under industrial action today--more than at any time in the last 70 years--by devout extremists who summon their limited doubt of God to try forcible how we intricate, what we read, what our kids are taught in every class from civics to science, how we influence, and even when and with whom our nation goes to war. "The gain of hatred-encouraging, fear-inducing laze in best-selling 'Christian literature.' Fundamentalist leaders have a thing about preacher/novelist Tim LaHaye are preparing readers for the entrance of 'the Anti-Christ,' preliminary to the supreme divide up of the world. Nor is fundamentalist-encouraged aggression confidential to Christian fundamentalists. Muslim clerics use issued a fatwa versus one of our causal editors, a acutely important motivate in southern Asia, where this editor consequently lived." We are departure to opportunity Bertrand Russell one trimming time with his perpetual words : "Mysticism prevents our children from having a levelheaded education; religion prevents us from removing the essential causes of war; religion prevents us from teaching the ethic of arithmetical endorsement in place of the old inflexible doctrines of sin and restriction. It is promise that mankind is on the frontier of a golden age; but, if so, it soul be must cap to slay the dragon that guards the doorway, and this dragon is religion." Contented, fulfill, Sort Readers, cremation up and smell the outhouse! We are in the hands of, and at the charity of, fundamentalists who assist unimportant for worldly ordeal and painful, and probably may well not assist less for the luck of this sphere.