A slightly different survey
Jun. 12th, 2004 04:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaThis is a collection of questions from an e-mail I got from the UU church I occasionally attend. They're all questions/topics that came up in the two sermons that the then-ministerial candidate (now minister-to-be) preached on Mother's Day and then the following Sunday. The questions I picked out of the list are the ones that aren't specifically UU ones. Much of this will have little to no relevance to the agnostics, atheists, and apatheists who read this, so feel free to skip the fairly long post behind the cut. This is largely an exercise for me, anyway, although anyone else who is interested in how parts of my mind work is welcome to read it.
1. Faith: How would you define or describe your "religious faith"?
Ugh. I hate the word "faith" in this context. I don't believe in anything that I haven't experienced; I just have weirder experiences than most. For me, talking about my "faith" in my religion, or my gods, is the same as my talking about my "faith" in my friends - that I believe that they'll be there for me, not that I trust them blindly or think they're infallible.
2. How has it changed over the years?
Quite a bit. I was raised by a Lutheran mother who started out conservative and got more and more fundamentalist over time and a Catholic father who started out practically agnostic and has ended up a moderate. While I attended both churches growing up, I was deliberately instructed only in my mother's faith, despite finding my father's religious cultus more interesting and more aesthetically pleasing. At the same time, I always followed the sun and the moon, and the changing of the Earth. I didn't realize this made me a heretic until I went through fundie Lutheran confirmation class. I stayed a heretic until I ran into Paganism in college (thanks,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
moontyger!) and began a slow but liberating relabeling of my worldview.
3. What part of faith and religion is fun to you?
Hmm. There's another dangerous word. I'm dysthymic, so "fun" isn't a concept that really holds much meaning for me. However, "all acts of love and pleasure are Her rituals." Any of the rare times I really am enjoying myself, whether it be in intelligent conversation, good food, or sex, then the Goddess is manifest in me.
4. How and where can we find humor in our daily lives?
Well, that's what the Spouse is for, isn't it? No seriously, my sense of humor is fairly dry and mildly dark. (Probably related to the dysthymia again.) For me, wordplay - especially inadvertent wordplay - and irony provide most of my humor.
5. Hope: What gives you hope?
Seriously? My greatest source of hope is entropy. Every structure eventually falls apart. Nothing harmful is so monumental, so monolithic, that it cannot be torn down and changed. Similarly, nothing good is so powerful that it will maintain itself without our intervention. We have the opportunity to re-make the world in a better image if for no reason other than that the world must be constantly re-made.
6. What does it mean to "live out your dreams"?
In the general sense, it means to actively work towards a conscious goal and make progress towards it. In my personal life, it means to become the best teacher I can possibly be, to motivate my kids to do their own best, and to continually educate myself about my profession and about everything related to it (which, after all, is pretty much everything - math underlies the universe).
7. What social justice issues are important to you and why?
Lots, but the most important are: universal education, because I honestly believe in the wealfulness of knowledge the way most people believe in the wealfulness of wealth; feminism, because the oppression of the half of the human race that has the larger impact on its children is clearly harmful for all involved - even the boy-children who will grow up to do the oppressing; and freedom of (or, in the appropriate cases, from) religion, because as a religious minority I can see how corrupting it is for a religion to be officially supported by the state
8. How much can you compromise before you lose some self-respect?
None. Of course, that's impossible, so there's a certain amount of loss of self-respect that's inevitable.
9. What is your mission in life?
To Teach, to Mourn, and to Take Care.
10. What mothers in your life or in history do you remember with gratitude, honor, respect or appreciation?
Well, my own mother, of course, as well as both my grandmothers, and my spear-side great-grandmother (who was almost an extra grandmother to me). The Great Mother as an archetype, and all of the Mother-Goddesses who draw from that archetype (including, much as I hate to admit it some days, Mary and Eve). My Matron goddess, who is sometimes named Mother Huber. Mama Carter, a high-school teacher of mine who is one of the largest reasons I decided to teach, and to teach math. Eleanor of Aquitaine. Anne Boleyn. Boudicia.
11. What does the word "God" mean to you?
With the capital letter and no article, it doesn't mean much at all to me, anymore, except that symbol that so many people use to repress others. With the cap and the definite article - "the God" - it means the sort of ur-spirit of Order in the universe, the Other to the Goddess, Chaos, Self. Without a capital letter, and with the indefinite article - "a god" - it means any one of many beings who are conscious and connected to some aspect of existence, who interact with human beings in mutually enriching (and sometimes not-so-enriching or not-so-mutual) ways.
12. Is God in nature, people, music, creativity or where?
Yes to all of the above. I'm a panentheist; the gods and goddesses are present in all things, though they are not the sum of all things.
13. What is the "divine" or "sacred"? And what is its relevance to your life?
Ah, two different questions. The "divine," for me, is whatever there is in something that beckons one to grok more fully - what calls to sentience and interaction, and nurtures them. Since I am a lover of learning and knowledge, of experience and emotion and intuition, it pretty much drives my life. The "sacred," on the other hand, is that which is set aside solely for the use of the divine, or (more often) for a specific god, goddess, pantheon, ritual, or cultus. I have a lot of sacred things in my life, but they're (naturally) an extra part, over and above my normal life.
14. What is the "beloved"?
That which is not me, yet calls me to interact with it and understand it fully. That which I care for. That for which its well-being impacts my own.
15. What answers to you seek?
As many as I can find. Both the answers and the quest to find them are what I'm all about.
16. What role does music play in your life?
It's one of my better ways of understanding things. I'm something of a synesthete, and quite a bit of visual/spatial information works better for me if I can grasp the "underlying music" for it. It's also one of my gates into the realm of the kinesthetic; I can dance myself into relation to my sensory-self when I can't inhabit it in many other ways. Dance and song (along with sex) are also my primary methods of worship.
17. What types of music do you enjoy and why?
Pretty much everything except for country, new-school hip-hop, and "new" R&B. (I like old-school hip-hop and R&B just fine.) I have a special relationship to music that has a good relationship with its lyrics or that otherwise has "content;" ambient music for the sake of having music in the room annoys me and seems disrespectful to the music and the space both.
18. What brings us together?
Common interests, common needs, common desires, or common enemies.
19. What is the value of community in your life?
A hard question for an introvert. For me, community is largely the system by which we build on each other's knowledge, experiences, and discoveries. It's both a support system for those who are new at whatever the topic or skill is, and the method by which we move beyond inventing the wheel in each generation. It also structures how we interact - which is both a good thing and a bad thing. For kids whom I've known for three years, is the correct structure still "teacher/student," or has it moved on to "mentor/protege"? Will it ever be appropriate for it to become "friends"? If so, when?
20. What fears to you have that you wish you didn't have?
Well, I'm working on not fearing Fire anymore. It's clearly still going to be a long journey, but it's been interesting so far.
I would like to not fear authority figures, and I'm not sure I can work on eliminating two fears at once.
21. What is our responsibility to the children of our community?
To not teach them bullshit. Sorry, that's getting a little ahead - to teach them, first of all, how to learn and how to think critically. To show them, by example, and teach them explicitly how to feel critically and adapt to what they're feeling authentically. To let them experience the world, while at the same time protecting them from its dangerous elements. To make sure everything that we explicitly teach them is as unbiased and as accurate as possible. To not talk down to them. And, finally, to let them grow up without making it a tragedy. Innocence should never be deliberately taken, but it is meant to be lost.
22. How do you feel about proselytizing?
First of all, it's unethical. Meddling in someone else's Will is dangerous and harmful. Secondly, it's probably unavoidable, at least to a certain extent. Living your life according to your religious and/or ethical values, and practicing either your religion or a lack thereof, is going to rub off on at the very least the members of your household, especially your children, if you have any. I don't have a good solution, although making sure one's kids are exposed to many different forms of religion and non-religion growing up - and good role models of them, if you can find them - is probably the best solution.
23. How do you approach life and faith with discernment? First, what is "discernment"?
Discernment is just a fancy way of saying "critical thinking," IMHO. Not that one should automatically disbelieve everything, but everything should be weighted against prior experience, logic, and what you've already learned about the way the universe works.
24. What are your theories or beliefs about what happens after we die?
These are purely theories, as I either haven't been there yet or I don't remember it clearly. I have enough fragmentary evidence in favor of reincarnation that I currently prefer that over soul-composting or a simple afterlife. I'm pretty sure we don't just "go out like candles," as Lewis Carol once put it. I certainly have no evidence at all that Hell or anything like it exists. I've met ghosts, but I'm not at all sure they're sentient - more like impressions or old echoes of a person.
25. Are we together to change the world for each other?
Yes. What else would we be doing? If I don't change a person's world, hopefully for the better, then what's the point?
26. What historical figures have inspired you and why?
Hypatia, Sophie Germain, Emmy Noether - for proving, three times over, that mathematics does not care about the gender of its servants. Hypatia again - for being a female teacher, intellectual, and Pagan in the early Christian world. Gauss - for being the greatest mathematician who ever set writing implement to surface. Abigail Adams - for lobbying for women's rights during the Founding. Benjamin Franklin - for being an intellectual, a scientist, a philosopher, a politician, a businessman, and a rake, and founding a nation that could house such a person. Susan B. Anthony, and all the other suffragettes - for securing the Vote.
27. How do we work for justice in the world? How do you define "justice"?
Justice is, really, undoing the wrongs we deliberately do each other. My personal fight for justice is to educate all comers - rich, poor, whatever ethnicity or nationality or creed - and to try to do so equally well, or at least as equally as possible given initial ability. To a lesser extent, it's to try and fight the institutionalized injustices in the educational system, but that's a much more long-term goal.
28. What issues are important to you? What are issues you are passionate about?
(This was originally two different questions. I merged them because my answers are the same for both - I can't find an issue important and not be passionate about it.)
Universal education, feminism, religious freedom, freedom of speech/the press, freedom of assembly, environmentalism, sexism and gender issues, freedom of sexuality, ageism (both high and low), ableism, anti-intellectualism, poverty/global hunger, the corporatization of the world economy, wise use of technology, racism
29. Why is it important to support same-sex marriages?
It's essentially sexist to say that two people can obtain a legal benefit simply by being of different genders. However, I see gay marriage as being the first large brick taken out of a huge wall of anti-queer and anti-sex issues, which the gay rights, feminist, and BDSM movements have been chipping at for a while now. Once we've addressed gay marriage, we can take a closer look at the institution of marriage itself, at our ridiculous binary view of sexuality, at polyamory and other responsible nonmonogamies, our family structures, our cultural fear of female and male-submissive sexualities, and so on.
30. How can we lessen violence in our world and violence in our hearts?
Oooo-eee. Tough one. I think a lot of the violence in my own personal emotional life is about rejecting things in other people that I either recognize and dislike in myself, or that are utterly foreign to me. The second is easier to manage - changing revulsion to curiosity isn't that difficult. The first is harder, and probably has to be healed in me before it can be healed between me and the Other. (If I were an extrovert, I might reverse that, though.) In the world - teaching the kids who have no other ways how to resolve disputes in nonviolent ways is a start. It's tougher at high school than at elementary, I think.
31. How do we celebrate our community, our lives and our passions?
My primary celebration for all of these is CMA, for better or for worse.
32. How might we change the world for the better?
My hope is that I'm doing so by teaching kids to think, and (secondarily) to understand mathematics in ways that will help them later in their lives. I also hope that interacting with me also helps my friends define what they want for themselves, or what they are, for themselves in ways that they wouldn't have felt or thought of without me.
1. Faith: How would you define or describe your "religious faith"?
Ugh. I hate the word "faith" in this context. I don't believe in anything that I haven't experienced; I just have weirder experiences than most. For me, talking about my "faith" in my religion, or my gods, is the same as my talking about my "faith" in my friends - that I believe that they'll be there for me, not that I trust them blindly or think they're infallible.
2. How has it changed over the years?
Quite a bit. I was raised by a Lutheran mother who started out conservative and got more and more fundamentalist over time and a Catholic father who started out practically agnostic and has ended up a moderate. While I attended both churches growing up, I was deliberately instructed only in my mother's faith, despite finding my father's religious cultus more interesting and more aesthetically pleasing. At the same time, I always followed the sun and the moon, and the changing of the Earth. I didn't realize this made me a heretic until I went through fundie Lutheran confirmation class. I stayed a heretic until I ran into Paganism in college (thanks,
moontyger!) and began a slow but liberating relabeling of my worldview.3. What part of faith and religion is fun to you?
Hmm. There's another dangerous word. I'm dysthymic, so "fun" isn't a concept that really holds much meaning for me. However, "all acts of love and pleasure are Her rituals." Any of the rare times I really am enjoying myself, whether it be in intelligent conversation, good food, or sex, then the Goddess is manifest in me.
4. How and where can we find humor in our daily lives?
Well, that's what the Spouse is for, isn't it? No seriously, my sense of humor is fairly dry and mildly dark. (Probably related to the dysthymia again.) For me, wordplay - especially inadvertent wordplay - and irony provide most of my humor.
5. Hope: What gives you hope?
Seriously? My greatest source of hope is entropy. Every structure eventually falls apart. Nothing harmful is so monumental, so monolithic, that it cannot be torn down and changed. Similarly, nothing good is so powerful that it will maintain itself without our intervention. We have the opportunity to re-make the world in a better image if for no reason other than that the world must be constantly re-made.
6. What does it mean to "live out your dreams"?
In the general sense, it means to actively work towards a conscious goal and make progress towards it. In my personal life, it means to become the best teacher I can possibly be, to motivate my kids to do their own best, and to continually educate myself about my profession and about everything related to it (which, after all, is pretty much everything - math underlies the universe).
7. What social justice issues are important to you and why?
Lots, but the most important are: universal education, because I honestly believe in the wealfulness of knowledge the way most people believe in the wealfulness of wealth; feminism, because the oppression of the half of the human race that has the larger impact on its children is clearly harmful for all involved - even the boy-children who will grow up to do the oppressing; and freedom of (or, in the appropriate cases, from) religion, because as a religious minority I can see how corrupting it is for a religion to be officially supported by the state
8. How much can you compromise before you lose some self-respect?
None. Of course, that's impossible, so there's a certain amount of loss of self-respect that's inevitable.
9. What is your mission in life?
To Teach, to Mourn, and to Take Care.
10. What mothers in your life or in history do you remember with gratitude, honor, respect or appreciation?
Well, my own mother, of course, as well as both my grandmothers, and my spear-side great-grandmother (who was almost an extra grandmother to me). The Great Mother as an archetype, and all of the Mother-Goddesses who draw from that archetype (including, much as I hate to admit it some days, Mary and Eve). My Matron goddess, who is sometimes named Mother Huber. Mama Carter, a high-school teacher of mine who is one of the largest reasons I decided to teach, and to teach math. Eleanor of Aquitaine. Anne Boleyn. Boudicia.
11. What does the word "God" mean to you?
With the capital letter and no article, it doesn't mean much at all to me, anymore, except that symbol that so many people use to repress others. With the cap and the definite article - "the God" - it means the sort of ur-spirit of Order in the universe, the Other to the Goddess, Chaos, Self. Without a capital letter, and with the indefinite article - "a god" - it means any one of many beings who are conscious and connected to some aspect of existence, who interact with human beings in mutually enriching (and sometimes not-so-enriching or not-so-mutual) ways.
12. Is God in nature, people, music, creativity or where?
Yes to all of the above. I'm a panentheist; the gods and goddesses are present in all things, though they are not the sum of all things.
13. What is the "divine" or "sacred"? And what is its relevance to your life?
Ah, two different questions. The "divine," for me, is whatever there is in something that beckons one to grok more fully - what calls to sentience and interaction, and nurtures them. Since I am a lover of learning and knowledge, of experience and emotion and intuition, it pretty much drives my life. The "sacred," on the other hand, is that which is set aside solely for the use of the divine, or (more often) for a specific god, goddess, pantheon, ritual, or cultus. I have a lot of sacred things in my life, but they're (naturally) an extra part, over and above my normal life.
14. What is the "beloved"?
That which is not me, yet calls me to interact with it and understand it fully. That which I care for. That for which its well-being impacts my own.
15. What answers to you seek?
As many as I can find. Both the answers and the quest to find them are what I'm all about.
16. What role does music play in your life?
It's one of my better ways of understanding things. I'm something of a synesthete, and quite a bit of visual/spatial information works better for me if I can grasp the "underlying music" for it. It's also one of my gates into the realm of the kinesthetic; I can dance myself into relation to my sensory-self when I can't inhabit it in many other ways. Dance and song (along with sex) are also my primary methods of worship.
17. What types of music do you enjoy and why?
Pretty much everything except for country, new-school hip-hop, and "new" R&B. (I like old-school hip-hop and R&B just fine.) I have a special relationship to music that has a good relationship with its lyrics or that otherwise has "content;" ambient music for the sake of having music in the room annoys me and seems disrespectful to the music and the space both.
18. What brings us together?
Common interests, common needs, common desires, or common enemies.
19. What is the value of community in your life?
A hard question for an introvert. For me, community is largely the system by which we build on each other's knowledge, experiences, and discoveries. It's both a support system for those who are new at whatever the topic or skill is, and the method by which we move beyond inventing the wheel in each generation. It also structures how we interact - which is both a good thing and a bad thing. For kids whom I've known for three years, is the correct structure still "teacher/student," or has it moved on to "mentor/protege"? Will it ever be appropriate for it to become "friends"? If so, when?
20. What fears to you have that you wish you didn't have?
Well, I'm working on not fearing Fire anymore. It's clearly still going to be a long journey, but it's been interesting so far.
I would like to not fear authority figures, and I'm not sure I can work on eliminating two fears at once.
21. What is our responsibility to the children of our community?
To not teach them bullshit. Sorry, that's getting a little ahead - to teach them, first of all, how to learn and how to think critically. To show them, by example, and teach them explicitly how to feel critically and adapt to what they're feeling authentically. To let them experience the world, while at the same time protecting them from its dangerous elements. To make sure everything that we explicitly teach them is as unbiased and as accurate as possible. To not talk down to them. And, finally, to let them grow up without making it a tragedy. Innocence should never be deliberately taken, but it is meant to be lost.
22. How do you feel about proselytizing?
First of all, it's unethical. Meddling in someone else's Will is dangerous and harmful. Secondly, it's probably unavoidable, at least to a certain extent. Living your life according to your religious and/or ethical values, and practicing either your religion or a lack thereof, is going to rub off on at the very least the members of your household, especially your children, if you have any. I don't have a good solution, although making sure one's kids are exposed to many different forms of religion and non-religion growing up - and good role models of them, if you can find them - is probably the best solution.
23. How do you approach life and faith with discernment? First, what is "discernment"?
Discernment is just a fancy way of saying "critical thinking," IMHO. Not that one should automatically disbelieve everything, but everything should be weighted against prior experience, logic, and what you've already learned about the way the universe works.
24. What are your theories or beliefs about what happens after we die?
These are purely theories, as I either haven't been there yet or I don't remember it clearly. I have enough fragmentary evidence in favor of reincarnation that I currently prefer that over soul-composting or a simple afterlife. I'm pretty sure we don't just "go out like candles," as Lewis Carol once put it. I certainly have no evidence at all that Hell or anything like it exists. I've met ghosts, but I'm not at all sure they're sentient - more like impressions or old echoes of a person.
25. Are we together to change the world for each other?
Yes. What else would we be doing? If I don't change a person's world, hopefully for the better, then what's the point?
26. What historical figures have inspired you and why?
Hypatia, Sophie Germain, Emmy Noether - for proving, three times over, that mathematics does not care about the gender of its servants. Hypatia again - for being a female teacher, intellectual, and Pagan in the early Christian world. Gauss - for being the greatest mathematician who ever set writing implement to surface. Abigail Adams - for lobbying for women's rights during the Founding. Benjamin Franklin - for being an intellectual, a scientist, a philosopher, a politician, a businessman, and a rake, and founding a nation that could house such a person. Susan B. Anthony, and all the other suffragettes - for securing the Vote.
27. How do we work for justice in the world? How do you define "justice"?
Justice is, really, undoing the wrongs we deliberately do each other. My personal fight for justice is to educate all comers - rich, poor, whatever ethnicity or nationality or creed - and to try to do so equally well, or at least as equally as possible given initial ability. To a lesser extent, it's to try and fight the institutionalized injustices in the educational system, but that's a much more long-term goal.
28. What issues are important to you? What are issues you are passionate about?
(This was originally two different questions. I merged them because my answers are the same for both - I can't find an issue important and not be passionate about it.)
Universal education, feminism, religious freedom, freedom of speech/the press, freedom of assembly, environmentalism, sexism and gender issues, freedom of sexuality, ageism (both high and low), ableism, anti-intellectualism, poverty/global hunger, the corporatization of the world economy, wise use of technology, racism
29. Why is it important to support same-sex marriages?
It's essentially sexist to say that two people can obtain a legal benefit simply by being of different genders. However, I see gay marriage as being the first large brick taken out of a huge wall of anti-queer and anti-sex issues, which the gay rights, feminist, and BDSM movements have been chipping at for a while now. Once we've addressed gay marriage, we can take a closer look at the institution of marriage itself, at our ridiculous binary view of sexuality, at polyamory and other responsible nonmonogamies, our family structures, our cultural fear of female and male-submissive sexualities, and so on.
30. How can we lessen violence in our world and violence in our hearts?
Oooo-eee. Tough one. I think a lot of the violence in my own personal emotional life is about rejecting things in other people that I either recognize and dislike in myself, or that are utterly foreign to me. The second is easier to manage - changing revulsion to curiosity isn't that difficult. The first is harder, and probably has to be healed in me before it can be healed between me and the Other. (If I were an extrovert, I might reverse that, though.) In the world - teaching the kids who have no other ways how to resolve disputes in nonviolent ways is a start. It's tougher at high school than at elementary, I think.
31. How do we celebrate our community, our lives and our passions?
My primary celebration for all of these is CMA, for better or for worse.
32. How might we change the world for the better?
My hope is that I'm doing so by teaching kids to think, and (secondarily) to understand mathematics in ways that will help them later in their lives. I also hope that interacting with me also helps my friends define what they want for themselves, or what they are, for themselves in ways that they wouldn't have felt or thought of without me.
