EARL 10/5/05

*clip-art from off the web. please e-mail me if you know who it should be credited to. thank-you*

I took a collage class at a community college a long time ago taught by my friend Ernie. It was a fun class. Most of us knew each other. I was able to bring along a boy that I knew named Earl.

Earl was a bright child who was always in trouble in school. Earl was fascinated by horror films and cult classics. He knew lots about them. He knew when they were produced, the actors, story lines, dialogues, and directors. His teachers only saw a kid who wrote and drew his own horror stories-- which were, to say the least, bloody and unsettling to the average schoolmarm.

Earl pushed the limits. Earl was kicks. To me and the rest of the adults in the class, Earl was brilliance in the making. Earl at the age of nine was full of ambition. He knew that he was going to be a movie director of horror films. It was a genre that he loved.

I know that one day I will be watching a movie directed by Earl.

-sapphoq

CELTIC NEW YEAR "satanic"???

* borrowed from an anti-halloween website which did not credit its source. if you know who should be credited for this image,
please send me an e-mail. thank-you*


I belong to a PAN group on yahell. One of the other members of the PAN group who is also a blogging buddy on " the other blog " sent me some links from d-moz. The links were all to anti-halloween articles written by literalistic christians.

Y

I am a witch. Although I respect the rights of people to write such inacccurate nonsense, I also reserve my right to freedom of expression. Thus, I will point out some of the fallacies that the d-moz articles portray. I will also give a more accurate representation of my beliefs and the beliefs of many of my witch and pagan friends.

The biggest misconception is that witches worship satan. Almost all of us don't. Almost all of us don't believe in the personification of evil.

I have at least one man of my acquaintance who is a satanist. He has the right to believe in satan and to practice his religion as he sees fit. In spite of the objections of many witches and pagans, he also has the right to call himself a satanic witch if he wishes to. We do not hold the copyright for the word witch.

None of us sacrifice children or babies to any divine icon or deity.

Some people I know who practice ifa, yoruba, or santeria do sacrifice animals. The animals they sacrifice are cooked and feasted upon afterwards.
Say what you wish about sacrificing animals. I hasten to point out to you that it is far more honest to look a chicken into the eyes and say, "I'm going to eat you," than to buy packaged meat from the supermarket.

Y

Samhain is the beginning of the celtic new year. We celebrate the seasons and mid-seasons because our lives are intimately tied up with the cycle of nature. Because we hold life as sacred, we become intricately woven into the web of life. Because we cherish the memories of our physical and spiritual ancestors, many of us recall the legacies that the ancestors have left us during samhain.

Y

Many of you believe that halloween was first a pagan holiday. Many holidays that christians today celebrate were in fact pagan holidays. The unholy roman empire and the missionaries combined our holy days with yours, in order to make christianity (the new religion) more palatable to the common people.

Your ancestors burned down our sacred groves and built churches there. That is where the saying, "Everything under the altar is profane" came from. I mourn the burning of the sacred groves. I also mourn the inherent trechery of intellectual dishonesty.


You co-opted many of your so-called christian holidays from our people. Having co-opted them, you spread lies about our beliefs and practices. You condemn us with one breath and then christianize our holy days with another. Of
course, you are free to celebrate these holidays or not as you choose. That is neither here not there to me personally.

Please DON'T teach your children to hate what they don't understand. DON'T teach your children to judge our children by allowing them to post names of the 'unsaved' on a large cross during a prayer meeting held on public school ground. DON'T teach your children that our childrens' lives are less valuable than theirs. This hate has got to stop.

No longer will we tolerate being left out. No longer will we passively accept the suicides of our pagan [and g/l/b/t -- pagan or non-pagan] teens. No longer will we sit back while the rest of you attempt to dictate your belief in one god or in a christian nation to us. Even if the untied states started off as a christian nation [which she most assuredly did not, as our founders were deists and not christians] that does not mean that we should be a christian nation-- or a theocracy-- today.

Y


We don't seek converts. We don't want your children. We don't expect to be subjected to harassment for our beliefs or our way of life.

Y

All of us are human beings trying to live on this battered planet without killing each other. Please take that thought with you to church this sunday.

-sapphoq

CRABBY? WHO'S CRABBY? 10/2/05

* from http://www.clipanimations.com *



Funny how many people think that our human ancestors spent lots of time running after or cowering from the dinosaurs. The fossil record shows that they did not live during the same time period.

It's easy to blame the media-- unrealistic cartoons, movies, and other teevee shows, or even schools and science classes. And now even our president wants children to learn about "intelligent design" in science classes and disdains evolution as "only a theory." What we need most of we don't often get taught in schools or even at home. And we have become lazy -- we no longer wish to be bogged down by doing our own research.

And what is that thing that we need? Critical thinking. Critical thinking might teach us that styrofoam cups of coffee from the drive-thru usually [and hopefully] contain H-O-T liquids. Critical thinking might also teach us that if something is too good to be true, it usually is. And it might even teach us how to examine various claims for how tenuous a hold they have on reality.

Reality-- now there's a word. Some of us were "taught" that reality is subjective, that no objective reality is possible. Some of us were taught that "it's all good" and that "all paths lead to onegod" or even that "all the gods are one god and all the goddesses are one goddess" [that would be "all paths lead to onegod" with a pagan bent].

We have become a nation of non-thinkers.

Me-- crabby? No way.
-sapphoq