Long ramblings on science, paranormality, the future of the Catholic church, and other stuff

"Well, this is going to take a long time, so you may want to get some snacks." - Cybernetic Ghost of Christmas Past from the Future, Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

Seriously. Go get some snacks. And something to drink. I’ve been typing this up off and on for almost a month, and it kinda got more verbose than I’d planned, and I don't feel like messing with it any further so it's going up. Apologies in advance for the freethought rambling; I haven't gone on for this long in a while, but there's a fair amount of interconnectivity, so there.

So. Ratzi retiring. What a bit of interesting history in the making. Anyone wondering about the whole process of what happens in transition can get a good overview with current players mentioned at this link.

A lot of stuff has been going around about how he’s been an ineffective pope, how he hasn’t done enough for those abused by priests, blah blah yada. That’s all true, but Palpatine is pretty old. At least he’s not stubbornly staying put like JPII did. I admire dedication to the death, but ministers can still minister outside of the job of ministry, and that’s all the papal position is, really – a position. Whoever’s in the role of pope is first and foremost a priest. Maybe Ratzi just wants to retire and kick back with his pretty manservant. More power to that hypocrite if so.

Practicing what I preach via plastic.

Quick context for the rest of this post: I was baptized Catholic as an infant but mom took me out when I was 5 or 6 so we could support one of her friends who started a church. I grew up with her going to a non-denominational church, my dad going to a Catholic church, me going to an Assemblies of God church since I had friends who went there, and going a few times to both of those plus a Kingdom Hall with my Jehovah’s Witnesses relatives. I have a ton of friends who follow some form of organized religion (not necessarily Christian) or somewhat organized spirituality, and just as many friends who are totally atheist / agnostic / secular humanist. My husband is very well versed in scriptures of many faiths (we have a nice collection in our library), is a preacher’s kid, and lives in tune with Wakan Tanka, but is most assuredly an avowed agnostic. We have some different perspectives regarding some spiritual things since I’m an avowed pantheist, but it’s all good. Technically, I’m more of a Zen Catholic who does not practice much at all, but I consider myself a pantheist because my definition of God is everything in the multiverses that we do and do not yet know about, and my church is nature. For what it’s worth, I’m also a card-carrying ordained Spiritual Humanist because I have no problems holding dichotomies. I also need to renew my JREF membership one of these years.

For those who don’t know how my weird mind works, I’m definitely a skeptic but mysterious and paranormal things fascinate me. I had a somewhat mysterious experience while waking up on Christmas morning one year, and I’d gone through RCIA within the year or two before to get back into being a good Catholic. In researching Catholic this and that, I came across information about stigmata, and reading about Catherine of Siena having invisible stigmata fascinated me, since that Christmas morning I’d dreamed about religiousy Christmasy things (probably from wanting to go to midnight mass but not going) and woke up with pain in the palms of my hands and feet. It didn’t go away after a few months, and I knew there had to be a scientific-based explanation for it, so I learned a lot about how the mind can create things that aren’t there (like false memories), how emotions can affect the physical body, kundalini rising, stigmata in history, everything. I also tried to figure out what it meant to be Catholic (wow is that varied) and reconcile that to what I was experiencing since I had no other context for it.

Long story short, 11 or so years later I found that it had to do with a severe deficiency in B12 and that I had been experiencing the related peripheral neuropathy. What kills me is that I could’ve found out after only 5 years of not knowing. A naturopath started me on B12 sublingual to help me build back my system after each round of chemo for breast cancer, and she was expecting me to feel really awesome after a few weeks. Nope. Nothing. She was astonished. She thought out loud, saying it could be due to a B12 deficiency, but then immediately dismissed that since B12 deficiencies of that level were rare. Heh. I’m a magnet / poster child for very rare things happening, so I should have figured it out then. (I blame chemo brain for the oversight.) Years later, when my primary care physician’s assistant checked my levels, she found the deficiency and started me on B12 shots. I ended up having to have 1,000 cc IM something like twice a week or each week, then every two weeks for over a year. Normally I would’ve gone to a monthly schedule after three months if memory’s correct, but I noticed involuntary eye twitching right before my biweekly injection, and found out about that involuntary twitching being a sign of possible deficiency, so just kept with it. I got to feeling better, but to feel more “normal” I take 2,000 IU microlingual methylcobalamin each morning, and I still do 1 cc liquid cyanocobalamin for when I know I’m running low, like after getting nitrous at the dentist’s office or while recovering from a cold. Incidentally, it was not fun to personally learn that liquid B12 has an expiration date for a reason.

So yeah, f yeah, science! There is always something scientific for everything mysterious and paranormal, and to me, anything genuinely paranormal just hasn’t been explained by science yet. Take intuition. There’s a fair amount of woo attached to a simple human sense, and that’s just so strange to me. Some people are more in touch with their perceptive abilities than others are, just like some people are supertasters,have absolute pitch, great echolocation, etc. Intuition is just another regular sense.

I’m also very aware of how people use mysterious events to try to control the behavior of others. When I heard the breaking news about the pope resigning, because of my fascination with the mysterious and paranormal, I naturally thought about the Third Secret of Fatima. (I also thought about the whole list of popes prophesied by St. Malachy thing, but I’ll get to that later.) Sure, most people will dismiss the Third Secret as a bunch of malarkey, but I’ve been intrigued with how Joey Ratz has involved himself with it.

Long story short, back in the day, God’s mama told some kids that some crap was gonna go down, and that the guys heading Holy Mother Church needed to pay attention to it and maybe say some prayers and live better so that it wouldn’t be so bad. The guys in charge were like, nope!, for whatever reasons (likely power plays and other blah). Some of the guys have tried to cover things up and misdirect others about what the crap is all about. There are a lot of conspiracy theories about the Third Secret and the “grain of salt” perspective works well in reading them; some history can be found here,  and this page has kind of a nice overview of some things. (Personally, I can see the making known of the scope of abuse issues as the big huge destructive thing that helps with renewal of the overall organization into something better, but some people aren’t into that.) Some guys have laid hints down throughout time in order for there to be a bread crumb trail to follow in case a course correction is needed. Ratzi seems to be one of those latter guys. As Cardinal, he was kinda involved with stating somethings about the Third Secret for the record, and as Pope, he’s mentioned that the whole shebang isn’tconcluded yet. 

So what’s the crap? Basically there’s corruption in high places in the church, and that’s a Bad Thing. *shrug* Having worked at the chancery of a Catholic diocese for five years, I know some things about the behind-the-scenes mindsets, and that perspective is totally right on.  Totally solid. I could see compromises in not just business decisions but in overall Vatican orders barked at us. Rewording the Mass in English to make it more true to the literal Latin still grates on my nerves, but that’s a personal preference (shared by some of the priests I talked with while trying to get their feedback on the then-suggested translations; not all evolution in theological understanding is good evolution, but meh). I’m not schooled in theology so I leave that up to the experts, but I’m wrinkling my nose as I do.

As far as internal strife, yeah. The tension between Bishops Grahmann and Galante was so thick some days it was like molasses to walk through, but that situation was a bit weird to begin with. (Normally, another bishop is brought in when one’s about to leave, but the one there wasn’t leaving, and so the other ended up being transferred some years later… yeah, awkward.) That tension, along with the molestation madness exploding, along with there being a bankruptcy plan on the shelf due to lawsuits against the diocese for local abuse issues, was enough to make me consider leaving the liturgical work that I really really really loved doing. Not only was I using my music education degree, I was all up ons with ritual. I loves me some ritual! And browsing catalogs full of vestments and shiny communion vessels and furniture…. Good times, good times. I should’ve left it sooner than I did, but I’m still grateful for the health insurance benefits I had through the diocese while I was still there, ‘cos unexpected triple negative breast cancer at age 30 was a bitch. It was even harder to see two occasional coworkers from there pass away from breast cancer. Both were older than I was; one had the aggressive form I did and the other had the usual kind that came back and metastatized within two years after having a mastectomy. The survivor’s guilt was pretty horrible.

It seems like the big thing about the Third Secret from this and from other tidbits scattered across the interweb is that because of the corruption of the church from within, Catholics everywhere are losing their faith. Some guy alluded to the loss of faith of a continent being worse than a ton of people being annihilated or something like that. This whole notion of people falling away from churchy things is really kind of a duh nowadays though, and not just in the Catholic realm.

Hold that thought while I mention the Malachy thing. Another long story short (did you get some snacks?), some guy allegedly called a dragon to weave a mist, no, wait. So this other guy wrote some buzzwords for all the popes who’d pope over the next few hundred years, and in some cases they’ve been eerily matchy-matchy (especially with JPII). We’re at the end of the list, and some Catholics are all, “this is the end!” while other Catholics are all, “there could be any number of popes between the current Doctor and his last incarnation, and the number could be totally different now since River Song used the rest of hers to bring Eleven back”…. oh wait, uh…. Well, some say there could be a gap between the next to last pope on Malachy’s list and the for reals last pope. Whatevs. There's been recent talk about it again, anyway.

Although I’m fascinated by prophecies and would love to be the Oracle of Delphi for Hallowe’en someday (someone get me the funny gases for authenticity, or maybe just some absinthe), my opinion of them is best stated by Londo Mollari (Babylon 5, "The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari"):

“Prophecy is a guess that comes true. When it doesn't, it's a metaphor. You could put a gun to your head tomorrow and pull the trigger, and then the dream is just a dream and the prophecy is just a metaphor… and so are you."

With the freshness of the Mayan non-apocalypse of 2012 in mind, and the buzzwords of end times and penitence and all that jazz, and with the power plays of the bishops and Vatican and Third Secret in mind, you know what? Ratzi is right.

Seriously. You heard me. Ratzi is right. And one (like me) doesn’t have to like him in the least to see that, with the concern about sensationalism. The whole thing with atheism as an evil taking over the world though… yeah, that’s not. It’s just life happening. Nothing to see here. Move along. Of course abusers molesting children is sensationalist. Of course people who have had faith are losing it. These things are connected in some cases, but in many many many other cases, atheism is just the natural evolution of seeing what religion is supposed to do and epically failing at it. I have friends who were devout Christians in a past life but have dropped at least some of their beliefs because of the power of education. Some still minister in churchy ways because they genuinely want to help others still, especially with when deconstruction of faith happens, and more power to them. That’s a tough path to go on.

See, in my opinion (which is considered a bona fide fact by many), religion is supposed to be like training wheels. You learn the basics, then ride however you want, AFTER you learn the consequences of what might happen if you’re not responsible with protecting yourself. At that point, you’re supposed to learn on your own about what’s best for you. Organized religion is nothing more than “How to be a Good Human 101, now with character stories!” It’s like, you know how those 613 laws in the Old Testament are still followed by some Jews but are not followed by Christians living a New Testament life? What works for some doesn’t work for others. Some people need more structure than others in order to live a good, decent, human life, with continual learning on how to best interact with fellow humans. Some people live best in a comfort zone of a tight-knit supportive community that doesn’t get shaken up by new ideas, and as long as they’re not hurting anyone, more power to them too.

The kicker is, there are a LOT of people who hide behind religion and use it as a shield to cover up whatever crap they know they’re doing. You know, like ultra-religious conservative politicians who want to legislate body parts of others without even having any real education on how said parts work, or even having said parts, because that’s what Jeeeeesus would want. Like well-meaning people who are complete bigots and racists because they don’t know any better, because they were taught a certain way and are unable and/or unwilling to think for themselves and evolve. Like those who refuse to see things like gay marriage as a civil rights issue completely outside of any religious context.

The real kicker is, most atheists are way more ethical, generous, and better people than a lot of people involved with religion. I’m not saying that everyone in a faith system is doing it wrong. Far from it. I’m just saying that religion is just one way to learn how to be a good person. Some people don’t need the threat of anything divine in order to be a good person. That’s just how it is. There are also assholes in every group, and that goes for atheist circles as well as Christian circles, but thankfully there are many more good people than asses.

So. To recap, or something, since I’m still rambling: Sensationalism with loss of faith is really nothing big these days. In the early twentieth century, yeah, that would be a huge deal, but not now. Damn hippies in the 60s, right? *smirk* Loss of faith a natural thing that happens to a lot of people who grew up with serious church attending and holy book reading and giving of money and all that. The more one learns about a faith, and about other faiths, and about non-faiths, the more it’s obvious that religion is mainly used to keep a segment of people under some sort of control. Analogies of ALMIGHTY GAWWWWWD and the Tooth Fairy and Santa are totally right on, and one doesn’t have to like it in the least for it to be true. And it’s definitely true.

Pantheist me still finds wonder and mystery and a sense of divinity in nature and in science, in how we humans connect with each other across time and space, and in how we interact and continue to grow during life. Evolution is natural. It’d just be nice for the science to catch up more with some of the seemingly paranormal stuff, like intuition. Humans have way more than 5 senses (some say we have like 21 or so), and there’s no reason we need to keep limiting ourselves just because some people insist on outdated information. Living with outdated information is like adults still participating as a child would in children’s church, and it’s completely unnecessary and sometimes dangerous. Someone might try to take advantage of you, knowing that you like living in cushy touchy feely certainties (that aren’t really certainties, but who’s going to tell you that? Nobody, that’s who).

Evolve, if you already aren't. You'll thank yourself for it later.

"My wedding ring is off. Woo hoo!!" and other recent thoughts

Don't panic - I'm still married to the same guy (and if all goes well I will be getting something very shiny on our 11th wedding anniversary next weekend....unless I cave in and go before then for a test drive and the car dude I've been emailing with for two months smooth talks me into getting what I want to get that day but I'mma be so busy I don't know, and this weekend we're busy when they're open and they're closed when we're not and I'd rather have hubby there for "guy presence" in case the dealership guys try to take advantage of my fragile womanity... woo, tangent).

See, the Weight Watchers thing has been going fairly well, and after 120 days I've been plateauing at the 16 pounds lost mark. The last few weeks have been like .6 pounds down, .2 pounds down, 1 pound up, .6 pounds down, but I was sick one week and overcompensated last weekend due to having an appetite again, but I'm trending back down so hooray there. I've lost an inch off my belly, 3 inches off my hips, 1.25 inches off my thighs, 1/2 inch off my chest, a cup size off my boobs, 1/4 inch off my neck, and NOTHING off my arms. GRR STABBY with the arms but overall, not too shabby.

So yeah, the other night I was able to remove my wedding ring for the first time in 3 years, and I was pretty thrilled about it. I thoroughly cleaned it and noted that the inscription I got on the inside about 3 1/2 years ago was totally different than the one I thought I'd gotten (I didn't match hubby's inner inscription at all and I thought I did - whoops). Naturally, I put it back on after 5 minutes because the last time this happened, my fingers swelled up again, and sure enough, I can't get it off now, no matter how much I try to shrink my fingers with icy coldness. It's nice to know that the body is rearranging the real estate here and there, anyway.

In other news, I need to catch up with a lot of things, and I've been pondering about several things recently....being a different person over time, why rules exist, and how I'm going to branch out the brand of me. Branching out is pretty much figured out - one branch for health and wellness things, one branch for ottery things, one branch for writing things, one branch for photography things, and one branch for my general weirdness. I want to do some pretty expansive things in each of these areas, and I have a road map for where I want to go in each place. Laying down foundational groundwork has been taking up a lot of my energy the last few years, but I'm about at the point where I'm ready to cement all the bricks and cobblestones together and get to building up already. It feels like birthing a whole family at once.

Thinking about how people evolve over time has been intriguing me lately. Tonight hubby and I went to the place I worked at a year ago (he had an artist meeting for this neat commission he's doing), and thinking about how different life was and I was a year ago made me smile. I felt like crap from the Sjogren's, fibro, endo, not working, and being frustrated with the SSDI application process, and I was so grateful to get a church gig filing music and helping with orchestra books for 5 hours a week. Now, I've been able to work at least 40 hours a week since February/March (when I started on Deplin and Savella), I feel much better with the current twice-a-day drug parties (with the current prescription meds and supplements), and I haven't bothered to worry about disability since being able to work again (btw getting lots of health records for the third application round after being denied twice was pretty amazeballs).

Recently I thought about the notion that each cell in a person's body replenishes at such a rate that we all have a new body every 7 years, and thinking back to where I was 7, 14, and 21 years ago really wowed me, with noting aspects of my personality that have changed and aspects that have stayed the same and deepened. 21 years ago I was a freshman in college.14 years ago I was going from a broken engagement to another relationship. 7 years ago I went from the field of Catholic liturgy into the field of hospital-related disaster preparedness. Everything that I've been has been burbling and simmering into a lovely stew of sorts, and I feel almost congealed enough to be put in a mold and cool and set like flan. Except instead of being flan, I'd be building on all the foundations I've laid along the different branches of my life path. (Also, I would eat the shit out of the flan before it fully set. I'm just sayin'.)

The rules thing has been turning over in my brain for the last few days. Hubby said that rules are for when there are problems. He thinks I have a problem with being on the computer a lot. I have made it known on Facebook that I have a Sims 3 addiction, but I'm not so addicted that I'm playing 24/7 and forgetting to be hygenic and losing my job. I instituted a rule for myself that I won't play start playing Sims 3 after 10pm on a school night because I will lose track of time while playing and it'll be 2am before I know it. (Had to put in that clarification because this only applies to starting to play, not actually playing past 10. I was trying to hurry while writing this.) I usually don't get tired until about 1:15 am anyway but I'm like that whether I play Sims or not, so really, not a solely Sims-related problem, and I haven't broken the rule at all. Thing is, with being an introvert, I require more alone time than most people to replenish my energy (hubby's even more of an introvert so he gets that), and with having plenty of chronic autoimmune crap to deal with after I get done being distracted from how I feel with the mindbogglingly amazing days I have at work, I require even more down time than before, so hey, I tend to do what I'm doing for a good long while, and it happens to be computery things, whether Sims or photography stuff or reading online or Facebooking. Wow that was a long sentence.

He has a rule of "no Oreos in the house" because he will eat them all and then throw them up. That is a rule because of a problem. I maintain that rules can exist without necessarily having a problem attached. Like, there are road rules for people because established standards of how to do things is important. Yes some people have problems associated with driving, but that's not why the rules exist. The rules exist for safety more than they exist for problems. (Well, that's how it seems to be to me, anyway.) Weight Watchers has the Points Plus system for people who have a problem with food, BUT it can also be seen as a lifestyle change by people of any weight, so it's really the same as adopting new established standards for safety (health) reasons. Am I bullshitting myself with thinking this way? I'm not sure. I'm food enabled (breakfast and steak and chocolate and Chinese and Mediterranean especially), but I make better choices now and the effect is pleasing me and making me healthier. I also know musicians who know the rules of music theory and proceed to break them to... still... create music. A former occasional coworker of mine taught me to "know the rules, use the rules" and that's served me well a lot of times. So rules... are problems necessary to have them? I don't think so, but that's just, like my opinion, maaan.

Ishri Devi with her pregnant unicorn Shanti.
I love this game.

Ooh, it'll be 10pm soon. Off to the land of Appaloosa Plains, where the Sim I'm currently playing with (an incarnation of Lakshmi) is expecting one of her unicorns to foal any minute now. The foal may or may not be a unicorn as the father is a regular horse, but I'll see soon enough.

UPDATE - I know the  adage of "rules are made to be broken" is held by some people. Breaking rules usually results in non-pleasant consequences. I am totally okay with breaking SOME rules if the consequences are such that I can deal. Like, uh, starting to play Sims 3 at 10:03 last night, breaking my rule for the first time, knowing the consequence would be me starting my next day with a lack of sleep. Sure enough...but I'll deal. Because I'm a big girl. And I know better. :) Also, the foal was a unicorn, and since I'm going to be picky with breeding for this game, the unicorn foal went back to the wild (disappearing from the game forever). I have one Sim with 4 horsey creatures and only 6 beings are allowed in the household, so it's breed until I get a foal that I like, then put one regular horsey parent up for adoption so I can breed another foal, etc. So now I've put one up for adoption, adopted a different horse, and will be playing with breeding next time too. But as Carl says, "It don't matter. None of this matters."

Let the dead rest in peace, dammit. Zombies suck.

I did not know typing my thoughts could make this happen.
(Silverlight has been crashing on me for the last 12,000 years
without fail, so this is definitely not from that. Sigh.)

You know when you think about contacting someone from your past because doing so would be very relevant to your very hopeful immediate future job, even though you haven't spoken in years and the other person likely hates you because of not understanding "friend trying to help you not screw up your life even worse" and you shouldn't have to explain that but then you do, and as soon as you finish typing your thoughts you see your computer screen turn green and pixellate, and it locks up so much that when it's restarted you get a notice that your overclocking failed so you have to go into the BIOS to fix things? Yeah, I hate it when that happens.

As I'm a pantheist (Zen Pantheist Skeptic more than anything else, even though I love me some Catholic liturgy), I think I'll take this as a subtle hint from the universe to keep not talking to him, even though this job I want would entail working closely with someone in a very similar way to how we'd worked together, and I want him to give me proper props like he said he'd do but I kinda want to make sure but now the making sure is not gonna happen because my computer is a bitch to begin with and I don't want to aggravate her further. Balls.

The universe tends to get my attention in a big way when I think about being a nice more-than-decent human being and shouldn't even bother, or when I want to do things I know I shouldn't do. I'm generally way too nice to people to begin with (like Bjork, I err on the side of generosity), but sometimes I get forced to pay attention to what I'm thinking about (or trying to not think about), and that's always interesting. 

The last time anything noticeable like this happened was about a year and a half ago, when I knew hubby and I should've just stayed at home in Dallas one weekend. However, there were exciting things going on, so I pushed myself to attend said exciting things even though I knew better and even with knowing I'd be extremely worn down afterward from having pushed myself in similar ways then-recently, but some of these things interested hubby so of course I wanted him to go too, so yeah, hot messes happened. 

We had a very (literally) crappy weekend out of state while doing a few college homecoming things and museuming as usual when in the area. It was nice to see some of my classmates after 15 years, and it was awesome seeing a kickass production of "Antigone" there, but it was not so nice to be surprised by a wrong way driver heading straight for us on a back road highway. (Yay for being able to get my swerve on while thinking about how incredibly awful I felt.) We should've stayed in our hotel room the first night instead of hitting the big shindig done by the school of music, since hubby's gut was agitated and mine was getting that way, but nooooo, I had to insist on going and had to get Imodium so all would be fairly well. I now know that this was wrong. He felt better the next day, when I missed out on museuming thanks to being in the bathroom for like an hour and a half in literal gut-wrenching agony. 

Naturally it occurred to me then that these things could've been avoided had we just stayed home (especially as the driving scare happened about 20 minutes before getting to said museum). There wasn't anything life-changing going on that we would've missed out on, aside from my really getting what the chorus of a Greek play should ideally be like, and aside from seeing a "Clerks" reference in context in real life, but even those things don't compare to the crap that happened.

The first thought that came to mind when seeing this:
"I'm not even supposed to be here today!!"
Well played, universe. Well played.

Of course, we could've just felt bad from food poisoning, but my gut would've exploded within 4-12 hours as usual instead of waiting 40 hours, so I kinda think not. Still, I continue to not buy chicken from Target, just in case we did have bad chicken the night before we left, even though I know this all was really a gentle prod from the universe to get me to take even better care of myself. Then again, it could be both. It really doesn't matter. None of this matters, except that I really hate when the universe course-corrects me in a big obvious-to-me way.

Okay, I'm really going to the arboretum soon. Today. Because I've been wanting to but changed my mind about it on Monday and yesterday. And because I don't want the universe to kick me anymore for not getting out to enjoy it like I should. (And I apologize if my reposting this a zillion times right now screws up your feed but the text is all fubar and it is driving me nuts, and yes, I know how that all sounds after what I just said. Balls.)