Among the usual bills and ads, I got a real letter. It was postmarked -- over very nice stamps, thanks -- a day or two after I started expressing unease about the Roman Catholic Church and the long "agony" of the pope -- that's the word many French papers used.
David Tokunbo from southern Nigeria, who stumbled across one of my vexed outbursts, tells me he finds I have "contradictions about religion", apologises for saying so, then asks me to clarify my position on the log, because ... well, he's right, I do occasionally "write about deeply spiritual matters" and I guess you could call me a "religious person".
My full answer has been a snail mail one, since Tokunbo doesn't use e-mail (and points out that the comments box can be long to load if you're on a slow Net connection; I'll try to do something about that but can't make any promises, now I've checked over the Radio UserLand site. I'm glad the rest usually comes up at a decent speed now).
I certainly believe in something, Tokunbo, but am unable to put a name to it any more.
My life has been such that I see a pattern and order to it I have a hard time understanding; the older I get the harder it is to "explain" except with help from the scientific research I follow, often finding more parallels in it with eastern thought than in the "laws" of organised religions built on monotheistic faiths.
By the time the requiem mass for Pope John Paul II was broadcast round the world on Friday, I thought we'd seen all I like least in his church, including a drawn-out "martyrdom" and an unhealthy obsession with suffering and pain far removed from Christian values I respect. Nevertheless, I hope it's been clear in what I've written, if not in so many words, about the ritual and the blanket press, radio and television coverage, that the target of my wrath has been institutions, not Christians!
I see no contradiction in finding the weeks up to the pope's death a morbid, grisly time while maintaining a high regard for the clerics, whatever their faith, who strike me as "spiritual people".
 That said, there are atheists I respect much more for their humanity, compassion and genuine concern for the well-being of others than some men of the cloth. With "Holy Scriptures", it's disturbingly and dangerously easy for people to find passages they want to support unnatural behaviour.
I was baptised, routinely, as an Anglican, but any faith I had in a personal God evaporated in my late teens. In 1975, Fritzjof Capra gave us 'The Tao of Physics' -- the Wikipedia says he was on drugs when the idea came to him! 'The Turning Point' (on line thanks to a Julia I know only by a name since I don't speak the Russian most of her site seems to be in) followed seven years later. If you're interested you'll see Capra was then well into the 'I Ching', while I'd begun studying it.
I was also reading the likes of Joseph Campbell ('The Hero with a Thousand Faces' and his three-volume study of the 'Masks of God') and Mircea Eliade's 'Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstacy'. Once my French could cope, one of my girlfriends helped me get into his monumental 'A History of Religious Ideas' (available translated by Willard R. Trask). The original became one of the real treasures on my bookshelves.
You'd be very bored if I detailed all I've studied since then, but the "mysticism" to be found somewhere in all the main religions linked up with the science in my head decades ago.
The upshot for me in 2005 is a thinking heart, with a plan mapped out and potentially budgeted this weekend to go on buying, listening to and writing about all the good VoW I can ... and what some of my friends have begun to fear is a complete and unrepentant obsession with sex!
So while I respect the religious convictions of Tokunbo and can understand the sense of loss and grief many feel at the death of an elderly Polish "Holy Father" in Vatican City, I'm semi-serious about the WG and other oddities in the 'long shorthand' column now on every page of this site.
As for sex, the LP's full of it because changes in the way women and men relate to each other are among the most entertaining ways of telling the stories in the screenplay.
"After a time of decay comes the turning point. The powerful light that has been banished returns. There is movement but it is not brought about by force... The movement is natural, rising spontaneously. For this reason the transformation of the old becomes easy. The old is discarded and the new is introduced. Both measures accord with the time; therefore no harm results."
When Capra prefaced 'The Turning Point' with that passage from the 'I Ching', maybe he was talking about the Quiet Revolution.
Women have been merciful to me of late, but the big slap I've been expecting from one or another for pushing six months now may come next week. If people have no sympathy for the "devil" now awake in me, then I fear women may be so cross with me that I added the definition of "trouble (in)" to the glossary among a few other changes last night.
The Squip, for her part, has either been dancing dust out of her neuron this weekend or is recovering both from remarks on her age and the way I actually left a comment on her blog. The truth is, Cyndy, I drop in on you and many others in the blogroll more frequently that you might imagine. Now that Firefox at work battle has been won my visits will be frequent if the news stops while I'm eating my lunch.
Meantime, I've a couple of announcements. First, being stupid, I've lost some chunks of the screenplay. I do "back up, back up, back up," but was a bit careless about the LP for a couple of weeks. The disaster happened when I was both writing and hacking the Mac at around 11:00 pm last night. I gave the computer a kernel panic and it shut down without saving my work.
So this entry comes after a second night totally without sleep in three, since once I'd finshed swearing, I told myself that "it's always better second time round". This is not the view, however, of a very "explicit" VoG currently waiting along with others in my iTMS shopping basket.
I can't download her because Apple says my payment for 'Angelzoom' -- yes, but I like it and have even got one or two "riot grrls" in the basket -- can't go through. This is more annoying than the lost LP scenes. I spent part of the night doing my sums on line again to find the bank has no reason to turn the payment down. By some time after dawn, I decided the bank's IMF plan is just another way of screwing me, so I've taken alternative measures to get the bastards off my back.
Call me naïf, I don't mind, but anybody who cares has probably read enough here by now about the LP to know that while I'm not out to preach, the screenplay's partly about people for whom the "war of the sexes" is over.
Whether I believe in a god or not, I have a strong sense of the "sacred" and sex can be one of the most spiritual and exhilarating activities people can engage in with one another; the church would look better stripped, too, of centuries of oppressive dogma.
"The movement is natural, rising spontaneously. For this reason the transformation of the old becomes easy."
11:51:23 PM link 
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