The importance of thinking big

(The inspiration I had for this post was a single video which blew my mind.  Feel free to read the rest of this post, but whether or not you do, you absolutely must visit this page: http://irfu.cea.fr/cosmography And while you're at it, check out a great song by Peter Mayer that captures the same mind-blowing sensation: Blue Boat Home)

Religious believers of all varieties are often accused by scientifically-minded atheists of being too narrow-minded.  Of containing their Gods and their creation within the known sphere of Earth.  As a science geek and a Pagan believer I aim to keep that wider scope.  It's why I wrote posts about deeper geological views of stones, Paganism in terms of other planets, the death/rebirth cycle in places we don't often consider, and Paganism in terms of ancient and extraterrestrial life. 

It's not just interesting to think about.  It's a difficult challenge to undertake.  One that has caused many a believer to walk away entirely and embrace atheism.  I can keep my faith in a state of cognitive dissonance, in a sense plugging my ears when I hear about how my faith is challenged by science.  But I'd much rather deal with it head on.

So what about the rest of our planet?  One of the false arguments made by many theistic apologists is that the Universe is fine-tuned for life.  Setting aside the serious weaknesses of this argument and looking only at our Universe, is it fine-tuned for life (See this great video by DarkMatter2525 about the issues with the 'fine-tuned' argument.  Totally NSFW!  Lots and lots of language.)?  Is it really?  On this planet we, and by we I mean every single living thing, live in a thin layer from at most a few miles down (some microbes have been found very deep in the Earth), to a few miles up (bugs, plant bits, and microbes have been found several miles up into the atmosphere).  Our planet is just shy of 8,000 miles across.  We make up less than 15 miles of that radius.  And we don't even take up all of that space.  There are places so dry, hot, cold, acidic, basic, and in general inhospitable that what little life we may find there just barely eeks by.  That's alright with me.  I don't believe the Universe is here just for us.  Nor do I believe it was created by perfect deities just to keep me happy.  I'm still wrestling out the details of that one for myself.

The Earth is not our temple.  THIS... is our temple.
Bow down in awe!!!  Or stand.  Don't worry, no one will notice.

But what then of the other 7,900+ miles into the core of our planet?  Do my Gods concern themselves with that?  Do they concern themselves with the barren, asteroid strewn surfaces of so many of the planets out there?  Or the vast expanses of literally nothing in the Universe?  Or are they only concerned about places where life exists?  Are there different Gods that handle the other worlds out there?  I may not ever have the answers to all of those questions, or even any of them.  But to me, it's important to find divinity out there as much as it is to find it in the cycles of the seasons or a flowing stream, or a delicate flower.

And there's a lot of there... out there.  I recently found a video in my geek podcasts done through the research complex atop the Mauna Kea in Hawaii.  It's a mind-blowingly detailed 3D walkthrough of the teeniest, tiniest block of our local neighborhood complete with annotations and explanations by one of the lead scientists.  It left me wondering about all of those galaxies, each with trillions of stars.  But beyond that, the gaps, the filament structures... everything.  Structures so huge that it turns our galaxy into a tiny swirling "You are Here" in an absurdly expansive map.  And it's such a small fraction of the whole Universe.  And if I'm theologically consistent, I believe divinity lies in all of that.  Every last atom.  So what does that mean?

To Be Silent

There's a funny thing about being part of a stigmatized group.  As you get more comfortable with who you are and what you believe, you begin to be more public about it.  Take pride in it.  Own it.  But as you get deeper into it.  As you get more involved and become part of the community, you find yourself once again speaking in hushed tones and taking care with your words.

When I first came to Paganism, I spoke about it to a handful of friends, but that was it.  That was it because being found out had repercussions.  Serious repercussions.  And so I kept silent.  And I learned the value of my magickal name as it developed.  It was freedom.  Freedom to be who I was, who I am, without fear (or at least less of it) of that being traced back to the name on my birth certificate.  I will say, some Wiccans feel a magickal name should be used only in a sacred context.  But I was a solitary and a kid and that ship sailed long ago so I've made my peace with it.  And so it was my freedom.  My pen name, my online persona, my spiritual identity.

And slowly, through college and into adulthood I came to be more open about it.  I told more people about what I believed and I got really, really good at spotting those who would be okay knowing and who wouldn't.  The lady at the bookstore who saw me in "that section" and commented about some of "those people" being in Delafield probably couldn't handle that I was one of them.  But by early on in my adult years, I started wearing my pentacle out in public.  

And I started to show up at gatherings with other Pagans in public places.  I got to know a few, and came to find out that a few people I knew already were Pagan.  But we're all very good at being silent.  Because we have to.  And so it comes out in hints and whispers.  Little clues.  Was that a pentacle I saw?  They're friends with whom?  They're mysteriously out of town during a big Pagan festival... interesting.  And it turns out a lot of us have at least a few of these experiences where the person workin in the shop down the street or hanging out in a particular crowd, or the person we're dating (yes, seriously) happens to be Pagan.  And it's a relief when we find eachother.  It's exhausting keeping secrets, maintaining secure online groups and identities, and making sure that at the local meetup we're not talking too loud.  And finding one more safe person to talk to about it is like a breath of fresh air.

But now I know people.  And a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.  And so while I've become comfortable enough to post secure posts on Facebook about it and have a blog about it, I find in some ways I'm even more quiet than I ever was.  As my mundane world crosses over into my spiritual world more and more I have to keep those secrets.  Because I know people who are in custody battles because they share my faith.  I know of people who have lost jobs because of it.  And I know of people who have been threatened and even shot at because of it.

And so here I am, full circle.  I'm still proud to be who I am, and I don't plan on a full retreat back into the broom closet, so to speak.  But once again I have learned to be silent.

I think you're all wrong

Yes, it's a cheap tag line to elicit a response.  But it's also true.  In the ecclectic Pagan world, and in other circles I've run in, we talk an awful lot about accepting other people's paths and orthopraxy versus orthodoxy.  And it's absolutely 100% true in one respect.  It's not important to us what specific theology the others in our circles adhere to, if any at all.  We share a lot in common, but rarely, if ever, everything.  And that's prefectly alright.  We can circle with eachother just the same.  But we don't actually all have the same theology.  More to the point we don't all have compatable theologies.

And I don't think we need to let this get in our way.  I don't think we need or want an orthodoxy.  But I've run into several discussions in the past few years, and really over the past decade and a half, that make me think that while practically, it doesn't matter, philosophically it's challenging.  This is especially true as you get further out to the edge of mainstream modern Paganism.  Christo-Paganism, nontheistic/atheistic Paganism, and the relationship between syncretistic Paganism and more defined paths like the various reconstructionisms and revivals push us to deal with these questions head on.  And the results aren't always pretty.

For the most part, we're usually able to lean on the 'valid path' conversations that are the glue that keeps our communities more or less together.  But as long as I've been part of the community (and before I was able to adequately work through these challenges myself) there has been a certain level of judgment from some quarters regarding those in the more controversial theological groupings.

Case in point was a recent article by T. Thorne Coyle which consisted of her interview with a non-theistic pagan friend of hers.  The conversation was predestined to be interpreted in whatever way the reader was likely to take such a conversaton.  I, personally, have struggled with the atheist versus theist issue personally, so while I though some of the wording was awkward at times, I could understand the difficulty in expressing how the interviewee felt without unduly offending people.  But some people were offended.  Because it's the internet, land of the easily offended.

But aside from the predictability of it, there's a real issue there.  Some people really can't handle nontheistic approaches to Paganism without reading into it all sorts of intent into the commentary.  Why?  Because nontheists think us theists are wrong.  And that sounds an awful lot like the judgy dogma our community recoils in horror from.  And I don't take anything away from the genuine feeling of offense toward a nontheistic world view.  We feel what we feel and while we may desire to change or improve upon those feelings, we can't grow if we simply deny them.

But here's the dirty little secret that any of us who think with a rational mind know about Pagan theology:  We think they're wrong, too.  What's more, the hard polytheists think the soft polytheists are wrong, the syncretistic Pagans think the reconstructionists and revivalists are wrong, etc, etc, etc.  Why?  Because we do have our theologies.  And we wouldn't have them if we didn't think they were right.  And I'm sorry, but there's no getting around the fact that while we can all respect eachother, circle with eachother, and learn from eachother, those theological approaches are not compatable.  In short, we can't believe what we believe without thinking everyone else is wrong.  And, as several bloggers have noted, rather eloquently, that's okay.

There's some practicality here, too.  I would have a hard time in a Christo-pagan ritual, despite the fact that I know enough about their practice to know they aren't many of the things they are often accused of being.  I actually admire their approach to deity.  But it's just too close to my past for me to be able to approach it comfortably.  Too much of it triggers an instant response in my head for me to get past it and enjoy a ritual based on it.  And many people answered T. Thorne Coyle's article in much the same way with respect to non-theists.  I'd have less of an issue with someone who had very similar physiological and psychological reactions to ritual, but assigned no divine meaning to them.  But several people in the thread found the conflict irreconcilable.  And that's okay.  Don't circle with them, not because you don't like them, but because you wouldn't be able to get past the issue enough to get something out of it.  Or circle with them anyway, but get something else out of it.

It doesn't mean we have to throw the baby out with the bath water, faction off into big D Denominations, and mutually excommunicate eachother.  We can keep on just the way we always have, because we can believe we are right and still accept that we may not have all of the picture.  Still accept that while we feel very strongly about our beliefs, we may not be right on all counts.  Accept that the theological differences, while important, are not road blocks to community.  There's value in our community.  Real value.  And there's value in the rituals the ecclectics among us perform, despite our personal theological conflicts.  To keep those things alive we need to be honest about how we are the same, and how we are different, and what those differences mean.  Because if we have these differences, but never work through their meanings and how they interact, they become irreconcilable conflicts.

Long cycles of the Earth: Plate Tectonics

So I haven't kept up to my initial motivation level with this blog, but I've made peace with that.  I knew it was a likely outcome as the rubber met the road and so it has been.  I think the central component was realizing what my boundaries were with respect to it.  I'm not a science expert, nor do I have a team of experts at hand to help me research topics and I don't get paid for it, so I have to hold up a job, which means less time to research and write a blog.  So I'm sticking to what I know, researching where I can, and not apologizing for things I haven't the time or knowledge for at present.  But enough meta mumbling.

I've found over the past few years that when you get right down to it, one of the few common threads in much of modern Neo-Paganism (as contrasted with Reconstructionists) is the idea of the Wheel of the Year and the sacred meanings behind its turning.  Many groups, Wiccan and non, observe this cycle in some form or another, and recognize its echoes in other areas of life from the four directions to the Rule of the Magi, to the signs of the zodiac and so on.  This has perhaps become the most important piece of my personal faith in that, while I wrestle, rail, and debate the details of it all, the one thing that has stuck with me from day 1 and remained unchanged is the turning of the Wheel.  It's perhaps the one constant underlying it all.  And so, as noted in an earlier post, I have been focusing on how other cycles present themselves.  In particular cycles that lie outside of the scope of the usual.

See this pretty olivine basalt from Hawaii?
It's like rock reincarnation.  And you
thought it was just shiny.

So, as this has been trending toward becoming a bit of a geology/space blog (they are central pieces of my geekiness, after all) I've been looking at plate tectonics.  We're the only planet we've ever seen that has it, and like the Sun renews it's dominance in the sky and the Moon refreshes her face as the month rolls on, the Earth's surface refreshes itself via tectonism.  Taking the broadest approach, tectonism is a story of making new from the old.  One plate is subducted below another where it sinks, melts, then rises to the surface as a volcano.  Continental plates subduct below other continental plates and form the grandest mountains on our planet.  And voila!  Everything old is new again.  My minerology professor in college had a leading theory, in fact, that hot spots, the forces that drive volcanism under Hawaii, Yellowstone, and the Galapagos, among others, is a function of extreme deep subduction of old oceanic plates deep into the mantle where, instead of the partial, bubbly melting plates do near the surface, they form huge plumes of melted rock.  And if you look at the short list I mention above, they are characterized by new, fresh growth.  New land from the volcanoes themselves, new life on the fertile soil that results.  It's really what they're known for.

But it isn't perfect.  As the plates subduct, pieces are scraped off on the continent overlaying them.  Island chains get glued to the mainland.  Recent evidence shows that pieces that get subducted break off and stick to the underside of the continents and continents drifting across the oceanic plates, like India did, leave bits of themselves behind where they sink into the seafloor making undersea mountains that, until recently, we had no good explanation for.  But when you think about it, that's not so different from the Wheel of the Year we all know.  Sure, every year the seasons reset themselves.  But look at last year.  The warm winter and hot summer led to a drought we are still dealing with now in North America.  The seasons still turn in Egypt, but the desert eats just a little bit more of the green every year.  Hurricanes batter shorelines and swallow whole islands and build new ones elsewhere.  Just like returning in the next life.  We're mostly new, but bits and pieces hang on.

See that island?  That's another continent.  The same one
that made Mount Saint Helen's blow up.  Whispers from a
past turn of the tectonic wheel.
(Point Sur Lighthouse in California)

It reminds me of the classic boat thought experiment.  If you replace the boards in a boat one by one, at what point is it a new boat? Or is it still always the old one?  Or is it both?  Are the slabs of the Farralon plate stuck to Washington, California, Central America and Canada the Farralon plate or the North American plate?  Is the hurricane blowing this year due to conditions set in motion one, two, even five years ago still entirely this year's hurricane?  Or does it really belong to the warm ocean currents of 2010?  Is the piece of me left over from my childhood or from a past life still that child or that past person?  Or is it just me, right now?  Or both?  There is no right answer and what answer we give says a lot about how we think about the world.

That's the thing about a cycle.  It's new, but it's the same old story.  A spiral, as we like to say.

Quantum Mechanics and Magick

So one thing I think any religious system needs to be aware of is the possibility of surprises challenging its assumptions and assertions.  One area in which I've always wondered if Wicca and other magick oriented systems may run into issues is that of science demonstrating that magick is impossible.

An old habit of the religious has been to leverage science as a tool to prove the viability of its particular assertions or at least provide space for it.  This has often been problematic in terms of deterministic science.  If every causitive agent has a determined effect that can be calculated based on initial conditions.

When I set out to find this I had to temper my expectations.  I'm not a physicist (though I know one quite well), but I very much respect what physics says versus what we wish it said.  So I must admit I figured what I'd find out there is a lot of pseudo-theory, very light on actual scientific understanding.  So I was surprised to find this article: http://www.ecauldron.net/quantummagick.php .  I don't know enough about the math or the theory to know if it makes any sense whatsoever, but it passes the basic understanding test in that it doesn't violate rudimentary concepts of quantum theory.  Unfortunately beyond that I'm star-struck by the math in it. In my line of work, algebra and set theory gets you pretty much everywhere you need to go.  But I'm very much pleased to see that someone has actually put some thought into really putting this to the test versus hoping that waving magic science fingers is enough to carry it through.

On Heritage

I came across a MediaMatters news item dealing with the recent Fox News treatment of Wicca and Paganism (for the record, it's Fox News, I'm not surprised and only mildly outraged).  As I am wont to do, I posted some replies in the comments section, which went down in flames shortly after when MediaMatters pulled the article.  But I wasn't posting in response to people making various horrible statements about Pagans and Wiccans.  I was mostly responding to other Pagans and Wiccans tossing around some of the old nuggets we've been recycling for over a decade now.

By now most Wiccans I know are well aware of a number of important details about our history.  I'm sorry if this is old news to any of the few folks who read this blog.  Given the crowd I run with, I'm sure it is.

So here goes.  We are not ancient Pagans.  We are not older than Christianity.  Christian holidays are not Pagan holidays in disguise, nor are those our holidays to claim.  With all that stated, let's get into the details.

So let's start with the age of Wicca.  By now a growing number of modern Wiccans are coming to the sensible realization that Wicca can't be demonstrated to have existed in any form substantially similar to today prior to Gerald Gardner.  Personally, I have little doubt that the New Forest coven existed in some form roughly similar to Gardner's description.  But by Gardner's own admission what he introduced to the world had an awful lot added and changed.  And with the aid of Doreen Valiente and others, what was to become Wicca, and the wider Wiccan-inspired world around it, was something other.  Inspired, yes.  Beautiful, yes.  Meaningful, yes.  But not the same.  But beyond that, there is little evidence of predecessors to New Forest existing prior to perhaps the mid-1800's at the earliest.

But even if there was, could we claim an ancient heritage stretching back to Rome, Athens, Gaul, Thebes, and Scandinavia?  Hardly.  If we suppose for a moment that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and we assume there were groups we simply haven't found yet because of their secretive nature, frankly I don't think it changes the picture at all.  If that were true, comparing us to the Religio Romana, Hellenism, or the cult of Isis, you'd expect some broad similarities.  Aside from the fact that both contain mystery cults and both share some names for their deities, Wicca and any and all ancient paganisms are strikingly different.  If there is some unbroken lineage yet to be discovered, it is one of the longest games of telephone ever undertaken and the end result is very much the same as the childhood game.

We have polytheistic reconstructionists out there.  They don't, so far as I am aware, claim direct, unbroken heritage with ancient Egypt or Rome.  They attempt to, through archaeology, resurrect the practices of our ancestors as best they are able with material gained from scientific and scholarly endeavor, and not through 1600 years of word of mouth.  And many, though not all, are quite incensed by our insistance that we can claim some substantial piece of those cultures.

But beyond that, conceptually, we have some very incongruous components in Wicca as compared to anient Paganisms.  Mixing pantheons alone brings us into contrast with the ancients.  There was the Religio Romana, under which one could worship any number of deities from any number of cultures.  And in that faith there were numerous attempts to adopt other pantheons as reflections of the Roman deities, but make no mistake, they would not have considered all Gods one God and all Goddesses one Goddess.

Neo-Platonists were by and large Pagans who had an idea of a universal Good, through which all things were derived and in that there were forms that descended from that Good with gradually more recognizeable, but more flawed forms.  Whispers of Gardner's Dryghten.  But even they didn't have a single God and a single Goddess as a functional layer in there.  If you brought up the idea to them, they might be willing to discuss it as it wasn't necessarily completely out of touch with their philosophy.  But the fact that it could fit in that world view, doesn't mean it ever did.

So let's again assume that somehow there was a development over the centuries and all the Pagan holdouts got together and formed such a framework, and let's say that made it to today, we would still, at best, be a derivative of that group, and not of the various ancient cults and religions themselves.

Now that we've established that, let's look at holidays.  A common item tossed about is that Pagan holidays, and therefore Wiccan holidays, were the inspiration behind modern Christian holidays.  First off, many of those assumptions are simply incorrect.  The timing of Easter, for instance, was derived from Judaism, another faith with a luni-solar calendar, and a much more logical connection.  As it was a centrepiece issue of the Council of Nice, there's actually a good amount of documentation supporting that, as opposed to Ostara.  Ostara, itself, was a month in one of the Germanic societies of the day, but it was not a holiday and there's substantial doubt it was a Goddess.  Plus the Easter/Ostara connection only really exists in English and a few other Germanic languages.  Christmas was, indeed, likely timed off of Saturnalia, but beyond a date on a calendar, it got precious little else from it.

So how about the celebrations?  The Yule logs, the eggs, Santa, Halloween, etc?  Those came not from ancient Pagan traditions, but from folk traditions.  Some of them, like Santa hearkening back to Odin, do have some whispers of Pagan roots, but they bear as much similarity to Christianity as they do to Wicca.  That is, not very much.  And again, these various traditions are different in almost every culture that celebrates them.  Those that are more universal now, like the Christmas tree, came first through a single cultural tradition, over a thousand years into Christian domination in Europe.  They are at best an extension of globalism and consumerism.

But say we scrub every single last shred of Pagan or folk influence out of modern Christianity and it would still be Christianity.  And that is probably my biggest gripe with the 'you got your celebrations from us' argument.  So what if they did?  It's not a central part of their faith, just a fleeting public expression of it.  It doesn't take anything away from the credibility of Christianity.  But claiming that we have some sort of intrinsic ownership of those holidays stretching back over the millenia takes away from our credibility.

So what ARE we, anyway, if we aren't that?  If Wicca is not ancient, is it valid?  Absolutely.  And in my view, we are the culmination of a variety of religious and philosophical ideas as well as numerous cultural currents in Western society.  The secret societies, the great poets honoring the old Gods, the mystics and cunning men.  The spiritualists and ceremonial magicians and cultural sentimentalists.  THEY are our heritage.  And we should be very proud to call them our forebears.  And as Wicca and Paganism start to look more and more like ancient and contemporary Polytheisms and Animisms, we can know that our history validates our modern path as much, if not more so, than a legendary lineage.

The Witch's God and the Witch's Goddess

So I'm stuck in a rut on theology for a bit, because it's what's mucking about in my head.  What has me spinning is the widely understood concept of the Wiccan Goddess and God.  Let me be absolutely clear, I'm not initiated.  So I don't pretend to know what goes on inside of initiatory Trads with respect to theology.  Frankly, it makes no difference to me.  I use the term Wicca strictly in reference to the system which has sprung up around Gardner, Cochrane, etc. with full understanding that it grates on the nerves of some initiated Trad folks.  I mean no offense, I assure you, but language is at best a near proximation of human thought, and a clumsy tool with respect to the divine.  So Wicca it is, caveats included.

I have come to find tremendous meaning and depth in the symbols of Wicca.  The Turning of the Wheel and the celebrations surrounding them, the triple Goddess and the God of the hunt.  The focus on the four classical elements and the ritual structure of it, as diverse as it may be.

I find myself less drawn to the things that make it 'witchier'.  Any of the forms of fortune telling such as scrying, runes, tarot, etc, really just don't speak to me.  Some of the non-divinatory pieces commonly found as trappings such as numerology and astrology really don't fit either.  And they don't need to as none of them are quintessentially necessary to Wicca or Paganism, from my experience.  Perhaps it's a knee-jerk geek reaction.  Skepticism nearly to a fault is a hallmark, for better or worse, of the modern science community and for good reason.  Frankly, skepticism is to science what food is to us humans.

So I guess what I'm really saying is that I'm not entirely sure I'm a Witch so much as I'm a Pagan.  (queue the terminology forestorm)

I've also come fully to the realization that I am a hard polytheist, something I hear is becoming, or perhaps has always been, the case in Wicca.  But more so than that I find myself disagreeing quite firmly with the idea of archetypes and thought-forms as a conception of deity.  I don't see the Wiccan Goddess and God as symbolic of all gods and goddesses.  The semi-popular Wiccan hymn  that starts with a chant of "Isis, Astarte, Hecate..." kind of grates on me for that reason.  Nor do I see those goddesses and gods as aspects of the divine feminine and divine masculine.  In short, I feel the Wiccan God and Goddess are as real, tangible, and distinct as the old gods and goddesses.  To put a stamp on it, if I get anything at all from Neo-Platonism or any other form of monism (as in mono meaning one, not monastery), it isn't in the form of "All Goddesses are one Goddess, all God are one God".  Perhaps it all boils down to a single, unknowable entity, and perhaps that doesn't make a lick of difference to me if I can't know it.

So now that all the gods and goddesses are their own beings and we aren't being reductionist, am I about to pick myself a pantheon and become a reconstructionist?  Kind of.  To me the Triple Goddess and the Horned God are very much the central characters in my divine space, and they have been for the whole of my life as a Pagan.  For whatever one might say about Wicca, its age, and its lineage, its central deities speak to me as themselves, not as core representations of others.  And they do so louder than the others.  And so while I feel I've had a connection with Demeter and Papa Legba of late, I'm not a priest of either so much as an... admirer, we'll say.

But that has left an interesting issue in my head.  One that makes me wonder about whether or not the ancients struggled with it, too.  And what's more it makes me wonder how reconstructionists and revivalists (my term here.  I'm meaning groups that revive worship of specific pantheons without strictly aiming for authenticity) wrestle with it.  If these are my chief deities, but I recognize the validity and stature of the other deities, how do I reconcile that with the fact that many of the other deities cover the same 'turf', so to speak.  Can you view Odin, Apollo, Zeus, etc as real divine characters with their classical roles and myths without having to confront the inherent issue with overlap?  With some deities, it's not a problem.  Deities of love, war, oceans, etc, can easily share divine territory (yes, I'm getting middle-school mythology here.  I know the traits of the gods are not that simple).  But what of chief deities?  What of the Norns and the Fates, who are said to govern all of destiny?  The tale of Demeter and Persephone governed the Greek seasons, but there were others that served the same function.

Do I reoncile that by simply picking a winner?  Do I take the truth versus factual distinction here by saying these are simply allegories?  I'm inclined to take the latter path.  As a science geek I know well how writing developed (at least so far as archaeology tells us) and that it had multiple likely origins.  And certainly Odin didn't give the Egyptians heiroglyphs, nor did Thoth scratch out early Chinese characters on turtle shells thousands of years ago.  But they are, in fact, real to me and their stories are important, if symbolic.  And here I am in Religions 100 again learning about truth versus fact.

I suspect I have a lot of meditating, ritual, and research to do before I come to any kind of satisfactory conclusion here.  And I'm sure the conclusion is not nearly so important as the meditation, ritual, and research.  But I think finally, over the past year, I feel I finally get what the gods are telling me.  And while I don't have the whole picture, I've got some substantial pieces.