CUEW Triad

I was appalled at the contents of two emails I recently received. The first was from someone within the UEW community, who had discovered a coven that would not work with her because she was on antidepressants. The second was from a bright young Wiccan in the pharmaceutical industry who stepped up to educate our local list and felt the need to apologize for her vocation.

Both of these things represent what I consider to be one of the most shameful things about Wicca and paganism. For a young pagan to repeatedly apologize and feel that she was "sure that you all hate me now" after writing a brilliant, well-reasoned rebuttal to a panicked, urban-legendish e-petition represents an absolute failure of our community. Further, to insist that the members of your coven eschew antidepressant medication in order to focus on "herbs and magic" to cure their ills is a failure of an equal magnitude. This failure is anti-intellectualism.

Anti-intellectualism is a disease of society. It works by taking away the critical faculties of reason, making one susceptible to demagoguery, charismatic charlatans and manipulative groupthink. It is, perhaps, the most dangerous disease, bar none, that infects the world today, because its attacks our own ability to diagnose and cure every other ill, physical, psychological, or cultural, that exists or will exist. In that sense, it is more dangerous than addiction, more dangerous than racism, more dangerous than sexism, and even more dangerous than terrorism.

I committed myself to Wicca because in it I found a religion that was equally committed to the spiritual and the intellectual, a religion that was not in danger of being co-opted by fundamentalists because its roots were mostly in the soil of academia and scholarship[1]. While it would be overly idealistic of me to believe that there are few anti-intellectuals in the Wiccan community, to have such crass anti-intellectualism on par with any screed coming from a fundamentalist Christian church[2] or a jihadist Muslim fatwa[3]. We can do better than this.

Posted by Brent at 09:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

http://www.uewiccan.org
The final deadline for submissions for the May article of UEWiccan is April 21st, 2007.
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, submit stuff.

Welcomed stuff:
Researched articles.
Personal rituals.
Brief notes and congratulations.
Letters.

The letters to the editors section for this version will be open to any letter talking about why a UEW newsletter is important to you.

To expidite your article's submission, send it directly to ME at kaatryn@macmorgan.org

Posted by Kat at 09:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As many of you know, my move knocked me off of Internetland hard. First there was the DSL company that said I'd have to pay $250 to rewire the DSL lines in the new house because their company didn't put them there. Then there was finding that the regular phone lines are soooooooo old that they can't carry a consistant signal to a dial-up company....which is why the previous tenant installed the separate DSL line.
Then we decided to go back to cable.... but then we found out that the cable company never bothered to rewire our (then unoccupied) house after the big storm in October that had FEMA out here acting like snow in Buffalo is normal on Columbus Day!
(It is not. The leaves had not changed color yet, and the sticky snow-ice pulled down hundreds of thousands of trees and powerlines. The only trees in Buffalo without damage were evergreens- which were evolutionarily adapted to deal with this....deciduous trees are not designed to withstand tons of snow on their leaves)
So, we should be back within the next two weeks....this has been very good for me, truth be told, I've done a LOT of soul searching and editing and stuff like that. Look for a flurry of stuff by May.

Posted by Kat at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ya know, I'm really hoping that there is some Swedish law being broken here so that they can order the extradition of this lunatic and his group of nutjobs and throw their sorry asses in jail for.... oh, how bout until rapture?

The Local - Princess Madeleine harassed by fanatical sect:


The Swedish Royal Court has confirmed that it has been receiving abusive faxes from the fanatical Westboro Baptist Church sect.

Led by minister Fred Phelps , the small group's hatred of the royal family and all things Swedish is linked directly to an equally virulent hatred of homosexuals.

Phelps praises homophobic crimes, including murder. When controversial Swedish minister Åke Green was convicted of inciting hatred of homosexuals following an anti-gay sermon, Phelps saw red and turned his attention to Sweden.

"You're doomed to spend eternity in hell," he said. "All you Swedes and your Swedish king and his family."

As part of the campaign Phelps launched the hateful website God Hates Sweden , which attacks the royal family and delights in the loss of Swedish lives in the 2004 tsunami disaster.

Princess Madeleine has been the main recipient of the sect's abuse, Expressen reports.

"I know that this is happening all the time. There have been strange faxes containing all sorts of terms of abuse," court spokeswoman Nina Eldh told the newspaper.

The court's lawyers have so far failed in their atempts to call a halt to the site's anti-Swedish hate campaign.

Expressen's attempts to secure a comment from the group were met with resistence from an agitated female representative.

"We hate Sweden! Don't call here again," she said.

Posted by mikki at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)