On Not Having An Opinion.

The Husband has convinced me to spend the day slothfully rather than productively. This means surfing. Which led me to Deborah Lipp's blog, and her post, Is The Wiccan Rede Ethical? A Response.

I agreed with her unequivocally, but trotted off to see Mr. Kraig's original post just 'cause. I found the following statement and damn near threw a hissy:

"If you see a person such as a child or someone who is elderly being attacked or abused, you can't use force to stop the attacker or abuser. That would be hurting them."

I am sick of such attacks on the Rede by non-Wiccans. There. I said it. Bad, bad me, daring to assert such an idea. I am a judgmental person for feeling that Mr. Kraig is deliberately playing dumb with this idea that "Wiccan" = "Amish", and that he has no idea what he's talking about to boot. I am mean, cruel, and academic.

It's about to get worse.

Frankly, if you're not an initiate into a Mystery Tradition, how can you have an informed, rational, intelligent opinion about it? How can I say that the Santeria practice of sacrificing animals is fine by me when I don't know that it's no more cruel than Farmer Bob next door sending his chickens to the Great Chicken Beyond in order to have dinner? Do I really know that I won't be required to fellate a goat if I attend the Eleusinian Mysteries? Hell, for all I know, my tradition may require me to wear a ritual Barney suit at some point.

I don't know about other people's Mysteries, because I am not part of them - I don't even know about all of the Mysteries of my own tradition. Therefore, while I can have opinions based on what I think their Mysteries are and how ethical they are or are not, I really have no idea. Hence, the old and honorable statement, "I don't know enough about it to have an opinion."

Stretch your brain a little with the following idea: if a Mystery tradition requires its followers/adherents/initiates to keep such Mysteries secret, how do you even know that the thing you're declaring ethical/unethical even happens/exists?

Altar/Alter

I am a spelling and grammar fiend.

I don't take it as far as some folks; one typo/misspelling/lack of punctuation isn't enough to send me to the comments section/reply button in order to completely ignore the content while I bash someone to death with Strunk & White. I don't assume a lack of proper grammar means that someone has nothing useful to say. Some people just never get punctuation, some people have dysgraphia/dyslexia/what-have-you, some people were busy doing much more interesting things in 8th grade while the rest of us were in class learning to parse sentences.

It does make it harder for me to read stuff when it's not "right", and my brain will refuse to go on until I have let it correct every "mistake" it sees. I am OCD about very few things, but this is one of them.

I've been reading another blog, Ex Libris Hieronyma, which I really like. Her misspelling of "alter" for "altar" was driving me a little nuts, until I considered the following possibility: if we witch-types do magic at our altars, thus altering things, maybe "alter" isn't the mistake I thought it was. At the moment, I have an altar at which I'm not doing any work; I'm just sitting at it and talking to my various gods. I have an altar in the temple/study where most of the work seems to be going on these days; maybe that's my "alter".

Too cutesy? Too much of that "language means what we make it mean" thing, when I think that most of us know that the words matter? Eh. Maybe you're right. But I had a new thought and got a new perspective, and I can't think of that as anything other than a good thing.