As I discussed in the previous blog, that rather humorous passage about the Queen of Heaven in Jeremiah. . . but Kate Gladstone chides me for not knowing that that passage is not in the current calendar of haftarot. Perhaps it may have been back then, but . . . Anyway, “Queen of Heaven” was a title used for many goddesses in the Hellenistic world. Could there still have been any genuine belief in a Queen of Heaven in the... Read more
At the end of Part I, I asked, Would the people in Jesus’ time have known who the Queen of Heaven was? Yes, they certainly would have, but to see why, we must look at how the state religion of the Kingdom of Judah (which therefore came to be called Judaism) was founded Read more
I discovered Her by accident. Given my predilection for Goddesses since age 14, I obviously hope She is truly there, but I think (or at least hope) that I can be objective enough not to engage in special pleading or distort the evidence. Read more
I am quite grateful for Peter Dybing’s praise for my writing in a comment he left a day or so ago. His focusing on how I “process” in my writing, rather than merely present conclusions, seemed, well, unexpected; at least, “process” was not a term that would have occurred to me. Read more
14. I think all prophets must be reprobates, since anyone bound by ordinary rules could never do something so extraordinary as founding a genuinely new religion. Read more
I received a few days ago my monthly statistical report from Patheos on how many hits I received last month, total, per day, per blog, etc. It was interesting to see that the greatest number of hits were on two blogs: “On Jesus as a Gnostic” and “Some New Pages for the Book of Shadows.” Read more
A dialog about whether the Gods are infinite or not often begins with “Gerald Gardner wrote that the Gods of the Wica are ‘little gods.’” Yes, he did, but he was not very interested in abstract theology. Read more
Since the Boston bombing, the newscasters have talked nonstop and nonsense about Muslims, saying nothing positive. Newscasters and all others who have not read the Qu’ran, who do not know what the Five Pillars are, and who badmouth Muslims and Islam are speaking out of ignorance and bigotry. They deserve being told to shut their mouths. Read more
“Tripartite Anthropology” is a standard, although pompous, name for the concept held by the pre-Socratic philosophers 2500 years ago (and no doubt by people long before then) that humans consist of body, soul, and spirit. Using those terms now is as inadequate for our times as using Empedocles’ four-element model would be for doing chemistry. We do have a physical body, obviously. The problem is with the other two terms. People now use the terms “soul” and “spirit” more or... Read more
In order to explain my theories about the nature of consciousness, I need to first relate how I became convinced that our minds have talents that cannot be explained in the Newtonian universe that most of us live in in our daily lives. I have no natural talent for being psychically sensitive. Instead, like most chronic depressives, I early on learned to ignore all my feelings in order to get on with each day’s business, and those feelings included any... Read more
Aidan Kelly: Including Paganism
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