Holiday update

Christmas with the family! I always enjoy being with my family. I do love all my family and they are each great in their own way.

My dad likes to keep the dish network on the church propaganda channel. Every day is like sunday indeed. For God's sake can we turn off the church and eat? It really is just like family-friendly fascism. I am all propaganda'd out. I never want to hear another church Elder talk about how faith can move mountains as if Mount Saint Helens is 1/2 gone because some Priest was "practicing".

The promises church speakers make are like the fake presents that are still under the tree in the museum on December 27th. No one is racing to open them because they know there is actually nothing of value inside. It is just all show, glitz, and mood setting.

I sometimes postulate that if investing tangible time and value into something that is no more provable than a fantasy brings someone to occasional idealistic selflessness, there may still be some good in it. I know that the religious systems to which people subscribe are not necessary for human beings to improve their character or care for one-another. They may actually be inefficient obstacles that, on balance, create more suffering and misery than they inspire goodness.

I listened to some of the " Slayer, Christ Illusion" album a week or so ago. It won a grammy, so it must be worth something. The music is solid and of a high quality in the genre. Much of what they make is for their own pleasure, though they do suggest that religion is a mass delusion.

I think if people want to hope for something that could be and can't be disproved, that is their own business. Faith, being the human hopes and dreams that may yet be, is at the core of human existence. We are reality generating machines and we can bring about many of of our dreams which have yet to exist.

Though, when one loses contact with reason and begins to state as reality things for which one merely hopes, there is some confusing self-delusion going on. One must always be prepared for the possibility that one's assumptions could be superceded by better science, knowledge and understanding.

Christmas also brought some good times touring through Seattle. Fresh fish, Coffee, Espresso, Lattes, Capucino and ...did I mention the Coffee? I have visited the Museum of Flight, Pacific Science Center, Puget Sound and the family all went to the holiday ball-breaker, "The Nutcracker".

I like hearing Tchaikovsky. This ballet, which I had never seen before, has been around long enough that it has popularized its music as Christmas music. It is an enjoyable ballet with enough material to give different companies some room for interpretation. I can still feel some old notions of royal social order in the dance.

The dances with a man and a woman seem to show the man turning tipping, arranging and manipulating the woman whose overwhelming power is to keep his interest focused only and continually on her and to captivate him at her side through it all. It is the love détente, each feeling in control in the manner he or she prefers.

Ballet seems to have a medieval quality of nearly worshipping women as precious objects on a pedastal, though these dancers really are admirable athletes. The men are secondary on this stage, though they seem to be able to do the flutter jumps well, the lightness of which belies the strength they need to perform them. Yet, nothing holds a candle to the women on point. What a wonder to behold. It makes one admire Russian culture.

There is my Christmas update, enjoy.

=sumwun