Suicide as a Moral Choice

After a particular headline popped up on my news-feed a few days ago, I've been at a total loss for words. I can hardly imagine what a slap-in-the-face that diagnosis must have been for this young woman who's life is practically JUST BEGINNING, then came the dumb-fuckery from the religious right (as usual) like a stopped-up toilet. Let's just think about this situation for a moment: Pretend you're under 30 years old, just got hitched to the love of your life and then one day - BAM! - terminal cancer diagnosis. You would have had an entire life of experiences to enjoy and decisions to make for yourself, and suddenly you realize that circumstances completely beyond your realm of control have robbed you of all that. The closest comparison that I can think of would be spending your entire life's savings on your dream-house only to discover (too late, mind you) that something is so horribly wrong with it that soon it will no longer be fit for human habitation & is about to be condemned. Well fuck, NOW what are you supposed to do? You've already dumped every penny that you had into the house itself AND moving all your stuff into it, you COULD wait six months and try to save up everything you can but you know it won't be anywhere near enough.

Should you walk away? Or stay for as long as you are able to do so? 

This isn't supposed to be easy, mostly because LIFE isn't supposed to be easy: Struggles and tragedies will happen, but so will joy and accomplishment. What I'm talking about here is another human being making a conscious decision to permanently eliminate all of their own possibilities of any of those things ever happening ever again: Death. As the late George Carlin once put it, "It's the most profound thing that you can do with your life: End it." And on the whole, I don't disagree; especially in the wake of Robin Williams' death, the SECOND TIME in my entire life that I've ever cried over the death of a celebrity. The first, of course, being for George Carlin. 

Despite what years of Army training tells me, I don't think that suicide is in any way morally wrong. The reason I say this is because ultimately, I have no more right to tell another person what to do with their own bodies than they do for mine: This includes contraception, tattoos, sex, drugs and abortion. During my military career, I intervened in 3 battle-buddy suicide warnings. I did so because I honestly believed that I was doing the right thing for them and for everyone else, and maybe it WAS. Also, I honestly believed that if I KNEW someone was considering doing it, then they ACTUALLY did it, that I could be held liable for DOING NOTHING. Now that I'm out of the military, I'm looking back at my decision and I'm questioning my motivations: I should note that I am not in any way saying nor implying that I wanted for those people to die, so if that's what you're thinking after reading this you can get that foolish notion out of your head RIGHT FUCKING NOW. Looking back, did I really have any right to make such a decision FOR THEM? All three were adults, one suffered from a diagnosed mental illness, and the other two were close friends of mine. One of them is still very much alive, I honestly don't know about the other two. Is it "right" to infringe on another person's bodily autonomy because of the effect that it MIGHT HAVE if that individual chooses to die?

My answer is NO, but even then I still struggle with the idea of 'doing nothing' when a loved one, or even a stranger, is contemplating the act. Decisions require reasons for making them, wether it's getting more ink in one's skin, ending their own life or even what to eat for lunch: Have I thought about the consequences of this specific action? What could happen if this doesn't go the way that I planned? Is there a chance that I haven't considered all of my possible options? Would the cost of this action outweigh any forseeable benefit? 

I don't think that suicide is "selfish" any more than procreating, pursuing an education or joining the military would be: The only person that truly owns your life & your body is YOU, and that means that it's yours to do with as you wish, to whatever end.

And as far as the "coward's way out" idea goes, I have a few problems with that sentiment: For starters, it assumes that you have some sort of special rights or claim over the person who chose to end their own life, like you think you have some grand plan for that person and they just up and decided to flip YOU the final finger. Which, it stands to reason, if you genuinely DID have any control over the lives of others, they wouldn't have been able to commit suicide in the first place. Second, if there are really "as many ways to grieve as there are people in the world," then there are as many reasons to voluntarily choose death that just so happen to be inconvenient for you. Third, you can't own another human being, so you ultimately cannot possibly expect to own their thoughts, feelings, decisions or actions: The odds are good that their reasons for choosing suicide probably had nothing at all to do with you, unless they left a very detailed note specifically saying otherwise (at which point, I should add, many people that DO kill themselves don't always leave notes) so in the end, there's no way you can know for certain. Lastly, Who the fuck do you think you are to speak of the motivations and actions of another human being that can no longer speak for themselves? That's a tad arrogant, no? 

These are just my thoughts and opinions on the matter, I do not necessarily (situation depending) condone nor condemn people for killing themselves. I am sad that Robin Williams is dead, but I also realize that he didn't owe it to me, or anyone, to continue existing for the benefit of others. I am also sad about the terrible predicament that Brittany Maynard has found herself in, but she's made her decision and all I can really do is wish her the best of luck no matter what the outcome. 

And yes, I have lost loved ones to suicide. I still don't have any right to force my own judgements or decisions onto other people, and at the heart of it all, neither do you.

I Love/Hate Chick Tracts

I would honestly love to know why some people think leaving these goddamn things all over the place is a good idea, really. If you want to waste your own money buying packages of these tiny pamphlets that most people just wind up either tossing into the bin or using for fire-place kindling, that's your prerogative I guess. All it really seems to accomplish is desecrating and defiling otherwise perfectly good trees but more notably lining Jack Chick's pockets with money he doesn't fucking deserve to have. Even my Christian friends despise Chick and think his material is grossly unoriginal and perverted. 

You hear THAT Chicky? Even your target audience despises your message!

So when I went to the VA in Fayetteville for an appointment last week and found one of these things not-so-cleverly "displayed" atop a PTSD brochure rack, at first I was more than just a bit miffed. I took it with every ORIGINAL intention of just tossing it in the trash where it belongs. No matter what the fucked-up story-line, these things are all fundamentally the same: The same "Turn or Burn" drivel over and over again only wrapped in slightly different packaging with each printing.

But not this time. THIS TIME I decided to do something outside of my usual routine: 

Get settled in for a wee "Bed-Time Story" kids, because this is not only about 20 or so minutes long but also chock-full-o-swearing and most certainly NSFW!

And as long as some unfortunate bastard continues to drop these things at the VA (which is a Federal Building and not technically allowed to endorse or display stuff like this anyway, so really I'm doing EVERYONE a favor, here) there will be more "Bed-Time Stories" to come in the future.

Please, enjoy ^_^ 

RANT: Suicide

My Grandmother, Josephine, lived to be 99 years old. In the last month or so of her life she didn't lament never being able to make it to her 100th birthday, she knew she was very ill and likely going to die very soon (this was in 2012.) She was living at my Aunt & Uncle's house in Patchogue, New York, a nurse and a Catholic priest would stop by the house every other day to see that she was comfortable and being taken care of (my Aunt & Uncle aren't bad people, per se, they just have no concept of "bedside manner" or how to take care of a dying person) and my Mom made a special trip from Maine to stay with her for a few weeks. About 10 days after my Mom was back in Maine, my Grandmother passed away in her sleep.

Death comes for us all: Christian, Muslim, Wiccan, Scientologist, and yes, Atheists like me. While I wasn't exactly surprised to learn about my Nan's death due to her slowly failing health, it still hit me like a speeding Mack Truck: A person that I grew up with will no longer be in my life, I will never hear her voice or see her face again outside of old family home movies. Nan left existence as peacefully as she lived her life, and now her remains are in a Catholic cemetery on Long Island. I will never again get to give her a hug or see her smile, she's gone.

I was yanked from a Field Training Exercise to go to her funeral, my husband called me and told me the news: For some fucked up reason I'm always the last person in my family to find out when something bad has happened or when someone dies.

About a month ago I learned that a former squad-mate, US Army SPC Steven M Hays, was found dead inside his vehicle with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. When I first met Steven I was so badly dehydrated that I was pretty much completely delirious, our unit had decided that it would be a BRILLIANT IDEA to drag everyone out to an obstacle course and make everyone run it in the height of September with the Arizona sun blasting it's ultra-violet hatred on everyone: You know, to boost unit cohesion and some good clean "fun." So after ranting, yelling and swearing at my entire Company (and apparently my Commanding Officer as well) I was taken to the ad-hoc Med-Station (Which was basically a Humvee with a tank of water and some stretchers) and then I completely blacked out. It would seem one of the Soldiers I had inadvertently cussed out was Steven: Um, sorry 'bout that. 

The following Duty Day, he came to me and asked me what the fuck I was going on about: I told him a very abbreviated version of my story, he recalled to me some of the crazy shit I apparently screamed at everyone, our friendship was sealed from that point forward. I was never terribly popular in my old Unit to begin with, engaging in an act of consensual sex with another grown adult (a concept that our military has always struggled with) during the deployment in Iraq didn't improve my odds with them either, but unlike the other Soldiers who tried their damnedest to make me into a pariah, Steven at least took the time to say "Hello" to me when he could, in a group of people who could obviously have cared less if I had lived or died, it was a shining relief to see at least one other person who was glad that I was alive.
 

The difference between an otherwise natural death versus a suicide is that while both tend to be an emotional surprise, news of a suicide just doesn't seem to register in the brain at first. It's like you don't believe it at first, it literally "does not compute"

Our military demonizes people who die by their own hand, our society does this as well but not always to quite the same extent that the armed forces do. Sure, they tell you that they want you to get help if you're feeling like self-medicating with a .45 "Anti-Depressant" and they encourage Service-Members to do so, all the faster they can get the necessary paperwork started to kick your ass out. If life in the military is so awful that you want to DIE, why on Earth would you want to STAY IN? Because for many of them, especially those who have deployed repeatedly to Iraq or Afghanistan, that's all they have left: PTSD has ravaged their minds, military life has destroyed their families (Service-Members are up to four times more likely to get divorced than civilian couples) they're so beaten-into the system that it becomes the only life they know. After they have no more self-will, no more distractions from outside and no more control over their own circumstances, it becomes their life in it's entirety.

After that point, a Service-Member becomes so absorbed into "The Almighty Army" that it literally takes over their life. They are so indoctrinated that they can no longer understand anything else outside of the uniform, this can get to the point of "ordering" a spouse to do push-ups or even trying to pull rank on civilians who don't even live or work on Post. They literally BECOME their job, and when anything threatens them in that state (be it an injury, thoughts of suicide or even an Article 15) they will fight like Hell, scream, shout, even flat out lie, to keep the only thing they have left in their world, their only means of existence. 

The military suicide plague isn't due to a lack of options, it's because of a crippling lack of human decency toward one another.

Choosing to end your own life isn't a cowardly act, but it's nothing particularly ballsy either. Generally most of the people who express that sentiment are those who are upset only because the person they knew is no longer around for THEIR BENEFIT, not because that individual was in a tremendous amount of pain that he/she felt was being ignored or overlooked. There's nothing cowardly about wanting pain to go away, so suicide isn't "the easy way out," if anything it's got to be the most fearful and mind-breaking way to die that I can imagine.

I should know, I've tried it repeatedly.

I guess, to a point, the desire to self-terminate will always be there. When I was younger I was honestly so terrified that I would either go straight to Hell or maybe I'd reincarnate as an animal I didn't like. The last time I gave offing myself any serious effort was in Iraq, I had been stealing my Jesus-Freak roommate's painkillers over the course of a month, along with any & all pills I could get my hands on, and my original intent was to down the entire bottle on or before the day of my Article 15. I made it to about half the bottle before I started vomiting, they never quite made it into my stomach because I could feel my own esophagus squeezing shut: Of course I never told anyone that things had gotten THIS BAD, if I did then they would have just sent me on the next plane to Germany and shoved me into a cotton-box until my discharge papers were done.

I guess at THAT POINT it hit me that not only was the game rigged the entire time, that my squad-mates were NEVER going to grant me the respect that the uniform mandated because I admitted to myself that I'm just a person after-all (and a lowly female, no less) but that if I had actually gone through with my plan it would only be granting them what they wanted the entire time: For me to get myself out of the way before "the Enemy" could do it for them, and I wasn't ready to put my family through all of that. At the time, they had no idea about the kind of relationship my husband and I had, about our "friendships" with other consenting adults, it wasn't so much about me being afraid of the consequences anymore, but instead that I had to live through just long enough to see that they were eventually exposed for their own wrong-doings as well.

Surprised? Don't be. THAT was the big turning point for me, I fed them a line of bullshit about "seeing the wrong of my actions" while in the back of my brain swearing revenge for not dealing with another squad-mate who had assaulted & harassed me to the point of physical illness (I had been blacking out and vomiting so often from stress& sleep deprivation at that point that I honestly thought I might have had cancer, I even went to the clinic and requested a screening: UNFORTUNATELY, I didn't have cancer) and I gave any notion of gods or devils, even any version of an afterlife, the boot: If any all-intelligent being out there purposely allows people to get to the point where they'd rather die horribly than suffer the abuse of their fellow humans, then who in their right might can call this entity "good?"

There was recently a YouTube user going by the handle "MannixThePirate" whom, for the third time, faked killing himself: It's causing quite the outrage.

There is no pain in the world quite like realizing that someone you once knew is now dead, by whatever means. This is an especially troubling process when that person opted to decide things for themselves, but it's hard to put into words the fury that one feels boiling up inside themselves when they discover that someone, for whatever fucked up reason, decided that it would be a BRILLIANT IDEA to play it as a sick practical joke: Fuck you, dude, there are families and lives that are ripped apart because of suicide and you wanted to make a mockery of it? I'm not normally one to say that there are things you just can't joke about, because that would be censorship and I hold very tightly to the idea that censorship is for cunts, but this Mannix character should feel free to go dine on some fine light-bulbs with a tall glass of bleach to wash the shards down: People actually thought you were dead, you sick fuck.

In the end (haha, see what I did there) death really is the only thing that anyone can really take seriously at all, there's never really any going back and no one, despite any and all claims, ACTUALLY KNOWS if anything awaits us on the other side. I can no more demonize the act of suicide than I can cutting of one's own leg, it's your body and your life so I can't tell you what to do with it so long as you don't mean anyone else any harm.

But please, I don't want you to kill yourself. If only because there may be circumstances that you might not have considered until now.

The Story of Z (Part 3)

Atheists often use a term called "Cognitive Dissonance" to describe a specific concept: Essentially, it's an accurate description of KNOWING that something is, or has a distinct and clear possibility of being, complete and total bullshit but going along with it anyway for whatever reason the believer sees fit. This is often applied to lay-believers who "have to believe in SOMETHING" but may be wrestling with some doubt in the back of their minds, sometimes feelings of cognitive dissonance can escalate into full-blown emotional turmoil: This is especially true for people coming from more "devout" situations, countries and families because they may honestly believe that having a shred of doubt at all will damn them forever or even get them killed. 

Cognitive Dissonance is also the title of a frikkin' sweet podcast: Glory Hole!

About a year into joining Z's Circle and trying to find my place in the Universe (as well as with the others in the Circle, who never seemed all that talkative) It was easy to develop an obsession with all aspects of the Occult, and working at a bookstore full time it was even easier yet to accumulate a massive collection of books on the subject and build my own library. Z had his own curriculum that he taught from, there were two books in particular that he insisted were the absolute best way to do magick by: "Earth Power" by Scott Cunningham and "Psychic Self Defense" by Dion Fortune, and you'll notice many modern occultists and neo-pagans insist on adding the letter K to the word "magic" because they want to distinguish their rituals from slight-of-hand and stage tricks. 

I was convinced, by an incident I couldn't explain (at the time) in the old Holbrook Dormitory, that I was constantly surrounded by malevolent spirits and ghosts: Although I should point out that long after I had quit M.E.C.A. and returned home to Raymond, I found legit historical records (via the Maine Historical Society's archive building on Congress Street) strongly suggesting that a settlement of the Abenaki Tribe was violently wiped out not far from where I currently live over 200 years ago. Some people still believe in ghosts, especially in the New England area, and if they WERE REAL I can't imagine any lot of un-rested souls with any better reason to hang around and show the living how pissed off they are than murdered Native Americans.  

I am no longer among those people, but at the time this was all the convincing Z and I needed: I'd be pissed if this were MY ancestral home that white people were building a Banana Republic on, therefore ghosts exist.

He trained a small group of us, three including myself, how to investigate and vanquish spiritual "baddies" who were bothering humans: I began to doubt the legitimacy of Exorcism as a concept pretty early on, but I guess I justified it in my mind because I not only thought this shit was REAL but that it was possible for ghosts and entities to actually hurt people (and not just in the commonly said "feeding on your aura/energy stuff" that many New-Agers often discuss) Let's say for a moment that ghosts WERE real, that the dead could actually communicate with the living and could play charades with human beings, what if one ghost had a legitimate concern or urgent issue that they needed resolved? Like if that dead person was a murder victim and wanted their killer found, but started pestering the current occupants of their house for help because, well, a murderer could still be at large! Lighting up a big bowl of Myrrh in every room of the house and telling them to Go Fuck Yourself hardly seems helpful or beneficial to ANYONE, not the spirit in need nor the current home-owner.

After a trip to some middle-aged lady's house between the three of us, doing pretty much what I loosely described above, that was when some cosmic shit started to hit a really big fan that so happened to be pointed directly at me: Some weeks later we found out this lady had been to SEVERAL "Psychics" in the area requesting the exact same services, we got the impression that she just wanted to be told what she wanted to hear about some incurable problem and that some cosmic force had it out for her and no one could help, boo-hoo. Maybe if you'd vacuum your floor every so often, lady, and clean all those boxes of worthless shit out of your house you'd probably feel a little better about yourself and your life might come together.

This was going down in very early 2003, the drive to and from this woman's house was icy and dangerous: At one point on I-95 my entire wind-shield iced up and I had to pull over to scrape that shit off just so I could see the road. The other two in my crew took that as a sign from the spirit world that they were trying to stop us from doing this, I figured that this was a NORMAL FEBRUARY NIGHT IN MAINE! Z gave me $5 for gas, I don't think the other two offered me one red cent. Thanks, assholes. I think it was at THAT MOMENT that I began to quietly acknowledge that maybe I was wasting my time and resources with these people. I had already ordered several "reimbursable" books that I never got a dime for, now this. 

It's quite one thing to believe in invisible forces and that you can interact with them, not only that but that if you're a member of a spiritual community that actively wants to do this then that you should form some kind of agreement with each-other about about inter-member conduct: That night I honestly felt like I was just being used.

And it STILL wasn't enough for me to leave! I just couldn't accept that a Circle that I had devoted time and resources to would only see me as a means to an end, even almost ten years later this is difficult, at times even painful for me, to wrap my head around: Okay, fuck it, these people really pissed me off! But maybe I was just having a bad night, or maybe malevolent spirits were dicking around with my mind as revenge for the "eviction notice" I participated in serving upon them, or any other excuse I could imagine to explain away my doubts.

I simply COULD NOT BELIEVE, and that's honestly the most accurate term I can think to to express the sentiment, that some weird stranger playing a flute on 9-11 in the middle of downtown Portland Maine, the very same dude that I had managed to befriend and even offered me shelter from the proverbial shit storm that my hipster-classmates sent my way, only thought of me as little more than a resource for the security of his operations. Why the fuck would someone do something like that? Why would a friendship fostered over for over two years be a sham?

Or maybe I'm just taking a small slight (and approximately $1000 worth of donations and books) a little too personally...

Part 4 will be the final installation of this tale.

Sounds Legit

Sadly... I saw this on Memebase and it made me wonder...

... Is it any wonder why Atheists and Wiccans (seem to) get along so well? I'm of the opinion that believing in less violent bullshit is, well... still bullshit.

Let's see how many more ellipses I can put in this post...

I guess you could say that the last nail in the coffin for me was hammered down while I was deployed. This is going to sound bad, but in a war-zone, you get used to violence. After a while, distant fire-fights and mortars don't scare you as much. I was what is commonly refered to as a "Pogue" aslo known as a "Fobbit." My job in the Army is not necessarily combat related, but that doesn't mean that combat doesn't find you on occasion (usually in the form of bombs.)

But to this day the most sickening things I've seen from other human beings came from those wearing the same uniform as me, but that's for another post (I've run out of wine.) I just don't get how any all-knowing ever-present being, from ANY pantheon, could ignore such a festering SNAFU as the Iraq War. Worse yet, many Soldiers and Veterans that I still talk to tell me their combat experiences have strengthened their beliefs. I now have a better idea of why battered lovers refuse to leave their abusive partners, perhaps the two situations are not so different...

My last week in Iraq (Baghdad,) I watched a rocket hit a small building with Military Police inside. I'm reasonably certain that some of them were killed.  

The thing about life (and death) in a combat-zone is that you hear the mortar/rocket/bomb hit, there's sometimes an alarm that's usually supposed to go off and warn people followed by the "All-Clear" signal, then if you go back to your room and the internet is down it usually means that someone died in the attack. They shut down internet services to prevent that Soldiers' family from finding out via Facebook.

I don't know anything about those MPs, probably never met them. What did THEY believe in, if anything? Did they pray every day, meditate or speak in tongues... the god that they probably dedicated their lives to, I can't help but wonder if they were afraid in the end and perhaps called out for him... then what?

Crumbling concrete, an alarm... silence (Exeunt.)

People have the right to believe as they wish and on their own terms, but if that were me bleeding out under rubble and hearing only my own straining voice calling out for mercy from my so-called creator, only to behold everything fading to black, I'd imagine I might feel pretty angry and scared. Look where my years of Sunday Sermons and thousands of dollars on devotional books has gotten me, and now it's over.

Pardon me, but I have a serious problem with the idea of a benevolent deity "calling home" such a loyal servant in such a disgusting manner. That'd be a bit like whatever company you work for "promoting you to District Manager" by shooting you in the dick.

Are people so afraid of The Great Beyond that they'll hang off from whatever insanity they can barely grasp like scared monkeys in a forest-fire? Are you really so certain of your convictions that if a rocket were to hit you out of the sky RIGHT NOW, that there wouldn't be some shred of doubt lingering in your mind?

Imagine then what people who believe in reincarnation and "energy" must be thinking, if this had happened to them: Almost there, just a moment more... damn it's cold, I though this was a desert. Wait a sec, nothing's - (dead.) People can't contemplate death because we don't have any experience close enough to it, and NDE's have so far been proven to be little more than high-powered hallucinations caused by the brain shutting itself down.

Maybe when I eventually die, all that LSD will catch up to me.

No amount of prayer or 'energy' in the universe will stop an incoming RPG, as you've no doubt observed. And you'd be very hard pressed to convince me that this is all the plan of a loving god who wants what's best for us. Right, because god clearly knows that war benefits EVERYONE. Maybe shit just happens and sometimes people die in the process, is that really so hard to understand?

After I got home, I never did any spell-work again. After having endured a whole year of almost non-stop despair and horror (but there were a few good times, too) It kinda forced me to really sit and think about why I would anymore. Spells can't even guarantee a winning lotto ticket or a job interview, so who am I to think it can do jack to stop someone from getting killed in the most horrible way I can think of? If witch-craft is a crap-shoot at best, since I've been told time and time again "it doesn't work that way" then why do it in the first place?

Either magic isn't real or I musta' been rolling 1's all these years.

I'm really not trying to be rude or disrespectful, Wiccans and Pagans take a lot of heat from mainstream monotheists just like... well, almost everyone who isn't a theist. But I just couldn't walk away from these questions and I challenge you reading this to think this over, too: If you can't stop a rocket, or summon one yourself, then what is it all for?

As for my old crystals, I'm going to give them to a friend. 

A Dilemma

Much Ado About Very Little Indeed. There are almost no available resources for Atheists who de-converted from Wicca (such as myself) What gives, Interwebs? Even Richard Dawkins' own organization, whom at one point produced a feature-length documentary debunking New-Age pseudo-spirituality, is strangely lacking Ex-Wiccans as a viable category of supporters. Surprising, given at one point it was said to be the fastest growing religion in America (come to think of it, I can't help but wonder if that was ever true.)

There's sure no lack of action for those of us who pulled proverbial bags over our heads and ran straight into the arms of Christianity, some of them even wrote (laughable) books about this. I don't know what to say, except that I feel lost. SURELY I can't be the only one out there who had just had enough bull-shit for one life-time.

And what am I supposed to do with all my old "stuff?"

There's a big plastic bin full of dried plants and shiny rocks, mysteriously no one I know who still "practices" wants anything to do with it. I used to wear a silver pentacle ring on my right hand, I gave it to a good friend who has been having some hard times: All it seemed to do was confuse him. I had a stack of candles and holders that seemed to vanish rather quickly when offered to needy non-pagan friends, but I still have my statues. THOSE were expensive, I suppose I could keep them as Art, but there are just too many memories of sky-clad wishes and rituals that never came to fruition. They're just pretty pieces of brass, wood and rock.

I am, however, keeping a small selection of my old books purely for reference. I think there are some serious lessons to be learned from my myth-adventures, the rest are at the bottom of the plastic bin in my room.

But I'm keeping my seashell collection, dammit. I worked hard to find all of those.

This just isn't me anymore. I still love to walk through forests and along rivers, but now I have a different kind of appreciation for them as what they are instead of what they might be able to do for me. The trees are living organisms that amaze in their own way, who cares what might (not) happen if I set a small piece on fire in an incense for Isis. My dreams have always been vivid and full of emotion, not messages from dead pets: If the dead COULD talk, they'd have better things to tell us than 'just saying hi.' A winning lotto ticket would be lovely, is that somehow asking too much? Is "The Universe" afraid of what I might spend that money on?

And this is kinda the problem: Wicca, Astrology and other commonly cherished New-Age ideas aren't so much dangerous as they are "cosmically Immature" (you like that? I came up with it) The odds of seeing anybody blow up a clinic or assassinate a political figure because Brighid told them to are relatively slim, but violence aside it's just as asinine. Why are you gathering your friends in the woods to walk around a camp-fire in the hope of "manifesting change" when a good sit-down with them at a coffee shop or perhaps even casting your vote can just as easily (and more likely) accomplish the very change you are probably hoping for?

While you were probably 'sending positive energy into the Universe' or reading The Secret wishing that things will go your way if you just pretend hard enough, a convoy full of Soldiers just got blown up in Afghanistan. This is not pretend, it's quite real. I've served alongside Christians, Wiccans and Atheists alike: Roadside bombs don't care what flavor Kool-Aid you prefer to drink, the result is the same regardless. When I was in Iraq, I had often pondered what a conversation with a so-called Medium would be like if s/he had been right there beside me for the entire year. If this person's abilities were genuine, if the dead could indeed show themselves and talk to us, of all situations a Combat-Zone seems the most appropriate: Thousands of men and women who were thinking about, just as well probably praying for, their families and loved ones back home lost at the press of a button. Maybe, if they were very lucky, they'll have their names carved into a piece of stone at Arlington to be lost among the great many "occupants" before them.

BOOM! I'm dead! Well, fuck. I'll never see my family or my kids again! Now what do I do for all eternity? I know, I'll go make objects move...

Doesn't it also seem just a little bit silly that none of these modern-day-mages has been successfully able to raise a corpse or cast something vaguely resembling Magic-Missile? If they could, we would have won both wars a long damn time ago. Or maybe we would have lost anyway, depending on when "the Power of Prayer" decided to kick in. Thy-Will-Be-Done rarely seems to enter the minds of those whose squad-mates have just been annihilated in battle, does it? If magic and prayer were real, why does war still happen? Why do otherwise good people continue to suffer while seemingly bad ones prosper? You'd think, if anyone could effectively fix such human issues, it'd be a witch or a wizard.

No Dice, not even a D20.

That's just life, if any mystical forces or beings DID exist they'd have never left us in the first place. Conjuring faeries and angels to fix your problems is on the same level of delusional as speaking in tongues, you'd be much better off simply confronting your asshole boss or changing what you eat than lighting certain colored candles. Flowers and mountains are still fucking awesome and continue to be as such without spirits or gods dwelling within or around them, why spend this one existence asking them for favors when we know they can't answer us?

It's quite literally talking to a rock.