said, "I would like to point out as well, the undercurrent of mother goddess worship in Catholicism in South and Central America, which was transferred from ancient indigenous deities to Mary after the Catholic Church forced conversion there."

The same was true to southern European Catholicism, with the emphasis on Mary.

Azathoth said, "f you want a progressive religon I suggest you try a newer one made by people with more modern sensibilities." Judging by your handle, you are probably knowledgable about just such religions. I quite like Wicca, where there is a God and a Goddess...

Back to my first paragraph - Catholicism has Mary, but in the bleak Protestant north of Europe the revival of the Goddess took place (in her own right, and not in a Marian type role), and probably at least in part as a reaction against the Christianity of those parts.

There does seem, going back o Azathoth, a movement in some quarters to recognize religion as human-made, and that therefore we can experiment and play with the forms and have them suit our moder selves, instead of wrestling with weird injunctions from the desert of 3000 years ago...

said, "Isn't the masculinization of the Deity the greatest blasphemy of all?"

Amen brother.

And also the humanization of the Deity (if any)... The Deity (if any) of the big bang, a gazillion nebulae, quantum physics, etc. etc. dwarfed into a desert warlord who wants all his male subjects to be big bad warriors... It's so absurd that it baffles me that anyone buys it.

is pre-human. In the animal world, males will mount other males to demonstrate dominance. In many species, particularly herd species, a male will dominate all the females and all the other males (if any other adult males are allowed to hang around). (Patriarchy damages most men as well as all women.)

That doesn't mean it's inevitable. Human beings are quite plastic. We also have innate antagonism towards The Other, innate inclination towards war, a natural impulse to rob, trample, prevail by any means necessary. However, childhood training, 'artificial' cultural standards and the rule of law keeps most of this in check. Even wife-beating is no longer acceptable, even if there haven't been many steps to counter-act it.

We also, as mammals, have as Rodriguez says, the mother-bond, and also, as herd animals, we have innate love, empathy and cooperation to draw on. Human history has been a struggle between the dichotomies of our nature, but in the long run, and at least in our own cultures, the "better angels of our nature" are prevailing. Proposition 8 was an unpleasant bump in the road, but heart and neo-cortex seem on the whole to be gathering momentum vis-a-vis the ancient primitive impulses...

Of course, economic hard times tends to move the culturally-progressive clock back...

Yeah - in fact he has come across as a hawk on Afghanistan (which has bogged down all previous invaders, and will do the same to the U.S.) (Though I acknowledge the perceived need to get and, in BO's words, KILL Bin Ladin...) (No, I have no solution to the conflicting problems of avoiding Afghanistan-bogging-down and getting BL. So far nobody else seems to either...)

(Someone should do a dissertation sometime on our 'handles'.)

Your mini-essay on Rand was great! The Rand characters are robots, missing a lot of the messy but essential human stuff. Romanticized psychopaths.

read a biog of Rand and her romantic relationships.

Thing about ultra-rationalists is that they don't seem to notice how irrational they are.

Not that we Subjectivists are doing a whole lot better...

isn't there some white woman, name of Kardashian I think, famous for one thing and one thing only, and that's her protuberant backside. P.S. - That url for the author brought up a bunch of pix, but none of her rear-end. I want my money back.

of the time (long ago) when my (then) husband remarked that black women have great behinds. I said, "So do black men." And he said, "They do? And you NOTiced?"

But Michelle has given up her career (at least for now) not to be mother to her children (she talked about juggling that with work, plus her mother's help) - she's given it up in deference to her husband. It isn't that she's stopped her high-power career to be full-time mother, but to be wifey. (Maybe she'll have a second career later on a la Hilary - hope so.)

...when Obama answered the question about what his educated, accomplished etc. wife would do rattling around in the White House. I think he should have deferred to her there. (OTOH that was an unnecessary little put-down by her about "what part of dishwashing do you like"). I thought the football thing at the end was stupid (and rude - people here are making the best of it as not the non-sexist moment it looked like to me). Owell, it *humanizes* powerful people to yammer on about sports with them.

Details, details. On the whole, they were a lovely couple. Imagine John McCain & Cindy there, or (shudder, reach for the bottle) Sarah and Todd Palin.

Vietnam then seems much like Iraq now - yeah, awful things were going on there, but the U.S. invasions didn't fix them...and, rather, had the Americans also doing awful things. If we could invade and fix everything up, well then okay, I guess - we sort of did that, after a fashion, in Germany and Japan in WW2. Maybe we thought we were gonna do the same thing again... I fear for Afghanistan, which has mired down invaders for centuries, and I don't think we're going to do any better.

It was Palin stirring up the mob with her 'oratory' about stupid stuff ("not like us, Ayers, terrorists"), whereas the reaction against her is based on her flubs.

Oh, projection projection... I keep forgetting and trying to argue against it...