Dowsing for Divinity

There are many nonbinary versions of common social roles. Here are some examples for Pagans and witches. The nonbinary versions are in bold. (more…)

Left-wing readings of Tolkien: look, ordinary people count. Joy matters. Beauty matters. Love, mercy, kindness can transform everything. (Oh and let’s resist drawing easy comparisons between orcs and people who are demonized by our culture.) Right-wing readings of Tolkien: anyone we don’t like is an orc. Hobbits are justified in their inward-looking mentality. And oh look at these cool things…

Have you ever read an “uplifting” meme online and thought, no, that’s not right? Normally I just scroll on by, thinking “that’s just not for me”, but sometimes I feel the need to unpack and critique what’s being said. This is one of those times. (more…)

It’s Disability Pride Month, so I thought I would take a look at books written by and for disabled people. (more…)

Ritual is like a vehicle for creating an experience of epistemological transcendence (experiencing the transpersonal, the collective). It is an encounter with the sacred other – the gods, spirits, elements, other people, Nature – through poetry and metaphor. Ross Nichols once said “ritual is poetry in the world of acts” – in other words, a poem is a word-picture aimed at evoking feelings; a…

Here’s a great interview involving three of my friends, talking about love of the land, Pagan networking before the internet, Scottish culture, and more.

My friend Jenny, who volunteers for an organization that helps trans people escape from oppressive countries (including the USA and the UK) has co-authored a book about how to get out of these countries. It’s a free download. Continue reading Escape to freedom

In a previous post, I looked at the possibility of being granted a religious exemption from using AI. This raises a possible dilemma: if people of conscience can get religious exemptions from harmful activities like war and other forms of causing suffering to others, how is that different from allowing bigots to opt out of registering same-sex marriages, or baking a cake for same-sex weddings, or…

If you have an ethic of avoiding harm to the environment and other people, AI and its associated requirement for data processing centres which guzzle water and electricity, and slave labour (or very poorly-paid labour) to mine the minerals needed for the devices it runs on, definitely qualifies as the sort of harm that we would wish to avoid. Continue reading Religious exemption from using AI

For people who want human-made art and writing in their search results, it’s getting harder to distinguish between AI and human-made, as large language models “learn” to generate productions that look more like human language and art. Continue reading Filtering out AI

Artist and author Mickie Mueller has created a “human intelligence” digital badge for art and writing, to make it easy to distinguish between human-produced art and AI-generated stuff. Here’s the elevator pitch: It’s a badge free for human creators to add to their social media posts of all kinds that helps everyone know at a glance that this is a human made creation, not made by AI. Continue…

When I was a kid and artificial intelligence (AI) was firmly in the realm of science fiction, asking whether AI could become conscious seemed like an interesting philosophical problem, but mostly irrelevant. Why did the Butlerian Jihad destroy all “thinking machines”? Why did humans hunt the androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The AI and robots of older science fiction stories are…

We watched the film Ammonite last night, about Mary Anning the geologist and a fictional lesbian relationship with another geologist, Charlotte Murchison. (Spoilers after the jump.) Continue reading Review: Ammonite

June is Pride Month in Canada. And it is not just an excuse for a party, but an opportunity for the 2SLGBTQIA+ community to be visible, and to celebrate our wins over the years, from greater social acceptance to same-sex-marriage. Continue reading Happy Pride Month