"Is the bondage of the priest-ridden less galling than that of the slave, because we do not see the chains, the indelible scars, the festering wounds, the deep degradation of all the powers of the God-like mind?"

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

How appropriate a verse in light of the recent allegations of impropriety and coverups by the Catholic Church. I'm sure that there are about fifteen other sects that are breathing a heavy sigh of relief that the spotlight is focused on the priests. I'm sure in time we'll come to discover that sexual abuse is not confined to just the followers of the Pope, we'll end up with a gaggle of rabbis and preachers in this before it's all over.

I must be fair about this, though. I had the good fortune to attend Catholic schools most of my life, and I do consider it good fortune. I had a terrific education.

Never in the entire time did a priest make any inappropriate gestures, and they had ample chances to, had they been so inclined. I was an altar boy, and spent long hours alone with priests for various reasons in school.

For example, to help pay tuition, I worked weekends answering the phones at the school, alone for long stretches of the afternoon and evening. Every once in a while one of the fathers would drop in to pick up something, or use the copy machine, whatever. Sometimes they'd sit and chat for a while. Perfect opportunity.

And I was a pretty little boy, though you'd have a hard time swallowing that looking at me today. Smallish, slender, long hair, rosy cheeks, the whole bit. Once, in my mid teens, working at a petshop and wearing a loose fitting smock, I was mistaken for a girl. I had a hard time living that one down. :-)

Anyway, in all those years, nothing untoward happened, for which I am thankful. All the priests I knew were fine men.

My pal macker seems to think that his conduct and personality as a Xian is an important facet of people's acceptance of his faith, or the lack therof. In fact, when he first came to know me, he assumed that my distaste for organized religion was due to some unpleasant experiences with the shamans in the Church while I was in my formative years. Not so.

My experience is that most adults have pretty much made up their mind about God, and aren't going to let other people's actions sway them much. We all know of assholes and angels in and out of the faith. If I was inclined to buy in to the whole Eternal Salvation thing, I'd be pretty foolish to risk my soul just because one insufferable asshole stumbled on the truth, too.

Conversely, I'm not going to be much persuaded to to believe, either, just because some proponent of the faith is charismatic, personable, and/or looks like a movie star.(Well, maybe the latter, iffn we're talking a female type. I might be willing to affect an enthusiasm. But if she was that sexy, I'd be more inclined to drag her over with me to the Dark Side. :-) It's a lot more fun over here.

So, I was not one of the "priest-ridden," at least in the most salacious interpretation of the term. However, I believe that we are all priest-ridden in a more insidious way, whether we are of the faith or not. We live in a culture in which many of the values are Xian values, and we follow them even if we don't follow the religion. They have transcended the faith to become an American value.

"Work Hard" is one of those values.

It's hard to find a man that's unemployed that feels good about himself, as men in our culture tend to define themselves by their job. Walk up to the average Joe, and ask him, "Joe, what are you?" In almost every instance, Joe will reply "I'm a truck driver." Not, I'm a Republican, or a father, or a model railroad enthusiast, though Joe is in fact all of those things, too. Take away a man's vocation, and you remove a large part of his selfhood.

All protestations of equality aside, we still look a bit askance at a man that chooses to be a stay-at-home dad. Or one that chooses to work only part-time, and lives a simple life so that he can afford to do so. Or one that is considerably under-employed. We expect men, and increasingly women, to work long and hard outside the home, as hard as they can, and to strive for promotions and raises. Anything less is considered laziness, and a character flaw. That's why it's called the "work ethic."

This is not the best way to live your life. Anthropologists tell us that we work much longer than primitive peoples in hunter-gatherer cultures, where most men and women only work a few hours each day, and spend the rest of the time relaxing, telling stories, having sex, or just "hanging out." Who knows what stress-related health problems and mental disorders result from this?

There are more of these cultural values which we've inherited from the Xian faith - the nature of sin, appropriate punishments for crime, denial of the senses as morally superior to indulging them among them.

In logic, the validity of a conclusion can only be as valid as the axioms used in it's construction. So too, as we search for the answers to many of the ethical dilemmas facing us today - the proper use of technology and natural resources, the just use of political and military power, even the simple centuries old question of how a man should live his personal life, we would do well to examine those unconscious assumptions to determine which we choose to keep, and which ones represent being saddled by the shamans, and deserve nothing more than to be tossed into the rubbish heap of history.

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About lunch time on Saturday, Wendy calls. Wendy does catering, and is in a bind. Can I work a party that night? She quotes a tasty hourly rate. Since I had no plans for the evening other than to write some stuff for this journal, and the place is just down the street, I said sure.

So I show up at the appointed hour, at this mansion, ready to sling whiskey.

As is usually the case with this sort of thing, it's a completely disorganized Bohemian ClusterFuck. The hostess has decided to purchase all the whiskey and setups herself, rather than delegating that chore to somebody that actually has a clue. Consequently, there's boodles of stuff that we don't need (gallons of apple juice???) and not enough of what we do need, (unimportant stuff like ice).

The party started at seven, and was scheduled to run until midnight. We were out of stuff by eight-thirty. My efforts to push the apple juice went for naught. Why do folks with boodles of moolah think it makes them an expert on everydam thing?

The folks throwing this shindig were Indian, and he is a doctor. The party guests were evidently all contributors to some charity thrown by the host. They were uniformly rich, Indian, and in the medical field. His swankienda was located in just about the most prime real estate in this very exclusive subdivision, right on the shore of Lake Woodlands. The bar they'd set up for me to work was just a few scant feet from the water.

Across the lake and behind some trees is the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion, a major concert venue, and there happened to be a concert that night. The music came bouncing over the water to provide the soundtrack for the party.

I felt like I'd been airdropped into some Fellini film with no subtitles. Here I am, surrounded by turbaned, nehru'd and sari'd Indians, bejeweled and shining, chatting in a mix of urbane English and some native dialect that was, of course, totally incomprehensible to me, handing out gin and tonics to the tunes of the Scorpions, Dio, and Deep Purple.

One of the things we were chronically short of was pitchers for refilling water glasses. We had only two, in fact, for over two hundred guests. So we kept two waiters running around full speed trying in vain to keep up. In my conversations with the thirsty guests, who were crashing the bar thinking, incorrectly as it turned out, that certainly the bar would have water available, I had to bite holes in my tongue several times to keep from referring to the waterboys as "Gunga Dins."

I wasn't too sure how a joke related to the British colonial period would go over.

None of them seemed to be very concerned over the recent unrest there. One guy told me he was going to leave for a vacation back in the old sod later this week. They were to a man convinced that the Pakistani Poobah, Musharaaf, was playing both sides of the street, and using the States like a cheap whore. To a man, they blamed the haphazard way Great Britain precipitously abandoned their colonial possessions without ensuring peaceful transitions for the trouble in the area.

It's interesting to note that of all the hotspots burning holes in the peace, three of the major ones, Afghanistan, India/Pakistan, and Israel, all were British possessions until shortly after the end of WWII, and all experienced wars within months of England relinquishing soverignty in a hasty manner.

One of the more interesting conversational threads was one I had with the head of anesthiology for one of the major Houston hospitals, in fact, the one where my father had a quadruple bypass a few years back. The guy told me that if I was ever there, to ask for him. I told him that I hoped he didn't take it personally if I told him I hoped I never saw him again. :-) He said he understood.

As an aside, am I the only person to notice that Indian women can be amazingly, wondrously beautiful? In my chequered past, I've had the good fortune to have a fling or three with women of nearly all flavors, but I've never enjoyed the company of an Indian woman. I need to work on that. :-)

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It seems I'm 90+% compatible with jonathan of words of my neighborhood.

I think the test must be flawed, as I don't think I'm 90% compatible with anyone, up to and including my own clone.

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