The Adventurous GIT

Content Warning: Weight Shaming Havamal 20: A greedy bloke, unless he curbs his bend, will eat himself into lifelong grief: he's often derided when he comes among the wise, a man who's a fool in the belly. Translation -  Andrew Orchard - Penguin Classics The AFA's podcast recently decided to attempt a discussion about one of the most complex and personal topics affecting society today: obesity and weight. It went about as gracefully as you'd expect... "A" for effort tho... The first clue was the title, an elegant foghorn to the listener that a holier-than-thou lecture was incoming: "No Fat Heathens." Leading in with several Havamal verses, including the one above, the presenter somehow felt it was wise to dispense questionable dietary/medical advice on a podcast ostensibly dedicated to religious topics. I don't see a benefit to a full point-by-point breakdown like  some of my previous rebuttals , but there are some salient...

Less than 20 blog posts into this mad experiment, and I've had my words shared across dozens of pages, a couple hitting views in the thousands. I've been shared to far corners of Facebook whose intersectionality with the Pagan (and specifically Heathen) audience I originally envisioned for this blog makes a game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon  seem straightforward. Seriously. But am I someone who should be saying some of these things? They're being shared and read, so there's obviously an audience who appreciates that they're said at all, and a large majority of the feedback I've gotten has been positive. From a certain point of view, I am practically the  worst  person to be sharing these thoughts, though. My upbringing was so cliché American White Bread™, it's practically an SNL skit without a punchline: White, firmly Middle Class, two parents, Christian, Private School, International Exchange Student... The list can go on, but you get the idea. ...

Odin is a Thief and a Deceiver. Tyr is an Oathbreaker. I'm okay with that. Not exactly qualities to aspire to, though. Something that many Polytheists struggle with is the fallibility, the errors, or even the outright terrible behavior attributed to the Gods and Goddesses in the Lore. Lacking the certitude of an "all-good" monotheist worldview, the myths and stories we have from pre-Christian times don't always seem like the noblest of deeds. There's a host of  examples that can counter that narrative of "all-good",  but on the whole, most monotheists still count their Deity as lacking character flaws. A debate on that is a different post for a different blog. This here blog is Polytheist Territory, and I'd much rather talk about Them, thank you very much. I can't promise this power isn't going to my head. Yes, the title of this post is the classic Star Wars reference, where a deception was created ( retroactively , because we k...