I've spent a lot of time recently thinking about what it means to be pagan. I've grown increasingly uncomfortable with religion in general. My experience has driven me to attempt to live a life of rigourous honesty, both with others and self. To attempt to live a life free of lies in both ommission amd commision, so that the bedrock question "What is real?" can be answered with some expectaion of probable outcome.

I recently participated in a Samhain ritual to honor our beloved dead, which has over the last few years been my favorite of rituals. It involves a guided meditation where, in our minds, we are guided to the Summerlands, the land of the dead, to have conversations with those we've lost. We each get the opportunity to publicly state the name of our loss and to actknowledge that "what is remembered lives"

That seems to have a worthwhile function as long as we understand that the Summerlands are ideas that we have created, not an objective destination where some element called "soul" will land. Of course in the "real" world, where there is a church on every corner, we see what kind of culture we create when humans, many seekers of truth, take ideas like the "Summerlands" or "Heaven" as literal places.

And that's the rub for me, truth seeker that I am, because I want my subjective universe to closely align with the objective universe that my senses, and my interpretive brain through experience, tell me exists. That's all we really get - part of being human is to exist in the paradox that objective reality is experienced through the subjective mind, brought to us through the senses. It's our job to reconcile the subjective experience that is what each of us lives, with the objective universe that exists outside ourselves.

In the past we took an experience, say, the hallucinations of nomadic tribesmen, as proof that an external God existed and gave us his law. The Dark Ages were ruled by religion, and are only now ending now that we have begun to understand that God or no, humans as a whole can and should have a say about how we organize our lives.

I listen , horrified, to the speeches of religious fanactics who want to "bring God back to the classroom" who state publicly that "if the ten commandments had been hung at Columbine high school, seventeen students would still be alive today." I'd laugh them off except for the fact that we've elected these people to craft law. (Want a really scary thought? These people have their finger on the nuclear button. Which fairy tale do you want to inform the finger?)

We're two elections away from a Christian Taliban. It's my contention that until we get beyond God, until we recognize that all we have is each other, we will never be able to have anything but the slavery of a religious police state. Humanity will not be free until ALL religions are consigned to the textbook and the museum. Things to be studied for their help in understanding human culture, but in no way controling the decisions of ruling bodies.

So what does this have to do with Gaia? Gaia theory in the end is another metaphor for understanding the world - literally the living biosphere from which we are made. Human culture is such a powerful force in motivating people, that until everyone we come into contact with at least understands our interdependence with this system as well as they know, say, the Lord's Prayer or the Pledge of Allegiance, we're going to continue to live with the by-products of the dark ages, a culture that views the world as a stage for their passion play, to be judged by the fairy tale god after the last bead of oxygen has wicked off into space.