At the risk of sounding like I actually know something, I think living is kinda like the contemplation of a koan. We become self conscious. We form concepts of ourselves and the world around us. Like bird dogs we waver back and forth focusing in on a scent. That scent is our being. Walking the razor's edge and not falling one way or the other. Beliefs that once protected us become traps to contain us. To be. There's not as much inclination toward judgement/labels as we get closer to it. The inclination to do so just pushes us off one side or the other. We've understood what two hands clapping sound like and we're getting closer to being the sound of one hand doing the same. Lovely post.

Very nice. Yes, it's been hard for women to find balance, to not overly self-critique. Stay at home? Hold a job? Whatever you like, whatever fills your vision and life and family and success. Whatever you have the stamina for. Whatever you choose there will be regrets for what's been lost. But still, it's more of an extended Chinese menu, not just either/or. Work at home, work part time, do something more arts-related, do volunteer work, don't have kids, home school, and so on.

"Self-socializing"? Yes, that's a nice term to combine our personal actions and our democratic system. We can vote for the level of organized socialism we want, and augment with our own personal efforts. It fits in with traditional Christian missionary work, Habitat for Humanity, foster homes and Boys/Girls Clubs. But at some point individual or group efforts aren't enough for the problems of the world, so we need the organization coming from a larger body, typically a government.

Choosing is important. It's the buy-in we have with government - it's not just forced on us, we had a choice.

Respecting people's religion is a good stepping stone to respecting differences in beliefs. We live in a world where contradictory "facts" exist so often that it's simply hard to look at anything and accept it as fact. We have parallel worlds of people seeing the same things and interpreting them in complete opposite ways.

The "redefining of marriage" is fairly trivial, since it could have easily been described as "when two people who love each other decide to hold vows and commit to each other", where the assumption would have been that those two people were the same race and same nationality and same religion and different sex, perhaps same clan depending on the time. The living together and having children portions had had huge variations through all of history - whether one would go travelling, whether they could have children or not (a number of dynasties decided on that point).

In the 60's it was easier to pick out who were the big bands, what were the "types" of music. Now it's a much bigger mishmash, and while something's lost, something's gained. But it's hard for Christians to accept not being the only real star on the tree. And once you start putting more stars on the tree, the tradition does indeed change and start to become something else. We have very few meaningful rituals in our culture, and diluting those does bring on fears of losing identity, and losing it for some vague conception of tolerance isn't always reassuring. Need more coffee, this is going off the tracks.

As far as the culture wars go, I do not believe they are over. There are still very strong feelings on both extremes, and getting to the middle is going to be difficult... All I know for sure is that being a polarized country is getting us nowhere. There is no way in HELL we are going to end up on either extreme, so we'd best figure out how each side can get as much of what it needs as it can, and learn to live in harmony somewhere in the middle.

This sounds essentially correct to me. I find the culture wars as unpleasant as you find them, but I do not think that they are likely to end soon. I cannot, however, share your desire to find "harmony somewhere in the middle." I am not prepared to say, in the interests of achieving a truce "all right, I give up; the other side can have its way if that is what is needed to bring an end to the fighting" or even "let's split the difference." Indeed, I know very few people who take that attitude, which is precisely why I do not think that the culture wars are likely to end any time soon.

I definitely agree, however, that they are getting us no where. I hate to call battles over abortion and gay-marriage "distractions," because the answers we give to these questions have very real implications for the lives of millions of our citizens, but it does seem to me that the focus we have given them has made us lose track of other questions with impacts just as substantial. I wish we really had the mental energy to attend to these battles and to matters like global warming, education, ballooning debt, etc. Evidently, however, we do not, and I do not have any good ideas how we prioritize our attentions in light of that fact.