Religion in its own blog

This is the same RantWoman the world has already grown to love in RantWoman

RantWoman promises to cross-link extensively. RantWoman promises to rant and rave as irreverently as ever. And RantWoman is, in the lingo of the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers, quite clear that her ravings about religion belong in a separate place from her rantings about shopping, pedestrian issues, the swine flu, the many ways to sin with Powerpoint, the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing, impaired vision or visual misbehavior and other topics.

The reasons RantWoman is clear on this point:

Keeping journals of one's faith journey is a long-established tradition among Friends. RantWoman has not exactly read an excessive number of these journals for reasons she will rant about at some point. RantWoman believes however that she is as fully qualified as any other seeker in the tradition to spill her guts all over the medium of her age both to aid her own faith exploration and for the edification, entertainment, and amusement of other present and future seekers.

Not everyone has the stomach to read about religion in any form, and some of those with no stomach can be quite disagreeable about it. Whether or not RantWoman thinks it is good for people to read about religion, even a religion that might seem odd or very different from others, RantWoman herself will find it easier to "stay centered" if she sets modest blog boundaries. Come in; you're welcome, but don't say RantWoman did not warn you this blog might contain arcana of somewhat limited interest to the wider world.

If reading about Meeting for Worship, Meeting for Worship for Business, God, Peace and Social Concerns, Ministry and Worship, the alphabet soup of Quaker organizations, and RantWoman's struggles to figure out what she believes and to live within the boundaries of what the beliefs require are going to bore you to tears, God bless you, but please click to something else immediately.

If mere mention of God is going to make you apoplectic RantWoman expects there are two possibilities: either you are a hopeless atheist doomed to the pretension that you do not need all that God stuff and you should leave this site immediately or you are a perfect candidate to seek and worship among the unprogrammed Friends of the Pacific Northwest who speak individually in a whole multitude of terms about God, Spirit, the Divine... and a whole bunch of other associated concepts.

The Religious Society of Friends is one of those small but mighty communities with an almost endless supply of topics about which the first thing the small but mighty community will do is to sink immediately into vehemently articulated schisms. Blind people in the US do this too. RantWoman thinks other religious denominations do this as well. RantWoman thinks this phenomenon may be proof that God whoever he or she may be has a really twisted sense of humor. And the POINT of RantWoman's making a separate blog about religion is to poke and pry and examine these phenomena an questions in all their peculiar glory in extravagant baroque even self-indulgent depth.

With that as an intro, let us settle into Worship.