By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

I don’t text or tweet but if I did, I’d have trouble with the acronyms. I like descriptive words that tumble off the tongue with conviction, layered with meaning. Shorthand doesn’t capture my imagination. In fact, it minimizes the importance of things. For instance, tongue in cheek, Stephen Colbert recently downgraded Christmas to Xmas, citing a conversation on FOX News where pundits supposed that Jesus would be considered a liberal today, probably a Democrat. Yes, they occasionally tell truth over at FOX, but only the kind their viewers are insulated against taking seriously. Evidently the Christ’s teachings vs. corporate Christianity is one of those topics. Trust Colbert to nail the argument, and brilliantly. He and Jon Stewart are valued as social commentators, but underrated as arbiters of decency and ethics.

FOX insists there is still a war on Christmas by the separation-of-church-and-state secular liberal hippy-types (me certainly, and maybe you). Their empty meme gets bumped into the agenda over and over by culture warriors like Senator Jim DeMint, who protested congressional meetings during the last week as an assault on the faithful who count their Christmas vacation sacred. Vice President Joe Biden, whom I suspect God/dess loves for his candor, suggested that it was a shame the nation’s business had gotten in the way of Jim’s Christmas shopping.

Another war I keep hearing about is the one going on between believers and atheists, with agnostics watching carefully to see who wins such an ideological battle (as if they’re waiting to hop the faster train.) Outspoken atheist Christopher Hitchens is dying of cancer, and I’d bet that some Christian blogger has already mentioned how Gawd-His-Own-Self is orchestrating Hitchens’s demise as punishment for the gent’s blatant homosexuality and faithlessness. Apparently the Christian God has a cruel streak and doesn’t approve of most of us, certainly any of us who think for ourselves, let alone touch ourselves or each other.

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Today’s Oracle takes us to the Cancer weekly of Aug. 27, 2004

The energy in your life is not as stuck as you may think, and developments of the next week will dramatize that. But don’t let things get out of hand; maintain a more or less steady posture. You are being offered something, and it may be fun, but it may work out to be a kind of false freedom. I suggest you keep some options and some energy in reserve for a few extra days, after the big uproar has passed. Meantime, the coming events will at least be interesting and will provide inspiration for the many creative tasks you’re considering — so take notes.

(The Daily Oracle is a random selection from one of 10,000 Eric Francis horoscopes. New horoscopes by Eric are published weekly plus twice a month in Planet Waves Astrology News and Planet Waves Light. The Oracle itself is a divination tool available to subscribers to either of these services.)

Note to Readers: This week I’m posting the subscriber edition of Planet Waves to the open side of the website. This is the last weekly horoscope of 2010. You can receive these columns by subscribing to Planet Waves (which includes longer articles) or Planet Waves Light (which includes horoscopes only). Happy holidays! –efc

Dear Friend and Reader:

Today is Christmas Eve, so I thought I would do something borrowing from an old Christian tradition. I’ve only mentioned being Quaker a few times on these pages, though it’s a significant piece of my philosophical heritage. I made this discovery as a kid, after attending Friends summer camps for five years (Quaker is old-fashioned shorthand for The Religious Society of Friends).

Photo by Eric Francis.

You can think of Quakerism as a form of Zen Christianity. It’s a religion without dogma, without hierarchy and with few words spoken. Each person is encouraged to develop his or her own relationship to God, the Creator or existence. There is no minister; each person speaks, if moved to do so, in the midst of silent meeting.

There are no set rules or doctrines, only flexible guidelines for living. We’re so used to religions telling us that this is how it’s supposed to be, and this is the law, and you have to do that or God doesn’t love you, that we may lack any concept that something else is possible. Friends’ guidelines for living include being dedicated to peace, doing business with integrity, not swearing oaths, and seeking divinity or the voice of spirit within. Quakers call this the ‘inner light’. It is considered a natural part of the human psyche, not something we have to earn.

One of the notable things about Friends is that we do not go to war, we so not advocate war, and we don’t advocate the cause of war in any form, for any reason. It is that simple. Warfare is unnecessary, immoral and stupid (besides being waged by businessmen and based entirely on deception and greed). We’re the people you come to if you don’t want to get drafted. Quakers saved the lives of a lot of young men who would have otherwise ended up in Vietnam because we know how to make the case against war on ethical grounds.

One of the modes of Quaker discourse is in the form of ‘advices and queries’. This is one of the basic models I use in writing my horoscopes, which I view as an ongoing inquiry about the nature of existence. In this last weekly horoscope of 2010, I thought I would borrow from the Quaker style and present queries based on the recent experience of astrology for each of the Sun signs. By recent, I mean going back as far as seven years for one of the signs, five years for another, and a bit less for the others.

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Today’s Oracle takes us to the Cancer weekly of Aug. 15, 2008

It has been said that we can offer three things for sale: our labor, our ideas and our time. Of the three, your ideas are by far the most valuable. In order to create a life where you can live on your ideas, you need to take emphasis off of time and labor. You also need to see a particular opening when the clouds part and the gateway is standing in front of you. Then you need the confidence to know if it’s the right one. In other words, you are standing very close to the place where preparation and opportunity intersect. The third factor is your having solid faith in what you have to offer, and noticing the guidance that tells you that this is the time to make a difference. Even you who have long wondered if the products of your mind have a tangible value will get some unusual evidence of that fact. But once the world opens up and proves this point, it is you who must remember every day.

(The Daily Oracle is a random selection from one of 10,000 Eric Francis horoscopes. New horoscopes by Eric are published weekly plus twice a month in Planet Waves Astrology News and Planet Waves Light. The Oracle itself is a divination tool available to subscribers to either of these services.)

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The focus of today’s astrology is the Sun and Mercury and the signs they are in. The Moon and Pluto will be mentioned as well.

We are past the sequence of events that culminated with the lunar eclipse on the Capricorn solstice. It may seem as though we are due for things to wind down. That does not appear to be the case. Something is going on. One would have to be asleep not to see it. Rather than having arrived at some climax or destination, it feels like we are setting out on a new expedition. One could almost bet that the evolving relationship between Mercury and the Sun can provide us with a handle to grasp.

The apparent motion of the Sun is now back toward the equator and we will soon see it change its direction along the horizon with each day’s dawn and setting. Preceding and during Sol’s period of pivot and reversal, Mercury’s retrograde has served as both a bridge and an amplifying counterpoint. With both the lesser planet and the greater luminary doing their similar business in the same vicinity of the zodiac at the same time, there has been a concurrency and exchange of energy signatures that more than anything, distinguished the recent astrology up to this point.

That was then, this is different. The new solar season initiates a fresh cardinal paradigm punctuated by a daily series of Capricorn conjunctions that will carry us through the Christmas weekend. At the same time but now in a very different place, Mercury continues to backpedal for another full week, right up to the penultimate day of 2010. This new and distinguishing pattern of same time, separate activity and separating place and has not come about suddenly. It has simply, gradually become apparent.

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Today’s Oracle takes us to the Leo monthly of April 9, 2007

We have all kinds of influences pushing us to be sexy, but very few encouraging us to relate to one another with sex as a means of celebrating and communicating. We’re told that sex is about power and commitment, not a gift we can give or receive freely. You of all people have the confidence in yourself to make up your own mind about what your own sexuality means to you. In so doing, you will inspire others to feel their own strength and beauty. Many have pointed out that sex spreads karma around, as if it were a trap; few have noted that it can be the karma of liberation.

(The Daily Oracle is a random selection from one of 10,000 Eric Francis horoscopes. New horoscopes by Eric are published weekly plus twice a month in Planet Waves Astrology News and Planet Waves Light. The Oracle itself is a divination tool available to subscribers to either of these services.)

Tell Facebook: “Relationships” Comprise More Than Just Sex Partners

by Christina Campbell, originally published at change.org. The writer has a really interesting blog — great perspective. Here it is.

Facebook allows us to write whatever we want in our profile’s “Religion” box — even Peanut Butter Cups. So why, for our “Relationship,” must we choose from a pre-set list of nine choices: single; in a relationship; engaged; married; it’s complicated; in an open relationship; widowed; separated; and divorced?

The relationship drop-down menu of doom.

Facebook needs to make the Relationship status a write-in field. I at least want the option of flaunting of my relationships with my cat or my hairdresser. But there are serious, bigger problems at stake here.

By forcing users to choose one “relationship” from a narrow range of options centering around marital status and sexual habits, Facebook perpetuates our society’s entrenched mate-mania, which over-worships the sexual-couple-unit, and marriage in particular. This bias devalues other important relationships. It devalues platonic friends and non-spousal family members. And it devalues people for whom conventional coupling/marriage is either not appealing or not an option.

Many of us have experienced this mate-mania in common discourse, such as the single person who weathers comments like “You’re so awesome, why are you still single?” But most people don’t realize that this irritating cultural quirk is actually codified into government policy. In the U.S. legal code over 1300 laws mention marital status, favoring married couples by a wide margin. People seldom question this blatant discrimination because they’re brainwashed by the myth of marriage-as-panacaea, a myth encouraged by casually couple-centric phenomena like the Facebook Relationship Drop Down Menu of Doom.

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