Guest, interesting discussion (though there are several guests here, so you'll have to sort yourselves out with that moniker).

Why the skepticism? The banner at the top of the page with the photo of the "Skeptical Enquirer" magazine cover tells me it is a "skeptic" movement website for debunking New Age beliefs, but not conventional religious beliefs. As I said, I see them as being just as lunatic fringe as much of the New Age stuff. If they were willing to challenge the religious belief systems of orthodox religion as stridently as they do New Age believers (many of whom are deeply religious and continue to practice their conventional religion in addition to believe in some New Age ideas and practices), I might give the article the time of day.

As with anything, one needs to be well informed, and a critical thinker. That includes being well informed about the "skeptic" movement and it's agenda.

The exposure to Postmodernism (also refered to as Deconstruction, a term McLaren used when refering to her evolution away from her former career) is a good way to compare the worlds. In my academic "indoctrination" as you call it (you were correct--two M.A.s), I covered environmental philosophy and American Indian literature. There are lots of "aha! moments when reading theory. Learn enough about Semiotics (signs/signifiers) so when you read multiple works within a given field the philosophy contained within the use of the language in those stories and poems and ethnographic materials begins to gel. You learn to look at the material and find clues to the meanings intended by the person who is speaking English, whether as a native speaker, as a second language, or as a translation (translations are by far the trickiest to work with). Thus, collections of American Indian stories with titles like Reinventing the Enemies' Language make perfect sense. The language is used in such a way that the EurAmerican is not at the center of the story, and what they conceive of as "universal" understandings are no longer valid. It's a real eye-opener for some, a real turn-off for others.

Not all traditional practices rooted in culture are positive. The native traditional practice of abandoning female widows in the wilderness after the death of their male partner, as was practiced among some native tribes in the fairly recent past, would be one that comes most readily to my mind. Granted, it isn't done in the way it once was among the tribes, but any trip to a contemporary reservation will show you that plenty of elderly, widowed native women have been abandoned by their families and left in substandard housing, with little to no attention paid to their most basic needs of adequate food, heat, sanitation, transportation, and medical and mental health care. How is that any different than leaving them in the wilderness?

There is a tremendous amount of misogyny and sexism in traditional cultures. I don't want to see that institutionalized in the name of false sanctity towards cultural traditions, which deserve to be left behind as relics of a superstititious past. The contemporary native religious practices are largely a reinvention, and that movement is wholly dominated by powerful male members of the communities who wish to glamorize a mythic warrior culture which never existed in the ways they claim they did. I don't support that.

No culture is perfect, they all have things that others find distasteful or immoral. I would respond to the charge regarding the abandoned elderly women that in the New World the poor elderly fall through the economic cracks throughout nations, not just in Indian cultures or on reservations. Not just women, not just Indians. With colonization came much of the economic chaos we see today; prior to the European arrival there were entirely different ways of reckoning were in effect. No value judgement here, just the simple observation that things were different.

As to debunking New Age and/or debunking modern religion. This could go on for many pages, and has, in many scholarly venues. I'll try to keep it brief. It is my opinion that humans have created their gods in various images, and their religions take on practices according to where they live. Some religions have grown and expanded well beyond their borders, and have lost touch with the native earth that gave rise to them. That the three big industrial religions were spawned in the deserts of the Middle East and now are entwined with Science and Economics means that they've moved far beyond the function of many autochthonous religions: a simple method of survivial that includes an origin story and includes many practices and rituals that, if successful, keep people more or less in a cyclical balance in the land where they live. When those local cultures and their spiritual practices go out of control to such an extent that their lives on the land become toxic (for example--Easter Island; some of the early Central American nation-states; probably some early European cultures; and quite possibly the Anasazi, in the American Southwest ca. 1300) then the cultures fail and vanish, and individuals reappear elsewhere to try something new.

The big three are much more than a way to live. They're a big power brokerage, where (mostly) white men control many people and get very rich in the process. Along the way there are people in it for good works, and there is enough of a balance between the rich and powerful and the altruistic that a lot of people never quite catch on to what is going on. (Kind of like the Republican party, evidently!)

"Reinvention," spiritually or in other ways, is a common practice in all cultures. To expect American Indian cultures to remain static museum pieces is unrealistic. If they had been untampered with for the last 500 years, they still would have changed from what they were in 1492. If Europeans had visited rather than conquered, ideas and practices still would have percolated quickly through the native cultures, and change would have occurred. The syncretism within native cultures is such, and in many ways more powerful than that demonstrated by the European cultures, that what you see today as Native Spirituality is an amalgam of religious beliefs--it's a survival skill. There is simply no way to describe a typcial American Indian today--they live everywhere, do everything. Those who live on reservations have a wide variety of experiences. The snapshot of the poor Indian on the Rez is just that, a snapshot through a keyhole. Just like many people from other cultures, there are some who can't get past the barriers of poor health, poor education, poor representation, and oppressive government and dominant culture practices.

In the McLaren article, she makes a point that illustrates precisely the problems we have when butting heads on some of these topics at Mudcat. She writes as a former New Age practicioner, now a scholar learning to understand the nuances of critical thinking:

Our cultural training about the dangers of the intellect makes it nearly impossible for us to utilize science properly - or to identify your intellectual rigor as anything but an unhealthy overuse of the mind. I know that sounds silly, but think of the way you view our capacity to dive deeply into matters of spiritual or religious study. You don't often treat our rigor as scholarship, per se (though it takes quite an intellect to understand and organize the often screamingly inconsistent sacred canon) - instead you tend to treat our work as an overabundance of credulity or perhaps even a stubborn refusal to listen to sense.

The "overabundance of credulity" is alive and well in some of these discussions. And we're always going to lock horns about it.

SRS