The Thing About Gratitude

Tags

God, gratitude, life

It’s all good, right?

I mean, we see it every day. The call to gratitude. We are told to journal it. We are told to start every day with it.

Well I read something the other day that got me to thinking that perhaps we are looking at it wrongly, or at least superficially.

Let’s be real here.

When do we invoke this “count your blessings” doctrine?

Usually when crap is going badly for us. When the winter has been too long, or we are challenged by a health issue, or a loved one dies, or doesn’t love us any more. When the kids fly the coop, when the sinuses act up, when a promotion falls through. The list of human bumps in the road are endless.

And somebody reminds us, or we remind ourselves, to remember how darn fortunate we are “all things considered.”

So we dig our way out of the hole by posting a list of ten “gratitudes” each day, or we write in a journal, or we at least start our meditation/prayers with a list. Partly this greatly enlarges our concept of what we can be grateful for of course. The flowers, the sun when it has rained for days, a really good cup of coffee.

But what underlines much of this process, either consciously or otherwise, is an assumption of who or what one is to be grateful to. In fact, it’s pretty much in your face in some meme’s I’ve seen on Facebook.

God.

We thank God for this, that, and everything good that happens to us. We thank God for a sunny warm day for that outdoor wedding, for surviving that heart attack, and for keeping us from that awful accident  at that spot we passed only seconds before.

And that creates the great unspoken counterpoint.

Other people died in the accident we avoided. Others don’t survive their heart attacks. It rains on plenty of outdoor weddings. What have these folks done wrong? not enough of?

When we give gratefulness to God for the good, we automatically suggest that others weren’t deserving enough, didn’t believe enough, well enough, or something. Not enough. We however, are “good” enough.

God must love us a lot since we have all “this”. And God, consequently must not love them as much.

That is what we mean, even if we don’t think it.

And of course even our prayer of gratitude is not pure. It’s done for a purpose. To get us out of our sad/angry/scared place.

See all the benefits?

Surely we should be grateful. We work hard, we are patient, we study, we have friends and family who help us. All these things can be the point of our gratitude and no doubt deservingly so. Whatever my parents were or were not, they got me to college, allowed me the opportunity to become a lawyer, make a good living, set myself up for a nicely comfortable financial life. I owe them my gratitude. I also owe it to myself for all those endless days and nights of studying that first year of law school without which their funds would have been wasted.

But when I take it up the scale and I thank God, then I’m heading in a whole new direction.

For then I must posit and belief that God is a meddler. God is a minutia freak. God is pulling an infinity of strings to make sure that I got that education, that job, met that man, moved to that place, and on and on and on. Once you start here, you can’t stop. God ends up being responsible for every tooth not rotted with decay. God becomes responsible for somebody remembering to post birthday greetings on your Wall.

Free will is out the door, because it’s all part of God’s plan, that fall-back position for “I don’t know how the hell this happened”.

And if it’s one way, then it’s all ways. God is also responsible for the flood that ruined your home with not enough insurance to cover the repairs. God is at fault the reason for sonny boy not getting into Princeton. God ruined the souffle.

Because He is either in charge or he’s not. There’s no middle ground. It’s all part of the great mysterious “plan” and it’s gotta happen that way. You have to have a headache on March 7, so that a husband doesn’t keel over from a stroke because you didn’t make that chocolate cake that was the last straw that would break the blood vessel’s  wall two days later.

And if all that is true, then people who are shot and killed in Syria today were only dying because God willed it. It was for that higher purpose “plan”. And if people live with not enough to eat, well they are supposed to. There are slippery slopes, and this is one of them. Start down the path to praising God for the good in your life, and you have to admit that he causes all the bad too.

I’m not saying that God sits back and never does a thing. I think he speaks to each of us urgently every moment, begging us to rise to the occasion. And if we do, we’re looking out for ourselves, our loved ones, and all the people we don’t even know. We’re kinder and better to ourselves and everyone else. God urges that surgeon to be the best surgeon and completely focused. He begs her not to drink the night before. BUT SHE EITHER LISTENS OR DOESN’T AND IF SHE DOESN’T, AND HER HAND SLIPS, SHE’S TO BLAME, NOT GOD, FOR THE PATIENT’S DEATH.

You see what I mean?

That’s how God is God and we are we, fault-prone humans with free will to do or not do as we choose.

So by all means, give thanks for all you have. It’s a fine practice. Just remember who you need to thank and who not.

God can be thanked for much, but micromanaging your little life? Ahhh, not so much.

God’s Owner’s Manual

Tags

God, Humor

There are some in this world of ours that think this  bible is such a thing, a owner’s manual. Written by the Almighty, it is purported to contain all the instructions for being a “good” believer and doer of God’s will. For some, any question is met with a rifling of pages until just the perfect passage is found, whether it be when to plant crops or what to do with a teenager in heat.

It has always confounded me this claim that the bible is the “word of God”, in that it is written in such a way that it could not be the work of a superior being. The “word of God” folks are quick to point out that God “used” humans to write it, and allowed them to use their own idioms and ethnic phrasing, putting the concepts in terms understandable by their own people.

Several things strike me as odd in that respect. First, this God whom they say created the earth and all within it, seems stymied by a lack of arms, hands or fingers to manipulate the pen. Second, it suggests that the all-knowing (omniscient) one doesn’t know the language of the people in question  well enough to construct simple sentences that they can understand.

So, it just seems like a convenient excuse to avoid the problem of why this collection of books is so confusing, convoluted, contradictory, and repetitive–why do we need FOUR gospels after all, why not three or thirty? This makes no sense as you can see.

Not that I deny that God cannot write a manual telling us how to act. But it seems to me that it might go something more like this:

DEAR CHILDREN:

I’m your father, . . . and mother for that matter. I know that doesn’t sound right, but trust me, in time you will understand.

You can call me God.

I created everything you see and hear and smell and taste. It’s all quite complicated, the actual how it all happened bit, but again, you will understand in time.

I created you too, all of you.

Now before you get all thankful and start bowing and making offerings of all sorts of stuff to make me happy, just stop and take a deep breath. Okay.

Let’s get this straight. I am not interested in being worshiped. I’m a God after all. Such things are nice, but unnecessary. I do like to spend time with you, just talking. I talk to you all the time, but mostly you don’t hear me. You have to be very quiet, especially in your mind before you can hear.

I know it sounds mysterious.

It’s really not, and as I’ve said already, you will understand in time.

No don’t pack a lunch. It’s going to take a good deal longer than that.

I suppose you want to know why you are here.

Quite simply, to be like me.

You are on a marvelous journey of discovering who you are. Each one of you is destined to attain perfection. It won’t all happen at once, or it may. You are each unique and you will create your own perfect path to me.

Do not worry if you are getting up there in human age. Enlightenment can happen in an instant. But it may not. As I said, don’t worry, there are unlimited do-overs.

It is part of your sentience that you are never without a question, so it stands to reason that people everywhere, throughout time, attempt to define me and describe what I want. In some places these written treatises have come to be called “sacred”. They are not really, just human ideas. Some are pretty close approximations and some are way off the mark. None is really close to the truth. But there is much wisdom  in all, and feel free to study them for that.

There is no judgment here. It would be like judging the relative strength of ant to an elephant if you get the analogy. You’re all so deeply flawed to one degree or another. It’s just a matter of degree compared to what you will become. So there are no grades. You will all pass eventually.

A couple of things you humans have hit upon are rather close to the truth, so you might be mindful of them as you live this particular life:

1. I never promised you a rose garden. Shit happens. I didn’t cause it, but I am here to kiss the boo boo. You’ll find that most of the bad stuff that happens is your or other human’s creation. There are consequences to your actions. I said most remember. Some bad stuff is just chance. Everything that happens, good or bad is something you can learn from.
2. If you meet the buddha on the road of life, kill him. Not literally. But if anyone tries to tell you they know who I am and what I like or don’t like, they’re wrong. Probably more wrong than you. The people who are truly enlightened try to give you the tools to find your own enlightenment, they don’t batter your head and threaten you. NOBODY FAILS. Ignore people who claim they are sure.
3. Don’t worry, be happy. Your biggest enemy is fear. There is nothing to fear, but you guys will continue to do most everything out of fear until you get that. Fear leads to mistakes, and mistakes lead to pain. If you don’t want pain, stop worrying. Half of it will happen anyway, the other half never was going to happen. Life is in this moment. That’s what you can effect.

A couple of rules of the road that will make this easier for you:

1. Don’t hurt others. Period. One day you will understand that hurting anyone will hurt you worse in the end, and ironically help the one you attack. Don’t do it. It’s not nice.
2. Nobody goes it alone successfully. You are EVERYONE’S keeper.
3. Don’t steal other peoples stuff, it leads to the problem of #1.
4. It’s actually true that things work best when you treat others as you would like them to treat you. Almost all of your silly divisions have already said this. It’s really true.
5. Don’t take yourself so seriously. Have more fun. You could be a salamander you know and I can tell you they are capable of way less fun than you can have. Enjoy your body and all the amazing things it can do, just be mindful of #1 again.

There is only one guiding principle. IT’S ALL ABOUT LOVE. THE UNIVERSE IS ALL ABOUT LOVE. YOU ARE LOVE. YOU ARE LOVED. BE LOVE.

Get it now?

We’re all rooting for you every moment to wake up. We have no doubt you will.

All my love,

Mom/Dad/God

 

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Idiots

Tags

absurdity, atheism, faith, fundamentalism, God, religion

My utter disgust and disregard for fundamentalist is well documented on this blog. I make no apologies for it, though I would argue that I am no zealot in this regard, and I am not on a campaign against them as a mission. My mind is far too eclectic in its selection of “things of interest” for that to be so.

I write of politics and my utter disgust and disregard for much of the GOP as well. It is not a mission with me either.

I believe totally in evolution as the means by which life has changed over eons of time. I believe that climate change is real and we are a major causative factor.  Similarly I believe that today is Thursday and that the sun will set in the West.  These are all factually provable items, available to be tested by a variety of reality-based mechanisms.

None of these things so I obsess about, for as I said, much else in the world interests me, such as who is the killer in the new show The Bridge, who will get kicked off Big Brother tonight, and what restaurant shall we eat lunch at today. I am a liberal or progressive, and I heave mightily to the left side of those spectrums, but sometimes extreme liberals/progressives piss me off with their short-sightedness from my point of view. I don’t obsess about that either.

As I said, I’m not a zealot, but a jack-of-all-trades. I likes what I likes and don’t likes what I don’t likes and I’ll tell you about most of them, and defend them until I get bored and move onto something else. I figure I’m fairly sane, fairly smart, and fairly normal and average.

But some folks ( religious fundamentalists for sure, and atheists of the newer type) are zealous. They are on a mission. And I’m here to tell you, that when viewed from the psychological lens, then are very hard to tell apart. I have almost always referred to fundamentalists as religious in nature. But that is not correct. Fundamentalism is a mental disorder or at least is thought so by some. It relates to a type of mind that is fearful of the world and thus creates a reality that is comfortable. It gathers “facts” to support its desired outcome, and is largely impervious to new facts that might contradict the contrived reality. It takes comfort in being a “minority”, being special, in the know, and therefore “better” than others. It regularly trashes non-believers as hell-bound, or not intelligent. It is a cultish worship of a world that works for it.

And folks it applies to the “New” atheist as much as the religious fundamentalist. Having spoken to a few dozen of these new atheists, I think I can safely speak about them. Almost universally they were either once fundamentalist believers, or were raised atheistic to begin with. But in each case, a traumatic occurrence happened and they became crusaders out to crush religion as some evil creation and one that is responsible for literally every bad thing that has ever happened in the world.

But let’s examine the patient. Atheists are fond of turning the tables in any discussion with them by asserting that the “one who asserts God exists must prove that existence.” And then they go about demanding that God be proven by a methodology that is designed to work in a physical universe. This would be fine if of course God was discernible by test tubes and spectroscopes.

If science tells us anything, it tells us that at the truly small end of things, the laws don’t operate quite the same as they do on our sensory levels. A thing can be at two places at the same time, and observing a thing can alter its behavior. There are posits of more planes of existence, some eleven I’m told, and that each may have its own laws, utterly alien to our own. But they continue to demand that God be proven to their satisfaction by human scientific standards.

They refuse (a no-information zone) to accept that they cannot prove to anyone’s satisfaction that God does not exist. All they can point to is a lack of scientifically generated evidence that he does.

Let me ask it another way.

Prove that the universe is a meaningless existence. Prove that it has no purpose whatsoever. Prove that it just came into being somehow, and is going through this process of evolution and that it all will end somehow and maybe or maybe not start again, in the same unendingly mindless way.

For you posit such a universe.

We are here by a series of accidents, we live for a short period, and we dissolve into nothingness, which billions of others perhaps on billions of other “earths” do the same, all for no purpose whatsoever. This is the world of Albert Camus, life is absurd.

If it is absurd then what is the point? What has ever been the point? Why have we crawled from the cave to get into our Prius’s and drive to work creating balance sheet profits for companies who will fight to avoid giving us a pension all to sit in the sun watching the balance of our lives fade with the sun? How have we found the guts and fortitude to deny ourselves, to be honest, to help others, if only to die inevitably?

Leave a legacy? Give my kids a better life? You have no ability to feel the satisfaction after you die. You have no legacy to watch mature and give birth to your great-great-great grandchildren. You can claim the satisfaction now, but is that but a joke you play on yourself? If you find life to be hard, filled with obstacles, potholes and down-right evil meanness at least some of the time, why not save your progeny that suffering by not bringing them into the world?

Seeing it from your perspective, why feed the homeless man? You but prolong his misery? The end remains the same. Oblivious death?

Or is it as Camus suggests to you? That accepting all of the above is the final freedom–the freedom to not give a damn? But of course you claim that not to be true, for you claim a morality that is as good, nay better than the religious believers you call names and make such fun of. Your freedom cannot be of the Camus variety.

Yes, you are moral people. Morality is I believe a genetic trait that we have found conducive to life. But you have no corner on intelligence my new atheist friends. You like to think you do, but you don’t.

You hold onto this religion of yours, for indeed it is that, because it makes you feel superior. You smugly look down upon others who believe in God as some sort of child who doesn’t have the presence of mind to know a fact from a fairy tale. Yet you who proclaim the scientific method and profess to understand the rigors of research inquiry, utterly refuse to even consider that the bible you ridicule can be read ANY OTHER WAY THAN THE SAME WAY THE FUNDAMENTALISTS YOU HATE READ IT.

That is rich indeed, for you give them the license to dictate the terms of the debate. And the truth is, you can’t allow that there are other, scholarly ways to interpret scripture, for then your fun would be over. You don’t see it that way of course, because you are on a mission, a mission to destroy religion.

And I’m not utterly opposed to that. Religion is an institution, and institutions need people to run them. And people who are beholden to institutions for their livelihood, are inclined to want the institution to grow bigger and richer, for that makes them more powerful and richer. Lots of nasty things happen as a result.

But faith is another thing entirely. You understand only one perverted facet of it and then extrapolate it to the rest because it works for you that way. That is not reality, but you are information proof.

But don’t get me wrong here. I don’t want to convert you. You are fine in your atheism as far as I’m concerned. No God that I understand wishes to punish you for your lack of progress. Humanity is a work in progress. Not all are as enlightened, and that doesn’t mean I’m somehow better than you because I see the world differently. It will all go as it is supposed to, for evolution is always upward. If we don’t blow ourselves to smithereens with our constant bickering.

I don’t seek to convert you but you seek to convert me. And that is a problem. I don’t seek to convert religious fundamentalists either, but I do seek to prevent them from homeschooling their children into their disease. And I do seek to prevent them from making me live in a society of their making. Minding one’s own business is the key, if you get my drift.

And that is the sad thing.

You are not stupid. But you are willfully ignorant. You cannot make it go away by refusing to examine it. Isn’t that kinda basic to a science-based belief system?

Related articles

• Before You Sympathize with Reza Aslan, Remember What He Said About the ‘New Atheists’ (patheos.com)
• Atheists: Who Are They? (musicalhumanist.wordpress.com)
• Is Moderate, Rational Atheism a Fallacy? (hebrewhutong.wordpress.com)
• Why Atheists & Theists are Stuck in the Same Ethical Boat (appliedsentience.com)

Searching For the Meaning of “Good” Friday

Tags

God, Good Friday, Jesus, love, religion

I’ve never been quite sure what the “good” in Good Friday meant. Perhaps we see beyond the pain, torture and death of Christ to the event of Easter. We live in those awful moments not in the moment itself, but in the promise of Sunday.

That seems to trivialize it a bit for me, and it doesn’t satisfy. I know that the Passover, celebrated as the Last Supper by Christians is that wonderful celebration by Jews of the release of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt. It celebrates freedom. And no doubt as the Synoptic Gospels relate, this date for the Last Supper of Jesus (the first night of Passover) serves to symbolize our liberation from sin.

John changes the mix a bit by placing the Last Supper not on the first night of Passover, but the day before, when the lambs are slain for the meal. He likens Jesus to the lamb slain. The general symbolism remains the same.

I am not a believer of substitutionary sin–the theory that Jesus took upon himself our sins and died for them– a demand of a God who requires payment for a sinful world. Such a God, to me at least, is both harsh and ugly–sending his own son to die in the most horrible of ways.

Rather I see, (note that these ideas are surely not my own, but are the theology of many a learned scholar and teacher as well as believers) that Jesus by his willingness to die for his beliefs, shows us the perfect way to engage with this creator we call God. Jesus, in dying, pays the ultimate price for principle, the foundational principle of life–love, no matter what the cost.

For this is the essence of the God that Jesus points us towards. A God who is unimpressed by formulaic ritual and a God saddened by our tendencies to divide ourselves into groups of “saved” “faithful” or “pious” and all others who somehow by human standards fail to reach the mark. So saddened is God by our divisiveness that Jesus shows through his willingness to endure scorn, beating and tortuous death, that even the least among us is worthy of dying for.

As we struggle in our daily lives to come to grips with the deep agonies that divide us as a people and as a world, Jesus on the Cross, stands as testament to the strength that we too can express if we are willing to take up that Cross ourselves and stand for love at all costs.

Jesus stands against those whose primary goal is to protect “number one”. He stands against those who are motivated by greed, self-preservation, and egotistical individual ruggedness. He points the way to a God of grace and love, who calls us daily to be bigger than our selves in our love of brother and sister. This God, so real, so in love with His creation that He becomes one of us, in an effort to show us, by his teaching, suffering and death, what He is really all about.

I speak not of Jesus as the son of God, but as the Son of Man, for the reality or fantasy of Jesus as the incarnate God is beside the point really. If Jesus is so infused with the Spirit of the Transcendent One, then it matters not the creeds we dutifully recite each Sunday. Jesus moved aside as human, and allowed the Spirit of God to envelop him so completely that God really was among us.

All the more important that we be especially careful to separate the Jesus of history from the Jesus of the Church. More and more I find them quite different beings, with quite different agendas. After having read much, I am still in love with Paul and his exuberance for the Gospel, but I recognize that Paul molded the ensuing Church and molded Jesus into that Church. I’m not so sure that it is the Jesus of history whom he never met in the flesh.

We must comb the Gospels carefully I think to find that Jesus–that gentle yet firebrand individual who sought to bring all into the house of God, as true and perfect children. He tenderly attended to the needs of the most broken and rejected in society without asking of them anything in return, other than to put God first in their lives. His anger was invoked by those whom he saw as impeding the people in their attempt to know their God. He pointed the finger and accused them of having lost all sense of why they were doing what they did. It had all become for show, for power, and for accolades.

True piety rested with the many Marys who lived with the Master, the self-less women who sat at his feet, absorbing his wisdom, who anointed his head, washed his feet, and knelt at the foot of the cross, and ultimately went to dress his broken and dead body, and found to their amazement that his real presence washed over them.

If we learn anything from the Friday, called Good, it is that we too can approach God in these simple acts of service–not by asking questions about who deserves and who doesn’t deserve our acts, but in simply being willing to give in love, knowing that the Spirit of God inhabits each and every one of God’s created beings.

Have a blessed Easter Time.

(I know that many of you who read this are not religious, and at best agnostic if not actually atheistic in your outlook. But I think that whatever you believe, you are beloved and understood and accepted by God as you are, and I hope the sentiments I express, resonate in that “human” way that knows no faith.)

Which Scares You Most?

Tags

advertizing, bill of rights, Constitution, Election 2012, freedom, God, GOP, heaven and hell, Humor, Newt Gingrich, non-citizens, North Korea, religious fundamentalists

I have to tell you, I’m pretty much stumped here.

Both send shivers down my spine I tell ya.

If you knocked on your neighbor’s door and looked upon either of these alternatives, I think you might start digging that bunker about now.

While I applaud devices that tend to bring families together, I kinda draw the line at footed jammies complete with hoodies and fingerless mittens, all to enjoy the frigid environs of one’s own family room.

Oh, and you can get your name on yours so you never have to be concerned about getting into somebody else’s stinky jammie.

I understand that next year’s fashion mavens are already calling for an embedded microwave and poo bag attachment, all to eliminate those troublesome trots to the pee-room.

On the other hand, nukes in the hands of the spawn of an idiot is not a pleasant thought either.

I hear tell the spawn-apparent, Kim Jong-un has already set off a couple of missiles that fell into the ocean, in celebration of his ascension to the top of the nut-tree.

So, it’s a toss-up in my view.

♦

Meanwhile, back in our own circus tent, Newty seems to have begun to fall already. Paul is now in the lead in Iowa, which proves something, I’m just not sure what. Mostly I think it means that Iowan’s are just bored as hell this time of year. Fallow fields, and a general color of grey-brown, is after all, boring.

But don’t get your hopes up Ricky S., the bell tolls, but not for thee. See, Ricky, we here in Iowa, just dad-gum-it, don’t like you. It’s just that simple. Go home.

Newty, ya barely kept the lead for two weeks! We thought you had better staying power than that. But you just can’t do it can ya? You just can’t keep your mouth in check. Talking about having judges arrested to justify decisions you don’t like, well, good grief Oh Slimy One, that was just not gonna catch on. Not even here in Iowa. And we like to punish judges here as good as the next guy. But REALLY.

You did not think that one through Gangsta Gingrich. You can’t ignore and intimidate judges and then talk about how you’re a constitutionalist. See they have courts in Iran my grifter friend, and they do quality stamp the state’s decision there. And if we do that here, well, it really screws up the argument that we gotta get ready to force  regime change there, cuz of their Mullah-dictatorships.

Getting my drift, NG? Well, it’s probably too late now. So it’s probably best you high tail it down to Callista’s next kiddie book signing, cuz my buddy, that is your future.

We could have had lots more fun, but your mouth got in the way. I guess we always knew it would.

♦

Well, we understand that the President (whom we rather like most all of the time) has agreed to sign a bill that allows for the detention of enemy combatants arrested on American soil, for virtually as long as forever given that a war on a thing, (terrorism) is not likely to ever end.

Now we understand that the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals has agreed with the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals that “undocumented aliens” are not entitled provisions under our Constitution, such as freedom from search and seizure and so forth. Such provisions are, in the Constitution, “reserved to the people.” Both courts now claim that “people” refer to “political community” and that “illegals” are not part of that.

My question, (or comment) is this: If we think these concepts are “human rights” and we are always trying to export them, sometimes with force, around the world, then how do we justify in not applying them to what I would term “inconvenient” subsets of humanity in our own land?

I just don’t get that. Not at all. Maybe this scares me more than hoodie-footies.

♦

If you go grocery shopping this week, don’t expect to find any cayenne powder around. It’s all be sold out. I gigantic order was placed by North Korea, and sprayed liberally over crowds ordered to appear in the streets to show their sorrow at the passing of Kim Jong-il. If you hadn’t noticed, people are crying all over the place there.  And they have the pictures to prove it.

♦

The Contrarian argues that God was too busy weeping over the Packer loss yesterday to pay his customary attention to Tim Tebow’s Denver Broncos. Well, he can’t be everywhere!

♦

Bryan Fischer, all around equal-opportunity hater of huge chunks of humanity, just had to speak up on the death of Christopher Hitchens. In a brilliant tour-de-force of logic, Fischer assures us all that Hitchens is in hell.

Now you might say, well, what would you expect Fischer to say? And I agree, but his logic, now that’s the real sweet spot here. He claims that God sent him there out of His perfect love. Hitchens asks for it, and he got it.

So, God, hey, I would like to move to New Mexico, and find a $5 million dollar house, on a foreclosure sale for only $25,000. It’s what I am really asking for.

♦

Is it just me, or didn’t the GOP jackasses in Congress swear that with their ascendency in the House there would be no more bills with riders that have zero to do with the major portion of the bill? Okay, leaving that aside, once again The House GOP has found itself caught between its own stupidity and the TeaNutz®. Or in other words, it’s caught between itself and itself.

They have, in their infinite dumbness, stopped the implementation of regulations designed to put in place the energy-efficient light bulbs. Now they have done this for a couple of reasons. First, their insane drooling miniscule crazies in the trailer-parks they pander to, think having “light bulbs of choice” is a “freedom” that must be fought to be retained. And second, the word “regulation” makes then salivate and lose their ability to hear.

Well, industry folks, you know, GE, Phillips, Osram Sylvania, you know, the JOB CREATORS WHO MAKE BULBS, are livid. Since they have all retooled and are busy about the business of making the new bulbs, they WANT THE FREAKIN’ RULES TO CHANGE. The  moronic TeaNutz® sit and scratch their nether regions, all the while shrugging and wondering what they did wrong.

♦

Okay. Now get the shovel and start digging that bunker.

 

 

 

Related articles

• American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer: God Sent Hitchens to Hell Because He Loved Him (littlegreenfootballs.com)
• God Sent Christopher Hitchens to Hell Because He Loved Him – Bryan Fischer – Focal Point (richarddawkins.net)

It’s Saturday, So It’s Philosophy 101

Tags

atheism, faith, gay rights, God, GOP, Humor, Republicanism

I just love it when I’m proven to be right. Or should I say that someone who has some real intellectual creds agrees with me.

Jonathan Rée, writing for The New Humanist, has a really lovely article on atheism. Writing as one, he points out a lot of the misconceptions of what the word means and has meant over the centuries.

Moreover, he chastises the “new, new Atheists” as he terms them, for not knowing the history of atheism, and engaging in a petulant and childish game with believers.

He points to the philosopher William James and says of him:

He hated the belligerent secularism that treats religion as a childish superstition which we will all put behind us once we reach the age of reason.

Much could be said of the new new atheists of today, he argues.

James spoke of faith in this manner:

Becoming religious was like falling in love, he said: not a process of intellectual persuasion, but not a delusion either, and it lent new aspects to the world, “an enchantment which is not logically deducible from anything else.”

I don’t think it can be better said or explained frankly.

While Rée certainly comes down in favor of atheism as being the more reasoned choice, he certainly does so in a gentle and non-judgmental way.

This is the stuff of real discussion. Read it and see if you don’t learn a thing or two.

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The chicken enchiladas? Pretty much of a bust. The recipe sounded good, but it failed on a number of levels. I’ve been pondering for some time, and think I may have a solution. I can’t tell you why I want a “perfect enchilada” but I do. So I’ll try my own hand in a week or so. You never know, the Pulitzer may be on the horizon. Surely they have one for cooking?

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I snatched this directly and entirely from Joe.My.God. simply because it needs to be said, and it’s said succinctly and with passion:

If you’re a Christian who believes that being gay is a morally reprehensible offense against God, then you share a mindset, worldview, and moral structure with the kids who hounded Jamey Rodemeyer, literally, to death. It is your ethos, your convictions, and your theology that informed, supported, and encouraged their cruelty. We Christians who believe that God created gay people as much in His own image as he did straight people are begging you to reconsider your theology — to do nothing more than be open to an alternative, fully credible, scholastically sound interpretation of one or two lines from Paul. How can you be unwilling to do something so simple, when you see the horrible ultimate cost of that refusal?” – Christian author John Shore.

♦

And this seemed to say it perfectly well too:

When the rich rain economic bombs on upon ordinary folks, that’s just capitalism. When ordinary folks point out the bombs, that’s Class Warfare ~Roshi Bob

And the beat goes on.

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I picked this up on Roger Ebert’s blog today, and thought it apropos.

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Brendan Beery is one very thoughtful guy. Please go read his latest post called, The Inelegance of Republicanism.  He writes a gentle but firm rebuke that could not fail to shame a rational person, but of course, for just that reason, it probably won’t.

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Humor is a necessity every day

. So get your daily dose from Political Irony and the best nuggets from the late night circuit. Actually he got all his stuff from Bill Maher today.

Frankly one of the funniest things I read yesterday was Billy Kristol’s remarks in his article about the latest GOP “debate”. Seems he got an e-mail from a “young and bright” Republican who was watching his first debate of the season.

“Why they ( meaning the field of GOP candidates) make us look stupid!”

Well, yes they do. Take a look at the House and Senate GOP, and you can add insane to the mix.

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From LOL God

Now go out and have one fine weekend!

Related articles

• John Shore To Christians Who “Hate the Sin”: Turn, Friend. (slog.thestranger.com)
• Why Many Religious Aren’t Bothered By Atheism (andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
• Atheists are Differently Religious – and No, Atheism is not the/a Religion (theframeproblem.wordpress.com)

In the Name of God

Tags

American Exceptionalism, founding fathers, God, Islamophobia, Politics, racism, religion, right wing extremism

The atheists have a powerful argument when they suggest that millions have died in the name of religion. They are right. From the beginning, humans fought over land each claimed was theirs by right, given to them by God.

It’s never ended. Down through all these millenia. We have continued to fight over land and control of populations, all the while upholding our efforts as the “will of God.”

It continues today in a war being waged between Jews, Muslims and Christians. All claim they are doing God’s bidding.

There is always a good argument that mankind would have been better off not listening to the small voice within that urges us to believe that we are destined for more than just a brief sojourn upon this planet only to return to dust.

The truth is, all these wars instituted to protect, promote, or to destroy a religion, are done in the name of religion. There is no objective proof that any of this is called for by God. The deeper you look, the more you see human motivation driving the crusade to install “our” God.

Any fair reading of the Old Testament raises a very obvious question. Isn’t it awfully convenient that God has been on the “side” of the Israelites, thus allowing them to then justify their genocide of whole towns and settlements? How convenient to declare that God has said, “why this land I give to you, so go and subjugate all those who oppose you taking their land.”

Muslims feel utterly justified in controlling the Holy Land, as do Jews, as do Christians. Over time, each has held sway for a time, and been more than willing to kill to retain power. All in the name of God. All in the name of an interpretation, that just might be a bit self-serving.

Religion versus religion, and religion versus secularism erupts in mostly non-violent war in this country today. It has been growing steadily, or resurging I should say. We can be sure that the US expansion into the West and our suppression of indigenous people, either red or brown, was done in some sense in the name of God. We are the City upon the Hill, and as such, God’s new chosen.

This convenient “American Exceptionalism” poisoned with religious righteousness, has justified in the eyes of its perpetrators all kinds of injustice, from genocide to land grabbing, and slavery.

For periods of time, we placed religion in mostly its rightful place–as a facet of each person’s life as they chose or not. Government stayed out of faith, and faith stayed out of government. Religion was a good place to develop ethical, moral, and just responses to issues of the day. It was not the only place however. Government did it’s best to cull the best of the just response and act upon it for the greater good of all, and so that minorities were not walked upon.

I was thinking of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, whatever his personal beliefs about God were, certainly believed that it was a personal issue, not one for the public square. Washington was so loathe to be seen as promoting a particular tradition that he didn’t go to church at all as president.

What must they think of the goings on today? One can only imagine. I suspect they would see it for what it is, shameless religiosity to justify what people want to do anyway. A serious segment of the religion right who intone  “marching in lockstep with Israel” do so only because they believe they are promoting their version of the end times. This of course is not lost on the Israelis, but they accept their friends where they can get them.

Herman, Step-‘n-fetch-it, Cain argues that in his uninformed mind, most Muslims are Sharia law followers, and as president he wouldn’t have time to ferret out the few who aren’t, so don’t blame him for not putting any Muslims in his prospective administration.

A segment of the religious right rejects Mitt Romney only because he is “not the right kind of Christian”. Warren Cole Smith, associate editor of the World, a right-wing magazine, argues:

Placing a Mormon in that pulpit would be a source of pride and a shot of adrenaline for the LDS church. It would serve to normalize the false teachings of Mormonism the world over. It would also provide an opening to Mormon missionaries around the world, who could start every conversation: “Let me tell you about the American president.” To elect a Mormon President is to advance the cause of the Mormon Church.

Non-Christians likely don’t care much about this point one way or the other. But for the Christian, this is a vital issue. One of the strongest warnings Jesus issues is to those who “lead little ones astray.” He said it would be better for that person if a millstone were put around his neck and he were cast into the sea. The validation of the false religion of Mormonism would almost certainly have the effect of leading many astray. Evangelical Christians should have no part of that effort.

This is no different from back in 1960 when a goodly sum of Protestants were pretty darn sure that electing a Catholic to the presidency would be tantamount to installing the pope in the White House, and for some, that was Satan himself.

The UCCB, the official spokesman for the American Catholic Church, has written a letter to Speaker John Boehner, basically condemning the Ryan plan and other GOP plans to gut Medicare as unfairly burdening the least able, while gifting the rich with more riches. Arguments go back and forth within the Catholic world as to whether or not voting for this person or that can be justified under definitions of intrinsic evil.

Exactly what Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers feared, has come to fruition. The public forum is now embroiled in an increasingly vitriolic war of words over whose interpretation of sacred scripture is controlling.

And underlying it all is the ugly raw truth. It still comes down to using God to justify why somebody’s vision of the world should be the one everyone else should be forced to live under. And it’s wrong, period.

End of rant.