When did Christianity turn into a Religion of Hate Doctor Bachmann?

There seems to be a theme of Matthew that runs through this rant.

I have to wonder what personal torture that white heartland born-agains have to endure in order to fit into the still existing heartland prairie town square where conformity is of utmost important and existence? 

You conform or you get shunned, banished and or killed for your personal instinctual sexual being.  The ghost of Matthew Shepard’s memory, of Wyoming hate crime fate, lives on, a victim of being different.

I do not want to say this with anger and or hate.  But I think that two suppressed sexual human beings in the form of Marcus and Michele Bachman are hiding behind a cross of confusion in their desire to establish a Christian theocracy in America.  It is a life but not much of one IMHO.

The above photo is of a gaydar billboard outside St. Matthews church in Auchland, New Zealand.

'Gay-dar' church billboard vandalised

An Auckland church known for its edgy billboards has come under another attack from vandals. 

St Matthew in the City put up a "gay-dar" billboard on Friday, which shows a spectrum from gay to straight, with a cross acting as a gauge.

A message underneath states: "As used by the Anglican Church to assess potential priests." 

Church spokesman Clay Nelson said the sign aimed to highlight discrimination in the Anglican Church against members of the gay and lesbian community. 

However, it had already been vandalised.

Gay-dar or gaydar is a word I had to look up very recently. It is a new acronym for gay and radar.  Meaning that certain types of body language and or presence supposedly connotes gayness.  In a way, gaydar is more often used to taunt children or young people who do not seem to conform even if they are or are not by nature homosexual.

What is the good in this vandalism in New Zealand?  At least the topic of homosexuality, a 19^th century pseudoscience terminology, is being put on the table for discussion in the Anglican Church worldwide.

Sexuality, and not just homosexuality, is a closeted subject in all of Christianity or so it would seem to me. 

I am looking at the current civil rights thing here in the United States regarding legal rights for Homosexual Humanity.  And even if I only believe in limited legal connection and not marriage as a right, I have to step back and realize that partial rights are really a statement or justification for no rights.

That the 3/5 clause in the original U.S. Constitution to appropriate representation based on a slave, first as property, and secondly only as 3/5 of a human being status, has long ago been changed in that Constitution.

But this is not about voting rights which is what the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s was all about.  That movement’s overall mission was to start establishing the reality of equality by first guaranteeing free access to the voting booth for all citizens.

This present era is bogged down in the decay of old ideas and old prejudices and things long closeted against the rights and privacy of each individual not only in this country but on this planet as well.

That the struggle for humanity throughout the ages has been to find one shiny perfect moment, a city on a hill moment, when man and woman, as part of God’s evolving creation, can stand on stable ground and separate the animal from the divine in our split natures and to maturely recognize the differences.  That, and to move on to higher ground and on to true ordained potential.

It is one thing to legislate equality.  It is quite another to legislate morality.  You cannot legislate what your definition of morality is.  Morality is oft times defined by geography more so than by any magic make believe revelation from above any normal timeline and existence.

Somewhere along the timeline, Christianity got obsessed about sex.  All sorts of twisted and bizarre justifications for spiritual enlightenment have to do with fasting from sex to get that spiritual high.  Rather than having discussion about sex, sex was not discussed.

All sexuality got hidden and closeted.  “So deep in the closet – you could see Narnia.”

Anything sexual got put under the label of sin and only the clergy could dole out definition or dispensation on a monopolized area of natural human activity.  Bizarre!

In fact, one of the things the first Council of Nicea did was ban self castration as mentioned in Matthew 19:12.  There was also no doubt a backlash against the old pagan practice of having sex with a temple prostitute to elevate your spirit and mental being up into your preferred god and or goddess presence.  But let’s not go there at the moment.

Never the less, Jesus, in the imperfect account of him in the gospels, does not seem to specifically mention homosexuality.  Paul mentions it here or there and usually in a long litany of sins.  Though they say that Paul was light in his sandals, I don’t believe it.

I think that Paul, the self appointed “Apostle”, was more likely a victim of a botched circumcision reversal operation so popular with middle class Hellenistic Jewish boys who wanted to fit in at the local gym amongst their gentile peers, so to speak.  “Look guys, I fit in, I am just like you now.” (wow)

For Paul, the lack of sex is a good thing, a spiritual thing.  But it was his thing.  Not necessarily any of our individual things.  There are many roads to spirituality, not just one.  And so it goes.

When did spiritual enlightenment, in so-called Christianity, get divorced from personal obligation to try and love yourself and your neighbor?  Love first.  Salvation second.  Not the other way around I would think.

When did the privacy of sexuality become the peeping Tom right of civil or church government to interfere in the life of an individual, or consenting adult individuals?

If you are unhappy in your own skins, in your own sexuality dear Marcus and Michele, please do not try to impose your unhappiness on others.  

In other words - get a life! 

Have a nice day.

I – My – U, Looking for a new definition of God in a Modern Age

Had a minor epiphany of sorts yesterday whereby a lot of things fell into a new place.

Above, I have written a descriptive using three words including a texting word “U”. I will explain shortly.

I am going back to my quest for a new definition of God in this modern age. I am dusting off something from Junior year in high school and the Jewish Philosopher Martin Buber. Indeed the picture of him in my religion textbook reminded me of Walt Whitman with the long beard and hat. Buber's I and Thou (Ich und Du) was publish in 1923. A similar idea, Freud’s The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es lit. "The I and the It”) was published the same year.

I for many years had merged a lot of the idea of I-it with the word Id and would often describe my job as a back office computer paper pusher as basically having an Id relationship with my PC. I also mixed in the concept of Zen in terms of getting a feel or a pleasure from the flow of the daily grind of that work. I am on a tangent here. Back to Buber.

Refreshing the high points of I-it and I-thou separates the reality of “I” from its surroundings or empirical from the analysis of the surroundings or abstract. You therefore have life broken down philosophically into the everyday real and everyday potential for the abstract.

I and Thou

What does it mean when a person experiences the world? Man goes around the world hauling out knowledge from the world. These experiences present man with only words of It, He, She and It with contrast to I-Thou. What this means is that the experiences are all physical and do involve a great deal of spirituality. Previously I mentioned that the world is twofold. What this means is that our experience of the world has two aspects: the aspect of experience, which is perceived by I-It, and the aspect of relation, which is perceived by I-Thou.

There is the I-thou into which the perception or concept or analysis and category regarding the concept of God falls.

Freud’s secular analysis of the world is one thing. Buber’s aspiration toward the divine is less known to the general world.

Thinking about this I-it and I-thou thing, I am adding a bridge word “my”. I say bridge word because the I-it and I-thou was a great concept in 1923 but it is almost a century later and I do not see much I-it or I-thou thinking in religious writing and theology or everyday religion practice. All I hear is the I-it when people pound their fist on the good book (It) in the pulpit. I do not feel much I-thou coming through there to comfort me.

Getting back to my bridge word “My”, I use it to describe intentional focus or attention to the empirical or the abstract. In other words, it the “my” focusing or touching the everyday world or by focusing on the meaning of it all – abstract – that places me in the universe in connection by a bridge from “I” to “It” or from “I” to “Thou”.

I – My – Thou. “Thou” is such an archaic word. I translate it modern into “U”.

Taking the idea one level above the empirical and into the spiritual, thou not necessarily divine, I am adding something of a holistic approach by combining all as I-My-U.

If I go a little further with the Quaker Idea of the spark of the divine in all living creatures, man in particular, then something merges here, has an energy of its own, that I recognized as such when I saw it happening. I thought of the four Hebrew letters or symbols that make up the sacred name of God. I have “Imyu” as a potential new name for God and everything (the universe).

Going back to the individual spark within every human being concept, perhaps if God in a Deist concept is a distant Creator, perhaps we each have the potential of being a surrogate of that distant Deist God in everyday life.

Adding more concept and or poetic license with Saint Paul's “looking into a mirror darkly”, perhaps, just perhaps, on occasion, you and I can look into the mirror of our souls and on a subconscious, if not conscious level, look into the mirror and see, quite briefly, God, in some abstract and or miraculous manner. In which case, the possible name of God “Imyu” becomes “Im- yu”.

I’m You.

Think about it.

A Journey Begun with 1000 Masses

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The mind wanders.

I am looking at a photo of my old catholic grade school in Philly, now defunct. The photo is from when it was brand new in 1923. There is a blacksmith shop and row houses where the convent would be built thirty years into the future. There is a woman in front of one of the houses no doubt calling her children to dinner and there are two boys in old fashioned knicker pants, perhaps hers, in the street roughhousing. There are trolley tracks for a trolley car line that no longer runs there.

While I think I can predict what will become of the RC church in America, I see a middle view. That new factory worker’s parish of my youth would celebrate mass in that school, designed by the world famous gothic architect George A. Audsley. The school hall would serve as temporary church for another twenty three years. The church, Romanesque, was the complete obsolete in style from the school. That structure would be built in record time and for cash when rationing of building materials would be lifted after the war.

You can take away the buildings. Christianity and its celebration, in the beginning of time and perhaps in the end of time, will be conducted in people’s houses, pavilions in parks, K of C meeting halls.

Without property, the Church belongs to the Holy Spirit and to the People. Without property, it will no longer belong to the pencil pushing all boys accounting club in Rome.

Rome may be building its future in the emerging world. Good for them. The people there will likely get a school, clean water and a medical clinic faster if they join the RC church than if they wait for some native corrupt dictator to send help.

Cycles and energies go round and round.

I have perhaps attended over 1,000 masses in my life, in my youth. Weekly and every school day in October, Lent, May , First Fridays, First Saturdays and the numbers add up. No doubt you get a smattering of words from the Epistles or the Gospels hanging out there in the stone house so often. Before all this talk of a Latin mass into English or English back again into Latin, the Epistles and the Gospels, the most important part of the service, were read to us in the native tongue.

Out of curiosity, I wanted to find some of those words that I remembered being read from the pulpit in my youth. Through research I found out that basically the same readings from sacred text were read at the same time every year, year in and year out. There was a one year lectionary in most of the Catholic churches in the world. I believe also that some of the Lutherans followed the same one year lectionary thing for centuries until Vatican II.

After Vatican II there was a suggested three year lectionary whereby more of the Epistles and Gospels would be read over a three year period. As I say it is suggested more for solidarity of all Christian churches, RC and Protestant, to be on the same page every Sunday so to speak. That is about the biggest accomplishment of Vatican II as I can see down here on the ground. That and talk -Talk - about interfaith dialogue but no real long term dialogue intended.

I started looking for a one year lectionary maybe ten years ago. I also wanted to find a 1957 Saint Joseph’s Missal. The missal was a book containing the mass in Latin and weekly one year lectionary readings. This was a personal book, held in one hand, that you took to service with you. I do not remember if it contained any hymns.

The Internet and its content has improved vastly in a decade and most of my research got done there without touching any hard copy.

Fast forward, I never got the Missal even though they are available on Amazon.Com or similar vending places. I never did get to a Latin Mass. Until recently the Latin mass thing was, and still is to some extent, a secret and clandestine thing to find. You need word of mouth to spread and find these rare Latin mass occurrences.

Because of all that I have read or researched I no longer have any nostalgia to see the Mass again in Latin. Latin is a dead language, meaning that no new words for it has been created for close to fifteen hundred years, not since the death of the Western Roman Empire.

Getting back to something I wrote earlier, I remember highlights of about a dozen Gospels from those annual readings.

One I wrote about earlier, the other two I will mention here.

One is the Transfiguration whereby Jesus and Peter and James, son of Zebedee, go to the top of a mountain. Jesus is transformed almost into light and is in the presence of Moses and Elijah. Peter wants to build a shrine to these three prophets after witnessing the event. Jesus says no.

I have often wondered why Jesus supposedly gave the reins of his mission over to a hardhead like Peter. After he just witnessed the divine or near divine powers of Jesus, he denies Jesus in the early morning hours of Good Friday when Jesus is judged and condemned to death.

On one level, Jesus saw that the weakest among us such as Peter should be the strongest link in the chain of the Christian faith. From what I have seen lately of the Vatican Three Stooges style bureaucracy, Jesus was indeed wise both as a human and or as divine being in putting this man eventually in charge, after the death of James, Jesus‘ half-brother, and as one of the first leaders of the early church.

The other reading I remember from my youth had to do with Jesus and his being asked what is the greatest law in the book. To which he replies in Matt 22:37 a quote from Deuteronomy 6:5 about loving God with your whole heart, soul and mind. He finishes with a second but no less sacred idea with Matt 22:39 “…Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself.” -- Matt 20:40 “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

I remember this passage whether it be from a movie, or from a one year reading cycle or in a religion class in high school. This thought always impressed me.

I put all this casual and earnest research into bible studies or daily reading or the reaction of the world to every day events away in my brain. This last most important commandment to love your neighbor as yourself is I think the keystone in the Christian faith.

Of course other world religions and beliefs also have similar ideas, text and dogma. I feel that a similar idea similar to the Golden Rule of “doing unto others what you would have them do unto you” is perhaps a starting point in restoring civility into this growing and in many places hostile global world culture.

I mention some of the words of Dr. Karen Armstrong from her interview on Bill Moyers Journal the other night. She mentioned that we in the west had three hundred years to accommodate ourselves in the changing of some institutions from the sacred to the secular.

No doubt the hanging of Quakers in Massachusetts led to the need for the founding of a place for Quaker political and religious asylum in the British colonies of North America. This led to William Penn, a Quaker, getting a land grant from Charles II to start such a place of tolerance that in many ways led to the formation of ideas of self worth, religious freedom, and even political independence.

Cycles and energy go round and round.

Massachusetts, shortly after the founding of Pennsylvania as a haven for all faiths or even non-believers, burned itself out on ignorance, hate, or whatever with their Salem witch trials around 1692. Turning against your neighbor is easy but sometimes the collateral damage is a bitch to swallow or live with.

I was disheartened to hear that they, Islamic fanatics, had bombed and killed people in a hotel in Islamabad because this hotel was a refuge for the tourists or native Islamists not observing the annual month long fast of Ramadan. It is this group mind think, this only one religious belief allowed in a country or the inequality of women etc. - that scares the crap out of me.

We in the west had our transition from the sacred to the secular over a longer period than these Muslim countries who have had to deal with it in decades. Diversity is a concept we understand. How it is adapted elsewhere, only time, and cultural context to digest it, will tell.

This love your neighbor as yourself is a good thing, a good concept, but I think the core to looking at it in terms of a long term or compressed timeline is that in order to love your neighbor in the truest sense you have to first love yourself.

The west in its recent past reached its pinnacle of individual freedom, potential and global scale selfishness. That the opportunity to spread individual freedom or its concept to the world means that it should be coupled with responsibility and selflessness.

Freedom with responsibility may be a oxymoron of sorts but marshalling and maintaining a positive energy flow connected with individual freedoms demands some rules to be followed. The chaotic present secular world without rules or regulations is not good for either the west or the east.

We have to look at Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. He did not love his neighbors as himself. He may have thought he loved his God with his whole heart, soul and mind but without the balance of love for neighbor, you only have an abstract obsession. Living with and dealing with your neighbor on an everyday basis is one basic building stone of civilization.

But by loving yourself and the cup overflows to your neighbor is an energy no doubt understood by Jesus when he zapped the fanatic Paul on the road to Damascus. Paul was truly empowered by Jesus to start building another path along the new faith’s road of life. On that day Paul started to love his enemies and started to truly love himself as well.

“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love” - I, You, We, are nothing in God’s ultimate scheme of things.

As the world grows smaller, we had better practice love for our self more and reach out in love to other neighboring cultures.

The mind wanders.

...and the journey continues.