Pope Joan I - First Woman Pope

I love myth and legends. It would appear that there are more references in the Vatican archives to Popes ordering the removal of all references to a female pope than there is any chance of seeing the destroyed documentation – not unlike the gospels and the stuff conveniently lost through the centuries. There is no hard core proof of Pope Joan I, circa 875 C.E., like there is no hard core, saved from the beginning, proof for the existence of Jesus.

The legend is a street fact. In fact there is a street next to the Coliseum that no papal motorcade is allowed to venture down. It is avoided and has been avoided for a thousand years by all popes and all official church processions. It is the street where Pope Joan I gave birth in procession and surrendered her sexual identity as the legitimately elected Bishop of Rome.

It is ashamed that in the dumbing down of America through the eight year lobotomy under Bush Cheney and with corporations controlling the newspapers, media and the movie theatres, few got to see this recent German movie about the life of Pope Joan.

(once you click start, click on screen to expand image)







Food for thought.

Does Christianity Hate Women?

Somewhere along the timeline on this blog I stated something like I was looking for a new definition of God.

In a way God is not obsolete but our many perceptions of him, her, it is obsolete. My dilemma has to find comfort in being a Humanist and follower of the basic Jesus ideas without the bullshit and trimmings added layer upon layer over the centuries. I try to follow “the Way” of early spiritual travelers inspired by Jesus. The Christian word had yet to be invented.

I distain the word Christian right now. There seems to be more negative attached to it over the centuries than anything balanced in the good. This is an observation and a matter for debate. There is no definite scientific measure of a question like this yet.

I do not think that the word Christian has any value. The way it is thrown around and abused in cash politics by the tax free church parties is just a tip of an iceberg of disgust for this ancient and extinct religious classification.

I started with the title and question - does Christianity hate women? I think it is a valid question to ask. Most women don’t bother to ask the question in as severe a manner as I have framed it. I am encouraged that there are legitimately ordained Catholic Women Priests out there who only have the trolls in the Vatican to deny their legitimacy.

I have spoken for the equal rights amendment. I think that women, many women have taken on the role of self-hating women. The term "self-hating" I have heard to describe Jews who are in agreement with aspects of anti-Semitism. That it would take many generations and an Equal Rights Amendment to unto centuries of damage to the female ego from society and religion.

Do self-hating women exist? Yes. And Christianity and Judaism and Islam contribute to a negative view of the potential role of women in society. Basically a good woman in the monotheistic world just shuts up, has babies, and tends house. Nothing wrong with that role if freely chosen.

But there is a potential view that a large percentage of women are capable to sustaining a role outside the tradition stay at home model. In this God forsaken economy, women are being pushed economically to the wall like everybody else and more so in a single parent household.

I ran into this article about how it is a woman’s fault for getting raped based on her clothing.

Blame the victim: Religious leaflet claims ‘ungodly’ dressed women provoke rape

“You may have been given this leaflet because of the way you are dressed,” it begins.

“Have you thought about standing before the true and living God to be judged?”

It continues with one essential theme: The sins of men are, in part, the fault of women, specifically women in tight-fitting clothing. Yates was annoyed. Then she got to a section on page two:

“Scripture tells us that when a man looks on a woman to lust for her he has already committed adultery in his heart. If you are dressed in a way that tempts a men to do this secret (or not so secret) sin, you are a participant in the sin,” the leaflet states. “By the way, some rape victims would not have been raped if they had dressed properly. So can we really say they were innocent victims?”

The hand-out is signed “anonymous.”

It is amazing how sexual bigotry can be spread around on anonymous Xeroxed propaganda sheets and quoting “Scripture”.

I ran into that article above by chance. I also ran into the above image of sculpture entitled “Christa” by British artist Edwina Sandys. It caused a bit of a stir when it was first exhibited in the liberal Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NYC back in the early eighties. It now is in the Feminist’s Art Section of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

I am not suggesting that Jesus was a woman. But what if the anointed one of God and the savior as sometimes described turned out to be a woman. Or that God was more than half female in nature in direct opposition to the all male patriarchal monotheistic religions. Or that God to balance the whole thing out sends back the Logos as a woman. Just a thought.

If decency is to survive in the new global world of tomorrow, so much baggage, bigotry and self hating has to go out the door with the past. A fresh and open way of looking at all things will make all things possible within a new outlook and a new definition for God and humankind’s relationship with that new reality of the future.

Doing God's Work - I Am Not a Christian

I do not know if the chairman of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, ever gets time to pray. Time is money. He and his cadre are obsessed with money. He has coined the phrase of this new age of unchecked greed and inhumanity in that he is just “doing God’s work” atop his skyscraper with his metaphorically speaking 100 million dollar salary and 100 million dollar bonus. The "Age of Chronic Luxury" lives on for some in these hard times.

So I guess that kind of “God is in Control” rhetoric that Governor Pawlenty coined at the recent Tea Bagger convention no doubt mirrors sentiments of the “God put me on this Pedestal y'all” crowd on the blinding white far right fundamentalist side of the aisle.

You know I am not a Christian. I am only a cultural Christian because I am too lazy to shop around for a new name brand. I am quite inferior to Christians like Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky, a Roman Catholic who runs a charity scam selling his autographed baseballs out of the trunk of his limo.

I am quite inferior also to a Presbyterian like Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona who thinks that in the middle of a Depression with no jobs, it is somehow a sin to collect unemployment. You would think that the lousy stinking 240 dollars a week maximum the territory/state of Arizona doles out to unemployed "lazy" welfare cheats would somehow match all the tax cheats Kyl has represented as a lawyer and senator all his so called working life. You would think he would have heard about - don’t ask, don’t tell – regarding personal greed.

Thank God I am not a Christian such as they. I only believe in love for humanity, as a Humanist, like that other loser, Jesus of Nazareth. Though I am in no way in his true league of matters.

I along with millions of others look forward to Jim and Jon’s upcoming retirement from politics. Good riddens to bad Christian trash. They give the Christ thing usually attached to the Jesus brand a very bad name.

The first birds of Spring are chirping outside my window this morning and all the damned to hell Country Club Christians cannot ruin my day. God, the real God is in the air here.

I do not hate humanity and I am enjoying the sound of nature outside of my urban dwelling. I too Lloyd am just “doing God’s work” in my own humble unpaid way.

Have a nice day.

All Miscarriages in Utah to be Illegal

All miscarriages in Utah will now be treated as a possible criminal offense with cops now acting as OB/GYN specialists in determining if the rich wife at the country club or the poor female tramp’s miscarriage was the intentional murder of her unborn fetus.

The country club bitch will get off. The poor bitch will surely go to jail. In a country where fundamentalist Christians openly hate women more and more, this is where the state of the union is without an Equal Rights Amendment to keep government out of the bedrooms of America. Religious freedom to snoop, spy, punish the unrighteous through our “God is in Control” laws!

March 8th and any miscarriage in Utah will potentially be a criminal investigation according to a new law awaiting the Governor’s signature, veto and no-action which lets it become law.

People in Utah want to make certain that you did not intentionally illegally abort a fetus, murder a fetus, when you miscarry and do not go to term. Turn an emotional nightmare such a miscarriage into a magnified emotional nightmare thanks to the Christian Inquisition against all Women. God bless us or at least those of us lucky enough to have been born with penises – amen.

This is a way of further trapping a women in her pregnancy with no way out. Abortions are still legal in Utah but a women living with a violent boyfriend or husband, gets beaten up and miscarries can be charged with murder because she would have knowingly exposed the fetus to potential harm by continuing in that relationship etc. Catch 22.

The law started last year when a 17 year old girl, 7 months pregnant, paid somebody to beat her in the hopes of miscarrying. Sad situation. The girl could not be charged because of loopholes in the laws that she was charged with breaking. So now every woman, who has a miscarriage will be investigated to the full measure of the law. God willing they will have wear a scarlet "M" on their clothing - "Miscarried".

Will one criminal investigation of suspected miscarriage and its records be on file forever, online like in Oklahoma etc.? You got pervs spying on kids on laptops in Pennsylvania. Can Google spy satelites point out miscarried women's houses on the map lest we tread near and be contaminated by association by the suspected unproven murderer who got off on a technicality - the miscarriage was just a natural miscarriage, yeah right, etc. How many miscarried witches can we burn in Temple Square this week???

Utah Bill Criminalizes Miscarriage

Paltrow says this bill puts a lie to the idea that the pro-life movement cares about women.

"For all these years the anti-choice movement has said ‘we want to outlaw abortion, not put women in jail, but what this law says is ‘no, we really want to put women in jail.'"

The New York Times, America’s secular atheist newspaper, takes a different tone, seems to think that Utah’s law is just like a lot of other states’ laws trying to put a women’s vagina in a cage or it is put people with vaginas into a cage. Are we certain that Fascist Murdock is not a secret shareholder at the NYT these days?

Utah Bill Would Criminalize Illegal Abortions

For example, if a pregnant woman gets into a vehicle, goes on a wild ride way over the speed limit without wearing a seatbelt and crashes and the fetus is killed, is she a reckless driver? Or is she a reckless mother-to-be who criminally ignored the safety of her fetus?

Under the bill, a woman guilty of criminal homicide of her fetus could be punished by up to life in prison.

“So many things can happen, and it’s all in the eye of the beholder — that’s what’s very dangerous about this legislation,” said Marina Lowe, the legislative and policy counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah which has urged Mr. Herbert to veto the bill.

Some women’s advocacy groups say the bill simply codifies what many states are already doing, using existing laws about the unborn to prosecute apparently errant mothers.

If the burden of proof falls hard on all women by the white male fundamentalist right, just to weed out a few mean women, then why bother to get pregnant in the USA. Just adopt or get a poodle.

Justice Delayed in Canada with Bishop Lahey

Boy! Do they want to forget about this loser Bishop Lahey and his computer full of kiddie porn!

It was amazing how when this story broke how the American Catholic Blogosphere treated Canada as if it was located not in North America but somewhere near Macau. I know Newfoundland and Nova Scotia are a bit off the beaten path but they did not fall off the side of the flat earth lately and land next to Hong Kong.

Oh well, the trial is set to begin April 26, 2011 – YES! – 2011. A very hot RC Catholic potato that nobody with a career or pension to protect wants to touch.

Justice delayed in Canada is justice denied.

Lahey trial delayed until 2011

OTTAWA - Bishop Raymond Lahey's trial on charges of possessing and importing child pornography has been set for the spring of 2011.

The trial will begin April 26, 2011 and run until May 6, Assistant Crown Attorney David Elhadad said in an interview.

The former bishop of Antigonish, N.S., is not expected to appear in an Ottawa court until his trial starts in more than a year's time.

(I predict here and now that the fix is in. The evidence will get conveniently lost, or corrupted while in storage, in the interim and the good name of Bishop Lahey will be restored in the halls of sweetness and light and purity at the Vatican.)

Mormons in Secret Merger Talks with Catholics

An internal coup has happened in Temple Sqaure since its temporary approval of gays rights within Salt Lake City limits? Remorse. Regress. Stop the madness!

I guess the magic, Black magic? of re-baptizing all my dead Catholic relatives has brought the Vatican round to recognize the one true magical kingdom in Utah.

For a second there, I thought I saw the word merger between these great noble institutions in America. Their “shared moral principals” are no doubt the basis of secret ongoing merger talks. I doubt that it will ever be an outright merger. But I can see Joseph Smith, Prophet and occasional horse thief, being raised to RC sainthood or even Church Father status based on his forged and plagiarized writings.

Thank the white Caucasian God that Solomon Spaulding is long dead. Though I am still in hopes of another Mark David Chapman document to surface saying that Joe Smith on his death bed converted to the one true church via the Jesuits. That would reassure me.

I did not see this in any American MSM, talks being secret you know. I first saw it in the Guardian UK, which because of Britain’s diversity these days and quasi-official Church of England thing, that paper has an excellent daily religion section. I am not certain how the secular atheist New York Times handles religion. It may be in the Arts section with the recipes.

Well anyway, if this is a PR handout, then the American papers did not want to touch a tired old religion story of two dying, declining Old Testament like entities, the Church of LDS and the RC Church America INC.

Searching around I found this breaking story on the Catholic Blogosphere and Utah Newspapers dreaming of glory days past and ahead in current joint efforts with the RC hierarchy.

Merger talks are good. A shrinking believer base makes it necessary. Shared corporate expenses. Shared Hate Non-Profit organizations to push gay-bashing and more restrictions on women’s right to choose.

Mormons, Catholics must defend religious freedom, Cardinal says

PROVO, Utah -- The fight to defend moral principles is linking Mormons and Catholics like never before.

"In recent years, Catholics and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have stood more frequently side by side in the public square to defend human life and dignity," Francis Cardinal George told nearly 12,000 students, faculty and community members gathered Tuesday at BYU.

"I'm personally grateful that after 180 years of living mostly apart from one another, Catholics and Latter-day Saints have begun to see each other as trustworthy partners in defense of shared moral principles."

Mormons and Catholics join forces

Last Tuesday, in a speech called Catholics and Latter-day Saints: partners in the defence of religious freedom, he told an audience that Catholics and Mormons must stand together as a "vital bulwark" against those who wanted to "reduce religion to a purely private reality".

“Trustworthy partners in defense of moral principles” – I heard (a rumor) all the U.S. Bishops have been down to Mississippi and had sex therapy along side Tiger. I am reassured. We would not want to have to share females in all those group marriages in Utah with the paps, would we? Though if you think about it, with polygamy, there are plenty numbers potential in the possible altar boy/future priest category.

“Reduce religion to a purely private reality” – well hell yeah, who wants the Mormons or the RC Catholic bullshit on the public platter. I thought religion was supposed to be private.

If “defense of religious freedom” are the new code words for “forced religion” in the public square – fuck it!.

I am glad that Studebaker and Packard are in secret merger talks. The Mormons and Catholics together really represent the future. Yeah right.

Sarah Palin’s New TV Comedy – Victim Mom

I have finally come to the end of my esoteric study of the recent American phenomenon called Sarah Palin. It takes no genius to see that women on the right are starved for a viable image of what is allowed for success for females in this country and at that end of the spectrum.

If you want something a little less perfect than June Cleaver in the 50’s comedy show “Leave It to Beaver” and want that small town PTA president, part time small village mayor, and half governor of the least populated territory/state, then Sarah is your girl. You can use that term “Girl”. No PC problems on the right with calling a spade a spade either. Whatever.

She is not an enigma, she is just a long list of things women do in one income household’s in the heartland. She is “rural, female, military mom, special-needs mom, etc.” Nothing wrong with that. It is how the MSM has handled or mishandled this that has kept an artificial flame of novel celebrity alive long past its expiration date of fifteen minutes.

There are more important issues to be studied and written about. But why do that when you can meet a writing deadline with another “Sarah Palin” story. Just damn laziness and not Journalism. (Me? I am off the hook on that one. I am no journalist.)

Now that she is a walking talking Barbie doll for crackpot right wingnuts, maybe she should try acting. She doesn’t act now? No. She is the real thing.

Sarah should take a cue from her daughter Bristol soon to play herself, a teenage single mom, in an ABC program The Secret Life of the American Teenager. Sarah I envision could master comedy with the right limited number of one and two syllable sound bites in the script. She is accused of not having a sense of humor by some. She of course would have to be a crazy scattered brained “Lucy” type, an American Standard.

I think the ideal name for all the roles women have in today’s society but get little of the way of recognition, appreciation or equal pay for – the ideal name of Sarah’s show could be “Victim Mom”. That’s the way she selectively reacts to anything said about herself or her trophy family.

An Outrage Smackdown: Family Guy Defeats Palin

Palin is a master practitioner of identity politics, with an ironic twist. When it comes to social issues or the academic canon or civil-rights legislation, it used to be conservatives who would chafe at liberals playing race, gender or other such oppressed-group cards. With Palin, though, conservatives have a champion who uses group identity — rural, female, military mom, special-needs mom, etc. — as her seal of authenticity.

The above is an excellent rehashing of the same old Sarah story told about ten thousand times already in the press and media and being devoured in the forgotten heartland around the kitchen table.

Sarah is a niche product. A niche product which has a limited shelf life. The novelty wears down.

Palin, self appointed high priestess of Democratic political correctness, demanded an apology from White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel as being quoted for the word "retard" in a memo describing some democrats. She then turned around and licked Rush Limbaugh's boots for his use of "retard" as some previously uncategorized form of poet license.

Sarah started to scold the TV cartoon comedy “Family Guy” for the use of Down Syndrome as part of a dating situation and as a side joke referring indirectly to Sarah and not her child. The context and sarcasm of the line and the punchline requires some timing and some wit in a show famous for such. Something no doubt missing in Alaska.

Thank God for

“a smackdown, from Andrea Fay Friedman, a Family Guy voice actress — who actually has Down (Syndrome). "My parents raised me to have a sense of humor," she said. "My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes." Ouch...

For a while there Palin was becoming Minister of Good Taste on every thing said in America.

My proposal of a new Urban Dictionary term and definition as approved by our self appointed Minister of Mayhem Sarah Palin.

Retard – a satirical term reserved exclusively for Rush Limbaugh.

Enjoy your fifteen plus minutes Palin family, it all sags in the end like Levi Johnston’s Playgirl gluteus maximus and then its back to shooting deer with or without a gov’ment permit.

Cheers.

politica cagna in Vaticano

No doubt revenge is too harsh a word, but invariably a true word, for members of the Vatican “Gonne” Party who have waited a bit to stab Archbishop “Rino” Fisichella in the back one year after making human statements about the abominable Church reaction to a child’s rape and forced pregnancy and abortion in Brazil last year.

Fisichella’s public defense was for excommunicated en masse doctors and nurses performing a late term Abortion last year in Brazil for the sake of saving a nine year old rape victim in danger of losing her life if forced to carry the pregnancy to term.

Vatican official refuses to resign in abortion flap

The Vatican's top bioethics official has dismissed calls for his resignation following an uproar over his defense of doctors who aborted the twin fetuses of a 9-year-old child who was raped by her stepfather, the Associated Press reports.

Monsignor Renato Fisichella told the AP on Monday that he refused to respond to five members of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life who questioned his suitability to lead the institution.

Fisichella wrote an article in the Vatican's newspaper in March saying the Brazilian doctors didn't deserve excommunication as mandated by church law because they were saving the girl's life. The call for mercy sparked heated criticism from some academy members who said it implied the Vatican was opening up to so-called "therapeutic abortion" to save the mother's life.

To quiet their complaints, the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a clarification in July, repeating the Catholic Church's firm opposition to abortion and saying Fisichella's words had been "manipulated and exploited."

What I see in the press is that the abortion was of two fetuses in favor of saving a mere female child in favor of – I haven’t yet read of any sex tests on the fetuses. But no doubt two potentially healthy, valid male children were aborted in favor of saving this worthless uneducated female creature.

Fisichella’s remarks last year were not humanist but honest and human.

The insane “third sex” or fourth sex types or whatever they are, they are not human, running the “male” only Vatican apparently still approve of Rape over Abortion in the case of rape or to save a women’s life, any day of the week.

Our sympathies to a true human being Rino Fisichella over the women hating skirts running the Vatican.

Privacy - Spirituality - Tiger - Oprah

-
Here goes my connect the dots sort of thing. With things in the news.

I ran into the following Christian Science Monitor article that was commenting on Tiger Wood’s brief vacation from the shadows to make a public apology of sorts for his public and private life. No specifics and no questions. Tiger is still clinging tight to his privacy. In fact probably only the extreme rich, such as someone as Tiger, can even dream of privacy in that old fashioned sense of it these days.

Beyond Buddhism, Tiger Woods has converted to another religion

It is true that we witnessed the conversion of Tiger Woods last Friday, but it was no voluntary conversion to an old religion. Rather, this was a forced conversion to the new Oprahite religion of emotional openness and making public one’s miseries and failings.

The article implies that Tiger’s short edited appearance on Friday was a conversion of sorts to the new global Oprah Sofa Religion of confessing everything in public for the sake of ratings and the new standards of 24/7 Media demands. Only after public confession in America can someone start all over again. Tiger until this point on Friday was a heretic of sorts to this new Oprah Media Religion. I invite you to read the article in its’ well thought out opinions regarding this matter.

Has Tiger now lost the spirituality of his Buddhism, his privacy of sorts, in embracing the Oprah Corporate Religion or Media Methodology even for a brief time?

Regarding Privacy in America at least, there was the filing of a federal group action law suit against contrived spying against children in the Privacy of their homes – in the Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania. There it is, that Privacy thing, floating around the air.

Prosecutors, FBI join school laptop spying probe

Seems that a young man using one of the school's laptop computers at home was eating cinnamon Mike & Ikes. The secret webcam/spycam on the computer snapped a picture and the student was accused of “improper behavior” in his own home by school authorities. No doubt the perv watching children at home thought that his “reds” of the sixties and seventies were also being taken by this child. Semantics at this point whether drugs or candy were on board here.

The young man’s sister at the same school realized that she used her school computer in the bathroom to listen to music while taking a shower everyday. The thought creeped her out. She obviously still has an old fashioned sense of the obsolete concept of privacy in this new Global Big Brother Age. Word spread to other children in the school to beware. The sister has not yet been accused of “improper behavior” in her home at school yet.

The school claims, lamely, that the secret webcam was a security device to locate lost or stolen laptops. Haven’t lame brains ever heard of Lojack, global positioning locked into an automobile or laptop to locate a stolen object?

The real bottom line in all this is that these spying on children laptops probably came of one of the last Bush/Cheney budgets.

And lastly to more boring modern scientific stats. An article about how a higher percentage of young people 18 to 29, seek spirituality rather than organized religion.

Spirit Quest

She told me that she had gone from religious to nonbeliever, and then to spiritual...

Many young adults seem to be moving away from organized religion while simultaneously trying desperately to connect with their spirituality.

In fact, two recently released reports seem to buttress this observation.

My point in connecting these dots - centers around the words Privacy and Spirituality.

The corporate state, the new Corporatocracy, since it leaves humanity out of most of its bottom line equations, now directly or indirectly must dismantle privacy, an entitlement of the obsolete human factor.

Spirituality is no doubt a private thing. I have to think of the early Christians who lived in the Roman Fascist State and how only the spirituality within, in search of a divine connection to a divine spark, was something the Fascist Corportocracy of the Roman Empire could not touch or ever conquer.

Spirituality as a New Drug?

I just encountered a half dozen large screen flat TV sets today. About five of them were on a wall opposite each check out clerk in a supermarket I had not been in before – and playing the same cable program. I then encountered one of the behemoth screens in the waiting room of a doctor’s office.

I had to wonder where people are today on their cell phones or watching TV shows on iPods or the like. The background noise of our civilization is noise and not necessarily communication. I don’t use much of that. I have problems trying to get messages off my cell phone.

Surround yourself in a bubble. Surround your bubble into a larger bubble etc. In terms of technology it seems like we are only a decade or two away from computers like on the Star Trek TV show from the late sixties. Talk to the computer. Ask a question. It talks back. It gives you an answer. My grandparents were born and lived the early parts of their lives in houses without running water. Bizarre.

So too, here is an odd article that I encountered on a forum where it was listed with a thread title as something like “Spirituality is a disease” – not quite in my opinion.

What do you make of this?

Links to Spirituality Found in the Brain

Scientists have identified areas of the brain that, when damaged, lead to greater spirituality. The findings hint at the roots of spiritual and religious attitudes, the researchers say.

The study, published in the Feb. 11 issue of the journal Neuron, involves a personality trait called self-transcendence, which is a somewhat vague measure of spiritual feeling, thinking, and behaviors. Self-transcendence "reflects a decreased sense of self and an ability to identify one's self as an integral part of the universe as a whole," the researchers explain. …

Selective damage to the left and right posterior parietal regions of the brain induced a specific increase in self-transcendence, or ST, the surveys showed. …

One study, reported in 2008, suggested that the brain's right parietal lobe defines "Me," and people with less active Me-Definers are more likely to lead spiritual lives. …

It’s pop science if it is only Yahoo and the Internet but wow. You see these movies where saints have visions and then they become prayful and “spiritual”. Makes you wonder if they fell on their heads as babies.

Makes you wonder what they could do with drugs to make everyone “spiritual”. Whatever.

And to round off this oddball assortment of pieces of a puzzle about the human condition, I caught what I thought was an odd obit about someone on Staten Island.

Howard Lotsof Dies at 66; Found Drug Treatment in an African Plant

Howard Lotsof was 19, addicted to heroin and searching for a new high in 1962 when he swallowed a bitter-tasting white powder taken from an exotic West African shrub.

“The next thing I knew,” he told The New York Times in 1994, “I was straight.”

The substance was ibogaine, an extract of Tabernanthe iboga, a perennial rain-forest plant found primarily in Gabon. In the Bwiti religion it is used in puberty initiation rites, inducing a powerful altered state for at least 48 hours during which young people are said to come into contact with a universal ancestor.

By Mr. Lotsof’s account, when he and six friends who were also addicted tried ibogaine, five of them immediately quit, saying their desire for heroin had been extinguished.

I have heard this at various times about how primitive societies with secret spiritual rites use chemicals to expand the mind. That once a certain level of understanding outside the “Me” thing, the individuals never touch the drug again. They are not addicted to substances in the Western Cultural sense that would be addictive.

There must be something missing in the equation of the spiritual formula. Western or modern society does not culturally connect the dots. Perhaps some once thought to be harmful drugs and their use as in the case of Marijuana would not be so harmful to society. Not harmful if society teaches its children up front the proper use of it. That doesn’t really work with alcohol though, does it? Some things are do doubt addictive to some and not so addictive to others.

Individuals are just that, unique from that individuality. The mindset toward Spirituality using spirits or drugs or falling on your head is not yet an exact science and probably will never likely be either.

912 Soluion in Texas Airplane Suicide?

Before the dopes in the media start to analyze the recent suicide bomber flyhing into an office building in Austin Texas, let me say a few things.

A person’s suicide is evidence of distress within that individual after the fact. There are many signs that few bother to notice before the fact of death.

I am not going to mention this man’s name. I do not know it nor do I know the names of the innocent victims he decided in his agitated state to take so violently with him.

The suicide note per say is also a manifesto or rants not unlike the US Declaration of Independence against good King George.

The rhetoric of this suicide bomber is something I hear reverberated on the for profit Murdock NEWS network everyday which I do not watch (am only an occasional tourist to that carnie sideshow of humanity and “news”).

So you have a troubled man in mid life crisis, no job, a very bad economy, and a healthcare system that rations aid to the middle aged especially in the mental health aspect. (40% of a decent European style healthcare model is all the thieves and lunatics in Washington can come up with? 40% is better than nothing you damn rubes!)

The only solution has to do with the me, me, me of the Me generation and you take your queues from the insane jihadists gliding into history and into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. It is all rather fucked up like the state of the American psyche these days.

The 912 solution of violence against the government as advocated by the likes of Lonesome Rhodes Beck/Murdock and company is manifesting itself. It is not a solution. It is a symptom of a really half-assed mismanagement of government and corporations and individual lives situation.

My sound bite is now over. I turn the mike back over to the media.

Harvey Cox and the Age of the Spirit

I ran into an article on the Guardian UK by Mark Vernon talking about Harvey Cox’s latest book The Future of Faith. I had to step back for a moment and say to myself, is Harvey Cox still alive? It has been over forty years since my sophomore religion teacher read and quoted Cox out of The Secular City back in those heady, positive, hopeful post Vatican II days of true, attempted by many in the RC church, Ecumenical Spirit.
Harvey Cox

Cox became widely known with the publication of The Secular City in 1965. It became immensely popular and influential for a book on theology, selling over one million copies. Cox developed the thesis that the church is primarily a people of faith and action, rather than an institution. He argued that "God is just as present in the secular as the religious realms of life". Far from being a protective religious community, the church should be in the forefront of change in society, celebrating the new ways religiosity is finding expression in the world. Phrases such as "intrinsic conservatism prevents the denominational churches from leaving their palaces behind and stepping into God's permanent revolution in history" (p. 206) can be viewed as threatening to the status quo, and for some an embrace of the social revolution of the 1960s.

I guess I must have been listening to Father Calvert. My own secular cultural Christian outlook seems similar with the excerpt quoted above.

I have not read any other religious works of Cox. I am not a theologian. I have spent much of my life within the context of a secular world where the religion of my youth no longer seems to function in a reality, to me, setting. To quote the sixties – “if it feels good, do it” – and if it does not feel right, ignore it or get rid of it.

No doubt Mr. Cox, retired now from Harvard Divinity School, has been doing a lot of thinking and filling in the gaps for us in the interim, still serving his gift of words in the pursuit of a meaningful understanding and relationship with the Creator.

Harvey Cox’s book The Future of Faith seems to be on the mark to dissect minimally and refresh the religious conversation so long dead in this country at least. I cannot speak for other countries.

Cox divides Christianity in three Ages.

The first is the Age of Faith which is the early Christians in direct and intimate contact with Jesus. The writings of Paul are there not for everyone but custom tailored to each geographic setting of many individual churches and centers of Christian faith.

The second Age is the Age of Belief whereby Constantine and his regimes that followed standardized what you had to believe in order to be a conforming good Christian.

The third and current Age since the Reformation is the Age of the Spirit. Indeed, today.

Anarchy in the age of the spirit

But his snapshot of the contemporary religious scene is unapologetically taken from the mountaintop, and it is also unapologetically optimistic. Cox recognises the risks associated with some of the features of the age of the spirit – its fundamentalism, say, or the prosperity gospel. But he argues they can't last. They are essentially reactions against modern biblical scholarship, which means "a religion based on subscribing to mandatory beliefs is no longer viable". Hence the emphasis on the spirit. Neither does he worry that Christianity today so often feels like a Jesus-centered personality cult. Rather, Pentecostalism is a positive force, part of "an inexorable movement of the human spirit whose hour has come".

I am not too certain about the Pentacostal thing – but it does represent energy – which is the future. Perhaps if a hardcore hold on the book, which is the foundation of the Age of Belief overlapping into the Age of Spirit, becomes secondary to the Spirit as it was in the beginnings of Christianity, the future of Christianity could be quite interesting and exciting.

Perhaps if in this Age of the Spirit, we could all have more user friendly religious situations. Perhaps the old fashioned Town Square will once again appear in America out of a patchwork of city blocks and neighborhoods bonded, cohesive, caring, loving - a home for groupings of individuals and more. The world would then be truly a more wonderful place in which to live.

Eight Haiti "Missionaries" Back on US Soil

Here is an update on the ten Baptist untrained, unprepared, civil disobedient missionaries and their quest to blindly save orphans and or Haitian children in general.

The judge in the case has released the eight least guilty of the lawbreakers and sent them home. They have arrived in Miami via U.S. Military aircraft on their way home to Idaho.

American missionaries jailed in Haiti return to US

The ringleader, Laura Silsby, and her employee, a native Haitian, have been kept behind in Haitian custody to determine what did they do, who did they talk to etc. on a December 2009 scoping out trip to Haiti before the big earthquake.

All things considered, I think the Haitian Justice System, rattled by earthquake damage, has functioned admirably in dealing with this case of child trafficking from invading, law breaking Baptist missionaries on a mission for God and their own egos.

I hope that this inconvenience to pie in the sky religious from Idaho has done some good for the children of Haiti who seem here to be victims of these “well intentioned” Baptist missionaries.

I hope that hundreds and thousands of Haitian children have avoided the sharks and predators in the waters and boundaries of Haiti from the likes of the free alledged pimp, human trafficking, unlicensed “lawyer” who stepped forth to take advantage of the Silsby Rambo missionary expedition and their moral and legal problems.

Bravo Haiti!

While I think Laura Silsby is at the very least an unfocused and confused individual, I do not yet think her a total villain. Only time will tell with the ongoing investigation by Haitian authorities.

Mount Vernon Tea Party with Ed Meese

The who’s who of the crooks from the Ronald Reagan years of government retardation, deregulation and outsourcing for profit only for your crony buddies - a group of fat cat white Republicans - met at George Washington’s old slave plantation as an appropriate setting to unveil their sole claim at being so-called Conservatives and trying desperately to claim lineage from William F. Buckley Jr. They met to sign a symbolic document, symbolic of the setting – The Mount Vernon Statement.

Can a New Conservative Manifesto Woo the Tea Party

...on display Wednesday, Feb. 17, when on the eve of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference in Washington, more than 80 conservative leaders gathered on the grounds of George Washington's former Virginia estate to unveil a manifesto reaffirming the movement's beliefs.

Like a bunch of heroin addicts or flies and insects on a corpse, in fact Reagan's corpse, the Regan fat cats can’t get enough of free government funding either by no-bid, no-show government contracts or by tax free “non-Profits” that are conduits for cash from all over the planet to enslave the American Government in special interest only concerns.

The Tea Baggers have started a ground work movement, not unlike the grunt patriots who shed blood in the American Revolution but got Jack Shit afterwards with the Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson fat cat club of that day and age.

First signer on this so-called Mount Vernon Statement is no-show to justice Ed Meese, a one time supposed Attorney General under the emperor god Ronald Wilson “B Film/Hollywood actor” Reagan.

Briefly saw the document on line but it has been pulled. The first two signers online were “Adolph Hitler” and one “Joe Dufus” according to Christian Science Monitor.

Mount Vernon Statement: A fake Hilter outdid conservatives online

I can't make this stuff up better than that. Perhaps they got the part time no benefits temp from Fox News to set up the website? You know, the temp who is always putting film of millions of people on the Mall in D.C. whenever there is gathering of ten or more tea baggers.

I cannot quote exactly, but besides all the usual boilerplate nineteenth century rhetoric about freedom isn’t free or some such similar nonsense, now offline, they were calling for “true Religious liberty” What the hell does that mean?

Tax-free voodoo is one thing. You mean we are going to have to do back to the middle ages and pay taxes to the churches again – that on top of the taxes we already pay to our dysfunctional national joke – our national government - the true Ronald Reagan legacy of the CINO "Conservatives in Name Only" movement???

Christian Madness Vacation Tour! (sales tax extra)

I only did half a rant on the Kook who was running around Haiti shanghaiing children to populate her soon to be built orphanage in the Dominican Republic.

The other half of the rant had to – has to – do with the weird state of “Christian” people in this second world country (checked our credit ratings lately?) towards the people, mostly of a different color in most cases, and in the third world.

Add to that the bizarre threat or was it a command to “Go teach all nations” the Christian way whatever that flavor of the month philosophy is this month on (Comedy Central) TV evangelism or Capitol Hill (by way of non-profit lobbyists with loads of cash).

Apparently that same article that describes the possible criminal activities of Laura Silsby and her bunch of Baptist do-gooders out on a little adventure in the bush – is how offensive this whole thing plays in the rest of the planet.

Haiti earthquake: In God's name

If I was a Muslim, or a Buddhist or a non-believer, I would look at Haitians, poor as they are, and see that they do have a social network of relatives they can turn to in times of needs. And if not, there are the orphanages. Plenty of them. Trying to get the rest of the planet to adopt children nobody else wants.

And here is this nose up in the air white Baptist American grabbing kids and running for the border to set up shop for her own gain. Americans, to the rest of the world, no longer look like the sane providers and saviours they once did seventy odd years ago when we helped, by force of arms, to directly defeat global Fascism and indirectly Stalinist Communism.

What did Laura Silsby think she was going to do? Did God have a plan for her success? (suddenly I sound like Joel Osteen). Build a Jim and Tammy Baker Amusement Park/Orphanage and rake in the cash as she made commercials showing sad little children and give interviews on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club?

What kind of a bubble world does she live in? Where is her humanity and her old fashioned sense of dignity and self worth? Where is she in this whole freaking Jesus Christ Ponzi scam that Christianity seems to have become in the past forty years or so?

She lives in the modern American E-Van-Gel-ical Christian reality of selling Jesus as a market commodity or product. “Do you accept Jesus as your Lord and Saviour?” I have heard a thousand times from some nitwit in the streets, in the mall, at a bus stop, at my front door. And my straight man line back is - “Does he come with a guarantee or at least a ten year warranty?” You have no idea how many times I have stopped the Jesus Freaks in their tracks with that line. Amen!

But seriously folks, since the Reformation, intelligent people have built, put a challenge on themselves to both learn to read and to learn to decipher the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Somewhere along the timeline for the Americans at least, it turned into a consumer product and a “don’t worry about anything else” once you bought the Jesus Gizmo, whatever it really is. That’s why when we started a war on Iraq and Afghanistan, George Bush felt safe to tell us to “forget about it” and go to the mall and shop some more on your grandchildren’s credit.

Getting back to the article about the crazy American missionaries, there is a ending note about how the Baptists, like the rest of all corporations, have outsourced the old fashioned missionaries who tried to get to know the people they were trying to convert. (outsourcing – reduces the benefits and retirement costs of evangelism)

The way I see it on a timeline, John XXIII did more than try to put some fresh air in the Vatican that now has it windows hermetically sealed. He also set a fire under paranoid white people in the South and the Heartland that saw a threat from a word called “Ecumenical”. Scared the shit of these “good” “Christians” enough to build walls and hunker down for the “end times”. What losers some of these evangelicals be. It is truly sad.

Now religion in America is a full corrupt arm of the politics of this country in sore need of unity, love and fairness – but instead we get “NO” or latte liberals who don’t really want to touch the unwashed masses either.

I see a sad person. I feel his sadness two thousand years later. I see the great sadness of Jesus as he lived in a very sad time and place such as our own when everything had a price including one’s immortal soul.

Nowadays, why be a missionary from modern burned out humanity America? Why be a missionary when you can be a tourist missionary two weeks in the third world vacation plan to enrich you spiritually and so you do not to have to touch the rest of humanity outside your tour guided bubble – not really touch global non-Christian reality. (Take a picture of me, won’t ya, with the poor people for me to show the folks back home?)

Best Christian Vacations

The white American gated community mentality and gated on their mind and soul Christianity (madness) is one reason I am shopping around to call myself anything but a Christian, cultural or otherwise, these days.

Child Trafficking for Christ? Alleluia?

The new global equation as it now stands is not so crude to state that people, collectively or individually, are commodities to be bought and sold for profit. But in truth we are all grist for somebody else’s mill these days. Capitalism and its workings are the secret, sacred words of GOD that only a few rich people truly understand (natural law).

Case in point, Laura Silsby, a good Baptist Christian businesswoman with a long trail of stiffing employees out of their wages, civil lawsuits with customers on her online shopping service and even lawsuits with her own lawyers for non-payment of legal bills. They recently foreclosed on her home and official address of her charity for the poor children of Haiti. On her Facebook Page, she is a fan of “Politicians”: Sarah Palin – “Products”: Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience.

Last year she gets a vision of starting an orphanage in the Dominican Republic for the children of Haiti before the recent earthquake. She gets this vision not from her God but from her children’s nanny who is from Haiti. Cash flow was a problem in getting the orphanage off the ground. But the competition for bodies, I mean children, went ballistic with the likes of Bill Clinton and W started getting in on the Haiti charity thing etc. Onward and upward for “God’s holy work”.

You get some of your fellow Christians in the local Baptist church in Idaho all stirred up, who volunteer, and you start picking up small bodies in the devastated streets of Haiti. If you are the anointed of God like so many losers lately like, Governor Sanford, Senator Ensign, Sen.“Ricky Ricardo” Coburn and Sen.“Waterloo” DeMint, the laws of mankind and or Haiti do not matter. “We’re on a mission for God” as Joe Belushi said in his great movie “The Blues Brothers”.

Laura calls around, no confidentially is adhered to, gets hold of a couple in Kentucky already in the process of adopting some Haitian kids from a legitimate orphanage there when the Earthquake hit, and they tell her to bugger off – but oh no, she puts that particular orphanage on your hit list. You pose as the friend of a woman you have never met when you get to that orphanage to pick up their kids to save or ransom or whatnot.

The kids are already evacuated and then you ask the orphanage if they have any extras. Then you get parents to accept your spiel about a better life in the white world and they hand over their kids to the rich white lady and off you go - ten very odd “missionaries” and thirty three kids in a school bus - off to the border only to be arrested and rightfully so for “child trafficking”.

The rest of this grisly tale of faith, greed and insanity are illustrated in an excellent article from the Guardian by Ed Pilkington in New York and Inigo Gilmore in Callabasse.

Haiti earthquake: In God's name

What was it about the 10 Baptists that gave them the hubris to believe they would provide better care for Haitian children than those children's parents? The acknowledged leader of the group was Laura Silsby, 40, who since the arrest has maintained the line that "we simply wanted to help these children. We did not understand [Haitian] rules."

Richard and Malinda Pickett, to offer them help in extracting three children they were already in the process of adopting. She phoned three times, and on each occasion was told by the Picketts that on no condition should she try to move the children. Remarkably, she didn't stop then. Once in Haiti, Silsby turned up at the orphanage where the children were and asked to collect them. Richard Pickett told Associated Press that she had claimed to be his wife's friend. The three children had by then already been moved, so Silsby asked the orphanage managers if they had any other children she could have.

So what exactly were the Baptists up to? Were they guilty, as charged, of entering a disaster zone, when people, particularly children, are at their most vulnerable, only to exploit them? Or were they, as they have insisted, simply out to help Haiti's traumatised orphans?...

The first puzzling fact is that of the 20 children who boarded the bus at Callabasse that day, many were not orphans. They had loving, albeit desperately poor and struggling, parents. Maggie Moise, standing outside her home, described the moment she handed over her nine-year-old twin sons, Volmy and Kimley. She had been approached by Adrien, who told her some white people wanted to help her family.

"They said they wanted to go with our children. They put the names of the children on a piece of paper and asked me to sign it. A white woman told me, 'Don't worry, you will be able to access your children.' They showed me a ¬brochure of where the children would be going to live. I signed the paper."

Whether you are a giant hedge fund ponzi scheme or a lunatic entrepreneur, running around, kidnapping children for the purpose of trafficking them for charity cash flow or profit for the glory of yourself and of course for the God thing, you are still exploiting them. There are laws. There are nations. There are limits to what individuals and groups and governments can do to help the people of Haiti during this period of recovery after a disastrous earthquake.

Crazies, stay home!

Secular Saint - William Blake

To see a world in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

I am not certain what to say about William Blake as poet, painter, engraver and printmaker. He was in his own league in his lifetime 1757-1827, with idiosyncratic views, on everything from nature to religion. His lack of formal education did not stop his self-education from reading all his life. From a long line of dissenters, he was for the most part pro-bible and anti-Church of England.

It is perhaps because he did not have a formal educated cookie cutter view of the world, that he was able to expand and populate his own personal universe with things of his own importance – interpretation of the classics, religion, words and art.

I periodically run into him in an arts section of a newspaper announcing this or that exhibit. You are always bound to see a new picture book published of his curious etchings and then there is his poetry for which his fame truly lives on.

He seems to have one foot in the past. His etchings were thought by many to be old fashioned, same as those of his original teacher under whom he was an apprentice. He made a fairly good living for most of the stretch of his life. You would perhaps have to classify him as rising but modest middle class in that aristocratic hierarchy of British Pre-Victorian importance and view of the day.

He does not quite fit in with the Romanticism of the time. Though he lived as a contemporary of the Enlightenment, he no doubt had strong pro views on the American and French Revolutions, his opinions remained in the background of classical themes. His real world, lived most of his life, in a stinking crowded ever-growing London.

As I child he learned to draw from stone and plaster classical statues as subject matter. In fact, looking at some of his later works I see a movement and flow that rises right up out of classical scenes not unlike the friezes of the Parthenon that he would not have been familiar with.

What holds the body of Blake’s work together is his view of the world and no one else’s view. What he saw as a child, aged ten, in light reflecting in a tree were perhaps angels as he claimed or the delusions of a child in full imagination of self within his own small secure turf, a private piece of the universe. The words of his poetry or his religious beliefs are condiments like salt and pepper that flavor all the rest of the world’s basic parts of belief and language.

I see some of his art works as being ultra-modern or even having a strong touch of Art-Deco in them from the early twentieth century. He surely captured the classical theme and also too with his spin of Biblical and Christian myth. The experts are still dissecting and reconstructing their own spin on the spins of this or that decade ever since his demise. They did not give him much recognition in his lifetime. His fame is born of human hindsight. That and the commodity equation of the value of his works.

He left no diaries. His biographers dig through public records and pinpoint him on a historical timeline for a few brief seconds out of every year he lived. The rest is speculation, conjecture and third party gossip. Such is life. He lived grandly of mind within the realm of his life and only shards of that full life of an artist remain alive in the energy and forms of surviving work.

Because he disliked and distrusted religious dogma and stuck with a kind of cultural Christian adherence on the fringes of that once great religion, I dub him as a Secular Saint in the This Cultural Christian’s Hall of Fame.





The words to his poem Jerusalem are part the unofficial national anthem of England sung at many sporting events.

Obama Overtones on Faith and Religion

Caught this item on CNN last week. Did you catch it too?

How Obama's favorite theologian shaped his first year in office

In the summer of 1943, when Adolf Hitler's armies marched unchecked across Europe, a pastor in a remote New England village decided to write a prayer.

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change," he began, "the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference."

It is now known as the Serenity Prayer.

In grade school this prayer was on back of a holy card of St. Francis of Assisi. I think the nuns even told me that St. Francis wrote it. Well perhaps not, if documentable current history can be depended upon.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Obama’s minimalism in politics, if it is such, matches something to his approach to faith and religion. Faith and religion can be two separate things. Perhaps too his seeming minimalism in the hard art of politics might also extend into the realm of agnostic in that of his religious beliefs.

He apparently is impressed by the history and words of:

His name is Reinhold Niebuhr, and he was a Protestant pastor in the mid-20th century whose words tended to unsettle people, not offer comfort.

Niebuhr is getting attention again because he has a fan in the Oval Office.

I never heard of him before I read this article of a man that many including Martin Luther King Jr. were fond of quoting.

Obama is said to attend church services at Camp David in a military chapel and out of the eye of the media. His motorcade of thirty something vehicles is somewhat embarrassing if he shows up at a formal church setting in Washington D.C.. He has done the church thing very little. He has been to St. John’s Episcopal Church, the “Presidents’ Church”, across the street on Lafayette Square before the Inaugural and on I believe at Easter. The man’s faith and the public display of it he has been kept largely private.

In the fishbowl world of the presidency and with the Pharisee Media Hypocrites ready to equate any religious overtones as within the legitimate forum of politics, I believe he has backed off in that sense since the Reverend Wright thing and Rev. Wright’s old fashioned and perhaps divisive rhetoric that does on occasion mix politics with religion.

So there we have it, our CEO in chief is fond of a New England preacher and some of his writings including the “serenity prayer”.

Niebuhr was a blunt critic of morally complacent Christians. He thought the church was full of idealists who believed that progress was inevitable and that love alone would ultimately conquer injustice, some Niebuhr scholars say.

"He said there was a difference between being a 'fool for Christ' and a plain damn fool," says Richard Crouter, author of the upcoming book "Reinhold Niebuhr: On Politics, Religion and Christian Faith."

It sounds like a book worth reading. I invite you to read the full article above.

How Gay Was Jesus?

The important thing about Jesus is his message. The other things, like his sexuality, have been greatly ignored mostly by religious types. The religious types for whatever reason think that suppressing their own sexuality and your sexuality as well is a good and wholesome thing, which I think it is not.

So the question remains. How gay was Jesus? I personally thought that the best seller of Dan Brown and Jesus being married to Mary Magdalene or at least her having Jesus’ love child was secretly applauded in the Vatican. Anything that redirects attention from flimsy birth control theology or the exact nature of the vague sexuality of supposedly celibate/chaste priests was a godsend in the midst of a worldwide catholic child abuse epidemic in that church.

On the other side of the street, other side of town is the carnie, big tent christianity where you cure people in wheelchairs, make them walk and then charge an arm and a leg in donations. Maybe they could walk to begin with, but you supply the older ones with wheelchairs while waiting in line to get into the tent like the way A.A. Allen used to do it. And when you pull them up out of a wheelchair and they can stand and walk it’s a miracle - right?

Tricks, whistles, bells, smoke and mirrors were present in the ancient Greek and Roman Pagan Religion world. It continues to this day with the official successor chrisitian religion of these ancient state religions.

The dark carnie side of the christian church, the evangelical fundamentalists who worship the periods on the pages of the NT as much as they worship and study a lifetime the words of Constantine’s approved bible – they don’t have a clue about humanity.

If you cannot get a death sentence for gays in the Uganda/Africa experiment, it is time to bring back some sort of legislation to ban or punish gays in the U.S.. Biggest myth in the kool-aid crowd now is that homosexuality is curable. Did not know it was a disease. The way these tax free carnies think and their take on this – that it is a disease. Pharmas are no doubt ready to sell pills to cure it as well if I am a good judge as to the bent of the American plastic non-culture lately.

The Hate Non-Profit groups with the word “Family” in their bought for opinions and PR titles are out in force on the news talk shows to bang the drum for open hate and discrimination against gays in the military. The so called “Don’t Ask – Don’t Tell” (Don’t get Caught) U.S. military policy is up for debate. The policy like the rest of a changing society and its secular changing attitude toward homosexuality is a half-assed situation whereby gays have to lie about who they are as people while defending their nation.

Gays are not lesser people. They are people who are thought of as lesser in the closed minds of people who live in a closeted dysfunctional religious world with half-assed ideas about human sexuality, birth control and real life in general.

How Gay was Jesus? Living at home with mom at aged thirty? I don’t know. I was not there. But I am willing to bet he was a real flamer!

No need to execute Jesus for blasphemy. Just execute him under white western Christian inspired Uganda Hate legislation being modeled over in Africa.

You know all this love for black gays in Uganda is upsetting the timeline for the taking, stealing of all natural resources in Africa by the rest of the world. Out there a hedge fund manager is suffering, not getting his bonus with all this fuss of killing off gays first in Africa and anywhere else.

People, gay or not, are not on anybody’s profit spreadsheet these days. The land and resources they stand on are on those profit spreadsheets – that is what is really important these days in an Atheist, for profit only, Global Culture.

Christianity on all levels and sides of the street had better get its act together, after two thousand years of confusion, as to what Jesus’ message was about and who it was for. Everybody or nobody is my take on the last part of that. Too much silence on the subject.

The Rick Warren’s of the carnie christian world better get the pie out of their mouths and start shouting something like humanist real life Christianity!

For Everybody!

Anti-Christ Burger in Italy – GOLDEN Satanic Arches – Rapture Burger???

This is a story totally F#cked up for weeks now coming out of Italy.

I keep seeing this BS PR McDonald’s – FOR DAYS, perhaps WEEKS - thing on many, many news sources and cannot determine as to what they are talking about???

Italy minister defends boost for McDonald's burger

I can only assume at this point out of the chaos and confusion of so called ROMQN PR firms making money on a totally confused burger –“ THE ANTI-Christ burger in ROME” as I call it. Cannot figure out yet if the Italian Agriculture Minister is taking a hefty bribe from Ronald McDonald or he just hates Italian Historic eating habits. That or he is addicted to heart artery clogging fast food crap!

I have taken a private pledge not to mention anything connected with the present (german)-anti/christ in roman digs. But I do not understand why McDonalds is trying to launch a new burger just before Lent in Rome unless this is it –

THE RAPTURE is upon us and if so why is some spam concoction with oregano so important to a burger franchise that can push anything down the throats of a captive Iraq and Afghanistan audience wasting their time with the Italians? Like – what is the real give on this????

Latte Liberals vs. Tea Bag Conservatives – 2010, 2012

The lines are drawn in the sand. Latte (coffee) Liberals vs. Tea Bag (lemon, no sugar) ultra conservatives in 2010 and 2012. Short of illness or natural death, Obama is Prez through January 20, 2017 C.E..

Humorist Joe Queenan over in an article in the Guardian UK has challenged the limousine latte liberals in their bubble liberal world in Georgetown, 72nd Street and Broadway and Rodeo Drive to start coffee claques. Liberal coffee claques to offset the minor jock itch irritation that the ADD child of Alaska, Half-Governor Sarah Palin has adopted as media toll-ed (troll) irritaion and will continue to the bitter last dollar of Sarah Palin PAC money = Tea Bag, Tea Party, ultra conservativism.

They started the Tea Bag movement, mailing teabags to members of congress under the delusion of imitating the real men of iron that started the American Republic in Boston. If Tea bagging is now some Urban Dictionary sexual definition- tuff – fight for primary usage!

Whatever Liberalism, Progressive, Conservative, and or Tea Bagger translates into modern in terms of modern reality, Liberals and conservatives are dealing with concepts only little more than a century old.

Democrats better reply with a coffee claque, and soon

The Tea Partyers are mostly pasty-faced middle-Americans, holding the sorts of smallish, grassroots, inbred gatherings that could easily be ignored in the pre-viral era before cable television and the internet. No more. Now 212 angry white people shouting down a rattled congressman in rural Idaho can command as much media attention as a roadside bombing in Iraq.

Anyway, back to Starbuck’s and Queenan with his supposed wry wit. Well I don’t know about wry – but he can buy me a rye anytime.

With similar roots in Philly blue collar origins and links to the infamous Jesuit St. Joseph’s college (now University) of my father and brother (OMG), I think I know of what he speaks or have a idea from where he speaks on matters of a one time Democratic concept called Liberalism and now Progressive.

Minimalist View - Cultural Christian

I know I can be a grumpy judgmental reactionary son of a gun from time to time. But I cannot but help feel hurt and betrayed by what I have expressed in the term “the God business”.

The politics in the USA is such that church and state are wrapped around one party more so than another and in terms of simple discussions, simple discussions are not possible in some cases, most cases. The mythical town square of my youth is not practical in a virtual age. I am perhaps obsolete with my memories and ideals of that once in many ways real American Town Square.

While I never directly experienced the tent revival kind of religion that many in the heartland experienced in their youth, I am suspicious of all things not from the middle of the road or with a traditional church community mindset. Very WASPish and very snobbish of me, would you not say?

I have seen the media big top business go from people like A.A. Allen to the Bakers and Swaggart who blatantly betrayed humanity for the sake of mere power and greed. And yet people are gullible and keep funding what I consider a lunatic fringe which is the backbone of the almost extinct GOP – the party of Pat Robertson.

I cannot, for the life of me, understand why old men with feeble minds are in charge of our national morals – our religions. Truth is, they are not and never have been. It is more like the myth of the town square, while still in the past a real physical town square, that kept the glue and adhesion of our society pasted together. It was also the myth of our religions that somehow we had more control over our lives and our destinies beyond this life.

It is strange how politics has worked in this country for two centuries. A two party system may have worked for a while, but of late, I do not see two distinct points of view. Everyone at the top of politics would seem to want to conform to a poll or a paid sponsor/patron. And if anybody is spouting wool coat fiscal responsibility or middle class stability, they sure as hell do not vote that way once they achieve office.

From the lowliest elected civil servants to the fat cats in the U.S. Senate, American seems not to be represented by any one sane, civil or moral voice. America, though diverse from the beginning of time, always seemed to have some abstract ideal standard that everybody tried to conform to. That standard used to have its base in religion for most people.

The secular world which sprang up out of our consumerism buried religion a long time ago. Religion as it used to be in terms of the age of computers was never user friendly. That fear of death and God and more importantly fear of life is what keeps the old institutions grinding on to the bitter end. No doubt there might be a revival but religion, monotheism across the board, Judaism, Christianity, Islam are all operating in other centuries – in other mindsets.

If you conform to the words written many centuries ago and do not question them in a modern world, then you must stagnate with the old words and not see a new revelation in the modern potential of text or in original intent. While I would be minimal in my beliefs as a Cultural Christian, most people just seem to sit or stand there in a fog of time and kill time here until death.

We are an age at many crossroads. The Internet helps to inform and it also adds fuel to any fire, religious or civil. “It is the best of times. It is the worst of times.” What we hold onto in terms of beliefs, becomes more private and specialized into a custom fit – to suit ourselves. That may be good in one sense. But to use one more cliché – “no man (or woman) is an island”. I do not know if we are blending into together better than the media implies or reports. But somehow, the human mess, the human race survives one more day.

No point in trying to analyze it. It just is. In many ways I think God just is as well. What we make out of the abstract of creation is either good or bad. It should be good for one and all – win win – or the cork may blow out of the bottle of our man made civilization. Whatever.

New Mindsets are needed. New ways of thinking must replace obsoleteness of thought. And that so long as humanity does not get factored out of the new equations of the present and into the future.

Fascism vs. Secularism – Joe the Pope vs. Freedom

There is quite a row going on in the British Press regarding Joe the Pope’s upcoming visit in September.

British protest Pope's swipe at U.K. equality laws

Joe the Pope, fresh from victories and a surprise blitzkrieg on Rowan Williams’ Church of England, arrogantly wants it to be known that he thinks that existing and proposed Equality laws in the United Kingdom are “against natural law”. In other words it is okay to discriminate against women and homosexuals in hiring and the use of public services.

Joe was really hitting out at British Freedoms I think, because of his church being cut out of the cash action when five “catholic” adoption agencies could no longer discriminate against gays wanting to adopt children under recent laws guaranteeing rights of all including gays to be treated equally.

These adoption agencies by the way did not close shop. They merely had to break official ties to the RC church and continue in operation. People in the UK are sensitive to the needs of its workers to keep their jobs no matter what a bigoted reactionary medieval church thinks is “natural law”. This is of course ludicrous. The Roman Empire hated all things natural. The pope’s morality based on nature is really only based on Constantine’s Army Manual of do’s and don’t in the conquest and suppression of all captives and slaves.

Getting back to the present. Britain is more European in a sense that church and state are loosely connected. It is kind of like their Monarchy – totally archaic and irrelevant but sometimes good for the tourist dollars. There are some Anglican Bishops in the upper house of their Parliament or House of Lords. The Church of England is the official faith of the country but in a secular world – that blows – in the face of reality.

There is pending legislation to lift exemptions specifically on priests and clergy from their Medieval rights to discriminate against gays and women in the workplace etc.

Which brings us back to the reactionary Anglicans, the British version of Episcopalians on this side of the Atlantic. Talk about being all F*cked up. You have these Anglican priests and bishops who can marry who do not want women to be priests and bishops. An extension of the hate thing against women goes to their homophobia against gays. So rather than be human and Jesus-like, these Anglican pricks want to take their parishes, churches and wives over to the RC church, which is waiting with buggering arms to greet them.

Joe the Pope, in typical German arrogance, is ready to enter Britain, not as a visiting head of state, but as a conquering hero – a salvation to all the women hating and gay hating Anglican clergy.

Throughout all this, Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, religious head of the Church of England, has turned his cheek so to speak. He was dissed by Joe the Pope when Joe recently ordered a fast track cutting of red tape to welcome any dissenting Anglican clergy into the ranks of the RC church. In a way, I think Rowan is glad to get rid of all the “white trash clergy” so to speak, and to gladly send them over to hell so to speak.

In the meanwhile the British public and the British Press are in a stink about Joe the Pope and his entering Britain in triumph. This former German Army private who once swore an army oath to Adolph Hitler, is not really putting out the right vibes to the Brits.

There is a petition going around the Internet to forbid the government from paying for any expenses of this dissing, Freedom hating potentate. I think that by September Joe the Pope will not be able to piss on Henry VIII’s grave as planned for in the hoped for wish list papal itinerary.

I think that maybe Joe the Pope will understand what fellow catholic Newt Gingrich felt when he became the most hated man in America when he was Speaker of the House and stopped printing social security and welfare checks.

Joe the Pope by September may be the most hated man not only in Britain but also in Europe as well.

So it goes.

First Sunday in Lent - Matt 4 1-11 - Feb 21, 2010

I first heard the story of Jesus and his fasting for forty days from the nuns in my grade school. It is a hard idea to teach. I never went to bed hungry. But the concept of not eating on purpose and called it fasting is something as a child I accepted without question.

As I grew older the idea of fasting for forty days seems to defy logic or credibility. If you look at a lot of biblical stories, they are presented to reinforce other stories in the bible. The number forty has to do with forty years the Israelites under Moses wandered in the desert. It rained for forty days and nights on Noah's immense boat.

It took me some years to realize that the season of Lent talks about forty days of fasting and sacrifice but the season discounts and does not count Sundays. Does that mean I can have a banana split on Sunday in between the fasting thing?

Many things in the Bible may or may not have happened exactly as they say. But no doubt and assuredly they really did happen.

I have to look at a dedicated man named Jesus who is trying to purge himself of all the things of this world, to purge them out of his mind. We do not know what went on in his mind in the middle of a very long and lonely separation from the world in the desert.

There is a modern popular horoscope guy in the newspapers and Internet who does a weekly column. He advocates that we take an occasional fast from the media. He is in essence saying, one day a week turn off the television, turn off the radio. Turn off the computer and Internet and the iPod. He says to tune into yourself. Is this so original or novel as idea? No.

Moses when he wanted to change his family, the blood of Abraham, turn them away from the very sophisticated culture of the Egyptians, he had them wander around the desert for forty years to get reacquainted with living in harsh desert conditions, surviving and prospering and becoming once again what they lost while living for centuries in Egypt. They lost the ability to be of themselves and dependent on themselves. It was a return to nature so to speak. It was a return to simpler less complicated days. It was a way of life where the individual on an individual level focused one on one with God and nature.

To do that, Moses ordered or created the Sabbath as a holy day in compliance for a holy day in the Ten Commandments. This is a day to shut out the outside world and to focus only on yourself and your immediate family and on reflection of God and his word. This is a day when you can or should turn off and turn away from the secular world. That one day a week is supposed to be for our spiritual side and in recognition of the Creator. This is a day to recharge our spiritual batteries.

That day of rest is to imitate the day of rest God took after he created everything in six days, is sadly not afforded to many of us in this mad 24/7 modern world. When do you fit in time for yourself or your family? Is a workout at the gym a good withdraw from the world? Is going to the PTA meeting or transporting the kids to soccer practice or ballet a plus or a negative? I cannot answer that. Only you can. The expression goes something like having " quality time" with your loved ones. Think about it.

Jesus who decided he had a destiny to fulfill, a destiny perhaps thrust upon him by the living God. He had to made an adjustment. He had to decide if he wanted to willingly choose that destiny, if he was worthy, if he was ready, and strong enough. He had to start somewhere. He had to fast and pray for a very long time, perhaps even forty days or longer.

In all that pain and suffering and withdraw from the world, he as a human no doubt played those video tapes of things in his life, played those tapes over and over again, things that he was giving up for his ministry to the poor and the ignorant of this world. He went into the desert one sort of man and came out another. He accepted his destiny, harsh as living that destiny would have to be. He, as the Muslims would say, submitted totally to the will of God. God's plan for the world was now his plan as well. No going back. Only forward.

And no doubt, because sometimes fasting gives you a chemical high off your body chemistry kicking in to offset starvation, no doubt he was temped to believe that he was great and powerful and that he could use his vision and his powers solely for himself. But no, this he did not do. If there is one thing that rings true in the gospels is the love and commitment that Jesus had to humanity - the other children of God. Us.

The modern world of Goldman Sachs, Wall Street bankers and Ivy League Harvard educated men and women do not add up in their tens of thousands to the one real man, the mensch, the one and only Jesus of Nazareth!

When they put the gospels together, there may have been some lost passages. What they perhaps left out of some of the gospels, these gospel writers, are the letters, numbers or words of the equation of man, of men as equal to one another and fully worthy of sharing in the those fruits of labor and wealth of this planet equally. The spirit of the message of Jesus comes through by recognizing man and humanity as a critical part of any political, economic or religious equations - then and now.

The world that Jesus envisioned may not be here in this world. It most surely is in the next where the things of this world are totally discounted. A rich man cannot get through the eye of a needle and it is that difficult for any greedy fools to try to carry their gold and cash off this spec of dust of this planet into a vast universe created by the living God.

Jesus sits at the right hand of that living God because he served others first and foremost and because he saw in every individual the potential and treasure of their individual soul.

In the season of Lent that Christians try to use to push off the things of this world in favor of more spiritual things, let us remember why we make sacrifices, make them gladly and remember that others too like Jesus have done them willingly in the past.

We are the present. We as Christians look to the future of mankind as envisioned by God. It is a vision we share with God through Jesus and his examples of love, honor, commitment, sacrifice and personal endurance.

Let us be glad to fast and abstain from the temporary things of this world during this season of sacrifice, this season of Lent. Let us attempt to reset out buttons away from the world of the secular and retread a path to the world of the sacred and spiritual.

Let us be glad to pray. Let us be glad to be there also in spirit with Jesus in that desert of fasting and prayer.

"You are my hiding place; you will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance." (Psalm 32:7)

Amen.


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