Who Needs (a) God When They Can Afford an iPhone 6 (Rhetorical ?).

I could die and go to heaven when I get my iPhone 7 !  (trash cult talk)

Made in the image and lifeness of god Steve Jobs…….lol

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Agnostic Spoken Here

Agnostic is spoken here.

It is not the only language. I welcome differing points of view. But after something like a quarter century search for meaning and life and purpose of being, I have come to the conclusion that nobody really knows when it comes to the concept of “God” – who or what that three letter word really represents or means.

As you may have noticed I did a visual change on the blog cover overhead.

The dragon is not demonic, merely my Chinese Zodiac sign in green, a life color.  My image concession to the growing global culture of the human race.

I have also included a phrase I have used for many years.

“Just because man invented God does not mean that God does not exist.”

Hardly McShea’s Law or Logic formula on Agnosticism but a start.

I do not think that Agnosticism is half-assed Atheism because once an Atheist declares “there is not God”, he or she is not proclaiming it in a vacuum but in a functioning multi-dimensional world that needs some explaining sometime, somewhere from a scientific point of view at least.

And to explain God in terms of centuries old myth and superstitions is moot in the Twenty-first century of a common global era of the human race.

Also, I do not like a lot of the Atheists out there in the public square who seem so loud and vulgar in their defense of something that is both of a quasi-religious and secular nature.

Most Atheists I perceive to be first and foremost anti-religion perhaps due to bad past religious life experiences. The issue of God or Creator gets caught up many times entangled in that personal experience thing.

Atheism per se has gotten a bad rap through the centuries because it has always been a political term to quash any political dissent within the ruling theocracies which I think have been a majority throughout human history, both helping and hurting human history along the road to evolution of the species to bigger and better things.

That an extension of the tribe or clan has been the city state and the official party line, the official religion and or god has always been the local glue that holds the whole mess together at any given time locally along the human race timeline. 

That God for a lack of a better word is a metaphor, real at least to me, matching reality to a point and not unlike that of my childhood imaginary friend.

I think that when people say they believe in God, they are really saying that they conform to the local standards and enjoy the myth coming off of stained glass or the printed page and not necessarily in relation to total reality.

That looking at Dawkins Atheist Forum dissolve into chaos and dogmatic warfare says to me that Atheism is too on a certain level just another religion full of useless dogma.

As I have stated here on more than one occasion, I am Areligionist first, without religion and or dogma, before I am second Agnostic, with doubt about all popular religious cultural myths. I simply do not know.

That if anything, I am a closeted Quaker, not an official member of that party, but believe in the specialness of my own personal being and or personal God within aka the divine spark within.

Seeing the political scape descend into madness is seeing too much money and too much religion in politics these days.

That must change. Theologies do not work in the face of technology. Reality and myth conflict and reality is probable in most cases as opposed to any myth.

I remain a Cultural Christian because I believe in the basic teachings of Jesus. I do not however believe in his so-called divinity. 

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Fear Guns and God - Limbaugh LaPierre Donohue - Paid PR Bully Hacks do NOT represent the Moral Compass of America

It is amazing what the corporate media try to tell us about us via their paid for Public Relation Media Hacks who constantly chant their Corporate “PROFITS FIRST – People Last” mantra. 

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Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs – Messiah of the New Global Culture

200 West Street - Goldman Sachs H.Q. NYC - the new Vatican

It is a secret to many perhaps about the return of Jesus to planet earth. One had always thought that he would come back in clouds and not in a revelation.

But since the premise I believe is true that:

Capitalism is the new religion; money is the new God – then the only body standing claiming both power and “doing the work of God” is his holiness Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs. (bow your heads)

Of course this may all be somewhat confusing to the holders of the old dead Christian belief systems, sects, cults, delusions, propagandas etc.

The truth of the big change in the United States elections for Emperor (President) is when the powers behind the throne of the G.O.P. (God’s Own Party) have backed the Mormon cult guy to lead “a Christian nation”. (wink, nod)

(Christianity doesn’t mean jack shit anymore apparently.  All that socialism and communism and actually trying to care for poor buggers etc., what a waste of valuable investment capital…)

I had been searching these past few years here to try and reconcile the early Jesus philosophy with the corrupted buggering army thing that Constantine the Great merged with all his favorite pagan religions and rituals.  Well time moves on, and the core of the old Constantine cult, the RCC, is obsolete when it cannot reconcile itself to half the human race, females (yuk!), let alone the new global culture that has risen right up among us.

And it like all cultural things, those clinging to the old ways are               somehow indistinguishable from the new religion of supply and demand, crushing 99% of humanity back into the caves where they deserve to belong – but oh how glorious is this new age of the raptured who have lived to see and be warmed in the light of the new God/Money.

Praise be to Dollars! (one of God’s favored nicknames) (Pounds in the UK, Yen in Tokyo etc.)

That means that 200 West Street in Manhattan, the Goldman Sachs Tower (above), is where the holy of holies is, a new Vatican(?), where the sacred ritual of trade is practiced and the messy collateral damage of computerized sacrifice to the new God/Money such as blood, chaos, starvation, poverty, civil war and evil imposed on the beasts, the poor, is not dirtying up the clean marbled and carpeted floors of the new high priests in their sacred skyscraper castle of this new age and religion. 

People must now remove their shoes when entering 200 West.

This is surely holy ground!

Oh God of Money, prove that you love me.  Inspire your high priest Lloyd, (Jesus come again) to give me a computerized formulated hedge fund algorism to make me rich!

Amen.

Behold the face of divine perfection you mere lowly mortals.

(warning - sarcasm)

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just because man invented God, does not mean that God does not exist

Clowns.  Proof that God exists?


Or is it merely the silly energy of it all that is the answer?




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James Thurber – Three Fables – Keith Olbermann

Perspective on God, the Universe and my place in It

It is an overcast spring day.  It has been a long winter.  Buds are on the trees.  Grass is in need of first trimming.  And I have to think about how the universe is unfolding…  

In a way, as a man in middle age and transitioning away from the things of youth, I have to adjust my point of view or perspective of it.  It, in this case, represents many things.

Rather than foster a fear of death, which statistically I am getting closer to, I must foster a new understanding of my present life.  I am in life.  Death is still a constant unknown.  

If you are a minimalist in beliefs as I am, you might want to cling to the mythologies attached to an afterlife.  The tail end of most pie eating preachers is a Disneyesque fairy story land of the hereafter.

Even though I believe in an afterlife, I have no idea what form it might take.

Do I believe in reincarnation?  Was not raised in a culture that fosters such beliefs.

Is there reincarnation?  Do not know.  I will find out when I get there so to speak.

My own interpretation of an afterlife has to do with a perhaps spiritual experience that took place six months after the death of my father; I somehow sensed a message received from that other side.  The message was something to the effect that “I’m okay” wherever and thereafter.  

Kind of like an old ancient texting thing called a telegram.  You pay per word.  Must be expensive to send messages from the other side if you only get an occasional “I’m okay”.   Still, brevity in good communication is truly an art form.

If I must wander with my mind as to what the other side is like, I borrow a minimalist view of Native Americans who called their paradise the “happy hunting ground” under the protection of the “Great Spirit”.

Whether the afterlife is eternal or temporary, I cannot tell you.  All that I feel for certain is that it is there somewhere down my road of life, passed this life.

Putting aside complex ideas and or simplistic minimalist versions of things, I have to paint a fuller picture of what I believe. 

A lot of really unanswered questions.  Why am I so unkind to mention them?  Well, if you reject what ninety eight percent of religion has accumulated in these many centuries; you have to feel some comfort in cleaning out the attic so to speak.

Rereading some of my past postings, I have to agree or disagree, if what I said in the past still sounds valid to me after time.  Has the wine aged right or will it be a poor vintage?

Looking back I agree with everything I stated in:

This Cultural Christian’s Creed

As Holy Man and Prophet, he is first among equals of all men born of women, and is the way, truth, light and path to a higher level of understanding of things human and spiritual. 

(A little bit formal or stiff, the creed that is.  Needs a little better grammatical polish and word flow?  But basically correct from my point of view since I choose to frame my spirituality within some old Christian ideas and ideals.) 

As for Jesus being a holy man and prophet.  The bottom line is that we do not know very much about who he was or what his mission in life was.  If you start writing about him thirty to a hundred years after his time on earth, there is an awful lot of gaps and speculation in the Greek play like setting of his story.

To save the world by his teachings as we know them?  Most definitely.  All good and true prophets try to share what is in their hearts with others.

As a divine son of God?  We are all children of God.  More on than later.

I could write several books on the speculation that keeps piling up in my mind regarding what I, by default, call him as Holy Man and Prophet.

There may not be much conflict on the idea of him as a holy man.  The problem I think lies in the question of what really is a prophet.  To which I refer to another of my other postings.

Modern age prophets – an insight 

From two homilies delivered at St. Mary’s in Exile (SMX) in Brisbane Australia.  

First from the homily of Dermot Dorgan –SMX- July 4-5 2009 

A biblical prophet is one who conveys a message from God to a particular time and place. They’re not, contrary to popular belief, people who can foresee the future. They are rather people gifted with an ability to see deeply into the present, to look below the surface of society and see the undercurrents and hidden realities that determine what is happening or will happen. The word “Seer” is a good description. … 

Next from the homily of Peter Kennedy –SMX-July 19, 2009 

…Most of all, I think that our seeking to find new ways of speaking about God is a prophetic act. We do this in baptism when we use the words creator, liberator and sustainer of life. It can be seen as a recognition that all the language we use about God has to be metaphorical language. The one thing we know for certain about God is that God is Other, God is different. God does not belong to this universe of which we are a part. And yet the only language we have is human language.  

We know from ordinary conversation that we sometimes have to say things two or three times in different ways before we can adequately express a feeling or an experience. There must be a million ways to describe the experience of being in love, all of them inadequate. But if some authority were to come along and say, “Look, all this multiplicity of words is downright confusing. From now on, we’re going to have one formula for expressing this experience, and here it is – blah blah blah. 

From now on this is the only orthodox way of expressing this experience. All other expressions are inaccurate and invalid. Well, we can see how ridiculous this is. But we’re tied to certain fixed expressions of the experience of God, and I believe it is a prophetic act – the act in fact of adult Christians - to look for other ways of expressing our experience…

In a sense if you look at the world as I see it, God the creative force set the Universe in motion.  God in the form of a Holy Spirit still keeps and orders inventory from time to time but comes and goes most times like the wind as described in sacred text.

The idea that God set the world in motion is called Deism.  That he, she or it is distant leaves the gap in between that beginning event and my present spot on a timeline away from that event.

As such, in the world where I believe in the divine spark of creation, I have to believe in what thousands of preachers, holy men, theologians and prophets have been searching for -  I have to believe in the possibility of a divine spark within.  

As such I am not so much a surrogate of God as creator in a cold distant Deist existence as I am a temporary holder, safe guarder of the divine spark within during this temporary timeline existence.  Whether we had that spark within before birth and keep it afterwards passed death, I do not know. 

I refuse to let fear of death make me believe in fairy tales and stone age mythology regarding God and God worship and God financial accounting which is what most spiritual beliefs seem to  transcend into after a few generations from the founding of any new idea about God.

We are all or have the potential of being prophets just like Jesus - or dare I say it, like a Moses, Mohammed and even Joe Smith.  Of course, I don’t believe in magic texts appearing out of nowhere.  Whatever.  Blah. Blah. Blah.  

Of course nothing I say or speculate about can be proven.  The very creation of the universe cannot be proven.  It is not that religion and scientific theory are incompatible; it is just that neither can be disproven either. 

Compatible?  Hardly.  More like apples and oranges.  Or kinda like two small fingers on two hands of the same body.  

Depends on how you look at it and or want to scream at the other side in a debate.  Which is what a lot of so-called pro or anti-atheism is presently about?  A modern perspective on God?

I do not want to get too deep here.  It was just that some of my thoughts past and present seemed to have merged together on a cloudy spring day with buds on the trees and grass in need of first trimming – as the universe continues to unfold, with or without us, here, now, and into future tense.

What do you know about God?

An interesting article about stats and who knows what etc. about God and religion.  The numbers are an interesting insight into the whole complex matter of ideas and realities regarding religion.

Atheists, agnostics most knowledgeable about religion, survey says

A majority of Protestants, for instance, couldn't identify Martin Luther as the driving force behind the Protestant Reformation, according to the survey, released Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Four in 10 Catholics misunderstood the meaning of their church's central ritual, incorrectly saying that the bread and wine used in Holy Communion are intended to merely symbolize the body and blood of Christ, not actually become them.


Atheists and agnostics — those who believe there is no God or who aren't sure — were more likely to answer the survey's questions correctly. Jews and Mormons ranked just below them in the survey's measurement of religious knowledge — so close as to be statistically tied.

So why would an atheist know more about religion than a Christian?

God is God is God

No matter what you name it or how you perceive it, God is God.

Speaking to an old friend, who had been in the hospital some time ago - She related the story about how some of her friends wanted to have their elders or ministers bless her in the hospital room.

Sounds innocent enough but first came blessings from Mormons, then from a Lutheran minister and finally from the Catholics. One nurse saw this and wondered why and how so many blessings from different groups.

Why was answered with the response about not wanting to disappoint friends and their good intentions.

How was answered with words that no matter what or how you call it – “God is God is God”.

God and Absolute Zero

It is so many degrees down to absolute zero 0-K that the universe operates on in terms of temperature. Zero Kelvin is something like -459F. At those temperatures there is little life and yet as evidence unfolds, life exists on all levels and in all dimensions of the universe.

Speaking of zero, going down to zero in life is a bit of a scary thought to me. Zero in language also communicates the absence of something. In fact, nothing.

So when going down to zero in talking about God and or religion, it is easy to eliminate religion, it is man made. But God and or the author of the universe is far from zero in any concept, scientific or mathematically. There is definitely something out there.

I am not aiming at Creative or Intelligent Design, the very terms cannot measure up to the sheer mystery of the concept of God.

It is difficult to think of God in the secular world that surrounds us. The opposite of western culture would be a theocracy and we been there, done that, and it does not work.

The human culture’s biggest task I think is to seek balance with an intelligent concept such as God, of laws, of morals, of tradition and balance them in the everyday world of living in the 24/7 world of today, of so-called reality.

GOP Hates Nature (and God)

I am not a tree hugger. But I do like to see trees. Would rather see trees than parking lots. Of this whole ecological disaster that the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has caused, I do not see words used like ecology – must be an old fashioned word. And as for Joe Barton apologizing to BP for supposedly being shaken down by godfather Obama – total bullshit.

I am picking on the GOP here because it more so than the Dems in this red states disaster - is a sign of God’s displeasure with man and man’s inept handling of nature. Do I believe that? No. But plenty others might if you look at man and his careless handling of God’s gift through nature. If you mismanage anything, someone has to be doing the mismanaging. Which brings me to the tangent of no accountability these days for managers – but that is another subject?

For the GOP to shrug it’s shoulders over New Orleans after Katrina leads me to believe how a ruined Gulf of Mexico means nothing to some politicians. It means nothing to future generations as well?

Makes you wonder how some pols GOP and Dems will shrug when we lose a city or two to terrorists. Tough luck. Where will my compaign contributions be coming from now?

Part of the reason civilization is in a downward trend may be because atheistic secularism does not count mankind in any economic or moral equations. God as the traditional parent of nature is also the traditional parent of moral codes. Hence, no God; no moral codes to live by. Think about it.

This is for all politicians but for the GOP more than most. If you do not like or care for nature - and assuming that God is the author of nature - One has to come to the clumbsy conclusion that if the GOP hates Nature as evidenced by recent performance in favor of British Petroleum over nature, then the GOP hates God as well.

Bread and God

The man with answers has no answers. People assume that God has all the answers. Does he?

I got into a short but strange conversation by way of compter translation with a person who contacted me on Facebook, one of those social networking websites that wants you to show a lot of photos.

The person for some reason mentioned to me my love of God. I guess he saw the name of my blog This Cultural Chrisitian and assumed that I was a full believing Christian.

Anyway, the person on the contacting end also mentioned the word “Mafia”. I assumed he was responding to one of my favorite movies being The Godfather. I joined in the conversation via a translate function and well, I did not get into good communication with this person.

He thought The Godfather was an bad movie glorifying evil. He was right but I also thought it a classic and great work of cinematic art. In any case, I did not get much out of his French except the literal computer generated translated meaning of words. I also got the sense of how closed belief is on subjects related to God, and not knowing his religious beliefs.

His translated words to me said something like he wanted to talk about God and that I wanted to discuss bread. Thus the beginning of this discussion based on two different human beings thinking that they are looking at the same object or subject and two different people getting two separate translations of the same thing according to individual prejudice.

The bread referred to in this Internet conversation/translation was about the Wedding Cake in the movie and the one I bought from the same bakery in Staten Island that made the one in the movie. Ours was a bit smaller. I wished to express my own interface with scenes in the movie and the identification with visual sites I know from Staten Island and put in the film as labeled as Long Island etc..

But it, the conversation, was a good beginning. Do we talk about bread or God when we join together and talk about God?

The Our Father speaks of our daily bread. In reality the nitty gritty of life is not God but Bread.

God is intertwined with all living things. Bread is life. God is life. We are life.

God and other imaginary thoughts

Many believers in the Deity take on non-believers in debates that range in all sorts of the “intelligent” design arguments that goes something like – who do you think created all this?

Nature created all this I fear. And invention of toilet paper and flush toilets are not the ultimate intelligent proof of “God”.

Interesting thing about this whole “God” thing is how the Deists and the Theists have let a concept out there for three centuries in which God is distant (deism) or God is up front and in your face (theism). The universe or more accurately man’s perception of the universe is much more intense and diverse that it was three hundred years ago.

If the distant God of Deism of three hundred years ago was sitting on some obscure star in some church mural, he is now by default very much more close in the abundance of scientific knowledge pushing him in closer amidst all the other info in the scientific portfolio.

God if valid is no longer able to be distant in the modern world.

So too, God in your face and Theistic is a bit too much when you give God credit for all that “charmin”.

Which leaves me in the argument with anybody who wants me to believe in their personal god, I have to say that the concept of an unseen entity in our midst is plausible if only in our imagination. Which brings me to something quite silly. But let’s face it, somethings of our childhood linger on and one such thing is imagination.

Writing about English artist and poet William Blake a little while back made me realize how the simple, the imaginative, the creative, the real gets dragged and or beaten out of us in the phase and change from childhood to adulthood. Oh, the pity of it.

In any case, in any argument about the existence of a mono-theistic deity gets shrouded in my thought process because of my silent, good listening, childhood imaginary friend. What was his name? Oh yeah. I called him God.

Pagan Transcendency into the Divine

Christianity is not a holistic religion in the ways that ancient religions were concerned with the whole and the parts of the whole and the interdependence of those parts.

By strictest definition, the word pagan means rural. In the context of ancient Rome with it hundreds of official and non-official gods and temples, pagan was a label for a country bumpkin religion with a country bumpkin god etc. As such Rome was the big time and so were its gods.

Along comes Christianity and every non-Christian religion gets a pagan label and then gets the heave ho off the side of the boat. Past wisdom, culture and insight got tossed as well. A respect for nature got a bad rap and label in the Christian stream of thought thing.

I have to laugh when I hear the apocryphal story of the mother of Jesus coming to live her last days in Ephesus and living with Mary Magdalene.

I do not think that that happened. Ephesus was home to the largest and grandest Greek style temple on earth, pictured above, and dedicated to a Greek earth goddess called Demeter. The temple was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Demeter can also be Gaia etc. The Roman version of the name Demeter is Diana.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, is the best you can do for a basic earth goddess in the male dominated monotheistic Christian religion. With a handful of sentences mentioning her in the NT, Mary is the stuff of myth and legend and not based on much sacred scripture.

I was doing some recent research or refreshing my memory from Freshman highschool English class whereby we had to memorize all the names of the Greek and Roman gods as a background to reading stories of ancient mythology.

What’s wrong with myth? Nothing. Before there was culture or churches and mosques, there was myth. Myth is the verbal and later written down sharing of culture around the small community nightly fire. Tribes are smaller than modern day countries. Myth is no longer small. Small myth sometimes now covers big modern countries and cultures but not too well. Something missing perhaps in old myths not properly retrofitted to today. As such, most myth is relegated to obscure storage and forgotten library shelves.

Myth or no myth, the western culture follows ancient Rome’s hatred of Nature to this day. Rome is long gone. Western civilization is not far behind using the British Petroleum’s behemoth haphazard failure to manage nature responsibly as a watershed mark in human history.

Do we finally take macro responsibility of the planet or do we, and all cultures globally, continue to ignore our environment? Our platform of life, on which we see life happening on many levels, must be shared with other living creatures in the oceans and on the lands. One species, if it goes extinct, sets the stage for other extinctions including our own species.

The ancient religious myth that God set us in change of Nature is a poorly written piece in that it leaves out the implied statement that we must take charge of nature responsibly.

I am not talking Neo-Paganism here. I am talking about resuscitating those portions of ancient culture that saw, felt and acted in response to the key points of nature that cause mankind to survive and prosper.

Gaia as the earth goddess is not really an ancient concept. Gaia as resurrected myth is an accumulation of many ancient earth goddesses. And what are earth goddesses? They are symbols of the sacred feminine.

The west and its hatred of nature is mixed with hatred of women in the mean desert monotheistic religions. Nature is buried along side with the feminine. The Roman military calendar replaced the lunar calendar. Conflicts were settled in blood along with the destruction of ancient pagan belief systems, based many times on nature. A world religion like Hinduism is based on many previous cultures and many previous cultures’ beliefs, gods and goddesses. Inclusive is one way to do religion.

Christianity, if it wants to survive must look differently at the world and be part of nature, God’s nature or be prepared to quickly, at this point in time, fade out permanently of historic view.

Part of a culture war in recent years in the west, or more accurately America, is between the dying western culture and against Secularism or Neo-Paganism. Neo-Paganism also goes by the name of Pantheism, whereby you believe in many gods instead of the mean singular desert gods of Judeo Christian Islamic monotheistic myth.   The many gods or idols that some secularists or neo-pagans would seem to worship are science, technology, cars, fast food, fashion, and greed and or success.  Any means to succeed including warfare are okay so long as you win at any cost.  Any cost these days means at the expense of humanity and the fragile nature of our planet.

Of course, the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims do not all agree that they are talking about the same god. As such and to such people, I label their beliefs myth. There seems to be many gods even amongst the so-called monotheists.

Transcendence into the energy of the universe is possible on any level, at any time and in any culture.

Transcendence into the concept of God is a way pagans used to channel into the Spiritual. The universe did not live, breath and evolve for a billion years waiting for the one true religion (there are so many) to finally arrive on this planet.

The ancients, the pagans, the pre-Christians did a thriving business in many belief systems. Those forced from the scene belief systems were many times balanced in being male and female. Transcendence into the energy of God was possible within some of those belief systems. Human or animal sacrifice though crowded out the clarity of any hoped for vision of God as we think of Him today.

Western civilization is in a way an extension of a single male god myth – now gone sterile over time. Western Civilization on the religious level is an extension of a long, out of date myth created by Constantine. The forced male only paternalistic religion thing does not work anymore in a total member, total cultural global society. That the culture attached to that lone god myth has perhaps travelled as far as that culture and myth can travel.

Time to think outside the sterlile (at present) western Christian box.

Any ideas I have at the moment are to restore at the very least the regular value of the feminine if not the sacred feminine back into western culture and its institutions in order to save it at this critical time in history.

Time to re-examine some of the ancient pagan ways of reaching out to the spiritual and the Divine that are in true balance with Nature and Nature’s God / Goddess.

Jesus and the Womb of God

This is where I get creative and inspired and perhaps even mystical.

Creative is a dirty word in American business. I learned that the hard way. It shows signs of intelligence which is verboten in our present American fascist state of things left undone, half-assed in the political and religious forums now abandoned to MBAs, PhDs, lawyers and hedge fund managers.

I am inpired by my recent postings on the forgotten female half of our civilisation. I use the British/European spelling. There is no civilization left in the American myth. But that is another story. (sorry for the negative aside)

If you look at anything, you can look at it twice and in a totally different light. I like to use the Earp Brothers and the fight at the O.K. Corral in 1881 in Tombstone Arizona as an example of an urban legend being cast into stone. It, the bottom line, was that the Earp brothers were out to make money and blow town. The truth is that they acquired a lot of deeds for land, property and mines.

They wanted to leave but there were bigger crooks than they running the town. Somebody redrew the town map and every lot in town was in dispute and had to be resurveyed. Of course the surveying fee was outrageous and enough to make most people sell out at a discount and leave town. Or you could sue in court.

So while the Earp brothers got entangled in Republican urban politics they crossed paths with the cowboys and rural democratic politics. The demographics have reversed over a century later. While the Earps didn’t mind eating stolen Mexican beef bought off the Cowboys, the Cowboys wanted a little more respect from the Earps while in town. And so it went.

The rest is history or is it? The Urban legend of the good city dweller against the evil cattle rustlers was set in stone by Hollywood. The good guys were the urban crooks and the bad, bad cowboys just drifted away into history.

In dealing with the concept of women in the church or a religious setting, one has to wonder where and how the urban legend of Jesus got set in Stone. At one point Jesus was real and just like the Earp brothers in Tombstone.

Everybody has a story, a direction and a purpose in life. Getting back to Jesus. As I read and read account after account, opinion after opinion, urban legend after urban legend I have strangely come back to some sort of mystical concept of Jesus.

(Here comes the mystical?)

That if the oldest gospel is dated around 70 C.E., then the oral history is being told and few if any living witnesses to Jesus were still around. In a world with a life expectancy of 35 years for the average human beings then and up until the beginning of the twentieth century, then the first and oldest account of Jesus is a third person account of an urban legend.

Let me throw in a little Islamic perspective which says that Jesus did not die on the cross nor was resurrected. That Jesus was assumed into heaven like the legendary prophet Elijah and you have what I mix with the beginning of the Gospel of John.

The beginning of the gospel of John calls Jesus Logos or the word or the reason God comes down to the perception of man.

The gospel of John is much more fluid and poetic in parts than the first three gospels. John is also the start of the Urban legend of the Jews as bad guys and the Jesus posse as the goodie two shoes of that O.K. Corral scenario.

Anyway, I look at the third party account of Mark and realize that if Mark is not a living eyewitness then he is describing Jesus and the perception and assumption of Mark is that Jesus is a man. No. I am not saying that Jesus is a woman. But if a person is writing history later, it is possible that you do not know 100% about who or what your history subject is about.

So if you take the Gnostic concept or poetic license of the Beginning of John 1:1-5 -

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.

Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

- You can look at Jesus from a different angle, like looking at a work of true art in a museum. I see some perfections and flaws of the artist so to speak.

That in real time, with a real Jesus preaching a real gospel, Jesus was neither male nor female. Jesus the logos, the word, the reason was standing right in front of you not unlike a space alien and you see, hear and perceive what you want to see, hear and perceive. Or what you are capable of perceiving in matters possibly divine.

If you are a male, you see a male. If you are female, you see a female. Jesus and his grouping of followers were both male and female. In God there is no male or female. In Jesus there is no male or no female as well?

It was not until after he dies or disappears from the scene that petty human traits arise. Suddenly is it not possible that Mary Magdalene was an apostle. Suddenly the gospels or Paul’s obsessions and petty male hang-ups become the things put into stone, into words on paper, a translation. The true and original urban legend fades into obscurity.

The miracle of God’s presence among us in the form of a future man, a humanist man, a divine male/female presence in our midst gets lost in translation.

I do not want to get into the logistics or the semantics of the Trinity which is really a stone age version, interpretation not suited to today’s modern scientific urban global person to deal with in a credible pattern or sense.

Without going much too deeply into this theory of mine which is already probably a half a dozen heresies rolled into one, I look at something rather symbolic of things, of teachings and urban myths and man and his engineering.

I look at the Hagia Sophia, or Santa Sophia, the primary center of Christianity for a thousand years. While this building, this church and the Eastern Rome flourished for a thousand years, they probably were herding domestic animals into the decrepit old Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome in the winter time for shelter throughout the dark western ages while this magnificent building was the one true Church to the civilized worlds in the east. Here too Islam had one of its grandest buildings for close to five hundred years.

Hagia Sophia is related to the word logos or word or reason or touching the purpose of man in response to God and his prophets to the human race. Hagia Sophia is holy or sacred wisdom. The eastern Roman empire would have seemed to have been more attuned into a feminine sense of wisdom, or understanding, and coming from God. This as opposed to the western male view coming to us to the modern day.

The western church is scared shitless of the feminine and the womb - it is where we all came from - figuratively and literally.

When I look at the image above, (click for a larger image), I see wisdom written in stone, in concrete, in mosaics and the “Allah is Great” Quran plagues. I see mankind reaching out to the universe before science or man had a clue or sense about what the universe truly is.

Click on the image above of the Hagia Sophia. It was the center of Christian faith, the premier center for a thousand years. It was a major center of Islam, its grandest mosque, for close to five hundred years. It is the most sacred spot on planet earth to all faiths of the one God concept.

Sacred wisdom, sacred knowledge, the word, the reason, the logos – no matter how you translate it – here is the spot where heaven touched earth directly for fifteen hundred years.

Look at the enlarged image. What do you see? Is it a museum? Is it a basilica, a church? Is it a mosque?

Look deeper. What humankind has left here for all generations to see is the myth of God, the myth of the Prophets like Jesus among others. I would see a cave if I were a caveman.

I see a womb, perhaps the womb of God. I see great mystery. And then I am transported back to reality and it is just a building.

The perception of man toward - God, Jesus, Science, Art are all in their own way part of a formula, a plan, a logos, a reason, a whisper from above and a meaning for all things.

The purpose of life is a mystery. To an artist, life is poetry.

Avatar - Christianity At War With Nature?

Pantheism or the respect of Nature and not the worship of nature is the default belief system of the human race. Long before we had popes and bishops wearing 20 yards of silk each in the name of the homeless guy – what’s his name? – Jesus, we had nature. And let’s not forget the Creator of nature.

No doubt, James Cameron, native of Canada, having lived through a few Canadian winters has a healthy respect for nature.

His film Avatar is opening a panadora’s box of meaningless tangents. These tangents are mostly of religious symbolism more so than dogma. It never the less scares the Bejesus out of the institutional Christian church because the respect for nature is something that can fall through the cracks and before you know it Druidism and Wicca will reemerge to compound the dying stake share of paying customers in church on Sunday.

Basic fact is that Christianity as a religion is at war with Nature. Avatar only in some ways in a symbolic manner rubs up against and causes friction with the established order of perception where religion is concerned.

Being a good OLD TIME Christian means you are at war with nature. Being at war with nature makes you a “GOOD” Christian. Or so it has gone since Constantine's time.

When you see the typical southern cracker Senator like Jim DeMint against Nature and or climate change, his spiel is part of the hidden dogma of Christianity and has been so since the beginning of that religion.

Which leads us back to an old question. Which came first, the teachings of Jesus or the teachings of the church?

There are two Christianities. Not the east and west thing with orthodox versus roman.

The two Christianities has to do with the teachings of the radical revolutionary Jesus and his message of balanced economics and LOVE as opposed to the totalitarian reformed Roman Army religion of Constantine, founder of the Roman church. Ancient Rome was always at war with nature. Christianity as an official vehicle of Rome is at war too with nature to this day.

The Book of Revelation as a book of Propaganda for the Roman Army/Church is a propaganda message of pacification to the natives. You are with us or against us. If you are against us – expect only Roman Hell to come your way.

Also, the western, Roman and or default calendar I have to say is the universal calendar now on the planet. Every major mcountry in the world including Muslim countries had secular 2010 New Year celebrations or at least in their major cities.

I say universal in a sense of commerce in terms of dating e-mails, letters of credit, date of trades etc. Every regional culture and Islam still has its own regional or exclusive calendar system co-existing next to the Roman Gregorian Calendar – default calendar of global convenience.

The Romans, starting with Julius Caesar, used this same or standardized calendar based solely on numbers. No more of the “move your army between the new and full moon" stuff. Move your army in ten days, period. Move it from Point A to Point B, period.

No more feminine lunar calculatons. No more farmer’s calendars. Armies take what farmers grow. Armies do no grow food anymore. No need for a nature or natural calendar. Sounds like parts of this echoes to this day with the present American/corporate global Empire.

The Romans and their armies crashed their roads through forests and waterways the locals considered sacred in any Pantheist sense. The quickest way to any place on a map is on a straight line. Those old nature religions got obliterated by the Roman Army. Nobody really knows what these old religions really believed. Only bits and pieces or historical rumors of these old beliefs come to us to this day.

Which brings us back to Avatar. Avatar as a word is Hindu Symbolism for the god Vishnu coming to earth. I guess when the Vatican criticizes this Cameron movie they are trying to deflect other religions and their symbolism and commonality as in Jesus as an Avatar and or human form of Nature and or God.

Also the tree of souls in the movie harkens back to the tree of Life theme common in every native culture on the planet.

From the comments in the article below:

The real "Nav'vi"--"Nav'vi" is Hebrew for "prophet"--railed against the nature worshipers of Canaan, because they "fertilized" the ground with human blood (including children of up to 4 years old).

Geez! Now even the Jewish angle is being played into the interpretation of a fantasy movie as a vehicle to promote religion.

If you sit down and analyze Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, you could write volumes on hidden religious and Pantheistic meanings. Why go there ?

Sometimes a movie is just a movie to paraphrase Freud.

The science fiction movie ''Avatar'' borrows themes from many religions.

The big religious question the movie raises can be put this way: Will we see creation hierarchically or ecologically -- governed from above or through mutual interdependence?

The movie preaches the latter, that a network of energy flows through all things, that disturbing natural balance leads to disaster.

Christianity has sometimes been called a religion of colonizers, despoilers and decimators of native peoples.

Also, I always thought that an avatar was something like the image I use on my Internet profile. But what do I know?

You really are giving too much credit to James Cameron who made Titanic. Cameron’s Titanic was a typical Hollywood formula movie with too much success as hype and a thin script thrown in. The gimmick in that Cameron film, which I waited to see on cable TV, was a hidden treasure, the necklace, and the sets and costumes, some extraordinary character actors like Kathy Bates and a puckish Leo. Kate of course is one in a million

We are talking James Cameron here. James "Terminator" Cameron. What religious symbolism did Arnold secretly tell us about? Let’s stop Americanizing the process and mistaking financial success for intelligence, fine film making, good literature or deep religious symbolism.

The religion of money and greed taints everything these days to the point where it is poison like Midas’ gold.

I fear that the new emerging GREEN(secular)RELIGION wants to makes Avatar more than it really is by playing to the Pantheism tune spun off from the Vatican recently.

Americans are dumb enough these days. Don’t make a cottage industry of trying to explain to them the common sense symbols or religious symbols in front of them. They either understand or they don’t. Do we have to FOX NEWS spoon feed them and explain PC and RC (religiously correct) reality to them? So long as they have the price of a movie ticket, let them and their herd in. Green in the form of money and is all they have to worry about.

I have avoided Avatar. My college age son assured me that he enjoyed it. Good. I perceived this new gimmick to be another Hollywood Video Game version of reality thingy with dancing blue monkeys.

I will probably end up seeing it on cable, sans 3-D glasses, when I have insomnia and hopefully the tired Hollywood formula of John Smith and Pocahontas will put me to sleep. Shamans always bore me too.

And at its very confused fused roots of origin, Christianity IMHO is in eternal war with nature (hostility to all things non-Roman) to mention one of several possible Intervention issues.

Twitter to God

Our Father, which art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name;
thy kingdom come;
thy will be done,
in earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our dail


(Commentary: Oh the modern age - how like the proverbial glass - is it half empty or half full?)

Of gods, Monsters and Intelligent Design?

I don’t know what to make of all the fake science that is trying to get endorsed or believed these days.

Intelligent Design is supposed to tell us that the universe is not a random chaotic thing, which it is. They would have you believe that there is an intelligent design (by God) to the whole mess. The Vatican and or its German speaking surrogates such as Cardinal Schoenborn of Vienna back Intelligent Design.

There is supposed to be some international meeting of minds or conference on Darwin sponsored by the Vatican on the calendar right about now. Don’t hold your breath expecting any intelligent outcome or pronouncements. One critic, the former head of the Vatican Observatory Father George V. Coyne, a real scientist, got fired over his views about real rational science, which is opposed to fake science or Intelligent Design. I don’t think he was invited to this Darwin Conference thing.

The whole folly comes within the realm of Voltaire from his book Candide and the philosophical falsity that this world is “le meilleur des mondes possibles” – the best of all possible worlds. Délusion. Délusion. Délusion.

If the earth is of an intelligent design then why did the Intelligent Designer waste hundreds of millions of years on the Dinosaur Project ???

The Creationist theory will tell you that the Bible, being the exact and perfect world of God, proves that science is wrong in determining the age of the earth. They will tell you that all physical evidence must fit into the five thousand year old timeframe of the Bible. That is why if you stop off at some GOP endorsed Creationist Museum, you will see our ancestors, as cave men and women, living in harmony with the dinosaur things.

The Bible is a flawed document. The bible is a human document. The New Testament is a committee written document. Jesus changes from a human being to a god in the time frame of three hundred years. Jesus’ words, wisdom, divine inspiration and divine mission have been subordinated to politics since his death almost two thousand years ago.

Did he rise from the dead ? Definitely. As a Christian I believe that. God can do anything including raise the dead. To believe in Jesus is to believe in the higher powers of an evolved, evolving species called man. I have faith in the non-tangible abilities and powers of God and his servant Jesus.

These religious screamers call faith, faith, faith. I do not think they believe or have faith. They need an exact user manual for life – a rule book. If anything, the day to day struggle of Jesus to get imperfect people to listen to his more perfect evolved message for the human race seems at times to have been wasted on many deaf human ears.

So too the flaws of the Old Testament are obvious. The Hebrew Testament does not get written or fully consolidated until after the Babylonian captivity. Along the way to consolidation several non-communicating committees manage to lose ten tribes and the Ark of the Covenant.

Tangible things such as fake relics like the Shroud of Turin or a Jesus Ossuary - speaks of non-faith in the original person and the true message of the teacher of Jesus.

What I have found or sensed along the way of this study of my own beliefs is the negatuve reception or reaction of others to the Gnostic concept of a divine spark within. Negative belief too in the possiblility of Jesus as a bearer or in his own recognition of that divinity. The role of bearer and of recognition connotes great responsibility to go forward in life as bearer of the light of God within and with that light to be given freely to others. Few of us now or in the generations past have come close to the ideal of Jesus as evolved enlightened being and creation of God.

There is hope - the human race continues and “Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”…(W.B.Yeats)

The problem with the Gnostic belief approach is that 99.9% of humanity do not seem to want responsibility. They want to be sheep and they want to be led. As such, the P.T.Barnum types in the Vatican and the far right fundamentalists need road shows, conferences, freak shows, museums, literal interpretation of myths - tangible proof of their so-called faith – which is not faith but seems so much more like superstition.

The show goes on.

Popcorn! Peanuts! Cotton Candy!

The Unity of Diversity

The unity of all things diverse

( in the universe

of things too great to count )

is God