Racism Is A Religion Of Hate Wrapped In A Bubble Of Fear

Racism is a religion and or dogma of hate wrapped in a bubble of fear.

GOP Bromance - Billionaires in Love - ‪‎Donald Trump‬ and Martin Shkreli‬

GOP BroMance – Billionaires in Love

God sends his spaceships to America, the beautiful
They land at six o'clock and there we are, the dutiful
Eating from TV trays, tuned into Happy Days
Waiting for World War III while Jesus slaves
To the mating calls of “Billionaires” in love…

(w/poetic license – Lawyers in Love – Jackson Browne)

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Why Does The G.O.P. Hate America So Much?

Strange Love of the Republican Party Towards America in 2014

Why does the G.O.P. hate America,

Or,

What America is it that it thinks it loves?

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Chicken with Plums - A Film of Love, Passion, Soul - Something Totally Lacking in the American Character / Genre of the Present

A Movie only the French can make.


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Into a Mirror, Darkly - Archbishop Cordileone - San Francisco

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

If I speak in the tongues of men and angels,

but have not love,

I have become sounding brass or a tinkling symbol.

And if I have prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge,

and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains,

but have not love, I am nothing.

And if I dole out all my goods, and

if I deliver my body that I may boast

but have not love, nothing I am profited.

Love is long suffering,

love is kind,

it is not jealous,

love does not boast,

it is not inflated.

It is not discourteous,

it is not selfish,

it is not irritable,

it does not enumerate the evil.

It does not rejoice over the wrong, but rejoices in the truth 

It covers all things,

it has faith for all things,

it hopes in all things,

it endures in all things.

Love never falls in ruins;

but whether prophecies, they will be abolished; or

tongues, they will cease; or

knowledge, it will be superseded.

For we know in part and we prophecy in part.

But when the perfect comes, the imperfect will be superseded. 

When I was an infant,

I spoke as an infant,

I reckoned as an infant;

when I became [an adult],

I abolished the things of the infant.

For now we see through a mirror, darkly, but then face to face.

Now I know in part, but then I shall know as also I was fully known.

But now remains

 faith, hope, love,

these three;

but the greatest of these is love.

Saint Mary Maytag's RC Cathedral San Francisco California

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KFC - Love

"Love is finger licking good."  - - The Colonel


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Happy Birthday Goddess – Aphrodite/Venus

I am told that the earth goddess is hundreds of thousands of years old in human civilization but that the legend of Aphrodite, the Greek name, Venus, the Roman name, of the goddess of love, born off Cyrus, is close to ten thousand years old.


That her real birthday is supposed to be sometime in the month of September, the 8^th or 26^th, 7989 B.C.E.?


Happy ten thousandth plus or minus a few months and or centuries.  


The thing missing with all these johnny come lately monotheistic male only gods is a sense of the eternal feminine.  Aphrodite/Venus is perhaps due for a return as part of the human equation of the new global culture.

Aphrodite/Venus

"Foam-arisen" Aphrodite was born of the sea foam near Paphos, Cyprus after Cronus severed Uranus' genitals and threw them behind him into the sea, while the Erinyes emerged from the drops of blood. Hesiod's Theogony described that the genitals "were carried over the sea a long time, and white foam arose from the immortal flesh; with it a girl grew" to become Aphrodite. Aphrodite floated in on a scallop shell. When she arose, she was hailed as "Cyprian," and is referred to as such often, especially in the poetic works of Sappho. This myth of a fully mature Venus (the Roman name for Aphrodite), Venus Anadyomene ("Venus Rising From the Sea") was one of the iconic representations of Aphrodite, made famous in a much-admired painting by Apelles, now lost, but described in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder…”

Divine (creative) Spark Within*

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This is your life.


Life is simple. 


Life is short. 


(Live. Breath. Learn. Love. Be. Be.)

Brian O’Hanlon – SMX – Homily March 26-27

Again, down under, an interesting homily from the St. Mary’s in Exile (SMX) community in Brisbane, Australia.

Faith community versus belief community is mentioned as well as the future of the faith in terms of a community living the word (God) through justice, compassion and love…

Brian O’Hanlon – SMX – Homily March 26-27

I was fortunate enough through the enthusiasm of my wife, Angela, to discover this community a long time ago – 1988 I think, and I have been a fairly regular attendee ever since.  Certainly I have been a constant attendee since, to borrow a term from the Irish, “since the troubles”, the troubles of exile. 

Peter in a homily towards the end of 2010 when restating his vision of this community, emphasised that we are a faith community not a belief community. A faith community is one developing a spiritually of Justice Compassion and Love. More recently he restated the value of the mystical contemplative tradition in Christianity traditionally suppressed throughout history. This implies  a letting go of, a freeing up from,  much if not all of our classical conditioning of religious tradition,( Recently at a friends wedding-a nuptial mass, I was sitting next to a women , who at the end of the ceremony commented “ that was scary- I have not been inside a catholic church for 25 years, yet I just knew how to do everything), or there could be a shifting of the core of our traditional stories and belief systems; if this is so what do we have left, what do we replace it with? What do we develop as the core of our own practice. According to Fr Richard Rohr OSM the oppositional mindset that was set in place after the reformation of the 16^th century, and after the enlightment of the 17^th and 18^th centuries meant that the ancient tradition of gaining spiritually through meditation was lost. We lost the older tradition of praying beyond words. I want to propose that this is what we can develop, praying beyond words, meditation-a vehicle for our spiritual pathway.

For a long time I have thought that the Book of James was the most useful, social and practical of the gospel writings; James warned against taking the Pauline view of Christianity to an extreme where Paul urged his followers to put their faith in Christ (i.e. what to believe, one who would deliver them).  James called his listeners to action, “Faith without works is dead, be doers of the word and not hearers only.  Religion that is pure and undefiled is this – to visit orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep ones-self unstained from the world” – to keep ones-self unstained from the world – what is this? Christians are very good at relieving the struggling and suffering of others-there are helping missions in every part of the world, just look at the community support provided during our natural disasters, out of this faith community Micha arose, and I am sure that nearly all of us are caring for family, relatives or friends; visiting the widow in her affliction, and as well there does seem in our community a growing interest in the spiritual/contemplative tradition, through the transformative experience of meditation, a way of remaining unstained from the world, our pastors refer to it in various ways, the Eckhart Tolle CD’s are taken home each week, and many books referring to the subject are sold, at  the drop in shop, the existing meditation groups are regularly attended. 

Jesus, it now seems, was primarily a teacher, a sage who bequeathed to his followers principles by which to live, not a body of eternally fixed doctrine that he expected people to believe. 

The teachings that Jesus bequeathed to us focused not on believing but on doing.  Even before the term ‘Christian’ (originally with a derogatory meaning)  came into use, the first Jesus-followers were attempting to practise the kind of life he taught.  They called it ‘The Way’. 

An ancient book called ‘The Didache’ (a Greek word meaning ‘teaching’) throws considerable light on this. 

It is interesting to find that the Didache has preserved the primitive label, ‘The Way’.  This is how it starts off: ‘There are two ways , one of life and one of death, but there is a great difference between the two ways’.  In its short description of the Way of Death we find listed all the commonly acknowledged human crimes and misdemeanours that are condemned in almost every culture.  But the emphasis of the Didache is on the Way of Life.  Listen to how it continues:

The way of life is this: First, you shall love God who made you; second, love your neighbour as yourself, and not do to another what you would not want done to you...

Quaker Cross - a Symbol for Compassion?

I ran into this modern symbol of the Society of Friends or Quakers. It is called a Quaker cross. It was first used by relief workers, as a symbol on their arms, by British Quakers in the Franco Prussian war in 1870-1871. It was also used as an armband for British conscientious objectors in WWI who did non-armed battlefield services.

The symbol above was adopted as the official symbol of the American Friends Service Committee in 1917. The variaton shown above is from the Australian Friends relief agency.

I like the circle around it. It really took me by surprise in that I grew up in Philly, a traditional center of Quaker culture, and never saw it before today. The Friends or the Quakers have been quietly doing charitable work for centuries without a visible or bloated bureaucratic religious leadership always handing out PR statements.

The Quakers as a Christian religion has a centuries old tradition of care for the mentally ill, anti-slavery campaigning and advocacy of equal rights for women. They also continue to condemn violence, the death penalty and war.

As such, as soon as I saw this symbol and understood its origin, I thought of the possible need of a visual for the Campaign for Compassion and or course the Tibetan Buddhist concept of Compassion, both of which are not unlike Jesus’ command to love your neighbor.

Of course you cannot steal a symbol but perhaps the design in two other colors could represent compassion.

Any suggestions on two good colors to go with a symbol design already associated with love and peace?

Keep the Message Simple

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I did not know when I started this blog how much I did not know about Christianity. It has been a learning experience. I learn new things everyday.

My perception of the subject matter has changed. Touching and working with the product has given me new insights.

It is like being a stage manager backstage and watching the play and knowing how it all is just a play and just an illusion at times. Or like being an elder at a monthly elder’s meeting and seeing how in so many ways a church is a business in terms of cash flow, memberships, goals, following the party line etc.

If I had the time or money to waste on biblical scholarship and research, my obsession, like so many I have met so far on this life journey, would probably be to cross the “t”s and dot the “i”s of acceptable scholarship and protect my reputation and pension. (Yawn!)

My greatest disappointment to date is in the realization that many great biblical scholars including Luther questioned certain parts of the NT as antilegomena. That certain books, epistles, are in contrast to good or believable scholarship and should not be a part of the official “sacred scripture”. Luther had his doubts about four works including Revelation and modern Lutheran scholars have expanded that "factory-second" label to another three epistles.

Of course there will never be a church council to re-evaluate the official NT. Constantine’s Bible stands forever.

Church hierarchy seems to exclude the common folk on every level. Too comfortable with the cash flow to do anything radical or rock the boat even if the matter at hand has to do with truth or the humanity of recognizing alternate life styles as valid in the eyes of “God”.

Christianity in a metaphoric sense these days seems destined to be an eternal Garden Party for Christ (of, by and for the hierarchy only), a daily press release, as at the recent Lambeth fiasco/corporate convention with little humanity or black and white LOVE to be expressed to or by God’s children.

Will the last person to leave the Christian church please turn off the lights!

My disappointment also lies in the fact that if I asked a question of a pastor while I was an elder, I did not get a straight answer on some theology questions. Ask the right question and get an answer. Ask the wrong questions and get a dumb stare.

Christianity since the Council of Nicaea is more about a dictatorship of the spiritual proletariat than about the basic philosophy and message of a Jewish goatherd named Jesus.

I have never liked Revelation, the last book of the bible, and have always wondered what it had to do with the basic Jesus. Coked up visions and killing your enemy’s children is a little bit I would say “unchristian”.

Love and tolerance and recognition of faults and forgiveness of self and a new start is the most basic form of the Christian message (and a super highway to heaven).

It is little wonder that Islam has its five pillars and the Buddhists have their five precepts as well.

K.I.S.S. “Keep it simple stupid.” goes the cliche.

K.T.M.S. Keep the message simple.

Somehow layer upon layer of propaganda, reworked script, and layer upon layer of horse crap has piled up in the stables aka basilicas aka churches of the Christian religion over the centuries and it cannot be easily translated into a modern age message.

The struggle between the sacred and the secular seems to favor the secular in the modern world.

Christianity seems a dying religion and maybe that is a good thing.

I believe in God and put my faith with the simple message of Jesus.

I don’t put much faith in religion anymore.
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