Category Archives: religion

This was going to be about Christmas.

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This morning I was getting ready to compose a post about the whole “Merry Christmas Controversy”, in which I was going to implore my fellow Christians not to participate in the uncharitable complaining which has cropped up in recent years in the face of well-meaning, or even purely commercial attempts to recognize the seasonal celebrations of our non-christian neighbors.

I was going to comment that this sort of harping seems to originate from voices whose agendas appear inconsistent, at least in this Christian’s viewpoint, with the teachings, much less the example, of Jesus. Of course if you’re a Christian who read this blog, I’m probably preaching to the choir.

I was going to explain that this “War on Christmas” nonsense makes us look like fools at best, and worse, that it encourages the kind of bigotry that led a group of young men, who probably consider themselves Christians, to attack group of young Jewish men and women on a subway for replying to their “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Hanukkah”

But I want to stop right there for a moment. I’ve got more to say on the Christmas thing, but something caught my attention, and I almost skipped right past it.

If you’ve been following the conversation on here the last week, you’ve noticed the phrase “human tribe” popping up a few times. You’ve seen that the recurring theme this week has been — what motivates people to help others when it’s not in their own direct self-interest?

You’ve read Red’s heartfelt thank-you to someone who helped her out, depite their disagreements.

We’ve wondered out loud how to change society so that helping people in need is the norm.

Now let’s go back to that subway.

Cause I wanna take notice of one of those people we’re talking about. Those people, like the KBR employee with the cell phone, and Red’s not-so-anonymous benefactor. A regular person, who didn’t just stand by & do nothing.

His name is Hassan Askari. He’s a 20-year old accounting student from Bangladesh, who says he’s not a hero. He’s a Muslim, but he wasn’t thinking about the religious differences between himself and these strangers.

“I didn’t have time to think about that,” he said. “I was more thinking that these guys were going to get beaten up and I should do something.”

According to Mr. Askari, his parents are proud of him.
They taught him to stand up for others.

Because it’s the right thing to do.

Golden Compass- Anti-Catholic?

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With all the hullabaloo surrounding this movie, I asked the Kid if he had read the book. Kid reads at least one novel per day, chances that he has read something are high. Turns out he’s read the whole series, loves them and had The Golden Compass hiding in the filth pit he calls a bedroom.

So I read the book. Since I can’t explain my thoughts without giving up the plot- stop reading now if you’re the kind of person that doesn’t want to know.

Lyra, the main character is an orphan living in an alternate England. In this universe, the Catholic Church runs the government through various councils and departments. The entire story is about the fight between theocracy and science and the idea of getting rid of original sin. It is very much a condemnation of theocracy and the way fear of the unknown makes people in a theocracy behave very badly.

If you’re a raging Catholic biggot like Bill Donohue and have the ultimate dream of a Taliban style American theocracy run by Catholic bishops, this book is going to piss you off. There are three distinct reactions to fear of the unknown in this book- the first is to hurt and kill innocent children to protect people from the unknown, the second is to kill and innocent child in order to manipulate the unknown, and the last and only logical response is to figure out what it really is. If you are someone who is afraid of the truth, then this book will piss you off.

I can’t wait to read the next book, Kid has promised to bring it home from the school library on Monday.

Blaspheme!

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Maybe it’s all the drugs I’ve been taking (or trying not to take- and they’re all Rx, btw). Maybe it’s just that I have been living inside my own head way too much lately. Maybe I’m just a hairsbreadth from the edge of reason, but I’ve been thinking about god lately.

First, I was thinking how boring it would be to know everything that was going to happen before it happened. Imagine watching Adam and Eve in the garden all happy all the time, never doing anything but eating and sleeping and fucking. They have no struggle because their world is perfect, so they never have to do anything creative. Get fruit, eat fruit end of story. I don’t know about you, but if I were god, I would be bored to sobs after watching my creations do the same damn thing day after day after day.

So if I were god, I’d create free will. Sure, giving creatures free will means giving up some of my all knowing, all powerful god authority. But it would certainly be more interesting than watching “get fruit, eat fruit” all the time. I don’t know if I would have started the free will program with a forbidden tree of knowledge, but it does give the “1st” people (as I am in no way, manner, shape or form a believer in the biblical story of creation- this is all a thought experiment, so go with me) their first real choice- knowledge or perfection.

I think it would be one of the best soap operas ever, to create this world and then sit back and watch what happens. Sure, maybe every now and then you get bored with the story line and throw a flood into the mix just to see what comes from it. But if your goal as god is entertainment, then minimal interference would be the best way to go.

After that, I was thinking about the creating of beings to begin with. Sure, it might be fun to create your first bunny rabbit or oak tree or person, but after bunny rabbit number 1000- it would get dull. So I would pawn off the actual reproduction on the creatures themselves. And fore those creatures smart enough to figure out that reproduction leads to babies (and a whole lot of work) I’d give them orgasms so that there is incentive to have sex and make sure that they didn’t get pregnant every time they have sex.

So that is what I’ve been doing. I’ve been playing god in my head.

“God Transcends Nationalism”

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I just want to clairfy I’m not trying to advocate for anarchy here. I’m just problematizing the the previous claim that one should see elected legislators as instruments of God. I believe each person, including the members of the board of supervisors, is flawed and finite and should discern the will of God for themselves rather than assume that persons in power will automatically work out a divine plan— Rev. Nancy McLadd, Bull Run Unitarian Universalists

I don’t fault your agnosticism.

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I really don’t.

Especially in the face of the tremendous harm that religion has done, supposedly in the name of god, I’m not suprised that you choose not to believe.

I often find believing to be difficult myself. It’s not God I doubt so much, as it is “His people”.

Actually, that’s not entirely true — I do question God. I don’t have any actual proof that God exists, or resembles what I believe God to be. But I still choose to believe. For lack of a better explanation, for reasons I’m not entirely sure of, it works for me.

However, I don’t understand how people who claim to believe in the same God I believe in, can behave so heinously.

I don’t understand a Christianity that’s more concerned with stopping gay people from getting married than with teaching its husbands to respect their wives.

I have nothing in common with a Christianity that soothes the conscience of the affluent with the notion that “God wants you to be rich” while opposing public policy that would help poor people (and everyone else) get their kids to a doctor.

I take issue with a version of my faith that makes no room for “foreigners” in “our country” when we’re supposed to be foreigners in the world.

I find atrocious an image of God that allows its followers to condone torture in the name of security, that advocates making war against an innocent population for profit. Didn’t Jesus say “love your enemies” and “blessed are the peacemakers?”

This is not the God I believe in. This is not the faith I practice.

The God I believe in is just as concerned with Iraqi & Afghan & Mexican & Guatemalan lives as American ones.

The God I believe in says his followers are required to take care of the sick & the hungry & the prisoners.

The God I believe in gave women a place of honor, and taught us alongside our brothers, and picked us to witness to his most wondrous of miracles.

The faith I practice doesn’t need to legislate its principles.

The faith I practice knows once the choice of what to believe is taken away, nothing else matters for much.

Taking my head out of the sand

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Way back when my brilliant cousin started this blog, she invited me to participate, partly as supplementary estrogen, and partly because “someone who could write from a liberal christian perspective would be an interesting contrast to all us secular agnostics and atheists.”

So some time near the beginning, by way of introducing myself, I posted a blog on what I mean by Christian. DeeK posted a response that at the time, hit me rather hard. Maybe he took my post as a clumsy attempt at evangelism, maybe he was just sharing his own perspective….I don’t know, and I suppose I lacked the courage to ask. Writing or talking about my faith among people who don’t share it is something that’s still a challenge to me. I’ve never been anxious to proselytize (something that gave me tremendous guilt pangs in my fundy-lite phase) even when I wanted to be a missionary (maybe i shoulda joined the peace corps instead…) and it’s hard to put into words what I wear under my skin.

The brand of Christianity I chose to identify with for much of my adolescence and young adulthood sometimes emphasized “The world hates us” so heavily over “God so loved the world” that any disagreement us youngsters encountered with non-believers was hailed as “persecution.”

I thought I had grown beyond that.. or that I was “too smart” to have internalized it very much. My fantastic liberal-Catholic-raised parents taught me better. I could argue the left-hand side of Christian politics with people 20 years my senior. Hot-headed and underinformed, but unwavering in my conviction that Jesus was a liberal.
But when DeeK said:

“I guess this is way of saying I accept the need to embrace others as wonder attempts, but I would like to leave the Jesus part out of it.”

I heard “Leave the Jesus part out of it.” Imperative. command. period. end of sentence.
I completely missed that he also said “ I accept the need to embrace others as wonder attempts“
And I assumed he was saying “your superstitions are not welcome here you deluded irrational fool”

For that misperception, DeeK, I humbly ask you to forgive me.

Unlike my gutsier relatives, I’ve always been a “nice girl”. And I was new around here. And I thought I had offended. And my feelings were hurt, so i took my toys and went home like a big baby, at least where spiritual/religious matters were concerned.

How hypocritical that I accused Jovial of the same thing in comments some months later. I hope you will also forgive me.

Trouble with that is, my belief in God-what I really believe, that thing i struggle to put words to, not the knee-jerk prejudices I’m trying to unlearn in light of Truth- inform every part of my thinking, and to avoid that is to strip all my convictions of their meaning. This is not to say that I can’t participate in a discussion without regurgitating a bunch of random Scriptures – as a matter of fact I rarely quote the bible to make a point in a discussion with people who don’t accept it as authoritative(partly because I’m no biblical scholar and partly because I detest seeing proof-texts quoted out of context).

But I’ve discovered I feel almost as out of place among secular progressives as I do among conservative Christians, and for the same reason. Because the “natural” assumption in both groups seems to be that progressivism and Christianity(or ANY monotheistic faith, really) are so diametrically opposed as to be mutually exclusive; that I must be insincere in one or the other; that I am, in short, a “liberal” in spite of my belief in Christ. I don’t know how to respond to this sometimes.

So I’ve avoided the Red Queen’s many attempts to call me out & get me to do my job. Please forgive me, for having kept my head down when the wingnuts brought out the big guns. And please continue to call me on the carpet when I fall silent.

Apparently sometimes God talks to Christians through snarky agnostics, reminding us that hanging onto power in this world was never part of the plan.

Meanwhile I rant to my mom about how the power-mad maniac brigade currently claiming to operate in Jesus’ name looks more like the Antichrist than the Son of God. To which she invariably replies that I should write about it, talk about it, after all, I’ve been given a forum to do just that…..
Martin Niemöller, who learned firsthand the danger of being, literally, a “Good German”, put it this way:


In Germany, they came first for the Communists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;
And then they came for the trade unionists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;
And then they came for the Jews,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;
And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up.

I know, I said I don’t usually throw bible verses around without context, but here’s one I probably ought to remember:


James 4:17 Remember, it is sin to know what you ought to do and then not do it.

May my God forgive me for my complacency, and may the Spirit keep reminding me to do what I ought to do…

Fun with Belief-O-Matic (Is that anything like a Veg-O-Matic?)

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It slices, it dices, it juliennes! and then it tells you what religion you are.

Basically you answer a little quiz & the little calculator adds up how closely your responses match up with their list of beliefs (kinda like a spiritual computer dating service… is this how e-harmony works?)

as they put it…. The top score on the list below represents the faith that Belief-O-Matic, in its less than infinite wisdom, thinks most closely matches your beliefs. However, even a score of 100% does not mean that your views are all shared by this faith, or vice versa

SO here’s my results… ok the 1st one was kind of a no-brainer, (although I’m somewhat disappointed to find I match any category 100% – the math must be off somewhere, it MUST be!!!) some suprises – my answers match neo-paganism, baha’i & 2 kinds of buddhism more closely than catholicism(grandma jo would be disappointed) the high match with LDS i have to attribute to spending a large chunk of my formative years in Arizona… i’ll probably edit this later after i read the descriptions….

1. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (100%)
2. Orthodox Quaker (83%)
3. Bahá’í Faith (82%)
4. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (82%)
5. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (79%)
6. Liberal Quakers (79%)
7. Jehovah’s Witness (73%)
8. Unitarian Universalism (69%)
9. Seventh Day Adventist (63%)
10. Neo-Pagan (53%)
11. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (53%)
12. Mahayana Buddhism (52%)
13. Theravada Buddhism (52%)
14. Reform Judaism (52%)
15. Eastern Orthodox (50%)
16. Roman Catholic (50%)
17. Jainism (48%)
18. New Age (48%)
19. Islam (45%)
20. Orthodox Judaism (45%)
21. Sikhism (45%)
22. Secular Humanism (38%)
23. Taoism (38%)
24. New Thought (34%)
25. Hinduism (34%)
26. Scientology (30%)
27. Nontheist (20%)

Who’s Your Moral Daddy?

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Recently, my work on mundaneastrology.net and on my upcoming book 1648 (sorry to plug at your expense, but guerrilla marketing must prevail!), I have thought much about morality, not the thought of dying, but who provides our moral structure. I speak not here simply of your everyday “though shalt not steal” kind of stuff, though these morals obviously still matter. What I speak of here are of the trickle down variety. Who provides our overall moral guidance? Who should we listen and why? This simple question has many ramifications.
The Church mostly lost is authority on the basis of its overtly corrupt practices. It is doubtful that such an overburdened institution–the Church had become with every aspect of life throughout every class–would have been able to keep up with the demographic changes that Europe rolled out through the 16th to 19th centuries. Nonetheless, the Church’s obvious hypocrisy opened the door for Luther to enter and for Protestants to rush in. Very apparent question arises here. Since the Church, the self-proclaimed arbiter of behavior, could not be trusted, when did the lack of trust began? Did it occur evenly across the classes? (Doubtful). Who won the authority over your morality? Catholics? Protestants? Christians? Did anyone win?
All of these questions become prominent when you consider these questions for people that have great influence on society. Who provides the moral center for our representatives? Who decides it is morally ok to move to Montana, overburden their infrastructure and contribute far less to the economy than you take away? Who provides the morality that ignores global warming? The one that says Wal-Mart is OK? The one that says being loyal to your oil buddies is worth all of the lives sacrificed to your cause?

I think in our shift to a more secular viewpoint, who determines our moral structure has never been addressed. The Church rejects secularism so it has little authority to answer related issues. Protestants too obviously have trouble reconciling their faith and the post-modern world. Governments should govern, but expect a certain level of adherence to social code. Very few concerns prove black and white anymore. For instance, what is the the moral code for projects that have down-the-line-effects? Is it morally righteous to invest in a project that could damage the environment long after you are dead?

It’s the Progress Stupid

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Hello again all! There hadn’t been much activity here so I have not posted anything of late. Nice to see that the spirited (haha) conversations continue.

Many of you know I am authoring a book tentatively tittled 1648: An Astrological History of Europe from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age. I can say with 100% assurance that the period between Neptune-Pluto alignments, approximately every 495 years, offers a more precise way to divide history into manageable portions than the more arbitrary ones of five hundred years etc. I am also finding that the Neptune-Pluto divisions also coincide with the familiar terms of the Middle Ages, The Bronze Age, etal. These divisions gives us the current “wave” (my term) beginning around 1892 and ending in 2384. We are in the first phase or quarter of that wave.
For a long while I had trouble classifying what this wave means. The problem is typically postmodern, too much information instead of not enough. Many of the candidates included global warming, globalization, the new power of women, integration of minorities into the mainstream, how to define religion in a post-modern world, etc,. All of these help define the issues we know face. But the more I ponder them, the more I conclude that these represen symptoms rather than the actual condition. But, seeing them this way lead to a more universal truth: it is the progress, stupid!
Until the last wave, 1398-1892, progress was NOT a given. Indeed, a purposeful march toward progress, the assumption that humans could use their minds to improve their conditions, was shunned as counterproductive and wasteful. Religion also cast a heavy shadow as human-centered progress removes God as the main factor governing our destinies. However, since the damn broke during Age of Reason, human generated progress was assumed as a given. But as we know, progress giveth as much as it takes away.
It is my contention that we have progressed beyond our abilities. What I mean by this is best seen in the climate change scenario, but applies to other issues such as demographic imbalance, income distribution and globalization. Machines gave us abilities to produce ever faster, stronger, more productive, bigger (ands smaller) machines. Science helps us live better and longer. At the same time, we have brought ourselves to the brink of ruining the planet by overpopulation and various forms of pollution. I.e, we moved to quickly without determining the consequences. Now, we cannot return to old ways, but cannot continue with our current path. Something must be said for the old attitude of seeing progress as counterproductive and wasteful.
If my Neptune-Pluto wave model holds true, then this is the first wave than began with human-based progress as a given. The first phase of any wave deals with defining what the overall means. My opinion is that we need to define what human-based progress really is. If whatever we do brings us closer to our overall demise or global destruction to the point of making most life untenable, then is it really progress? The answer seems to be a resounding “NO”.
Then if “progress” really is not progressive, what is it? No, there are no simple answers, but not attempting to answer the question is even less progressive.