Category Archives: How I see it

God Is Good. Well, Not *THAT* God…

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In the aftermath of the terrible killings in Oslo, Norway, there is a clear take-away message that I’m getting, and I’m so glad that right-wing pundits, conservative nutjobs and Tea Party members, among others, are brave enough to share this insight:

If a Muslim kills folks, it’s clearly terrorism, and also proof that Islam is an inherently violent religion that is obsessed with taking over the world and crushing the United States to dust.

If a Christian kills a bunch of folks, it’s simply a sign he was slightly too aggressive in expressing his understandable bigotry and/or he isn’t practicing his religion properly.

Thanks for clearing that up, folks. I feel so much better now.

Your F*#k!ng Field Guide to Humanity

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I’ve made it pretty clear that I can deal quite well in a world where faith and science mix, match and occasionally create volatile reactions. Matters of the soul and matters of physics are both things that I embrace, and I don’t find them contradictory to each other.

So, I fully accept that evolution exists and that humanity…that is, Homo sapiens…continues to evolve, change, adapt to the environment and all that jazz.

In fact, we’ve already evolved quite a bit…well, evolved sort of implies improvement to many people, so maybe that’s the wrong word. We’ve mutated and branched off into some unique species of humanity and most people simply haven’t taken the damned time to notice and actually explain what has happened.

Because, while we haven’t gone and done the X-Men thing where humanity suddenly starts random jumps forward with super-powered people belonging to the group Homo superior, I think we need to stand up and take notice of some of the important new groups of humanity.

You can fucking thank me later.

Posteriorus orificia

Sure, many people in the previous baseline category of humanity known as Homo sapien have been and continue to be capable of periodic asshole behavior—all of them, in fact…even Jesus, Gandhi and Mother Theresa—but this category of humanity lives and breathes asshole behavior. It is not only in their genetic makeup to be dickish to most people they meet, but also to encourage asshole behavior in others as a form of sustenance. As asshole-ishness exudes from the very pores of those they incite, they absorb the emissions and become capable of even greater assholery for a time.

Defecatorum cranius

Members of Posteriorus orificia, for all their faults, can still manage charm at times—sometimes quite a lot of the time, and the most entertaining and personable ones are sometimes called “snarks” to differentiate them from the “jerkweeds,” “asshats” and “douchebags” within Posteriorus orificia. However, there are some who exceed even the faults of those worst of Posteriorus orificia and therefore must be deemed members of Defecatorum cranius instead. The primary differentiation is that those in Defecatorum cranius almost never exhibit redeeming features of any sort, owing in part to some biological mechanism that causes a portion of their feces to be processed in the brain instead of all being excreted anally.

Fornicatus visage

A distinct offshoot of Defecatorum cranius, members of this branch of humanity not only act like complete shitheads but also look annoying to the point that you want to punch or kick them repeatedly about the face until it’s an unrecognizable mush. Donald Trump is believed to be the peak of evolution within Fornicatus visage: the ultimate fuckface.

Sanctimonia evangelica

It would be easy to simply classify religious extremists, aggressive Christian evangelicals and others in this category, but it encompasses a broad range of humanity in addition to such groups, including everything from annoyingly smug vegans to judgmental mommy bloggers, insanely extreme animal rights activists to Tea Party members, and social media branding gurus to people who try to claim the Holocaust never occurred.

Regularia josephica

An increasingly shrinking branch of humanity that actually consists of average people who aren’t especially annoying and while aren’t always interesting, have their moments and at least are reliable when you need to drop off your kids, ask for a pickup when your car dies or you need to borrow a ladder or some tools. Although many Regularia josephicae still exist, and they make up the largest single group of humanity, their numbers seem to be trending downward at an alarming rate, this trend having begun with the increasing popularity of Facebook, Twitter and other social media, suggesting that electronic/in silico aspects of life may directly impact our genetic and evolutionary tracks.

Projectila caca

This is a distressingly small group, consisting of cool, accessible humans with whom you can easily and readily “shoot the shit.”

Conclusion

All of my above assertions are unassailable, and if you say otherwise, I’ll tell everyone you’re a Defecatorum cranius. Or maybe I won’t, since I like to think of myself as a Projectila caca.

And yes, you can argue against the science of all of my above classifications by pointing out to me that these are all still humans, and cannot be separated into entirely new Genus/species categories like this because they are capable of interbreeding and shit.

To that, I say shut up and go bother Stephen Hawking or something. I’m more a geek than a nerd anyway (but never a dork).

Post-Rapture Wrap-Up

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So, as you might have all assumed, May 21 passed and the followers of Harold Camping turned out to be wrong that the Rapture was coming that day.

Well, you’d be wrong!

Hah! I’m in Heaven right now tweeting while Jesus checks out some movies on Netflix, and I’m thumbing my nose at you because the Apocalypse is soon to start. And I bet you haven’t seen much of Kirk Cameron, either! He’s right here next to me, talking to God about how wonderful bananas are (bananas being the “atheist’s nightmare”)!

OK, yeah, you caught me lying.

I wasn’t raptured, and now for that lie and for making fun of Kirk Cameron, I never will be. *SadProgressiveChristianPanda*

I’m still really busy in life, mostly re-engaging with Mrs. Blue in some most amazing ways and also with Little Girl Blue in very different but also amazing ways. So, I don’t have any huge thought-provoking posts in me. And so, while I realize that the whole “ridicule the rapture” thing from last week is probably already at the “jumping the shark” stage, I’m going to be lazy and leave you with a series of some of my Rapture-related tweets over the past few days about the whole Rapture Debacle, in chronological order from oldest to newest:

I’ll probably only be raptured if I cancel my Saturday plans & stay home to repent nonstop

Don’t worry, there’s no cellulite in Heaven (which is good, considering there are apparently no clothes, either)

Dear Rapture Predictors: IF there is going to be an actual Rapture (& it’s not simply symbolism in Bible), you will NOT have advance warning

Rapture called off, everyone!…back to your regularly scheduled human failings, foibles and outright deviancy…

At roughly 1:40 a.m. EST on 5/21/2011, I experienced rapture, but I don’t think it was the kind the twenty-firsters were predicting.

Special today at Starbucks until 6 pm PST: The fraptureccino !

Understand, of course, the fraptureccino isn’t for everyone: coffee, mocha cream base, caramel syrup, blood, wormwood, small bits o brimstone

Unless media has finally tracked him down, I’m assuming Camping, given his silence, has been raptured to Barbados with flock’s $$$

Now that the rapture is old news I wanna move on to next order of business: Our new reptilian overlords, soon to arrive from Alpha Centauri

The only post-Rapture wrap-up I care to pass along (wish I’d written it) http://www.caffeinatedpriest.com/2011/05/whats-not-left-behind.html

Spiritual Journeys Are NOT Destinations

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So, my wife is struggling with her spirituality these days, trying to reconcile how she feels and how she views the world with an upbringing that was fairly fundamentalist in terms of Christian doctrine, even if she herself has always been pretty progressive/liberal in terms of social issues and politics.

This won’t come as any surprise to anyone who follows both she and I on Twitter (and several of you do; for those who don’t, she’s @blackgirlinmain on Twitter and she also has a blog…follow her in both places and I think you’ll be glad you did). She’s been talking quite openly about her spiritual struggles. I’m proud of her for her journey and her explorations and finding the proper path for her.

Because being on a spiritual walk is like any other walk. There isn’t a clear destination. Sure, you may be going somewhere, but even once you get there, the place you’ve reached might not be the perfect place to be. And even if you do like that place, there’s always a need to walk someplace else at some other time, for other needs.

Journeying is exploration, and any person truly seeking spiritual growth will find many different twists and turns; they should never be satisfied that they know it all and have found it all. That would be self-delusion and ignorance.

Thing is that I’ve been on a spiritual journey myself and still am. I came to Christ after years of being a lapsed and “recovering” Catholic, and that was through the woman who would become my wife, and the church she attended, which was presided over by her dad. That being said, while I was never a fundamentalist in any true sense of the word, I did have some beliefs that were more fundamentalist than what I have now.

As I look at some of the earliest posts on this blog, I can see where I have changed and grown. I haven’t changed my path drastically, but there have been adjustments as I grown closer to my soul and to the quiet voice of the Holy Spirit. I’m sure more changes are to come.

I might post on this a bit more later this week, but that should do for now.

What the Hell Is a Christian, Anyway?

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Hey, I’m posting something! Yay, me!

Of course, it isn’t any topic I’ve had rattling around my head for weeks, but it’s something. Then again, my other blogs haven’t gotten the full attention they should either.

Anyway, today’s post comes by way of a couple things I saw on Twitter.

One was a person who tweeted a famous quotation by Mahatma Gandhi in which he essentially tells Westerners: I like your Christ, but I don’t like your Christians.

Another was a tweet with much the same sentiment by another person in my timeline that said something like: There a couple of things that are totally incompatible: Christianity and Christ.

Both observations are totally on the mark.

It’s pretty hard to look at Jesus and say something like, “What a jackass.” Even being followed and doted upon by some, there is nothing in the chronicles of his life that shows him to be arrogant or cruel. He has his harsh moments and times when irritation gets the better of him, but his life was one of uncompromising love and compassion. He promoted social justice, he healed, he taught and did all sorts of other things (many of which we really don’t value in society, quite frankly) that were more important to him than comfort, ego or adulation.

On the other hand, you have his so-called followers, who are often judgmental, narrow-minded, not inclusive and totally against reaching out, lifting up or teaching other people. I mean, there are Christians who try to spin the Gospel into something that supports rampant, greedy, free-market capitalism. How much more twisted out of shape (and away from the message) can a “Christian” be?

The trouble is that most Christians don’t act a bit like Jesus Christ. They don’t even try and they really don’t want to. I include myself in that to some degree. I mean, I like the idea of being more Christ-like, but it’s hard. It’s so much easier to live in the moment or get caught up in the rat race or to snark about people. Still, I’m way more Christ-like than the Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter types.

So there’s that.

I don’t think one has to perfectly emulate Christ (or come close) to be a good Christian. Most people I know who are good people (religious or not) are flawed and screw up a lot. But they try to have their hearts in the right place, which is more than I can say for some of the most vocal so-called Christians who litter the media coverage out there on various issues.

So, I thought that since “Christian” is such a loaded term these days, how about I make some new designations?

Christ-like Folks

Good luck finding one of these. They exist, and some of them might work or live near us, but they are few and far between and often because they do their kindnesses quietly and without desire for thanks, we don’t notice them being Christ-like. But there are some who are hard to ignore because of the scope of their work. I think Mother Theresa was a very Christ-like person. So too was Mahatma Gandhi (actually, for the record, his name was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi; the “Mahatma” is an honorific), and he wasn’t even Christian. But somehow I don’t think that kept him out of Heaven.

Christ-loving Folks

I see myself and many other Christians whom I respect in this category. We admire and respect Jesus’ teachings, and many of us believe he is the son of God and our savior, and we try to do right. When we don’t, we try to be honest with ourselves that we fucked up. We try to do better, and we hope that one day we can get over ourselves long enough to be Christ-like instead.

Christian Posers

These folks think they are doing good, and they see themselves as either Christ-loving or Christ-like, but they just don’t get it. They try too hard, and they take aggressive and off-putting postures. They lecture and harangue people, or they are so blindly earnest (with no critical thinking to back up their faith) that they don’t probably do much to advance the Gospel. I suspect that many of the people they win to Christ are, sadly, also doomed to be Christian Posers. A lot of evangelical types fall into this camp. They are so busy trying to score points with God and Jesus by “doing the right thing” that they often don’t end up doing the right thing. They are the kind of people who would rather tell people they need Jesus or will go to hell (and honestly, they say this out of love because they believe it and don’t want that to happen) than to actually help people in day-to-day needs and let Jesus show in their actions, which is far more likely to win people to the notion that Christ (and by extension Christianity) have personal value to their lives…as well as being the sort of thing that Jesus actually told people they should do (feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoners, etc.)

Christianoids

Just like in science fiction and fantasy stories, where a humanoid is something that looks human (or at least has a sorta human shape) but isn’t, so too is a Christianoid someone who sounds like a Christian and looks like a Christian (of one of the types above) but really isn’t. These folks go through the motions but don’t even have the misplaced passion of a Christian Poser. They go to church either because they feel they have to or because they see it as a way to be connected and network. I think many Christianoids think they are in a faith walk, but really they’re just doing an empty and soulless routine. They are the true zombies of the Christian world. Whereas Christian Posers are often lulled into unsound religion doctrine because they don’t examine the source or search their own hearts enough, Christianoids follow the drum beat simply because it’s the easiest course for them. Both groups, though, form the infantry and support base for the people below…

Christo-Scum

Every person who sees a natural disaster and proclaims it as God’s judgment for sinful behavior, every person who would kill a physician or care worker to protest abortion, every person who glories in war instead of seeing it as a necessary and rarely-to-be-used evil, every person who thinks they know who’s going to Hell, every person who puffs out their chest and lets the world know just how righteous they are, every person who oppresses a group and calls it God’s will…and so on and so on…these are Christo-Scum. I would call them antichrists but really, those would be the people who actively oppose Christ’s message. Christo-Scum are those who use Christ to justify their evil. They lift up his name but pervert his teachings. Frankly, I think I respect an antichrist more than I would these ass-hats.

Where I Need God and Where I Don’t

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I have some thoughts that have been rolling around my head; just haven’t been in the right mindset to put them to words on this blog (writing fiction so much lately is eating up my time and energy, so that’s part of it).

Until I can, I just wanted to share a quick thought with those who criticize the practice of religion or the pursuit of things spiritual:

Don’t mistake me for someone who needs God to make sense of the world or to explain how things are. This isn’t a case of needing the existence of a higher power for lighting and rainbows to be explained or to make sense of where the universe came from. Science has proven more than up to the task of breaking down the physical world and explaining a lot of those things. I look to God for making sense of the things that science doesn’t touch and probably never can: The things of the spirit. That is the place where I need God, both as a guide and as an endpoint to seek.

And argue all you want that there is no spirit. No soul. No existence beyond the current prison of our flesh. I don’t need you or science to prove that such things exist. I have seen them and I feel them and they are real. If you chose not to recognize them and are satisfied with that, more power to you. But telling me that the spiritual isn’t real doesn’t make it so, and where science cannot tread, there I will seek a higher power.

God May Be Immutable; the World Is Not

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While I have begged off further involvement in a debate here a while back about the Catholic Church’s reputation and the Vatican’s legitimacy (see here), my opponent David made an interesting comment about God’s immutability and I’ve been planning to address that subject ever since, as well as contraception (since David and I went pretty heavily back and forth on the rightness or wrongness of birth control), and the ways the two issues tie together in some ways.

This post may be a bit of a ramble. Apologies in advance if so.

God is, reportedly, immutable, unchanging and eternal. I really have no argument with that (though I also have no proof of it). I know a lot of agnostics and atheists do reject the unchanging nature of God, and they often contend such notions with talk about God’s personality shifts in the Bible, but I disregard that line of argument. I disregard it in part because I believe it is less a case of God changing than of God changing the way He approaches people.

And really, how could He not?

Humanity has evolved (genetically, socially, technologically, etc.) in so many ways. God had forged multiple covenants with humans not because He cannot make up His mind but because dealing with us is an ongoing process, and guiding us toward the next steps in our spiritual development (in this life and beyond it) is an ever-shifting process.

Now, Jesus pretty much put a final stamp on the basic theology and the priorities we are supposed to have. Given the period in which he appeared historically speaking, it was probably as good a time as any to make a “final” covenant that would carry humans through until God’s plans were complete in terms of our time here on Earth.

However, I cannot help but notice that Jesus didn’t talk about nearly as many things as the apostles did after he was gone, and Jesus certainly didn’t emphasize the minutiae of the Old Testament laws. I cannot help but notice that Jesus kept it pretty simple and basic. I also cannot help but notice that while Jesus himself followed Jewish law for the most part, he didn’t uplift it as something to be a slave to, and he broke it in cases where it was irresponsible to follow the law simply for the sake of the law.

And here’s where I get to contraception, boys and girls.

First off, let’s toss that Onan shit out the window. Anyone who can read that story and still say it was about masturbation being evil and contraception being evil has totally and completely missed the point that Onan was punished because God told him he needed to get a child on a certain woman after all his brothers had died and Onan failed to do so because he didn’t want to. If God was so mad at masturbation, why kill that guy, after centuries upon centuries of masturbation and coitus interruptis, and no one else? God had a mission for that man, for some reason, and Onan defied God and did so in a highly disrespectful manner. End of story. Don’t anyone argue with me on that point. Don’t even start. Jacking off was NOT the sin in that story.

Now, you can point to various things in the Bible and extrapolate that God wanted men and women to marry and have lots of kids. Great. But let’s take that in context. The world was not overpopulated at the time. Women were often little more than baby-makers, sometimes little more than chattel, and so from a societal standpoint, they weren’t considered useful aside from family-rearing. Also, families needed new blood to keep things going and run the farm (or herd the sheep, or make the boats, or whatever). Fathers needed heirs. Infant mortality was high. Many women died young thanks to birth complications.

So, of course there is going to be a focus on marrying people off and having them breed in those times. Particularly as regards Isreal, because if God set them as his messenger and the venue through which Jesus would come, so He’d be particularly keen on them making plenty of babies and remain viable on the Middle Eastern stage. So, for the Bible to support “be fruitful and multiply” made sense then.

But that is not the world we live in now. Many things in the world today are not covered biblically and attempts to use the Bible to deal with current issues based on anachronistic origins end up ringing untrue for that very reason. End of life decisions, abortion, pornography, electronic interactions and a ton of other things are all things that not only didn’t really factor into daily life (or at all) in Jesus’ time (or before) but also don’t even have any logical parallels with things covered by the Bible.

So, times change. The Bible is meant to be a guide, not a lawbook. It doesn’t change to keep up. God doesn’t check back in with us to give us the Commandments version 25.1 or something. We are expected to try to act as much in concert with the Holy Spirit as possible. But when something like the Vatican makes blanket rules and says they will never change and we’re going to keep doing it because we have been for 2,000 years (or longer) doesn’t make sense.

Is it really sensible to think that God wants married people to have sex only when they plan to make kids? No. Sex is also a relationship-bonding experience. It is, I dare say, a spiritual experience when I give my wife an orgasm, when I get one, or when we both come together (blessed be those nights…and sometimes mornings or afternoons). If God’s goal was only for us to breed, why not leave us with mating seasons and specific sexual cycles? Why have it be something that feels so good and cements a loving relationship so well, and have it only be for baby-making? So, right there, we’re already off track when contraception is condemned because of the notion that every sexual act should be potentially procreative.

Jumping to the next point, does it really make sense in this resource-strapped world, with so many poor and so few rich but so much wealth in the hands of a tiny number of people, that God wants us to breed like bunnies? Is it really wise for us to do so? No. It makes us poor stewards of the planet. China has population control policies, and look how huge THEY are. What if they didn’t have such policies? What if every married couple in the United States in these modern times had families of six to 15 kids or something. When my dad was young, that was tenable. Now, it’s environmentally irresponsible and financially untenable. Did God not give us free will so that we could exercise some common damn sense?

Contraception is not evil, and attempts to make it so are simply a game of maintaining the status quo for the sake of comfort or habit or plain ignorance.

Is is because we change that we were sent the Holy Spirit, and why we have to try to listen to that spirit of God. It is because we change that God approaches us in different ways at different time. And for a long time now, it’s been right and appropriate for God not to overtly reveal himself, because it is through the search for Him and our attempt to forge a relationship with Him (by whatever means, Christian or otherwise) that we show we are honoring those things spiritual.

The Vatican needs to get up off that no-contraception policy, as do many other Christians and non-Christians. People need to stop calling God a victim of capriciousness and multiple-personality disorder simply as a way of disregarding religion.

And we all need to keep up with the times. But that doesn’t mean throwing out Jesus’ teachings. It means keeping them in context.

The Three R’s of Modern Republicans

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In honor of the New  Oxford American Dictionary naming as Word of the Year that made-up monstrosity “refudiate,” which was coined by a clueless politician/pundit/reality show star who apparently doesn’t know what “repudiate” or “refute” are (or where Russia is, or what economic policy is, or what the U.S. Constitution really stands for)…well, I’d like to offer up my own R’s.

Maybe the dictionary folks can name mine “Phrase of the Year”

It’s in honor of the modern Republican “Let’s Just Say No to Everything the President Says Just to Be Bullies” Party, which instead of having a slightly misguided agenda (particularly since Ronald Reagan’s presidency) but basically trying to do some work in Washington, D.C. (as used to be the case when I was a younger man), now instead cozies up to crazy people and espouses insane theories and bands together as a single unit to do nothing but stop progress in the nation for the sake of holding on to power.

OK, sorry for the tangent.

Anyway, my new phrase of made-up words:

Reduxe, Retrues & Reswipel (yeah, it more or less rhymes with the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” phrase coined by the liberal elitist scum who actually read books instead of banning or burning them.)

Reduxe, you see, is a merging of “redux” and “reduce,” meant to convey the GOP’s longstanding history of cutting socially minded programs in favor of paying for the waging of war, subsidizing of the oil industry, or making sure religion is taught in public school.

Retrues honors the increasingly common practice of making shit up about anyone not in the Republican Party, not matter how much evidence to the contrary exists, and investigating them for crimes related to those made-up facts whenever possible. It also honors the ability of more and more GOP politicians to use the Bible as their basis for refuting climate change research, based on the idea that God won’t let anything happen to us (though many of them will tell you, oddly enough, that if we allow same-sex marriage God will strike our nation down, because apparently he can handle climate issues but not relationship ones.)

Reswiple merges the “re” prefix with “swipe” and adds extra crap just to make it sound right rolling off the tongue. It honors the practice of continuing to give bigger and bigger tax breaks to the wealthy, while denying cost of living adjustments (or sometimes living wages) for the people who actually do the work in this nation (see my rant here for more on that).

No, no need to thank me for me for giving you some new R words and a whole new made-up phrase, Republicans. Just send me a check for $2 million and we’ll call it even.

Mind Your I’s and A’s

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While our pastor’s sermon kind of meandered today (good message, but it seemed overly long and somewhat disjointed), there was a portion that caught my attention:

Where there is ignorance, there is often indifference. Where there is indifference, we often see intolerance. And wherever there is intolerance, we will see injustice.

That explains a lot to me about the world. Ignorance remains at the core of so many of our problems. Ignorant Christians, ignorant atheists, ignorant Muslims, ignorant Jews, ignorant agnostics, ignorant pagans…you get the idea.

Now, those who read me regularly might expect me to pick on the members of the Tea Party here in the United States. And certainly, their ignorance is often astounding, as they make people with education seem to be the enemy. Suddenly, to them, knowledge is the problem. God forbid anyone pays attention, or tries to consider complex issues. No, lock-and-load or fly off at the mouth are the ways to go.

But they aren’t alone. I’ve known a ton of ignorant “progressive” people and other liberals. People who say they understand the plight of people who struggle but who distance themselves from such people. They are just as ignorant, because they have some kind of general knowledge or book learning but no connection to the real issues or what needs addressing.

Stay-at-home middle class mothers who knock other mothers’ choices to send their kids to school instead of home schooling, thereby showing complete ignorance of those other mothers’ challenges and lives, which don’t mirror their own and therefore cannot often follow a similar model.

Men who blame women for leaving them and being shallow, while remaining ignorant of their own gender sins and the things they did that helped scuttle the relationship, too. Women who show the very same ignorance as they set unrealistic demands and then dog out their former (or current) men online for not being perfect.

Ignorance is at the heart of ethnic conflict; passive workers who allow themselves to be undercut by corporate interests; corporations who focus on short-term goals at the expense of the country and their own organizational health; teachers and doctors who slap labels on kids like autism or ADHD when they’re just being kids; and so on.

And so, with my pastor’s example in mind, with those four I’s, I now offer my four A’s as a counterpoint. As a healthy alternative. As the path for our salvation, whether secular or religious:

First, we need awareness. Honest, willing efforts to look past the surface of things and challenge our own assumptions about everything.

Second, we need authorship, so that we will be not just show silent accountability but also open assertion of where we fail and where we cease to understand. Such things will lead to us asking for help in increasing our awareness and then our authorship.

Third, with those two things, we will see more acceptance. Always in society, there will be things we cannot accept, but those will be the things that are truly hurtful as a result of cruelty or ignorance. But we will accept that people are different and even when they lead lifestyles that we find uncomfortable, they have a right to be the way they are.

Finally, those three things, if we seek them (and I have no reason to expect that humanity will bother to, but there’s always hope, right?) will lead to the start of ascendancy. This could be secular as easily as it could be spiritual. But it will mean that we are on the path to fully realizing our potential beyond mere self-satisfaction and laziness. We won’t likely become truly ascendant in these our mortal coils, because that’s expecting too much.

But damn it, we need to make an effort to head in that direction.

Dueling Dissonance

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So, I’m having serious headaches from the cognitive dissonance created in meh wee brain thanks to both side of the ideological aisle.

On the one side, there are the conservatives, who inspired dissonance-related sufferings in my cerebrum when I heard one too many of them on NPR today indicate that the threat of climate change is some big myth and we should stop trying to control carbon levels in the air or protect endangered species and all of that. Where does the cognitive dissonance come in?

Well, a lot of these people will be happy to tell you God has everything in hand and we should stop worrying. After all, God promised not to destroy the Earth again and if the climate changes, it’s simply God’s will and we shouldn’t mess with it.

So, if we should keep our hands off because God has climate under control, why the hell does He need your help trying to derail same-sex marriages and homosexual rights? I mean, if you think He doesn’t need any help with the climate, surely you don’t think a bunch of gays and lesbians are going to pose Him any problems, right?

Therefore, while you’re ignoring our collapsing environment, do us all a favor and stay out of the affairs of consenting adults who happen to be the same sex.

Thanks.

The other half of my dissonance comes from the left…a group who’s been shoving legislated health down our throats for ages. Bad enough that Happy Meals are being banned in San Francisco but now the FDA is going to slap hideous disease-ridden photos on cigarette packs because the Nanny State mentality dictates that smokers still just don’t get it and therefore we’ll shock them into quitting.

First, aside from the fact that I want to see some diseased livers or graphic bloody drunk-driving related action shots on liquor bottles to balance that out…as well as photos of fat-clogged arteries and diseased hearts on potato chip bags…I want to know how my progressive brethren can possibly endure the following dissonant thought:

How can you rail on about how evil it is to flash photos of aborted fetuses in the faces of women seeking to terminate pregnancies, and be in FAVOR of flashing rotting body parts to adults who should be able to choose any damn legal vice they please?

So, on the left and the right: How about both of you get a grip and go back to minding your own damn business.