a question.
Twice in the past 5 years, I have heard a voice whisper my name in my ear. This happened as I was in bed, waking up. I was awake so it wasn’t a dream. I’m pretty sure the voice was female, and no, I’m not schizophrenic. Anyone else ever experienced anything like this?
Up, Up and Away
“This is the strangest thing I’ve seen since I’ve been on the
force,” said Paul Madison, first officer on the scene. Madison
questioned the man who looked like Jesus and discovered that he was
dressed up as Jesus and was on his way to a toga costume party when
the tarp covering the bed of his pickup truck came loose and released
twelve blow up sex dolls filled with helium which floated up into the
air.
Can’t vouch for the source, but a good story any way you look at it.
Oh Heavens
(This is a kind of companion piece to an earlier one — A Few Important Religious Ideas — that appeared in elimae.)
I don’t know much about it, but it’s going to be great!!
I don’t like family visits that last more than a couple of days, but in heaven something will make me like that for eons.
I guess I’ll like the new body they give me. I’m betting they will have food that tastes great but only puts “spiritual” weight on you.
I’m sure I’ll still be “me” and I’ll still know it, since I’m the one who did all the work of arranging to end up there in the first place. I mean, if I turned out to be some other totally different kind of being, why would I give a shit if I saw grandma again—which is a big part of the pitch for going.
Read more
Old? Hell, Let’s See it Again Anyway
But Ross Perot, who paid her medical bills all those years ago, now believes that both Carol McCain and the American people have been taken in by a man who is unusually slick and cruel – even by the standards of modern politics.
‘McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory,’ he said.
‘After he came home, Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history.’
I mentioned this to some McCain supporters the other day and, surprisingly, they hadn’t heard the story of how the man came to be married to his present wife. As the whole story here indicates, Carol was disfigured in a traffic accident and lost her looks–so hubby dumped her and set out to help the world of himself.
via Praxxus
Letters To Those Who Have Been Left Behind
Here’s a fantastically insane blog hosting letters written by Christians to non-Christians about why all the good people have up and disappeared from Earth and the lowly heathen jerks have been left behind.
Dear Friend,
Are you looking for me? Is the world looking for millions of missing people that have just vanished in an instant? Are all little children around the globe part of the missing group? If so, I can tell you what has happened. Don’t believe the very convincing lies you will hear. Don’t believe UFO’s got us. Don’t believe some cosmic reaction erased us.
The truth is - are you ready for this? - we’re at a wedding. Yup. In fact, we are the “bride.” The “groom” is Jesus, the Messiah, the Promised One from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. (Hear, O Israel!) He has come to take His cride, the true Church and all little innocent ones, out of this world because of what is coming.
Yes, yes, I know. There are all sorts of Christians running around now insisting that this explanation CANNOT be the correct one because THEY are Left Behind. This may include some very visible Christians, like maybe a Pope or something. What does this tell you? It tells you that any “Christian” left behind was a phony. They may have said they believed, blah blah blah, but God knows the heart of men, and He has seen that they are fakes.
It’s like fan fiction, only 1000x more pathological.
(thx Sean)
you go first
I’ll just hang around and watch.
i have a bum jedi outfit
If you don’t laugh at Dave Hil: Jedi Master, then I regret to inform you that you are either a defective person or bitter that you can’t attend a local Jedi school.
the atheist apocalypse
Now with 100% less destruction and anger and vengeance and world-endingness.
(click to embiggen)
a re-acquaintance with the terminology
Richard Dawkins (paraphrased):
THEIST: Someone who believes there is a supernatural intelligence behind the universe that intervenes on behalf of humanity at certain junctures. A theist believes that prayers are answered, interventions occur, miracles happen. A theist believes that the supernatural intelligence has a plan for each human on earth and is deeply invested in the fate and proceedings of its creatures.
DEIST: Someone who believes that there is a supernatural intelligence behind the universe but does not believe there is any continuing intervention. A deist believes that the supernatural intelligence was intimately involved with the creation of our universe, but aside from that preliminary work, is not active with respect to the daily affairs of humankind.
PANTHEIST: Someone who does not believe in a supernatural intelligence at all, but appreciates the beauty and wonder and structure of the natural world around him. A pantheist may occasionally dip into religious language, but the God mentioned when doing so is a poetic, metaphorical god that represents the feelings of awe and smallness of man when contrasted to the natural world and its systems. God to the pantheist is a non-supernatural term for nature, the universe and the laws that govern its workings.
…
Pantheism is sexed-up atheism; deism is watered-down theism.
In Cuneiform–The Oldest Dream of Dumuzi
In preparing for an upcoming dream workshop I came across this, the oldest recorded dream from the ancient culture of Mesopotamian Sumeria at around 3400 BCE. It was a nightmare.
In ancient times…the shepherd lay down, he lay down to dream. He woke up–it was a dream! He shivered–it was sleep! He rubbed his eyes, he was terrified.
“A dream, my sister! A dream! In my dream, rushes were rising up for me… Tall trees in the forest were rising up together over me. Water was poured over my holy coals for me, the cover of my holy churn was being removed, my holy drinking cup was torn down from the peg where it hung, my shepherd’s stick disappeared from me. … The churns were lying on their side, no milk was poured, the drinking cups were lying on their side, Dumuzi was dead, the sheepfold was haunted.
Be reminded of your Spiritual self
. . . and for only $80 per bottle!
Some observations here
(via Andrew Sullivan)
I want to laugh at this. I really do.
But when I see things like this, I can’t help but feel a bewildered despair, at least for a little while.
Step Two.
We now have an answer to what we should do after we’re all done with this.
A Carnegie Hall Requiem
Along the lines of John Pakaluk’s recent post on Mahler’s 2nd Symphony, give a listen (when the audio is posted this afternoon) to this story on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, “A Carnegie Hall Requiem for Darfur Refugees.” Conductor George Matthew’s comments on how Verdi’s piece speaks to that the human and societal dimensions of that tragedy are, to my ear and mind, extraordinarily moving.
“The one true translation”
Bruce Alderman comments on Mark Driscoll’s “theological reasons” for preaching from the English Standard Version of the Bible:
In point #3, Driscoll says, “Words carry meaning.” Unfortunately, he has forgotten about the Bible verse that says, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” (I don’t recall the exact scripture reference for that one, but I’m pretty sure it’s somewhere between “Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” and “God helps those who help themselves.”
Anyway, my point is that a Bible translation with lots of pictures is therefore better than one without. And the ESV, whatever its strengths, falls woefully short in the area of color pictures.
East Liberty - fountain and church
The fountain is turned off for the winter, but the circle of dancing figures is still a strong presence behind East Liberty Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh. I just found out that it was named “Joy of Life” - which seems appropriate at any time of year - but particularly on this sunny day in December.
Altar
“There are hundreds of lives here, a lot of struggle, washed up on the beach,” said Bill Lacovara, a Ventnor insurance adjuster who was fishing last month with his son when he spotted a flowered plastic shopping bag and waded out to retrieve it. “This is just a hint of what really happens. How many letters like this all over the world aren’t being opened or answered?”
Interview with George Saunders
DB: You more explicity reveal in your latest book that undergirding your satire is a spiritual primitivism, i.e. a very simple and basic individual humility in God’s world. The reason your spirituality is so primitive is because the current value systems, especially in these fictional extremes, reduce your characters to an elemental state of consciousness, very much stunted and in desperate need of loving relationships and truthful language. Diminished by circumstance, your characters are doing the best they can. Your artistic decision is to locate our moral salvation in a God toward whom our first steps are likely to be sincere but awkward. Why?
George Saunders: I like the phrase “spiritual primitivist,” kind of. I am not traditionally religious. I was raised Catholic and got a lot of good from that. My wife and I are Buddhists now, me in no small part because a lot of things I’d come to believe, through observation and experience (and via writing), I found present in those teachings…. Though it may not be a happy state of affairs, we are only as good as our individual moral impulses, and these are only as good as our willingness to be constantly reappraising them…. So maybe the important human work is to constantly be working to clarify and fire-test these impulses while improving our ability to monitor them…. In this book, what kept happening was, somebody who was lost in a shitstorm of bullshit and lies and propaganda kept struggling to get to that place of innate wisdom/kindness. To me, that’s moving, and it’s also what each of us is doing every day, maybe more in these crazy times than in others, although actually I doubt it. We’re just doing it in a particular flavor. But the extremity of the anti-truth forces (corporate logic, government forces, happy-face New Agers, our own darker impulses) and their newfound volume (via the new media, totally in bed with money) make it all that more urgent a struggle and maybe necessitates a kind of loud restating of basic truths.
Link
Link
Terry Eagleton blows a fuse…
“Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree.”
The Tao, Revised
What is a bad man, but a good man’s teacher.
Holy Fools
musings on Matthew 25:31-46
Final Judgment. Kingdom of God or eternal damnation; as easy as separating the Sheep from the Goats. I don’t know about you, but this culling out business makes me a little uncomfortable.
Via Media
Buddhists call the focal point of their spiritual practices the Middle Way. Anglican Christians have traditionally called it the Via Media, relating it both to theology and spirituality as well as to church polity. Jewish spirituality calls it the wisdom of impartiality. Sufism gives it the image of “flying by the two wings of God”—wrath and mercy. It goes by other names as well: detachment, even “cool loneliness.” These terms form the core ideal for the practice of wisdom in all the world’s great sacred traditions.
In her brilliant and simple text, Comfortable With Uncertainty, the Tibetan Buddhist nun, Pema Chödrön, speaks eloquently of this pattern of daily practice:
Cool loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideas of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment.
Cool loneliness doesn’t provide any resolution or give us ground under our feet. It challenges us to step into a world of no reference point without polarizing or solidifying. This is called the middle way, which is another way of describing the path of the warrior-bodhisattva.
The Hunted
There was once a King who loved to hunt—almost daily. One day out on the hunt he galloped after a deer, leaving his fellow hunters behind. His horse was sweaty and exhausted, but driven by a strange impulse, the King galloped on and on. When he had totally lost his way, inexplicably the deer stopped, turned, and started to speak. Addressing him directly it said: “O hunter, you came into being for more than this. Even if you catch and kill me, what difference does it make? Its just one more hunt, one more kill you’ve made.” The deer stopped speaking and vanished instantly.
Like an arrow, the deer’s words pierced the King deeply. Crying out he flung himself from the horse onto the ground. A shepherd happened to be passing by. The King begged him, “Here, take my jeweled clothes, take my horse, take my weapons, and give me in exchange your cloak and never tell a soul what has happened to me.” He put on the shepherd’s rough clothing and set out on a path of destiny.
– a traditional Sufi fable
The Twin
From an Erik Reece essay on Thomas Jefferson and the Gospel of Thomas in the December 2005 edition of Harper’s:
So when I first discovered the Gospel of Thomas about a decade ago, I was shocked to find a version of Christianity that I could accept and one that, moreover, could serve as a vital corrective to my grandfather’s view that we live helplessly, sinfully, in a broken world. According to Thomas’s Jesus, humankind never suffered an irredeemable Fall. The world only appears to be a realm of separation from the Creator and from one another. When Thomas’s Jesus tells his followers that “Adam came from great power and great wealth, but he was not worthy of you,” he is implying that Adam’s first sin was to take on the knowledge of good and evil — the knowledge that continues to divide the world into us and them. The stunning message of Thomas’s gospel is that such divisions are arbitrary, destructive, and, finally, unnatural. Only the talking animals believe in them. Thus Adam’s sin, ironically, was simply ignorance. True, that ignorance proved to be congenital, but it wasn’t terminal and it didn’t demand divine intervention. What it demanded was a realization on the part of each individual that he or she still possesses a divine light lodged within the heart, and that light can reveal the world to be a beautiful, undivided wholeness.
My dad has written a translation and commentary on the Gospel of Thomas that can be found here.
Fear
A man that flees from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it.
–J.R.R. Tolkein