yayyyyyy God

[d_rawk]

Hamilton: ordering the book right now. Thanks for the rec.!

[Birdy]

Where's the book's worth of material!?

[d_rawk]

No-one challenged me yet

[Birdy]

I think it might be too assumptive to say that convention leads to dispassionate repetition of prayer. Because after all, you can't account for what's going on in the heads of all those repeaters. This line of thinking seems to fuel the debate (not exclusively) for those who are against religious prayer in schools, work, government and basically wins it, letting a few speak for the majority, which isn't so inclusive after all.

[d_rawk]

We've already had that debate. Religious symbols thread, probably. We are on different sides of it, and have been unable to reconcile that. It could be revisited, but I'm not sure that we would come out with different opinions at the end then we did the last time 'round.

I do not like mandated prayer, and I do not appreciate the Lord's Prayer being reduced to a formality. Or imposed on anyone, because I think it should be adopted knowingly, individually, with passion, if adopted at all. I'd much more appreciate a moment of silence where I can do my own thing, and everyone else can do their own thing too.

But we've been around this bend already, at least once.

[Birdy]

Oh no, it's not meant as debate... i was just merely commenting on your remark in order to show how (i think) that line of thinking leads us to more exclusionary behaviour.

Anyway, that debate was a year or more ago and i've since changed my position in an effort to be more inclusive and less... traditionary. Because ultimately, traditions are too personal to be mandated.

[d_rawk]

Because ultimately, traditions are too personal to be mandated.

Birdy. That is a facking brilliant statement. Sincerely.

[Kanada Kev]

hear hear

[Birdy]

Thanks guys... it's the power of truth.

[d_rawk]

This thread is inspiring in interesting ways. It has probably already been said better:

[not proselytizing, just rambling on and heavily quoting Bell, hoping that friends will indulge me]

So if you were God, the all powerful creator of the universe, and you wanted to move toward people - you wanted to express your love for the world in a new way - how would you do it?

If you showed up in your power and your control and might, you would scare people off. This is what happens at the beginning of the ten commandments. The first two commandments are in the first person: "You shall have no other Gods before me", "You shall not make for yourself an image, for I the Lord". But starting with the third commandment, someone else is talking. "You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord ..." The rabbis believe that this is because God was speaking directly to the people in the first two commands, but they couldn't handle it. As it says in the text, "They trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, "Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die." So, the rabbis reasoned, the switch in person is because Moses gave them the remaining eight commandments.

Just God speaking is too much to bear.

If you're God and you want to express ultimate love to your creation, if you want to move toward them in a definitive way, you have a problem, because just showing up overwhelms people.

You wouldn't come as you are.

You wouldn't come in strength.

You wouldn't come in your pure, raw essence. You'd scare everybody away.

The last thing people would perceive is love.

So how would you express your love in an ultimate way? How do you connect with people in a manner that wouldn't scare them off but would compel them to want to come closer, to draw nearer?

You would need to strip yourself of all the trappings that come with ultimate power and authority. That's how love works. It doesn't matter if a man has a million dollars and wants to woo a woman, if she loves him for his money, it isn't really love.

If you were an almighty being who made the universe and everything in it, you would need to meet people on their level, in their world, on their soil .. like them.

Consider the story just for the sheer poetry of it. Jesus is born to teenage peasants under questionable circumstances. His mother gets pregnant before marriage. He's born amid the dung and straw of a stable. He's placed in a feeding trough. His brothers and sisters think he's out of his mind, and after his first sermon in his hometown, the people he grew up with form a mob and try to kill him.

And who does Jesus identify with? The outcasts, the people of the land who aren't good enough, clean enough, wealthy enough, and pure enough to be a part of the establishment. He's invited to dine with the elite and the rich, which he does numerous times, but he also eats with the lowest of the low -- and he enjoys it. He enjoys them.

He touches people with infectious skin diseases, he lets questionable women touch him, he lays his hands on dead bodies, and he engages in conversation with promiscuous women alone in the middle of the day.

His entire life is about the stripping away of power and control. Jesus always chooses the path of love, not power.

Inclusion, not exclusion.

Connection and solidarity rather than rank and hierarchy.

Touch, rather than distance.

Compassion, rather than control.

He comes on a donkey, not a horse.

Weeping and broken, not proud and triumphant.

This path he has chosen, which he continues to choose day after day, takes on some ominous undertones. He finds himself at odds with those in power. Partway through the Gospels, he starts dropping hints that this path he's on is going .. somewhere. Somewhere that involves suffering and even death. His hints, which start turning into predictions, are about a conflict that he sees as inevitable. A conflict between love and power.

This is what love does, it threatens the empires of power and control and wealth and manipulation.

He's eventually arrested and put on a sort of trial, at which he's asked to perform miracles. He refuses. He's eventually beaten and flogged. When he doesn't fight back, he's mocked, and he doesn't say anything in return. He's hung on a cross and says, "I am thirsty."

If you have ever given yourself to someone and they responded, they reciporcated with love of their own, you know how God feels.

The cross is God's way of saying, "I know what it's like."

The execution stake is the creator of the universe saying, "I know how you feel."

Our tendency in the midst of suffering to to turn on God. To get angry and bitter and shake our fist at the sky and say, "God, you don't know what it's like! You don't understand! You have no idea what I'm going through. You don't have a clue how much this hurts."

The cross is God's way of taking away all of our accusations, excuses, and arguments.

The cross is God taking on flesh and blood and saying, "Me too."

[/not proselytizing, just rambling on and heavily quoting Bell, hoping that friends will indulge me]

I mean, I guess if we are really serious about not being afraid of each other, we can say these sort of things. The thing I like about this story, is that it doesn't have to be factual to be true.

So what other stories do people inform themselves by? I engage with Christianity for a few reasons .. one, that I think Jesus, at least as recorded, was a fucking awesome guy. Two, that his legacy, which initially was one of transformative love, became flooded by hate and I felt love could re-transform it. Three, the underground railroad, same sex marriages done despite the disdain of the law, gender equality, etc.., that I found in the Quaker community. But I don't see Christian theology as superior to any other belief, and I don't have any discomfort with atheism or agnosticism. I just like the story, and have deeply internalized the narrative such that it informs my decisions, day to day. So the dude succeeded, if that is what he set out to do.

I wonder if we can make the 'Yayyyy God' thread an actual 'Yayyyy God' thread for a moment. Or am I the only one here? We're a rather non-theist bunch, I gather.

[Birdy]

You're not the only one here. You don't have to be a theist to celebrate God, because at the heart of religion lies the want to do good and be good, and that should be something to celebrate.

Thanks for posting and rambling on and heavily quoting Bell. That story was great.

I don't really invest in any sort of God, and believe rather that humanity has a certain inter-connectedness that guides us through this world and leads us (not always) to help each other through the tough times. So when your story started talking about god appearing on a donkey, it made me think that that donkey is the good will of man and that the most important thing (to me at least) is to live up to the potential inside of me to be good, to help others and to not take this life for granted.

I know i'm not alone in thinking that everyone in the world is here for a reason, or that I wasn't the only one growing up thinking I can change the world. I can't tell you how long I struggled with the concept of changing the world and what that meant, or how I was to go about tackling this big case. But finally i had the realization that changing the world wasn't a jigsaw puzzle to put together, or a skyscaper to build alone, but it was more about being good, whole and human, considerate and compassionate and in being so, allowed this goodness to become infectious.

It's simple for me - promote understanding, talk to one another, don't be afraid, recognize extremes as extremes, help when you can, be compassionate, understand that we are all born and we all die and in the middle we're wading through and what a better world we'd be if we'd wade through it together.

That is what I consider spirituality and why I have always wanted this thread to not be 'Yayyyyy God' but to be 'Yayyy God!'. We all have this within ourselves, it's just coming to the realization that it comes in many forms with many faces.

[Thorgnor]

Edited November 20, 2008 by Guest

[d_rawk]

I'm a dummy and can't figure out the picture, though I'm sure it is funny

I'll just respond quite randomly

[Birdy]

I had two scenarios for how to take that photo and didn't want to say anything, because i'd prefer to stick with the one scenario, rather than have it be the other.

[SaggyBalls]

TB wants to be bigger than Jesus and come on a horse. What's that called...Lennon Complex?

I think that equating God with Love is essentially the most important part of the puzzle.

Because Jesus was born to Mary out of wedlock (At that time women out of wedlock were still referred to as Virgins) and Joseph fathered a Bastard Son, then Jesus was the true son of Love. God.

Sure Jesus was an awesome guy. I can only imagine how cool his old man was. After all, he was the guy that ALWAYS had a virgin.

Yay God!

I often think it's the most peculiar that the world's 3 monotheist religions are based on the same God, same stories, same place...well, 4 if you count Rastafarianism, which probably deserves more than it's given.

And aside from the Rastas, they're the most divisive powers working against one another - especially within themselves.

So this upcoming Holiday season, tip a glass to Joseph as much as you will for Jesus. Like Father like Son!

[d_rawk]

I often think it's the most peculiar that the world's 3 monotheist religions are based on the same God, same stories, same place...well, 4 if you count Rastafarianism, which probably deserves more than it's given.

It's always the smallest differences that cause the biggest grief. Someone more famous and more intelligent said it very well once .. someone help me out here?

[SaggyBalls]

someone more famous and more intelligent than me?

Wasn't it God?

"have no other gods before me"

(quit yer fighting)

[d_rawk]

Haha, not fighting .. I meant more intelligent and more famous than me. I just can't remember the precise quote I want and was hoping someone would have it on their tongue - yours, despite not being the one I was after, works quite well too.

[SaggyBalls]

shhhh.

[Thorgnor]

I just thought it was a funny pic, maybe a little ironic with a cop showing up on a mule to ruin the day.

Clearly I have a god complex.

If you knew me you'd know that I actually have a God hates me complex, and there's evidence.

Maybe it would be easier for us both if you were to come out and say what you stand for instead of eluding to this and that and me having to put together the pieces in order to form some kind of argument, which in turn, isn't an argument. Are you a social anarchist? I have no bloody idea. Maybe better, what do you identify mostly with? I understand it's hard to pin a person down... so maybe that's a better approach.

Post-Islamic Old-Testament Hebraic Rastafari Animist/Scientist... doesn't help does it?

Let's call it Post-Humanism or Hip-Hop, whatever you prefer.

I rarely try to argue the "nature of man" because of the very reason that we all see nature as we define it. That's cultural bias. Our political spectrum excludes our First Nations for the very reason that we simply disagree on things like property and the "nature" of humanity... call me "Off The Spectrum".

You seem to prefer my earlier reference to anarchism though so let's proceed from there...

Call me crazy but I remember you claiming Libertarianism, while conveniently ignoring this...

Wikipedia -

"Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, "the first person willingly to call himself an anarchist," outlined a "libertarian society based on cooperation, as opposed to competition and coercion, and functioning without the need for government authority."[10]

The term libertarian was first popularized in France in the 1890s in order to counter and evade the anti-anarchist laws known as the les lois scélérates.[citation needed] According to the anarchist historian Max Nettlau, the first use of the term libertarian communism was in November 1880, when a French anarchist congress employed it to more clearly identify its doctrines.[11] The French anarchist journalist Sébastien Faure, later founder and editor of the four-volume Anarchist Encyclopedia, started the weekly paper Le Libertaire (The Libertarian) in 1895.[12]

In the United States, libertarianism as a synonym for anarchism had meantime begun to take hold. The anarchist communist geographer and social theorist Peter Kropotkin wrote in his seminal 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica article Anarchism that:

"It would be impossible to represent here, in a short sketch, the penetration, on the one hand, of anarchist ideas into modern literature, and the influence, on the other hand, which the libertarian ideas of the best contemporary writers have exercised upon the development of anarchism."[13]

Today, worldwide, anarchist communist, libertarian socialist, and other left-libertarian movements continue to describe themselves as libertarian. These styles of libertarianism are opposed to most or all forms of private property but would not use a coercive state to abolish it."

So you're right again Birdy, I have no idea where you stand... You call yourself one thing and do something else.

Edited November 22, 2008 by Guest

[Thorgnor]

Should I have just told you that your views were not welcome as some others have done? You seem to be the one with the agenda of dismissing and contradicting the "LIBERAL" evil lies you saw "constantly" spread on here. If I insist on arguing feel free to read past it, or to threaten me with you leaving. *tear*

I can be mean spirited without feeling inhuman, can you? I believe that conflict is in our nature, hence my need to disagree with your stance on involving religion more prominently in government. I have agreed in the past and present when our views coincide, but you have often contradicted your own statements in order to represent "a different view".

don't like the politics forum anymore?

I don't even know you, I debate against what you write in a public forum. Your letting the need to defend yourself often overrides your arguments, the above are sound even if I disagree with them.

Insisting that it's more inclusive to ignore a faith's high-holidays because you want to, instead of measuring racism properly, through it's impacts, is absurd. I just wanted to point that out. The larger debate was meant to point out that we're both anarchists if you read carefully, but that you've supported a party that has increased the size of both the military and the deficit through a fundamentally right wing Christian ideological agenda. And then you ignore the fact that they do so while criminalizing large portions of society. That's not love, compassion or goodness, regardless of whose version of good you decide to back. This is why I'm arguing that we have to move past ideas about how

I’m not a mean and cruel person, I’m actually a pretty fuÇking awesome person.

to "I may not be taking into consideration the effect of my beliefs because I have a need to feel like I'm a good person."

I understand your fears of expanded government and a lack of service, but I disagree that private healthcare has made things better for everybody where it has been adopted. Many impoverished people die because of the over-representation of Plastic surgery as a specialty, care to imagine why that is. I don't think more money in the hands of those who already have too much as being any help to the rest of us, unless we choose to provide them with service, not the Liberty that either of us imagine, je'pense.

Edited November 22, 2008 by Guest

[Thorgnor]

Fair enough.

Read the post again though, I never accused you of spreading "evil lies", but of trying to fight against what you thought of as "lies" or exaggerations at the least. You wouldn't have felt the need to speak up otherwise.

You began this years ago by proudly proclaiming your vote for the C's while in a thread where we were showing how little we appreciated their approach.

You asked for debate. You continually debate everyone else and get real sensitive when it comes to us arguing your view.

Particularly me. I sense that maybe I get too close to the truth sometimes.

And as I said, many of these arguments are sound.

Your insistence lays in your need to affirm "goodness", the most vague thing I can think of to attempt to come to a consensus on in changing contexts. We've tried to talk about this and it seems that you can't accept the tenuousness of this stance. I want what makes life more fulfilling too, but not through a do it yourself abandonement of our fellows, world wide. The C's have openly stood for the lowering of regulations and taxes that on the surface empowers people while they remain ignorant to the voices of the poor, and the results of their actions.

I'm not afraid of a hidden agenda, I'm afraid of the loud and powerful voice of a radically backwards fundamentalism given legitimacy by their links to the party... when they openly stand for what's right (re; Khadr, etc) I won't have much ammunition, admittedly.

We both want a well supported military, you voted for a party that wanted to go to Iraq... that's reason to doubt their sincerity in shrinking government size, or expenditures... there's nothing hiding here either.

On health-care, the ugly implication of the style of care this represents is that not only is there a proliferation of "in it for the money" kind of Doc's, but that the poor no longer have access to the best (plastic or otherwise) surgeons, they're busy with those who will (can) pay. It's a double-catch-twenty-two. There's no reason to believe that suddenly people will work altruistically simply because there is an option to, when they can spend their time earning more. It would be ludacris to assume that the C's would hike taxes on them to compensate, why would they spend their retirement money on altruism when the economy is all great big crazy-time.

Don't defend the anti-semitic ignorance of your employer if you don't want to feel so put upon. I remind you, as someone who voted conservative, you are in the majority, democratically speaking and therefore I consider your voice to be that of Big Brother, here to shut me up. When you say that the problem is organizational, that is a way for you to absolve yourself. "I couldn't do anything, it was decided elsewhere," means you should have directed this lady to the right place, not complained about an "obviously pissed off Jewish lady" to the interweb, and a bunch of strangers. That's supporting systemic anti-semitism and if I, as the son of a German immigrant whose father was a Nazi, can see that, it must be because I am bad. If you cannot see that your interpretation of events doesn't change the effect of your ignorance, than it must be your goodness shining through.

Edited November 22, 2008 by Guest

[Thorgnor]

You're right... you are fucking awesome.

High-five.

You post to join in the "Yayyyy God" thread and then you turn around and say it's bad. Now it's my fault.

You can now claim moral victory, Good Queen Birdy.

Maybe I'm just baiting you? Maybe I'm just practicing my debating.

Maybe I've got a God complex in arguing for secularism... seems like sound logic to me.

I'm sorry that the anamalous, anonymous entity that you are somehow affiliated with did not take into account or perhaps care to recognize the conflict.

I suppose you shouldn't be upset if your employer decides to disregard Christmas in an effort to be more inclusive?

Did you actually read my last post in Private Jets?

Edited November 22, 2008 by Guest

[Birdy]

[SaggyBalls]

Isn't this thread supposed to be about Religion and Politics?

Church and State?

Forward Moving Discussion?

Why do you keep bringing up the Right Wing Agenda, TB?

I know that I've written some ridiculous, bloated, meandering posts in my time but it's discussion like yours that keeps a Politics Forum entirely irrelevant to most people on this site.

You seem to be lashing out a bit more than the discussion warrants.

Puppies and rainbows, buddy.

Edited November 23, 2008 by Guest
what the fuÇk?