Sandhill Trek

Good Advice...

How to stop blogging?  McD suggests...

Wordpress makes it so easy:

Go to the “Options” page

Select “Delete Blog” from the  sub-menu

Unify real and virtual selves in some temporal plane.

 

God: Frequently Asked Questions

Visit the "Official God FAQ" for all you really need to know about the old boy.

Experience or faith?

the here and now is sacred

there is something of god in every person

hatred destroys, but love endures and overcomes

speaking Truth to power and acting nonviolently can bring  peace

From Mandarin Meg...

Thanks Michelle...

"Love
does not consist
in gazing at
each other
but in looking
together
in the same
direction."

- Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Previous author: Buddha

If the phone doesn't ring, it's me.

antinomianism?

George W. Bush.

On my mind...

Here are three things that surfaced during the last week when I was using all my blogging power assembling the tremendous contributions from engaged bloggers in the "How do you Blog?" series.

1)  I want to write a post about authenticity and meaning.  AKMA has a serious perspective on that and I want to say what I think about it.  But it's deep stuff, and any offhand post won't be as meaningful, as authentic, as if I season the topic a little bit, do some more reading and then clarify what I really think.  AKMA says,

The Hermenaut article’s invocation of Philip K Dick touches on the point for which I’m arguing. The relation between “the convincing artifice of genuineness” and “heartfelt painstakingly-devised prose” defies a binary taxonomy of authenticity. I like hearing the mistakes and rough edges when some performers play, the eyebrow-scorching graphic explicitness of some writers’ prose — and the elegant precision in some performers’ recordings, and some writers’ fine, exquisitely-assembled literary compositions. I like them all, authentically. Or not.

2)  I want to write about being and seeming, about life and death, about insanity.  I want to riff off Ophelia, review Mike Golby's Danish post, from Hamlet to Heisenberg.  Mike, the prolific genius says,

At the last, we must ask ourselves: are those associated or dissociated from insanity precluded from reading or interpreting it? In as much as we are disqualified from any objective assessment of experience, yes. Also, it's a question of degree; the extent to which we associate with or dissociate from it. If we are to qualify as interpreters of Ophelia's malaise, surely those who can say they have been associated with it—or something like it, i.e. they bring both perspectives to bear, are best suited to doing so? Otherwise, we should refrain from interpretation and, by extension, identification, altogether.

3)  I want to write about what went wrong and how christianity has again torn the heart out of reason and how they are using this season to continue their implacable war against meaning and love and truth and beauty, about how close we were in the late forties to a clear understanding of our lonely place in the universe, and how the marketplace was manipulated to shut down the empowerment of existentialism, of humanism.  I want to dig deeper into something Beth told me about the big box churches, about how this year since christmas is celebrated on a First Day, the big boxers are not holding services, rather handing out videotapes and encouraging parishioners to honor the holiday at home.  I want to write about Madison's Bishop Morlino and how he has taken a seat on an advisory board to America's school for torturers, the School of the Americas, aka WHINSEC, about his decision regarding whether or not to sell the recently torched St. Raphael's cathedral property to downtown developers or to rebuild, about the shame of allowing the brutish psychopathic misogyny of catholicism to influence the availability of RU486 among other reproductive health treatments.

But I have the day job, and the night job now, and my blogging is getting away from me.  And it's the winter holiday season, a time for elaborate preparations and more socializing than I enjoy.  Perhaps writing about what I want to write about will help me get to the writing.

Perhaps not.

Evola Virus

RB is onto something...   customers who bought the Evola book are also advised to check out this Amazon Guide by noted critic S.R. Prozac.

Peace Council

A couple of weeks ago the Peace Council met at Union Theological Seminary.  The Dalai Lama was there, lending visibility to the assemblage, but there are twenty peace councilors and the latest manifestation of the Buddha of compassion is just one.

Monday night they had an "interfaith service" at the Riverside Church, a ceremony that would have made RageBoy proud.  First there were fish, big paper fish being rippled along overhead on long poles.  After the young people with the fish on their poles had processed, the dignitaries found their way in beneath the fish.  They were preceded by some people with brooms, sweeping something up (fish poo?) and there were humongous puppets in the procession, monkey puppets I think, but I could have that wrong... and the twenty peace councilors, in red robes, orange robes, blue robes, gray robes... about two thirds of them representing the monotheistic Abrahamic religions and a third representing the rest of the mainstream... Jain, Buddhist, Hindu.  Really, try to put together an "interfaith service" for the breadth of professed believe in that group... even RB would be hard pressed to fire something up more diffuse than a fish and monkey puppets and brooms motif.

One of the purposes of the gathering was to give the Peace Council an opportunity to meet with winners of the Tanenbaum Center's Peacemaker in Action awards.  They were also gathered to follow up on their 2004 Chiang Mai declaration on Women, Globalization and Religion.

The number one purpose for the get together according to the program was, "To review threats to peace that are posed by the growing political influence of extremist or 'fundamentalist' religious viewpoints and groups, and to discuss or plan responses to these trends."  And the meeting notes make it pretty clear they're as concerned, perhaps MORE concerned about American christian fundies than they are about Sunnis and Shi'ites.  Dr. Joseph Hough, president of Union Theological Seminary, opened a discussion on the growing political power of the “religious right” in the United States and its influence on domestic and foreign policy.

But the real reason these peeps got together was because - face it - they're party animals.

... if in the mysticism of silence we grow in awareness of That which grounds us and gives us inner, personal peace, in the mysticism of service we have the opportunity to sense and know That which connects us and calls us to care for and love each other. In the mysticism of silence, I feel that I am one with the Divine; in the mysticism of service I realize that I am one with you, in the Divine.
- Dr. Paul F. Knitter

Gotta Serve Somebody

The second time I fled to San Francisco, I moved into a spacious first floor flat in a three flat Victorian on Divisadero between California and Pine.  The room my friends saved for me was a purple painted bedroom with a double bed comprised of cinder blocks supporting a sheet of plywood on which was placed a six inch thick foam mattress with mattress pad.  I shared the room with Jude.

Jude was a fair-skinned red-headed girl, seventeen years old, pretty, gravity defiant in that adolescent way, and just in town for a short time from the midwest where she had accidentally gotten