If God has something to tell you, s/he will tell it to you. As soon as a "messenger" gets in the mix, God's word gets interpreted and filtered through someone less-than-God. You're not getting it from the source. I really don't believe God is telling George Bush to lead a bloody holy war in Iraq. It's probably just Cheney on the baby monitor during Dubya's nappy time.Or maybe God's message is along the lines of "bring peace to the world" and George interprets that as "kill everybody and everything." Then there will be peace! Thunder is God's way of saying "D'oh!"
I'm not anti-religion, per se. It's just when people think their religion is more right than others and that their God can beat up someone else's God, that we get into trouble. Big trouble. Like wars and stuff. Organized religions seem to feel they have a manifest destiny to spread their way of NOT thinking to the whole world.
What the extreme fundamental right of any religion forgets is that they were told a story and they chose to believe it. Christians, Catholics, Muslims, Jews, etc., all have their own beautiful story full of courage and miracles. But it's still a story and it loses it's purity every time it's translated into a different language or modern vernacular. It's all open to interpretation and you can find pretty much whatever you want to find to support whatever closed-minded ideas you want to promote.
Spirituality is a being open to God and being in touch with nature and the universe. Spiritual is too often separate from religious, although it is available to everyone. Even atheists.
Here's a lovely quote from The Story of B by Daniel Quinn...
"Nothing in the community lives in isolation from the rest, not even the queens of social insects. Nothing lives only in itself, needing nothing from the community. Nothing lives only for itself, owing nothing to the community. Nothing is untouchable or untouched. Every life is on loan from the community from birth and without fail is paid back to the community in death. The community is a web of life, and every strand of the web is a path to all the other strands. Nothing is exempt or excused. Nothing is special. Nothing lives on a strand by itself, unconnected to the rest. ...Nothing is wasted, not a drop of water or a molecule of protein- or the egg of a fly. This is the sweetness and the miracle of it all... Everything that lives is food for another. Everything that feeds is ultimately itself fed upon or in death returns its substance to the community."
Your life is on loan. You never know when your promissory note will be due. Believe in whatever story you want to believe in, but we are all connected and we don't all need to be of the same religion to love and respect each other. We don't all need to be going to the same Sunday potluck and rummage sale for the world to finally be all right. We can connect with what we have in common. There's room for everyone and, as long as you're not sacrificing animals or virgins, any religion.
Except for the Methodists. Those shifty assholes really need to be kept in check.
THE BS NEWS QUIZ OF THE DAY
Yesterday, I asked...
"The New York Times newspaper is cutting costs by doing what?"
33% answered "Using larger print, resulting in fewer words." No, that's what I did to pad term papers in college.17% of you picked "Eliminating color pictures and ink." Nope-a-rooney.
The most popular answer with 50% was "Reselling day old papers to pet stores." Nope. Animals and humans may continue to deposit their "opinions" onto the news for free.
No one picked the correct answer which was "Reducing the size of their pages."
According to Editor & Publisher, the NYT has reduced the width or their pages by an inch and a half to cut expenses. Their new motto? "All the news that's fit to shrink."
