Jesus and the Stoners ?

Thank you, Lash. It means the world to me.

Joe(Imagine if Paul hadn't fallen off that horse)Nation

Hey Joe - do you personally know anyone who follows the tenets of any religion perfectly? Or any philosophy? Or for that matter, any credo?

My only point is that I know some christians and one muslim who try pretty hard to do that "love thy neighbor" thing - better than I can, anyway.

Perfection isn't the question, that's a distraction. If what you are asking is: have I known anyone who was true to themselves and others? The short answer is yes, more than several, but I tend to hang around with people who are like that: honest, loving, open and essentially non-judgmental.

Hmmmm. I've known, and know, some Jews, Orthodox and Reformed, a gob of Catholics, some deeply religious Muslims, some not so deep, a couple of scores of various Protestants including the regulation Episcopalians, Methodists and Presbyterians but also a scattering of Pentacostals, Baptists, Mennonites and, probably the happiest man I've ever known, who was a minister of a Texas First Christian Church.

I lived, danced and did a lot of yoga with some Sufis, sang a lot of righteous freedom songs, done days worth of chants on buses going to some poverty protest or freedom protest or peace protest where my face didn't look like anyone else's. I've eaten with Communists and Quakers, Jesuits and Jesus-freaks, sometimes at the same table, I've known honest men and women with millions of dollars and found the same amongst people who didn't have enough change under the front seat of the car to buy a gallon of gas to get home. Some of my best friends are atheists, some of my best friends go to Miracles workshops, I'm funny that way.

The best of them were, are, like you and me, snood, trying pretty hard to love our neighbors, but none of them so far have been anything so boring as perfect.

Joe(even Christ got pissed off at the fig tree )Nation

Joe Nation:



I probably wouldn't have asked what I did if you had just added the words 'some of' right before "his followers".

This popped into my head yesterday and I thought the distinction was important.

When I bring up the Beatitudes (and maybe Joe and others feel the same way), I'm not suggesting that Christians are missing the mark because they don't attain Jesus's ideal--I am saying they're DENYING what he said.

The Beatitudes (to me) was like his manifesto. You can hardly find 'him' in the churches and rhetoric of people who have co-opted his name. How can anyone read the man's words and think CP is something he would support?

Anyway.

Well, I am in agreement with the sentiment that a lot of Jesus' supposed followers aren't net assets for society. I guess my take on that is, what's the point of worrying about that.

Because it is far easier to deal with the actions of the merely anti-social in the extreme than those who believe their pathological acts are ordained by some variety of supernatural being.

Joe(there are layers of wackiness to unfold)Nation

I guess I wonder what you mean by "deal with" the actions...

As far as I can tell, people just get a lot of satisfaction from bitching about how f*cked up christians and other religious folk are.

What I mean is, I acknowledge they're f*cked up and historically so on a big proportion, but that's all anyone can really do - acknowledge it. Beyond that, it's an endless loop of arguments about whether such-and-such religion did more harm than good, or other similar wheel spinning that does nothing but perhaps give the person bitching the loudest a sense that they've by golly told them what for.

It's more than that, snood, besides the really bad stuff, like the President thinking that his mission in Iraq is a commission from the Almighty, there's the little crap.

Free parking in New York City on Sundays, why?
Because that's the day people go to church. (Unless you're one of my Orthodox Jewish neighbors or a Hindu or a Muslim or another member of the other several hundred sects living here. Tough nuggies on them.)
Oh, and six and half million dollars PER Sunday of revenue lost to the city.

Shemini Atzereth, Simchas Torah, Diwali, Idul-Adha : mean anything to you? Those are a few of the days, along with Solemnity of Ascension Day and Holy Thursday that alternate side street parking is suspended. Holy Cow! The streets don't get cleaned on those days. Why? Because somewhere some holy writ overwrites.

I know, small potatos, but such things give believers the courage to think of other things to influence, like stem cell research, like a woman's right to her own body, like the whole movement to put creationism in the schools and the opposition to research in cloning are amongst a few things off the top of my head.

We've been through this kind of thing throughout our history as a nation. Blood transfusions were opposed by the Catholic Church as well as the Klu Klux Klan. Vaccines and Fluoridation were and are still opposed by fundamentalist Protestant Churches. And the basic human right of two people in love to be married in the sight of their community is being fought tooth and nail by persons holding up Bibles.

The same Bibles the Puritans and Pilgrims held up as they placed the heads of Indian sachems on the posts of Plymouth Colony and marched their other captives unto slave ships bound for the Caribbean.
The same Bibles as were held up to greet the slave ships from Africa.
The same Bibles which were used to lock this nation into slavery for two hundred years.
The same Bibles that were used after the Civil War to separate black from white, in schools, in hospitals, in parks, in neighborhoods and in our Armed Forces.

I noted, and really enjoyed, your piece on your reading(s) the autobiography of Malcolm X. He certainly saw the damage caused, but even he was lost for a long time as he tried to listen to what another God was trying to tell him to do. It wasn't until he was in Africa and listened to his own heart that he understood humankind.

Joe(and the delusions were gone)Nation

Well...he kept his faith in God.

Yes, he did, but had he lived who knows what other growth might have come?

Joe(There's a leonard cohen song waiting to be sung)nation

This is the supreme point.

How could he have changed so incredibly radically if he had the same faith in the same God?

What changed?

I guess I can explain my feelings like this: Imagine people started following you around, listening to your philosophy, your political opinions... And you were asked to speak all over the country... And you became intensely popular and beloved. After you died, people tried to remember the stuff you said and wrote books about you and your life.

And a couple of centuries later, the snoodism movement was synonymous with child abuse. Or Snood became the patron saint of stealing from the poor,...or was adopted as the name of the Homosexual Party, where they took a few words you's said a couple of thousand years ago and twisted it to make it appear you were all about homosexuality.

When a true and loyal lover and student of snood challenged them to find your words approving of these decidedly un-snoodlike activities, they ignored your actual words and recorded actions and insisted on perpetuating lies about you for their own disgusting, nefarious purposes.

Damn. I'm pissed at the Christians again.

Wait, I haven't read past "the snoodism movement" yet....

I wanted to be a snoodist, but I chill easily. Wait. I may have made an error in translation.

===

The Passover
So, one day Jesus finishs preaching amongst the creatures on one of the fartherest arms of the universe, urging them to sell all their gahoodies and snood one another, when He decides to take a trip back to that little blue planet, the third one from the yellowish sun on the edge of the Milky Way.
He arrives just as that sun is making it's appearance over his old haunts near Jerusalem. He finds He cannot walk on the road to Bethlehem, it's blocked by the Israeli's new wall. He is stopped and searched every time He enters a store or comes near a market.

He looks the same as did those short 2,000 years ago, and a lot of people are dressed just like Him, however, no one seems to have the slightest idea who or what He is. When He announces to a small crowd that He has returned from His Heavenly Father, He is relieved that the authorities are called. They soon arrive and He is taken to see a mental health expert who tells Him that a lot of people, especially young men like Himself, think that they are the returned Messiah. He is told to rest at his hotel and given a small bottle of pinkish pills.

He is not surprised by what he finds, it's really difficult to surprise an omniscient being, but He is curious as to how humans managed to arrive at their present state. He refreshs Himself, a deity thing, meaning that He takes a half a milli-second to review the contents of all the minds and souls that exist or have ever existed since His last passover.

Joe(you finish the next three paragraphs)Nation

We all three (O'Bill, Lash and I) have in common respect for what Jesus purportedly said and did.

The difference I see here is in our approaches to discussing the harm "religionists" have done. To different degrees Lash and O'Bill appear to believe that constancy in the awareness and criticism of the worldwide and historical actions of religionists is important. To me (all due respect) but that just boils down to agitating hostility, and not much else.

I think that Lash's attitude toward christians, for example, would (say in a meeting of community leaders) preclude her from seeing the good or acknowledging the reasonableness in anything they say. In such a situation, her hostility would be counterproductive. At some point, pointing out the differences becomes moot, and disagreeing without being disagreeable to work toward common cause is all there is.

I acknowledge reasonableness when I perceive it.

I am up with that.

Lash, sorry to hear "your attitude would preclude you from seeing the good."

Joe(what was that saying about judging again?)Nation

<shrugs innocently>

snood

Were Malcolm, Martin and Martin Luther just "agitating hostility...?"

and


Hey, snood.

Have you thought about this? Interested in your answer.