Category Archives: Religion

May 19, 2020 · 21:29

Unclear On The Concept

There are a fair number of things that push my buttons these days, and I seem to have a lot of buttons. I’m trying to “maintain an even strain,” particularly here (mainly because I fear that once I let those floodgates crack open there won’t be any way to shut them) but an image today has piqued my interest in a special way.

Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

I will attempt to be brief and to the point.

  1. I have nothing charitable or nice to say in any way, shape, or form about those who are ignoring the scientific facts with the current pandemic, particularly those who are actively campaigning to “open up” our cities and states.
  2. I’m a “recovering Catholic” who got a LOT of dogma rammed down my throat as a child. While I find theology a fascinating topic in general…
  3. …questioning Catholic dogma got me in a **LOT** of trouble about the time high school rolled around. (It’s tough having Mom trying to get me to be an altar boy multiple days a week when Father Murray is horrified by the fact that I said something like “What a crock of shit!” when he gave me a stock answer to my wise ass question about something that didn’t make any sense at all.)
  4. Points #2 and #3 being a given, just because I thought it was nonsense didn’t mean I wasn’t paying attention. (You never know, that point of doctrine from St. Bernard of Clairvaux in the 12th Century could show up on Final Jeopardy when you most need it!)

So when I see this particular picture, all of this dogmatic trivia coalesces in my brain (sort of like congealing grease mixed with yesterday’s leftover oatmeal, grey and lumpy) into the following thought:

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Filed under CoronaVirus, Moral Outrage, Religion

April 20, 2019 · 23:27

Easter Eve

We just got home from the family Passover Seder which, as a “recovering Catholic” especially, I find wonderful and thought provoking and fantastic.

It’s late.

It’s been a long day. It’s been a long week, and month, and year.

We found at least five rabbits on the front lawn. There might have been more – it was dark.

There had better be a shit ton of Easter eggs out there in the morning!

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Filed under Castle Willett, Religion

March 19, 2018 · 23:17

Cloudy Days

If you have a clear Western horizon with minimal clouds over the next few days, take a look just a few minutes to a half hour or 45 minutes after sunset. You’ll see the crescent moon, a little bigger and a little higher every night. You’ll see Venus, which will be REALLY BRIGHT. And if you’re lucky (not too lucky, it’s not THAT hard), to the upper right of Venus a ways you’ll see a much dimmer object – that’s Mercury.

We won’t be seeing that in Los Angeles. This was last night:

And this was tonight:

There’s a major storm moving in for the next several days, so maybe Thursday? Friday?

That’s the message from the Universe tonight. It doesn’t care what you wanted or were wishing for or were hoping for. It doesn’t care if any given time period was going to have something happening that you wanted to observe or participate in or enjoy. The Universe will cloud out your planetary conjunction or eclipse or rocket launch or baseball game or marathon or parade or plane flight or vacation and be totally oblivious and uncaring.

It us, the little animated meat sacks on this dust most in the cosmos who put meaning on it. We are the context.

Logically, or perhaps “theologically,” the Serenity Prayer has it correct in that there are three things we should ask for – serenity to accept things that can’t be changed, courage or strength to change the things that can, and wisdom to know which is which.

It’s one cloudy day when I start quoting prayers. As for this particular prayer, today I’m apparently zero for three.

There’s always tomorrow, even if it’s cloudy.

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Filed under Deep Thoughts, Photography, Religion, Weather

January 24, 2018 · 22:42

No Context For You – January 24th

Perception. It’s a funny thing.

I liked this picture on the phone, but couldn’t figure out to save my life what the snippet of writing was or any of the other forms. Maybe that’s why I liked it so much for this post.

Then, just before hitting “Publish,” one element goes “SNAP!” in my brain, recognizable despite the aspect change, color change, spin away from the horizontal. Like lightning dominoes the pieces fell into position.

The brain is weird.

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Filed under Paul, Photography, Religion

January 17, 2018 · 23:57

No Context For You – January 17th

 

 

Thought #1 re: everything – as we all know, “Don’t think! You can only hurt the team.”

Thought #2 re: Thought #1 – “What’s the team done for me recently?”

Thought #3 re: Thought #2 – “Yes! I hear you! The voices! The nuns, the nuns, will they never GET OUT OF MY HEAD!!”

Thought #4 re: Thought #3 – Sin! Ask for it by name! Accept no substitutes!

GOTO Thought #3 – Infinite Loop

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January 8, 2018 · 22:58

No Context For You – January 08th

I did not come down with a cold – yet. Or the flu, which has rampaged through our small office – yet.

Thought #1 re: that – Let’s assume my guardian angel is doing a good job of prioritizing and protecting me from the biggest threats so I’m staying healthy while all about me are spending days and weeks in misery. How bad must that flu be so that I need that sort of angelic protection instead of some divine intervention with Lottery numbers or something useful? Hey, I’ll take a week of the flu if I can get about $50M cash after taxes, thanks! Just an FYI…

Thought #2 re: that – How freakin’ EGOMANIACAL do humans have to be to believe that the Lord Supreme God of the Entire Universe would create an entire race of divine beings for no purpose other than to follow us around (invisibly, mind you) and protect us from evil and guide us toward being good people. We, the psychotic and only semi-intelligent meat puppets of planet Earth, working hard to annihilate ourselves and take the rest of the planet and the biosphere down with us, **WE** get our own personal set of divine slaves!

Thought #3 – wow, that got dark and escalated quickly!

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Filed under Paul, Photography, Religion

August 1, 2016 · 23:24

Groundless Faith vs Depressing Reality

Having been raised Catholic, complete with six years of nuns in full “penguin” regalia teaching Catholic school, I’m familiar with the concept of faith.

Having rejected Catholicism and all other religions, I’m familiar with the realization that reality often sucks.

Tonight, having exposed myself to my daily dose of muck, mire, stupidity, and hatred in the news, I saw a comment by someone who was taking solace in her faith in God and her belief that under divine guidance it would all work out for the best. (For the moment we’ll ignore the discrepancy between that common view of the deity’s job description and the theological necessity for free will.)

For a moment I was almost jealous. In her piety and faith she wasn’t pissed off, depressed, furious, outraged, or anxious. God would take care of it, all’s well, let’s have dinner!

Then I was wondering how people with that kind of faith can manage to hold on to it when their it turns out God might have been asleep at the wheel that day. I know that many people lose their faith at that time (hey, welcome back to reality, have some wet wipes, there’s a lot of shit being flung about out here!) but many, such as my mother, hold onto it no matter what.

So which is better, to face reality with all of its flaws and warts and at times like this being pummeled heavily about the head and shoulders with the fact that we’re a long, long way from that mythical Paradise? Or to sail through it all with our faith as the rock solid keel keeping us on course, only to end up spinning and capsizing when that keel breaks away?

I’ll stick with reality for a lot of reasons, but here’s a key one that comes to mind.

If you forfeit the ownership of the world’s slimier aspects, you also forfeit any credit for its moments of bliss. You can believe that God’s invisible angels are all around you, or you can find yourself to be an angel of our own making. This can be in the smallest things, the way you treat people from total strangers to heads of state, to the biggest things possible, such as how you choose to react in a crisis.

You also get to take ownership of the world’s rainbows appearing in a ray of brilliant sunshine slipping through a hole in a black  thunderhead, the sound of the thunder rolling across the landscape, and the brilliant stars that come in the clear night skies that follow.

Sometimes there is an awful lot of shit to wade through, but if you’re going to have faith, think about a Mozart symphony, a 9-11 first responder, your child’s first cry, and the feel of your lover’s hand in yours as you walk through a quiet forest – then have faith there there really will be a pony underneath all of that shit.

 

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Filed under Politics, Religion

February 11, 2016 · 22:59

By Their Bumper Stickers Shall You Know Them

I don’t think it’s ever a good thing to judge total strangers based on a first impression or some potentially superficial facet of their persona. But I’ll make an exception for bumper stickers. If you’re passionate enough about something to start advertising it as you drive around, you’re fair game for a snap judgement based on the advertising you choose for your vehicle.

Two cases in point from LA’s streets:

First, I’m one of those guys who, either for altruistic reasons or for neurotic reasons (or both), will flash my headlights at someone who’s driving at night with their headlights out. About 98% of the time it’s totally ignored – someone who’s clueless enough to be driving without headlights is also so brain dead or distracted behind the wheel that they simply don’t notice anyone flashing their lights. About 1% of the time it actually works – they get the signal, recognize it, go “Oh, shit, that’s me,” and turn on their lights.

The other 1% I ran into on my way home tonight. His custom plates were something like “GOD♡4EVR” and there were at least a half dozen bumper stickers on the back gate of the minivan asking if I had been saved, warning me that in case of the Rapture the car would be empty, and so on.

Coming up behind them I could see that the tail lights were dark, and as soon as we got to a darker stretch of the road it was obvious his headlights were off as well. The brake lights were working fine, so the problem was obvious. I flashed my lights, once, twice – nothing. We were coming up on a light that had just turned red, there was no one else around us, so I switched lanes and pulled up beside the guy. I rolled down my passenger window and honked, trying to get him to look over so I could tell him what’s wrong.

Nothing. I honked again. Still nothing. I tapped the horn a third time and let my car drift forward a few inches so that I could see the driver better. Isn’t the normal reaction to at least glance over and see who’s honking and why?

The look on this guy’s face said it all. It was a middle aged white guy, balding, collared dress shirt with no tie but buttoned all the way to the top. He was staring straight ahead and scared shitless. There was no way on Earth he was going to glance over and make eye contact.

MY GOD SOME LUNATIC ON THE ROAD HAS BEEN FLASHING HIS LIGHTS AT ME AND NOW HE’S HONKING AT ME IT’S PROBABLY ONE OF THOSE GANG INITIATION THINGS THAT I HEARD ABOUT ON HANNITY OR THE 700 CLUB AND IF I LOOK OVER THERE IT WILL BE A LOW-RIDER FULL OF GANG MEMBERS JUST WAITING TO BLOW ME AWAY SO WHATEVER YOU DO DON’T LOOK! DON’T LOOK! DON’T LOOK! DON’T LOOK!

I left him alone and gave him plenty of space, not honking or flashing any more. About a block later he turned off into a subdivision which, coincidentally, had a serious lack of street lighting. It was almost comical as I went by to see how he suddenly slammed on his brakes in the middle of the road and finally turned on his lights.

Do I think he suddenly said, “Ah ha! That’s what that guy was trying to tell me!” Or do I think he’s at home on some whackjob website perpetuating that stupid urban myth?

Second guy, while I was taking a quick walk around the block at lunch yesterday. A guy is trying to parallel park. He’s got a Prius. He’s trying to parallel park into a spot big enough to easily fit an Escalade. The key work is “trying.” Once, fails. Pulls out and tries again. Fails. Pulls out and backs up to try to pull forward-ish into the spot. Fails. Pulls back out and tries the parallel parking again. Fails and almost hits the car that’s already parked there.

I was going to stop and give him some hand signals or help (remember, altruistic and/or psychotic) when I saw the not one, not two, but three “Ted Cruz” bumper stickers.

For all I know he’s still trying to park that sucker.

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Filed under Freakin' Idiots!, Los Angeles, Politics, Religion

November 17, 2015 · 22:07

Too Much World News

I’ve always been one who wanted to keep abreast of the news, even when that meant the evening news with Huntley and Brinkley and the Chicago Tribune. Or the Springfield Times-Reporter and John Chancellor. That interest in current events and world news became an obsession when I was a midshipman at Annapolis.

One of the “learning exercises” that is used to train plebes is to have them memorize massive amounts of information, then regurgitate it on command of any upperclassman or officer. This is, of course, impossible by definition. It teaches many things, among them how to think under pressure, how to keep track of large amounts of data and multitask, how to fail and still keep going, how to prioritize your time, and so on.

One of the particular techniques used for this is the delivery of a morning newspaper every day, usually before dawn. If everyone else is up at 0600, plebes need to be up at 0500, scanning the paper for details and news that might be of particular interest to the upperclassmen in their company. These are the ones most likely to be grilling you at breakfast. You learn quickly that this one’s favorite baseball team is the Yankees, his favorite player is Lou Piniella, so you need to know the score of last night’s game, what Piniella did, where the Yankees are in the standings, who the winning and losing pitchers are, where they’re playing tonight, who tonight’s starting pitchers are… Tomorrow you get to learn that all over. And the next day.

Multiply that by twenty or thirty or more. This one hates baseball but loves NASCAR. This one is keeping track of the development of the F-14 Tomcat fighter. This one wants to know anything significant about Detroit, his home town. That one follows politics and economics and wants to know what the Dow Jones is doing. And so on, and on, and on.

One of the side effects of surviving this (sort of) is that you either never want to see a newspaper or news report again, or you become neurotically obsessed with the news. Since most of the young men and women there are extremely bright, well educated, in touch with the world, and being trained for leadership roles, it’s almost always the latter.

Flash forward forty years, where 1974’s stream of information has become more like Niagara Falls. The internet, social media, FaceBook, Twitter, hundreds of channels of cable television, multiple 24/7 news channels…

As you might imagine, this is like giving a heroin addict a lifetime supply and an IV the size of a garden hose.

This is not to say that I spend all of my waking hours trying to “drink from the fire hose” of information. I manage to stay quite functional, thank you very much. But I do have a much higher than average interest in the news and keeping track of almost anything that I find interesting, be it local, state wide, national, or international. In my case, this also extends to interplanetary, interstellar, and intergalactic, as you may have noticed from some of the previous 1,000+ posts.

One of the serious down sides of this that I’m seeing is the almost overwhelming depressing tone of so much of recent news. Whether the terrorist attacks in Beirut, Paris, and Egypt, or just about anything coming out of any of the US Presidential candidates, it’s difficult to stay optimistic and upbeat some days. Yet, there’s that phobia, that fear (thanks, Annapolis!) that something important might get missed or overlooked if I turn away.

I find more and more that I find myself reaching my limit and turning away. I don’t know if it’s me getting older, or weaker, or if the news itself has just gotten to be more horrible. Actually, I think it’s just an effect of the sheer volume of information and news available today, not necessarily the nature of it. If the internet and social media had been around in all of their glory during the American Civil War, World War II, or even Vietnam, I’m sure we would be seeing horrors that would match anything that Daesch is doing or Trump is spewing out of his ignorant face. (Sorry, did that come out loud?)

So now that we can see cell phone videos from inside the theater where more than 100 people died on Saturday – I don’t need to. Now that we can see videos of Jihad John decapitating innocent hostages – I don’t need to. Now that the Republican presidential candidates seem to be trying to constantly one-up each other to see who can be the most ignorant, reactionary, clueless, and tasteless – I don’t need to watch.

Many people are responding to the deluge of hate, anger, and terror by posting pictures of kittens or puppies. Or penguins. That may be a better option for me right now. I’ve got stories to write, another major adjustment in my life to make, and enough stress in my every day life to keep me on my toes. I don’t have to pile the troubles of the entire world on top of that.

I no longer care what Bob Guida’s favorite football team did today or what happened in Detroit. Google it yourself.

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Filed under Freakin' Idiots!, Not My Float, Politics, Religion

July 2, 2015 · 23:38

Flash Fiction: Do You Believe In Love?

This week’s Flash Fiction Challenge starts with a song title. We were to pick a random song title (from our iTunes or Apple Music or iHeart or Pandora or Spotify or by taking the entrails of an albino crow and throwing them on our vinyl collection – whatever!) and using that as a “seed” to tell our story. I got a Huey Lewis & The News song. As always, comments and constructive criticisms are appreciated.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN LOVE?

Slow fade to black, the sound of the paramedic getting fainter, the smell of gasoline and burning rubber wafting away.

A pinprick of light, a single star, getting extremely bright either very quickly or very slowly. No adrenaline left to fuel fear or panic, joy or jubilation. Only the base part of the primate brain clings to life, spawning curiosity.

Damn, my mother was right, there is an afterlife. I’m going to hate having her rub that in for all of eternity. Let’s just hope she was wrong about that vengeful God who was so hung up on judgement and salvation.

“Do you not believe in judgement or salvation?” There is no voice, just the thought which is both the approaching light and the receding darkness.

“Neither was high on my list. It all seemed arbitrary, no rules that made any sense.” I was never much for trying to bullshit my way through confrontations. This doesn’t seem to be a good place to start.

“Do you believe in rules?”

“Yeah, I guess I believe in natural rules. Physics, math, astronomy, chemistry – they all seemed to be bits of the big picture, a puzzle that added up to a complex universe.”

“Do you believe in a God?”

This might be one of the big questions. I wish I had studied for the quiz. “The Judeo-Christian guy? Garden of Eden, Noah, Moses, Jesus, all of that? Nope, sorry. Nothing personal if that’s you, but your plot has an awful lot of inconsistencies and loopholes.”

“Do you believe in a Devil?”

“No more than I did the rest of the dogma. I understand from a storytelling view you need your antagonist to offset your protagonist, yin and yang, black and white, good and evil, but when the God character isn’t believable, the Devil doesn’t do any better.”

“Do you believe in good and evil?”

“Sure, all you have to do is watch the news. It’s all over, in both the macroscopic and the microscopic views. Gandhi vs Hitler at one end of the spectrum, letting the guy merge into your lane or cutting him off at the other.”

“Do you believe that you were good or evil?”

Who knew that the afterlife would be a job interview where I have to name my best and worst qualities? “I think I was good, but I wouldn’t claim to be perfect. No one is purely one thing or the other, no matter which dimension or parameter you’re measuring. I think overall I was getting into the ninetieth percentile on good, but that doesn’t mean that I never went off on someone who didn’t deserve it or think non-monogamistic thoughts about Peggy in accounting.”

“Do you believe in absolutes?”

Ooh! Ooh! I know this one! “Nope, you screwed that up when you came up with quantum mechanics. I don’t know what you were smoking, but it must have been good. Which left us with nothing at all black or white, just infinite shades of grey. Not that that’s stopped people from making a good living out of selling a million varieties of dogma as each being the one, true word.”

“Do you believe in religion?”

Somehow I don’t think that being an altar boy fifty years ago is going to help me now. “Sorry, gave up on that a long time ago. I may or may not have tried to chat with you one-on-one every now and then, but if you were holding up your end of the conversation, I wasn’t able to hear it. But all of that fighting over who’s right and who’s wrong, who’s going to Heaven and who’s going to Hell? I had better things to waste time on.”

“Do you believe in Heaven and Hell?”

“No. Heaven as sold sounded boring, and as much as they wanted me to believe in eternal torment, that didn’t make any more sense than eternal bliss. Angels? Devils? Purgatory? Mortal sins? Venal sins? They had more rules than the IRS, and their rules made just about as much sense.”

“Do you believe in the afterlife?”

“No, but the longer this conversation goes on, the more likely I am to change my mind.”

“Do you believe in me?”

Is this what Eternity is, playing twenty questions raised to the Nth power? Hell is sounding better by the minute. “You haven’t said who you are. Conventional wisdom says you’re God, but I believe you’re just as likely to be a hallucination going on in my consciousness as the last oxygen gets used up and neurons start firing at random. If the Universe and this conversation go away and I become nothingness, I’ll never know, or care. So, answer a question for me. Who are you and what’s going on?”

“Do you believe in love?”

“Is that supposed to be an answer? Are you God, and are God and love one and the same? That’s a common part of many theologies and it’s one of the better points, but it doesn’t have anything more to back it up than any other article of faith. Who are you?”

“Do you believe in love?”

Okay. Maybe this is the really big question. Either that or there’s a glitch in the automated menu on the entrance exam to the afterlife. Just my luck.

“Yes, I believe in love.” Suddenly I’m overwhelmed with images of family, friends, pets, high school sweethearts, a flood of emotion. “It’s undefined, unmeasurable, ephemeral, completely outside of the rigorous scientific universe, yet it’s still the thing that keeps us moving from the day we’re born until the day we die.” Again I’m smothered by visions, flashes showing my wife, kids, mother, father, grandkids. “Love is still here with me, even beyond death. Yes, I believe in love.”

“Good. I love you.”

The light expands to fill the void, fill me, fill the universe.

Again, I am.

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