Are we voting for President or the Pope?
Thankfully I am not the only one who has had it with the religious tenor of this presidential election. Even the Democrat's are busy trying to prove each is more religious than the other. It's not only infantile and annoying, it's irrelevant. So you can begin to understand why I find this tid bit by Melissa McEwan over at AlterNet.org priceless:
Saying "I'm a Christian" or "I'm agnostic" or "I'm a Sikh" says nothing about a person's intrinsic character, despite what plenty of people who wear each of those labels (and others) would have us believe.
Can you say Priestly Pedophile, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, or Ted Haggard?
So it doesn't really matter a fig to me whether Romney believes Jesus and Satan are brothers; I still know he's a disingenuous, opportunistic, integrity-challenged dodo. That Huckabee is trying to make it an issue only confirms that he is a brainless, ethically-impaired gobshite, hiding behind his religion because he's got nothing else to offer.
Their respective religious beliefs didn't figure at all in those calculations.
Hallelujah, sister!
Woah.
Finished book two and no angels yet. There was a small tid bit about a heterosexual fellow discovering his feminine side, but that was about it.
In other news I was telling my sister that I wanted to go see The Golden Compass and she responded (with some passion) "No! Don't see that movie! [I'm thinking at this point she's joking.] It's an atheist agenda to destroy God! You do still believe in God, don't you?" Didn't see that coming. I had no response for her except to chuckle, which she didn't like much.
I'm not sure how unique it is to Mormonism, but the commonly held belief is if you leave the church eventually you will fall completely into wickedness and corruption. Hence the question asking after my belief. Probably checking that I'm not completely lost. Yes, I do believe in God, but probably not in a way she would find satisfactory.
You see, I don't believe in a jealous and petty god. I believe that heresy is man made because God doesn't need people to believe in him. I once told an atheist friend of mine, Tony, that my god doesn't mind that Tony doesn't believe in him. He doesn't throw tantrums when people don't do what he says. In fact, I'm not sure he has all that much to say. I don't think I believe in a god who is actively involved in the daily lives of individuals. I believe he is there and that human beings can reach out and tap into his power if they want, but if they don't that's fine too.
I call God "he" mostly out of habit. I'm not sure God has a sex and if he does I'd be stunned and disappointed if he conformed to our narrow and silly definitions of gender. While I'm open to the idea that what we understand to be God is really some pervasive, impersonal force that binds all life together (channeling Yoda now), I find it more comfortable to think about an actual being, an individual, but maybe that's just habit, too.
I read a Jewish proverb once that said something to the effect that God rejoices when his children out wit him. I like that.
All I could come up with for my sister was that I had been reading the books and that I was enjoying them, so no promises. I was kind of surprised I hadn't heard anything from the usual suspects condemning the movie, so I asked a friend of mine who's usually more on top of those kinds of things. Apparently the wingnuts are actually nervous because the movie takes a softer stance toward religion than the books. They're afraid people will like the movie and read the books. Because God, you know, hates it when people read something he hasn't written himself, or from which he hasn't at least got an endorsement deal.
Things that make you go hmmmm……
Have you ever stopped to wonder if all the evil in the world is the result of malcontent? Wanting what you don't have? Wanting something you can't have? Wanting more than what you already have? There's a line from The Matrix about the Merovingian. Neo asks, "What does he want?" and the Oracle replies, "He wants what every man with power wants. More power."
I guess I'm thinking mostly of the rich and powerful, 'cause it's one thing to be working three jobs to feed your family and to want to only have to work one. It's something else to want a third house in Tuscany cause your second house in Bordeaux isn't enough. I'm not sure where the cut off point is. There are certainly plenty in the middle class who are guilty, but does wanting a BMW instead of a Mazda count? I don't know. A Bentley instead of a Mercedes probably does.
A while back I read an article about the monstrous yachts the insanely wealthy own and some of them bitching because some harbors in the Caribbean aren't deep enough for their yachts to pull up pier side and they actually had to endure the inconvenience of taking a launch to shore. We're not talking about a rubber dinghy. The launches were full sized luxury speed boats. (When you're spending 15 million on a yacht what's a few hundred thousand more?) That definitely counts. I'm sorry, but there's some psychopathology there.
One would think wealth distribution would be relatively easy to get your head around, but it's always more complicated than it first appears. There are never easy answers, but one of the characters in The Golden Compass got me thinking along these lines. And they say fantasy is just fluff...
Oh, and if the movie does only cover the first book and it ends where the first book ends...people are going to be ticked.
Truth is stranger than fiction.
This is just unreal. A 20-year-old Saudi women and a male companion are repeatedly gang raped by seven men over the course of several hours and she is given 90 lashes because she shouldn't have been outside with a male not a relative in the first place. When her attorney appealed, the sentence was increased to 200 lashes and six months in jail. The rapists were sentenced to five to seven years in jail.
But it gets better.
A Saudi judge, Ibrahim bin Salih Al-Khudairi of the Riyadh Appeals Court, said in an interview published in Okaz newspaper on Nov. 27 that if he were a judge in the Qatif court that he would have sentenced her, her male companion and the seven rapists to death and that they should be lucky that they did not get the death penalty.
And how about this?
The Qatif girl said that she was photographed during the rape by one of the men using his cell phone camera. The photos were later entered as evidence in the trial, but the judges refused to consider them.
I'm speechless, but there is one bright spot in the story:
The husband of Qatif girl, who also refuses to be identified publicly, found out about his wife's rape only four months after it happened when the rapists were bragging about it in Qatif. He has not divorced her, which he could under Saudi law, instead choosing to help her fight her case in Saudi courts.