Double Visioned

An idea whose time is way overdue

2009-12-19T16:46:00.000-08:00

2009-12-18T19:49:00.000-08:00

Do, or do not. There is no 'try.'
- Jedi Master Yoda

Coming Out of the Other Closet

2009-12-09T18:35:00.000-08:00

My god, My god, Why have you forsaken me?
- Jesus, in Matthew 27:47

My admiration for the holy man of Nazareth often mixes with dry cynicism when it comes to the god of the Bible. I am today certain that Jesus, if he did live, must have flirted with atheism at some point, and I say this based on the shocking comments that he made in John 8:44 where he called the god of the Jews 'the devil', 'father of lies' and 'a murderer'.

In a society where women were stoned to death on the streets by religious murderers, to come out atheist must have been unthinkable, and these thoughts must have produced a huge inner battle which he settled by reinventing his idea of God. I'm afraid I don't have whatever it takes to pull that one off.

Let me first start by admitting that many good things have come from religion: that cannot be denied. However, the burden of homophobia is so heavy, even more than 1,600 years after Constantine enshrined anti-gay hatred in the Bible, the Muslim terrorist zeal is so hostile, and the anti-science creationist movement is so ludicrous, that one has to laugh at the clowns that religion so readily produces for our amusement and horror.

The reality of it is not so funny: our democratic and secular traditions, our educational system, our rights, our liberties and our safety are all being challenged by the ultra-religious, who have special protections, a special tax status, and who alone call it their privilege to reject gays and to be bigots without there being, so they say, any moral reprehension to their bigotry.

There are literally thousands of reasons for my rant: I'll merely share a fraction of them. Moses inaugurates the tradition of terrorism in Exodus 32:26-29 by having 3,000 killed for not sharing his beliefs. Then, in those verses he praises the Levites for acting on his orders and killing their own brothers and neighbors.

Among the other violent incidents associated with this most despicable prophet, I can mention Numbers 15:32-36, where a man is found picking logs for a fire during a shabat and is brought before the totalitarian theocratic warlord Moses, who finds him guilty of the terrible crime of working during the shabat and has him stoned to death accordingly, acting of course not of his own accord but as the self-appointed personal ventriloquist of Jehovah. This is how people lived under Moses and his Law: people must have been utterly fear-ridden after witnessing this.

We may even excuse these savages from the Bronze Age, in view of the rudimentary levels of civilization that surrounded them, but today there are people whose lifestyles are not too different from that of Moses and his people. Moslems, with their obstinate, baseless theistic speculation, their marrying of little girls to old men, their frequent loyalty to absolutist regimes, and the violent vulgarity of their superstitions, are far more difficult to forgive today as we enter the Space Age. They are Moses' legacy in our day.

What's more, the incentives that Muhammad offered to his correligionaries in exchange for killing people of other religions were quite ignoble: he was well aware of what hid in the dark crevices of his soldiers' minds. The 72 virgins are not mentioned in the Qur'an but are in the hadith, and are generally considered a reliable tradition which is accepted by most Moslems. Perhaps tits and champaign are not too much to ask if you've been brain-washed, taunted and intimidated into giving your life in order to advance the cause of theocracy.

Then there's homophobia. I conjure up visions of mad priests chanting formulas in Latin while they cook gay men alive during the inquisition; the hate crimes commited by minors raised in hostile anti-gay homes; the peculiarly high rates of homelessness and suicide attempts among gay youth; and so many other voices that history (and modernity) silenced.

No one should be surprised that the homelessness and suicide attempt rates among gay youth are high: parents and churches convince children that if they're gay, they are not worthy of love, even of God's love, that God has destroyed entire mythical cities in his fury against gays, and that if they turn out to be gay they will never be accepted by their family and society. Anyone's spirit would be broken if left without even the ideological resources to survive homophobia.

I thought that as a Hare Krishna, I would be saved from turning into an atheist because here is a religion with strong theistic tendencies which is entirely divorced from the Abrahamic tradition and their vulgar pretensions. But the Guru, Prabhupad, was also homophobic, mysogynistic and he held many anti-science opinions.

In Vaishnava forums online, messages posted by dissidents often magically disappear, and one is told that one must never question one's Guru. I hate and profoundly distrust absolutist worldviews. I am a Westerner and I expect any religious tradition that I engage in to respect my intelligence: there is an unsurmountable wall for me to climb in this Guru-chela structure and relationship.

I love the Vaishnava faith, but I will not accept the inability to respectfully question a figure in authority and to openly disagree. Above all, I know that for many gay youth in India, their experience of Vaishnava homophobia is probably not too diferent from Christian homophobia in the West. Gays are expected to either lie about who they are or remain celibate: that is the official, cruel doctrine at ISKCON. I can not, in good conscience, legitimize a tradition that holds such an anti-gay policy.

Upon closer observation, I noticed that behind my attachment to Hindu theism, lied an elephant in the living room that I could no longer ignore: there is in our society a stigma against atheists, one of the most hated groups in our country, which is not only unfair but also rooted in the same ideologies that are challenging our precious, cherished traditions of secularism and democracy. Atheists, like gays, must come out of the closet.

It seems like the stigma is diminishing, thanks in part to 9/11 and a series of cultural changes, including the best sellers that followed it. Prominent among them is The God Delusion and other literary works, and there is what has been labeled 'the New Atheism' movement, which is mostly a reaction to recent events and developments in the Western World.

In view of all this I've had to ask myself: Why should I be held hostage by the same religious prejudices that I constantly criticize?

Many are atheists and won't admit it even to themselves. They're in the closet and in denial. In my case, for instance, for many years I entertained New Age ideas and sort of painted God in new colors. I redefined him to oblivion.

Many people say "I am spiritual, but not religious". They find this agreeable and easier for people to digest than to say they're not religious, or that they're atheists. But a theist who does not believe in a personal deity is not a theist: an energy field is not a personal God. We should not need to commit acts of self-sabotage and mental or rhetorical tricks of this kind. That, I believe, is infantile, dishonest and ridiculous.

I pulled together data on frequency of prayer from over 50 countries, and found that countries where people prayed more frequently had lower life expectancy and scored lower on the Peace Index. They also had higher infant mortality, homicide rates, and levels of corruption, and had more AIDS and more abortion. That's pretty conclusive.
- From the article Why some countries are more religious than others, by Tom Rees

The above cited article by blogger Tom Rees is quite interesting and worth reading. It's based, in part, on a previous study by Gregory S. Paul entitled Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies.

In learning about statistical data and the correlation between religiosity and societal health, levels of education and other hard data, one thing that stands out is that Scandinavian countries are the closest to what might be labeled a utopia here on Earth, and yet in Sweden, for instance, about 85 % of the population is atheistic. Time and again, when we quantify the violent crime statistics, the rates of abortion and other data, we find that, compared to other countries that are more religious, the Scandinavians are better off.

One interesting recent detail that is worth mentioning here, in line with my criticism of New Agey attemps at respectability through theism, was the conversation between Oprah and a group of Danish women during Oprah's visit to Denmark to figure out why they were the happiest people on Earth. She had a hard time believing that they were happy atheists, and even suggested that maybe they did believe in God, but they called it something else. It was all so foreign and unimaginable to her.

But yes, in countries like Finland they have unthinkable things like universal free education, even up to the university level, and universal medical coverage. Overall, Scandinavian countries not only have the lowest violent crime rates and the smallest prison populations but they also enjoy the highest levels of literacy on Earth: 100 %.

They do not exhibit the serious symptoms of dysfunction that the more religious countries exhibit, like the levels of violent crime, the levels of dysfunction and the prison populations that we have in the US, which is the most religious of all the developed countries.

Worse yet, rates of crime are higher in the more religious southern US, and the most religious ethnic group (African Americans) is also the one that exhibits the most symptoms of dysfunction and makes up an exageratedly disproportionate percentage of the prison population. The abundance of churches in the black communities may not be a sign of salvation but a symptom of dysfunction, a sign that people are trying to sedate themselves, that they're trying to evade their reality somehow. Perhaps it's culturally sanctioned psychotherapy. Whatever it is, surely there must be a healthier way because it has not really transformed the population that it serves according to its claims.

I also observe, time and again, that across the board the most religious countries often tend to be more hostile to democracy and human rights, and they tend to have the lowest educational performance. In the most extreme of religious societies, places ruled by superstition such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, the women are routinely denied access to an education, sometimes they can't even drive a car, gays are executed in public and so is anyone who cannot believe in Islam and is willing to admit it.

In Nigeria, which is one of the sorriest god-fearing societies in the world, members of two foreign religions that were brought there by colonial powers, islam and christianity, are constantly killing and attempting to destroy each other and there are recent news of a genocide of more than 1,000 children among the 15,000 who had been accused by Christian churces of witchcraft. Maybe they were autistic or epileptic?

In view of all the data and empirical evidence that is available to me, I have concluded that there is absolutely nothing wrong with being an atheist. I looked in the mirror recently and I had to admit that I had slowly and unexpectedly become an atheist. I could no longer honestly say that I believed in God and, although in honestly at the time it was not what I would have wanted, I was at peace with this and in fact I realized that I had been an atheist for quite some time.

It was probably the result of the 2008 election in California where gay marriage was voted out, because that's when I could no longer deny that as long as Christians (and Mormons) have political power, they will continue to attempt to destroy the reputations and even families of gays and that I was forever unable to trust Christians again even if they seemed friendly. They will always try to turn back time and take away our progress, if and when they have the chance. I have to admit that something died within me as I pondered this.

But I have to go still further back to September 11 of 2001. I started morphing into an atheist back then. I lost the ability to think of theism as inherently morally superior, as innocent and as wholesome as society had led me to believe it was. And in the end I lost the ability to believe that God was a real force outside of our imagination.

Innocence shares its cradle with ignorance. Ignorance is bliss, yes, but like fellow atheists have pointed out: should we envy the happiness of a drunk person? By coming out atheist what I am saying is that I do not want that old innocence anymore, and the ignorance that it arises with, that I am glad that I lost it and can be sober and honest about the nature of religion.

I want to continue to awaken, to see things as they are. I want to use Buddhist teachings and methods within a secularized, naturalist (meaning, non-supernatural) context in order to neutralize a bit of the cynicism that comes with being a grown up, er, an atheist :) because I've seen many ugly truths and I'm aware that that can be detrimental to one's character.

I prefer the freedom and freshness of naked reality without using religious illusions to escape. I prefer to not pay the high price we pay for the false hopes of religious beliefs. I boycott religions as a conscious consumer :) and I know that I have the strength it takes to move beyond false hopes because I have seen them for what they are.

Even the innocent and heartbroken Jesus, hanging from the cross, hesitated. Some people think theists have a softer heart than atheists, but atheism, for someone who has believed all this life, is also a moment of human vulnerability.

Not only that, but after he hesitated he said 'It is done', maybe resigning himself to the price that he had paid for wanting to defend the good name and the good reputation of a God that moments before didn't seem to be there. Few Christians are willing to try to contemplate those last few moments of realization in the life of their divinized cultural hero. Like Richard Dawkins, I too am an atheist for Jesus and I too think that Jesus would be for atheists if he lived today.

I am surprised by the fact that it has not been depressing but liberating to come out atheist. I am at peace and happy. If any one of my readers has considered seeing the world with the glasses of atheism, my advise is to not fear the cultural stigma. It isn't harder or easier to be an atheist. It's simply a more lucid, more honest, more sober way to live.

Junk Science Used to Justify "Kill the Gays bill"

2009-12-09T18:13:00.000-08:00

Humanlight

2009-11-27T14:15:00.000-08:00

As the holiday season approaches, people of different religions and cultures celebrate Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Pancha Ganapati or other alternatives. Humanlight is a secular, Humanist version of the late December festivities for non-religious people. Here is more on the holiday: http://humanlight.org/, and and there's an introductory video on youtube on the holiday also:

Biblical Family Values

2009-11-16T16:15:00.000-08:00

I'm repulsed by Christians who use the Bible to legitimize homophobia by claiming that the Bible teaches 'family values', which is one of the most absurd, insulting things I've ever heard. The Bible was written by a primitive people who stoned women to death on the streets for adultery and yet allowed men to have multiple wives, and who ordered the stoning to death of disobedient sons.

Jacob had multiple wives (chapter 30 of Genesis depicts how he had sex with his two wives and two slaves - these are the four mothers of the 12 tribal patriarchs of Israel), not to mention kings David and Salomon who had a harem with both women and eunuchs or transgendered women. There are girls getting their dad (Lot) drunk and having sex with him. There are brothers selling their little brother (Joseph) into slavery out of jealousy. Who would have a mind twisted enough to call these attrocities 'family values'? The Torah even gives us the price of a woman (50 silver coins, see Deuteronomy 22), should we decide we want to sell our sisters or daughters.

If by family values we mean 'heterosexual marriage', then we read accusations from Paul, who never met Jesus and did not share his values. He states in his letter to the Romans that the cause of homosexuality is ... idolatry. Like modern religious foes of gay rights, he does not feel that he has to provide evidence of this link that he claims to exist between homosexuality (or any form of sexuality for that matter) and idolatry. Today we know that no such link exists, in fact most gay people who are coming out today were raised in monotheistic traditions, and the 800 million practitioners of Hinduism, a polytheistic tradition, show no higher ratio of homosexuality than the rest of humanity.

Paul was evidently expressing the prejudices of Jews of his own generation, who believed that all gay men were temple prostitutes. However, his lies ended up in the Bible and have been repeated by ignorant and hateful homophobes and his fabrications have become 'Bible truth' by virtue of having been included among the Biblical texts and being mindlessly repeated over and over for centuries.

Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men.

- Romans 1:22-27

Further study of this text also reveals that Paul believed that it was GOD himself who turned idolaters gay, which would necessarily mean that gayness is not a choice, but a God-given condition, which he nonetheless labels as shameful although he believes it's God's will that gays be gay ...

But Sarah ... said to Abraham, "Get rid of that slave woman and her son, for that slave woman's son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac."

- Genesis 21:10

The events concerning Hagar and Ishmael, the true firstborn of Abraham, are also shocking from the perspective of true family values. The intrigue generated by Hagar having Abraham's child and the jealousy of his first wife Sarah led to the EXILE of Hagar and Ishmael into the desert, where they could have died from hunger, thirst, or even from a serpent or scorpion bite. A single woman and a child with no protection in the desert, in those days, was unthinkable.

The irresponsibility of Abraham, his treachery towards his own son, and his inability to say no to Sarah, do not in any way communicate family values to me. If my father, under the spell of the whispers of one of his wives, had cast me and my mom into the desert with the serpents, it would have taken me many years to forgive him, if I ever did forgive him. Patriarch Abraham was what we today would consider a deadbeat dad.

Regardless of how many times you repeat the mantra 'Biblical family values', that will not turn the Bible into a document that teaches family values. That is simply dishonest, particularly when you ponder the modern meaning of this notion that Christians conceive. The Bible does not even teach monogamy. It does not even teach heterosexuality as the only ideal, but the status of an 'eunuch' is promoted, a status which includes sexual minorities - and this not only in the teachings of Jesus, but even of Isaiah (chapter 56).

That eunuchs were not thought of as celibate is plain when we consider characters from history such as Bagoas, the 'favorite' of King Darius and, later, of Alexander the Great whose effeminate beauty was scandalous and world renouned. Eunuchs often entertained kings and soldiers returning from war with music and performances ... and with sex. The later notion that an eunuch was a celibate person, which became the common Christian conception of the eunuch, originates with none other than Paul.

Jesus himself did not favor marriage, much less heterosexual marriage, as an ideal, nor do we see him in any way putting out his energy protecting the 'nuclear family' like some Christians do today (clearly not in imitation of Christ). Said behavior is therefore, literally, unChristlike. Instead we see him flatly denying his family access to him when they came to see him saying that those who follow him are family to him. If he came to us today and did this, his message would be labeled as pro-gay propaganda by modern conservative Christians

In the book of Matthew he says: 'There are eunuchs who are born such ... it is better for these to not marry ... let him who can accept this, do so.' We see Jesus instead clearly defending the rights of sexual minorities to what in those days represented a non heterosexual lifestyle!

But then, WHAT IF the state had to recognize that monogamous heterosexual marriage is a Christian institution?

WHAT IF we concede that, even if we know it's a fallacy? What then becomes of marriage, being a religious institution, in a SECULAR society with SECULAR laws?

Having established the fallacy of calling our modern institution of marriage by the label "Christian", then that means that we have to deal with the modern conservative Christian insistence, based on openly mystical, supernatural and theological proclamations that are not shared by everyone in the country, that marriage is a religious, and furthermore Christian, institution.

If we concede that it is, then clearly the boundary between religions and the state was crossed when marriage became recognized by the state, and marriage should therefore be either abolished, or a comparable, but secular, separate institution needs to be put in place by the state so that Christian marriage can remain sacred and heterosexual for the Christians while the state is able to recognize only those people who enter either 'civil unions', 'contracts' or whatever the secular version of marriage ends up being named.

This idea has been proposed before and is making more sense to me now, as I realize that in Islam (and early Mormonism) polygamy is practiced, and since Muhammad their prophet practiced it, millions in the Muslim world would never dare transform that tradition. Muslim Marriage is between one man and up to four wives! That's how it was in Muhammad's time and that's how it will always be!

Not only that, but Muhammad's youngest wife was six, and then nine years old when she consummated the marriage with a 60 year old Muhammad. If marriage is to be considered a sacred and religious institution, then the state better respond with a modern alternative that is more rooted in our modern taste and sensibilities than in millenia-old Semitic traditions that are starting to become seriously dangerous to our democratic, secular, modern values as more Muslims bring their traditions with them into the Western world, and as Christians are beginning to feel that secularism is bad and that it is their place to dictate our secular laws and to turn the USA into a land where people fear their God.

By challenging the secular nature of our laws and imposing a religious model of marriage on everyone, religious or non-religious and of every denomination, what they are doing is in fact not only articulating a modern, superstition-based RELIGIOUS marriage but also killing secular marriage and leading us non-religious people to propose a new institution to replace it at the state level, one that is based not on the laws in Deuteronomy that appraise women at 50 silver coins but on the radical contemporary idea of equal relations between all men and women.

Where the Wild Things Are

2009-10-17T20:27:00.000-07:00

It was interesting to watch the movie Where the Wild Things Are ... just as news were flashing about a boy whom, they thought, had been taken away in a balloon by accident. The whole story was so outlandish! But it was the timing that I thought was interesting.

Joseph Campbell, the mentor of George Lucas and a lifelong mythology enthusiast, used to see linkages between random events and how they affected the collective psyche of humanity. He was heavily influenced by Carl Jung and his school of analytical psychology.

Joseph Campbell, being a mythographer, was naturally a great storyteller and it was very easy for him to weave meaning into things. One of the main Joseph Campbell stories that I remember was his story about the Earthrise pictures, that is, the pictures that were taken from the moon by the Apollo missions as they saw the Earth rising in the lunar sky.

He explained that this was an epiphany because throughout all of history humans have imagined their Gods as celestial objects. Astrology and mythology were linked intricately in the human psyche. The planets have the names of deities. Now the Earth, we confirmed, was a Goddess also. She was a majestuous heavenly object.

At around the same time as this picture started circulating, the Catholic Church announced that the dogma of the Assumption of Mary into heaven had been declared official doctrine of the Catholic Church and that Catholics had to adhere to this belief. Classical Greeks used similar imagery for their deified mortals. Campbell saw a connection between these two new feminine faces of Divinity and their new status, just as the feminist movement of the sixties and seventies was blossoming and changing human civilization forever. All of our assumptions about womanhood were about to be turned upside down.

According to the Jungian school, there is a collective psyche, and according to Joseph Campbell all of these symptoms in the culture indicated that something was stirring in the collective mind of humanity, something that was feminine, sublime, numinous and powerful, that it was awakening and that there would be no turning back.

I watched the movie Where the Wild Things Are with a friend the day it came out. To me, the movie dealt with child psychology and how children sometimes cope with stress by escaping into their imaginal realm.

But if I was to draw a link with the balloon incident (which took place, curiously, on the eve of the debut of the film) like Joseph Campbell did with the Earthrise and Assumption of Mary incidents, it seems to me like there is a new myth that is being born, an archetypal image that is being constellated in the collective psyche, of a child who was almost spirited away but returned, having gained wisdom or insight from the experience. It is a hero's journey dealing with the evolution of the puer aeternus, the eternal youth, in our culture.

The tendency of the puer aeternus is to be an idealist, to run away from responsibility and reality. I think of Peter Pan, of Michael Jackson, of men who never grew up. Now, I see that he experienced the running away but retains his groundedness. We do not have to fear losing him to the imaginal realm. He can discern the difference between imaginary and objective reality.

The writer of the book on which the movie Where the Wild Things Are is based mentions that the movie is made in such a way that it respects children. Looking at all the crazy things that are being done to children everywhere, from marriage of little girls to grown-ass men in the Muslim world, to the frequent gang-rape of girls in Sudan and South-Africa, child abuse by church and laity everywhere, and even slavery of children in sweatshops in China, India and elsewhere, I'd say that any advance in human rights for minors would be welcome.

It is the misery of the children that produces the need to escape reality, to go 'where the wild things are', and the incentive to never come back ... which ultimately produces dysfunction. If we alleviate said misery, we will find that children are better able to live happily and be wholesome and productive.

Hopefully these are all good omens.

Exodus 22:18 and the Women's Holocaust

2009-10-07T10:59:00.000-07:00

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
- Exodus 22:18

Jesus himself said that we 'should know them for their fruits'. I have at times turned this rhetoric around on Christians in my arguments with them and studied the fruits of their own scriptures and the people who wrote them. In addition to the order to commit genocide against gays in Leviticus, I believe that Exodus 22:18 is one of the thorniest verses in the whole Bible, in terms of its fruits.

The month of october always conjures up (for me, at least) Western society's collective memories of the dark ages and the inquisition, particularly the burning of witches, which is a very unpopular subject even today, and many people like to dismiss it saying that those were remote times, but I believe it's so important to keep it alive in our memory. Should our descendants dismiss the Jewish holocaust when the II World War seems remote enough?

More to the point: Why do we use the word holocaust when we refer to the Jewish tragedy during the II WW, but not when we refer to the inquisition? Clearly we do not want another mass extinction of a whole people, be they Jews or Gentiles. But it's no less obscene to think of what the church did to women during the feudal age, yet the rhetoric in the history books is absolutely dishonest when it comes to the genocide of women.

According to some estimates, up to 9 million people, 80% of whom were women, died during the inquisition. This may seem exagerated, but we should keep in mind that this happened over around 300 years, so many generations saw these events, many generations of children had to watch their mothers, aunts and grandmothers being burnt, and there were entire villages in France that were wiped out by the Christian church, including Trière where it is said that no one was left alive, and an adjacent village where only about two people survived, apparently due to the fact that they celebrated festivals that were considered Pagan.

The genocide of women should also be compared to the burning of the Library of Alexandria, except that their cultural treasures were intangible and oral knowledge. With those women, died an entire culture, customs died, traditional songs and fairy tales died, even kitchen recipes died, and the knowledge of how to use certain herbs and medicines. The same herbs that are today used by the pharmaceutical industry, were known by many of these women. A paranoid, murderous, neurotic clergy burnt all of this, and the momentum of thousands of years of European cultural history and infrastructure was halted when they mass murdered all those women. The cultural soul of Europe died, literally, to be replaced by something that was dictated by Christian priests.

The church was particularly worried about the midwives, who challenged their god's will when they tried to relieve the pain of giving birth, which was their god's particular curse upon the women in relatiation for Eve's transgression. They were also accused of propagating abortion and family planning practices ... some things never change.

What's worse, the burning of women was very lucrative for the church. Lawyers made money, people who worked for the legal machine of the inquisition had to be paid, and greed was often the main reason behind the accusation of witchcraft: all of the property of women who were massacred by the church became church property. This is why it so happens that many of the victims were widows: they had no one to protect them and many of them had inherited some property that the church wanted.

We're living in a post-colonial era and history should be told from a more honest perspective. October is the month when we're invaded by imagery of witches: it's plain wrong to forget the voices and the memory of the women who were categorized as witches in feudal Europe, and what those events mean. People were cooked alive due to greed, stupidity, intolerance and superstition. A huge lesson of History (or HERstory, in any case).

We shouldn't want the Jewish holocaust to be forgotten, but also we shouldn't want the holocaust of the women to be forgotten. It should be treated with the same level of solemnity as the Jewish holocaust. Hallowe'en should be reclaimed as an occassion to remember the ghosts of the female ancestors of Europe and their trials and tribulations. This should be a time to tell their story.

Amalia

2009-10-03T15:34:00.001-07:00

The song Amalia (No Quiere Ir Ebozo) (which translates roughly into 'Amalia don't wanna go husband' in 18th century Black Caribbean Spanish), might be based on a true story of an enslaved African woman who was sold or given to marry against her will and separated from her family. Her voice and story persist today in this sad, but beautiful, wailing bomba - which is an ecstatic Afro-diasporic musical genre from the Spanish Caribbean island of Borinquen.

In addition to the compassion that it awakens and the natural, organic flow of the song, I think one reason why I love this song so much is because history was told to us from the perspective of the conquerors. The conquered, often not even knowing how to read or write, had no other resource outside of their music, and so they danced their pain away. Amalia is a song which was preserved in this way: it is memory which is reproduced in the body of the bomba dancer. It is a dramatized, danced, intangible historical document. The ancestors dance and raise their voices, long forgotten, and tell history from their viewpoint through bomba, and now with the magic of the internet the whole world can hear them!

Amalia was popularized by salsa giant Willie Colón, then by legendary performer Héctor Lavoe. The version in this video is from William Cepeda, from one of the most well known bomba families in Puerto Rico.

One of my Favorite Christians

2009-09-29T12:56:00.000-07:00

The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbaric idea based on a primitive concept of God that must be dismissed.

- Liberal Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong

Mangalam (Tala Mantra)

2009-09-24T10:11:00.000-07:00

Mangalam, Music by Ravi Shankar

Peace on Earth,
Peace in the water,
Peace in the fire,
Peace in the air,
Peace for this planet,
Peace for the Sun,
Peace for the Moon,
Peace in the soul,
Peace in the body,
Peace in the mind,
Peace in the spirit,
Peace Everywhere Om!

Songbirds and Roosters

2009-09-21T11:10:00.000-07:00

... I'm here
so care for me
laugh with me
while I'm near smile just for a while
I'm here
so die with me
smile with me
while I'm near smile just for a while ...

- Robi Draco Rosa

R.I.P. Patrick Swayze (aka auntie Vida Bohème)

2009-09-15T09:40:00.001-07:00

... p to the r to the n to the cess ...

2009-09-03T11:17:00.000-07:00

Be a light unto yourself;
betake yourselves to no external refuge.
Hold fast to the Truth.
Look not for refuge to anyones besides yourselves.

- Buddha, shortly before dying

2009-09-03T11:10:00.000-07:00

When your mind is not leaning
it's none other than Whole Mind.

-Steve Hagen, in his book Buddhism Plain and Simple

2009-08-31T09:23:00.001-07:00

“Perhaps I myself am the enemy who must be loved.”

Carl Jung

A Contemplative Science

2009-08-28T20:29:00.001-07:00

What the world most needs at this moment is a means of convincing human beings to embrace the whole of the species as their moral community. For this we need to develop an utterly nonsectarian way of talking about the full spectrum of human experience and human aspiration. We need a discourse on ethics and spirituality that is every bit as unconstrained by dogma and cultural prejudice as the discourse of science is. What we need, in fact, is a contemplative science, a modern approach to exploring the furthest reaches of psychological well-being.

- Sam Harris

2009-08-26T18:53:00.001-07:00

I fight authority
Authority always wins

- John Cougar Mellencamp

Happiness

2009-08-16T13:12:00.000-07:00

Let us live most happily
free from hatred in the midst of the hateful;
let us remain free from hatred
in the midst of people who hate.

Let us live most happily
free from dis-ease in the midst of the diseased;
let us remain free from dis-ease
in the midst of dis-eased people.

Let us live most happily
free from restlessness in the midst of the restless;
let us remain free from restlessness
in the midst of restlessness.

Let us live most happily
possessing nothing;
let us feed on joy
like the radiant Gods.

- Teachings of Lord Buddha in Dhammapada 15:1-4

2009-08-10T18:17:00.000-07:00

Don't be afraid to be weak.
Don't be proud to be strong.
Just look into your heart,
my friend.
That will be the return to yourself,
the return to innocence.

- a song by Enigma

A cheerful heart is good medicine

2009-08-09T11:06:00.000-07:00

The recent article Feeling Stressed? Why You May Feel It in Your Gut, touched on a subject that I've been considering for many years, ever since I read that metaphysics teacher Connie Mendez mentioned in one of her books that ulcers and cancer in the stomach are oftentimes caused by a chronic history of strong, toxic, volatile emotions. The study appears to indicate that high stress levels increase the activity of pain receptors in the guts.

Later on I observed that, at least for one neighbor of mine who died of stomach cancer, the link was probably right on: she was a very unforgiving person, one who would always hold grudges even for apparently insignificant reasons. A history of negative emotions will probably generate serious stomach health issues.

Aboriginal, Hindu and Chinese systems of medicine resonate with this truth. The idea is that there is no real boundary between the spirit, the emotions, and the body and that all things affect each other within our body-mind complex. The healing system of accupunture is based on this understanding that all of our parts are connected in many, very subtle ways.

The Vedic medicinal system understands the chakras to be energy centers within the body which carry out all kinds of subtle functions in addition to those accepted by Western medicine. The stomach chakra in particular is considered to be the emotional plexus, which explains why emotional shocks produce knots in the stomach and the inability to eat. Humans are not just bone and flesh: our thoughts and emotions are things that move within our bodies and affect everything else, as the movie What The Bleep Do We Know so plainly explained in detail.

What this means is that, by LITERALLY listening to our guts, we are literally putting an ear to the ground of our emotional self. The stomach chakra is where the emotions dwell and make themselves known.

Presumably, a healthy tummy would also support a healthier emotional life. The culinary traditions that associate emotional states with foods and how they are prepared are not only popular in India, where food lovingly cooked for God is considered transcendental and known as prasadam (literally, God's mercy). In the West, we have also incorporated language into how we eat that reflects an intuitive understanding of the link between our states of mind and our food: the notion of 'comfort foods' comes to mind. Emotional eating is also linked to several very serious eating disorders such as bullemia and anorexia, which can claim human lives.

The wisdom tradition contains numerous passages linking health with states of consciousness:

A happy heart makes the face cheerful,
but heartache crushes the spirit.
Proverbs 15:13

A cheerful heart is good medicine,
but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.
- Proverbs 17:22

And, of course, aboriginal American spirituality speaks of God's grace as medicine and is a botanical, medicinal tradition very much concerned with natural physical and emotional health and its origins in Spirit. Like the wisdom tradition, aboriginals also link Spirit and states of consciousness with health.

Then there's the etymological origins of words like spirit (from Latin for breath, life-force). Right breathing is the foundation of the various yoga and zen meditation systems, the positive health effects of which are well documented.

In Latin, anima is another word for soul and it's linked to animosity, animation, animated, and with levels of energy and vitality in general. Shamans believe that sometimes sick people who lack vitality, do so because their soul has left them.

People who are habitually bad-tempered in colloquial Spanish are said to have a 'mal genio' (a bad spirit). People who are fed up and angry, in English, also speak of being 'sick of' a person or situation. Much more can be said of the shamanic therapeutic uses and origins of these notions. Suffice it to say that words evoke, and originate in, the depths of the human psyche and should be studied carefully: it is in these forests of unexplored rhetoric that our hidden thoughts, emotions and inner drama can be found.

Since Spirit and health go hand in hand, methods of stress relief, both religious and secular, should therefore be all considered medicinal and spiritual practices. Acts of laughter, of joy, social interaction between friends and family, forgiveness, creativity, exercise, all carry a kind of natural medicine, quite literally. They all support not just the emotional health, but the bodily health as well.

In addition, drinks and foods that lift the spirits, that act as mood boosters without harmful side effects, can safely be considered sacraments, because the boundary between nutrition and medicine is non existent in them.

In my religious tradition, we are told that we should ONLY eat prasadam. That is how important eating spiritualized food is to us.

2012 and Time

2009-08-07T10:47:00.000-07:00

I recently attended a cultural event in celebration of Mayan mythology and had the honor of having a friend find out my Mayan astrological sign. It was a very interesting experience, apparently much more complex than our traditional astrological system in the West. Many New Age circles are beginning to take notice of Mayan astrology and measurement of time due to the 2012 prophecies and the momentum that they're building.

Click here to find out your Mayan astrological sign.

2009-08-05T12:53:00.000-07:00

I AM ANOTHER YOU

- Mayan proverb

2009-07-21T10:24:00.000-07:00

The international meat industry generates roughly 18% of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions—even more than transportation—according to a report last year from the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization ... Global meat production is expected to double between 2001 and 2050. Given the amount of energy consumed raising, shipping and selling livestock, a 16-oz.T-bone is like a Hummer on a plate ... If you switch to vegetarianism, you can shrink your carbon footprint by up to 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide a year, according to research by the University of Chicago. Trading a standard car for a hybrid cuts only about one ton—and isn't as tasty.

From Skip the Steak, a Time Magazine article by Bryan Walsh

Jaya Radhe

2009-07-18T15:21:00.000-07:00

It is said that Lord Krishna enchants all the worlds, but He himself is enchanted and controlled by Radha's love. For Krishna cannot be understood through the Vedas, only through bhakti, pure loving devotion.

Srimati Radha-rani is the pleasure potency of the Lord and the embodiment of all the spiritual qualities that Sri Krishna is attracted to. Therefore, She is the perfect devotee, and in pleasing Her, we can easily please Sri Krishna.

Radha is therefore the Supreme Goddess. In fact She is so important in Krishna Consciousness, that She is always worshiped together with the Lord. The word 'Hare' in Hare Krishna refers to Her.

Please enjoy this bhajan 'Jaya Radha' by Jai Uttal.

Jaya Radhe Shyam!
All Glories to Srimati Radharani!