Gender and Sexuality

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week I’d like to share some of my own thoughts on God, emotion, and patriarchal thought with you all:
The richness of human emotions, the wealth of nuance and excitement that can be generated by human neediness, the depth of love that can be generated by human relationships — these magnificent aspects of reality are likely to be aspects of God as well. Why should God be any less wonderful than human beings? If one rejects the notions of perfection that come from Hellenistic and patriarchal thought, then one could easily see that attributing emotions, personality, feeling, and caring to the spiritual Being that permeates all of reality is not a put-down or a belittling, but a celebration in God of what we can and ought to honor in human beings. And if we recognize that a caring being is also a being that hurts, yearns and desires, then there is no reason to think we are belittling God when we see that S/He (as the unity of all being) is a yearning, desiring and sometimes hurting totality. It is only if we accept the male-dominated vision that perfection is that which has no needs or lacks and that God must be perfect in this sense that the Jewish conception of God becomes a scandal.

Christianity

Atheists are Beautiful: A Religious Person Defends Atheism

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Being an atheist in America means being less than human. I know from personal experience, not from being an atheist but from being raised Christian in a conservative Christian town and holding negative biases about atheists. Like many others I thought that a belief in God was the foundation of morality, that Christians were superior to others and that atheists were a threat to believers. I didn’t, however, reach this conclusion consciously after weighing the facts and examining the issue independently. But rather it was something so ingrained within the culture that it permeated the social conscience.

Politics & Society

Memorial Day

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The dead do not need us. We need them. We listen to their silent secrets and they tell us that there is no tribe, nation, race religion, class, ideology or identity in the world of the dead. They tell us to savor every moment, to eat slowly, to laugh too loud and too often, to taste the salt of our sweat and tears, to love deeply, madly, and truly because death is an awful finality.

Culture

Neil Innes: Pop Goes Your Culture

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All around the musical villageThe alarm-clock chased the vulture.The sands ran through the hourglass -Pop! goes your culture……………(old children’s song) “Good evening,” said Neil Innes, as he stepped out onto the Hughes’ Room stage last Thursday. “It’s wonderful to be.” He opened with “I’m the Urban Spaceman”, ended it after 30 seconds, smiled at the audience and said, “Thank you. That was a medley of my hit.”

Environment

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week’s spiritual wisdom is a passage entitled “The Cosmos and Revelation” from Islamic Spirituality: Foundations by philosopher and professor of Islamic studies Seyyid Hossein Nasr:

The revelation that comes from Him to Whom belong the heavens and the earth and all that is between them and below the earth also addresses itself to all these realms of the cosmic hierarchy as well as to man. The Quran is, in a sense, a Revelation unto the whole of creation, and one of its primary functions is to awaken in man an awareness of the Divine Presence in that other primordial revelation which is the created order itself. Primordial man saw the phenomena of nature in divinis, as the story of Adam in paradise reveals. Islam, in bestowing upon man access to this primordial nature and in addressing itself to the primordial man within every man, unveils once again the spiritual significance of nature and the ultimately theophanic character of the phenomena of the created order. It enables man to read once again the eternal message of Divine Wisdom written upon the pages of the cosmic text.

Politics & Society

How Spiritual Progressives Can Celebrate International Workers Day: Social Justice, Anarchists, and Stewart Acuff

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I once worked for a small greeting card company in Berkeley, piecework packing cards into plastic bags: $7 for a box filled with twelve-card bags. After a while, I became quite efficient and could fill almost two boxes in an hour. The owner, however, was outraged at what my hourly wage had become and moved to cut it. Clearly she had earlier decided she could afford $7 a box, but now, apparently, the idea of a mere worker getting a decent wage was more than she could stand. Disgusted and furious, I left as soon as I could find another job.

Earth-based Religions

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from a piece about Earth Day by Jeff Vogel, a respiratory therapist at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York:
Earth Day 2010

All living things — large, small, and in between — share in the precious gift of life on Earth. However, it is we humans, with our large brains enabling us to be self-consciously aware of this gift, that are the only creatures to celebrate Earth Day. As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, let us remember that this grand unifying perspective was made possible by one of our nation’s greatest gifts to the world, the first stunning photo of Earth from outer space taken during the Apollo moon missions. This awesome image of our beautifully round whole Earth, suspended in the vast blackness of space, may be humanity’s crowning achievement, the climax of our long collective urge to explore our surroundings. This new perspective of the Earth took our self consciousness to a whole new dimension.

Rethinking Religion

Agnostic but Spiritual? This is what I believe, anyway.

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“Agnostic” we understand as “not knowing”–usually referring to beliefs about God. “Spiritual” is more problematic. If I say I am a “spiritual agnostic” some people think I am claiming to be holier than thou, as if calling oneself a humanist meant one was a better human being than thou. These self descriptions are more about aspirations and outlook than achievements. What would a “spiritual agnostic” believe about the universe, suffering, or the meaning of life?

Earth-based Religions

Permaculture and Paganism (3) — An Interview with Starhawk

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Permaculture is a movement whose time has arrived. We’re all concerned about “global weirding” (climate change), and according to Starhawk, permaculture offers a set of simple solutions to this problem. In my last post (and the accompanying video), Starhawk talked specifically about how permaculture would sequester carbon in the soil. Carbon Farmers of America is a group that’s taking this issue seriously. Star explained that they’re funding research to discover the best practices for large-scale building of soil and paying farmers for every ton of carbon dioxide they capture in new topsoil by marketing carbon sinks to the public to fund the work.

General News

Psalm 30 – A Cycle of Renewal

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Psalm 30 beautifully captures the constant undulation of human emotion. As this psalm describes for us, these changes in our emotional state are a natural part of the human experience, both on the daily level (evening and morning) and the epochs and eras of our lives (times of prosperity and times of descent into ruin). This is true not only on an individual level, but collectively as well.