Thursday, October 30, 2008
Multimedia message
Alongside old clothes and shoes
Progress makes new trash
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Vote No on 8: Armageddon?
Apparently, somebody has placed a "No on Prop 8" sign at the city of Megiddo in Israel, the supposed site of Armageddon. This is a response to the fact that there are Christians from all over the United States pouring their money and effort into a "Yes on Prop 8" campaign in California, and some of them are saying that the right to same sex marriage is a cultural armageddon. The actual wording of California Proposition 8 includes these exact words: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."
i rarely use caps, but feel the need to press the Caps Lock key today... WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE??? WHY DO THEY FEEL ENTITLED TO CALL THEMSELVES CHRISTIANS AT ALL?? NOT IN MY BACKYARD, NOT IN MY STATE, AND NOT ON MY PLANET. Christians are supposed to be intelligent, thoughtful, and according to Jesus' one big command, they are supposed to love their neighbor. Is denying rights to your neighbors some new way of expressing your love for them?
What does it take to see that this proposition is simply denying rights to a certain minority of people? Why would somebody see fit to act out a hurtful ideology against a group of mostly kind and loving people in the name of CHRIST? That is just the worst thing imaginable. I suppose this could be explained by some convoluted logic which ties same-sex love to sin, and cares that people don't go to hell when they die, and therefore a measure like this keeps them safe from sinning. But that neglects the fact that being disallowed to love freely is a real form of hell for any people while they're alive.
Further, in addition to the fact that this effort is trying to limit rights for people, it is also EXTREMELY IMMORAL to be devoting energy to something like this when there are AMAZINGLY LARGE AND SERIOUS PROBLEMS GOING ON IN THE WORLD WITHOUT HAVING TO GRANDSTAND AGAINST SOMETHING LIKE THIS. When this is all said and done, this will be seen akin to tilting at windmills in the middle of a hurricane. A genuine fools' errand, and there are millions of American sucked into doing it through religious ideology.
IMO, it's about time for the rest of humanity to come around to a more quaker way of thinking.
It looks like I'm going to be spending my birthday working against this effort, and perhaps even performing a wedding.
To those who are so concerned about gay marriage that they are devoting this much time and effort into preventing it, I'll say simply that my prayers are with you, but I will not stand with you, and your effort will fail because it is unloving and against what Christ wants for the world.
lyrics: "There's more to love than boy meets girl." - Communards
colors: Solid Rainbow.
mood: Exasperated, yet hopeful.
chant/prayer/mantra: May there be world community one day, with an overflowing amount of love, where no love is denied. Amen.
pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel
i rarely use caps, but feel the need to press the Caps Lock key today... WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE??? WHY DO THEY FEEL ENTITLED TO CALL THEMSELVES CHRISTIANS AT ALL?? NOT IN MY BACKYARD, NOT IN MY STATE, AND NOT ON MY PLANET. Christians are supposed to be intelligent, thoughtful, and according to Jesus' one big command, they are supposed to love their neighbor. Is denying rights to your neighbors some new way of expressing your love for them?
What does it take to see that this proposition is simply denying rights to a certain minority of people? Why would somebody see fit to act out a hurtful ideology against a group of mostly kind and loving people in the name of CHRIST? That is just the worst thing imaginable. I suppose this could be explained by some convoluted logic which ties same-sex love to sin, and cares that people don't go to hell when they die, and therefore a measure like this keeps them safe from sinning. But that neglects the fact that being disallowed to love freely is a real form of hell for any people while they're alive.
Further, in addition to the fact that this effort is trying to limit rights for people, it is also EXTREMELY IMMORAL to be devoting energy to something like this when there are AMAZINGLY LARGE AND SERIOUS PROBLEMS GOING ON IN THE WORLD WITHOUT HAVING TO GRANDSTAND AGAINST SOMETHING LIKE THIS. When this is all said and done, this will be seen akin to tilting at windmills in the middle of a hurricane. A genuine fools' errand, and there are millions of American sucked into doing it through religious ideology.
IMO, it's about time for the rest of humanity to come around to a more quaker way of thinking.
It looks like I'm going to be spending my birthday working against this effort, and perhaps even performing a wedding.
To those who are so concerned about gay marriage that they are devoting this much time and effort into preventing it, I'll say simply that my prayers are with you, but I will not stand with you, and your effort will fail because it is unloving and against what Christ wants for the world.
lyrics: "There's more to love than boy meets girl." - Communards
colors: Solid Rainbow.
mood: Exasperated, yet hopeful.
chant/prayer/mantra: May there be world community one day, with an overflowing amount of love, where no love is denied. Amen.
pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel
Labels: anti-oppression, Christianity, environment, equal rights, LGBT, renewable energy
Thursday, October 23, 2008
the current economic crisis laid out in clear terms
Oh my. This article on the demise of our monetary system by visionary writer Charles Eisenstein is a goldmine of cogent sanity. It tells the story so clearly, it is almost unethical to provide a link to it. But according to whose ethic?
I hope all my friends get a chance to read it. I'll comment more on this article later.
"In the face of the impending crisis, people often ask what they can do to protect themselves. "Buy gold? Stockpile canned goods? Build a fortified compound in a remote area? What should I do?" I would like to suggest a different kind of question: "What is the most beautiful thing I can do?" You see, the gathering crisis presents a tremendous opportunity. Deflation, the destruction of money, is only a categorical evil if the creation of money is a categorical good."
"In the meantime, anything we do to protect some natural or social resource from conversion into money will both hasten the collapse and mitigate its severity. Any forest you save from development, any road you stop, any cooperative playgroup you establish; anyone you teach to heal themselves, or to build their own house, cook their own food, make their own clothes; any wealth you create or add to the public domain; anything you render off-limits to the world-devouring machine, will help shorten the Machine's lifespan. Think of it this way: if you already do not depend on money for some portion of life's necessities and pleasures, then the collapse of money will pose much less of a harsh transition for you. The same applies to the social level. Any network or community or social institution that is not a vehicle for the conversion of life into money will sustain and enrich life after money."
Here's another good article from realitysandwich.com, talking about the end of our current global economic system. This is some serious stuff.
lyrics: My dog is running in her dreams. I know, 'cause she's kicking her feet. I've been having dreams about earthquakes, and doves, and things.
colors: the color of war is the color of blood is the color of money. money, money, money, money. oink, oink, oink, oink. -god bullies, off of some song from the album war on everybody.
mood: stressed out and procrastinating
chant/prayer/mantra: a deep prayer for a transition through the coming crisis.
pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel
I hope all my friends get a chance to read it. I'll comment more on this article later.
"In the face of the impending crisis, people often ask what they can do to protect themselves. "Buy gold? Stockpile canned goods? Build a fortified compound in a remote area? What should I do?" I would like to suggest a different kind of question: "What is the most beautiful thing I can do?" You see, the gathering crisis presents a tremendous opportunity. Deflation, the destruction of money, is only a categorical evil if the creation of money is a categorical good."
"In the meantime, anything we do to protect some natural or social resource from conversion into money will both hasten the collapse and mitigate its severity. Any forest you save from development, any road you stop, any cooperative playgroup you establish; anyone you teach to heal themselves, or to build their own house, cook their own food, make their own clothes; any wealth you create or add to the public domain; anything you render off-limits to the world-devouring machine, will help shorten the Machine's lifespan. Think of it this way: if you already do not depend on money for some portion of life's necessities and pleasures, then the collapse of money will pose much less of a harsh transition for you. The same applies to the social level. Any network or community or social institution that is not a vehicle for the conversion of life into money will sustain and enrich life after money."
Here's another good article from realitysandwich.com, talking about the end of our current global economic system. This is some serious stuff.
lyrics: My dog is running in her dreams. I know, 'cause she's kicking her feet. I've been having dreams about earthquakes, and doves, and things.
colors: the color of war is the color of blood is the color of money. money, money, money, money. oink, oink, oink, oink. -god bullies, off of some song from the album war on everybody.
mood: stressed out and procrastinating
chant/prayer/mantra: a deep prayer for a transition through the coming crisis.
pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel
Labels: Capitalism, environment, paradigm shift, pax hominibus/bright shiny future
Sunday, October 19, 2008
the problem is leaving: a tarot reading today
.
hi everybody,
i just did a tarot reading to suss out the haps for a new online church i am considering initiating.
the site will be called xcollective.org (unfortunately, at present there's somebody already squatting on (or planning for) it a little. perhaps we have common cause. they have a nice logo.)
the tagline on the top of the front page will read:
"say hello to your new online church community.
check in weekly for new songs, new services, new missions, new fun."
it will begin with services composed of readings, songs and dog-walk sermons by me, and in time will include works from my friends, and eventually any members of the site with an egalitarian high-renown.
$10/month, applications for waivers accepted
the site will also have a forum available for peer-mentoring. this will be a new venture of peer ministry. i am hoping to have it user-moderated in some way akin to slashdot. somebody writes in and says "hey, i have a problem," or "hey, i need a clarification," or "hey, i want to start up a project." then others reply to them either with offers of advice, or of assistance. based on the questions and answers, certain readers (selected at random, upon login) will be able to vote responses up or down. then those whose responses are voted up (based on the awesomeness of their questions, answers, or projects) will earn a certain amount of renown (a measure of moral virtue and brilliance).
and the there will be a portion of the site that will help us to have enough economic fuel to energize the effort. it will read:
say hello to t-shirts, to soup kitchens, sweatshirts, knitted blue mittens, shorts, hats, jackets, solar power, carbon offsets, and more. paper clip triangles!! (that last one i will expand upon in another post/sermon.)
okay so at the top of this post is the tarot reading i did this evening, using the Tarot of Dreams deck and the Orphalese Tarot program, and a custom reading I designed myself. It has a lot of cards, but the reading's story-form fits together nicely (as does the story of this specific reading). I'll let the cards and the explanations in the boxes tell the story. the subject of the reading is the effort surrounding xcollective.org.
and then i had a little revelation, and a cause for hope and joy.
there is a problem that has been plaguing the world. we are beginning to identify it
and soon, by the grace of the one who set fire to the sun, we will vanquish it. the problem will either leave or die or be reformed into the solution.
this problem is the fallen state of humanity. how did we fall? we fell when we invented the possessive pronoun -- "mine," "yours," his," "hers," "ghers*, "its," even "ours." We fell when we applied it to stuff that we had no right to claim (resources outside our body, or our immediate needs, when we began to acquire and collect and accrue money and possessions, rather than them being owned collectively by the community or the earth). and we fell when we chose to value the first person pronoun more than the first-person plural pronoun ("I" is more important than "we").
this fallen state (the same such as st. paul mentions in romans 8) is our frustration, experienced by us as living within a futile system, rife with external impositions and exploitation dividing humans against humans, using tools such as malleable currency and usury/interest in an untethered growth market economy, corporations, media, adversarial individualism, adversarial nationalism, adversarial corporatism, manifest destiny, go-forth-and-conquer attitudes, slavery, sexism, racism, classism, prisons, and a system of law designed according to the values of the dominant groups within humanity. it hurts because we know the glory is coming and seek a way to co-create it, and yet the sentience on this planet is divided into more than one will. yet multiple adversarial will ought not be the case, as it's a waste of resources.
one day soon on this planet, we will have a growing and infectious community of universalist utilitarian egalitarians, with a strong distributive justice ethic. (comprised from among a group of xcollectivists, including: all sorts of christians, all sorts of muslims and sufis, jews, buddhists, hindus, jains, sikhs, humanists, daoists, confucianists, pagans, neopagans, zoroastrians, rastafarians, pastafarians, olympians, angels, children of god, children of the earth, and existentialists -- plus many more yet to be named. even dadaists and people dressed as unicorns. this community will have the will to create, sponsor, and steward a set of values that are in league with the needs of the previously-mentioned glory.
apocatastasis is soon to be upon us.
*gher is a gender-neutral possessive pronoun, pronounced with a soft g, like the j in "frere jacques, frere jacques, dor mez-vous."
Lyrics: "Sent by the one who set fire to the Sun!" from Parable of the Light
Colors: Rainbow above the magician's head on the 1 card.
Prayer: No bosses, only peer-mentors and students. Everyone owns their own energy.
pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel
http://revjd.blogspot.com/
"Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence."
- Frank Zappa
"The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers."
-James Baldwin
i just did a tarot reading to suss out the haps for a new online church i am considering initiating.
the site will be called xcollective.org (unfortunately, at present there's somebody already squatting on (or planning for) it a little. perhaps we have common cause. they have a nice logo.)
the tagline on the top of the front page will read:
"say hello to your new online church community.
check in weekly for new songs, new services, new missions, new fun."
it will begin with services composed of readings, songs and dog-walk sermons by me, and in time will include works from my friends, and eventually any members of the site with an egalitarian high-renown.
$10/month, applications for waivers accepted
the site will also have a forum available for peer-mentoring. this will be a new venture of peer ministry. i am hoping to have it user-moderated in some way akin to slashdot. somebody writes in and says "hey, i have a problem," or "hey, i need a clarification," or "hey, i want to start up a project." then others reply to them either with offers of advice, or of assistance. based on the questions and answers, certain readers (selected at random, upon login) will be able to vote responses up or down. then those whose responses are voted up (based on the awesomeness of their questions, answers, or projects) will earn a certain amount of renown (a measure of moral virtue and brilliance).
and the there will be a portion of the site that will help us to have enough economic fuel to energize the effort. it will read:
say hello to t-shirts, to soup kitchens, sweatshirts, knitted blue mittens, shorts, hats, jackets, solar power, carbon offsets, and more. paper clip triangles!! (that last one i will expand upon in another post/sermon.)
okay so at the top of this post is the tarot reading i did this evening, using the Tarot of Dreams deck and the Orphalese Tarot program, and a custom reading I designed myself. It has a lot of cards, but the reading's story-form fits together nicely (as does the story of this specific reading). I'll let the cards and the explanations in the boxes tell the story. the subject of the reading is the effort surrounding xcollective.org.
and then i had a little revelation, and a cause for hope and joy.
there is a problem that has been plaguing the world. we are beginning to identify it
and soon, by the grace of the one who set fire to the sun, we will vanquish it. the problem will either leave or die or be reformed into the solution.
this problem is the fallen state of humanity. how did we fall? we fell when we invented the possessive pronoun -- "mine," "yours," his," "hers," "ghers*, "its," even "ours." We fell when we applied it to stuff that we had no right to claim (resources outside our body, or our immediate needs, when we began to acquire and collect and accrue money and possessions, rather than them being owned collectively by the community or the earth). and we fell when we chose to value the first person pronoun more than the first-person plural pronoun ("I" is more important than "we").
this fallen state (the same such as st. paul mentions in romans 8) is our frustration, experienced by us as living within a futile system, rife with external impositions and exploitation dividing humans against humans, using tools such as malleable currency and usury/interest in an untethered growth market economy, corporations, media, adversarial individualism, adversarial nationalism, adversarial corporatism, manifest destiny, go-forth-and-conquer attitudes, slavery, sexism, racism, classism, prisons, and a system of law designed according to the values of the dominant groups within humanity. it hurts because we know the glory is coming and seek a way to co-create it, and yet the sentience on this planet is divided into more than one will. yet multiple adversarial will ought not be the case, as it's a waste of resources.
one day soon on this planet, we will have a growing and infectious community of universalist utilitarian egalitarians, with a strong distributive justice ethic. (comprised from among a group of xcollectivists, including: all sorts of christians, all sorts of muslims and sufis, jews, buddhists, hindus, jains, sikhs, humanists, daoists, confucianists, pagans, neopagans, zoroastrians, rastafarians, pastafarians, olympians, angels, children of god, children of the earth, and existentialists -- plus many more yet to be named. even dadaists and people dressed as unicorns. this community will have the will to create, sponsor, and steward a set of values that are in league with the needs of the previously-mentioned glory.
apocatastasis is soon to be upon us.
*gher is a gender-neutral possessive pronoun, pronounced with a soft g, like the j in "frere jacques, frere jacques, dor mez-vous."
Lyrics: "Sent by the one who set fire to the Sun!" from Parable of the Light
Colors: Rainbow above the magician's head on the 1 card.
Prayer: No bosses, only peer-mentors and students. Everyone owns their own energy.
pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel
http://revjd.blogspot.com/
"Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence."
- Frank Zappa
"The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers."
-James Baldwin
Labels: art, Book of Romans, Capitalism, Christianity, equal rights, heaven on earth, oppression, paradigm shift, parousia, pax hominibus/bright shiny future, tarot
Friday, October 17, 2008
California Proposition 8: No
Hello Editor at the San Francisco Chronicle-
I am a heterosexual male seminarian. I have been happily married for nine years.
And I am saddened by Prop 8's intention to make the happiness of marriage an impossibility for certain people, based on the gender of the couple.
My faith tells me that our Creator loves everyone equally, and calls upon us to do likewise in the charge, "Love your neighbor."
To my heart, loving your neighbor means allowing them the same rights we all want for ourselves, including the right to love one another, and not be penalized for that love.
To seek to eliminate rights for one group of people is not morally just, and goes against the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness this country was founded on.
Therefore, I encourage readers to join me in voting No on Proposition 8 in November.
Joel *************
*****************
*****************
I am a heterosexual male seminarian. I have been happily married for nine years.
And I am saddened by Prop 8's intention to make the happiness of marriage an impossibility for certain people, based on the gender of the couple.
My faith tells me that our Creator loves everyone equally, and calls upon us to do likewise in the charge, "Love your neighbor."
To my heart, loving your neighbor means allowing them the same rights we all want for ourselves, including the right to love one another, and not be penalized for that love.
To seek to eliminate rights for one group of people is not morally just, and goes against the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness this country was founded on.
Therefore, I encourage readers to join me in voting No on Proposition 8 in November.
Joel *************
*****************
*****************
Monday, October 13, 2008
I approve of this video
An absurd interview with David Byrne circa the Stop Making Sense tour and live album.
pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel
pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel
Labels: music, sacred texts
