A couple years ago, a social psychologist composed this world map, showing the relative subjective happiness levels of countries around the globe.  A little more backstory is at link on the title.

Labels: personal bookmarks, theological sources

 Here is a man who lied and cheated his way into the presidency.  Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and then used that presidency to direct the taxpayers' money (including future taxes -- his administration borrowed HUGE sums of money, which will have to be paid back) into wars and into the pockets of the rich.  The list of atrocities commited upon the American people is almost too much to fathom.  (There are people good wholesome values and convictions who were so upset by his anti-American fearmongering, warmongering, and obstinacy -- and calling it "American" from the highest seat of power -- in the face of justice that they are pretty near suffering from PTSD.)

Labels: changing the prison paradigm, freedom versus freedom, globalism, politics, restorative justice, USA, war and peace

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It's about time the United States joined other developed countries in taking care of the health of its citizens REGARDLESS of their economic/employment status.

Labels: renewable energy, universal health care, USA

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Labels: anti-oppression, changing the prison paradigm, coursework, drug war, economics, oppression, personal bookmarks, politics, USA

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About a month ago, I went shopping at the local Grocery Outlet, and saw some sugar frosted flakes in a box on one of the aisles. It caught my attention because it had an interesting looking guy (a la Buzz Lightyear) on the front of the box. I turned the box around, and on the other side, it had the same picture, but with all Arabic writing on it, probably saying something like "Sugar Frosted Flakes."



So I bought it, and I just finished eating it (Yes, I still sometimes indulge in sugar cereal), and I took pictures of it, and then I went to visit their website, nmc.ae (beware the loud cheesy music that accompanies the intro video).

Labels: art, Capitalism, indifferent corporations, inter-faith, Islam, paradigm shift, theological sources, UAE

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The last year has shown us more about the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor than I can remember.

Here are a few things people have to say:

In this interview, Jared Diamond explains how the societies that do best are those where the well-being of the common people and the well-being of the rulers are tied together. In simplified terms, in the Netherlands, where everybody -- both rich and poor -- live below sea level, the rich ruling class made sure to have really good dikes. In New Orleans, where the ruling rich people live up on the hill, and the poor neighborhoods are flood risks, they sat around for 10 years without really upgrading the dikes.

From the comments, awesome quote #1: "Retention of power is the primary motivation of power." [Joel adds: it may be the case that it is, but is very much not the case that it should be.]

Awesome quote #2: "As far as the uber rich goes, until someone gives me a reason why I should care about people who don’t give a damn if people have food on their table, I’ll always be on the side that says ‘Fuck them’." [I would use non-expletives here, and would say that the reason to care about them is that they're humans. Horribly misguided and masked from the horrors, but human nonetheless. How far should we go in caring? That is another question entirely, partially answered by the quote below.]

Super-amazing quote #3:

"Somehow it’s always reasonable to hurt the poor as a way to make them shape up. Tougher bankruptcy laws, welfare reform, it’s all good social engineering.

But if you talk about hurting the rich to make them reform, it’s terrible. Taking money away from a guy with plenty more to spare is worse then taking money away from a person with none left.

You know, in the Aztec Empire, if you were a peasant convicted of public drunkenness, they’d shave your head to show people you’re an ass. If you were a noble convicted of public drunkenness, they’d just kill you, because they thought that people who were accorded great power and respect should behave themselves in a way befitting their station.

Here in America we’ve hit the point where the rich deserve to be rich because they are rich. They don’t have to be useful or polite or interesting or classy."

I'm with the equality now camp. I have a feeling that unfettered free-market capitalism will not give us that. Unfettered free-market capitalism gets us rich inheritees with diamond-encrusted dashboards, while other people are waking up on Christmas morning next to their shopping carts.

pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: anti-oppression, art, Capitalism, classism

Our country puts people in prison to work for pennies on the dollar. It helps the privately run prisons turn a profit. Please view this map, and article attached to it for more information.

I'm glad this issue is getting coverage by the New York Times.

Here's a quote from the article: "....an industry that detains half a million people a year, up from a few thousand just 15 years ago. The system operates without the rules that protect criminal suspects, and has grown up with little oversight, often in the backyards of communities desperate for any source of money and work."

pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: changing the prison paradigm, classism, racism, USA

Here is a quote for the ages:

Labels: Capitalism, economics, indifferent corporations, music, USA

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Labels: anti-oppression, classism, dream recollection, LGBT, racism

I have to go to bed soon, so can't develop this nearly as much as I'd like, but wonder how many readers of this little blog have had the opportunity to suffer freedom in the round. The few times where I've been in a situation where I had freedom to explore and do what I wanted were good for a while, but after an extended period, I needed to get a script, a plan, and some structure.

I came across an interesting article someone wrote about how the U.S. will move into tyranny, though I am hopeful that the Obama tyranny will be of a noticeably better variety than the Bush tyranny, with a different bent to it.

Essentially, according to Plato in his Republic, a true democracy breeds atomistic freedom units, individuals, and eventually that leads to the worship/glorification of freedom at the expense of communal actions. Then some people exercise their freedoms to develop tyrannies. That can take the form of corporate monopolies or government, or "free-market" advocates (I'm a fair-market advocate, BTW), NGO's, etc, that by way of having so much freedom that it turns to license, and it falls out of balance. I'm sure if you read the article, you'll get something different from it.

lyrics: "Bye bye baby. Baby bye bye" by the Bay City Rollers.

chant/prayer/mantra: which is most desirable: structured freedom, or freedomed structure? what do those look like?


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: freedom versus freedom, personal bookmarks, personal religion, politics

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I haven't listened to this one yet, but it's one for the bookmarks. You can download and listen to the .mp3 from here.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: audio, personal bookmarks, theology

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Last night, I was thinking about gravity-powered spaceship design*, and realized I need to brush up on my physics.

While doing a search for gravity, force, and energy, I came across this great site, called School-for-Champions, which seems to have lots of great info for first time learners, and long-rusty reviewers.

lyrics: "Build me a mountain, lord. High enough to climb to the top, so I can reach for you."
From Psyche-Out, by Meat Beat Manifesto

*The basics of the design are a massive (10 km long, 2 km wide) toroidal hull that operates like a jet engine, with gravity as its force The front side of the toroid is pulling, and there's a gravity gradient within the hole of the toroid that leads to the rear side of the toroid which is anti-gravity. The good thing about this design is that people will live inside the torus, along the spindle (toward the higher gravity end), so not only does the gravity propel the ship, it also provides a way for people and plants to know which end is "up." Once we figure out how gravity and electromagnetism are related, and put more research into magnetic levitation trains (and their offshoots), and learn more about how the Earth's sweep around the Sun is a form of gravitational curvature, we'll be well on our way toward this technology. Eventually, these drives will approach warp one, if not exceed it somehow. The other things we'll need to figure out are how to successfully design a closed biosystem, so that we take into account all of the matter and energy within the ship.

In the meantime, Earth is our ship, in this elliptical path, and we need to understand and appreciate this closed biosystem, so we can better maintain it.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: astrophysics, education, personal bookmarks, theological sources

Something has been on my mind for the last few years, and I'm finally doing a little research. Fortunately, it's easy.

I wanted to know how much water does it take to make certain products, so that I can make better decisions when choosing. Here are a few that I want to know:

1. How much to make a computer, desktop or laptop? Or even just how much to make a circuit board or chip...
2. How much to make a 1 Liter plastic bottle to put a liter of water into?
3. How much to make a 500 sheet ream of paper from scratch? And from recycled materials? And therefore, how much water to make a single sheet of paper?
4. How much water to make a hammer, or a saw?
5. How much water to make all sorts of plastic doo-dads?
6. How much to make clothes from natural fabrics? From synthetics?
7. How much for a paper bag or plastic bag at the grocery store?
   

Let's see what comes up.
Here's a quiz.

Here's the answers to the quiz, because they make you go through heck and high water just to get this important information.

Water required to make one pair of jeans: 1800 gallons
Water required to make one loaf of store bought bread: 1000 gallons
Water required to make one cotton T-shirt: 400 gallons
Water required to make one ounce glass of milk: 48 gallons
Water required to make one pound of plastic: 24 gallons
Water required to make one keg of beer: 1500 gallons
Water required to make one new car: 39,090 gallons


Here's another little one, to figure out how much fresh water it actually takes to make your FOOD.

chant/prayer/mantra: I think Blogger lost my most recent edits for this post. I had some more answers, but here's a picture of some...



Song Lyrics:
From "Story of my life" by Mary Livermore, p. 254

Oh, brethren pray, for cloudy is my way;
Go send dem angels down!
Dere's a fire in de East, an' a fire in de West;
Go send dem angels down!
Ole Satan's mad, an' I am glad;
Go send dem angels down!
He'll miss one soul he t'ought he had;
Go send dem angels down!
I tell yo' now, as I told yo' befo';
Go send dem angels down!
T' de promi' lan' I'm boun' t' go;
Go send dem angels down!

pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: economics, environment, interconnected web, salvation, water justice

 I've been skydiving one time, and it was one of the most intense things I've ever done.  But it took a lot of training and had the possibility of serious injury.

Labels: heaven on earth, recreation, sustenance, technology

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Here is a satellite's eye view of the deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest.

I just thought I'd leave a note here on my blog that I saw it. It looks like one helluva scar, 100 miles wide by 400 miles long. One big scar, about the size of Kentucky!



And another view of an area called Ruropolis (I wonder who named it that?)


Where does all that wood GO TO??? Is the land usable after it's been clear-cut?

chant/prayer/mantra: For our home, Earth. May we see fit to bless it and save it and all its creatures from ourselves, before it pays us back.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: economics, environment, interconnected web, theological sources, Universalism

Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, by Doug McAdam is a book which I have been meaning to add it to my reading list. I recommend it to anybody interested in being a change-agent. For one of my classes, we read chapter three, and I was really impressed with the way he exposes new ground for political leverage.

If you know me, and like me, feel free to order me a copy.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: anti-oppression, book list, personal bookmarks, politics

Click here, and see if you can guess where the various organs of a snail actually reside.

I could not. At first, I was even thinking that the head was on the left, which really made it difficult.

lyrics:
"It's conditional
Not for free
There are strings attached
Tied to me
I'll want something back
If you agree
To be in love with me."
From Conditional, by Tracy Chapman

Oh, and regarding the "Speaking of slow" comment in the title. I was referring to the previous post's sermon, where I was referring to photons of light from the Sun's core.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: audio, interconnected web, renewable energy, theological sources

Multithetical Manifesto: Hardcore Angel Power

There is a practice in Unitarian Universalism where the youths spend a year studying a wide variety of religious beliefs. Then they get an opportunity to get up in front of the congregation and make their individual statements of belief. Not having grown up in the tradition, I'd like to now share my faith statement, after a fashion. And yes, I do still plan for it to fit within the parameters of the actual assignment of preaching prophetically.

Here, now, please let’s take a quick journey out into the solar system. It takes about 8 minutes for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth. And it actually takes over 100,000 years for the photons produced in the sun's core to travel the 700,000 kilometers John 3:17, metaphor, Multitheticalism, personal religion, renewable energy, salvation, theology, sefrom the core to its surface, and then for those final eight minutes, it travels to Earth at the speed of light. This parallels how our ideas and communication work. Our collective ideas gestate for a long time before they're ready. Then we communicate them orally and they are delivered at the speed of sound, or we can type them and they end up halfway across the world in seconds.

Growing up, math, along with spelling, was always my favorite subject. Now, it informs my theology in fundamental ways. One primary way is through set theory. For example, imagine the set of whole numbers between 1 and 5, inclusive. The subset of all odd numbers is 1, 3, and 5. The subset of all even numbers is 2 and 4. 1 by itself is a subset. So is 2 by itself, and on and on. The largest “subset” is all five numbers, and then there is the empty set, which includes nothing at all, but still qualifies as a set.

I wonder: Do you see where I'm going with this, theologically? To put a word to it, I'm a multitheticalist. That means I'm an atheist, including Buddhism and Humanism – either a system of religious belief that doesn't consider any god, or a religious belief that specifically denies that a god exists. And I'm a theist. And a monotheist at that – including each of the various descriptions of “the one God” written by leaders such as Moses, Zoroaster, Jesus, Paul of Tarsus, and Mohammad. And I’m a polytheist, to the degree that I can learn about the many Hindu gods, and the pantheons of Greek and Roman deities. And I'm a pantheist, a panentheist, and even an animist.

“But which of those do you believe,” I hear my 20 year old fundamentalist self demand of me. “You have to believe something!” And I do. I believe that it's impossible to know anything about the divine, so that might lead one to label me as an agnostic. But agnostic is too simple a term, without sufficient examination of the complexity of meaning at play here.

In a fluid bedrock kind of way, I've come to appreciate that anything carried with words is metaphor – it's meaning attributed to physical happenings and existences. But in telling stories about the world, by necessity, we are mapping from the ultimate reality into stories that we believe, to help us make sense of the world. That mapping simplifies complex things however. It distorts events to fit into recognizable frameworks. This mapping deletes things because telling the whole truth in all its complexity would mean recreating the whole universe. And the mapping that accompanies systems of belief also generalizes things, turning them into archetypes, stereotypes, and symbols within our stories.

Knowing all that, choosing just one belief is like being stranded on an island and choosing only one book, or one album, or one type of food. Or one thing for my mind and spirit to ingest. Therefore, I'm a multitheticalist (from “multi-thesis”) – or holding several theses in balance all at once, and keeping them open for critical evaluation. My free and responsible search for truth and meaning demands this of me.

But it's not just about belief. It's about the heart. When I first got into this, God told me that it was going to be my heart on the line. But like Jonah, I escaped for a while. I escaped into concepts and theories, and reveled in wonderment at the opportunity to examine the “Big Picture,” (whatever size that actually is). But going beyond means coming back. That's the responsible part of the search. Even with all the angels and demons I’ve collected along my journey, I still feel inadequate to tell my prophetic story. All I know is that for everyone out there with messages (either to deliver from your mind through your voice, or to your mind from your senses), we're cut from the same cloth as those other prophets, especially when we can see beyond the boundaries of our cultural contexts. With all my agnosticism, that is a story I do know.

But what's a prophet to tell? Ideally, I'd light up a cigarette, strap on a guitar, and sing for you, about you, and with you. Why use this gracious gift of breath just to expound on so much theology, or to craft something that compels people to action, but what action? There are SO MANY of them!

There's the age-old practice of taking moral stances on issues:

• The ERA still hasn't passed. What gives?
• The construction of race, and how racism undergirds so many other justice issues
• LGBTIQ – an alphabet soup that simply says “equal rights to all regardless of gender or sexual expression”
• The creation and continuance of class structures, and ownership, and workers' rights.
• Earth justice and animal rights
• Abortion issues
• Drug policies

Or budgetary concerns like:

• Putting money toward wars and failed prison systems and
• Laws to ensure certain economic controls and property rights are secured,
• Instead of putting resources to Education, Energy policies, Scientific research, and Health care

I feel like I could (and very well might) speak to these things from the pulpit every week. It just goes round and round, like wheels in icy slush in March in Minnesota. I want to put sand down under the tires. I want to dig out to the concrete below the ice and get some traction! I want to be primal, to recognize it's not just about squeezing out words as breath flows out past my vocal cords. Text and speech is necessary, but so insufficient. I want to put out that all-too-necessary barbaric “yop” -- I'm ALIVE!!!!! And I hope you do too.

I have to do that. When my God speaks (all of them, and none of them, and one of them), it's through me. See, I'm one of those Multithetical Universalists who believes in radical uncertainty. Our salvation is all tied up together in this boat named Earth, and there is no fate but that which we make. This world is so beautiful, and yet so fragile. One of my versions of God is where I am the creator born into creation to walk upon this beautiful blue-green planet I have made, and I weep and marvel all at once at the horror and the beauty of the upside-downness side by side with the right-side-upness. Because like it or not, humanity has declared dominion here. Now, they/we will get credit or blame for whatever is to come. The blame or credit goes not to God, or ancient prophecies – only to humanity's insistence in those gods and prophecies. Demanding that theirs be the true version, and arguing over details in their stories of divinity and prophecy.

Because we have a preponderance of new prophets, telling the story clearly and honestly, from really recent and accurate knowledge about this world and our relationship within it. Yet there is almost no need for prophets now. The story of the condition of our cultures and our planet now comes to us ever more clearly. Humans have to close their ears, eyes, and minds to avoid the trumpets call. In Zoroastrianism, the job of the Saoshyant, or final judge at the end of the age or world, is simply to point that out. In essence saying “Open your eyes. Look around you! There is your prophecy, and my work is done here.” But its not as easy as that, since peoples' frames mask the full truth, until truth's complexities start to pull open the frames. But the process is soooo slow. After all, wasn't it 2000 years ago that Jesus said, “Those who have ears, let them hear...”? It's slow, but it's coming.

There's more to the story. In my rear-view mirror, I have all these memories of the heavens and hells my mind has visited, to bring me here. In my dreams, I've seen chariots and thrones, and so many apocalyptic futures, like the beatific utopian heaven-on-earth that my inner voice compels me to co-create. I do hope one day to write a utopian sci-fi drama. On the other hand, some of those memories of potential futures are outright hellish. I won't go into detail, but those dreams had people in the grayest darkest cavernous pits, stepping on those below them to try to climb out, but always being stepped on from above by someone else. Even those highest up were still in the pit. With nobody ever reaching down to lend a hand. And then there's the bittersweet end, somewhere in between. Where the world plods through, suffering for centuries or millennia because of the damage we've done to our planet and each other.

So, what saves us? Our actions do. Which are influenced by the thoughts and words that compose our world-views. Our actions influenced by our beliefs, with all their tendencies to distort, delete, and generalize. That is why I'm preaching multitheticalism today. It seeks to open wide to any possibility, evaluating it while finding ways to enrich worldviews. But it has one big drawback. It takes a lot of time. It's heavy, and it's slow to come into the light.

It's slow, like the photons inside the sun.

chant/prayer/mantra: For energy to deliver this well.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: Atheism, Christianity, drug war, environment, guitar, inter-faith, Islam, John 3:17, metaphor, Multitheticalism, personal religion, renewable energy, salvation, sermons, theology

 

This one is about how a guy actually discovered gravitational waves back in 1987.

Labels: astrophysics, personal bookmarks, politics, renewable energy, technology