Labels: 7th UU principle, Capitalism, ecology, environment, readings, renewable energy, sacred texts

Labels: 7th UU principle, drug war, ecology, economics, freedom versus freedom, marijuana, renewable energy, USA

Labels: ecology, environment, homelessness, housing, personal bookmarks, renewable energy, sustenance

Labels: economics, indifferent corporations, politics, renewable energy, USA

Dear Mary Jane,

I imagine this Janice Hahn may be a good candidate, however I will not be helping Organizing for America now or in 2012.

I am entirely disenfranchised with the right/centrist agenda Barack Obama has been pursuing.  His policies have amounted to making "Change We Can Believe In" the saddest hollow promise I've ever heard in my 42 years.

Specifically, his budgetary policies continue to serve the wealthy corporate investors in a fashion similar to George W Bush including offering to trade away social security; he is continuing to invest our military in wars upon wars rather than pursue more peaceable solutions; his administration flip-flops on the drug war, muddying the legal waters while continuing to harass moral and innocent people in medical need, using taxpayer dollars as if they are criminals; and he has done astonishingly little to support renewable energy, compared to subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear. 

Therefore, his name attached to your request does not inspire me to help you unless he truly becomes "The Change I Thought I Was Believing In."  Please send him this message--I voted for him in 2008, but he and any Democratic candidates he supports have squandered my good faith, and lost my support for 2012.
,
With peace and real hope,
Joel

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes
the existing model obsolete."
 -Buckminster Fuller (Architect and Geometrist)

Labels: changing the prison paradigm, classism, drug war, peace, politics, renewable energy, USA, war and peace

Labels: economics, environment, interconnected web, renewable energy, sacred texts

Just another bookmark. Too busy with life to blog today.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: bicycles, environment, personal bookmarks, politics, renewable energy

I've been thinking that if the Gulf of Mexico gets so very contaminated with oil and dispersants and toxins--or if the leak cannot be successfully plugged--the Gulf may need to be quarantined off from the rest of Earth's oceans.

I introduced this thusly on Facebook:

[Me] wonders how quickly a causeway could be built from the tip of Florida to Cuba, and another from Cuba to the Eastern Mexican peninsula at Cancun, in order to close off the Gulf of Mexico, if need be. Also wondering about the environmental impact of doing that, versus not doing it.

Friend: It would have to be one hell of a causeway as parts of those routes are very deep. Then, we could extract the oil caught there, process it, and open it back up?

Me: My reason for bringing it up is to protect the rest of the world's oceans, and limiting the damage from that area. If it were to continue gushing for several years or heaven forbid the leak grows in size, there's the potential that the oceans could die [and us all with them].

Me: Here's a view of what I was thinking (map (c) 2010 by Google Maps: TerraMetrics, Google, INEGI, and LeadDog Consulting).

I guess that's kind of suggesting an oceanic amputation of sorts. I'm morbidly fascinated by the logistics of the endeavor and I wonder at the idea of what this would do to weather patterns, habitats, and oceanic currents. The reason for building the causeway(s) would be trying to make the best of a potentially globally-catastrophic situation.

It would require an astonishing amount of Earth to do it. Assuming a height-width ratio of at only 1-2, of a trapezoidal prism-type shape where the top is steadily 100 meters wide, and the depth varies from about 20 meters at the coasts to 1850 meters at the deepest parts of the Florida Strait and the Yucatan Channel. Also assuming that the causeways would total about 430km (270 miles), doing a little math gives a rough estimate of the rock mass required would be to take a simple triangular prism 1850m deep, 430,000m long and 3700m wide at the base.

1.85km^2 x 430km => 1472 cubic kilometers of rock.

To put that number in perspective, that much would be the equivalent of digging out a section of Earth about the size of a major metropolis (including its suburbs) to a depth of a kilometer deep. But that estimate is a little in the high side, because we used a simple triangular prism instead of trying to work out the volume of a trapezoidal prism with varying depth, plus it's all an estimate, since I can't seem to find the proper bathymetric mapping online (Would it be too difficult to have oceanic topography freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection?). I studied math at University, but I forgot how to do double-integrals sometime around the time I received my diploma. Also, I estimated on the high side, because I doubt that the causeway could be built so steep and have integrity, so likely a causeway would need to have a lower rise/run ratio.

I realize digging up that much earth and rock would have a tremendous impact on the sources, the rock-mining sites, so we'd need to be really careful where we dig from. My guess for the Florida Strait is there's some land in Cuba, and some of the southernmost Appalachians. Though nobody really wants to hear the news that you need to tear down their mountain and toss it bit by bit into the ocean. We could get some of the finer Earth and sand from Florida to fill in between the boulders.

It would require new thinking and new scales of labor--I envision an army of solar-powered Earth-moving robots, specialized into miners and movers. The former dig it up, and the latter haul it like lorry trucks--in fact, you could haul them in electric trucks with human drivers as well. (Hooray for creating jobs!) Alternately, there could be underwater solar-powered Earth-moving robots that could mine and scour up some of the Earth below the waters of the Gulf, most notably the continental shelf just north of Cancun.

This page shows how amazingly complicated all this is because the entire Mississippi River basin flows into the gulf, yet the gulf is not large enough to dissipate off that much water into the air, so it would want to flow out from the causeway, which would essentially work like a dam unless we can find a way to use up most of the freshwater that flows through the Mississippi....

So obviously before we go into a plan like this, we need to get an honest assessment of the possible environmental impacts from the gulf leak. And the environmental impact of a big drastic change like this, plus the impact of actually implementing it. In addition, perhaps there are ways to do this other than a causeway. Perhaps the Dutch could come in and help build some serious dams.

pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: environment, globalism, indifferent corporations, renewable energy, salvation, sci-fi, technology, water justice

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From the FDA's website:

On September 22, 2009 a ban on cigarettes containing certain characterizing flavors went into effect. The ban, authorized by the new Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, is part of a national effort by FDA to reduce smoking in America.

According to the act

…a cigarette or any of its component parts (including the tobacco, filter, or paper) shall not contain, as a constituent (including a smoke constituent) or additive, an artificial or natural flavor (other than tobacco or menthol) or an herb or spice, including strawberry, grape, orange, clove, cinnamon, pineapple, vanilla, coconut, licorice, cocoa, chocolate, cherry, or coffee, that is a characterizing flavor of the tobacco product or tobacco smoke

In short, it's not illegal to possess them, but it is illegal to sell them. However, you can't get them anymore because nobody's able to sell. It's supposedly to keep kids from starting smoking. That lie is so easy to see through, because this legislation was supported by Philip Morris, an American cigarette manufacturer.

• They're not banning menthol cigarettes, which are a major cash cow for American cigarette companies. Clove cigarettes are imported from Indonesia.
• Kids who smoke haven't heard of clove cigarettes, and typically smoke marlboros or camels. The big demographic to be affected by this: people who wear black and go to Cure concerts, NOT kids.
  
• They're not banning flavored alcohol (wine coolers, schnapps, the new Bacardi-Ice-type malt beverages, etc), which kids DO consume.
• If we're serious about stopping kids from smoking, why not ban cigarettes outright? Are the big US tobacco companies still pushing it to kids overseas?

This is about US tobacco companies getting a stronger hold on the US tobacco market, by literally making the competition illegal. In fact, if you look closely, you'll note that this legislation goes against legislation in the WTO agreement that the US signed onto.

This is remarkably similar to the conspiracy of the corporate power grab against industrial hemp, except this one is obvious and right in front of us. It's hard to say where the industrial hemp suppression originally came from, but at this stage, it's obvious that it should no longer be suppressed (for environmental and economic reasons). The main reasons now for not legalizing industrial hemp are:

• There actually now are competing industries (oil, ethanol, timber/paper, cotton) that don't want hemp back in the mix because it is a mighty useful plant.
• It is not easy to tell from a distance whether a plant is industrial hemp or actually contains cannibis flowers on it. My guess is that as long as the war on marijuana continues, there will be little headway made against laws pertaining to growing hemp.
  

Compare the complexities regarding the illegality of hemp and marijuana to the simple change of making clove cigarettes illegal. The former two remain illegal because of the ability to wield a continuance of economic and social power (including the drug war's value as a tool for perpetuating a powerful institutional form of racism), and the latter is simply a bald-faced power-grab by the corporations who have the most to gain, though considering how many menthol cigarette cartons I've seen in downtown Oakland, one could build an argument that race and class play a factor in the cigarette policies as well.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: drug war, economics, indifferent corporations, interconnected web, racism, renewable energy

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THIS should be right up there with healthcare reform.

What the person at the link says is mostly about Biofuels, which I think are only a part of the equation, but there is a lot of good information about algae and industrial hemp there, so that's why I put up the link.

chant/prayer/mantra: free and natural. that's how i want to be


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: indifferent corporations, personal bookmarks, renewable energy, USA, yachts

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Here are two readings, related to the sun, that I am considering using for the upcoming service I'm putting together. I'll probably trim the latter down a little.

The Fabric of the Cosmos, by Brian Greene, p.171 (2004)

Where did our highly ordered sun come from? The sun formed about 5 billion years ago from an initially diffuse cloud of gas that began to swirl and clump under the mutual gravitational attraction of all its constituents. As the gas cloud got denser, the gravitational pull of one part on another got stronger, causing the cloud to collapse further in on itself. And as gravity squeezed the cloud tighter, it got hotter. Ultimately, it got hot enough to ignite nuclear processes that generated enough outward-flowing radiation to stem further gravitational contraction of the gas. A hot, stable, brightly burning star was born.
So where did the diffuse cloud of gas come from? It likely formed from the remains of older stars that reached the end of their lives, went supernova, and spewed their contents out into space.



Child of the Sun, by Margaret Dulles Edwards, p. 37 Beacon Press (1957, originally 1939)

This is the story of the Pharoah named Amenophis (a.k.a. Amenhotep
Suddenly, without changing the direction of his gaze, Amenophis raised his arm and threw a stone with all his strength into the water. At the sound of the splash, as if some magic spell had been broken, the whole garden became alive. The fish went scurrying to safety. The lotus flowers swayed on their long stems. The cat sprang lightly to the branch of a sycamore tree. The pharoah rose to his feet. He was still looking into the pool, but now his eyes were seeing, watching the ever-widening circles on the surface of the water. The ripples sparkled in the sunshine.
"It is a sign," he said. Today I will act. I will give one great command. As the stone causes these widening circles, so at my word the truth will spread in my kingdom.

“Too long priests have followed their own ideas and planned their own ceremonies. The people have worshiped gods in many forms. I shall allow this no longer. No more wavering; no more half-way measures. I will carry out my ideas. Ever since that day just ten years ago when Mesu and I talked together about the sun, I have tried to find the truth about the gods. Now I am sure. There is but one God, the power of life behind the sun. My people have always known of the greatness of the sun. Today they shall worship this power with new understanding. They shall call his name Aten.

“This day is called my 'Name Day.' It will be a 'Name Day' never to be forgotten in the history of my people—a day of new names and new meanings.

“I will give myself a new name. No longer will I be called amenophis in honor of the god Amon, but Akhenaten, 'The glory of Aten.'

“We will have a new symbol for our god. Since ancient times the sun has been known by many symbols: a pyramid, a bird, or the wings of a soaring hawk. But these signs are understood only in Egypt. Aten is the god of the whole world and his symbol shall belong to all peoples wherever they live. Aten shall be known by the disk of the sun with rays reaching down like hands with gifts.”

And here is a link to the data behind an astounding fact: it can take 100,000 years for photons of light created in the sun's core to make their way to the surface. Once they get to the surface, it only takes 8.5 minutes to reach the earth (which, since it's moving at the speed of light, is interestingly enough, moving magnitudes of order faster than lightning).

I would also like to add this link, regarding the types of stars in the universe. Though I may not touch on this topic directly in the sermon, the general concept is implied.

chant/prayer/mantra: stay calm, carry on, enjoy your time. breathe.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: astrophysics, favorite scriptural passages, metaphor, renewable energy, sacred texts, theological sources

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While I still remain skeptical about the actual likelihood of success for this iteration of the process of creating contained nuclear fusion at Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility (NIF), I am also hopeful that this will help guide our research.

Lasers, lasers, and more lasers. And amazing amounts of instantaneous energy. Wow. Maybe a little scary too.

I'm just thinking of all the good we could do with all the energy nuclear fusion could provide us. We wouldn't have to bat an eye about the high energy costs of desalinization. We could power an energy grid that could mean we have clean trains running from every city on each continent, and we could even power boats and individual transit eventually once we get the battery technology up and running. Of course, sadly, there's probably also a lot of bad we could do with that energy, and I'm not going to devote my own energy toward considering it. But what awesome/awful wars we could have with that much energy! But all sardonic attitude aside, with all that energy, we'd have a surplus of it, and energy wouldn't be a scarce resource. Without scarce resources, the reasons for going to war are greatly diminished.

chant/prayer/mantra: Let there be light.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: astrophysics, desalinization, pax hominibus/bright shiny future, renewable energy, technology

New Batteries created by bacteriophage:

I really do think it won't be too long before we have battery technology that is clean to make and clean to use, and requires no disposal. Two decades, though we've got to keep the R & D coming. Plenty of jobs to invest there -- get the kids in higher education for free, and make sure we've got housing, food and clothes for everybody.

Offshore wind farms which more than meet US energy needs:

While I think its high time we turn to renewable resources for energy production, I wonder why the big push for putting wind farms offshore? It seems they'd be a lot of work to set up, and then get the energy back to the mainland, even if only in relatively shallow water. Looking at this wind map (the multi-colored one on the left) and this one of South Dakota (with a legend explaining the colors), it appears there's a LOT of wind energy to be had in the middle of the country, though from the first map, it really does look like there's even more just offshore. All I know is that if there's wind there and we know it, it's a lot better than drilling for oil and not knowing how much is going to be there.

And astrophysics geeks talking about the science behind FTL warp drives:

The comment by Geckipede is a helpful explanation of what I was talking about in an earlier post.

"The problem is that in order to have a region of spacetime moving in relation to the outside universe, space has to expand behind it and contract in front, which demands negative and positive gravity in those regions. You need a large negative mass held in place in front of you, and a large positive mass behind." [Joel adds: All you have to do is carry around your own quasar and black hole, and you're set. But put the black hole at the front, and try and scale it back a bit so it doesn't actually tear a hole.]

lyrics: "Space, I believe in space... Jefrey, with one f, Jefrey."
From Space (I Believe in), by Pixies.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: astrophysics, education, renewable energy, slashdot, technology, USA

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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

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

Now this is the kind of thing I"m talking about. It's passive solar technology done intelligently.

Consider that large bodies of water (and earth) can hold heat for quite a while, and consider the daily rhythm in which the earth heats up and cools down. In cool times, if you heat the water up during the day by having the water uncovered, then at night cover them, the heat from the water can warm the house. In warm times, you have the water uncovered at night and then it will help keep your house cool during the day.

The most interesting quote I came across was this: “One of the reasons he hasn’t had more success is that the entire solar industry, with few exceptions, has been undercapitalized.” If you check out the stats from this post, you'll note that the Bush admin requested less than a pittance for renewable energy research and development. The Obama administration MUST make energy production and conservation a priority. This is one way to do it.

lyrics: "low, low, low." R.E.M.

colors: color of the sun in the night time.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: economics, environment, renewable energy, sustenance

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

Labels: anti-oppression, Christianity, environment, equal rights, LGBT, renewable energy

Here is something I posted on a slashdot poll the other day, which asked, "Who is to blame for the US financial situation?" I was responding to someone who blamed the American Dream. It's the first thing I've ever posted there that got modded to +5:

What we need is for people to start redefining the American dream.

Here's a start:

1. A modest two-bedroom home (house, apartment, or condo) within walking distance of a municipal train line powered by electricity.

2. A home that is energy efficient, and powered by local power off the grid.

3. A job within half-hour's travel from one's home. (Perhaps by electric car/scooter/motorized skateboard, but preferrably by public transport or bicycle.)

4. A grocery store with good produce, and some good restaurants, all within walking distance.

5. And a 30-hour work week.

6. A cute puppy, if you're into that sort of thing.

7. A modest wardrobe of clothes that you really like, with a classic style that matches you, so you don't need to buy into next year.

8. Three or four pairs of good shoes (dress, sports, knockabout, boots).

9. Well-maintained and funded municipal lending libraries and public workshops for tools, so that not everybody needs to own a reciprocating saw and a compound miter saw for those once-a-year projects, or try to set up and maintain their own home recording studio. (If you're super-serious about that avocation, then yes, you have your own private workshop out back, but often, owning and maintaining your own is more of a hassle and a waste of resources.)

10. A clean and safe park within walking distance.

11. An electric guitar or piano or something of your own to cherish, that reflects an authentic manifestation of your true self and your avocation.

12. An internet connection that is as robust as a phone or electrical connection, and secure, and as simple to access as a (70s-style) television.

13. A community, a job, and a government that supports me more and counts on me, but doesn't exploit me.

14. A partner and friends to enjoy life with.

That, to me, is the American dream. I could care less about impressing you that I'm keeping up with the Joneses. I'd rather impress you by being me, and by allowing you to be you.

While I offer that as a hope and as a new vector for us all to pursue, I recognize a few things:

First, it would require a little bit of reengineering our politics, government, and economy, so that we could establish these "sharing" things. It would also require a little bit of backtracking with respect to the draconian pursuit of individual achievement in the USA.

Second, this is not just a dream for the USA. This is something I'd like to see for everyone alive in the world.

Third, we may need to cut that dream back even more, unless we can get our population down a bit further. My list, while much more modest than the old American dream, may still not be sustainable, especially when we consider the trees, the bees, and the orangutans. Read Sustainability by John Cobb for more info on where I'm coming from.

And fourth, this is just my vision of how things ought to be, and I haven't elaborated on many of the complexities of these goals, so please try not to read in arguments against them or support them without spending a little time thinking of what they might mean to you, and what kind of backstory I would add in support of these goals.

lyrics: "Angel flying too close to the ground." -Willie Nelson

chant/prayer/mantra: "Change is coming. Now is my time." From Forty-six and 2, by Tool.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: heaven on earth, pax hominibus/bright shiny future, renewable energy, slashdot, sustenance, theology, tool, Universalism, USA