An American Mantra – A Poem

An American Mantra

Love is for Doves.

Look.

Power makes others cower.
Greed is what you need.

More Money for your Honey,
        more toys for your boyz,
        a big dinner for the winner,
        shota rummy for your tummy,
line up at the trough and feed.

Don't let nothing bring you down,
        shoot 'em, boot 'em, burn their town,
till the day you're in the ground.

Sweet land of Liberty, to Thee I sing.

        Love it or leave it.

Look.

Love is for Doves.

~riverflows

Goin’ For a Swim – a Poem

Goin’ For a Swim

Left brain, right brain, God brain, no brain

	in the light or dark, or maybe rain.

Singin', Oh, Glory, gotta tell the story,

	runnin' from the place with all the pain.

Saint or sinner, dancin' for your dinner

	tryin' to pretend it's all a game, 

	while worryin' 'bout the score and 

		sayin' you don't mind, but

		watchin' your behind all the same.

Or maybe you pretend you know how the story ends,

	or not, it don't make no never-mind.

Hidin' out, hope to shout, look, you're gonna fall,

	big river calls, get off the bank, suhkah!

	Better dive in, sink or drown or swim

		or you gonna, really gonna miss it all

		(and you already paid for your ticket,

		 	and the clock is tickin').  

		 	Wow, is it NOW already?

		 	GONNA DIVE, BAY-BEE!!!

		 		KerSPLOOSH!!!

Shhhhh ...
	Listen.  Don't you hear the river call?

~riverflows

Not Love – a Poem

Not Love

It’s not love when I’m afraid, when
	I know from many times that
	you’ll say
		those things with
			that expression. 

I want you and
	already my gut knots, knowing
		whatever happens will
			hurt.

You don’t do tenderness, not in sex.
	Understanding’s not where you
		come from.
	You wear black robes even when
		you’re naked.

I have trouble keeping it up in enemy
	territory, waiting for your knives to
		cut me down.

It’s not love when you won’t hear me, won’t
	hear me, won’t tell me, eyes locked
		somewhere years
			away.

It’s not love when I do for you or away you
	go, snarling, I must try to
		make it better or good-bye.

It’s not love when your eyes turn so evenly
	blank to TV, no time for me, us,
		seeing nothing you don’t want
			to see.

It’s not even friendship, it’s
	a moth trying to love a spider.

It’s not love when it’s we two, hungry, “Feed me,
	feed me.  Daddy, mommy, care for me,
		damn you.”

Suck each other dry, toss and grab another.
	“They’re all alike, can’t trust any,
		unreliable.”

A year, you never saw me once when it
	really mattered.

(Well, perhaps once, or even more.  I think
	sometimes you worked at being kind.
		It’s just I couldn’t count on you,
	worn down by waking every day not
knowing if you’d be with me tomorrow.)

It’s not love.  With you it was
	love as I knew it, school in session.
	You taught me more than you
		know, I think.
	For that I thank you.

I know you tried, hard enough to say you’d
	tried, not hard enough to love, to
		face that what you think and do
			might connect
		with why it
	never works.

So truly brave sometimes, but still
	in love an angry coward.

Never saw
	through any eyes
		but your own.

It wasn’t love, but yet for us it was,
	and now
	I strand by strand untangle wings.
Perhaps I’ll learn to fly.

~riverflows

A Message from God

Ok, folks, this is God at the keyboard, and I have a few things to tell you.

More and more religions and ignorant people continue to make outrageous statements about me and what I want, so it is again time for me to set the record straight. I am using a set of hands happily placed in my service for this message, and I’m using the Internet as My medium because this is where you are.

Now heed My words.

• I gave you free will. Use it. Ask questions. Explore. Trust your instincts. Question authority. See for yourself.~
• When you are willing and you open yourself to Me, you become my hands, think my thoughts, feel my feelings. You know when you do this, and you know when you refuse to do this. You are not compelled to open yourself to Me. You can choose to be disconnected and experience your life from that place.~
• Do not search in some moldy old book for me. You will not find me there. I am here, now, closer than your mother, closer than your lover, closer than your heartbeat, You will never capture me in words.~
• Open your heart, stop trying to explain me or picture me, and you will know that I am there. I am the Presence that is there when you cease trying to find me and simply see, simply feel, simply be.~
• As one of you has observed, if your minds were simple enough for you to understand them, they would have to be so simple that you could understand nothing. Yet you still persist in trying to use your minds to understand Me.~
• I am the heart and soul and consciousness that enfolds and embodies the universe. Why do you try to explain Me, One you can never truly know or comprehend, to others?~
• You claim to know Me, yet all the while you don’t know your own child, your own spouse, your own mind, your own heart. In my body, you are but a tiny mote, a minuscule part of a single cell in Me. I contain you, I contain reality itself, but you can never contain, never be aware of more than the tiniest spark of me within you.~
• You sometimes call that spark of Me life, you sometimes call it awareness, you sometimes call it many things, but the most important aspect of Me is love. How can you say you know anything of Me if love does not rule your heart? If you must choose between love and belief when opening to me, choose love.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

• Following the rules doesn’t always make you good. Breaking the rules doesn’t always make you bad. It depends on the rules. Live in love, and you can do no evil.~
• Don’t believe everything you read about me. I do not demand that you spend your life trying to please me. I do not and never have condoned the slaughter of innocents, despite what some of the Old Testament stories say.~
• I am not jealous, I am not possessive, I am not needy. I am to you a good parent. Good parents give their offspring the tools they need, then set them free to find their own way, their own destiny.~
• I am not God the torturer. Forget the lake of fire. You individually and collectively provide yourselves with hell. You need no help from me.~
• Your sacred writings say God is Love. This is true. Hate in any form separates you from Me.~
• If you must have some rule to follow, remember this: Act from love and compassion and you’ll be a better person than you will be if you simply follow rules and do what you’re told.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

• To those of you who say “I asked God to do this thing & He didn’t do it, so there’s no God,” I say, “Do you know what kind of arrogant little jerk you come across as? What am I, room service? If you ask me to jump, do you want me to say ‘How high?’ Get over yourself.”~
• Just because I don’t do as you ask simply because you ask, that doesn’t mean I don’t manifest in your life. Who do you think inspired “You can’t always get what you want, but sometimes you’re gonna find you get what you need?” Think on that. Listen for my messages. I still speak to you. To hear, first you must listen.~
• There are those who promise you rewards and threaten you with awful punishments in my name in order to try bend you to their will. Do not be deceived. They know me not. They make mockery of Me and My love for My children.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

This part is for the religious among you who seem to think I owe you favors because you worship me:

• Worshiping Me doesn’t make you any better than anyone else. I don’t award special status to anyone just because they believe I exist. Do you think I need you to believe in Me, to be subservient to Me, for any reason? It is not I who need you.~
• Worshiping me is not a business deal. There is no guaranteed payoff for being subservient to me and doing what you think I want, and there is no guaranteed punishment for ignoring me. Free will means freedom to choose. You have that freedom.~
• If you follow church rules and do as you’re told out of hope of future reward from me, don’t expect Me to be impressed. Being good doesn’t spring from actions motivated by hope of some payoff.~
• If you avoid doing wrong or evil things out of fear of future punishment, don’t expect Me to be impressed. Being good doesn’t spring from fear of being punished for some behavior you secretly want to do.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

• Therefore, if you worship me out of desire for advantage or reward for doing so, or out of fear of divine retribution for not doing so, then don’t expect me to think well of you. I save my real approval for those who act from love, kindness, and compassion with no thought of personal gain or advantage. Loving is its own reward, and requires no action from me.~
• I will not fight your battles for you. I will not kill your enemies for you, for your enemies, too, are my children.~
• I have given you everything you need to live in this place. If you learn to live in harmony, you can make your world a paradise. If you continue to live as you are living, you can continue to create hell on Earth. You have free will. The choice is yours, individually and collectively.~
• No matter how much you flatter me, entreat me, plead with me, I will not take sides in your small-minded, hate-driven conflicts. If you wish there to be more love and less hate, more good and less evil in your lives, then love more, do more good, and hate less. Your fate is now in your hands, not mine.~
• I love you and wish you well. Make good choices.

Pushing Kids, Screwing with Heads

My standard disclaimer applies.

“I envied … the thought of growing up in a world where someone cared so much about your happiness and so little about what you accomplished in life.”
~ Kelley Armstrong, in “Bitten“

Sometimes I’ll be reading a book and something will just jump out at me, like it’s written in glowing text.  The quote above was one of those.  It’s like this person was writing about stuff from inside my head, putting into words what had always been there, but only as this messy clump of sad-angry unspoken feeling.

It’s not that my parents were intentionally cruel to me … well, my father was now & then, and my two older brothers were when I crossed them or they were in a bad mood … mostly general anger, fecal matter flowing downhill, I think.

But I don’t think my father or my brothers gave a rap about what I became when I grew up.  My father didn’t particularly seem to care about my happiness, but he didn’t lay any expectations on me about who or what I should be when I grew up.  As long as I did what I was told, he pretty much left me alone.

My mother was the one who had plans for me.  She was a very strict religious fundamentalist (Southern Baptist), and, according to her, I was supposed to grow up to be a preacher.  As far back as I can remember, I was going to church with her 2 or 3 times a week, except for revivals in the summer, when it was every night except Saturday.

When I was 10 or 11 years old she had me read the entire Bible, a chapter or two at a time, over the course of a year.  It wasn’t really how I wanted to spend my childhood, though I did get a lot of attention from her in the process.

When I finally broke free, left home, and quit pretending to be this little religious robot that my mom seemed to want, I detested almost everything about the fundamentalist Christian religion I had felt imprisoned by while growing up.  I then spent a lot of years being guided by the principle that, when in doubt, I should do exactly the opposite of what my mother and the church would want me to do.

Drinking, drugs, sexual acting out, and other dubious and illegal behaviors were supposed to be my declaration of independence.  Way too many years later, I finally figured out (duh!) that when I knee-jerk did the opposite of what I thought my mom & the church would want, I was no more free than when I did what they wanted … either way, it was my mom & the church that were guiding my behavior.

To feel compelled to rebel against and oppose some belief system, some set of values, is still a form of slavery to whatever’s being opposed.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So here I was, reading this lively werewolf-focused paranormal romance, and this sentence I quoted above jumped out and grabbed me and I started thinking.  I would say my mom was pretty much the opposite, that she cared so much about what I accomplished in life and so little about my happiness.

I think she would probably have said she cared about my happiness because she wanted me to go to heaven & stay out of hell, but that’s not what I’m talking about.  And I think that excuse is just easy, automatic, religious-based rationalization for wanting me to be something that would make her look good, be who she wanted me, allow her to shape my life.

That whole “I’m only doing this for your own good” shtick is way too often a cover for something like “I want you to be what I want you to be, not what you want to be.  I want you to make me look good, I want to be able to see you be this or that and feel good about myself as a parent, be able to tell myself that I made you what you are, and take pride in that.”

How do we show we care about the happiness of our kids?  I don’t think it’s by indulging their every whim, and I don’t think it’s by forcing them to do exactly as we say and become exactly what we tell them to.  Neither of these approaches seem loving, kind, or compassionate to me.

How about we show our kids, by our example, what it’s like to live a life that includes play, joy, excitement, working things out with love … maybe loud, excited, passionate expression of feelings and differences, but how to live a life that includes happiness.  I would have loved to have seen a little of that in my home while growing up.

How about, if we’re unhappy, we deal with our own crap, work it out for ourselves, instead of trying to makes ourselves happier and reach some of our goals vicariously, at the expense of our kids (and, speaking to my own kids, I’m so sorry about being so caught up in my own stuff, thinking only about my own needs and ignoring yours so much while you were growing up).

How about we just set reasonable limits and requirements on our kids and then listen to them, support them as they play with life, trying this or that on for size, finding out what works for them and what doesn’t.  How about if, instead of telling them what we want them to be, we ask them about their hopes and dreams, what they like and don’t like, and then listen and don’t try to pull rank or discourage them from making their own choices.  As parents, we know when we care about our kids’ happiness.

There’s no recipe … the only way to care is to care.  Part of caring is accepting them for who they are and staying away from caring too much about who or what you want them to be.  And I know teenagers can be hard to communicate with … but I can still care.  Love goes a long way, love of the developing person temporarily in my charge, not love of showing off this or that thing that my child can do.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

My oldest daughter grew up without me (a story for another day, one in which I’m the guy in the black hat), and she ended up marrying a strict right-wing conservative religious fundamentalist and adapting herself to his lifestyle.  Her husband is a humorless, arrogant, rigid man who has told me he likes his “good Pentecostal wife” exactly as she is and doesn’t want me communicating with her for any reason, because he doesn’t want me trying to “open her up.”

She goes along with him on this, partly because of a rift we had over the fact that I had read some paranormal romances by an author that she disapproves of (with heroine Anita Blake) and refused to apologize or agree with her that my reading such books was wrong … this is despite (or maybe partly because of) the fact that said daughter grew up as a voracious reader of romance novels.

This incommunicado situation is not exactly comfortable for me, but what really torques me is that my daughter is my mother all over again, only more so.  Her home-schooled children (two older daughters, two younger sons) have no access to television, the Internet, or long-distance telephone service, all avenues by which they might become corrupted by the world.  They follow a strict dietary and exercise routine, supervised by their mom.

She constantly brags to other family members about her kids’ high scores in this or that subject, or on national scholastic achievement exams (home-schooled, so this is also the teacher bragging about her students’ performance).  The kids are praised for being thin and censured & ridiculed any time they deviate from mom’s standard of how her children should look.  Mom & dad decide which schools their kids should go to (like MIT and Duke) … you get the picture.

I feel sorry for the kids.  Projection, I think; if I were in their shoes, I’d be miserable.  They may turn out fine … I hope so, but I have this image of a few more screwed-up souls coming unprepared into the real world having no idea who they are underneath the masks they wear for mom & dad, no idea what their own values and beliefs are.  Good luck, guys.  You’ll need it.

If you’re reading this and have memories of growing up in a world where someone cared so much about your happiness and so little about what you accomplished in life, I hope you realize how lucky you are.  Anyway, that’s the view from my window.

And thanks, Kelley Armstrong, for saying it.

Peace.
~riverflows

Ask Uncle Seeker: God, Religion, and Stuff

Ask Uncle Seeker

Uncle Seeker, could you help me understand something?

Maybe, Little One.  What is it you don’t understand?

Well, it’s about religion and God and stuff.

Wow, that’s a pretty big subject.  Is there something special that’s bothering you?

Yeah.  Sometimes it doesn’t make any sense.  The pastor at the church we go to says the one true God is the Christian God and people who refuse to believe in God and Jesus Christ, His Son, are all damned and going to Hell.  And this Muslim kid in school says the Muslim God’s the real God and only the good Muslims will go to Paradise.  And a Jewish kid talks about how Jews are God’s chosen people and how God wants them to follow a bunch of rules & learn a bunch of scripture and stuff.  He says that Jews have the real truth and worship the real God.

So you have all these people claiming to be right, and they can’t all be right when they all claim to have the only true religion and say that you have to go their way or be damned.  And the people with these different religions fight each other a lot and kill each other and are mean to each other.

And my Sunday School teacher says that God wants us to love each other and be kind and forgiving and help each other. And then I see stuff on the news about religious people blowing themselves and other people up, and shooting each other and bombing each other, and I don’t see how this could have anything to do with us loving each other.

Then I think maybe they mean that God wants them to be loving and nice, but only to people who belong to their own church or their religion.  And that seems stupid, ’cause Christ was kind & understanding to pretty much everyone except some people who tried to make money off religion, and He didn’t seem to care if other people belonged to some church or the other, He loved them anyway.  But the people in my church sometimes say mean things about other people outside our church or say even worse things about people who quit our church.

OK, Little One.  I think I hear what you’re saying.

You want to know how so many different religions with different stories about who God is and what God wants can all claim to have the one and only truth about God.

Also, you want to know why religious people who supposedly believe God is Love and that we are supposed to love each other can be so quick to judge, fight, and kill each other.

Did I get that right?

Yeah, that’s right.  I mean, these are grownups that are supposed to be smart and are supposed to show us how to live.  But what are we supposed to do when they argue and fight and talk bad about each other.

Good question.  I had the same things bothering me when I was your age.  I used to wonder how it was that I just happened to be born into a family that had the one true religion in the whole world.  I used to wonder what it would have been like to have been born in a Muslim country or some other country with a different religion instead of having born in a Baptist family.

If I’d been born somewhere else with a different religion, would they have told me the same thing that our church did, that their religion was the one true religion?  If they did, how could I decide which one was the real true religion when everyone in a bunch of different religions all said theirs was?

And if God wanted us to love each other, why weren’t my parents and the other people in our church more loving to everybody?  That was something else that didn’t make sense to me.

So is this what you’d like to explore?

Sure.  What do we do next?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Well, if there actually is a God, is God real?

If God exists, is God real?  That’s a dumb question.  He’d have to be real if He exists.

Hmmm … have you ever met God, in person, got a good look, maybe said hi?

No.

Then how do you know God’s a He?

Because our church and the Bible and pretty much everybody call God “He.”

This is the same church that claims that whatever it is they believe is the one and only true religion and that anyone who doesn’t agree with them and believe what they believe is wrong and in big trouble?  If you’re not sure you believe them about being the one true church, why do you believe them when they say God’s a He?

I don’t know.  What else would God be?

That’s what I’m trying to say.  I don’t know what God looks like or acts like or thinks or believes or wants.  I’m not talking about God as described by Christians or Muslims or Jews or whoever, I’m talking about the real world, where the real God has to be if there’s a real God.

Why should the creator and soul and intelligence of the stars and galaxies and all of space and time or whoever or whatever God is look or think anything like a human being, or like any kind of living thing we know?

I don’t know, but the pictures I’ve seen show God as this big strong old man with a beard, like someone’s father or grandfather.

Well, it’s probably comforting for some people to think God’s like someone’s father, only with eternal life and super-powers, and maybe that’s why they call God “He” and picture God as this wise-looking old man, but there isn’t any evidence I know of, one way or another, as to whether God is male, female, something else, or even exists at all.

If that’s the way it is, then how am I supposed to think about or talk to or believe in God?

A lot of people would be very happy to answer that question for you, to tell you who God really is and what God wants you to do and believe.  The problem is that you’d hear a bunch of different answers and wouldn’t have any way to know who or what to believe.

This is one of the reasons it’s so hard to really believe what any religion says.  There are lots of people trying to get you to believe this story or that story about who God is and what God wants, but the only thing to back those stories up is more stories written by other people and a lot of arguments thought up by people who are trying to prove whatever they believe is true.

This is really confusing.  So is this religious stuff all a bunch of made-up stories about someone who isn’t real, like the stories about Santa Claus that little kids believe?  The people who tell me about God and religion and stuff are grownups and seem like they are smart and know stuff, so why would they say this if it isn’t true.

They tell you this because they have decided to believe it and they want you to believe it too.  None of them can really prove anything, though they’d try to tell you that certain words written in certain books prove what they believe.  But different books have different words, and words don’t really prove anything except that someone wrote them somewhere, sometime.

So are you saying that none of the stories and the religions that tell them are true, or that one of them is true but we can’t tell which one, or what?  If they can’t prove anything about God, how can you? Isn’t what we’re saying here just another story?

In my experience, no one can prove to another person that there is a God, or Gods, and no one can prove to another person that there isn’t.  None of us can prove anything at all about whatever it is we call God, though I like saying “The Mystery” better, because whatever it is we call God is really a Mystery to us.

Without any real proof one way or another, each one of us has to rely on our own personal awareness and pay attention to what is real if we want to find the truth; we have to open ourselves to the truth of what is, what exists in the real world, and see what shows up.

So what we’re saying here, now, isn’t just another story, it’s us exploring the idea that you can’t find the real world in words, in stories. You can’t find it in what we’re saying here, either, though we might find some places to avoid so as not to waste our time if we’re only exploring what is real.

You won’t find reality in a book or in what other people say.  What you find in books and hear from other people are stories, ideas, creations of our minds.  They are not reality.  The reality of books is paper, ink, and squiggles that we call words, symbols we humans create to try to share what’s in our head with other people.

Deciding that this or that story or book of stories about God is true because your parents or girlfriend or some speaker told you so, and then hiding out from or denying the contradictions and meanness and shaky points in the story or the book, and believing in the book instead of what your own eyes and own heart tell you – this is not the way to truth.  This is the way to living in illusion, fantasy, a dream world, or maybe a nightmare.

So if I don’t believe any of the stories from any of the religions that tell about God, then what do I believe in?

Do you believe in sunshine?

I wouldn’t say I believe in it.  I see it, I feel it on my skin, and sometimes I get sunburned by it.  When it’s there, it’s there, and when it’s not, it’s not.

I think I see where you’re going here, but there’s one difference between sunshine and God.  I can show sunshine to anyone, and they can’t say it isn’t there.  Even blind people can feel it.

Ok, I see that.  Do you believe in sadness?

What’s to believe in?  When I’m sad, I’m sad, and when I’m not sad, I’m not.

What if you met someone who didn’t know what being sad was?  How would you let them know what it meant?  What would you say if you were feeling sad and tried to tell them what it was like?

I guess I’d ask them to think about times when they lost something really important, or someone they loved was mean to them, or something like that, and say that’s the way I feel now.

What if they couldn’t think of some time something like that had happened to them?

Then I guess I couldn’t let them know how I feel.  The word “sad” doesn’t mean anything to you if you’ve never felt sad.

This is back to God again, isn’t it?  If I’m aware in some way of God, the presence of God or of something sacred or holy, I can’t tell anyone else about it in a way where they’ll know what I mean unless they’ve had some awareness like that, too.  To understand me, first they have to become aware of God and the sacred by themselves, right?

Well, I wasn’t going to say that, exactly, but I agree with what you said.  Another way to say it is that I can’t lead you or anyone else to the direct awareness of God, of truth, of the sacred, the holy, no matter what I say or what I’m personally aware of.

The best I can do with words is to tell you about some dead-ends and traps of illusion to avoid in your own exploration of reality, of the real world.  It’s pretty hard to be open to the real, actual sacred, whatever it is, when you’re caught up in some story that you’re trying to prove is real.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Ok, I know you said you can’t show me God or direct awareness of truth or the sacred, but you also said you can use words to help me avoid traps of illusion.  Does that mean you can tell me a story that will help me avoid getting lost in some of these traps?

Yeah, I think I can do that.  Promise me, though, that you won’t start believing in this story, that you’ll just use it as a way to look at things from another point of view.

Oh, yeah.  I think I can do that.  But before we go on, I’m not sure I ever got an answer to my question about what I should or could believe in.

What makes you think you need to believe in anything?  I know people have probably told you that you should believe in this, or that, in something, but think about it.  How does picking some religion or philosophy or political system to believe in get you any closer to whatever’s real?

Ok, I guess it doesn’t.  It just gets in your way, makes you pay a lot of attention to some things and ignore others, makes you try to prove that things you believe in are true and that things you don’t believe in are false, and blocks you from seeing and feeling things as they really are.  Right?

Yep.  At the top of my blog, I say “You don’t have to believe in reality.”  What do you think I mean by saying that?

Maybe that you can believe in anything you want to, and you can decide to not believe in something, even if it’s real?

I can see how you could get that meaning from the words, but what I was really trying to say was something like “You don’t have to believe in reality, because reality’s there whether or not you believe in it.”

A writer I like, Philip K. Dick, once said “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

So if God is real, do you have to believe in God?

I get it.  No, I don’t, because if God’s real, then God will be there whether or not I believe in God.  If I become aware of God, then God will be part of my awareness at least part of the time, like sadness or sunshine.

So I don’t have to believe in sadness or sunshine if I‘m personally aware of them in the world, and any awareness I have of God or the sacred works the same way.  Without that awareness, I can decide to believe in God if I want to, but that believing doesn’t mean I know anything about God.  It might even cause me to miss out on my actual awareness of God, of the sacred, if that awareness doesn’t fit in with whatever story about God I’ve decided to believe.

So if I want to ever find spiritual truth, the holy, the sacred, I need to keep my eyes open and free of the veils of belief.  I need to keep it real … not believe in keeping it real, but actually keep it real, actually stay aware of what really is real, and not just focus on what I want to be real.

Thanks, Uncle.  That helps.  Now what was that story you were going to tell me that will help me avoid traps in my mind?

Well, I was going to tell you a story about people and how they love to worship idols that they dream up and some of the problems that causes, but it’s getting pretty late and I have some other things I need to do.  But I’d love to talk about this more tomorrow.  Would that be ok?

Sure.  That would be cool, Unk.  See you tomorrow.

Ok.  Good night, Little One.

‘Nite.

Letters From The Earth – Mark Twain on Fundamentalism

Mark Twain is one of the greatest authors America has ever produced.  I still read and enjoy his stories, and he is still one of America’s all-time best-loved storytellers.

I first read his book “Letters from the Earth” sometime in the Sixties, and I loved it.  I was just getting started in my process of recovering from being raised as a fundamentalist Christian, and I had (still do, actually) a lot of issues with the cruelty and savage treatment of others that the Bible and fundamentalist Christians attribute to the wishes and guidance of God.

“Letters from the Earth” was written in 1909, but wasn’t published until 1962, more than 50 years after Mark Twain’s death.  His daughter, who controlled his estate after his death in 1910, was apparently worried about her father’s reputation being damaged by people’s reactions to these essays.

I felt enormously relieved and validated to see a lot of these issues spelled out and poked full of holes by Mark Twain himself, an author I’d read in school, in the title essay in his book, an essay also called “Letters from the Earth.”  This is a good essay to check out if you’re interesting in exploring a few nooks and crannies that fundamentalist Christians don’t exactly publicize, or if you’re just curious to see more of Mark Twain’s writing.

Here’s a sample of one of the Biblical (King James version) passages he references:

(Deuteronomy 20)
20:10 When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it.
20:11 And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee.
20:12 And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it:
20:13 And when the LORD thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword:
20:14 But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the LORD thy God hath given thee.

Sooo … if I were an Israelite and a soldier in the time of Moses and my unit decided to fight a city, and that city resisted us, we’d lay siege to the city and when we’d starved them into submission, we’d round up the entire population and then butcher (hack to death with swords) each and every male in the city, husbands, sons, toddlers, infants; any living captive human male, we would kill.

But we’d keep the women, little girls, and female infants for ourselves, along with the cattle and whatever else of value we could find in the city, and we’d divide them up between ourselves. Now what’s a soldier going to do with a woman or girl that’s given to him as part of the spoils of conquering and sacking a city? Whatever it is, I don’t think Oprah or Dr. Phil would approve.

To me, this sounds like something out of a story about particularly nasty pirates, what with the sacking and looting and taking the women & girls and killing all the men & boys. If I were reading such a story, I’d be waiting to see how these bastards finally got what they so richly deserved. But, according to the Bible, these butchering, murdering, and almost certainly raping looters are the good guys, under God’s personal guidance.

In Letter XI, while writing about a similar passage describing the slaughter of the Midianites by Israelites (Numbers 31), Mark Twain said:

The heaviest punishment of all was meted out to persons who could not by any possibility have deserved so horrible a fate — the 32,000 virgins. Their naked privacies were probed, to make sure that they still possessed the hymen unruptured; after this humiliation they were sent away from the land that had been their home, to be sold into slavery; the worst of slaveries and the shamefulest, the slavery of prostitution; bed-slavery, to excite lust, and satisfy it with their bodies; slavery to any buyer, be he gentleman or be he a coarse and filthy ruffian.

It was the Father that inflicted this ferocious and undeserved punishment upon those bereaved and friendless virgins, whose parents and kindred he had slaughtered before their eyes. And were they praying to him for pity and rescue, meantime? Without a doubt of it.

With a God like that, who needs a Devil? Personally, I think God should sue the writers & publishers of the Old Testament for libel, but that’s a subject for another post.

Time for bed. ‘Nite, all.
~riverflows

Do Pigs Believe in God?

“If it screams, it’s not food… yet.”

Bacon and eggs: a day’s work for the chicken… a lifetime investment for the pig.”

“I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down to us. Pigs treat us as equals.”
~Winston Churchill

Meditation on the Damned

To whom do pigs pray,
	stacked in their crowded lonely cages,
		eating, defecating, waiting
		for the knife, the butchering, the second eating?

Is their God made in their image, all-powerful and mysterious?

Do they grunt "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?"
	when they wake from dreams of warm sun and cool mud,
		of rooting in the rich earth for treasures?

What is their reward for a life well lived
	(and how do they know when they have lived well,
		or what living well is)?

What is their hell like?
	Who rules it?
		For what crimes are they resurrected
			for agony eternal?

Do they believe that death will release them
	to escape to a happy place, far from the sad torment
		of the life they are given by their keepers,
	that only by dying will they begin living?

If a Messiah arises among them,
	what message will he bring?

What ruler will sit upon the throne
	in the day of their final judgement?
		Where will we, all of us, be
			then?

~riverflows

Barack Obama is Black? I don’t get it.

What makes a man black or white or whatever?

This post is a ways off my usual track, but I’m genuinely scratching my head here.

I was just reading in today’s paper that Barack Obama is now the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. Several times in the article, the author mentioned things like how far the country has come, now that Barack Obama is in line to become the first black US President.

Later, in the same article, I read that Mr. Obama’s father was a black man and his mom was a white woman.  Then I started thinking.

In my reality, a child of one parent of race B and one parent of race W has a genetic makeup of BW, pretty much 50% B and 50% W.  Now, if this BW child ends up being elected President, how can anyone in good conscience say this person is our “first B President?”  I mean, wouldn’t the person be as much a W President as a B President?

What if Mr. Obama married a white woman and had a son with her?  That son would have 4 grandparents, and their 4 races would be BWWW.  Would Mr. Obama’s son then be a B man, simply because his father was labeled a B man because he had a B father?

I was born in 1944, when segregation and racial discrimination were still institutionalized.  I witnessed the Civil Rights movement, or at least watched parts of it on the news.

I seem to remember reading that in the days of slavery a person was classified as a black person if they were 1/16 black or more.  That means a person was legally classified as a Negro if just one of their great-great-grandparents was black.

But those days are gone … aren’t they?  So why is our Democratic Presidential Candidate referred to as “black” when he has only one black parent?  I can think of a few reasons, and I don’t especially like any of them.

Race and religion … people seem to be uneasy unless they can pop you into this or that pigeonhole and slap a label on it and then think of you as that label.  Why is this not a good idea?

Peace, y’all.

~riverflows

Let the Mystery Be

Everything you ever needed to know about the spiritual side of life.

I really like Iris DeMent. I like her voice, unique, quirky, and expressive. I like that she was born in the same Bible Belt state I was (Arkansas), and I like where she’s gone with her songs and music.

If you’re having spiritual/religious headaches and have burning questions about the nature and wishes of God, I unreservedly prescribe for you an uninterrupted listen to this song, paying especial attention to the words and the calm, serene way in which they are delivered.

Cultivate this flowing, accepting attitude in your beliefs and your life and you’ll be right as rain before you know it. Repeat as required.

If I were ever to, God(dess) forbid, start a church for real human beings, this song would be its one and only hymn.

Keep the faith, y’all.
~riverflows