Sunday, October 28, 2012
Sunday, October 21, 2012
I had a dream
I had a dream. In this dream I wasn't afraid. I could say my words, voice my thoughts, let my spirit swell and be me. No one knew me to be wrong. No one thought me odd. We all spoke truth, and love, and hope. We lived the day, we loved the night, and we knew peace.
I woke from my dream in tears knowing I would never see my dream again, no matter how I tried.
Friday, October 19, 2012
Sorry NOM, Logic says you will fail.
Incredibly, this issue continues to mystify me, brings me back again and again to trying to understand the rationale. I just can't. So, this post is going to be a bit choppy and unpolished. But, please, add your thoughts...
There are some out there that seem to think that a homosexual would be a heterosexual if only being a homosexual was not so easy.
A good example: the marriage equality controversy. You see, somehow, by denying a man the option of marrying a man, it will somehow make a society more stable and conducive to rearing the succeeding generations. Why? Well, supposed by these such people, a mother and father are the best pairing for raising children. Therefore, that is reason for denying a homosexual marriage.
But, if I consider that logic for a moment, they are saying that a man - or a woman - who find themselves sexually attracted to those of the same gender, who orient as same sex attraction, should just marry one of the opposite sex if they want to have a lasting, loving, caring and stimulating relationship. What's better, they intimate this with a straight face - no pun intended.
So, let's follow that logic, again, for a bit. If I as a gay man were to marry a woman, who at best I loved as a friend but who I did not find sexually enticing, would I not be miserable? I would imagine a person in such a relationship soon growing angry and short tempered, feeling miserable and alone, uninspired and uncaring. Suicidal? Wouldn't such a person be likely to seek sexual fulfillment outside the marriage?
Now, what part of that is great for rearing children and stabilizing society?
Here is a link to another persons ideas on this. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/01/the-logical-fallacy-gay-marriage-opponents-depend-upon/251486/
Hugs everyone.
The simple fact is that homosexuality is a part of every culture. It just is, and no refusal to accept that will change the fact. The concept that homosexuals are lascivious and a detriment to society and therefore should not be allowed to marry is just as idiotic.
Ok, let's play pretend and presume that is a fair statement. Marriage to a sexually stimulating, mentally challenging and joyful spouse would likely "tame" the wild homosexual -- gees, suddenly sounding like a Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom narrative! But, that would likely result in that person staying home a bit more, or if going out, doing so with a committed partner which would then quite likely inhibit dalliances, right?
No, when it gets right down to it, there really is no real rationale for not allowing equality in marriage so that two consenting adults can become one, be they hetero or homosexual. Even the concept that a hetero relationship brings children into the world presumes: a) the marriage will produce children. b) we need more people in the world. c) there are no orphans in the world who would love to have two mommies or two daddies rather than none of either. No, even then the argument has no leg.
I guess this could go on forever. The thing is, sooner or later marriage equality will be a fact rather than a fantasy. There are too many smart people in the world - idiocy can't last forever. Can it?
There are some out there that seem to think that a homosexual would be a heterosexual if only being a homosexual was not so easy.
A good example: the marriage equality controversy. You see, somehow, by denying a man the option of marrying a man, it will somehow make a society more stable and conducive to rearing the succeeding generations. Why? Well, supposed by these such people, a mother and father are the best pairing for raising children. Therefore, that is reason for denying a homosexual marriage.
But, if I consider that logic for a moment, they are saying that a man - or a woman - who find themselves sexually attracted to those of the same gender, who orient as same sex attraction, should just marry one of the opposite sex if they want to have a lasting, loving, caring and stimulating relationship. What's better, they intimate this with a straight face - no pun intended.
So, let's follow that logic, again, for a bit. If I as a gay man were to marry a woman, who at best I loved as a friend but who I did not find sexually enticing, would I not be miserable? I would imagine a person in such a relationship soon growing angry and short tempered, feeling miserable and alone, uninspired and uncaring. Suicidal? Wouldn't such a person be likely to seek sexual fulfillment outside the marriage?
Now, what part of that is great for rearing children and stabilizing society?
Here is a link to another persons ideas on this. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/01/the-logical-fallacy-gay-marriage-opponents-depend-upon/251486/
Hugs everyone.
The simple fact is that homosexuality is a part of every culture. It just is, and no refusal to accept that will change the fact. The concept that homosexuals are lascivious and a detriment to society and therefore should not be allowed to marry is just as idiotic.
Ok, let's play pretend and presume that is a fair statement. Marriage to a sexually stimulating, mentally challenging and joyful spouse would likely "tame" the wild homosexual -- gees, suddenly sounding like a Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom narrative! But, that would likely result in that person staying home a bit more, or if going out, doing so with a committed partner which would then quite likely inhibit dalliances, right?
No, when it gets right down to it, there really is no real rationale for not allowing equality in marriage so that two consenting adults can become one, be they hetero or homosexual. Even the concept that a hetero relationship brings children into the world presumes: a) the marriage will produce children. b) we need more people in the world. c) there are no orphans in the world who would love to have two mommies or two daddies rather than none of either. No, even then the argument has no leg.
I guess this could go on forever. The thing is, sooner or later marriage equality will be a fact rather than a fantasy. There are too many smart people in the world - idiocy can't last forever. Can it?
Monday, October 15, 2012
Sunday, October 14, 2012
In the Shame-Shame file.
Parents!
Your children do not get rolls of Toilet Tissue for runny noses!
Today I went out to play with the dog and found that some little pack of snot nosed bastards had tp'd the neighbor lady's house. (no this is not a pic of her house) This is an 80 year old woman with Alzheimer's! I can't imagine the stress she must have felt, the anger, the fear even.
Unfortunately, I didn't notice it right away. It was after 6 pm before I could go clean it up.
You know what would have impressed me? If these little butt wipes had gone two doors down and tp'd the county k-9 officer's house. Him with his guns, law, and two German Shepherd K-9 trained dogs. Now, that would be impressive.
Your children do not get rolls of Toilet Tissue for runny noses!
Unfortunately, I didn't notice it right away. It was after 6 pm before I could go clean it up.
You know what would have impressed me? If these little butt wipes had gone two doors down and tp'd the county k-9 officer's house. Him with his guns, law, and two German Shepherd K-9 trained dogs. Now, that would be impressive.
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Who is My Neighbor?
While I was at work, I began to think on the parable of "the Good Samaritan", and how it has seemed to lose its meaning in today's culture.
Now, from my readings, lawyers of Jesus era and those of our own have one thing in common: they seem to often debate the law looking for loopholes that excuse less than honorable behaviour, thereby making it acceptable.
It is at this that Jesus speaks the parable of "The Good Samaritan".
So, first, understand that Samaritans were considered the unclean, despised and hated. They were an Abrahamic religion, similar to Judaism. In a way, one might think of them as Lutherans and Catholics, having a common philosophical ancestry. In another, one might see them similar to Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims - again, having a common ancestry of philosophy but now - often - quite violently opposed.
I'm going to assume most know the parable of the good samaritan to save space. But, there were two other main characters in the story: the Priest and the Levite. I'm not positive of the roles each played, though I know Levites cared for the religious articles and temples. In essence, these were so called 'holy men'. Holy men who found reason to leave a man beaten, robbed, alone and unable to care for himself. Holy men who found excuse to not help another. Men who used "God's Word" to ignore "God's Word".
Now, who was this Samaritan? Who was this man who stopped to help a stranger on the road? Who was this "unclean" individual who gave his time, his safety, his physical strength and his money to one who was beaten? Was he one who thought himself so righteous as to actually speak for God? So worthy as to care for God's house? Nope, and yet Jesus spoke very highly of him.
This is who I see as fulfilling God's word:
Love, protection, wanting the best for another....
I tell you all of this to come to my point: The most frightening thing in this world to me is a man who would disrespect, disenfranchise and disavow another because "God said".
I've spoken of many of these things before, and I likely will again.
I am angry with the so called leaders who preach hate, I am disappointed with those who would place themselves above others yet sip at the sewer.
I am unimpressed with those who are so impressed with themselves for no reason other than their attraction to the opposite sex.
Frankly the anti-ethics of a loud minority who seem to have the podiums, the pac's, the radio and news shows scare the living lights out of me. They seem so intent upon their irrationality!
What brought all of this on, you may ask. Well, I had another strikeout with another church. At a certain level, I could care less - knock the dust from my boots and move on. Still, rejection hurts a bit, especially being told that one is fundamentally unacceptable.
But, although I have felt alone, rejected and unloved at times, I've also found those who have loved me, picked me up and put me back on my feet. Great people who tell me I'm a good man, who by their example encourage me to be a better man. Who knows what's on the horizon, maybe a lover of my own? Whatever, today is a good day, because no matter what some will say, I'm loved.
Friday, October 12, 2012
A bit of song that calms the heart
I hope you will all enjoy this artist. Look up her music, buy some and support great artists. Thx.
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Sunday, October 7, 2012
Monday, October 1, 2012
The fallacy of moral decline....
Hi Friends;
Reading Scottie's post, one of the first words that caught my attention was "moral decline". I began a search for those very words. Some time ago, I'd read a blurb about how "the decline of moral values" has been a part of every political campaign since before Lincoln. Further, it was always the fault of the incumbant and his party rather than the challenging party(s), and could only be solved by the immediate change of rulers.
Well, I couldn't find that article or information. Mainly because I read this article and stopped looking for the moment.
If you ask my impression of the concept of moral decline, I point to the Kardashians and Jersey Shore. But, guess what...... I Change The Chanel! And, while that may not be fair, my real point is that just because I don't agree with someone's "morals" I still retain the liberty to not take part. It does not make my own so very correct, theirs so very wrong, and surely doesn't place in the role of the decider of what shall be and what shall not.
Well, here is an interesting article. I stole it from George Monbiot (The Guardian, 5/14/12) here's the link if you would like to check out the source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/14/family-life-best-for-1000-years
Moral decay? Family life's the best it's been for 1,000 yearsConservatives' concerns about marriage seem to be based on a past that is fabricated from their own anxieties and obsessions.
'Throughout history and in virtually all human societies marriage has always been the union of a man and a woman." So says the Coalition for Marriage, whose petition against same-sex unions in the UK has so far attracted 500,000 signatures. It's a familiar claim, and it is wrong. Dozens of societies, across many centuries, have recognised same-sex marriage. In a few cases, before the 14th century, it was even celebrated in church.
This is an example of a widespread phenomenon: myth-making by cultural conservatives about past relationships. Scarcely challenged, family values campaigners have been able to construct a history that is almost entirely false.
The unbiblical and ahistorical nature of the modern Christian cult of the nuclear family is a marvel rare to behold. Those who promote it are followers of a man born out of wedlock and allegedly sired by someone other than his mother's partner. Jesus insisted that "if any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters … he cannot be my disciple". He issued no such injunction against homosexuality: the threat he perceived was heterosexual and familial love, which competed with the love of God.
This theme was aggressively pursued by the church for some 1,500 years. In his classic book A World of Their Own Making, Professor John Gillis points out that until the Reformation, the state of holiness was not matrimony but lifelong chastity. There were no married saints in the early medieval church. Godly families in this world were established not by men and women, united in bestial matrimony, but by the holy orders, whose members were the brothers or brides of Christ. Like most monotheistic religions (which developed among nomadic peoples), Christianity placed little value on the home. A Christian's true home belonged to another realm, and until he reached it, through death, he was considered an exile from the family of God.
The Reformation preachers created a new ideal of social organisation – the godly household – but this bore little relationship to the nuclear family. By their mid-teens, often much earlier, Gillis tells us, "virtually all young people lived and worked in another dwelling for shorter or longer periods". Across much of Europe, the majority belonged – as servants, apprentices and labourers – to houses other than those of their biological parents. The poor, by and large, did not form households; they joined them.
The father of the house, who described and treated his charges as his children, typically was unrelated to most of them. Family, prior to the 19th century, meant everyone who lived in the house. What the Reformation sanctified was the proto-industrial labour force, working and sleeping under one roof.
The belief that sex outside marriage was rare in previous centuries is also unfounded. The majority, who were too poor to marry formally, Gillis writes, "could love as they liked as long as they were discreet about it". Before the 19th century, those who intended to marry began to sleep together as soon as they had made their spousals (declared their intentions). This practice was sanctioned on the grounds that it allowed couples to discover whether or not they were compatible. If they were not, they could break it off. Premarital pregnancy was common and often uncontroversial, as long as provision was made for the children.
The nuclear family, as idealised today, was an invention of the Victorians, but it bore little relationship to the family life we are told to emulate. Its development was driven by economic rather than spiritual needs, as the industrial revolution made manufacturing in the household unviable. Much as the Victorians might extol their families, "it was simply assumed that men would have their extramarital affairs and women would also find intimacy, even passion, outside marriage" (often with other women). Gillis links the 20th-century attempt to find intimacy and passion only within marriage, and the impossible expectations this raises, to the rise in the rate of divorce.
Children's lives were characteristically wretched: farmed out to wet nurses, sometimes put to work in factories and mines, beaten, neglected, often abandoned as infants. In his book A History of Childhood, Colin Heywood reports that "the scale of abandonment in certain towns was simply staggering", reaching one third or a half of all the children born in some European cities. Street gangs of feral youths caused as much moral panic in late 19th-century England as they do today.
Conservatives often hark back to the golden age of the 1950s. But in the 1950s, John Gillis shows, people of the same persuasion believed they had suffered a great moral decline since the early 20th century. In the early 20th century, people fetishised the family lives of the Victorians. The Victorians invented this nostalgia, looking back with longing to imagined family lives before the industrial revolution.
In the Daily Telegraph today Cristina Odone maintained that "anyone who wants to improve lives in this country knows that the traditional family is key". But the tradition she invokes is imaginary. Far from this being, as cultural conservatives assert, a period of unique moral depravity, family life and the raising of children is, for most people, now surely better in the west than at any time in the past 1,000 years.
The conservatives' supposedly moral concerns turn out to be nothing but an example of the age-old custom of first idealising and then sanctifying one's own culture. The past they invoke is fabricated from their own anxieties and obsessions. It has nothing to offer us.
Reading Scottie's post, one of the first words that caught my attention was "moral decline". I began a search for those very words. Some time ago, I'd read a blurb about how "the decline of moral values" has been a part of every political campaign since before Lincoln. Further, it was always the fault of the incumbant and his party rather than the challenging party(s), and could only be solved by the immediate change of rulers.
Well, I couldn't find that article or information. Mainly because I read this article and stopped looking for the moment.
If you ask my impression of the concept of moral decline, I point to the Kardashians and Jersey Shore. But, guess what...... I Change The Chanel! And, while that may not be fair, my real point is that just because I don't agree with someone's "morals" I still retain the liberty to not take part. It does not make my own so very correct, theirs so very wrong, and surely doesn't place in the role of the decider of what shall be and what shall not.
Well, here is an interesting article. I stole it from George Monbiot (The Guardian, 5/14/12) here's the link if you would like to check out the source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/14/family-life-best-for-1000-years
'Throughout history and in virtually all human societies marriage has always been the union of a man and a woman." So says the Coalition for Marriage, whose petition against same-sex unions in the UK has so far attracted 500,000 signatures. It's a familiar claim, and it is wrong. Dozens of societies, across many centuries, have recognised same-sex marriage. In a few cases, before the 14th century, it was even celebrated in church.
This is an example of a widespread phenomenon: myth-making by cultural conservatives about past relationships. Scarcely challenged, family values campaigners have been able to construct a history that is almost entirely false.
The unbiblical and ahistorical nature of the modern Christian cult of the nuclear family is a marvel rare to behold. Those who promote it are followers of a man born out of wedlock and allegedly sired by someone other than his mother's partner. Jesus insisted that "if any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters … he cannot be my disciple". He issued no such injunction against homosexuality: the threat he perceived was heterosexual and familial love, which competed with the love of God.
This theme was aggressively pursued by the church for some 1,500 years. In his classic book A World of Their Own Making, Professor John Gillis points out that until the Reformation, the state of holiness was not matrimony but lifelong chastity. There were no married saints in the early medieval church. Godly families in this world were established not by men and women, united in bestial matrimony, but by the holy orders, whose members were the brothers or brides of Christ. Like most monotheistic religions (which developed among nomadic peoples), Christianity placed little value on the home. A Christian's true home belonged to another realm, and until he reached it, through death, he was considered an exile from the family of God.
The Reformation preachers created a new ideal of social organisation – the godly household – but this bore little relationship to the nuclear family. By their mid-teens, often much earlier, Gillis tells us, "virtually all young people lived and worked in another dwelling for shorter or longer periods". Across much of Europe, the majority belonged – as servants, apprentices and labourers – to houses other than those of their biological parents. The poor, by and large, did not form households; they joined them.
The father of the house, who described and treated his charges as his children, typically was unrelated to most of them. Family, prior to the 19th century, meant everyone who lived in the house. What the Reformation sanctified was the proto-industrial labour force, working and sleeping under one roof.
The belief that sex outside marriage was rare in previous centuries is also unfounded. The majority, who were too poor to marry formally, Gillis writes, "could love as they liked as long as they were discreet about it". Before the 19th century, those who intended to marry began to sleep together as soon as they had made their spousals (declared their intentions). This practice was sanctioned on the grounds that it allowed couples to discover whether or not they were compatible. If they were not, they could break it off. Premarital pregnancy was common and often uncontroversial, as long as provision was made for the children.
The nuclear family, as idealised today, was an invention of the Victorians, but it bore little relationship to the family life we are told to emulate. Its development was driven by economic rather than spiritual needs, as the industrial revolution made manufacturing in the household unviable. Much as the Victorians might extol their families, "it was simply assumed that men would have their extramarital affairs and women would also find intimacy, even passion, outside marriage" (often with other women). Gillis links the 20th-century attempt to find intimacy and passion only within marriage, and the impossible expectations this raises, to the rise in the rate of divorce.
Children's lives were characteristically wretched: farmed out to wet nurses, sometimes put to work in factories and mines, beaten, neglected, often abandoned as infants. In his book A History of Childhood, Colin Heywood reports that "the scale of abandonment in certain towns was simply staggering", reaching one third or a half of all the children born in some European cities. Street gangs of feral youths caused as much moral panic in late 19th-century England as they do today.
Conservatives often hark back to the golden age of the 1950s. But in the 1950s, John Gillis shows, people of the same persuasion believed they had suffered a great moral decline since the early 20th century. In the early 20th century, people fetishised the family lives of the Victorians. The Victorians invented this nostalgia, looking back with longing to imagined family lives before the industrial revolution.
In the Daily Telegraph today Cristina Odone maintained that "anyone who wants to improve lives in this country knows that the traditional family is key". But the tradition she invokes is imaginary. Far from this being, as cultural conservatives assert, a period of unique moral depravity, family life and the raising of children is, for most people, now surely better in the west than at any time in the past 1,000 years.
The conservatives' supposedly moral concerns turn out to be nothing but an example of the age-old custom of first idealising and then sanctifying one's own culture. The past they invoke is fabricated from their own anxieties and obsessions. It has nothing to offer us.
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