flowperson

Messers JTEDM

You may or may not be aware that the UCC fully affirmed its support of all lifestyles and genders at its national meeting last year. Although I am not currently affiliated with the UCC, I was for most of my life, and I can assure you both that most of the UCC churches that I attended and have been a member of have followed this policy and practice for many decades prior to the official declaration.

Of course there are congregations of a more conservative bent, such as the covenant congregations which adhere to policies passed down from the Congregational Churches of the past before they became UCC. I do not know what has transpired since the national policy declaration by the UCC, but I haven't heard of any schism movements as a result of the decision last year. The Episcopal Churchs' situation, however, seems to be another matter worldwide.

Can anyone else speak knowledgeably about the situation? All I know about this is what I read in the news.

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I have had this on my fridge for about 10 years now. To me it quite simply states what I believe all human beings are really after in this life, or at least what most of us give lip service to.

But after Mr. Kung started this movement and wrote this book he was summarily dismissed from his professorship at a Gernman university and relegated to direct the religious affairs of an obscure parish in Swizerland.

It is difficult to reconcile such a pure vision and such true words with such harsh treatment, but then exile has always been the modern version of punishment for those who refuse to fit in with the group dynamic.

Do you believe that this treatment of Kung by the Church was justified and fair?

COMMON GROUND

" Bahai, Buddhist, Confucian, Christian, Hindu, Jain, Jew, Muslim, Shintoist, Zoroastrian, and others - we have come together in peace out of a common concern for peace.

As we sat down together facing the overriding issues of peace, we discovered that the things that unite us are more important than the things which divide us. We found that we share:

* A conviction of the fundamental unity of the human family, of the equality and dignity of all

human beings.

* A sense of the sacredness of the individual person and his consciousness.

* A recognition that might is not right, that human power is not self-sufficient and absolute.

* A belief that love, compassion, unselfishness, and the forces of inner truthfulness and of the

spirit have ultimately greater power than hate, enmity, and self-interest.

* A sense of obligation to stand on the side of the poor and the oppressed as against the rich and

the oppressors.

* A profound hope that good will finally prevail. "

Excerpted from Kung, Hans. A Global Ethic. New York: Continuum, 1993, 63

Ahhhhhh ! Another mystic. No wonder his work appeals to me and seems so ageless.

We hear alot about Shiite and Sunni Muslims, and mostly in negative ways, but almost never about the Sufis. Does anyone know if there is an active population of them these days, and if so why don't those of us with like tendencies hear from them every once in a while ?

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Maybe his eyes are red because his paw is on your foot. Devil Dog ???? Cute though.

Did anyone see the video of the greyhound in the pound that figured out how to open his cage, and then proceeded to methodically open every other cage in the shelter. Very intelligent and inspiring hound. They're couch potatoes Huh? Sounds like my kind of dog.

On second thought your dog must be the greatest ever, Fred, since it is obvious from the picture that he shops at Trader Joe's !!!!

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Hmmmmmm !

And I thought "Rumi" was someone you lived with at college.

A very wise person. I had not heard of this poet's work before. I'm more of the Gibran generation though.

But it is REALLY difficult to treat one's enemies with respect and love them for what they are and what they do. I know it's what true Christians are supposed to do, and try as I may I still find myself screaming bad stuff at them inside of my head and hoping that I don't have to deal with them ever again.

But then "stuff happens, things change" and as long as we are able to walk around and breathe, there is sometimes still hope.

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Wonderful thoughts here AR and Fred.

As I have gotten older I have naturally relied more upon ritualistic behavior patterns to get me through the weeks and months without despairing. Life seems to do this to us quite naturally over the years since we simply do not always have the reserve energy levels required to seek out spontaneous and surprising activities to try and fill our time with. Work, self-care, care for others all become a familiar pattern that carry us forward through time with not much time left for other things.

But that all brings a sadness as we age because life's most meaningful, memorable, and pleasurable moments are those of spontaneaity and surprise. I notice this alot more these days since I am the primary care-giver for my parents who are 90 and 89. While they can do very well for themselves at home, I must often direct things when it comes to outside activities such as shopping, the doctor, and entertainment. Some months our monthly visit to In-N-Out Burger is the high point, except for visits they enjoy with friends and relatives. And say what you will an occasional buffet and an hour so of nickel video poker gives them a visible lift in spirits.

They have ritualized their lives to such an extent that any surprise or spontaneous occurrence causes them alot of dismay and upset. So as we age it is a good thing to delay gratification in order that the good times are more meaningful, but often looking ahead in anticipation is not always advisable because we come to experience over time that too much anticipation can and does sometimes spoil the event when it does not meet expectations. So one of Peck's other principles comes into play, balancing.

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I believe that in the real world there are hateful and judgemental people that intrude into our realities and do turn potentially beautiful episodes in life into hellish experiences. At least that's one truth that I fave found in my everyday experiences over sixty-plus years or so.

To write a television drama that conforms to one person's or a small group's ideals of what the world they are creating through writing "should be like" would be tantamount to creating a "fantasy world that really doesn't exist". Or, one could call this a massive "suspension of disbelief", which is the key to writing successful fiction.

In the world of television programming, writers are led into creating "so-called" realistic scenarios that serve to enable a larger share of watchers to identify with its goings on than the competitions'. This enables larger survey numbers that draws more advertising money to the program and network, which is the entire point of the television business.

It's ok to criticize what's on TV and wish that it were something else, but for me the reality of the medium is that I personally agree less and less with the truth of what is presented there, and spend less and less of my time watching it. For me it is simply not worth it.

I guess I do not enjoy watching television portrayals of the activities of hateful and judgemental people because I've experienced enough of that to last several lifetimes, so I don't. Televisions can be turned off, and I do quite often these days.

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I made this one up.

In the study of complex systems (ie. chaos theory) some have chosen to name the coming together of two or more entities to form a new and viable entity an harmonic convergence. Think corporate mergers, the merging of male and female chromosomes to generate a new human being, the meeting of warm and cold air masses to generate rain clouds, etc. In general the outcomes of these happenings produce positive outcomes over the long term ( except maybe for Enron scandals, serial murderers, and tornadoes) and start new timelines for the harmonized entitiies, some long, some short.

Maybe we haven't given the situation enough time to show any positive outcomes, but in this case it seems that an event cluster occurred that produced only negative outcomes, an ending of viaible entities and apparently nothing of value to follow the originals other than historic recordings, writings, etc. Since nothing seems to have been harmonized, or brought together to fashion a new beginning for anything other than sadness and separation, I took it upon myself to designate this particular event cluster as a disharmonic convergence.

Any better suggestions ?

Oh, I forgot to note that this happened on 01,06,06. Maybe we should be a little apprehensive about June 6th this year ?

I believe that I'm going to stock up on canned tuna, crackers, and bottled water right away.

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While this article may be a bit offputting to our more conservative participants, I found it to be full of fascinating ideas and concepts.

And no, I wasn't on drugs when I first read it, and not now either, except for some vitamins, herbals, and blood pressure medications.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/07/internat...fman.html?8hpib

January 6th 2006 may go down in Chicago history. This was a day when an odd cluster of events significant to the African American population of that great city seemed to bunch together in a way that said something to those who pay attention to such things.

1. Vocalist Lou Rawls died of cancer in Los Angeles. Mr. Rawls was a premminent interpreter of the jazz and blues musical idioms. He grew up on the near south side of Chicago and began performing publicly as an adolescent in a group that included the late Sam Cooke. He called Chicago home for most of his life. A theater and musical performance venue named after him is located in the bronzeville neighborhood on the near south side of the city.

2. The Pilgrim Baptist church, which was a synagogue before becoming a Baptist church in 1922, located in the bronzeville neighborhood on the near south side of the city, burned to the ground following an apparent construction mishap while sections of its roof were being repaired. The church is recognized nationally as the birthplace of the gospel music idiom under the directorship of Dr. Theodore Dorsey. It included performers such as Mahalia Jackson among its musical members and affiliates. A truly inspiring and sacred place.

3. President Bush gave an address before the Economic Council of Chicago regarding how well the economy is doing under the current administration's program of tax cuts for wealthier citizens, open-ended warfare, massive deficit spending, and significant budget reductions in services to the elderly, children, families, and reductions in medical benefits for those who cannot afford to pay for their own care.

Anyone wish to comment ?

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/07/national...?pagewanted=all

The doors that swing both ways always remind me of the entryways to saloons in the old west , and of a terrific story in Ralph Ellison's epic novel, Invisible Man. Some prominent critics consider it to have been the landmark novel of the 20th century. I concur. Read it. You won't regret it.

In the scene the hero, a young black man who attends a military school is forced to fight another young man for the pleasure and entertainment of clergy, businessmen, and politicians in the Golden Day Saloon. I won't tell you everything that transpires there. It would spoil your enjoyment of a truly great read. Even though it was published in 1947, the book tells us volumes of what has really been going on in our country since WW II.

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It'll cost 2 cents more to mail a letter next week !!!!!

ARRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH !!!!!

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What's Pat and all these nutcases smoking anyhow ?

I want to make sure I don't get any of it by mistake !!

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This all goes to show that the major conclusion I reached sometime ago after 60 years on this third rock from the sun is definitely true. Life is a joke, and we should all be laughing at ourselves because we are usually so ridiculous. It's really a healthy thing to do.

I said the same thing to my minister some years ago (whom I greatly respected for his courage, discretion, wisdom, and lovingkindness) upon the occasion of my leaving the denomination that I had been a part of all of my life.

He didn't disagree.

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90% in category 9, and in the 70 percentages in 1,2 and 6.

Sounds like I'm one mixed-up and confused dude, but I'm very calm about it all.

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MOW :

I knew it was something like that since it has always been one of my hauntingly favorite melodies. But then so have Beethoven's 9th, The Green Leaves of Summer, and See Me Feel Me Touch Me Heal Me.

Thanks for your work . The part I knew about was that a billabong was a stream or spring in the outback. Always a very refreshing and sacred thing in the middle of vast dryness.

I especially liked the part about anti-authoritarianism. Is that anything like antidisestablishmentanianism ? Sounds like some stuff from the 60's to me.

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DD...re: automatic writing

Maybe some of the Government programs (or is that pogroms?) begun in the fifties did come to fruition such as MKULTRA, which was a well-thought out and planned stategy to make mind control possible.

After all the brain is an electrochemical device in its operational aspects, and thereby subject to certain degrees of control, albeit intermittent, if placed in the "right" circumstances and electromagnetic environments. There's got to be a reason why the Amish don't like electricity.

But of course all this work went under the black curtain in the sixties and consequently we never heard much about it except from conspiracy theorists. But that $40 billion a year is being spent in the black on something. Why not an occasional bit of automatic wriing or speaking by individuals who have the ability and position to intervene in order to influence public opinion in one way or another to suit political and strategic objectives? Pretty Satanic, No?

Lots of thing go on in the darkness. Lots of them we don't want to know about. But sometimes it's necesssary to shed some light on them so that we might come to realize just where we are all being led. I made up my mind some time ago that there are too many secrets. Why is that? Maybe we are about to find out some of the reasons.

Yours in deepest, darkest secrecy....

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JB

My take on this is that G-d ALWAYS pushes human nature to transcend its current conditions in order to take this world of suffering into the next realm.

Victimhood, pain, suffering, legal process, retribution, and justice, are functional attributes of this world, not necessarily of the next set of spiritual realities.. Therefore door slamming and silence is sometimes necessary on G-d's part in order to evoke transcendant moments in each of our existences.

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JB

I believe that Waltzing Matilda was popularized in the 1950's movie On The Beach. It was sung by herdsmen in the outback and is a traditional Aussie song on the order of our Home on the Range, or maybe Red River Valley. I know what a few of the words mean but not all of them.

The movie starred Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Tony Perkins, and Fred Astair in a dramatic role that didn't require dancing. I believe that Astair won a supporting actor oscar for his role.

The story is based on a novel by, I believe Nevill Shute, and posits an end of the world scenario after the northern hemisphere destroys itself with nuclear weapons and the rest of life on earth is slowly snuffed out by spreading radioactive clouds. A wonderful book and movie, and I highly recommend both if you like being emotionally moved. The song was extensively used throughout the film as background music.

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I love it when people anthropomorphize body parts. Reminds me of a Robin Williams routine !

It makes one's life ever so much more interesting. Sounds like you had a fleeting case of automatic writing (been there, done that) while your fingers visited Iowa. But then, that's where heaven is.

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Well, as usual I had to go to work this a.m. at 2:00 but since I live a half mile from the strip, all the fireworks went off at midnight and woke me from a sound sleep. My kids are still here and they were with the half million revelers in the street.

Came home after work about noon and put a turkey in the oven and we ate that with all the trimmings about 5:00. Toasts with asti spumante were made before the meal. We all took lots of leftovers over to my folks' place about an hour ago and now we're about to have some cheesecake and tea before crashing.

Day off tomorrow so lots of relaxing time before I go back to the new year's grind on tues. A very happy and prosperous new year to you all from me and my family.

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So Be It !!!

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Very well put. I agree. There are limits of belief in everything.

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There is such a thing as overgeneralization. To go from the entanglement of subatomic particles that were created together and have very good reasons to be entangled to saying that the entire universe is entangled is quite a leap. All my life I have heard facts about quantum mechanics morphed into fantasies that met some pre-existent desire of some dreamer. Some of those dreamers were a lot better physicists than I was, like Richard Feynman, who believed in parallel universes resulting from choice somehow. A lot of words have been invested in such ideas, but they remain no better documented than the contents of any dream.

 

I made computer models of memory in the seventies, trying to reproduce this quality of an output recapitulating a previous state, from an input that is only a piece of that state, part of the "hologram" metaphor. It can be done, if one doesn't get too lost in the how a real hologram works and remembers instead that it is neurons doing this, not photons. Exactly how these neurons do everything they do is still a great mystery. Synaptic plasticity doesn't explain everything yet. Neither does the hologram metaphor.

 

Physics shows in great detail how the physical universe is one, how a few forces and particles explain everything, with some areas where it's hard to be explicit how they do. My consciousness may be entirely due to that, or there may be something else to explain whatever part of a mind turns out to be unexplainable by the physical brain. Call that something else spiritual reality or whatever else. Regardless of that, there is some kind of separateness in my consciousness and apparently everyone else's consciousness. I doubt it is as absolute as those who believe they are totally free in their thoughts or choices at some level. Yet there is a separateness that seems even more important a thing to perceive as unity. God is God, and I am not. I have many examples to illustrate that, even if it is also true that I am part of God in some way.

 

The Michelson-Morley experiment showed that the speed of light was the same regardless of the path the light took, meaning there is no ether required for the EM waves to propagate through, as startling at the time as anything now.

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Thank you for a most intriguing post. I would be interested to know the context in which your 70's memory initialization and replication work occurred. Industry? Government ? Academia ?

Anyway, my suspicion is that the work probably was not limited or stymied by the conceptual or experimental-procedural constraints, but probably due to the limitation of the signal transmission environment of the processors that you may have been utilizing. And here not so much by the speed with which the signals were processed, but by the flow characteristics of the circuitry in which they had to travel.

From what you wrote, I believe that you would agree that there may be some theoretical point in time and space where individual perceptions could exist of separateness-aloneness in conjunction with some sort of connectedness-unification to-with a greater wholeness. And further that this theoretical singularity in space-time might arise in brain tissues, at least that's what I've been able to decode from the information in this discussion.

IMO musical structures (hence mathematical constructs) will likely play a large part of this theoretical harmonic convergence at that future time-space locus. I ran across this article on today's NY Times website and I believe that it points to a direction that may work in the future to resolve the experience-based conundrum that you found in the 70's.

BTW, Richard Feynman is one of my personal heros and if the future described in the article comes to be then there is a likelihood that his dream of choosing locations in parallel universes may have a possibility of occurring under special circumstances, at least individual perceptions of that. You, of course, also remember that Feynman, prescient futurist that he was, had a deep and abiding pessimistic outlook regarding a future that included nanotechnology. But here we all are already in that future, and life seems to go on, no ?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/29/technology/29nano.html

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The Bible says "By their fruits ye shall know them."  For me authentic faith is faith that leads you to act compassionately for social justice  I view people like Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, Jean Vanier and Ghandi as having an authentic faith.  It is their faith, whether Christian our otherwise, that gves them the strength to lead exemplary lives.  This is not to say that others, who are not so well known don't have authentic faith, but those who do know them can see the the fruits of their faith

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And, I would say that all this gives us the courage to follow their lead and demonstrate to others just what is possible through belief in the principles that they demonstrated. This leads to positive and progressive action that will carry faith into the future.

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