Rector

Rector

Solace:

Religious experience for sure is salvation for most, a melancholy but handy companion as we begin, continue and end our journey of life. Most religions cushion the blow in the expiration of life in giving us comfort that we will continue on in a utopic realm. Spiritualism though, is not delegated solely to a religion based on afterlife while relegating to the dustbin any other independent philosophy of emotion for the here and now. Spirituality is purely an emotional state. It measures in multitudes of form and is at its highest when on an individual plane.

As an inherited species, we need our quiet moments; a time for contemplation; for reflection to focus. For sure, religion holds no sole rights to this splendor. I remember so vividly still…the spiritualism felt of the first time in hearing red wolves howling throughout a chilled night in the East Texas piney woods. Seeing a whale breach no matter the first or hundredth time fills the mind and body with spiritualism…an inner sanctity indeed not limited, but felt in its relevancy. It is an inward purge that flows so strongly outwards, where minuteness clashes with vastness in an intermingled state of being.

We can supplant birth’s blessings to some deity form, but as a purely physical event, the bond of new mother and newborn is beyond that scope in mammalian birth. This mother and child bond, this corded link is what has allowed our continued survival as a species. It molds our personification. I don’t care how much one professes in their love of a god, there is no greater love than between mother and child; it is truly our existence. Only when this bond has erred in divestment is there truly an injustice enacted upon the spirit.

The above samples of spiritualism are not limited to mankind, for indeed other animals experience its grasp as well. An elephant will weep and mourn a lost family member. A goat can take care of a blind aged horse that eventually dies only for the goat to soon pass as well due to the emotive state of loss in its spiritual being. A mother bear is fearless in defense of her cubs and without hesitation will forfeit her life to ensure the continuance of her cubs’ lives. All mammals reason within the realm of emotion, they just haven’t taken emotion one step farther to imagine a creator.

With the above read and hopefully pocketed to keep in mind, let’s move on to religious measures of emotion.

Supplant:

And Jesus in anguish cried out, “Eloi, Eloi lema sabachthani” (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!”) and there was no reply.

In this verse from Mark 15: 34-37 and Matthew 27: 46-50, God ignored his only begotten son and gave no reply. Of course I assure you most will argue that this is not true, for the resurrection is the seal in the deal. But in Jesus coming back to life…it truly rests on shaky ground and far from hallowed.

In the resurrection, or even resuscitation, there is no physical evidence, no inscription and no historical document to reference the event; it is only in the New Testament as written by the faithful in the aftermath, long after the actual event. It is the persuasive power to believe, not an actual occurrence itself that manifested the resurrection. No pro, hostile or neutral eyewitness jotted down anything. Nor did Jesus, Mary, Peter, nor any of the Twelve, seventy, or 500 disciples. Not the Sadducee high priest Caiaphas, not Gamaliel the leading Sanhedrin authority of the day, who was also a teacher of Paul’s recorded the sequence. The King of the Jews, Herod Agrippa gave no documentation, nor Pontius Pilate the Roman prefect of Judea give credence to the event. There just isn’t a Jewish, Greek or Roman account to attest to the resurrection.

As much as the faithful has to refute, Jesus most likely, as what typically occurred during the days of Middle East Roman rule and execution of prisoners, had his body dumped into a mass dug ditch with burial perhaps performed. Most of the time, the bodies weren’t covered with earth, they simply were left exposed to the physical elements.

Naturally this was not a befitting end for the followers of the Christ savior. So long after the event unfolded, later followers wrote down a more proper closure to give credence to Jesus’ life with a competent ending by molding it into a beginning. This shows up as evident in that there was more than one story to Christ’s final moment. In Luke 23:46, the last words were, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.” In John 19:30, Jesus simply states, “It is finished” then bows his head and dies. The editors of these four gospels wrote to different generations in different times, so gave the best interpreted representation to fulfill the particular needs of their audiences.          

The three main themed religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) all based on the Hebrew god casts a dour meaning in a cultural society as twofold through fear. Fear is the binding adhesive to alleviate any straying from the fold by employing allegiance and guilt. Enacted fear in life motivates the faithful to ensure the downfall of a designated enemy that is perceived as evil. Due to fear of death, disobedience to the worshiped god is damnation. With both cases conjoined, if you do not condemn a god’s perceived enemy, you have disobeyed that god’s commandments, thus you are doomed to a hellish eternity.   

I suppose gods kill for their own purposes which are for the advantages of religious man, but surely at the expense of mankind.

Conception:

To say that the natural man in primitive nature is not yet fully human is one thing; but in reasoning further it is quite another thing to say that the man of nature cannot become fully human on his own whether he was created or not in a creator’s own image. Let’s explain.

As natural causation goes in a human setting, the human infant learns as he matures in a societal and communal norm. Once the instinctual tactics are enlisted such as suckling, crying and even the instinctual urge to take…societal etiquette post cedes. He/she now benefits from gaining knowledge learning to walk, what it is to share, potty training, speech and of course indoctrination into a religion. To be human though, is not necessarily to perform human traits such as bipedalism and speaking or...coming up with a god.

The vast amount of cases have been hoaxes or abandoned children that were born wholly mentally handicapped, but there are a few documented cases of true feral children. A feral child is a toddler who was abandoned in the wilderness for whatever reason, but survived in being nurtured by wild animals. Void of human contact they have no remembered experience of human care, loving or cultural behavior.

In these very rare cases of a hundred or so, the animals of concern in the survival and upbringing of the children were apes, monkeys or wolves. But included is a she bear and leopardess adopting a child along with a boy who roamed the Syrian wilderness with a herd of gazelle.

Once found, captured and brought back to civilization, none of these children could walk upright, could never learn to speak and most certainly could not entertain the concept of a god. They only portrayed the characteristics of the animal that adopted them.
 
It appears they were not only abandoned to the wilds, but abandoned by the gods as well. Along with the advantage of a wild animal’s nurturing they reverted back to a primal state with accentuated senses and body mobility conforming to the respective animal they were in the care of. Surely no god of compassion would ever allow its supposed greatest creation to live in this way as godless in thought.

These rare cases of feral child behavior in my opinion anyway, demonstrates that a god is man made and not the other way around. When past the prime age in the ability of the brain to master and understand language has passed, along with other human conditions there can be no concept of a god.

Does this mean, though albeit less kind, but nonetheless still that a god can exist? The answer is rather simple; for them never. Their wild upbringing had no need of a god, therefore to placate one even after exposure to civilization was beyond their scope. Even though they show no outward traits in being human, these feral children are indeed a human being both genetically and morphologically; they simply weren’t taught a deity. Apparently God will not speak nor reveal himself to all.

To Reverse a Reversal:

Can a creationist teaching science truly relay to his students the concepts and facts of science? Just as in Islam, many American schools are placating learned scientists with religious creationists. This is wrong, for as evolution will not be entertained in a Sunday school class, neither should religion be indoctrinated into a public school science class.

Recently, there was a creationist by the name of Eric Hovind that was beginning his introduction of creationism to a group of elementary students. His theme was that there had to be a creator simply because God must exist or we can know nothing without God's existence.

This is circle argument, or as philosophers insist a post hoc ergo proctor hoc. It is an illogical fallacy. Fortunately, instead of brainlessly allowing it all to soak in, there was a quite bright eleven or twelve-year-old sixth grader that took him to task.

The student confronted Hovind with contrary logic that caught Hovind off guard. So he responds in an aggressive nature by quickly standing up as if to block the child’s misdirected confrontation while acting as if he’s rolling up his sleeves. This doesn’t faze the student one iota. Eventually Hovind realizes he’s losing the argument with this little Einstein of a sixth grader, so abandons ship by saying your father would not agree with you, therefore you must be wrong.

The video below captures the debate between Hovind and the sixth grader:

    

This kid reaffirms my faith in the younger generation, mankind and critical thinking. Hovind in the video, when stating in his circular logic that we can know nothing without God, the student confronts and dispels it.

Allowing fundamentalist Christians to incorporate creationism into our educational curriculum is no different than Muslims incorporating sharia law into theirs. It’s indoctrination, not education.

Science, while dispelling myths and even stances it had once held through analytically derived new observations, constantly seeks out plausible explanations. This is why today we live such a convenient lifestyle with our artificial habitat thermostat climate control, electronic gadgetry, transportation and medicine. Hovind’s logic necessitates us to lose and forget science’s objective measurement.

No matter how we might argue or tweak, science and religion are not inclusive to one another, they are exclusive. In fact they do not even parallel one another. Religion is based on unchanging religious dogma. It’s based on tradition and cannot change, for after all, God’s word is final and eternal…unchanging. Once God has made up his mind and spoken, it is for the ages. Science is constantly changing in revelations discovered in this universe we’re parked in because we now know it is not a static station but is a constantly changing reflux itself.

There is far more intensity to this universe we do not know and as for now it remains unexplained, but in what we do know, it was science that enlightened us and not ancient sessile myths. Our real beginning may be more exciting than we could ever have imagined.

Just reason this, in slow infancy steps science is figuring out the vastness of this universe in how it arose and how it will end without the need for coming up with a sole creator and there let it rest. Holding onto perceived myths guts further knowledge in revealing the truths.

Actually we are no smarter than the first Homo sapiens caveman. The caveman infant if raised today would have no disadvantage, or more advantage for that matter, in learning current technology than any other present Homo sapiens infant. Our knowledge today is simply accumulative, built up and on during our reign in evolvement by science with a little common sense sprinkled in.

Science is the innovation of knowledge. Tradition structured philosophy is its stagnation. Is science attacked because the attackers fear it will prove God does not exist; that it will finally put to rest the bones of the gods? I answer the question in this fashion. Directly yes, it already has, but indirectly never, for there will always be those that cannot shake free from long held beliefs.

No compass to Gauge:

Deviant behavior; now how would one precisely define that phrase? Do so for yourself. Before looking up any reference, state your definition. Now go and look it up. Any similarities; any stark differences…

Stringed to society, or a sociological context, deviant behavior is expressed as behavior that entails actions that are committed outside the norm of a society. In a deified religious norm this would include murderers, criminals, gays, juvenile delinquents and anyone who doesn’t accept their religious doctrine and dictates.

But sometimes I wonder if the deeply religious society, with its strict rules of allegiance and narrow acceptance is the ones who are actually showcasing deviant behavior.

Case in point is the Reverend Terry Jones’ burning of the Koran which in retaliation we saw Islamic Inmans inciting their followers to kill. This is religion at its best in utmost irresponsibility; a spectacle of humanitarian disaster. 

Adolf Hitler, I suppose most, except maybe for skinheads and the KKK, would emphatically say he was an atheist, but indeed he was not. He was true blue devoutly Christian. So much so, he wanted the world purged of the rift raft he perceived as not to keep the Aryan Christian purified.

Even today here in the states moral majority evangelicals have the need to fulfill fellowship with one another, but only if that fellow has the right skin tone, ethnic background and sex gender preference.

Republican Todd Akin, currently Missouri’s outgoing representative famous for his idiotic quote entailing rape cannot end in pregnancy solely because, in his mind only, the rape victim’s body shuts down, also said, “Liberals hate God.” He truly feels, as the prevailing conservative moral majority goes that the right-wing evangelical has sole direct rights to God.

The conservative right even goes further in their exclusivity to God as in the quote from Virgil Peck (Republican Kansas Representative) when he suggested the best way to reduce Latino immigrants in his state was to incorporate gunmen flying in helicopters to pick them off. Atrocious but true.

Specifying they are the ones for less government infringement on individual liberties, the religious right adamantly opposing same sex marriage is the imposer. Among conservative Christians as a most revered pastor, Charles L. Worley figures to get rid of the scourge of homosexuality on moral upright Christians is “to lock the lesbians and queers” in concentration camps with electrified wire. His congregation cheered the sermon.    

Reviewing worldly events, by far the most radical people have been and are the devout religious ones. From the crusades to current Middle East violence, through the motives of ordained hate are all religiously based. They claim sole rights to devious endeavors for it was an ordained commandment from their god.  

Hatred and evil was the justified cause for the crusades. The reason Israel keeps encroaching on and taking away land and water rights from the poverty stricken Palestinians is that it is their god given right. The reason that Judeo-Christians cheer Israel on and encourage Israeli inhumane treatment onto Palestinians is that they feel the second coming won’t come until the Israeli government has reconquered all Israeli biblical lands.

Netanyahu’s government in defying the world’s logic for real Mideast peace by continuing West Bank transgressions is defiling the image of the true Israeli character.

Evil indeed is a manmade concept that becomes a real fixation of what a perceived enemy is in flesh, mind and spirit. But religion’s gods allow evil to be conducted by its own followers in order to rid the evil they want to annihilate. If you ask me, the English word ‘evil,’ spelling ‘live’ in reverse, should have been more paraphrased as ‘divine evil.’ 

Judaism, Christianity and Islam in worshipping the same god are so similar and much more than they would like to confess. Their only difference is the prophets they chose to interpret the godhead. The Jews chose Moses, the Christians Jesus and the Moslems Mohammed. 

This same god of the Torah, the biblical Old Testament and the Koran was a warring god. He was vengeful, jealous, sacrificial, a sadist, murderous, a thief and encouraged male polygamy.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam, whether from their background or current cultures, relishes killing in ridding perceived evil and corruption of belief systems. This is the toll upon societies religion extolls in dehumanizing factors.

In contrast, Jesus was the King of Peace, preaching to take care of the poor, emphasizing the meek, paying heed and taxes to the law of the land, acceptance and turning the other cheek. So while Jews and Moslems are enacting the warring god’s ways, as their prophets promoted his wishes, Christians have a dilemma.

How can a supposed Christian nation, a people who are followers of Christ and his teachings be a warring nation? What are the main rallying cries of America’s religious right? They are with no argument for: huge military spending, condemnation of homosexuals, no acceptance of other faiths, no taxes, and humiliating the poor portraying them as moochers.

For sure, God may be parked in the Republican lot, but the liberals have Jesus on their side lock, stock and barrel.

Song of the Soul:

Sometimes I refer to religion as ‘rear legion’ for it is a culture believing in some spiritual creation that has forced its hand upon the life of mankind. It does not negate the bigotry of cultural subsets but rather promotes it. Don’t tread on me, but allow me as the blessed one to do the honors in treading on you.

Although religion is static in tradition, it does adjust to suit current rhetorical positions; it is easily interpreted into many conditions.

Do I like religions? I suppose I’d have to give it a yay, but only as curious sideshows in understanding why people believe the way they believe. Do I like the religious? Again, I suppose that I’d say yay overall, for I have many religious acquaintances, but a concerned nay ironically due to their beliefs. Grant me to extrapolate...

As an environmentalist, a watermelon head or tree hugger if you will, it is hard for me to accept religious dogma. The creator, but in no way man I’m told, is the one who controls weather and climate. Even Senator James Inhofe came out with a book that tells us so.

             

For these global warming doubters who believe and spread this misinformed deceit, I got a problem with. To not only ignore all the decades’ long empirical facts and analysis, but also to attack it only with political and religious rhetoric is misguided hogwash. Yes hogwash with a sack of rotten tomatoes.

Through self-deified ordainment, humans have hacked, chopped, drained, drilled, and poisoned our way through the atmosphere, forests, jungles, wetlands, mountaintops and oceans and still the conservative disputes the conservationist by believing man is not responsible for climate change.

With more than adequate data in proving manmade emissions are increasing global temperatures, we’ve seen a spiked increase in our lowest temperatures. The Sahara Desert is growing southward while new deserts have formed in China and Madagascar in one generation’s time. One-third of our glaciers are gone while over half of our coral reefs are now dead. All this due to the ravishes of man induced global warming.

To say that I like the mentality factor that insists man’s greedy indulgence in diseasing our natural environment has nothing to do with changing climatic patterns…No, I don’t like it, for where is the soul in this baseless argument…

Wishing the Happiest Christmas & 
Merriest New Year to All

BJA

12/05/2012