Currently Considering

There was a time stretching over most all of Human history, that electricity as a scientifically conceivable and verifiable phenomenon, just waited to be discovered, named, harnessed, applied.

During this time, common religion was not permitted to push the envelope in mutual appreciation together with the sciences, but was consigned to remain enveloped in traditions of custom, superstition, ritual and manipulation.

Today we are fortunate to know and embrace science and the blessings of advanced discovery.  Science however, takes the place of “Old Religion” when it becomes itself enveloped in self-serving dogma.

If before the Modern Age you’d approached anyone with the idea that a cable plug placed in a socket would draw an unlimited current of electric energy, so powerful it could either kill in an instant or power everything in your domicile – you’d have been avoided, outcast, maybe pilloried or worse.

How many, considering themselves religious or not, agnostic or atheistic or indifferent – how many now, today, would consider taking the plug of their own original potential and with sincere childlike interest, trust, devotion or love, placing that into the socket igniting the current of God’s presence, love and grace?

Just as electricity can be known without ever being explained or explainable – so is God’s current just waiting to be discovered.

 

I May Surely Get Whacked For This:

When gays or lesbians or bisexuals are simply permitted to be comfortable with their sexual orientation in an accepting society free of stigma or defamation, isolation, pressure to hide or repress this (or as in Muslim countries, murder or public execution) - that is a matter of human rights. That's it. I'm hetero, my sons and daughters all are as well. So? And I've always conveyed to them the inalienable recognition of human rights, whomever it addresses.

When, however, everything becomes glaringly, invasively, redundantly, unavoidably about the sexual orientation of Ls, Gs, Bs, Ts - and that they are somehow all "wonderful" for it - and YOU are sexist, homophobic and "white male"-fascist (wherever that one came from!) for even suggesting that you are perhaps becoming more than fed up with having a cartoony Rainbow ceaselessly shoved down your throat: this is Ideology. And, as I've often asserted and cannot stress enough: all good things turn rancid when they hit Ideology. Dogma kills, it deadens with the slow blows of a cudgel.
Fundamentalist or Fascist, Communist or Capitalist or Collectivist, Right or Left: it dries up all life with the same dumbing-down demand for compliance and obedience.

Are Jews "special" because there was a Holocaust or we all loved "Fiddler On The Roof"? No. They are Jews.
Are African-Americans "special" because of their forced immigration to serve "The Peculiar Institution" and enduring a century of Jim Crow? No. They are African-Americans.
Are gays and lesbians "special" because the overweening trend says so? No.
All three examples are human beings who have endured persecution and worse.
All three have also contributed vastly to our culture with their creativity.

Ideology is dictatorship over the mind, above all. It dictates what you may or may not think, what is "permitted" and what not - it is a "one-size-fits-all" dogma which holds you to a brain-sucking "political-correctness" and goads or intimidates or punishes you with propaganda and character assassination if you don't behave and get in line.

To introduce being gay as The New Norm would be like making Jewish or Black the "preferred" norm. If I run for office or am in some other public position, should I make being hetero the hallmark of my character or accomplishment? Why then must I know of someone's non-hetero sexual orientation as if that has anything to do with his/her actual values, judgement, competence, character, stability, suitability; am I homophobic for still considering the bedroom a private matter?

Here's another way of formulating this:
Ask a Jew what makes him/her "Jewish." You'll get a whole variety of possible responses, from biblical to philosophical to banal to humanistic, history and heritage, values and community. I'd wager that at the bottom of the list, if at all, you might hear circumcision or diet.
Ask a Muslim the same question, you get "no pork." That's it. A pork-abstinent Jew doesn't count, a vegetarian (from the Planet Vegan) doesn't count; only Muslims count, and without knowing squat really, most will give you as Number One Criteria: no pork. All else follows.

So I may get myself placed among the racists, sexists, homophobix, Islamophobix - please add antisemites - because the Ideologues and Lobbyists for the Cult and Culture of Political Correctness so dictate.

Still, I will maintain to my last dying breath at the ripe age of 150:
that every human being is to be treated with dignity and respect, kindness and empathy. Because s/he is Human. Not because s/he is special. No one is. But every One is divine in origin - no exceptions.

And that is what I pass on to the kids.

http://samuelinayatchisti.blogspot.de/2014/04/a-critical-look-if-one-still-may-at.html

http://samuelinayatchisti.blogspot.de/2014/05/reactions-to-my-lgtb-critique.html

"What's love got to do with it . . ."

No one realizes God through fixation on "reward" and "punishment" - rules and regulations and laws and codes and creeds:  all dogma and doctrine, binding one to a belief.  Belief is not faith and faith is not realization.  Belief is "taught-religion", faith is at least something like conviction, but neither of these is realization.  Realization or Knowledge of God can only come through love,  and through nothing but love.  Everyone is on the path, whether atheist or fundamentalist.

Ultimately love is its own reward because it bestows a sovereignty which no dogma ever will.  Nor does its mere absence mean God wants to "punish" one.  Hopefully we mature, because love is mature.  Love is objective, non-sentimental, stimulating one to love more and to give oneself into it.  I've seen more humanity, more empathy and openness among some "non-believers" than among any hard-core fundamentalists of any faith, Muslim, Jewish or Christian.  Envy, spite, judgment from fear & loathing of the "other", supremacy and self-pity based together on a deeply insecure self-loathing which extends outward.

Every mystic from any tradition knows this, that's why they recognize each other right away when encountered, but are respectively never understood or recognized by those in their own traditions who are still ruled by dogma and doctrine, by hope of "winning paradise" and fear of "courting hell"...

The mystic doesn't love God because s/he believes in God, s/he believes in God precisely because s/he loves God, call that what one likes, God-Goddess-AllThatIs.  The mystic might then say, reversing the logic of this world:  "I believe (or place my trust) only in That which I love, and I can only love That because I know That."  This is why the mystics demonstrate "remembering God" - not like remembering your car keys, but in going back into a deep and intimate knowing, perhaps first only sensed, then followed - and this is really religion - a knowing of one's own origin and source of Being.  And how can one not love That?