Drips – 2

Getting old means that I like the truth to be expressed in fewer words, like:
Women are fighters, men are wimps.

On the way

We know we have arrived when what we really love becomes what we really need.

the good and the news

Can it be that the high nose Christians, you know who, those defined by weekly worship in designated places, are losing the chance of fulfilling the command of spreading the good news? At least one of them has recently remembered a long neglected tribe, where the gospel is seen as a story not only naive but harmful even. What is sure is that the evangelicals who have been for the last decades the champions of missionary work are left behind in this courtship in reverse. Will we see another change of ownership for the army of cathedrals and places of worship? Hope not but even if that would happen I would still say pass to signing on.

What I am interested in though is watching the competition between both camps for initiating social good:

Balkham says he has envied churches the sense of community they can offer, and thinks atheists can learn from the social good that many churches do. “It’s naive to deny that there’s a lot of good that comes out of organised religion, and I think helping in the community is another thing that Sunday Assemblies should be aspiring to unashamedly copy.”

So help them…selves.

Unmediated love

Faith is unmediated knowledge

Love begins with the terrifying sense of a presence in our vicinity.

It than takes us further to exploring the options which can be only two: either to attempt a contact with this presence or avoid it.

Whichever you pick and start with you’ll end up realizing that you need both of them. You need to be alone when you fall in the trap of mistaking relationship with ownership and you have to be with the Other when the dessert of you sole presence has completed its job and brought you back on earth.

Confession

Forgive me father for I have sinned.

After a long break I re-visited someone’s relatively new blog.

I have been following his first blog, now more neglected, he opened this one at some point and I have completely (are there three or four syllables here?) forgot to register. It is still a pleasure to get lost in his, apparently meandruos, line of thought.

The following has startled me and made me realise how far I still am from writing in English in such a way that my texts would not scratch the trained eardrums of the literati; as if they would ever stumble upon my humble abode:

I have two rules for writing: never, ever, under any circumstances use a passive verb; and never, ever, under any circumstances use the expletive constructions “there is,” “there are,” “it is,” “it was,” and so on. I have my students, as the last step in editing their own writing, do a word search for “there” and simply delete it and rewrite the sentence without it. Getting them to recognize passive verbs is like shoveling sand at the seashore.

My favorite passive construction, by the way, is one that more politicians than you can shake a stick at have used, “Mistakes were made.” The ultimate wiggle-room statement. Who made the mistakes? Obviously not me. Some unknown, unnameable force. They were made. By aliens. Not by anyone in MY office!

So here lies my sins and they are all over the place in my texts.

There is a time where one has to accept that a leopard cannot change it’s spots. Mistakes will never stop being made.

It does not mean that I should stop trying though, innit?

Martin, Luther and the biblemaniacs

Take Luther and Co and all things that happened after his outburst.The wake and rise of the alternative approach to doing Christianity was bound to happen.

Christ is not just the first part of the name of one of most popular religion, after all. Sola Scriptura came about as the cover up for the real aim : Solus Cristus (somebody help with some proper Latin here, please). Without Christ there is no real Christianity. The trouble is Jesus has always been hard to follow, in his times and now. But there is always a way around and people managed to find it again this time. A replica. Look, there is the real thing, too bad is quite far, and cryptic, and faceless even, so here is the best representation of him: his brilliant, heavenly mind whose produce is laid out for all to see and feed on it, aka the Bible. A new star of Battlemayhem was  born and everybody is keen to follow it. All you need is to be alive and possess a brain.

The old tables with the law of love have been successfully replaced again. This time with the holly text.

Drips -1

There are two kinds of crowds in which you could find yourself: one is very impressive in size and visual impact, the other less so.

The first is made up of leaders and followers. They are actually all leaders except the followers are completing and/or competing with the leaders. They are in the same place because of what unites them: an illusion that power is something you exert over someone else.

The next group, to which I am attracted, is that of stand alone people, people who do not envy the leaders, do not understand the followers, moreover they are organically not interested in power. The only power for which they long is the one needed for self-improvement for the sake of their sanity.

For some reason I do pity the first crowd and respectfully take my hat off to the other.

Drops -1

The ultimate battle is that between the hunger for absolute freedom and the fear of losing your life.

The Christian promise is that of a successful Ikarus.

Ultimately, the Pascal wager is just a desperate play on ideas, another trick up the Christianity’s sleave, a licence for faking faith.

For many weeks the top three tags used by people lost on my blog were Jesus, Robin Hood and Levite.

my way (the high way)

It won’t be long

be fore

my eyes will see

the shore

where

I’ve been longing

to belong

Licence to sin

For the first time since I started writing here I had the title in my mind first and then I tried to fill it in with matter. Sir Bond has little to do with the subject of the following text; it only provided me with the idea that people need an external approval before doing something unusual, against the prevalent common sense or even illegal. It is an issue for everybody irrespective of their belonging to a religious group or not.

The religious aspect comes with the rest of its baggage. It is relatively easy to figure out what is good and what is bad in the normal circumstances  of one’s life. It becomes a struggle when people find themselves caught between two wrongs or, worse, between two apparently opposite goods. A religious person needs not only the external approval of his peers for one course of action or another but more importantly the approval of the highest instance, that of his god(s).

The subject in fashion these days in the Christian circles was the sacred nature of marriage and the alleged assault of a certain minority against it. The trouble with this is that, as well as with other hot issues, it is another one which divides the members of the said group. I will not go as far as making my point clear in respect to the fact of allowing “unclean” people to stain the purity of the act of answering “I do” to a couple of questions. The answer to this issue is simple as any answer to life’s questions. I do not recall Jesus saying that his way of life it is complex and needs generations of theologians, and a couple of millennia, to be sorted. Au contraire. (citation needed here).

You can find one example of how easy is to tackle this and other similar “problems” here.

If you do not fancy this author you can pick hundreds others who did not fall in the trap of going in circles until their own conscience becomes dizzy enough to feel the need to go to sleep.

Any way we decide to look at it, the first problem to be solved here is that of our own maturity. And the last.