Sheria at The Examined Life posted some statistics from the Daily Kos depression poll of the century. Just as well, I need crap like this … extrapolated so as to keep it at some remove. Sanity is precious, you know,  and one wants to go on believing the best of ones’ neighbors, in both the immediate and existential sense. I have always thought that being hateful inside must be the most boring of lives. Read the rest of this entry »

reformation21.org You know, too, the grievousness of affliction. After all, who enjoys suffering? Yet you also know that all affliction is sent by a wise, fatherly God.

Not me. Wise and fatherly? There are damn few women, believers or not, who would rest comfortably in that out-dated image. Read the rest of this entry »

This was the cut used in Cadillac Records. They cut off the Vegas parts and, amazingly, had a song, the voice, from Elvis that implicitly told, Here is the first White Man who sounded like us. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh, hell, you know and I know the web is woven with lunatics, this is by nature part of its ghastly beauty. I just happened upon the rat’s nest described below, and oh my dear, Will Jesus when He Returns please make a special trip, just for these guys? (I don’t see The Coming as a single event, but—holy crap, I just realized I am talking like one of the characters in my novel.)

You come to do this, in, ahem, maturity, you find you’ve developed the skill to both be yourself and, on another level, observe yourself, from almost an aesthetic point of view.

Or maybe this is me, and on this cool, peaceful evening, the usually separate trajectories relax and blend. What I write to you—my all-important reader—what my characters say to me … I think there’s a third meta-level hiding in here somewhere … Read the rest of this entry »

Chuckling: “The failure to understand Genesis is literally “undermining the entire word of God,” Ken Ham, the founder of Answers in Genesis, says in a video. The collapse of Christianity believed to result from that failure is drawn out in a series of exhibits: school shootings, gay marriage, drugs, porn and pregnant teens.”

But what if it’s the other way round?

What if Christianity, as practiced, is a whopping failure?

That fails those in need because it has been the vehicle of men like Ken Ham, founder, who see profit and power, the toxic mix of money and ego, even in the body of the Christ.

Aw hell, Christ Himself would be bored to tears and not a little pissed with the video-taped crap of the Ken Hams of this world. Would throw their smarmy asses out of the temple—probably muttering to himself, Christ, again?—and hand the whole thing over to the women. Whom he admired, whom he was close to, and why not, would you give anything deep to men?

One feels sorry for people whose lives are run by their gonads, but you tell me, are they ever in their right mind? I think not.

Step back and for the moment ignore the fact that men have taken the role. Are they really fit ?

Or is it they who constitute the troubled, the baffled and bereft. Who bring eternal grief to the family, to the lives of women and children, to nations. Spiritually damned by that untruthful double life.

In the short time He was alive, Jesus invested in the women around him. Despite the fact they were as respected as sand fleas. Which no doubt aided the idea of his enemies that He was just some kind of nut.

But if you’re at all grown up, you know. The crazy are sane, the meek the strength of the earth, where Buddhists practice Christianity and a celibate Pope honks on and on about sex.

It would be nice to have a true church to turn to, but honey, as we know, Institutions are categorically fucked. I just got some ideas why.

Well, first place, any church camp for teens run by an overweight person who goes by her first name, that stinks to high hell of psychological problems we don’t even want to think about. Do we.

Of course she wears glasses. And curly hair most all cut off. Can’t you take nothin for granted?

So these kids, their hormones are buzzin and pretty soon she’s got them yappin like dogs, weeping for Christ and George W. Bush, who almost overlap, both bein’ in the Pantheon, you see. Pastor Becky’s got her eye on a spot for herself, but it don’t do to move too fast. How many souls do you s’pose you have to save before you can sit up there with Christ?

When Pastor Becky thinks about very large numbers, she has to take a extra Ativan. Doctor says so. And the headaches from the yappin’ you just would not believe. Sometimes Pastor Becky lets herself be weak and dwell upon her years behind the cosmetics counter, where is was so damn quiet and the most she had to puzzle over was mascara, brush or wand. Oh here, she sometimes thought, take the wand you old bag and go home—but seldom, because she wasn’t being tested for the Lord, in those days.

Not like this. For one thing, sex. Pastor Becky is certain that at least eight of her campers are humpin’ like bunnies and she wishes to heck she had hired more Juniors for Jesus. Zip! Zip! Zip! She couldn’t very well unzip every sleeping bag herself now could she. Not and get a good night’s sleep. Besides which, it made Pastor Becky remember highschool—and what she wanted more than anything else, right now, was to forget her past, forget there is even such a thing as the future, and most of all forget she was stuck for life in that body, and wouldn’t ever be Pure Spirit.

Does the Spirit appreciate Ativan? She chomped another one down …

“In my experience going in to Hindu temples, Buddhist temples and etc. I have realized that Christians must be intolerant of other religions. Buddhism and Shintoism and all other religions that don’t teach that Jesus is THE only way are lies from Satan. I understand that we sound close-minded and intolerant, but we have to be. There are too many people around the world that are going to hell because we are trying to be too sensitive.”

Lately, it’s love that cuts me like a knife.

It’s still a slice. Its sudden launch, from within the body—from the stores of memory, from the firings of both heart and brain—is still as much of a surprise. Love hurts, in surprisingly grief-like ways. How to discern, when the heart pores over. When experience (this is my theory) is just too large to bear. The psyche sorts—so Psyche-like—by discarding, expressing, overflowing. I just don’t know how you men decide what to keep. I don’t know how you manage to live so without living, but I suspect this is at once what it is to be a woman, and the reason that you hate us. The reason, for example, that feminism has become just an increasingly real-seeming imitation of what we’re not: invulnerable. Able to carry on. No matter what. Read the rest of this entry »