(no subject)
Dec. 10th, 2016 04:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. I'm thinking very strongly of booking a 9 day excursion with G adventures to Costa Rica as a Xmas/Birthday gift to myself. Next year is a big birthday for me, and I sort of want to be elsewhere.
Trying not to think too much about the future for obvious reasons.
2. Saw a very troubling post on FB news feed. It wasn't by anyone I knew or friended, thank god. It was one of those posts a family member had responded to. On facebook unlike lj, you see everything people respond to or comment on. It's one of the reasons that I prefer lj, more private and filtered.
The posted stated simply "America is Christian Only" and then, that this is reconfirmed in the US Constitution and the US Constitution is based on the Bible. Outside of the fact that the individual who posted this has clearly never read the Constitution or has any knowledge of it, what bothered me was how Un-Christian that statement truly is. It flies in the face of what Christianity stands for and what the US and America is about. I couldn't find her post again, but I feel this compulsion to respond to it. Here and on FB. In hopes others will hear me.
A million years ago, or so it seems, a Jewish boy was born in a stable, because his parents were on the run from a government that persecuted people who did not practice their religion. Later, he was crucified by that same government for daring to speak out against it, and practicing a faith that this government's people were terrified of. The people who followed him created the Christian faith. He brought hope into the world, and love. That was his main message. Years later we celebrate his birth. We also celebrate another Holiday, which he probably also celebrated, since he was Jewish, which was also about being persecuted for practicing a religion separate from those in power. In Greece, the Macabees persecuted the Jews and destroyed their temple, the Jews fought back, and got it back - but there was only so much oil left for one candle, but miraculously it lasted eight nights...this too is about hope and light.*
How can anyone who claims to practice these faiths, persecute someone who practices another faith? Isn't that the opposite of what your religion is telling you to do? Christianity at its heart is about hope and love, anything else goes against that. And Islam and Judaism come from the same root...they are sisters and brothers. And America was founded on religious freedom, freedom from persecution. Millions have immigrated here for that very freedom, they shed blood for it. They fought in Wars for it. I have family members on both sides who fought in WWII for this freedom. Also, prior to Europeans coming to this land, the Native's practiced a religion that also celebrated hope and love. To say, America is only for Christianity and to persecute those who don't practice as you do...is about fear and hate and rage, it's the polar opposite of the Christian faith, and it gives the faith a bad name. So many astrocities have been committed in the name of Christianity, from the Spainish Inquistion to the Crusades to the Salem Witch Trials...please let us commit no more.
[*ETA: To the fact-checkers on LJ, this isn't a news item, it is a story to make a point. I was deliberately paraphrasing it, changing things, and generalizing -- because it was in response to someone who had done the same thing. Trust me, I know the Bible Story, I studied religion in school.]
3. Staying away from FB and the news this weekend for the most part. It is admittedly a bit like a train wreck or a five car pile up -or a horror movie --- you're watching it happen, know it will be horrible, have your fingers over your eyes, are screaming don't do that, but can't look away.
As a result, I can't watch horror movies, thrillers, or anything negative at the moment. Anything that makes my blood boil. Current events are terrifying enough.
Also, I'm apparently an optimist. I keep scrolling through warnings of spider monsters, hoping for a pony.
4. It's a cool December day in NYC. Finally clearing, with blue skies, after an overcast morning, the sun dwindling in the west, and growing dark at 4:49 PM. The darkest days arrive just prior to the Christmas Holidays and the beginning of the Winter Solistice, as Autumn falls to Winter.
Soon I'll journey south to visit my aging parents in Hilton Head to celebrate the Xmas Holidays as we do every year since I was born. I think I've only missed one or two to date. (Knock on wood.)
Trying not to think too much about the future for obvious reasons.
2. Saw a very troubling post on FB news feed. It wasn't by anyone I knew or friended, thank god. It was one of those posts a family member had responded to. On facebook unlike lj, you see everything people respond to or comment on. It's one of the reasons that I prefer lj, more private and filtered.
The posted stated simply "America is Christian Only" and then, that this is reconfirmed in the US Constitution and the US Constitution is based on the Bible. Outside of the fact that the individual who posted this has clearly never read the Constitution or has any knowledge of it, what bothered me was how Un-Christian that statement truly is. It flies in the face of what Christianity stands for and what the US and America is about. I couldn't find her post again, but I feel this compulsion to respond to it. Here and on FB. In hopes others will hear me.
A million years ago, or so it seems, a Jewish boy was born in a stable, because his parents were on the run from a government that persecuted people who did not practice their religion. Later, he was crucified by that same government for daring to speak out against it, and practicing a faith that this government's people were terrified of. The people who followed him created the Christian faith. He brought hope into the world, and love. That was his main message. Years later we celebrate his birth. We also celebrate another Holiday, which he probably also celebrated, since he was Jewish, which was also about being persecuted for practicing a religion separate from those in power. In Greece, the Macabees persecuted the Jews and destroyed their temple, the Jews fought back, and got it back - but there was only so much oil left for one candle, but miraculously it lasted eight nights...this too is about hope and light.*
How can anyone who claims to practice these faiths, persecute someone who practices another faith? Isn't that the opposite of what your religion is telling you to do? Christianity at its heart is about hope and love, anything else goes against that. And Islam and Judaism come from the same root...they are sisters and brothers. And America was founded on religious freedom, freedom from persecution. Millions have immigrated here for that very freedom, they shed blood for it. They fought in Wars for it. I have family members on both sides who fought in WWII for this freedom. Also, prior to Europeans coming to this land, the Native's practiced a religion that also celebrated hope and love. To say, America is only for Christianity and to persecute those who don't practice as you do...is about fear and hate and rage, it's the polar opposite of the Christian faith, and it gives the faith a bad name. So many astrocities have been committed in the name of Christianity, from the Spainish Inquistion to the Crusades to the Salem Witch Trials...please let us commit no more.
[*ETA: To the fact-checkers on LJ, this isn't a news item, it is a story to make a point. I was deliberately paraphrasing it, changing things, and generalizing -- because it was in response to someone who had done the same thing. Trust me, I know the Bible Story, I studied religion in school.]
3. Staying away from FB and the news this weekend for the most part. It is admittedly a bit like a train wreck or a five car pile up -or a horror movie --- you're watching it happen, know it will be horrible, have your fingers over your eyes, are screaming don't do that, but can't look away.
As a result, I can't watch horror movies, thrillers, or anything negative at the moment. Anything that makes my blood boil. Current events are terrifying enough.
Also, I'm apparently an optimist. I keep scrolling through warnings of spider monsters, hoping for a pony.
4. It's a cool December day in NYC. Finally clearing, with blue skies, after an overcast morning, the sun dwindling in the west, and growing dark at 4:49 PM. The darkest days arrive just prior to the Christmas Holidays and the beginning of the Winter Solistice, as Autumn falls to Winter.
Soon I'll journey south to visit my aging parents in Hilton Head to celebrate the Xmas Holidays as we do every year since I was born. I think I've only missed one or two to date. (Knock on wood.)
no subject
Date: 2016-12-11 09:46 am (UTC)Well, he was born in a stable because of a tax census. :) And then they went on the run to Egypt to escape the government - Herod the Great, specifically, who was Jewish, and who (for sound political reasons) did not want his people to start being excited about a possible Messiah and thus incur the wrath of the Romans. Killing all the babies was barbaric, but effective. No qualms really with anything else, but since I just love Dorothy Sayers' description of why he was killed, I'll copy it out (written in the early 1940s in England):
'God was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own - in the over-ripeness of the most splendid and sophisticated Empire the world has ever seen. In a nation famous for its religious genius and under a government renowned for its efficiency, He was executed by a corrupt church, a timid politician, and a fickle proletariat led by professional agitators.'
The world has not changed. People have not changed. The fact that so many of the people who claim to follow Jesus would have been backing the Pharisees enthusiastically had they been there, is just ironic... I keep meaning to re-write The Good Samaritan as 'The Good Muslim/Immigrant'.
no subject
Date: 2016-12-11 01:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-12-11 01:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-12-11 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-12-11 07:41 pm (UTC)My previous quote was from the foreword to The Man Born to be King by Dorothy Sayers, where she talks about how all the 'characters' in the Bible are easily recognisable, once you strip away the stained-glass-ness:
'[...] Pontius Pilate was a provincial governor, with a very proper desire to carry out Imperial justice, but terrified (as better men than he have been before and since) of questions in the House, commissions of inquiry and what may generally be called 'Whitehall'. [...] As for the Elders of the Synagogue, they are to be found on every Parish Council - always highly respectable, often quarrelsome, and sometimes in a crucifying mood.'
no subject
Date: 2016-12-11 11:02 pm (UTC)I'm sorry, no. If you are using God or Christianity or Religion as a way of furthering your own self-interest or political aim, you are distancing yourself from God, and that's not God you are worshipping any longer.
That's you and your precious ego. (Not you personally, of course. ;-) )
no subject
Date: 2016-12-12 06:45 am (UTC)More that that's what people are like. Sadly. Christianity also happens to explain why and what the cure is.