Is anyone else an atheist with BC besides me?
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I do the same thing. Nobody has ever noticed that I omit those two words. And I hold my hand over my heart when the flag passes by. I'm actually quite patriotic, for a pinko, commie liberal.
I've even wept during a particularly beautiful live rendition of the Star Spangled Banner.--CindyMN
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When I was in school, the pledge was written without "under god" so I say it the same way
I did in school...but I am patriotic also..
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Just checking in after a few weeks - sheesh, more like a month - away from the board. Layne, I'm so very, very sorry to hear that your mother is fading. I wish both you and her peace.
Linda
Edited to add: Ivorymom, I just wanted to add that your second cancer sucks, sucks, sucks.
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Hi Layne and Lewing .. sending you both hugs.
Layne .. I can understand your mom's fear and sadness. Maybe she is sad because she has regrets or missed opportunities. I think that would make me sad too. My dad was afraid, too, just before he died (a couple of days before). He only had 6 weeks from diagnosis until when he died and he knew it was coming. But, just around the time he died, he wasn't afraid anymore .. he just wanted to go once he had everything in order for his wife. I would be afraid too .. and wanting desperately to know what was next and if there was a next.
I've been thinking about the Pledge ... and back when we recited it in Lutheran grade school, there was no "under God" in it.
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{{{To All}}}
This thread and all on it mean so much to me. Kindness, intelligence, compassion shows in all of your posts.
I say the pledge but not "under god". When I attend religious ceremonies with my sister's family, I don't bow my head in prayer but look around the congregation. (My sister knows that I am not Christian but the kids don't.) It seems that more people are looking around than use to. I wonder if those who are supposed to be Christian are really going through the motions to keep the peace in their families?
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Hey Layne. It's good to hear from you. And Lewing, where the heck have you been?
As a volunteer in the ER, I've had more than my share of conversations about God with patients. Tonight was no exception. A lovely woman whose husband had died suddenly seven months ago, leaving her to raise two kids on her own. Her accent indicated she was from a different country but I didn't get around to asking where.
She derived a lot of comfort from her belief in Christ and God. If that helps to get her through the day, I have no problem with that.
On the other hand, the Christianity on display most often in this country is pretty frightening. During the Republican primary, I remember thinking it odd that those who claimed to be the most devout were the same ones bragging about their love for torture and war.
I also continue to be surprised by the emphasis many fundamentalist Christians place on money as a measure of someone's value. Their disdain for the poor is striking.
This article asks a lot of the questions I struggle with:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-lux/how-do-christians-become_b_570361.html
It's certainly a meaner form of Christianity than I was raised on. Hating someone because they're from a different religion would never have been intolerated by my family or the family church. Yet some Americans feel free to slam Muslims with total freedom.
These are, indeed, strange times.
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Rico, I agree. I may have posted this before, but I can't remember (chemo brain?). Anyway, I'm the local chairperson for a national organization that provides handmade blankets for children going through trauma or serious illness. I have quite a few volunteers who provide the blankets for me and during the Haiti earthquake, I sent out an email to all of them letting them know I had a connection who could get the blankets into Haiti for the children there. Almost all my volunteers wrote back that they'd be able to provide me at least one (in many cases two) blankets. I say "almost all" because the spokesperson for one group of women associated with a local church wrote back that they would not be providing any blankets because this particular request did not "fit with their mission." She also wanted to check on behalf of the group that I would not be sending any of the blankets they had sent in the month before to Haiti because some of the women would be quite upset and not likely to provide any additional blankets in the future if I did.
I must say, I was quite surprised. I thanked her for checking with them and assured her that the previous blankets sent in have already been distributed so they would not be going to Haiti.
To this day, I still don't know what to think about it.
I did run into the woman who sent the email about a week ago and asked her to clarify for me as I wanted to be sure not to send a request in the future that would not fit with their mission. She just looked at me and said something along the lines of, "well, that particular request did not fit with our mission. That's all I can say about that."
I had plenty of other blankets to send from my other volunteers, all individuals or with secular quilting groups, so the quantity wasn't the issue. I just thought it odd that my only group associated with a church refused to send any blankets, either individually or as a group.
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Not wanting to provide a blanket to a child in need -- nice, real nice. Some people make me vomit.
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Well ya know, Haiti did make a pact with the devil so blankets made by Christian hands would likely have burned them anyway. *slow counterclockwise eyeroll, followed by an arm flail*
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I just read that a nun was rebuked for allowing an abortion to save the life of a pregnant woman. The woman whose life was saved was automatically excommunicated. No word on the pedophile priests who ruined thousands of childrens' lives but were allowed by the church to continue working with children.
Here's the article:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37171656/ns/health-health_care/
Of all religions, Catholicism makes the least sense to me. As a child raised in the Catholic church, I remember thinking at age 6 that a lot of what I learned in Sunday school made no sense. Including the teaching that Catholics were the only true believers, and non-Catholics were all doomed to hell. Wait a minute, aren't we all Christians? I was made to stand in a corner for asking that question.
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Oh, stop it girls -- you're making my head hurt
.Ever since the birth of Christianity, nations and human beings have been rewriting the Christian narrative to serve their own selfish purposes. I suppose it shouldn't come as a big shock that today's ultra conservatives are choosing to do the same thing, or that fundamentalist spokesmen choose to make up frightening, false stories about the tragedies that befall those who do not believe as they do.
Similarities are abundant -- and the greatest similarity is in keeping the less fortunate, the poor and the needy, servile, while allowing/promoting the rich and, hence, powerful, to maintain control. The Catholic church mastered this technique, and now the fundies are copying it, albeit by different means.
Hmmm, my head STILL hurts
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Joel Osteen is all about the wealth aspect of believing .. and he has the biggest church in Texas right now. I used to watch him on T.V. about five or six years ago. I was all for gettin' some of that wealth ... until he had a sermon about husbands and wives. One of his points about holding a marriage together was that if the wife is overweight, she needs to lose weight and shop at Victoria's Secret .. just like his wife (who looks like a Barbie doll BTW). He didn't say anything about a man's beer belly. That was the last time I ever listened to him. And there began my descent ... and it hit bottom when I went to a church in NC and the preacher talked about two teenage boys killed in an accident and only one was going to heaven (he was born-again) and the other one was going to hell. Yikes.
That is almost .. and just almost funny, that those ladies wouldn't let their precious blankets be touched by Haitian hands. I remember when Roberts tried to backtrack what he said about Haiti .. it was a futile effort.
About the Bible .. I always stuck to the King James version .. all those other ones significantly changed the meaning. The words themselves didn't make as much sense after they were changed. Now we're going to have a fundamentalist conservative Bible. Geez .. what's next.
BTW .. I'm pretty damn happy today. I took a drive up the Blue Ridge Parkway today and stopped at Lover's Leap, Mabry Mill, Meadows of Dan and the Morrisette Winery. It was an awesome drive!
Today at Mabry Mill
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Beautiful photo, BinVA!!! It's a welcome respit.
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Hey Michele: your story exemplifies two themes that I find, shall we say, "interesting."
First, Christian charity apparently is not free. There are requirements that must be met. Which also means that there is control involved. You want something from me? Okay, but you have to give me something back that meets my standards.
Second, it's all about the giver rather than the recipient. How many times do we hear that conservatives don't want to give through their taxes. They want to give by choice because it makes them feel better. I thought that giving was about benefiting the recipient.
It's gotten to the point where I don't recognize the conservative version of Christianity. Talk about black is white, up is down!
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There was an interesting book called "The Women's Bible" written during the suffragette times in the US - early 1900s maybe. It was done by a committee - they each took a bit of the book and wrote what they thought it said about women. It was republished sometime back in my early feminist days, maybe the mid or early 1970s. Quite interesting.
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Regretably, the story about the church that didn't want to donate blankets to Haiti doesn't surprise me. Wish it did. Years back, I was visiting my grandmother and got hauled to her church. It was an exciting time--a missionary was visiting to talk about his trips to convert the heathen in Peru--you know, the catholics. I found it mind boggling that all these people could see was that those silly peruvians needed to be converted and saved from catholicism--not food, not schools, not vaccines, nope what they really needed was to be saved from catholicism. grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Among other books on my nightstand, I am reading Karen Armstrong's biography of the Bible. Its quite interesting.
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A biography of the Bible . . . sounds interesting. You know, I've never read the Bible all the way through, just bits and pieces of it. Most of my knowledge comes from having been packed off to (Christian, Protestant) Sunday school as a kid; my parents weren't religious at all, and didn't go to church themselves, but wanted me to have a modicum of a religious education, I guess. My own daughter doesn't have that, and while I don't regret not bringing her up in a religion, I do regret that she knows so little *about* religion. I used to plaintively wish for a children's book that would introduce Bible stories as stories, like all those books of Greek mythology out there. If something like that exists, I never found it! Maybe the Armstrong book would be a good read for her (and for me).
(Ironically, she tutors kids once a week through a local church . . . not quite a mega-church, but one that offers a pretty ambitious array of social services and activities: concerts, a cafe, tutoring, divorce support group, etc. etc. I was a little leery at first, but really respect their commitment to service.)
Bren, my parents are vacationing this week along the Blue Ridge Parkway. Massanutten, I think? Is that anywhere close to you? I loved the picture!
Linda
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Hi Linda .. Harrisonburg is about three hours north and a little east of me. I looked Massanutten up on the net .. and what a lovely resort! Your parents are almost to the Shenandoah Valley (between the Pkwy and Appalachian mtns).
I was talking to my son in San Diego last night .. and he told me this story. A group of people came to his door and said they were from the neighborhood and wanted to invite him to a Bible study. Luke has lived in that house for 16 years (8 yrs with me and 8 since he's owned the home). So he asked them what house they lived in ... oops ... not in the neighborhood. Luke told them they didn't believe in Jesus .. and the group just kept smiling and inviting him. I think they must have some instruction in how to maintain happiness in the face of persecution. At this point, I think Luke got bored and finally said, "Jesus was a socialist and a communist." (Now I'm laughing so hard I'm choking.) This was all it took for the group to hit the road, after the usually amount of sputtering and denial.
Luke's a physicist. It was so ironic, as he and I have never talked about this stuff before. I asked him what the scientists think happened before the "big bang" and he couldn't explain it either.
I got such a kick out of the story, as we had just been talking about this here. He even referred me to a website called democracynow.org. I haven't checked it out yet, but will today.
Happy Monday to all,
Bren
EDITED: 3monstmama .. I'm still working my way through Armstrong's history of fundamentalism .. good read .. but my ADD makes it difficult to read more than a little at a time.
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I can never understand how Christians feel it is appropriate to lie in order to bring someone to Jesus.
As for the Bible, I did read it cover to cover including all footnotes as I went along. It is what made me stop believing in Christianity and started me on the path to atheism. If you want to read a true horror story filled with the violence and inhumanity of a serial killer, read the bible.
There is a short bit in the middle of the New Testament about the childhood and preaching of Jesus that is OK and then it is back to mindless violence, threats of damnation and miscegenation. The Christian religion should really be called the Paulian religion. You remember Paul, the guy who fell of his horse and got brain damage.
The difference between science and religion is that when science doesn't know it says so. When religion doesn't know it says goddidit. The more science knows the less religion can say goddidit and that is making religion very nervous. It is this nervousness that makes fundamentalists fight science in general and evolution in particular.
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Some religion might be explained scientifically. What if Jesus was an alien? HA!
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LOL @ blue! Good one. :-)
notself - I have to disagree with you on the science thing. I've had many doctors speak of something as a known fact only to have something come along later to disprove it. I also think of scientific models for weather and climate change, all of which are the basis for predictions, but who some present as fact. If scientists preceded their factual statements with "as far as we know..." I wouldn't have a problem with them.
Nobody has all of the answers. Except for me, of course. PM me if you want them! LOL...
E
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Madalyn, I totally agree.
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I agree too. I was thinking about this yesterday .. what happened to all the other books that were considered for the Bible. I only know about a couple of them. I saw something about this on NatGeo awhile back .. and it seems that some that were left out portrayed Mary Magdelene in a much more involved role in the early church.
Blue .. I am so glad to see you "typing" more. It makes me happy.
love,
Bren
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I would agree with Blue and Madalyn---as always its how other people have manipulated one individual's mesage to suit their purpose that is the problem for me. Islam is suffering from the same problem---The Quran doesn't say one should be a martyr or kill innocent women and children or any of the other myriad stupid things that some people claim it says. I have no problem with the "actual" words of the Prophet or of Jesus--its the interpretors that I take issue with.
As I recall, my issues with Christianity started in confirmation class and just got worse! I had trouble wrapping my teenaged brain around the idea that if god was the father, he had favorites and liked some children better than others and would allow his "children" to be sent to hell for believing the wrong things. That was a real head scratcher!
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Layne .. what's CCD? Is it like Boy Scouts for church?
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laynel57, I empathize with your husband. For 3d and 4th grade I went to a small Missouri synod [sp] Lutheran school---I was a bad 2d grader and this was the only private school my mother could afford. In science class, we got scientific creation and then in religion class, we got 7 days creation. I was befuddled sby the difference o I went to my teacher to ask why teacher A says 7 days but you said billions of years. As I recall, she just ignored me. Everyone else in the school was pretty much a member of that church so I guess thats why all the other kids just accepted it though they were VERY worried that I was going to hell because I hadn't been baptised. There was much relief in 4th grade when I came to school and proclaimed I had been baptised. . . well, at least until everyone realized I was baptized episcopalian! ; )
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Madalyn: Just checked Wikipedia and apparently it's not so unusual for a couple of pairs to stick together with their offspring and, in Canada Goose-speak, this gathering is called a creche. Probably it's formed for protection, although any coyote or other creature who wants to tangle with one of these birds might be in for a shock -- they're vicious when under threat. Sort of like most other mild-mannered Canadians --- well, most of the time, except when insulted
!3mons: I wonder if those two teachers ever had any calm, thoughtful discussions -- or did the fur fly frequently in the staff lounge???!
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I would guess that Madalyn is right--it was a REALLY small school and the teacher doing the science lesson was the wife of the principal so I suspect she only did it because State law required it.
I have also heard of geese joining up to be collective parents. Of course, there is also the new research on geese who are, lacking better terms, gay or lesbian, and yet are still raising goslings. . . .
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Ha ha! I was going to mention that perhaps the geese had been overhearing folks talking about same sex marriage being legal in Canada and just decided .... what's good for Canada's people is good for Canada geese (to paraphrase!), and the wee goslings are loved and cared for
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Ahh, the Canadians and gay rights. How very progressive of you.
We, yankees, on the other hand, have more important battles to wage.
This is not work-safe, by the way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMUVFctJ2Xw&feature=player_embedded#!0
