Tag Archives: religion

Burning Issues

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As the sun rises over the baked and burning land of Too-Hot Carrollton, Texas, the clouds have decided to finally give us a break.  It rained today.  And that is significant in the land where Texas Republican government flatly states that climate change is a hoax, and fracking and drilling for oil and natural gas are the best thing in the world for all.  I can’t breathe because the drought out west, caused by this hoax, has led to the world being on fire in more literal ways than Texas Senator Ted Cruz ever thought to scare toddlers with.  Smoke from California makes the air difficult for someone like me to breathe.  I have lung problems from a long ago encounter with farm chemicals.  Texas officially recommends that instead of complaining, I should just try to conserve air, and only breathe every other day.  I am doing my best, but turning a little blue.

Matthew 5:44&45 says; “However, I say to you: continue to love your enemies and pray for those persecuting you; that you may prove yourselves sons of your Father who is in the heavens, since he makes his sun rise upon wicked people and the good and makes it rain upon righteous people and unrighteous.”

So, I take note of that, and appreciate that the unrighteous are sharing the cooling rain… whether I believe in the words of the Bible or not.  The Bible says many things that are very true, in spite of the fact that there are many people praying for the destruction of me and my kind (people who actually think for themselves) and basing those curses and ill wishes on what the Bible says.  Of, course, they call it “cherry-picking the Bible” when they pick out isolated verses and use them to justify not doing their clerky jobs or condemning immigrants and people of the wrong color.  I often think of it as being more of the “rancid lemon-picking of the Bible” myself.  There is a lot of cow poop in that wondrous old book if you look for it.  And I have personally read the entire Bible twice with numerous re-reads of many of the good parts.  Where, then, does a heathen like me look for salvation?  Buckminster Fuller, of course.

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Who the hell is Buckminster Fuller, you say?  Well, he is hero of mine from high school where I learned about him from a beloved Math teacher who told me about his efficient use of construction theory mathmetics in things like Bucky balls and geodesic domes .  Yes, it is in fact a nerd thing.  Bucky is a demigod to me, almost as much as Jesus of Nazareth.  Here is a website you can read about him at, and hopefully learn to love him as much as I do; https://bfi.org/!!!

The truth is, I believe science will do as much to ultimately save our souls as religion does.  But the point here is clear.  We must learn to love and value 100% of our fellow human beings.  Even the ones who hate us and insist that their right to make huge profits outweighs my right to breathe fresh air.

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As the sun sets, reddened by the smoke from western fires, this suffering cowboy wishes to acknowledge that a fellow blogger, Angie Trafford, wrote this blog It Had To Be Said and made me twist the lemon-juicers of my brain about how to make people appreciate others more.  So appreciate her and the people she passionately defends.  I know Bucky would.

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Matters of Religion

old mad gods

People around this country are busy expressing their religion.  They refuse to do their government clerical jobs and deny people marriage licenses.  They do it because of their beliefs.  They picket military funerals with signs about “God hates fags” (though I don’t see why the creator dislikes English cigarettes so much) because of their beliefs.  They refuse to bake wedding cakes because Christian fundamentalism has somehow become about who gets to eat your cooking.  They condemn parts of the Middle East and pray for war because there is religious head-chopping going on, and certain countries are not promising to give up their nuclear daydreams sincerely enough.  Expressing religious beliefs seems to be mostly about condemning stuff.  And, admittedly, some of it is bad stuff… like the head-chopping.  But is that what religion is for?

The Paffooney I am using today is called “One Day the Old Mad Gods Will Be Made Whole Again” which is a nutcake picture created during my grad student years in response to the basic undercurrent of fear that underlies most of Christianity.  I think I may have written it wrong, though.  It used to be about “fear”, and today it has become about “FEAR!”

angel by Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1825-1905)

angel by Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1825-1905)

People turn to religion primarily because they fear death.  Christianity promises an ever-lasting immortal life, either in Heaven (Which I have my doubts you will ever find on a map) or (as the Jehovah’s Witnesses in my family believe) on a Paradise Earth.  To never die you are expected to follow a secret formula, or somehow cast a magic spell that will guarantee that even if you are killed, you will never die.  If you knock on enough doors to share the “Good News of Christ’s ransom sacrifice” you will be resurrected to everlasting life.  If you “Love what is good and hate what is bad”, you will claim a spot in Heaven.  But you can’t earn this undeserved kindness.  God gave his only son to die on the cross so that everyone else might live.  …But not sinners.  Not people who do not get the formula right… or do not express the right views… or say the wrong thing.  What the… Heck?

It is not a logical construct.  Elders among the Jehovah’s Witnesses explain to me that is all about belief.  You have to express belief through action.  And where belief conflicts with science or logic, you must prefer belief.

So, the man puts his hand down in an old aquarium full of rattlesnakes, and God is supposed to protect him.  But if the man gets bitten and dies, well, he must’ve been a sinner or needing to be punished.  Hellfire for all eternity… you can’t beat fundamental Christianity on the matter of punishment for sins.

If you have gotten this far through my essay without throwing up your hands and consigning my sinful soul to the darkest pit of hell to burn for eternity, then you have probably concluded that I am just another old philosophical atheist spouting semi-logical nonsense about why there is no God.  And you would be dead wrong.  There is a God.  I talk to him daily.  He helped me write this post.  I am a Christian existentialist.  I believe there is a God, and he can be found in the Bible at First John 4:8.  “He that does not love has not come to know God, because God is love.”  I don’t believe in everlasting life.  I believe I am a part of the whole.  I believe in love, because loving my fellow man is part of loving myself.  I would willingly lay down my life to save another, out of love, because that other person and I are one.  And when they bury me to become worm food and fertilizer, I won’t be feeling the pain and confusion and fear anymore, but I will still be part of the whole.  And the whole is God.

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A Matter of Religion

Iowans are simple people and have a simple faith.  We believe in the land and we believe in making things grow.  Whether we use Christian symbols and Republican moral imperatives, or liberal thought experiments laced with atheistic flavors of actual thinking, we all basically accept that we should believe in the land and make things grow.

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The church in the Paffooney picture is a real church in my real little Iowa home town.  Once it was the Congregational Church in Rowan, the second location.  The first Congregational Church building that stood on Main Street burned down before I was ten.  But it didn’t remain pure Congregational.  Little Rowan was not really big enough to support two different churches.  So long about the time when I was wrestling with the fact that I had lust in my heart, and looking at the pretty Congregationalist farm girl two seats ahead of me and the Methodist Minister’s son on the school bus made my soul hurt, the Methodist Church and the Congregational Church were forced to become one church.  They used both church buildings on a weekly rotating basis, using the same minister for both.  It was the Methodist minister, my best friend’s father who got the job of spiritual leader for the entire community.  And there was hell to pay.  Congregationalists hated the idea that the minister was no longer speaking Congregationalist approved Biblical ideas.  And Methodists resented the fact that they had to have their immortal souls saved in the same church building as those unclean Congregationalists.  Heckfire, they didn’t even like taking cold showers as much as Methodists did.  They took them, all right, but didn’t really like them enough.  So religious wars were fought in our little town for decades.  But only in the manner of Iowegian Christians.   Silent wars employing laser-focused glares of righteous disapproval.  Attacks on the other side committed solely with clucking tongues and expressed only to members of the same congregation in places where the other side will never hear of it.  And of course, as children tackling the full range of punitive forces and concepts associated with puberty, we were completely unaware of what was going on behind closed doors.  Fury of Biblical proportions was disrupting the digestion of nearly one quarter of the Yoke Ministry of the United Churches of Rowan, Iowa, and causing innumerable bottles of Milk of Magnesia to be consumed in the middle of the night.  These two Midwestern flavors of Christianity were just too different to co-exist in the same building.  Of course, I couldn’t tell you what the differences actually were.  I still can’t.  But I learned the tremendously terrible and atheistic notion that all Christians are the same, and they all worship the same God, and they are all equally worthy of love.

The scariest thing of all is this.  I went on from the religious wars of Rowan, Iowa in the late 1960’s and the early 1970’s to living in a community in South Texas where the two sides were Hispanic Catholics versus Southern Baptists.  I got married to a Jehovah’s Witness, and tried very sincerely for a while to be a Jehovah’s Witness.  I taught kids who were Catholic, Baptist, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist.  And scariness comes with the realization that I still believe “they are all equally worthy of love.”  Atheists too, for that matter.  I am sorry that atheists are not crazy enough to actually talk to God.  There is comfort on so many levels with the ability to speak to an invisible mythological father.  And I speak to Him daily.  So what is my real religion?  I am not sure.  But Valerie Clarke in the church Paffooney agrees with me (because I totally created her and she has no choice); the church parking lot is a great place for skateboards.

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Cloudscapes

Cloudscapes

Once upon a time, the English poet and, I would argue, cartoonist, William Blake once said, “You look at the sky and see clouds, while I see the assembled heavenly host!”  This is why my literature class in college about the Romantic Poets of his day made him out to be a certifiable nutcase who probably belonged in in a mental institution.  (And back then, in the 1800’s, the sanitarium was a place where inconveniently crazy people went to die.)

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Look at a couple of my cloudscapes.  Do you see angels?

Cloudscapes (a poem)

Blue and white and filled with light…

The cloudscape burns with angels…

And wholly bought with grace unsought…

I long to fly with angels…

Are they really there in the cloud-filled air?

I see them there, they’re angels!

So, there you have it.  I’m a loon.  I don’t even have the excuse of being a Romantic Poet and well-known for my poetry as a defense against the loony bin.  But as the matter stands, I am fully willing to accept the consequences.  Creativity has its price.  And, while you may not agree that I am somewhat creative, I am swimming in a vast ocean of perceived revelations that enriches me and fulfills me at the very same moment that it drains all the energy from my soul.  If that is not what it means to see angels… then I do not know anything of use to anyone but me.

The word “angel” (according to Wikipedia, the source of all true knowledge) comes to English via Late Latin and the word “angelus” which the Romans stole from the Greek  ἄγγελος ángelos,  The ángelos is the default Septuagint’s translation of the Biblical Hebrew term mal’ākh denoting simply “messenger” without specifying its nature.  (Notice, I am giving full credit to Wikipedia because it is far more all-knowing than I.)

I have many atheistic and agnostic notions in my ultimate belief systems, but still, I claim to be a Christian and believe in God Jehovah… within limits.  I still communicate with God on a daily basis, and while I don’t publicly pray anymore (a notion promoted by the Biblical Jesus) I find answers to my questions and solutions to my problems from the observable universe around me.. the messengers of God.  So, now that I have fully rationalized being crazy as a loon, I am going to tell you where that craziness is taking me.  I started a new Paffooney for one of the books I am working on.  Here is the pencil sketch;

pencil sketch

This will be a picture of Valerie Clarke and her Daddy, the farmer Kyle Clarke.  In my fiction, Kyle loses his farm to the bank (in the Family Farm Crisis of the 1980’s) and believing himself incapable of any longer supporting his family, kills himself.  But the thing is, the love of his daughter transcends death for Kyle.  She is able to reconnect with him time and again because the angels work for her as well as for Kyle.  I may be loony and ill in real life, facing the Angel of Death myself, but I am not done doing God’s work… not yet… not for a long time to come.

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Banned Breakfast-Table Talking

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At Mother’s breakfast table we were always encouraged to talk about stuff.  That was a given.  It was how families operated in the 60’s and 70’s.  Mom and Dad not only listened to the mindless drivel coming out of the childish mouths of me, my two sisters, and my stinky little brother, but they also tended to hold forth about things they wished to teach us. We learned Methodist-Church-flavored Christianity and Eisenhower-Republican values.  Ike had been president when I was born and got most of the credit for the post-war boom in the economy.  We were middle-class people with solid middle-class values.

And then I had the bad sense to grow up and start thinking for myself.  Nixon had let me down big-time when I was in high school.  I had defended him against my McGovern-leaning loony liberal friends.  My best friend was a preacher’s kid, a Methodist preacher’s kid.  His father actually believed in progressive nonsense about sex-education for children and helping to feed the poor.  And then Nixon turned out to be a liar, a coverer-upper, a cheat, and a bad-word-user.  I suspect, though my Dad never admitted it, that he may have voted for Carter over Ford.  It was my first time voting, and it actually felt good to use my vote to strike back at the party that betrayed my trust.

Religion, too.  In the late seventies a man named Carl Sagan put on a TV show called Cosmos.  The man bedazzled my father and I with Science.  He taught us that every molecule of us was composed of atoms that could only have been forged in the cosmic furnaces in the centers of stars.  He showed us how spectroscopy of the stars could show us what they were made of.  He showed us the meaning of Einstein’s special Theory of Relativity.  He pulled the universe together for us in a way that could not be undone.  And he did it without calling upon the name and blessings of God.  But he pointed out that we are connected to everything in the universe and everything is connected to us.  To me, that seemed to define God.  My religion was changing from Christianity to Saganism.  Of course, Mom heard that as “paganism”.  Breakfast table talking changed into early morning arguments.  We didn’t exactly throw chairs at each other, but some pretty heated and pretty large ideas went flying through the air.   Religion and politics became the banned topics at the breakfast table.

tedcruz  So that brings me to the Paffooney points for today.  This blog has turned into a place where a disobedient son, a horrible sort of “free-thinker” type of radical hippie pinko goofball, can talk about the loony-liberal progressive ideas that have taken over his good-little Eisenhower-Republican little-boy mind.    I spent the last post talking existentially about my religious beliefs.  My conservative, old-fashioned friends and family call me an atheist now, but I truly believe in God.  It’s just, I recognize the factors behind Christian myths.  I bow to the wisdom of Scientists like Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and Stephen Hawking… as well as hippie psychologists like Alan Watts… and literary heroes like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S, Lewis.

Will_Rogers_1922I am proud to be an Iowegian (a Mickian word for being from Iowa), yet my birth-State produces gawd-awful Tea Party politicians like Steve King and Joni Ernst.  The stuff that comes out of their mouths doesn’t even make good fertilizer.  But they are comedy gold.  Will Rogers would have pointed out that the jokes will write themselves.  All the humorist would have to do is consult the front page of the newspaper.  I also live in Texas where the debate over secession from the United States still goes on with new Governor Greg Abbott, a man who is a Rick Perry clone, except that he hasn’t bothered to put on glasses as much to make him smarter.  And Texans are looking forward to the next Republican president in 2016.  Both Rick Perry and Ted Cruz are running.  That doubles Texas’ chances, right?  With Global Warming not being accepted as a real thing, the need for giving all our money to the Koch brothers and the Walton family being recognized by both parties in Congress, and looming war with foreign nations that have the bad sense to be “Muslim in nature”, the future looks kinda bleak.   But it is a great time to be a humorist, and I am guessing I won’t be doing very much talking at the breakfast table for a while.

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The Gawd Problem

Dansegawd 4

In my little town in Iowa there were only two Midwestern churches, a brown brick Methodist church and a beige-brick Congregational church.  Midwestern Christianity tends to be very brown or beige.  So I was raised believing in God.  I was taught that there was God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Ghost.  Three people in one.  And, since Methodists, the religion of my parents and grandparents, were basically puritans, we were raised believing sex was dirty and shameful, possibly evil, and we should save up all our sexual energy for the one person in life that we would most love, as long as that person was the opposite sex and also pre-conditioned to believe that sex was evil and we should not enjoy it.

The thing is, deeply ingrained religious beliefs like that, based on faith and the words in the Bible, is almost the exact opposite that highly intelligent people who get turned on to science tend to believe.  I had the misfortune to locate myself directly in the middle between these two high-powered magnets that were destined to pull me in two opposite directions at the same time.  Why are such things always based on contradictions?  Religion depends on faith, which Mark Twain suggests means devoutly believing what you know ain’t so.   Science depends on evidence and experience, and rejects anything your heart tells you is true that conflicts with the evidence.  Is there no middle ground?  Of course there isn’t.

So what do I actually believe?    I am a Midwesterner to my very marrow.  I believe there is a God.  The universe has an intelligence, a spiritual element, and is deeper and wider than my mere five senses can verify.  In fact, Carl Sagan said in Cosmos that because we have intelligence and discernment, we ourselves make the universe conscious of itself.  This is a profound point.  The universe is alive and aware because our existence gives it those qualities.  That’s the basic truth at the center of Existentialism.  Existence precedes essence.  A rock has to exist before its “rock-ness” becomes real.  So I am an Existentialist who believes in God.

At this point many of the Christian people I know begin yelling at me.  “You can’t be both a Christian and an atheist!”  But I am not an atheist.  I believe in God.  Further, because I believe that love is the most necessary quality in the universe, I choose to be called a Christian because Jesus Christ preached forgiveness, helping the less fortunate, and everything else based on love.  I also understand that the other major religions of this world are, at their core, based on love.   So I call myself a Christian Existentialist (though I realize I could just as easily be a Buddhist Existentialist, or some other kind of Existentialist).    I love people, even the bad ones, the ugly ones, and the ones who disagree with me (meaning practically everyone).    I don’t wish to be stupid or blind.  I don’t wish to be unfeeling.  I think the Truth (with a capital “T”) lies between the poles.

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