Into the Void

I attended a reiki share at a church in a nearby town. The fellow who ran it, I’ll call him “Paul,” told a story about a religious leader who visited from India. This leader sat in one of the chairs in the church, and Paul always told the story.

To a reiki practitioner, the chair seemed to have retained some of the religious leader’s energy. I like to call it “the God-Realized Chair.”

And a Happy Hannukkah to all my friends of the Mewish persuasion!

moar funny pictures

More blog-fodder from Yahoo! Answers.

I think we can all agree that consistantly objectifying women is not just wrong, it is dysfunctional. By objectifying I mean that the viewer isn’t concerned with the woman’s needs and desires but only with his own. This lack of empathy, **when taken to extremes**, is the hallmark of a sociopath or a narcissistic personality.

In Muslim cultures this objectification is so ubiquitous that the women must wear burqas to protect themselves from being attacked. Displaying the female form, the clerics claim, incites sexual excitement in men and invites rape.

The United States actually has a great deal more censorship than most European countries. It started with the Comstock Laws, laws that were intended to oppress women by denying them healthcare information. In Europe, casual nudity is unremarkable and nobody is inappropriately aroused by it, while in the U.S. a little too much neck or leg on TV provokes a great outcry.

If I’m understanding you correctly, you are telling us that Americans are **not** able to appreciate the human form, male or female, without being sexually overwhelmed. Does your minister also promote rape? I hope not.

Prehistoric fertility totems, ancient Greek statues, and Renoir’s paintings: these are all nudes, too, and if you have your way they will be censored along with the sleazy garbage that you and I don’t care to look at.

Narcissism
http://www.narcissistic-abuse.com/empathy.html

Australian fury at Muslim cleric’s claim that women provoke assault
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/10/27/wmeat27.xml

The Comstock Laws
http://law.jrank.org/pages/5508/Comstock-Law-1873.html

Nudes
http://www.slowart.com/articles/obese.html

Email to a Fundamentalist who obsesses on what he claims is a religion that “espouses rejoicing.”

Your religion also espouses killing members of other religions as part of its teachings. That makes you a danger to many members of this list.

I have never understood why people have to have “faith.” Is it because their religion causes a rift with the higher self? What, no more epiphanies? No more divine revelations? No more burning bushes? That’s ok, you can still have faith.

I prefer to believe in the sunset in Pacific Grove, California; a trip down the Wading River in the pine barrens of New Jersey; the view from a boat on Loch Ness; driving up into the sharp red mountains in Arizona. There is no imaginary playmate in my head trying to claim my feelings at those times.

The awe, the sense of something bigger than yourself? The earth is a big beautiful place, and that feeling means you are at the very edge of becoming part of it. Can’t have any of that Pagan nonsense in our heads! Quick, say that God made the things that gave you that feeling.

On the other hand, nobody ever builds a high wall around God except maybe Jesus or the Pope. I can see the attraction in diverting your feelings to something that you believe will never abandon you no matter what evil you do.

Letter to a good Christian woman:

I think we can all agree that consistantly objectifying women is not just wrong, it is dysfunctional. By “objectifying” I mean that the viewer isn’t concerned with the woman’s needs and desires but only with his own. This lack of empathy, when taken to extremes, is the hallmark of a sociopath or a narcissistic personality.

In Muslim cultures this objectification is so ubiquitous that the women must wear burqas to protect themselves from being attacked. Displaying the female form, the clerics claim, incites sexual excitement in men and invites rape.

We heard this same argument when miniskirts were popular in the US.

The United States actually has a great deal more censorship than most European countries. It started with the Comstock Laws, laws that were intended to oppress women by denying them healthcare information. In Europe, casual nudity is unremarkable and nobody is inappropriately aroused by it, while in the U.S. a little too much neck or leg on TV provokes a great outcry.

If I’m understanding you correctly, you are telling us that Americans are incapable of appreciating the human form, male or female, without being sexually overwhelmed. Does your minister also promote rape? I hope not.

Prehistoric fertility totems, ancient Greek statues, and Renoir’s nudes: if you have your way they will be censored along with the sleazy garbage that you and I don’t care to look at.

Just in case anyone is still complaining that Islamists are violent, here’s something from the KJV bible. It’s pretty clear what a good Christian is supposed to do to non-Christians.

Deuteronomy 13

6 If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers;
7 Namely, of the gods of the people which are round about you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth;
8 Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him:
9 But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people.
10 And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the LORD thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.

NORAD tracks Santa 2008

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) is a joint U.S.-Canada military organization based at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado. NORAD systems scan the skies for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) flying over the poles.

Artist’s rendering of NORAD engaging Santa during his Christmas Eve errands. Click the thumbnail picture above to download a larger image for your desktop.

Santa’s annual trip is a logistical nightmare for the folks at NORAD. His sleigh has no transponder. The only light is Rudoph’s nose. NORAD has responded with a special-purpose, one-night-a-year Santa Tracker. Santa-Cam images will be available at the site linked above on Christmas Eve.

It’s great fun. Do be sure to check it out!

Thanks to Max for the excellent artist’s representation. He also did the one for the post on last year.

Hey, Girl Scout friends! Now THIS is a knife.

Get one of these bad boys and you can throw away your tool chest, cutlery, fishing tackle box, and corkscrew. Oh, and fire your auto mechanic. It’s all there.

I can’t help it, I love to window shop at amazon.com. I have NO idea what I was looking for when I found this. I was thinking about getting one for hubby for Christmas as a joke.

What’s really strange is that as I was typing this in, hubby came in with the Hammacher catalog. They’re selling one that has every tool Victrinox ever made. It’s about 5 times the width of this (and 5 times the price) and is simply bristling with screwdrivers for hardware that most people will never even see, much less need to tighten.

Sarah Palin: The Nuclear Option?

It didn’t take long for a discussion forum to show up poking fun at Vice-Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin’s religion/political platform, or what little is known about it. As best I can figure out, she plans to nuke the lower 48 and take her throne in Alaska.

Portions of the first major interview will be televised beginning on Thursday’s “World News with Charles Gibson” and “Nightline.” ABC will also air a special “20/20″ at 10 p.m. Friday devoted to the interview.

Update: The Interview.

“Sin is occasioned precisely by the fact that man refuses to admit his ‘creatureliness’ and to acknowledge himself as merely a member of a total unity of life. He pretends to be more than he is.”
Reinhold Niebuhr