Jesus, the Bible, Christians, and Religion

Long before Jesus, there was religion and the sacred quest for the divine.
Stonehenge.
(Photo by Jameson)




Mark Twain said it best:


If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be--a Christian.

Truer today than when he wrote it.

Now that I've gotten (and deleted) nasty comments from zealots, I want to write one entry on Jesus Christ and the Bible ; then move on. Zealots love to thump the Bible and talk about abominations.
"Homosexuality is an abomination..."

Never mind that eating shrimp is an abomination.
So is cheating in business.
So is touching pig skin (like a football or expensive gloves).
So is remarrying someone you have previously divorced.
There are over a hundred references to abominations to which Christians pay no attention.

Get out your concordance. Look them all up.

Far worse than an abomination is breaking one of the Ten Commandments-- you know, the ones zealots want to place in front of the courthouse. Why aren't the zealots of the religious right wing clamoring for the arrest and damnation of people who work on the Sabbath? People who commit adultery? People who bear false witness or covet what their neighbors have?
The list of marriage rules in the entry before this one is universally ignored. But the zealots say they take the Bible literally as the word of God.

Then there are the words of Jesus, conveniently colored red in my King James Bible. Not one word about homosexuality. Just a lot about loving thy neighbor and thy enemy.

A lot about NOT judging others.

Nothing about Family values. A lot about rejecting greed, rejecting love of money, opposing war and opposing killing. Jesus was much more of a socialist than a capitalist. In fact, he condemned everything on which capitalism is based. Go ahead, read his words-- in red-- in the Bible.

Jesus of Barcelona
Sagrada Familia
(photo by Jameson)


The best analysis of faith, the Bible, and Homosexuality I have ever read is in the book of a Baptist minister: Peter Gomes. I recommend him to all who want to reconcile their Christian faith with being gay or loving gays.

Read the revelatory article God and Harvard: A profile of Rev. Peter Gomes by Robert Boynton, published by the New Yorker.

Gomes' wrtings:

The Good Book, and The Good Life offer us spirituality at its best.

All Saints Chapel,
Sewanee
(Photo by Jameson)

Like philosopher Bertrand Russell, who wrote Why I am Not a Christian, I find my reason and feelings to be other than Christian . Like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Abe Lincoln and other fathers of our country, I am, perhaps, a Deist. I have empathy with Buddhism. I don't deny that there is a spiritual, or supernatural dimension to existence. But I agree with Sartre and with the moral founding philosophers of our country, above mentioned, that the idea of a personal, omniscient, unchanging, all powerful god is self-contradictory. Read the works of the above and think for yourself-- this link is a great starting point.

Likewise, I support freedom of religion for others to believe whatever they like-- just so long as that belief does not deny freedom or equality, or the pursuit of happiness for others who believe differently. Jesus turned the water into wine, not the other way around --as the zealots would do. Thank God for a little intoxication to clear from our heads the cobwebs of superstition.

Amen.

Jameson

When a *Kiss* is not just a kiss...

Brokeback Mountain's momentous kiss, winner of the MTV award for best kiss last night,
makes a good image to send in reply to George W's ploy (See what Bush really thinks...)to rouse the bigot base of his party by urging the Senate to pass a "defense of marriage" amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Radical Right, rather like the KKK, makes most of us cringe with their hatred of all that is different from their narrow-minded, uninformed selves. Religion should be about love and caring for others, not intolerance, damnation, and hatred. Unfortunately, it remains the source for the death of Socrates, the Inquisition, the horrors of the crusades, the suicide bombings of radical Islam, and the list goes on.

All the misguided attempts to suppress love, to call it sin, to make it forbidden, have only made those stolen kisses that much more ecstatic. It is a thrill to see and experience the kiss denied us for so long. At long last, love is conquering those trolls and potentates of religious oppression.

More on the Madonna Kiss...

More on Batman kiss


Finally, we all should have a good laugh at the people (and Congressmen and Bush) who tell us to follow the Bible on marriage:

Here are the rules:


Biblical Principles of Marriage

* Women are the property of their father until married and their husband after that The value of a woman might be approximately seven years’ work

*Marriage consists of one man and one or more women.

*Nothing prevents a man from taking on concubines in addition to the wife or wives he may already have.

*A man might choose any wife, provided only that she is not already another man’s wife or his [half-]sister, nor the mother or the sister of a woman who is already his wife. The concept of a woman giving her consent to being married is foreign to the Biblical mindset.

If a woman cannot be proven to be a virgin at the time of marriage, she shall be stoned.

A rapist must marry his victim - unless she was already a fiancé, in which case he should be put to death if he raped her in the country, but both of them killed if he raped her in town.

If a man dies childless, his brother must marry the widow.

Women marry the man of their father’s choosing.

Inter-faith marriages are prohibited

Divorce is forbidden.

Better to not get married at all - although marriage is not a sin.

Article with citations:

http://www.samesexmarriage.ca/equality/biblical_marriage.htm

Provincetown Kiss

Smooch!

Jameson

Summertime (and the livin' is easy)

A trek to Asheville and the Blue Ridge Mountains marked for us the beginning of summer.

Dar Rocks
Pisgah Inn

As an Epicurean, I enjoyed the local brew, the food, the art, and the nightlife of alternative Asheville. The city's progressive attitude and awareness was everywhere evident, from downtown religious dancers to the dancers of Scandals and other clubs. Starr and I toasted the latter with cosmos in real martini glasses-- our choice in a world of plastic.

We hiked along the trails of Pisgah also, a world removed from the daily bombardment of bad news: air pollution and smog days in Atlanta, faulty levees in New Orleans, U.S. Marine massacres of civilians-- women and babies included--in Iraq, the threat of nuclear warheads in Iran, whose leader denies the holocaust and assails Israel.

Sometimes it's best to regard the beauty of tiny wildflowers to remain sane.

wildflowers along the
Blue Ridge

Photo: Jameson

Happy Trails.

Jameson

What would Spinoza think?

Salon's essay,

Everybody loves Spinoza,

Illustration by Bob Watts/Salon.com

and Rebecca Goldstein's interview, Free Radical

easily lead me to wonder just what Baruch would think about the World today.

He was a Jew living in the world's most liberal city and country in the 1600s:
Amsterdam, Holland.

He witnessed religious intolerance: Spain expelled Jews and Moslems, as did Portugal. The Jews went to the Netherlands. Yet the Jewish community also expelled Spinoza for his philosophy.

Spinoza exalted Nature, saw God and Nature as one, became in the eyes of many, a Pantheist or even a Panentheist.

How instructive is it to see our own universe through the lens of this lens maker, this Rationalist, this man of Ethics?

We would see that nothing has changed. There are still religious wars. There is still intolerance. Man continues to rape Nature, failing to find harmony or nurture. No doubt Spinoza would remain the optimistic fatalist he was 400 years ago. The wise man, he thought, sees the world from the point of view of eternity. Spinoza, like the Buddhist, was a determinist. Nothing can be otherwise than it is. Individual freedom of action and choice-- mere illusion. So too the sensory world. Knowledge through reason alone can bring happiness. The ladder of knowledge, using reason, leads up to God where God, Nature, and the Mind become mystically one. No wonder there was no Mrs. Spinoza. Just one substance exists in Baruch's universe, God is ultimately alone. The monist becomes a solipsistic God. Yet he is filled with self-love, love for all those marvelous manifestations of God and Nature in the modes and attributes. Narcissus adores the pool of himself.

Spinoza, like so many modern workers, died in the dust and the pollution of his own work. The dust of lens grinding contributed to his death by consumption, at the age of 45. The individual death, though, is but an illusion: from the lens of the eye of God, Spinoza's thought, the only meaningful reality, is immortal.

I like what Shakespeare, Spinoza's near contemporary, wrote. The words seem to apply to Spinoza, himself:

His life was gentle; and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up,
And say to all the world, THIS WAS A MAN!

William Shakespeare

Happy Thoughts...

--Jameson

Buddha's May Moon

Last night the full moon marked Vesak :
The Birth, Enlightenment,
and Death of Siddhartha Buddha.
All in May. All on the May full Moon.
What better cause for meditating on the meaning of life, or lack therof.

Full Moon over Palm Springs
photo by Jameson

If nothing else, our global awareness and omnipresent access to the World's events, give us food for thought. I still recall standing in the Blue Mountains of Australia looking at the same moon I've seen at home, the same constellation Orion, and delighting in the familiar sky of another continent. Everyone on the planet sees the same full moon; why can we not all see the same divinity? And what better divintiy than Buddha to unite us and bring peace? (OK I wouldn't forget Pan and Dionysus-- maybe we can have other favorites to supplement and individualize our Buddhisms).

Think of it: The same full moon, lighting the lovers in the garden, lighting the lake enough for skinny dippers to catch a glimpse, lighting the bombed out hovels where soldiers look for an unknown enemy, lighting Washington and Moscow, and Baghdad evenly. Lighting the Parthenon, the cliffs of Dover, Stonehenge. Would we could harvest this light and illuminate our souls with it instead of dousing our souls with the dead, dark residue of the dinosaurs.

"From the aspect of eternity," wrote Spinoza. I'll take the cosmic, the universal, the global over the local any day-- unless the local is my very own GARDEN OF EPICURUS.



Happy trails in the sky,

Jameson

Asheville

Next stop:

The mountains of North Carolina
and the city of Asheville.


For Memorial Weekend we shall drive through North Georgia and take the Blue Ridge Parkway to Asheville where Starr will join us for a few days of hiking and enjoying the ambience of this progressive, artistic town.

Here are a few photographs of recent treks to the Blue Ridge:


Looking Glass Falls






















Brother John at the Devil's Courthouse




















Dillard House Field






All Photos by Jameson





Asheville News

(click)

Our Photos of Asheville and friends

(click)

Blue Ridge Mountain photos

Our Asheville page





Happy Trails...

Summertime

"Take from the trees of summer
All their leaves
And wed them to you" -from The Preludes
James Land Jones





 
Fergus 
on the path to Moon River



On this long Sunday afternoon of rain and birdsong, my thoughts go back to Moon River, Johnny Mercer's house near Savannah to which I moved in May exactly thirty-five years ago.


From my screen porch, I watch the squirrels scurry up the wet bark of oaks, rodents and tree trunk both the color of centipedes. The deep green canopy of rain dripping trees recalls the lushness of Moon River.

This afternoon a single mocking bird convinces me that birds must believe in the Sun God, in Apollo, Tawa, Helios, Huitzilopochtli ... for they sing their prayers to summon the Sun from the night, from the rain, from a total eclipse with all the faith and optimism of Bodhisattvas. What purity fills this simple bird cry. It is untainted by the dark world of war, disease, poverty, and ruin humans have produced.

Indoors, I listen to Spanish guitar, Rodrigo's Concerto de Aranjuez, equally pure evocation of a world removed from the horrors on televised news. And there again I find my friend Jim, now in Mexico, gazing at Orizaba, snow covered, pure, rising above the horrors, the Mayan sacrifices, the Aztec obsession with death, the black holes in the universe that are the eyes of suffering. Always more real and lived in Mexico than in the sanitized U.S."Take from the trees of summer..."

If enlightenment is anything, it must be the purity of birdsong, and have the  harmony of Spanish guitar.

Jack

May Day

Today is May Day,
Lei Day in Hawaii,
International Workers Day--

A Day of demonstrations:
A Socialist Day for workers of the world to take to the streets: Mexicans, Latinos in the U.S. by the millions...
Chicago, 1889, 2006.

Just give me the English maypole
or the Valborgsmässoafton-- Walpurgis Night of Sweden.
Or Beltane:

Also known as May Eve, May Day, and Walpurgis Night, happens at the beginning of May. It celebrates the height of Spring and the flowering of life. The Goddess manifests as the May Queen and Flora. The God emerges as the May King and Jack in the Green. The danced Maypole represents Their unity, with the pole itself being the God and the ribbons that encompass it, the Goddess. Colors are the Rainbow spectrum. Beltane is a festival of flowers, fertility, sensuality, and delight.

http://www.circlesanctuary.org/pholidays/Beltane.html








A day to be leied.

May your maypole be merry.

Lei before Buddha
photo by Jameson
(click to enlarge)

--Jameson

WEEDS

We need Weeding: These are the WEEDS We must remove...





War
Environmental ruin
Econmoic malfeasance
Diplomacy gap
Social Inequality

Spider Plant
Photo by Dar and Jameson

The ultimate source of the weeds is selfishness. Whether it's the private interest of an individual, a company, a congressman, or a nation, the result is the same-- every act falls drop by drop into the sea of devastation. Ben Franklin's statement is appropriate:
"We must all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately."

Here's my letter published in the Atlanta Journal April 26,2006:

Editor:
The AJC's editorial on lawnmowers (4/25) highlighted one of many problems we face because of selfishness. In this century, more than ever, we need to cultivate a sense of global awareness and a sense of the community. Acting out of private interests ultimately hurts us all. This is true of polluting mowers, energy poor cars, failure to develop good quality public transportation, especially rail and light rail, and the near-sighted attitude, whether of individuals, money hungry representatives, or businesses like the Southern Co. to act out of private interest rather than the greater good of society. Unless we all change our attitude and see the consequences of everyone doing what seems individually insignificant, we are doomed to unhealthy air, ever more congested highways, and all the problems of unchecked growth. To quote Ben Franklin in today's context, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

The cure?

RUBS:

Romanticism-- love of Nature, adventure and romantic love..
Urban sophistication-- awareness of art, the variety of life, the Worldviews of others..
Buddhism--Love and respect for life and nature without all the petty intolerance of the lesser religions.
Socialism-- The good of all in society, humanism, individual style and worth, the end of capitalism's worship of power, money, and the destruction of the world's resources.

The message of massage.

Happy trails and touch.

-Jameson

Big Easy 2006

Not so big. Not so easy. The city that care forgot is now the city too few care about, a city forgotten by the rest of the nation.






New Orleans
April 9, 2006
photo: Jameson








While whole neighborhoods remain in ruin in New Orleans, much of the city is recovering, rebuilding, even thriving, especially the French Quarter and the "River Sliver" running uptown from Canal to Tulane and Audubon Park, including the Garden District. One of the best commentaries on the situation and the New Orleans power struggle is from The Nation:

Who Is Killing New Orleans?

On the up side, The Crescent City is full of Attitude: Photos--Biscuit Palace; Cornstalk
(by Jameson)







More photos taken by this Epicurean Hedonist are available here to show the continuing beauty and joy of this spirited place:

New Orleans
Springtime 2006




Happy Trails...

-Jameson

Meltdown

As the glaciers melt, making Greenland green, as scientists make pigs produce Salmon fat, our leaders continue to show the spine of jellyfish.

Beach Jelly: St. Simon. photo by Jameson


As CEOs, those not in court or jail, jetison ethics, their corporations accelerate Global Ruin. "Nothing in Moderation" is the cry of the Oil execs, the Car manufacturers, and most damning of all, the U.S. Consumer and the envious politicos of the developing nations.


Conservation is in eclipse. The socialist ideal of comfort and care for all is in eclipse. Peace has been eclipsed by the Bush war, by the 21st Century Crusade and the clash of the titan fundamentalisms. Sanity is in eclipse: and the Zone of Totality is a place of fearsome darkness...

The Zone of Totality
Crosses Turkey
March 29, 2006
(news photos)



Like Epicurus, I hide out in whatever garden I can find, knowing that it is deteriorating faster than the fading azaleas. But for now, we head to New Orleans, hanging garden on the edge of the Abyss..

Mother of Jameson:
"Stop Bitching"
photo: Jameson

Happy Trails...

Jameson

Cumberland

As we passed over the hills of the Cumberland Plateau, I thought of Ireland.
Sinead O'Connor's voice and the green of approaching spring enhanced the picture. The lake of Fall Creek lay before us like Innisfree. Cumberland: Hadrian's Wall, Castlerigg, the Lake District we explored exactly a decade ago come to mind.

We had returned from New York City. From Spamalot. From the demon mind of Joe Orton-- Alec Baldwin entertaining Sloane right before our eyes. Evil Priss!

Fall Creek Falls: photo by Jameson

Therapy-- the upper westside gay bar-- left us sick on cosmos after Brokeback crashed. Riding over Cumberland, we could not recall how we made it back to the hotel, ten blocks of midnight Manhattan unaccounted for-- nor how my glasses wound up in the hall.

Better to recall Sartre's mistress Simone de Beauvoir's affair with Nelson Algren. A Transatlantic Liason of fifteen years, including trips to Chicago, Mexico, Paris, New York. Better to recall their climb to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun, my climb there in Teotihuacan three decades ago. How relationships are enhanced by other relationships-- De Beauvoir's insight.


We are soaring over the Cumberland plateau as the countryside gives more healing than antibiotics. The ducks' quacking eclipses Jack's hacking. Our neices pucker their gift of red wax lips. We hike along the gorge, glimpsing a waterfall as high as the Empire State Building.

See it. (click)

Empire State Bldg from our window
Photo: Jameson

Romanticism wins over cynicism, for now. The way up and the way down are the same, Heraclitus claims. The Tao crosses Cumberland.

...and leads to St. Patrick's Day in Savannah; then to the Ocean, to Saint Simon's Island, South of Cumberland Isle.


Happy Trails,

Jameson

Amadeus Mozart

STEPHEN KOVACEVICH's

performance tonight transported me to the 18th Century and the universe of Amadeus Mozart. For a moment I sat again in The Theatre of the Estates in Prague where Darryl and I heard Don Giovanni from our private box.

Prague: photo by Jameson



The Atlanta Symphony's celebration of Mozart's 250th birthday was a success: The soon-to-be-abandoned hall filled to capacity. I was fortunate to have front row center seat in the balcony, nothing between me and the music.

It is wonderful that in our world of non-stop noise, terrorism, violence, and nervous energy, there is a person who can play the music of Mozart with such brilliance and perfection. Koveacevich was born in 1940, and yet he can still command every note of two different piano concertos, the 24th and the 25th. It was sublime to experience such harmony.


--Jameson

True Love in Brokeback Mountain

Why is Jack Twist beaten to death in Brokeback Mountain? The answer that it's because he's gay is inadequate. Plenty of gay men, even in Texas, got by on the sly or by secret relationship, without getting killed. By the time of his death, it is the '80s. Gay rights were on the upswing, even in Texas.



(The original cowboy lovers, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, tame the Bull of Heaven, 7th Century, B.C.)




This story conveys something else. It is Ennis' refusal to accept Jack's love, the most passionate love he knows, that ultimately kills Jack. In a way, it kills Ennis as well. He is left alone, bereft, holding his true love only in memory. His grief and Jack's death are heartbreaking.

The number of reviews of this film is staggering. Most of them have nothing but praise for the film, for Ang Lee, and for the actors, all of them. The most repeated point is that this is a universal love story rather than a gay cowboy film.

The film is also about the kind of deep abiding bond between men that writers have praised since the time of Gilgamesh, or of Plato and Aristotle. The death of Gerald in D.H. Lawrence's Women In Love is a similar tragedy. Birkin, despite his happy marriage, is left weeping, "He should have loved me. I offered him." Sexual or not, explicit or implicit, love between men is also a universal need.

The truth of this film challenges the prudish view that homosexuality is a sin. Here it is the denial of genuine love that is the sin that brings on the tragic end. "Love is a force of Nature," the ads for the film claim. Such love as this film portrays is as sacred as anything we know. To deny it is morally wrong. Trying to deny it only brings misery and loss to everyone involved.

A number of commentators have pointed out how American this film is. It is the culmination of feelings and revelations that go back to Melville, Whitman, and Mark Twain. It reveals the kind of love Abraham Lincoln felt for Joshua Speed (again, whether sexual or not). Our culture, obsessed with material possession, superficial success, and a narrow understanding of family, has lost touch with our rich heritage. How fascinating it is that this "Western" set in Wyoming, should so hearken back to the heart of Western Culture, from the literature of Homer to the history of Alexander to the Calamus poems of Walt Whitman.

More than all of this, the film is such a fine work of art that it touches us in ways we shall continue to discover. It is ineffable, beyond mere description. Like the blinding of Oedipus, it lets us see into recesses of the psyche we could not see otherwise. It will provoke thought and feelings for many years to come.

--Jameson

Afloat on the peaceful Pacific
Photo by Jameson

Aloha,
and Happy, Enlightened 2006 from Hawaii.

Some photos. (click)