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yermom

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Posts posted by yermom

  1. :birthday
    HBD VC! Thanks to all my “internet friends”    for many years of interesting exchanges and sincere affections! -LL


    I can’t believe I managed to log in on the first try! Now I’m going to run away - I don’t want to wade in too deeply because I was mostly in my 20s during my active VC days and I fear what embarrassing skeletons I might find if I dig around here for long now. 😆

     

     

     

     

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  2. A couple of items in my avatar might give you a good idea of what a taint tickler is.

     

    Also, my seasonal avatar is 98% better than the next Wilco album.

    It has something to do with a puking dragon with bad teeth and a cute pilgrim kitty? Yay, I am so looking forward to getting older so that the mysteries of life will be revealed to me!

     

    fonz.gif

  3. but it is the episodes that deal with emotions (e.g. 'The Girl In The Fireplace' - not suprisingly written by Steven Moffat the new producer for this series, or 'Vincent and The Doctor') and moral dilemas and the clever/witty dialogue that provide the real payoff for adults.

    Ditto this.

     

    And for the record, I liked both Eccleston and Tennant more than the new guy. I'm cool with the new guy but I loooooved Tennant.

  4. Here's some random geeky shizz...

    I was reading a Who discussion on Facebook and found this comment interesting:

    The Immortality gate is used to take Gallifrey out of the Master's mind. That's what the constant drumming is: During the Time War, they found a way of packing Gallifrey into his head, then used the Fob Watch thing to allow him to escape, taking them to safety.

    Is that what's going on, you think?

  5. Hallelujah for this sort of thing:

     

    October 15, 2009

     

    A Manifesto! The Time Has Come!

     

    I have made a decision. I will no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone. I will no longer engage the biblical ignorance that emanates from so many right-wing Christians about how the Bible condemns homosexuality, as if that point of view still has any credibility. I will no longer discuss with them or listen to them tell me how homosexuality is "an abomination to God," about how homosexuality is a "chosen lifestyle," or about how through prayer and "spiritual counseling" homosexual persons can be "cured." Those arguments are no longer worthy of my time or energy. I will no longer dignify by listening to the thoughts of those who advocate "reparative therapy," as if homosexual persons are somehow broken and need to be repaired. I will no longer talk to those who believe that the unity of the church can or should be achieved by rejecting the presence of, or at least at the expense of, gay and lesbian people. I will no longer take the time to refute the unlearned and undocumentable claims of certain world religious leaders who call homosexuality "deviant." I will no longer listen to that pious sentimentality that certain Christian leaders continue to employ, which suggests some version of that strange and overtly dishonest phrase that "we love the sinner but hate the sin." That statement is, I have concluded, nothing more than a self-serving lie designed to cover the fact that these people hate homosexual persons and fear homosexuality itself, but somehow know that hatred is incompatible with the Christ they claim to profess, so they adopt this face-saving and absolutely false statement. I will no longer temper my understanding of truth in order to pretend that I have even a tiny smidgen of respect for the appalling negativity that continues to emanate from religious circles where the church has for centuries conveniently perfumed its ongoing prejudices against blacks, Jews, women and homosexual persons with what it assumes is "high-sounding, pious rhetoric." The day for that mentality has quite simply come to an end for me. I will personally neither tolerate it nor listen to it any longer. The world has moved on, leaving these elements of the Christian Church that cannot adjust to new knowledge or a new consciousness lost in a sea of their own irrelevance. They no longer talk to anyone but themselves. I will no longer seek to slow down the witness to inclusiveness by pretending that there is some middle ground between prejudice and oppression. There isn't. Justice postponed is justice denied. That can be a resting place no longer for anyone. An old civil rights song proclaimed that the only choice awaiting those who cannot adjust to a new understanding was to "Roll on over or we'll roll on over you!" Time waits for no one.

     

    I will particularly ignore those members of my own Episcopal Church who seek to break away from this body to form a "new church," claiming that this new and bigoted instrument alone now represents the Anglican Communion. Such a new ecclesiastical body is designed to allow these pathetic human beings, who are so deeply locked into a world that no longer exists, to form a community in which they can continue to hate gay people, distort gay people with their hopeless rhetoric and to be part of a religious fellowship in which they can continue to feel justified in their homophobic prejudices for the rest of their tortured lives. Church unity can never be a virtue that is preserved by allowing injustice, oppression and psychological tyranny to go unchallenged.

     

    In my personal life, I will no longer listen to televised debates conducted by "fair-minded" channels that seek to give "both sides" of this issue "equal time." I am aware that these stations no longer give equal time to the advocates of treating women as if they are the property of men or to the advocates of reinstating either segregation or slavery, despite the fact that when these evil institutions were coming to an end the Bible was still being quoted frequently on each of these subjects. It is time for the media to announce that there are no longer two sides to the issue of full humanity for gay and lesbian people. There is no way that justice for homosexual people can be compromised any longer.

     

    I will no longer act as if the Papal office is to be respected if the present occupant of that office is either not willing or not able to inform and educate himself on public issues on which he dares to speak with embarrassing ineptitude. I will no longer be respectful of the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who seems to believe that rude behavior, intolerance and even killing prejudice is somehow acceptable, so long as it comes from third-world religious leaders, who more than anything else reveal in themselves the price that colonial oppression has required of the minds and hearts of so many of our world's population. I see no way that ignorance and truth can be placed side by side, nor do I believe that evil is somehow less evil if the Bible is quoted to justify it. I will dismiss as unworthy of any more of my attention the wild, false and uninformed opinions of such would-be religious leaders as Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, Albert Mohler, and Robert Duncan. My country and my church have both already spent too much time, energy and money trying to accommodate these backward points of view when they are no longer even tolerable.

     

    I make these statements because it is time to move on. The battle is over. The victory has been won. There is no reasonable doubt as to what the final outcome of this struggle will be. Homosexual people will be accepted as equal, full human beings, who have a legitimate claim on every right that both church and society have to offer any of us. Homosexual marriages will become legal, recognized by the state and pronounced holy by the church. "Don't ask, don't tell" will be dismantled as the policy of our armed forces. We will and we must learn that equality of citizenship is not something that should ever be submitted to a referendum. Equality under and before the law is a solemn promise conveyed to all our citizens in the Constitution itself. Can any of us imagine having a public referendum on whether slavery should continue, whether segregation should be dismantled, whether voting privileges should be offered to women? The time has come for politicians to stop hiding behind unjust laws that they themselves helped to enact, and to abandon that convenient shield of demanding a vote on the rights of full citizenship because they do not understand the difference between a constitutional democracy, which this nation has, and a "mobocracy," which this nation rejected when it adopted its constitution. We do not put the civil rights of a minority to the vote of a plebiscite.

     

    I will also no longer act as if I need a majority vote of some ecclesiastical body in order to bless, ordain, recognize and celebrate the lives and gifts of gay and lesbian people in the life of the church. No one should ever again be forced to submit the privilege of citizenship in this nation or membership in the Christian Church to the will of a majority vote.

     

    The battle in both our culture and our church to rid our souls of this dying prejudice is finished. A new consciousness has arisen. A decision has quite clearly been made. Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state. Therefore, I will from this moment on refuse to dignify the continued public expression of ignorant prejudice by engaging it. I do not tolerate racism or sexism any longer. From this moment on, I will no longer tolerate our culture's various forms of homophobia. I do not care who it is who articulates these attitudes or who tries to make them sound holy with religious jargon.

     

    I have been part of this debate for years, but things do get settled and this issue is now settled for me. I do not debate any longer with members of the "Flat Earth Society" either. I do not debate with people who think we should treat epilepsy by casting demons out of the epileptic person; I do not waste time engaging those medical opinions that suggest that bleeding the patient might release the infection. I do not converse with people who think that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans as punishment for the sin of being the birthplace of Ellen DeGeneres or that the terrorists hit the United Sates on 9/11 because we tolerated homosexual people, abortions, feminism or the American Civil Liberties Union. I am tired of being embarrassed by so much of my church's participation in causes that are quite unworthy of the Christ I serve or the God whose mystery and wonder I appreciate more each day. Indeed I feel the Christian Church should not only apologize, but do public penance for the way we have treated people of color, women, adherents of other religions and those we designated heretics, as well as gay and lesbian people.

     

    Life moves on. As the poet James Russell Lowell once put it more than a century ago: "New occasions teach new duties, Time makes ancient good uncouth." I am ready now to claim the victory. I will from now on assume it and live into it. I am unwilling to argue about it or to discuss it as if there are two equally valid, competing positions any longer. The day for that mentality has simply gone forever.

     

    This is my manifesto and my creed. I proclaim it today. I invite others to join me in this public declaration. I believe that such a public outpouring will help cleanse both the church and this nation of its own distorting past. It will restore integrity and honor to both church and state. It will signal that a new day has dawned and we are ready not just to embrace it, but also to rejoice in it and to celebrate it.

    – John Shelby Spong

     

    You probably already know about Spong, Joe. He says

  6. It seems to me that there are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. This bothers me a bit.

    :lol
  7. My question should have been phrased to address the problems with participating in religious practices. But as for the statement as it stands, are you saying that those active in religious practices don't ask the "big questions"? That they completely cease to wonder or participate in any sort of introspection or philosophizing simply because they, let's say, accept Jesus as their lord and savior?

     

    My answer to this is pretty much there in the rest of your post:

    Surely, some people do, but there are also secular people who haven't done a damned thing toward asking big questions. It's not unique to religion, and questioning is not unique to the secular realm.

     

    My use of phrases like "seems to" and "bothers me a bit" can be taken as indicators that I don't confess to know much of anything. :hmm

  8. But what's wrong with believing?

    GON touched on this but I'd like to answer too. "Believing" bothers me a bit because it seems to hinder the search for truth. If there are serious irrefutable answers to the "big questions" we'll never find them if we all decide to settle on "faith" and stop looking, stop investigating, stop searching for truth. I'd like us to keep looking until we find better explanations than "I believe..." or "the Bible says..." y'know?
  9. I’m 110% in favor of supporting local growers and buying organic, but I cannot help but think that if EVERYONE did this, the small “farms” would eventually be overwhelmed, and to keep up, they’d eventually have to grow and grow, and by growing, lose what made them special in the first place.

     

    There are 350 + million humans in this country alone, is it even possible to feed everyone utilizing local growers? And if we tried, would they simply end up being the Monsanto’s and the mega-farms of the future?

    If the demand for local produce was that great, I'd so totally become a farmer. I imagine plenty of people working shit jobs at Tyson's or McDonalds would gladly trade in their latex "food" handling gloves in exchange for a beautiful pair of dirt gloves, like those M Chris posted, too.

     

    I think one important step we can take/are taking is to continue to raise awareness - through movies, books, conversation, of what goes on behind the scenes in the food industry. Eventually, enough people will realize how totally screwed the whole thing is and demand reform.

  10. First of all, nobody "knows".

    Exactly. That's something I can't get behind, the idea that anyone "knows." When my daughter asks about god, "Is god real?", I just explain that some people think so, Dad doesn't think so, and Mom really just doesn't know.
  11. I think of toddlers that die, or kids in horrific murders, or parents of murdered kids, or people paralyzed for life, or people with mental problems, or the billions of kids born into poverty in 3rd world countries....

     

    It's sad to me to think that these people have shitty existences, then just die. I imagine these people getting a chance to REALLY live after this life. I imagine it being a heavenly existence, but who knows....maybe they get to lead another life after this one. Obviously, I don't know for sure. This is just what I feel....and what I think many believers feel.

     

    We all have our own soul and feelings and emotions. It's amazing and magical to me. I absolutely CANNOT and WILL NOT EVER believe that it's all just some happy accident. It's hard for me to believe that this existence is all there is.

    When I am thinking about this stuff (every day) and encounter the "What about toddlers..." issue, I think that when these things happen, it's not completely senseless horror. I get the same feeling I get at funerals (and I've attended my fair share) and that's the feeling that while this loss makes me tremendously sad, it also reminds me of the value of life.

     

    When someone dies, it reminds me to be thankful that I'm still alive and it reminds me of how strongly I loved that person and how strongly I love so many people in my life. I've never been so in love with the universe and so awed with the beauty and magic in life as I am when I'm reminded of how lucky I am to be here to witness it and of how quickly it can be taken away from me. I don't worry too much about what happens when I die because I know that, if nothing else, I'll live on in the memories of those who love me and serve to remind them of the value of their own existence...every moment of it, even if it only lasts as long as their heart is beating and no longer.

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