Mother Teresa's Doubts and Angst

I will offer this news item first with an editorial post to follow tomorrow. I find this story extremely poignat:

Fri Aug 24, 2007 3:39 PM ET


By Daniel Trotta

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A book of letters written by Mother Teresa of Calcutta reveals for the first time that she was deeply tormented about her faith and suffered periods of doubt about God.

"Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear," she wrote the Rev. Michael van der Peet in September 1979.

Due out on September 4, "Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light" is a collection of letters written to colleagues and superiors over 66 years. In the United States it will be published by Doubleday, an imprint of Random House, which is owned by German media group Bertelsmann.

The ethnic Albanian Roman Catholic nun, who dedicated her life to poor, sick and dying in India, died in 1997 aged 87.

Mother Teresa had wanted all her letters destroyed, but the Vatican ordered they be preserved as potential relics of a saint, a spokeswoman for Doubleday said.

Mother Teresa has been beatified but not yet canonized.

Time magazine, which has first serial rights, published excerpts on its Web site.

"I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God -- tender, personal love," she wrote to one adviser. "If you were (there), you would have said, 'What hypocrisy.'"

The book was compiled and edited by the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, a proponent of her sainthood and senior member of the Missionaries of Charity order that she founded.

The letters likely would do little to affect her cause for sainthood as church history is dotted with saints who have been tormented about their faith.

Saint Thomas the Apostle -- the "Doubting Thomas" -- doubted that Jesus had risen from the dead until, according to scripture, he touches the wound of a resurrected Jesus. Christ himself wondered "God, why have you forsaken me" while on the cross, the Bible says.

But the Mother Teresa letters nonetheless stand in marked contrast to her public image as a selfless and tireless minister for the poor who was driven by faith.

"I've never read a saint's life where the saint has such an intense spiritual darkness. No one knew she was that tormented," the Rev. James Martin, an editor at Jesuit magazine America and the author of "My Life with the Saints," told Time.

THE DARK LETTERS

The writings address numerous topics, but the ones most likely to create a stir are what Doubleday called the "dark letters."

"Please pray specially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself -- for there is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead," she wrote in 1953. "It has been like this more or less from the time I started 'the work.'"

Then in 1956: "Such deep longing for God -- and ... repulsed -- empty -- no faith -- no love -- no zeal. (Saving) souls holds no attraction -- Heaven means nothing -- pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything."

And then in 1959: "If there be no God -- there can be no soul -- if there is no Soul then Jesus -- You also are not true."

At times she also found it hard to pray.

"I utter words of community prayers -- and try my utmost to get out of every word the sweetness it has to give -- but my prayer of union is not there any longer -- I no longer pray."

On Having your own Direct Experience of Life....

I received his in my inbox this morning, from a dear dear man. We had been discussing the nature of direct experience vs. teachings of others. Tom is a very wise being, in his 80's living in the UK. He wrote the following, which in view of the fact that I am about to write a post about Mother Teresa's crisis of faith, I found to be very timely:

Trudy,

Steeped in Chrisianity, steeped in Buddhism, steeped in Islam,
Church, Dhamma Centre, and Mosque, I went to speak with a very
beautiful woman in New York, I saw light in her eyes, and joy written
upon her face, she gave me the best piece of advice I had ever
recieved, She said, "Do not ever let anyone tell you what to believe,
or what you must do"

Tom.x.

The Big Picture

I get so wrapped up in politics sometimes that it appears even to me, to be Real. At these times, it benefits me to step back and take a look at the Macrocosm. The Big Picture.

What I Really Know is that we appear to be on a ball whirling in space in a galaxy we have named the Milky Way. But where is that galaxy, precisely? Where is it's location vis a vis all other known galaxies? Where is the outer edge of the Universe? It all comes down to truly we don't know. What we do know is that we are conscious; we have awareness and we can learn and know ABOUT things. But to truly know anything? My old spiritual teacher used to say "You don't know what anything IS!" That is so true and so liberating when contemplated deeply. For me, the liberating sense is to drop into Awe again, that anything anywhere exists at all. It is a huge Mystery.

It saddens me that human beings can't simply rest in being in AWE of the unknown instead of fearful of it. I see originating out of that fear, all of the psychological projections and Cro Magnon insecurities that invent the Creation myths. These in turn become codified religions with doctrine and dogma which in turn create "us" and "them" and my god is truer than your god. Or if not religion, then belief in materialism but not in abundance, not in "enough to go around", but more like Pink Floyd's "Money". "I'm alright Jack, keep your hands off my stack!" All this fear-based stuff. Politics is just the way in which we organize ourselves around these issues. Politicking begins in grade school. (What strategies can I use to feel safe and included when really I'm feeling so scared and confused?)

But allowing yourself to fall into the Mystery of Existence is to take time out from all of that. I used to do it as a kid. I literally spent hours staring into space, into the blue sky and asking 'Where did this all come FROM?" "What WAS before any of this appeared?" It used to make my mind itch.......but I couldn't stop pondering. Sometimes all I would get is frustrated. But other times, magical-mystery times, I would suddenly shift in my awareness and I would see that the manifested world is play of objects and processes upon and within a background of .......what I only termed "Presence". As if there was an eternally Present but untouched Witness to all of this and the Nature of that aware Presence is Acceptance, Peace, Space. Acceptance of everything as it is, room enough for everything to fit comfortably. Big, small, good, evil, light, dark, the Awareness was/is not at war with any of it. The sense of the Aware Presence I always felt could be summed up in the word "sublme." yes, it was, it is sublime.

I wonder what I'm passing on to my kids. Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing my job of passing on the torch of any enlightened ways of viewing the world, of being in this world. But then I remember one day, with my oldest daughter when she was at the age of about six. We were at the Pulgas Water Temple in San Mateo at sunset. I said "Come on sweetie, time to go." She didn't budge, I took a moment from packing up our stuff to look at her. She was just staring off into the horizon. I said (rather stupidly) "What are you doing honey?" She said "I'm just looking at the Universe." Then I recall another moment with my youngest daughter. We were driving in the car, she was in her carseat, being the age of three. Out of the blue she says to me "Mommy, God is everything and everyone." I smiled and said "that's right baby girl."

I needn't worry after all. The same Presence with which I communed as a child is still available, it still communicates with children of all ages. In those still moments. "Be Still and Know." Yeah.

Miss Teen USA South Carolina 2007 with Subtitles

Beauty Pageants.......gotta love 'em! (Are we sure this isn't one of the Bush girls? She sure is having a W moment)

And when will we FIX our Education system?! Read what young Americans were writing circa 1907 compared to 2007 and you'll be SHOCKED at the shrinking of vocabulary!

Think the Surge is working? Ask fleeing Iraqis

From today's Independent (online), an excerpt:

US surge sees 600,000 more Iraqis abandon home
By Leonard Doyle in Washington
Published: 25 August 2007

The scale of the human disaster in the Iraq war has become clearer from statistics collected by two humanitarian groups that reveal the number of Iraqis who have fled the fighting has more than doubled since the US military build-up began in February.

The Iraqi Red Crescent Organisation said the total number of internally displaced has jumped from 499,000 to 1.1 million since extra US forces arrived with the aim of making the country more secure. The UN-run International Organisation for Migration says the numbers fleeing fighting in Baghdad grew by a factor of 20 in the same period.

These damning statistics reveal that despite much- trumpeted security improvements in certain areas, the level of murderous violence has not declined. The studies reveal that the number of Iraqis fleeing their homes not intending to return is far higher than before the US surge.

The flight is especially marked in religiously mixed areas of central Iraq, with Shia refugees heading south and Sunnis towards the west and north of the country.

Calling it the worst human displacement in Iraq's modern history, a report by the UN migration office suggests that the fierce fighting that has followed the arrival of new US troops is partly responsible.

The spectre of ethnic cleansing now hovers over the once relatively harmonious country. The UN found that 63 per cent of the Iraqis fled their neighbourhoods because of threats to their lives. More than 25 per cent said they fled after being thrown out of their homes at gunpoint.

The statistics were released as President George Bush's policy of staying the course in Iraq was under grave threat yesterday as the scale of the humanitarian disaster became clearer and a key Republican senator said that it was time to bring the troops home.

A dangerous rift has also emerged inside the US military between the high command, which says the strain the war is putting on the military endangers American security, and commanders on the ground who still say it is a winnable war.

For President Bush, the greatest danger may come from losing the support of Senator John Warner, one of the most influential Republicans in Congress on Iraq. Just back from a trip to the country, he bluntly told the President to start pulling troops out in time for Christmas. He did so as a damning new assessment was delivered by all 15 US intelligence agencies. Written by the CIA, it concluded that the government in Baghdad was "unable to govern effectively" and "will become more precarious" in the next six to 12 months, with little hope of reaching accommodation among political factions.

Why Would Bush Cite "The Quiet American"?

From the Chicago Tribune...

Thanks go to Joe at "For What It's Worth" blog (link in favorites) for once again tipping readers off to this WTF? tidbit in a never-ending string of 'em coming from the head Orc in Mordor. The story was up on Joe's blog this a.m. and it caught my eye. What boggles my mind is that BushCo would actually let W quote from this book/film. Are they irony-challenged? Did they think that Alden Pyle was a true American hero? Here's the Trib article:

by Frank James

In his speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City today, President Bush summoned up the Alden Pyle CIA agent character of Graham Greene's classic Vietnam novel "The Quiet American" which is essentially a contemplation on the road to hell being paved with good intentions.

I'm not sure he really wanted to go there or why his speechwriters would take him there.

As Bush said:

In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called "The Quiet American." It was set in Saigon and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."
After America entered the Vietnam War, Graham Greene -- the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam. Matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled out, there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people. In 1972, one anti-war senator put it this way: "What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they've never seen and may never heard of?"


Bush seemed to be seizing on Greene's idea of U.S. naivete on entering the war and trying to turn it around and apply it to those now calling for a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

But Greene wrote his book about the way America bumbled into Vietnam, not how it left it.

By reminding people of Greene's book, Bush was inviting listeners to recall the mistakes his administration made in entering and prosecuting the Iraq War. Did he really want to do that?

Even more astonishing is that Bush's speechwriters included in the president's speech a mention of the very fictional character some of the president's critics have used for years to lambaste him for what they consider a major strategic blunder.

The thinking goes, Bush may have been well-intentioned like Pyle but, also like the Greene character, Bush's efforts are ultimately doomed.

Writing in Newsweek in November 2005, Christopher Dickey said:

For any of us who lived through the cold war, Bush’s attempts to equate the scattershot writings of Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, with the challenges posed by Marxism-Leninism and the Soviet empire are just mind-boggling. In his Veteran’s Day address to troops at Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania (Murtha’s home state), Bush started four paragraphs with the phrase “like the ideology of communism.” He longs transparently for the challenge of an Evil Empire, like the one his idol Ronald Reagan confronted, whether or not it exists.
This is nuts, but alas, not that unusual in the annals of American policy. Once again, President Bush’s lethally misguided good intentions are reminiscent of Alden Pyle in Graham Greene’s novel “The Quiet American,” about the early days of U.S. involvement in Vietnam: “He was absorbed already in the dilemmas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West; he was determined—I learnt that very soon—to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world. … When he saw a dead body he couldn’t even see the wounds. A Red menace, a soldier of democracy.”


Then there's this pre-war, 2003 interview in Salon with Phillip Noyce, director of the remake of "The Quiet American" who also saw similarities between the very real Bush and the fictional Pyle.

NOYCE: What was the question? I forget. [Laughter] Greene defines, through the caricature that he wrote of Alden Pyle, he defines some aspects of American foreign policy that resulted from all of those factors coalescing. And, in doing so, he answered a lot of questions about the war against the Vietnamese that hadn't yet been asked. And in many ways, Alden Pyle is alive and well today. And that's either a mark of Greene's brilliance, or the fact that some things just never change. I think his thesis has become very important to us, given the current administration. In theory, you've got a White House full of Alden Pyles. [Laughter] And that's scary.
INTERVIEWER: Let's draw that analogy out a little further.
NOYCE: Well, George Bush is the ultimate Alden Pyle! He's hardly been out of the country, he's steeped in good intentions, believes he has the answer, is very naive, ultimately not that bright, and extremely dangerous. One only hopes that his advisors like Colin Powell are listened to carefully.


Earlier in the interview, Noyce responded to a question about whether "The Quiet Amerrican" was anti-American by calling Pyle a "dunderhead."

NOYCE: So no, I don't think it's anti-American, although at the time the book was written, Greene was accused of being anti-American, really for two reasons: one, Alden Pyle is a bit of a dunderhead. He's just a complete big bumbling idiot who's really not aware of any of the implications of what he's doing. I don't think that would have been true of a CIA operative at that time. And secondly, we have to remember the context that the book was written in, when Stalinism was still a valid and onerous enemy of America and of freedom everywhere. And a treatise like this might have been considered even by reasonable people to have been anti-American within the context of 1955.
Given all this negative Pyle baggage, why a White House speechwriter would include a reference to Greene and "The Quiet American" is dumbfounding.

Greene doesn’t really help the White House's argument. Indeed, most people would read Greene's novel as a refutation of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. And why draw attention to a fictional character who has been used to outline Bush's alleged flaws?


Posted by Frank James on August 22, 2007 1:40 PM | Permalink

Bob Schieffer Sounds Off about Lying Politicians.

Seems a good time to hear again from Bob Schieffer on this one. Buh-bye Gonzo.......

Now Congress has to continue to investigate the AG & White House- you betcha!

I'm concerned that now that Gonzales has taken a powder that there will be a push to simply let the whole matter drop. Just b/c Gonzales splits, doesn't mean that the investigation should end. When a crook leaves the crime scene, do the cops just say "Case closed." ?

Anyway, at least Harry Reid is saying this:

“Alberto Gonzales was never the right man for this job. He lacked independence, he lacked judgment, and he lacked the spine to say no to Karl Rove. This resignation is not the end of the story. Congress must get to the bottom of this mess and follow the facts where they lead, into the White House.“


Into the White House indeed. "bottom of this mess" makes me think of a perpetual cesspool spring.......kinda like "Old Faithful" in Yellowstone, only more like the Dorian Grey version, straight out of the bowels of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Jaysus! Even when they're leaving b/c of lying, they can't stop lying!

It was reported in today's NY Times that Alberto Gonzales has resigned as AG of the US. I was considering titling this post "The rats are leaving the ship!" in view of KKKarl Rove's recent announcement of departure, but then I read further down into the article. I saw that, although Gonzales had telephoned George W on Friday to resign over the phone (breaking up is hard to do!), as late as Sunday, Gonzales was still denying that he was going to resign.

What IS it with these guys? It's compulsive. Even when they know they'll get caught, even when they ARE caught, red-bloody handed, they STILL freakin' LIE. It IS Orwellian: yes means no, good means bad, bad means good, up means down etc. That is the handbook, the roadmap, the program synopsis for BushCo et al. Once you know the code it is a slam-dunk to figure these guys. With the possible exception of the latest to come out of Bush's lips, straight out of "The Quiet American"...who can figure THAT one?? More on that later. For now, here's the text of the NY Times report on the AG (finally) abandoning ship.

August 27, 2007
Embattled Attorney General ‘Resigns’

By STEVEN LEE MYERS and PHILIP SHENON
WACO, Tex., Aug. 27 — Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, whose tenure has been marred by controversy and accusations of perjury before Congress, announced his resignation in Washington today, declaring that he had “lived the American dream” by being able to lead the Justice Department.

Mr. Gonzales, who had rebuffed calls for his resignation for months, submitted it to President Bush by telephone on Friday, a senior administration official said. There had been rumblings over the weekend that Mr. Gonzales’s departure was imminent, although the White House sought to quell the rumors.

Mr. Gonzales appeared cheerful and composed when he announced that he was stepping down effective Sept. 17. His very worst days on the job were “better than my father’s best days,” he said, alluding to his family’s hardscrabble past.

“Thank you, and God bless America,” Mr. Gonzales said, exiting without responding to questions.

In Waco, President Bush said he had accepted the resignation reluctantly. He praised his old friend as “a man of integrity, decency and principle” and complained of the “months of unfair treatment” that preceded the resignation.

“It’s sad,” Mr. Bush said, asserting that Mr. Gonzales’s name had been “dragged through the mud for political reasons.”

The president said the solicitor general, Paul D. Clement, would serve as acting attorney general until a permanent replacement was chosen.

Mr. Bush has not yet chosen a replacement but will not leave the position open long, the senior administration official said early this morning. Among those being mentioned as a possible successor were Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security who is a former federal prosecutor, assistant attorney general and federal judge; Christopher Cox, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission; and Larry D. Thompson, a former deputy attorney general who is now senior vice president and general counsel of PepsiCo Inc.

Mr. Bush repeatedly stood by Mr. Gonzales, an old friend and colleague from Texas, even as Mr. Gonzales faced increasing scrutiny for his leadership of the Justice Department over issues including his role in the dismissals of nine United States attorneys late last year and whether he testified truthfully about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs.

Earlier this month, at a news conference, Mr. Bush dismissed accusations that Mr. Gonzales had stonewalled or misled a congressional inquiry. “We’re watching a political exercise,” Mr. Bush said. “I mean, this is a man who has testified, he’s sent thousands of papers up there. There’s no proof of wrong.”

But Democrats cheered Mr. Gonzales’s departure. “Alberto Gonzales was never the right man for this job,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader. “He lacked independence, he lacked judgment, and he lacked the spine to say ‘no’ to Karl Rove.”

Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who sits on the Judiciary Committee and has been calling for Mr. Gonzales’s resignation for months, said this morning: “It has been a long and difficult struggle, but at last the attorney general has done the right thing and stepped down. For the previous six months, the Justice Department has been virtually nonfunctional, and desperately needs new leadership.”

Senator Schumer said that “Democrats will not obstruct or impede a nominee who we are confident will put the rule of law above political considerations.”

Another Democrat on the Judiciary Committee who has been highly critical of Mr. Gonzales, Senator Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, said the next attorney general must be a person whose first loyalty is “to the law, not the president.”

Mr. Gonzales’s resignation is the latest in a series of high-level departures that has reshaped the end of Mr. Bush’s second term. Mr. Rove, the political adviser who is another of Mr. Bush’s close circle of aides from Texas, stepped down two weeks ago.

The official who disclosed the resignation in advance today said that the turmoil over Mr. Gonzales had made it difficult for him to continue as attorney general. “The unfair treatment that he’s been on the receiving end of has been a distraction for the department,” the official said.

A senior administration official said today that Mr. Gonzales, who was in Washington, had called the president in Crawford, Tex., on Friday to offer his resignation. The president rebuffed the offer, but said the two should talk face to face on Sunday.

Mr. Gonzales and his wife flew to Texas, and over lunch on Sunday the president accepted the resignation with regret, the official said.

On Saturday night Mr. Gonzales was contacted by his press spokesman to ask how the department should respond to inquiries from reporters about rumors of his resignation, and he told the spokesman to deny the reports.

White House spokesmen also insisted on Sunday that they did not believe that Mr. Gonzales was planning to resign. Aides to senior members of the Senate Judiciary Committee said over the weekend that they had received no suggestion from the administration that Mr. Gonzales intended to resign.

As late as Sunday afternoon, Mr. Gonzales himself was denying through his spokesman that he was quitting. The spokesman, Brian Rohrekasse, said Sunday that he telephoned the attorney general about the reports of his imminent resignation “and he said it wasn’t true — so I don’t know what more I can say.”

Steven Lee Myers reported from Waco, Texas, and Philip Shenon reported from Washington.

Leader of the Free World - Freudian slip

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
-- George W Bush

Giants game!

No blogging today. Am off to SF to see the Giants play ball. YES! Last time I was there in May, we saw Barry hit a homer. Go Giants!

Brrrreak Fest!

No (Every) Child Left Behind...especially the smarties OR "How to burnout teachers faster than a Santa Ana wildfire

Yesterday as I sat in a doctor's office, waiting..... I picked up a current issue of Time magazine. Being an educator I was interested to read the cover article "Are We Failing our Geniuses?". I've BEEN knowing that the "No Child Left Behind" law is a dismal failure in terms of actually teaching children and actually preparing them for higher education. My public school teacher friends who've had to teach to the test, bemoaned the absurd focus on just one aspect of learning and how subject matter is only covered to prepare the kids to take standardized tests. You know the kind; multiple choice, fill in the bubble, no chance to put in your own words your understanding of the subject, just pencil the bubble that makes the most sense to you.

I've BEEN knowing that even though children in a classroom may not even speak English, or have not eaten breakfast, or have no one at home to help with homework cuz the PARENTS don't read English, or live in impoverished, frightening ghettos, teachers are expected to raise them up to certain standards regardless. I'm also aware (are you?) that IF said teacher cannot raise the classroom to the mandated goals that they get punished (maybe fired) and that the school itself, if overall performance does not meet expected goals, will also be penalized FINANCIALLY and have funding diminished. That is crazy, to me; a sub-standard school with sub-standard facilities, lack of textbooks, impoverished, at risk students will be punished financially and have what little funding they have diminshed in order to what.......stoke their fires to "do more with less"? (That's some pretzel logic baby! But hey, it's from BushCo....what's new...)

What I did NOT know were the following statistics about how not only is the Bush Administration's education plan failing poor kids and burning out teachers like a Santa Ana wildfire, but has totally taken a powder when it comes to the kids who may really have great potential academically. I have excerpted here some of the data which the Times article provided:

"In 2004-05, the most recent academic year for which the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) has data, U.S. universities awarded 43,354 doctorates--more than ever during the 50 years NORC has gathered the data. But the rate of increase in the number of U.S. doctorates has fallen dramatically since 1970, when it hit nearly 15% for the year; for more than a decade, the number of doctorates has grown less than 3.5% a year. The staggering late-1960s growth in Ph.D.s followed a period of increased attention on gifted kids after Sputnik. Now we're coasting.

To some extent, complacency is built into the system. American schools spend more than $8 billion a year educating the mentally retarded. Spending on the gifted isn't even tabulated in some states, but by the most generous calculation, we spend no more than $800 million on gifted programs. But it can't make sense to spend 10 times as much to try to bring low-achieving students to mere proficiency as we do to nurture those with the greatest potential.

We take for granted that those with IQs at least three standard deviations below the mean (those who score 55 or lower on IQ tests) require "special" education. But students with IQs that are at least three standard deviations above the mean (145 or higher) often have just as much trouble interacting with average kids and learning at an average pace. Shouldn't we do something special for them as well? True, these are IQs at the extremes. Of the 62 million school-age kids in the U.S., only about 62,000 have IQs above 145. (A similar number have IQs below 55.) That's a small number, but they appear in every demographic, in every community. What to do with them? Squandered potential is always unfortunate, but presumably it is these powerful young minds that, if nourished, could one day cure leukemia or stop global warming or become the next James Joyce--or at least J.K. Rowling.

In a no-child-left-behind conception of public education, lifting everyone up to a minimum level is more important than allowing students to excel to their limit. It has become more important for schools to identify deficiencies than to cultivate gifts."

So as I'm reading this, I flash on a news story I heard on ABC Radio in SF about the dearth of Math and Science teachers in the U.S. and how we are having to recruit from abroad those teachers proficient enough in these subjects as to be classified as "highly qualified". Our country simply cannot produce and attract Math and Science teachers. But other countries are churning them out like hotcakes. What's going on? We're outsourcing our teaching jobs now because we no longer have "highly qualified" candidates? Could it be linked to the abject lack of support for our gifted and talented students who perhaps would go on to achieve advanced math and science degrees? Uh......could it be that the teaching profession in the US is so grossly under-valued and underpaid that no American with the talent and degree who COULD do the job, would want to do the job? Think it's a combo pack? Me too.

I'm just wondering if the Democrats are even taking a serious look at this. I sure am not hearing a whole lot of discussion about our abysmal Education system. If YOU'VE heard any candidate talking about it or discussing a NEW plan, let me know.

The Reluctant Messenger

This is from the book titled, "The Reluctant Messenger of Science
and Religion" by Stephen Boston...

The Master waved his hands in exasperation. Chester looked up from
the blackboard with his face in a classic puzzled response. The
Master tried to explain, "You don't have to spend all your time
trying to prove your conclusions to me. If I don't accept your
conclusions I will ask questions. Otherwise just give me the
conclusions. " The Master smiled and gestured for Chester to continue.
He paced back and forth as he played with a gold coin. He seemed to
make it appear and disappear from one hand to the other.

Chester said, "Your slight of hand doesn't impress me. I have a
couple of card tricks I can show you. Ok, you want conclusions and
skip the reasoning process? Let me lay this on you. Quantum Reality
is composed of Infinity! Its called the many worlds solution, but it
describes our physical universe perfectly by allowing an infinite
number of parallel universes to be part of the solution set."

The Master grinned and said, "I agree completely. An ancient Hindu
Master told us that Brahma contained the infinities and all
possibilities in his heart. One of the Seven Wisdoms is that the
Infinite nature of God makess all things possible. I am not going to
give you a gold coin for what my Master taught me many years ago.
Please I'm waiting for new truth."

Chester was shocked at how quickly the Master agreed with one of the
most profound discoveries of Quantum Science. "Ok, it gets more weird
than that. Unless you observe something, it isn't real, it is only a
potential set of probabilities that are not resolved unless observed.
Aha, that should blow you away!"

The Master laughed! "My Master taught me long ago that what I call
reality is just my awareness choosing one of the infinite paths that
lay before me. He taught me that all life sprang from the Absolute
Awareness and discovers its place in the Infinite. That sounds much
like your Quantum Reality. I want you to tell me something I don't
know."

Chester pointed out, "All of the material physical universe is a
balance of forces. Positive and negative energy in balance in an
infinite array of forms and patterns. In fact, all of reality is a
zero sum game."

The Master nodded and said. "The Wisdom of Balance. You know much
already. Please..." His voice trailed off as he played with the gold
coin and watched Chester think.

Undaunted Chester quickly shot back. "At the subatomic layer all
reality is non-local."

The Master paused and asked, "What do you mean by non-local?"

Chester smiled and said, "At the most basic level of reality there is
no separateness. Everything is connected to everything else. I barely
believe it myself."

The Master pushed his index fingers together and pressed them to his
lips. His eyes lit up and he exclaimed, "Oneness. You describe
Oneness. You are sharing with me some of the Seven Wisdoms. But I
understand the non-separateness of this world for nothing is separate
from God."

Chester licked his lips. This was harder than he thought. He watched
the Master play with the ancient gold coin. "Ok, time is an illusion.
It is relative to the motion of the observer! Aha, I got ya there!"

The Master held out his hands and said, "Science is wise. You have
shared with me 5 Wisdoms. I am impressed you know these. You lack but
2 wisdoms to be a Master. Your time is an illusion is most perceptive
of your knowing. For time is the opposite of Eternity. Eternity is
one of the Absolute Aspects of God. All that there is and always will
be, is the Eternal Ever Changing Now. All the past is, is the memory
of the pattern before and all the future is, is anticipation of the
pattern to come. There is no time there is just now." The Master
pushed the coin into his pocket. "We talk again later. It is time for
lunch." ............ from the Reluctant Messenger..

__._,_.___

My Real Education - Part I

I have been thinking lately of the time when I was to become acquainted with my first Teacher under the category “spiritual”. ☺) I smile because that has become such a loaded word. Not unlike “nondual”. (One, not-two etc.) Regardless of the loadedness of the words, I will employ them both here in hopes that readers will not lay too much heaviosity to hang on them, as they are wobbly enough. Ahem….

Sometime in 1985 I was invited by management in my company to attend a human potential weekend seminar. These weekend-enlightenment circuses were all the rage in the early 80’s…..primarily begun by the famous EST group by Werner Erhardt. Werner was not in charge of the seminar I attended, alas I attended EST Lite, or EST for Dummies, a basically ESTesque seminar put on by folks calling themselves PSI World; “People Synergystically Involved”….yeah I know……that’s why they called themselves “PSI” (pronounced “sigh”) World. These seminars were designed to produce a radical new POV in people to help them unleash their full potential, using various tactics such as sleep deprivation, group think pressure etc. These HP seminars were all about that. But they’re beside the point. The seminar served as arena for what was going to happen next.

A little backstory: I had already had experiences of a nature far more profound than what was to be offered at any weekend human potential shindig. In ’81 I had a remarkably transformative awakening to the Absolute Nature of Being, as Love. After requesting help from what I then thought of as Source/Creator/Divine, I was answered by a force so powerful I was smithereened at the heart. Spun my worldview completely around and healed my psychic wounds from the past, instantaneously. Put my feet firmly on the “path” so to speak. Then in ’83 I had what was described by the head Psychiatrist at a private hospital as “a spiritual experience misdiagnosed as psychosis”. In other parlance, it would be termed as a “kundalini awakening”. So I was no stranger to psychic openings.

At the PSI World seminar I met a woman who was the most spiritually aware, cosmically hip, avante garde, outrageously fun person I’d ever met. Her given name was Grace, but she went by the name of Dulalee. This name she told me, was one which Krishna was supposed to have used as an endearment for his consort Radha. Being that Dulalee was a big fan of Krishna, this made sense. She definitely held the opinion that if Krishna were to incarnate now, he’d be a big fan of HERS.
She was to become a dear friend and ally in what I sometimes call Cosmic Trekking. She didn't drink alcohol, had never done drugs, the strongest substance she was into was coffee, yet she was an incredible "tripper". On the natch. She knew that non-dual place of "All That IS". She spoke straight out of her higher consciousness most of the time. And she was fun to the tenth degree. Super fun and spontaneous.

She was open to all possibilities and from this her spontaneity was a constantly renewable resource. As I said she was open to all possibilities; except one. She could never have been cruel; hers was a wide open heart, yet with an eagle eye for chicanery and tricksters of every variety. Her one complaint about the seminar we were attending was that they were only exploring the MERELY human potential within the psyche but leaving untouched the depths of spiritual experience, spiritual awakening, and that is what Dulalee was all about.

She, herself was a trickster of sorts in that she was not what convention would approve of as “seemly’ for a spiritual person., at least in those days. The way we met was during a break in the action, out in the hotel lobby, she excitedly approached me, grabbed me by the arm and said breathlessly, “You are so goddamned sexy! You remind me of ME, 15 years ago! Come on, let’s get some coffee!” I don’t know if it was her exuberant smile, her utter confidence that I would WANT to waltz away to the coffee shop with an utter stranger or the intuition that I was about to embark on a serious adventure (probably all three), but I didn’t hesitate for a moment. Off we went for a cup of Joe.

I don’t really remember our opening conversation as we sat in that booth, but I DO remember her saying to me that “the highest Being on the planet right now, in my opinion is a guy named Da Free John.” She quoted something of his, I said “hmm, I don’t get it.” She said “YES you do.” and handed me a Laughing Man magazine which she yanked out of her cavernous handbag. That “YES you do.” was to become a regular mind-stopper she would use on me whenever I was uncertain about my knowingness of something REAL.

end of Part I

Today's Darshan

Toe Darshan

President for LIFE! Conquering the drawbacks of Democracy

Often, over at Huffington Post in the "comments" section of many articles, some readers suggest that there is a faction of Right wingnuts who really DO wish to see Bush as President for Life. When they suggest this, all manner of trolls and rightwingers begin by saying "You moonbats are at it again! Seeing conspiracy theories all over the damn place! You liberals are outta your minds...blah blah blah....."

Well the following, boys and girls is straight out of the netherworld of uber-Reichwing political machinations, from a group calling itself "The Family Security Foundation, Inc.".

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/index.php

I visited their website and the subtext is: "The National Security Resource for American families". The graphic on the Home Page is a photo of a young woman with a little boy in a very clean looking modern American city. The woman is a white, blonde woman, wearing a white shirt and the little boy is a white blonde kid, also wearing a white shirt.......white, blonde Americans; ( it's practically their logo)!

So to disabuse the Rightwingers of the notion that the charge of Bush's "Imperial Presidency" is a liberal fantasy, I offer this essay from FSF, Inc. It's from "Crooksandliars" from yesterday, August 20, posted by Digby:

Exclusive: Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy
Philip Atkinson

Author: Philip Atkinson
Source: The Family Security Foundation, Inc.
Date: August 3, 2007

While democratic government is better than dictatorships and theocracies, it has its pitfalls. FSM Contributing Editor Philip Atkinson describes some of the difficulties facing President Bush today.


Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy
By Philip Atkinson

President George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States. He was sworn in for a second term on January 20, 2005 after being chosen by the majority of citizens in America to be president.

Yet in 2007 he is generally despised, with many citizens of Western civilization expressing contempt for his person and his policies, sentiments which now abound on the Internet. This rage at President Bush is an inevitable result of the system of government demanded by the people, which is Democracy.

The inadequacy of Democracy, rule by the majority, is undeniable – for it demands adopting ideas because they are popular, rather than because they are wise. This means that any man chosen to act as an agent of the people is placed in an invidious position: if he commits folly because it is popular, then he will be held responsible for the inevitable result. If he refuses to commit folly, then he will be detested by most citizens because he is frustrating their demands.

When faced with the possible threat that the Iraqis might be amassing terrible weapons that could be used to slay millions of citizens of Western Civilization, President Bush took the only action prudence demanded and the electorate allowed: he conquered Iraq with an army.

This dangerous and expensive act did destroy the Iraqi regime, but left an American army without any clear purpose in a hostile country and subject to attack. If the Army merely returns to its home, then the threat it ended would simply return.

The wisest course would have been for President Bush to use his nuclear weapons to slaughter Iraqis until they complied with his demands, or until they were all dead. Then there would be little risk or expense and no American army would be left exposed. But if he did this, his cowardly electorate would have instantly ended his term of office, if not his freedom or his life.

The simple truth that modern weapons now mean a nation must practice genocide or commit suicide. Israel provides the perfect example. If the Israelis do not raze Iran, the Iranians will fulfill their boast and wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Yet Israel is not popular, and so is denied permission to defend itself. In the same vein, President Bush cannot do what is necessary for the survival of Americans. He cannot use the nation's powerful weapons. All he can do is try and discover a result that will be popular with Americans.

As there appears to be no sensible result of the invasion of Iraq that will be popular with his countrymen other than retreat, President Bush is reviled; he has become another victim of Democracy.

By elevating popular fancy over truth, Democracy is clearly an enemy of not just truth, but duty and justice, which makes it the worst form of government. President Bush must overcome not just the situation in Iraq, but democratic government.

However, President Bush has a valuable historical example that he could choose to follow.

When the ancient Roman general Julius Caesar was struggling to conquer ancient Gaul, he not only had to defeat the Gauls, but he also had to defeat his political enemies in Rome who would destroy him the moment his tenure as consul (president) ended.

Caesar pacified Gaul by mass slaughter; he then used his successful army to crush all political opposition at home and establish himself as permanent ruler of ancient Rome. This brilliant action not only ended the personal threat to Caesar, but ended the civil chaos that was threatening anarchy in ancient Rome – thus marking the start of the ancient Roman Empire that gave peace and prosperity to the known world.

If President Bush copied Julius Caesar by ordering his army to empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans, he would achieve immediate results: popularity with his military; enrichment of America by converting an Arabian Iraq into an American Iraq (therefore turning it from a liability to an asset); and boost American prestiege while terrifying American enemies.

He could then follow Caesar's example and use his newfound popularity with the military to wield military power to become the first permanent president of America, and end the civil chaos caused by the continually squabbling Congress and the out-of-control Supreme Court.

President Bush can fail in his duty to himself, his country, and his God, by becoming “ex-president” Bush or he can become “President-for-Life” Bush: the conqueror of Iraq, who brings sense to the Congress and sanity to the Supreme Court. Then who would be able to stop Bush from emulating Augustus Caesar and becoming ruler of the world? For only an America united under one ruler has the power to save humanity from the threat of a new Dark Age wrought by terrorists armed with nuclear weapons."


There you have it.


WTF??

The Orc returns to Mordor......let's hope he doesn't befoul the countryside too much in transit.

Messianic Religion = Messianic Politics

All credit goes to Mahablog (link in Favorites) for this great article on NYT Magazine essay "The Politics of God". Just great.


August 20, 2007
Messianic Politics
Filed under: Bush Administration, Religion, big picture stuff — maha @ 9:36 am


Mark Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia University, has a long and fascinating essay in the current New York Times magazine called “The Politics of God.” The essay is adapted from Lilla’s book The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West, to be published next month. In brief, Lilla looks at the relationship between politics and religion in broad historical context, and presents three essential points:

1. Separating political authority from religious revelation made modern liberal society possible.
2. This separation came about in the West (17th century and after) as a result of a unique crisis within Christian civilization.
3. There is little reason to expect other societies, such as Muslim ones, to follow the same path.

Very briefly — this is a long essay, as I’ve said — it was Thomas Hobbes who showed Europe the way out of the bloody religious wars touched off by the Reformation.

In his great treatise “Leviathan” (1651), Hobbes simply ignored the substance of those commands and talked instead about how and why human beings believed God revealed them. He did the most revolutionary thing a thinker can ever do — he changed the subject, from God and his commands to man and his beliefs. If we do that, Hobbes reasoned, we can begin to understand why religious convictions so often lead to political conflicts and then perhaps find a way to contain the potential for violence.

In the next few paragraphs Lilla elaborates on what Hobbes wrote, then concludes:

Hobbes was neither a liberal nor a democrat. He thought that consolidating power in the hands of one man was the only way to relieve citizens of their mutual fears. But over the next few centuries, Western thinkers like John Locke, who adopted his approach, began to imagine a new kind of political order in which power would be limited, divided and widely shared; in which those in power at one moment would relinquish it peacefully at another, without fear of retribution; in which public law would govern relations among citizens and institutions; in which many different religions would be allowed to flourish, free from state interference; and in which individuals would have inalienable rights to protect them from government and their fellows. This liberal-democratic order is the only one we in the West recognize as legitimate today, and we owe it primarily to Hobbes. In order to escape the destructive passions of messianic faith, political theology centered on God was replaced by political philosophy centered on man. This was the Great Separation.

The ideals of our Enlightenment founders were built on Locke, and to them separation of church and state was a cornerstone of good civil society. Much of Europe, however, took a slightly different road. Inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 19th-century Europeans decided that politics and religion would not have to be separated if religion could be adapted to fit modernity.

It would have to be rationally reformed, of course: the Bible would have to be interpreted in light of recent historical findings, belief in miracles abandoned, the clergy educated along modern lines and doctrine adapted to a softer age. But once these reforms were in place, enlightened politics and enlightened religion would join hands.

This worked for a time, but eventually — especially after World War I — strong elements of messianic nationalism crept into this more “enlightened” religion. In Germany especially, messianic nationalism after World War I had some nasty results.

All of which served to confirm Hobbes’s iron law: Messianic theology eventually breeds messianic politics. The idea of redemption is among the most powerful forces shaping human existence in all those societies touched by the biblical tradition. It has inspired people to endure suffering, overcome suffering and inflict suffering on others. It has offered hope and inspiration in times of darkness; it has also added to the darkness by arousing unrealistic expectations and justifying those who spill blood to satisfy them. All the biblical religions cultivate the idea of redemption, and all fear its power to inflame minds and deafen them to the voice of reason.

There are a lot of undercurrents in this essay about fear and redemption. We humans can’t stop thinking that history has some pre-ordained arc toward utopian perfection, and beliefs about an impossibly perfect destiny fuel fanaticism and war. Even the political heirs of Hobbes have fallen into this delusion.

A little more than two centuries ago we began to believe that the West was on a one-way track toward modern secular democracy and that other societies, once placed on that track, would inevitably follow. Though this has not happened, we still maintain our implicit faith in a modernizing process and blame delays on extenuating circumstances like poverty or colonialism. This assumption shapes the way we see political theology, especially in its Islamic form — as an atavism requiring psychological or sociological analysis but not serious intellectual engagement. Islamists, even if they are learned professionals, appear to us primarily as frustrated, irrational representatives of frustrated, irrational societies, nothing more. We live, so to speak, on the other shore.

In other words, we in the West tend to think that the historical-political arc that took us to democratic liberalism is somehow natural and pre-ordained for all human societies, and it is only a matter of time before all other peoples wise up and step into the light with us. But Lilla says this is not likely to happen in any foreseeable future. Our liberal-democratic order, tenuously maintained in a small part of the industrialized world, is an exception; a fluke of European history. We must not expect mass conversion to our way of thinking about separation of church and state.

This essay ignores the religious fanatics and messianic nationalists in our own midst who are determined to send America backward to the Dark Ages. It may be that Lilla discusses them in his upcoming book. But it is striking to me how easily some can go from declaring that liberty is “God’s gift” to deciding God has called us to spread that gift throughout the world by force of arms.

Think of it; for the sake of a ideal of democratic government made possible by separating religion from government, an American government led by a messianic Christian president engages in war to enforce that ideal in Muslim nations that don’t want it. If there is a hell, all the demons in it must be laughing their butts off.

Update: In today’s Washington Post, Peter Baker what happens when messianic presidents attack.

Drive by

Illegal $80k T-shirts and Bush's super secret crowd control Manual

Freedom of Speech? Self expression? Not in George W. Bush's Amerikkka.......at least for a little while. Nice try Georgie, but your nemsis the ACLU is on the case. You won't be hearing about this story on ACLU-bashing Faux News anytime soon
Check this out, from Pandagon's website:

Feds pay $80,000 over anti-Bush T-shirts, contents of Presidential Advance Manual revealed
15 Comments Posted by Pam Spaulding in Bush Admin, Legal Issues
The Bush administration assault on freedom of speech continues, but the government ended up on the short end of the stick this time. Nicole and Jeffery Rank of Corpus Christi, Texas, were handcuffed and tossed out of an Independence Day rally at the West Virginia state Capitol, where Bush delivered a speech. Their “crime”?

The front of the Ranks’ homemade T-shirts bore the international symbol for “no” superimposed over the word “Bush.” The back of Nicole Rank’s T-shirt said “Love America, Hate Bush.” On the back of Jeffery Rank’s T-shirt was the message “Regime Change Starts at Home.”
A White House spokesman said the $80K settlement was “not an admission of wrongdoing.”
The other news about the settlement, however, is that some of the contents of a purported “sensitive” Presidential Advance Manual have been revealed, which, as ABC’s Blotter reports, “laid out the White House’s meticulous efforts to protect the president and his public image from dissent.” Some nuggets:

“As a last resort, security should remove the demonstrators from the event,” the manual instructs. The government turned over a heavily redacted version of the manual to the ACLU in the course of the lawsuit.
The first step to keeping demonstrators out of events, the manual tells the president’s event staff, is to encourage the Secret Service to “ask the local police department to designate a protest area…preferably not in view of the event site or the motorcade route.”

Inside the event space, the manual advises, White House advance personnel should preposition “rally squads” that can swarm any protesters at the event and “use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform.” The rally squads can be formed using “college/young republican organizations, local athletic teams, and fraternities/sororities,” the manual notes.

The document is available on the ACLU web site.

Anandamayi Ma - one of my mystical guides

I post the following because I have beautiful history with Anandamayi Ma. I once had a very lucid dream of Ma which held a very strong message for me as a personality. It was profound and left me, upon awakening in a state of such bliss, awe; stunned really. My sweet friend Tom on a garden group in Yahoogroups posted this and I thought to submit it here as it gives a taste of Ma and her "non-dual" perspective. She is gorgeous too, btw, a most sublime physical presence. I'll try to dig up a photo to post soon.

From Tom:

When Paramahansa Yogananda met Anandamayi Ma and asked her about her
life, she answered:

"Father, there is little to tell." She spread her graceful hands in a
deprecatory gesture. "My consciousness has never associated itself with

this temporary body. Before I came on this earth, Father, 'I was the
same.' As a little girl, 'I was the same.' I grew into womanhood, but
still 'I was the same.' When the family in which I had been born made
arrangements to have this body married, 'I was the same.' ...
And, Father, in front of you now, 'I am the same.' Ever afterward,
though the dance of creation change[s] around me in the hall of
eternity, 'I shall be the same.'"

Tom.x.

Hitch on his book tour (blue shirt) ok, ok, guy standing in blue shirt

Hitchens in Vanity Fair

Joe, over at "For What It's Worth" blog (link in Favorites) posted a section of Christopher Hitchens' article in latest Vanity Fair, (also link in Favorites) where he discusses his book tour through the South and elsewhere. Hitchens seems to think that there is a coming sea change in America (and even in Amerikkka) and that soon we may be exiting the era of the Christian Right stranglehold on politics. I read the article (it's great) and following are my comments:

Thanks for the heads-up on the Vanity Fair article Joe. I do adore Hitchens; we need more rascals of his stripe around here. Enjoyed the article and am not surprised of his findings on tour either. I do believe this is a groundswell of intelligent, critical thinkers in our midst who are getting fed up with the Bible thumpers' attempts to co-opt public policy. Enough is enough seem to be the mutterings I'm hearing.

For me, the halt to stem cell research is the worst abomination in the political capitulation to the fundamentalists. I'm disappointed that the Democratic candidates aren't making more noise about it. With this research we could possibly leap ahead several squares obviating a whole tour of other less promising roads to cures. It would be like pulling the Lollipop card in Candyland, like turning on all of the features of the Batmobile, like going to Warp Speed on the Enterprise....you get the drift...

Instead, we've got these believers in Bronze Age mythologies; people who think the Earth is six thousand years old and that dinosaurs boarded Noah's Ark, indirectly directing our nation's funding of Scientific Research. It would be hilarious ala a good South Park episode, if it weren't so damned infuriating and tragic......sooooo tragic.

Book Review: This is Always Enough by John Astin

My friend Gloria Lee, Editor of Nondual Highlights published this review:


#2903 - Friday, August 17, 2007 - Editor: Gloria Lee

NONDUAL HIGHLIGHTS

This is Always Enough
John Astin

Clear and Still
A review by Gloria Lee
Silent Retreat


The nametag
says it all:

"I am
observing
silence"

How true.

This is indeed
what I am -
the observing silence,
and everything
that is observed.


John Astin


To see fish at the bottom of a pond, the water needs to be both clear and still. So does the observer. John Astin renders his precise observations with the artistry of a Zen master's ink drawing. Simplicity and naturalness characterize both his poems and prose. This book is a work of art that will stop you in your tracks. Will you see the vision of reality pointed to by the words? It would be hard to miss, presented in a way that goes so directly to the heart of the matter. Indeed, why complicate it? Few writers can paint a picture of essential truths so succinctly and with such loving grace. Like a hologram, each poem somehow contains the whole.

There is also a familiarity with the ways life can slip by us, how the moment may elude us. Reading the section "Our Argument with What Is" provides invaluable insights that question our habitual ways of thinking and our unexamined assumptions. The way "All Strategies Eventually Fail" is actually good news! So what if we are going from one unknown to the next unknown? Hasn't it ever been thus, whether we realized it or not?

"There is no escaping the truth of this impermanence, is there? But who would ever want to?"
~ ~ ~

The mystery that is aware of this moment has already
accepted it, as it is. We cannot create this radical acceptance
and we are powerless to make it go away, for the very nature
of awareness is to accept, without conditions, what is.

~ ~ ~

To not-know is to be free, free from the prison of your own ideas.

~ ~ ~

Awareness is free -- free from knowing what will
happen next, free from knowing what should happen next, free
from knowing what anything really is, free from knowing the
reason for anything, free from knowing what freedom is.

~ ~ ~

The Story

Rest here and watch.
See how long it takes for
the story to reappear –
that ancient legend that tells us
this is not enough.

Keep watching.

Can you see it happening?
Nothing is missing, is there,
until the mind comes back
to tell us there is,
no problem
until the storyteller returns
to tell us something is wrong.

Can you see?

The whole thing
is made up –
the destination
and the path
to get there.
Every story,
even the one
that tells you to stop
telling stories,
is a lie, a tale of lack
where none
has ever been.

John Edwards calls Ann Coulter a "she-devil". That's it? That's all??

August 17, 2007 6:44 PM

ABC News' Rick Klein Reports: Former Sen. John Edwards on Friday fired the latest round in his ongoing verbal feud with Ann Coulter, calling her a "she-devil" at a public event before quickly adding that he shouldn't engage in name-calling.
Edwards, D-N.C., was railing against the right-wing media -- including Fox News and Rush Limbaugh -- when he reminded a crowd in Burlington, Iowa, that his wife stood up to Coulter in a public spat earlier this summer.
"We know these people. We know their game plan. They're going to attack us personally," Edwards said. "They attacked Elizabeth personally, because she stood up to that she-devil Ann Coulter. … I should not have name-called. But the truth is -- forget the names -- people like Ann Coulter, they engage in hateful language."
In June, Coulter went on ABC's "Good Morning America" and said she had learned her lesson after being blasted for suggesting in a joke before the Conservative Political Action Conference that Edwards was a "faggot." "If I'm gonna say anything about John Edwards in the future, I'll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot," Coulter said.
That prompted Edwards' wife, Elizabeth, to call in to MSNBC's "Hardball" and challenge Coulter directly. "I want to use the opportunity … to ask her politely to stop the personal attacks," Mrs. Edwards said.


Well dang! If they are gonna drag religion into it.....what else could Coulter be, cosmologically speaking anyway? She got off light, IMO. Why would John Edwards say such a thing, you might ask. Here are some Coulterisms to call to mind, just so we can be "fair and balanced" around here:

"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building. "

"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war. "

(Hey, Ann, did you love the Crusades MUCH?) Here are some more Coulterisms, compiled on The Washington Monthly:

"[Clinton] masturbates in the sinks."---Rivera Live 8/2/99

"God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'"---Hannity & Colmes, 6/20/01

The "backbone of the Democratic Party" is a "typical fat, implacable welfare recipient"---syndicated column 10/29/99

To a disabled Vietnam vet: "People like you caused us to lose that war."---MSNBC

"I think we had enough laws about the turn-of-the-century. We don't need any more." Asked how far back would she go to repeal laws, she replied, "Well, before the New Deal...[The Emancipation Proclamation] would be a good start."---Politically Incorrect 5/7/97

Oh Hey New Yorkers, take a listen to Ann here:

"I love Texas Republicans!" she said. "They're these beautiful women, they're so great-looking, they're completely loaded. They're dripping in this gorgeous jewelry, they're really funny and sarcastic and smart. Americans are so cool, and they're such parochial idiots here in New York." - AntiCoulter.com 2002

BUT THE WINNER IS:

wait for it.......


""Cheney is my ideal man. Because he's solid. He's funny. He's very handsome. He was a football player. People don't think about him as the glamour type because he's a serious person, he wears glasses, he's lost his hair. But he's a very handsome man. "

So, folks, you tell me, has John Edwards gone too far, calling Coulter a she-devil? Not far enough? I even left out the homophobic and "retard" quotes....oh yeah......there are those too.

Happy Birthday India

Mine Disaster

So I just read over at HuffPo that Keith Olbermann on MSNBC is finally turning some attention to the Mining Czar, Richard Stickler. (Btw, what's with all of these "czars" that W likes to appoint? Are we living in 1918 Russia.......or does "czar" imply that the appointee has carte blanche to do whatever they want, as if they WERE a czar? Looks that way to me.)

Anywho, turns out that this Richard Stickler wasn't too keen on slapping meaningful fines and/or showing some teeth to these mine owners.....surprise, surprise. It appears to be another case of the old fox watching the henhouse. This is a Bush appointee prerequisite; when these guys interview for the job they must have to demonstrate a commitment to gutting the hell out of whatever bureau they're in charge of. " I HATE the UN, IMO it shouldn't exist!" "Really? GREAT! You've got the job Mr. Ambassador!"

Relative to this mining disaster, we'll probably be hearing "Heckuva job Sticky!" any day now.

And now more people have died in this disaster......

It's so depressing.....I'm going to work now where the little cosmos of our school makes sense. How come 3 and 4 year olds have a better sense of justice than grown-up politicians and "leaders"? When does it all go pear-shaped?

Ciao

I've sworn off sugar (for now) - I categorize this pic as "diet porn".....

Just for Fun

Found this on Moxxiegrrl today:


C/O Rense...

Bush Personal Library Destroyed

CRAWFORD, TX -- A tragic flood this morning destroyed the personal library of President George W. Bush. The flood began in the presidential bathroom where both of the books were kept.

Both books have been completely destroyed. A presidential spokesman said the president was devastated as he had almost finished coloring the second one. The White House tried to call FEMA but there was no answer.

We will continue to keep you updated on this crisis.

Rise of New Fundamentalist Caliphate...from Mole's Blog

I'll tell you, one of the things that scares me the most about the political soap opera in the world right now, is the building and consolidation of fundamentalist power, Muslim style. While Christian fundamentalism and Judaic fundamentalism are also hard to take, at LEAST these two desert religions have been through Reformations and Enlightenment periods. The Catholics have their Jesuit intellectuals and there are countless enlightened Jewish philosophers and intellectuals whose influence extends into the community at large. But Islam......to this date, has NEVER had a reformation and that is because the Koran states that it is the final word of god.....that nothing can be changed or added. So Islam is still operating out of a mindset prevalent 700 years ago, we're talking positively Medieval. How women are perceived and treated under this system is a subject for another, much longer post, but that aspect of fundamentalist Islam is the most agregious in my book.

This is what "Mole" has to say about recent developments within the worldwide community. Mole can be found on "Culture Kitchen" .....one of my links in column to the left.

Submitted by mole333 on 13 August 2007 - 3:09pm.
caliphate | fundamentalism | Islam

I have been discussing for more than a year now how Bush's horrible foreign policy is enabling the rise of a Fundamentalist Islamic Caliphate, uniting fundamentalist Sunnis against us world wide.

I discussed this regarding Somalia and its neighbors (which got me invited onto BBC Radio twice, though I only went on once,

I discussed this regarding Pakistan, our supposed ally which Barack Obama is right not to trust (remember, the elite forces of the Pakistani army put the Taliban in place in Afghanistan and are probably sheltering them now),

And even regarding such normally stable nations like Morocco, Bahrain, and Bangladesh.

My simple message is Bush is actively antagonizing pretty much every Muslim in the world while ignoring the REAL fundamentalists, thus allowing those fundamentalists to become heros almost across Islam. In fact, about the only nation that is almost certainly NOT open to the rising al-Qaeda/Taliban/Saudi style fundamentalism is Iran...and look what we are doing there.

Bush is, in my mind, enabling the rise of a fundamentalist Caliphate.

Funny thing about predictions...sometimes they show signs of coming true. I chose the term "Caliphate" deliberately because I saw it as a future endpoint of Muslim extremist sentiment someday. I wasn't even aware whether any movement was actually USING that term. It was the concept of a fundamentalist, Sunni, unified Muslim empire that I was referring to.

But there is a movement that is USING the term and using it in much the way I am. From BBC News:

Some 100,000 Islamists have met in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, to press for the re-establishment of a caliphate across the Muslim world.

The Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir - which organised the conference - said it had been the largest gathering of Muslim activists from around the world...

Hizb ut-Tahrir - or Liberation Party - was founded in Jerusalem in the 1950s by Palestinian religious scholar Taqiuddin an-Nabhani.

Today it has a mainly clandestine following in the Middle East, a large presence in Central Asia - where hundreds of its members have been jailed - and active supporters in the West, including London, which is believed to be one of its main bases.

Many experts see it as ideologically close to jihadist groups, and suspect its commitment to peaceful means is purely tactical.

Indonesia did its best to keep the most extreme speakers away and keep everything quiet. But what we have is a wave of fundamentalism sweeping across Islamic nations, either in terms of taking over governments (Somalia, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain...) or leading armed terrorist rebellions against the government in an attempt to set up a fundamentalist government (Morocco, Bangladesh, Iraq...) and a political wing that is pushing for a unified Caliphate.

And all of this has been going forward merrily under Bush's watch almost unchecked. If anything, Bush's failed policies have ENCOURAGED the growth of this nasecnt Caliphate.

A conversation between two friends

Below is a conversation which took place between two friends in a little online gardening group. Someone had posted a poem written by a spiritual aspirant/realizer. The thrust of the poem was the longing for the lover to see or behold the Beloved, the Divine.

This type of spiritual longing has been praised in the paths of Devotion. It is typically subject-object devotion with the spiritual practitioner adoring the Divine in the form presented within their tradition. It could be The Beloved as in Sufism, it could be Krishna, Christ, Divine Mother in other traditions. In this case, in this poem, it is written from the perspective OF the Divine TO the devotee. One of our dear friends, Marifa had something to say and our dear Bob supplied a response!

I thought this little conversation was really to the point from the non-dual perspective (that being that there is ONLY GOD/Source/Divine ultimately and our separate selves are illusory) so I asked permission to re-post it here.
I'd be interested in YOUR perspective, if you'd care to comment.

Marifa reads the poem and says:

I find strange that such an inspired Being
can ask so many questions

"Why do you not see Me? Why do you not hear Me?
Why? Why? Why?"

doesn't He know the answers? :-):-)

I love when God is speaking
but to whom is speaking here?

Marifa

Bob writes back saying:

Hehe, Marifa, very good!

There is a kind of spiritual schizophrenia inherent in most
dualistic forms of mysticism, in which mind divides itself in two in
order to appreciate itself. The problem is, it really begins to
assume that this division is real, and so spends a lot of time
trying to re-unite with that from which it has never actually been
divided. The dog is chasing its own tail. Sure, it makes for lovely
poetry, but is it true, are we actually separate from Source? Have
we ever been, except in our imagination? Of course, right from birth
religions have told us that we are diseased, separate, deluded,
sinful, blah blah blah, and so we get all these prescriptions from
the doctor-priests-sheiks about how to cure this imaginary disease.
What a racket! OK, well, I'm going back to the Begonias, I'll send
some new pictures later.


LoveAlways
(Bob)

Teacher-astronaut talks to kids about space

I am interested in Astronomy and in Space exploration; not to say I'm knowledgeable about Space Tech, b/c I'm not. BUT I love reading about discoveries made in Space and our ever-expanding Universe. Soon another Teacher, Barbara Morgan will be launched into Space after 22 years prep time. There is a video available on: http://www.space.com/ of her speaking of her interest in Space and what she sees as Education's role. (Sorry I think the link within these posts are not hypertext, so you have to type in the URL until I figure out a way to hypertext the links in posts.....waaah!) It's a great website, so have fun and DO be sure to check out the uploaded Space photos sent into from regular old peeps like us!

The amazing Kingfisher......Ah.....

Goodbye Karl Rove!

Don't let the door hit you in the ass.

Karl Rove, wonder boy, architect of Bush's electoral successes has resigned. Rove certainly was one of the best minds in the Republican party. He parlayed his position to the point where he operated as a strategist on major national issues. He used his abilities to play partisan politics to the hilt. He was driven by power, the power to implement George W. Bush's agenda and it seemed that he would do anything to win. He was downright nasty the way he did play politics of smear and destruction. He sure pushed the limits in order to build his party's strength. But the agenda to institute a Republican rule has run aground, due to Iraq and the fact they he and George Bush pushed too many partisan issues, too many times.

Let's hope that with Rove gone, a lesson will be learned and the lesson might be that the American people are tired of intense partisanship and one party rule. They want bi-partisanship. A man like Rove is irrelevant in cooperative, fair government. It's time he left.

I always said I would have a party if Karl Rove ever ended up wearing an orange jumpsuit.

For now, I'll have to settle for having a celebratory Chinese dinner with a beer.

Hey It's a Misspeakin' Epidemic!

Wow. It's really spreading like wildfire. Awhile back I think Darth Cheney "misspoke". Didn't Mel Gibson "misspeak" or maybe his was "incoherant drunken rantspeak". He may have started the whole misspeaking virus though. Not long afterwards, Kramer from "Seinfeld" misspoke, in much the same manner as Gibson, but these incidents were separated by weeks, if not months.

Today, we have TWO misspeaking outbreaks and they are in the Presidential candidate's race. First, Rudy Giuliani who said a couple of days ago that he was a frequenter of Ground Zero MORE than clean up crews (Oops, Rudy, did you really think that one would slip by without notice, in NYC??) came out yesterday and said "I misspoke about being at Ground Zero as often or more than 9/11 workers."

Next we have Mitt Romney, who a few days ago said that his sons didn't have to go into the Army, because their patriotic duty was fulfilled by helping him get elected. (Who knew, helping Mitt Romney = active duty in the Armed Services.) Today, however, it seems that Mitt, too has been bitten by the "misspoke" bug and had this to say "I misspoke about sons choosing my campaign over military."

(Somebody should tell these guys that misspeaking or "I misspokin'" doesn't not erase the collective memory of those who heard the original "speak".)

"Misspeaking".....that and "checking into Rehab" seem to be the latest epidemics in the public arena these days. At least these folks are learning that they are not immune. I'm watching for the "I take full responsibility" bug to break out.

Dawkins on "steroids"...

Having just recently glowingly reviewed Hitchens' book on god not being Great, (whatsoever), it might appear that there is no room for a spiritual perspective in my world, but that is not the case actually. I find myself getting irritated with Richard Dawkins (author of The God Delusion) and his wholesale chucking out the planetary window of anything REMOTELY mystical or mysterious. If it doesn't have concrete, verifiable, quanitifiable evidence, it doesn't exist, PERIOD! Here's today's column in Guardian Unlimited Observer Review by Neil Spencer entitled "The Dawkins Delusion: science good, the rest bad".
Spencer says it alot better than I can:

Neil Spencer
Sunday August 12, 2007
The Observer

Thanks to Richard Dawkins I have just acquired a new title. It's official: I am an 'Enemy of Reason', a wily opponent of rationalism interviewed (in my capacity as The Observer magazine's astrologer) by Dawkins for a new two-part TV documentary. In the first programme, he attempts to debunk alternative medicine, in the other to rubbish the ideas of astrologers, channellers and other so-called 'New Age' types.
Evidently hoping to prove astrologers are know-nothings, Dawkins' interview started with a lengthy grilling about astronomy - the precession of the equinoxes, sidereal and tropical zodiacs, Kuiper Belt objects. There was the usual objection to astrology dividing people into 12 Sun signs, and my usual reply: that's eight more than the Myers-Briggs personality test used by commerce. Actually, astrology's basic personality types number 1,728.

On we went through genes versus soul, dark matter, forecasting 'trivial' horse races, astrology's antiquity. Dawkins thinks anything pre-Enlightenment is 'primitive'. As primitive as a gothic cathedral or a Plato text then. Am I bothered by Dawkins calling me names? Not really. I'm in some esteemed company - Resurgence publisher Satish Kumar, and Dr Peter Fisher, clinical director of the Royal Homeopathic Hospital (and the Queen's physician) - also fall under Dawkins' stony disapproval.
I object, however, to being bracketed with such 'enemies of reason' as religious fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists, whom I dislike quite as much as the professor. But The Dawk sees enemies everywhere: chanting hippies, doughty dowsers, internet surfers - all are helping 'undermine civilisation'.

Dawkins has always been easily offended but his tone has taken on a distinctly paranoid tinge. 'Superstition is gaining ground and science is under attack,' he warns grimly. 'Primitive darkness is coming back!' What can he mean? The slaughter in Darfur perhaps? The shadow of Lord Voldemort? Why no - he's fretting about newspaper lifestyle pages offering 'free advertising for alternative medicine'.

Few things arouse the indignation of science's hard hats like non-conventional approaches to healing. Homeopathy and acupuncture are particularly repellent since they work through mechanisms unknown to the laws of physics. Homeopathy's supposed cures are, according to Dawkins, merely the result of the placebo effect. 'It's our own minds that cure the pain,' he concludes. How that explains why animals respond to homeopathy isn't confronted.

The placebo effect is real enough, as any GP knows, but common sense and a wealth of personal testimony attest that there are other processes at work in treatments like homeopathy. For scientism, however, personal experience is not admissible. Everything must be subject to randomised, controlled double-blind trials, just like medical drugs - 'drugs that work' as Dawkins insists.

Indeed they do, but not all the time. The medical profession admits that the success of approved drugs can be as low as 60 per cent. It is precisely the people for whom the drugs haven't worked, or who can't face the side-effects, who turn to alternative remedies. If they find help there (many don't), it seems patronising to sneer at their 'delusion'. It particularly irks the sceptics that anyone should earn money from alternative remedies (Dawkins snipes at their 'healthy fee'; presumably his own goes to charity). The enemies of reason are clearly only in it for the money, while science is presented with a moral halo as snowy as the lab coat Dawkins wears as he strides through shining pharmaceutical laboratories. This, let's remind ourselves, is the same benevolent pharmaceutical industry exposed by a 2003 Observer inquiry as routinely hoodwinking doctors with ghost-written articles about their products, a practice the editor of the British Journal of Medicine called 'a very big problem'.

There are frauds, scamsters and incompetents in the mind/body/spirit arena, but the same is true of applied science. Its assumed halo turns downright grubby when one considers its graduates' willingness to put ethics aside for questionable industrial practices - dowsers or chanters don't devise ever deadlier land mines.

There are doctors and biologists keen to explore 'alternative' remedies, physicists who are comfortable talking about spirituality. For Dawkins, however, there can be no compromise, no collusion - the 'fault line' between faith and reason, logic and irrationality, is absolute. His view of science requires an acrobatic rewrite of its own history, and for the 'esoteric' interests of its heroes to be suppressed. Galileo was, after all, astrologer as well as astronomer. Likewise Johannes Kepler, who was preoccupied with Pythagorean mathematics and Platonic solids. Isaac Newton was fascinated by alchemy, as was Robert Boyle, father of chemistry.

The borders of science, then, require constant patrol. The tricky domain of quantum theory, claimed by some as a bridge between mysticism and physics, calls for particular vigilance, hence Dawkins' previous warning of quantum's uncertainty principle having 'deplorable effects on popular culture'.

Scientism's greed to own abstract theory as well as physical matter extends even to feelings. Ever the thought policeman, Dawkins distinguishes his own 'real mystery' and 'real sense of wonder' from the bogus wonder the rest of us feel when contemplating nature or the night sky.

Feelings, alas, are not amenable to regulation or double-blind tests, for we are not creatures only of reason but of intuition and emotion. Nothing makes that point as clearly as the great human preoccupation with love and romance.

I had always wondered how Dawkins could square his zealotry for reason with his admiration for William Blake and WB Yeats, the former a mystic who talked with angels and created a despot called Urizen, the latter a fully initiated magician from the Order of the Golden Dawn. Enemies, in short.

'Oh, [Yeats] wrote a lot of pretty words,' Dawkins said to me with a dismissive wave, 'whether they mean anything is another matter.'

Pretty but meaningless words! Might as well close down the poetry faculty now and stop bothering with pesky hermeticists like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Yeats and Hughes.

Scientism, of course, hates meaning. It prefers to view humanity as a random accident, isolated in a cosmos of 'indifferent vastness' - the legacy of the post-Copernican enlightenment that Dawkins claims is now being 'betrayed'. The opposing view, that the world has soul and purpose, that humanity and the cosmos are linked, is to be found not, as he and others claim, in the dogma of religion, but in art and in the depth psychology of Freud and Jung that Dawkins holds in contempt. The sweep of Romanticism, from Goethe and Beethoven down to Nash and Ginsberg is where modern humanity has articulated many of its quests for metaphysical and spiritual truth.

'In effect, the objective world has been ruled by the Enlightenment, the subjective world by Romanticism,' Richard Tarnas says in his remarkable book Cosmos & Psyche, an attempt to heal that schism, to 're-enchant' the cosmos and redeem what he calls the 'pathos' of the modern condition. By contrast, Dawkins' one-eyed view turns reason, as Blake warned, into the enemy of imagination and of art.

What do YOU think? Yes, YOU!

This just in!

BEIJING - - Tibetan living Buddhas are no longer allowed to be
reincarnated without permission from the atheist Chinese government,
state media reported Friday.


The new rules are "an important move to institutionalise the
management of reincarnation of living Buddhas," the Xinhua news
agency said.

According to the regulations, which take effect on September 1, all
reincarnation applications must be submitted to religious affairs
officials for approval, Xinhua said.


Hey Kids! Alla you who want to reincarnate as a Buddha, line up! (Hmm....does this mean we'd have to reincarnate in China? I wonder if there is a special application for reincarnating in say......Brazil or Sicily...somewhere warm with good food.)

Book Review: god is not Great by Christopher Hitchens

I just finished reading Christopher Hitchens' "god is not Great" subtitled "How Religion poisons everything" and I have to say, it is nothing if not thorough. Hitchens gives some first person, eyewitness accounts of religious insanities he has observed in his many travels which flesh out his argument quite nicely. This is not to say that his argument is a skeletal structure by any means. He gives an overwhelming avalanche of examples to make his case from our common Human history; but his own anecdotal incidents of evidence grab you viscerally as they echo the very horrors that can be read most recently in the news coming out of the Middle East and Africa. Because he gives you the up close and personal POV of these events, you really get the visual....and inescapable emotional response. Hitchens really does articulate brilliantly and paints a vivid picture in the telling.

When I was a child in church (Catholic) and heard the story of God telling Abraham he needed to murder his son Isaac in order to prove his love and loyalty, I recoiled from this "loving Father". Although I tried, I really did, to wrap my mind around this being the request of the supposed Creator of us all, even as a little girl I couldn't make sense of it. Ditto the story about Adam and Eve eating a fruit and God being so angry as to tell Eve that, not only would SHE be booted out of Eden and have to have pain in childbirth, but EVERYONE else ever to be born had this coming to them AND not only that, but they had the stain of "Original Sin' on them. God wasn't just mad at Eve, but mad at all women to come, forever. And ever. Now I knew my parents to be loving people, yet they were strict and punishment was part of their parental repertoire. If I was naughty, I might get a spanking during the heat of their anger; yet their anger cooled AND they wouldn't dream of spanking my brother as well, for something I'D done. Yet here was, God, the Being represented to us children in Catechism as an infinitely loving Father, being angry and desiring to punish EVERYBODY for what Adam and Eve did, from the beginning of Time onward. If God was such an Omnipotently loving Being how could he be meaner and more vengeful than my ordinary, humanly loving parents? I could never square this peg into a round hole.

When we got to the New Testament and learned about Jesus, the disconnect between logic, evidence and doctrine continued. Once again, here was God being represented as a loving Father, whose love knew no bounds apparently, because he decided that in order to stop being angry at all of us human children, he would send to Earth a perfect human being, (who was in essence part of himself we were told) and THAT person, if tortured and crucified (even though, he'd done nothing wrong and was exempt from the charge of Original sin) would "pay" for our sins. This was represented as a bargain for us. Well, even as a child, I thought this was outrageous! IF God was Omnipotent, as was said, WHY oh WHY did he simply not find it in his (infinitely) loving heart to simply forgive us? Why was this excruciating, horrifying murder necessary to appease him? My puny human parents forgave me on a regular basis for naughtiness which I engaged in purposely, yet God couldn't forgive humanity for being born AFTER Adam and Eve ate a fruit?

In a nutshell, what I was asked to buy was that God was an all-Loving Father who cared for his children beyond anything a human parent could ever do; and that he was our TRUE Father after all, yet he required that blood be spilled in order to be quit of his anger. Additonally, if we continued to be naughty children on occasion and should we die at some point without benefit of a (very) recent confession and penance we would go, not to our "rooms" or miss a celestial supper or two in Heaven, no we would be damned to go to Hell, where we would be tortured by burning in fire FOREVER....and EVER. There was NO possibility of parole, no possibility of appeals for Mercy, no possibilites or alternatives, period. I will tell you that my little child heart rebelled mightily at this notion, it seemed so overwhelmingly unjust and yet, just the opposite was told to us: that God was a just and merciful God. We were told that our duty was to love God with our whole heart and whole soul. I could never do it, I never would do it and when told that God's ways were "mysterious" it never satisfied my intellect OR heart; I never could buy what they were selling and later I would realize that this behavior wasn't "mysterious" but something quite different. It starts with a "psych" and ends with an "otic".

Well, Hitchens' book definitely outlines every major and minor inconsistency in the religious tales we've been told; in the cosmologies and ontologies. Beyond demonstrating, most convincingly, that "god" sprang out of the anthropomorphic imagination of a wandering desert tribe in the Iron Age, he provides scientific evidence which belies the claims of the Bible and Koran with respect to the creation myths. This is to be expected in a book of this nature, and Hitchens leaves no stone unturned here, but he also does his job with wit, irony and a writing style that brings not a few smiles and for me, a few instances of great belly laughs. There are also instances of heavy sadness; one can't help but be moved.

Overall, for people who've questioned or are questioning the veracity and usefulness of the old time religion in this day and age, Hitchens book will be edifying and elucidating. For those of you who've already jumped ship, this book will STILL provide much history and information to further educate and inform and in a way that may have you feeling that you've had a most enjoyable read. Even if there is a sense that Hitchens' may be preaching to the choir, (pardon the irony in that phrase), it will leave you with the hope that this "choir" is one that will grow in light of the facts. If we are to put an end to the current atrocities that are occuring in "god's" or "allah's" name, humanity WILL have to come out of the Iron Age and into a new Enlightenment. After reading Hitchen's book, you may feel that it can't come soon enough.