Dear Blue Cross,

I've written this on the Forum many times
but I'll do it again hopefully to help
you understand where I come from:

" I come from a tribe of nature worshippers,
pantheists, believers in faeries, forest sprites,
and wood nymphs. Who heard devils in their
windmills, met them in the woods, cloven-hoofed
and dapper gentlemen of the night.
Who named the god of thunder, who praised and
glorified bread, dark rye waving waist-high out of
the earth, and held it sacred, wasting not a crumb.
Who spent afternoons mushrooming in forests of pine,
fir, and birch. Who transformed Jesus from his wooden
cross, transformed him into a wood-carved, worrying
peasant, raised him on a wooden pole above the
crossroads where he sat with infinite patience in rain
and snow, wooden legs apart, wooden elbows on wooden
knees, wooden chin in wooden hand, worrying and sorrowing
for the world...

These people who named their sons and daughters after amber,
rue, fir tree, dawn, storm, are the only people I know
who have a diminutive form for God Himself, "Dievulis," -
"God-my-little-buddy."

Any wonder I catch myself speaking to trees, flowers, bushes -
these eucalyptus so far from Northern Europe. Or that I bend
down to the earth, gather pubbles, acorns, leaves, boles,
bring them home, enshrine them on mantelpieces or above
porcelain fixtures in corners, any wonder I grow nervous
in rooms and must step outside and touch a tree, or sink
my toes in the dirt, or watch the birds fly by..."
(A. Zolynas. LITUANUS - Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of
Arts and Sciences. v.49. No. Summer 2003).

I hold the conviction that the heart, not the brain,
is the light of the world. The mind goes insane
without the guidance of the heart. The intellect for me
must bow to the spiritual impulse. Hatred is the cancer
that threatens the survival of the species. The only
antidote is spiritual. That is the hope for mankind.

Well, that's a steaming revelation indeed.

I've never seen any of that on OLO before!

Just an overwhelming overture to 'the reasonable' that sometimes sounds just a little too contrived, or maybe naive... from my jaundiced perspective Foxy, of course, I hasten to add.

I, on the other hand, come from a long line of county clod hoppers, who have grasped their way to the light, fighting off the fools who have surrounded them in higher positions, struggled with the slate, and 'made good' in trade, rising ever upwards as the generations unfold, until... the peak... my generation of ingrates comes along.

My forebears fought for the Lairds, did their turns in Europe during the 100 years, died in industry, raised the stakes in delivering the world a system of writing still in use today, cut meat, delivered goods, taught, expanded horizons, dug for gold, played music for the masses, suffered for Gods, Kings, Czars and countries, fought on both sides, were driven from some states, and delivered into others, were hated, despised, shunned, and made use of, as are most simple people, hid when need arose, and of course, suffered the cutting silence of families split asunder when the 'wrong faith' was chosen temps de temps... in short, a fairly normal Anglo-Saxon family, albeit injected with alien blood from Europe, during the last few hundred years.

Religion... played its required divisive role throughout, nurturing no one, pleasing the leaders, splitting families and communities, and worlds at times.

"The only antidote is spiritual. That is the hope for mankind"... strikes no chord here.

Blast... the blue pencil cuts in on the Blue Cross... TBC in Pt 2

Aha... foiled Graham... Pt 2.

For what does 'spiritual' mean?

A 'look' of the sky at night?

A 'feeling' ill defined and uncertain?

An individual pondering in a world possessed?

Perhaps, but it must be divorced entirely from any monolithic power structure, for that is no 'spiritual' avenue at all, at all.

Define it, describe it, so it may be known, expand on it, colour it, make it tangible... but it cannot be so, can it?

A dream, a hope, an 'aspiration', to coin a much degraded Howardism?

Dust, Foxy, mere dust... from whence we came, and return to.

By all means, believe in 'the spiritual', and good luck to you too, after all, you neither need nor ask my permission to do so, but if that is the 'only hope for mankind', then we are done for, for sure.

Without stretching my mind too far... as I think about who in the public domain who might be on 'the list' of 'the spiritual', in this nation alone, who claim to be 'in touch' with 'the next phase' represent the most unholy alliance of vagabonds, dunces, fools, charlatans, shysters, carpetbaggers... need I continue?

The recovering ex-Hippy from Nimbin probably represents a better bet than any Bishop, Archbishop, Cardinal or 'vicar', never mind the prosyletising and evangelising fake politicians we suffer from, or the would be academics trying to make sense of Kant, Hegel and others, with their ponderings of 'the thing'.

On top of this all, are the absolute and total frauds, such as the Pope, and his ilk from other faiths.

If our fate was left to them... well, it has been so far, and look where we all are.

Up some creek, in an Opus Dei barbed wire underpants canoe, with Pell, Jensen, Rudd and Abbott 'leading the way'.

Hossanah!

Dear Blue Cross,

I used to think that I wasn't religious,
and perhaps I wasn't. I didn't like what
organized religion had done to the world.
I still don't. I've come to see however,
that true religion is internal, not external.
The spirit within us can't be blamed for the
blasphemies carried out in its name. What
some have done in the name of religion, projecting
their neuroses, even perpetrating evil on the
world, does not however make religon invalid.

Secularized organized religions have become, in
many cases, as calcified as other institutions that
form the structure of our modern world. Our religious
institutions have far too often become handmaidens of
the status quo, while the genuine religious experience
is anything but that. True religion is a force by which
we burst out from what is old and calcified, into a
higher mode of being.

Religious institutions, as such, are not the only
arbiters of religious experience. They do not own
the Truth, for Truth cannot be owned. Nor should
they think they hold some franchise on our spiritual
life. They are consultants and frameworks, but they
are not God Himself. We should not confuse the path
with the destination.

Organized religion will not be the same; it will
step up to bat, religiously, or it will wither away.
Organized religious institutions are in for a huge
transformation, for the simple reason that people
have become genuinely religious in spite of them.

Spirituality is an inner fire, a mystical sustenance that
feed our souls. The mystical journey drives us into
ourselves, to a sacred flame at our center. The purpose
of the religious experience is to develop the eyes
by which we see this inner flame, and our capacity to
live its mystery.

Religion means "to bind back." Its purpose is to turn
back into ourselves, to the well inside from which we
are endlessly creative.

Returning to the theme of the thread:

"Priestly abuse of children is nowadays taken to mean sexual abuse, and I feel obliged, at the outset, to get the whole matter of sexual abuse into proportion and out of the way. Others have noted that we live in a time of hysteria about pedophilia, a mob psychology that calls to mind the Salem witch-hunts of 1692… All three of the boarding schools I attended employed teachers whose affections for small boys overstepped the bounds of propriety. That was indeed reprehensible. Nevertheless, if, fifty years on, they had been hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than child murderers, I should have felt obliged to come to their defense, even as the victim of one of them (an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience). … The Roman Catholic Church has borne a heavy share of such retrospective opprobrium. For all sorts of reasons I dislike the Roman Catholic Church. But I dislike unfairness even more, and I can’t help wondering whether this one institution has been unfairly demonized over the issue, especially in Ireland and America… We should be aware of the remarkable power of the mind to concoct false memories, especially when abetted by unscrupulous therapists and mercenary lawyers. The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories. This is so counter-intuitive that juries are easily swayed by sincere but false testimony from witnesses."
(Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, pp. 315-16)

Severin
I quoted you word for word. 'Shadow'? What was that all about? Please don't play games in reply as part of your win/lose, even if that proves my point.

Oliver,
I think my post of Monday, 12 April 2010 9:01:40 AM makes it clear where I stand. Did you see it because one of the issues I raised as a 'sleeper' is the possibility of systemic corruption?