Jesus

So, I'm praying to get into a jail ministry course in 2 weeks. Very personal decision, and while I may reveal that in time, my greater concern is the injustice being wrought on inmates, and if the progressive Christian movement is a remedy.

I'll be posting my take on the subject, and I welcome the opportunity to reason together with you, now, ok?

The great Tao flows everywhere.
All things are born from it,
yet it doesn't create them.

The number Of Iraqis slaughtered since the U.S. invaded Iraq is 1,320,110. [1]

The number of U.S. military personnel whose mothers will never see them again live has been officially acknowledged at 4,284. [2]

So far, the War in Iraq has bled $667,095,136,653.00 from USA tax payers wallets.

The genesis of Mother's Day in the U.S.A. began when Anna Jarvis, an Appalachian homemaker, organized a day to raise awareness of poor health conditions in her community and fifteen years later, Julia Ward Howe, a Boston poet, pacifist, suffragist, and author of the lyrics to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," organized a day encouraging mothers to rally for peace.

As mothers bear the loss of human life more acutely than anyone else, in 1870, Julia Ward Howe wrote the first Mother's Day Proclamation, from which I excerpt:

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe our dishonor; nor violence indicate possession. At the summons of war let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

"The struggle is in the mind. We must bury our own monsters and stop condemning people. We are all Christ and Hitler. We want Christ to win. We're trying to make Christ's message contemporary. What would he have done if he had advertisements, records, films, TV and newspapers! Christ made miracles to tell his message. Well, the miracle today is communications, so let's use it."-John Lennon

"Where there is no vision, the people perish."-Proverbs 29:18 - King James Version

The ancients understood that God spoke to them in their dreams and visions. The ancients told those stories around the camp fires and those stories grew by the flame enkindled in the hearer's hearts; transforming them into story tellers too.

During the season of Lent-the days between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday- Christians are called to self reflection and repenting-understood as a turning away from or as a change of course which seeks God first.

In the gospel [good news] told in Mark 3: 31-35, the mother of Jesus' and his brothers arrived at the house where he was teaching.

Standing outside, they sent word to Jesus and called him out. The crowd around Jesus told him, "Your mother, sisters and brothers are outside asking for you."

Jesus replied, "I am here with my mother, sisters and brothers. For whoever does the will of God is my brother, sister and mother."-Mark 3: 31-35

In the March/April 2008 edition of Tikkun Magazine, Walter Wink, Professor emeritus of Auburn Theological Seminary, pondered upon what happened to Jesus and his disciples:

"No two resurrection accounts in the four Gospels are alike. At the core of all these accounts is the simple testimony: we experienced Jesus as alive…The resurrection appearances did not… take place in the temple before thousands of worshipers, but in the privacy of homes or cemeteries. They did not occur before religious authorities, but to the disciples hiding from those authorities.

"What happened was every bit as real as any other event, only it was not historically observable…Though skeptics might interpret what the disciples experienced as a mass hallucination, the experience itself cannot be denied…what may have happened: the very image of God was altered by the sheer force of Jesus being. God would never be the same. Jesus had indelibly imprinted the divine…In Jesus God took on humanity, furthering the evolution revealed in Ezekiel's vision of Yahweh on the throne in "the likeness, as it were, of a human form." -Ezek. 1:26.

Dwight Eisenhower understood that "people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our government. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days, governments had better get out of their way and let them have it!"

One of those people on the forefront is the Anglican Reverend Naim Ateek, who has been seeking peace and reconciliation in the Holy Land by seeking justice; an end to the illegal occupation of Palestine and equal human rights for all people.

The Palestinian Ateek, became a refugee in 1948. He founded the Jerusalem based and internationally supported SABEEL organization in response to his experiences in 1948, the 1967 War and the first intifada [translates to: rise up and cast off] that erupted on December 9, 1987.

The theology of Sabeel is a theology that arose from the oppression of Palestinians under the state of Israel and also a theology of liberation from the watered down theology that keeps many Christians too comfortable.

Sabeel's liberation theology is rooted in righting the injustices inflicted upon the indigenous people of the Holy Land.

Sabeel offers an ecumenical and interfaith theology that seeks to unite the World Wide Body of Christ to the suffering of their sisters, brothers and cousins in the family of Father Abraham in Israel Palestine.

"I've heard newborn babies wailin' like a mourning dove
And old men with broken teeth stranded without love.
Do I understand your question, man, is it hopeless and forlorn?
Come in, she said, I'll give you shelter from the storm."-Bob Dylan

"Where there is no vision, the people perish."-Proverbs 29:18 - King James Version

The ancients understood that God spoke to them in their dreams and visions. The ancients told those stories around the camp fires and those stories grew by the flame enkindled in the hearer's hearts; transforming them into story tellers too.

During the season of Lent-the days between Ash Wednesday, which begins February 25 this year and Easter Sunday on April 12- Christians are called to self reflection and repenting-understood as a turning away from or as a change of course and go and seek to discern and do the will of God first.

In the gospel [good news] told in Mark 3: 31-35, the mother of Jesus' and his brothers arrived at the house where he was teaching.

Standing outside, they sent word to Jesus and called him out. The crowd around Jesus told him, "Your mother, sisters and brothers are outside asking for you."

Jesus replied, "I am here with my mother, sisters and brothers. For whoever does the will of God is my brother, sister and mother."-Mark 3: 31-35

Hypocrisy of Faith; Deciphering God’s Will in an Election Year
By: Lanni Alecia Lantto

Here it comes.
He is going to say it soon. The intentions. This is usually where my heart starts skipping beats. Okay, alright, this happens every week, just breathe.
"We pray for the sick and those afflicted with addictions, that they may come to find peace in your loving arms."
"We pray for our men and women in the military and for their swift return."
No one else around is moving. For the most part, aside from some small children, the congregation stands erect, their faces forward, pale and solemn. They repeat in unison, "Amen".
So far so good. But, it's coming I know it is…
"We pray for an end to abortion. That the sanctity of life be preserved."
If my toes could curl in these shoes they would. My head flops forward and my hair dangles over my mouth as I mutter, "…and an end to killing of innocent life in war". The person to my left shifts their eyes in my direction. I don't actually see this but I sense it.

The search for the Historical Adam

All around the internet, in response to the Republican campaign against 'spreading the wealth around', the tubes have been filling up with quotations from Adam Smith.

The scripture for fundamentalist capitalists, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, contains many neglected sayings that deserve to be studied and interpreted by a new Adam Smith Seminar wherein scholars who are steeped in the text and its cultural context would seek to shed new light on the Historical Adam.

Very possibly, some of the original text has been corrupted during its various editions . A preliminary selection of difficult passages makes clear how daunting the task will be, as doctrinal errors may well have crept in, unnoticed.

1. Did the Historical Adam really prefigure the class analysis that showed up later in Karl's Manifesto to the Exploited?

Most notably and possibly inserted much later, under the influence of Karl's Manifesto:

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."

And

"All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."

And