I spend a lot of time [perhaps too much?] being at least peripherally aware of the current events of the world; and the mess that the American Government has become. Including the madness of [would be] king Donald… I want to state, for the record, that using Nukes for any purpose is truly Madness; especially for the inane purpose of dissipating hurricanes…
What angers me most is our nation’s duplicity in believing that America is a godly nation; and our incredible short-term memory when it comes to the decisions that have driven the American Story.
I am a man of Faith. I did not pursue Faith; it ‘hit me upside the head’ in my third year of college. I can’t say that I was raised as an atheist—the concept of ‘god’ was associated with the ‘godandcountry’ patriotism of the American Legion—that which served as ‘church’ for my parents. Forty-six years later, Faith is what defines my life; Faith drives all of my decision-making.
I think that the one thing that the American Church does, that annoys me the most, is to express the idea that belief in [the Christian] God somehow makes a person ‘special’. In the Book of Hebrews [written in Greek] one finds the text, translated literally:
Thou didst make him some little less than messengers, with glory and honour Thou didst crown him, and didst set him over the works of Thy hands and placed everything under his feet. When God subjected all things to him, He left nothing outside of his control. Yet at present we do not see everything subject to him…
A lot of the translations use the word, “angels” instead of “messengers”. Hollywood has messed with the concept of “angels”—I’m not sure that 21st Century ‘pilgrims’ [like myself] truly understand the nature of an angel. There are a number of Hebrew words that are translated in English as “angel”. In context, “angels” do the work of communicating with humans.
The text goes on to say that Jesus, Himself, was also a little less than messengers. “A little less than the angels” may not have the same ‘special-ness” attributed to the human race and the Human Propensity to F*ck things Up [aka ‘sin’]. After all, we humans destroy entire cities to make a point.
Truman apparently felt that incinerating hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians—men, women and children—was ‘better’ than letting American soldiers die by attacking the Home Island of Japan. Roosevelt imprisoned Japanese-American citizens here in America based on where their parents were born. There were no Germans imprisoned in Concentration Camps, here in America.
Humans are able to make the distinctions between ‘good’ people and ‘bad’ people based on features of humanity that are entirely beyond our control. Soldiers today return home with PTSD, often resulting from the horrible things that they have been ordered to do, in the name of National Honor. What honor exists in destroying a child out of fear that she may be carrying an IED?
My immigrant family members came here from Scandinavia; where the ultraviolet rays of the Sun do not require the human body to create additional Melanin to protect the skin. The ultraviolet rays of the Sun are the most harmful in the Equatorial regions; the Creator enabled the human body to produce Melanin as needed for skin protection. This is why pink-skinned people pay money to turn their skin brown, in order to sunbathe; and yet they treat people with naturally brown skin as being lesser in value. Currently, the Government of the United States treats children that come from places the President has called “shithole countries” as criminals, locking them away in cages. The President now wants these children locked up for an indefinite period of time; causing the United States to truly be a shithole country… the only ‘developed’ country in the world that publicly locks up children for the ‘crime’ of being born. And the American people, with the exception of a few brave souls, does nothing to stop this from happening.
I, too, have my own excuses for not forcing change.
Today we use words that were not part of the vocabulary when dinosaurs ruled the earth before the invention of Social Media; and words that were not used in ‘polite society’. For the President of the United States to use language in his speeches that must be censored on television by FCC regulations was unheard of. The biggest controversy over the ‘Nixon tapes’, in the Watergate era, was not that the President authorized the break-in of the Democratic Party headquarters; the biggest shock to American society was the profanity he regularly used while in the Oval Office. A type of language that offended ‘polite sensibilities’—the language used [in the thinking of the time] by people of low moral character.
What is staggering to me today, is that the Evangelical Church in America is willing to accept with little criticism, a President’s language in campaign rallies that matches the language Nixon only used in private. Having not been raised in a church environment, hearing speeches/sermons on a monthly if not weekly basis, that the ‘moral decay of America’, was evidenced by celebrities who occasionally ‘cussed’ on camera; or by celebrities who ‘cheated’ on their spouses; the Evangelical Church’s acceptance of the ‘Porn Star President’ puts my brain on ‘TILT’. [BTW, one of the leading media outlets in 2018 discovered that Donald J. Trump has a cameo in 3 porn films from the 90s; another first for an American President]. He is also one of the most investigated Presidents of our American history, suspected of criminal activity:
Consequently, I have had to come to new understandings of language, when referring to the Eternal; the Creator of all that exists in the Universe. Most of the language of the Church I find to be inadequate.
Human beings are selfish, hateful people with the possibility of living more in touch with those who are downtrodden; and more in touch with the world we were given stewardship over. I’m not an expert, but I can’t think of many species on Earth that devour each other with such abandon as human beings.
I cannot think of any reason why the Creator of the entire Universe should pay any attention to humans at all; and yet, the Creator of the Universe entered Time and Space in the form of One created cell, implanted in the womb of a teen-aged girl. The boy that was born lived among us—we have very few accounts of His life before His thirties, when He gave up carpentry and became an itinerant preacher and Healer.
Having pissed off the Conservative religious leaders of His day, by teaching and by healing ‘without a permit’, He was arrested and executed as a criminal, by the most offensive method of His day. He died and was buried in a tomb, guarded by professional soldiers. Three days later, He walked out of the tomb, and for the months that followed, entered and left buildings without using the door… He said that Death could not hold us, either.
We are not special. We are the insects that live under rocks, in terms of the entire Universe; somehow, we are Loved with Abandon. The Creator of the Universe came to live with us under our rock; and our ancestors killed Him. Yet, we are still loved.
Jesus never said a word about entering time and space in order to save mankind from our Human Propensity to F*ck things Up [aka ‘sin’]. Jesus taught a new way to live.
Enough of that.
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We live in a three-dimensional world [four, if one counts time]; and yet we only have two-dimensional tools for creating ideas [holograms work in movies, but it’s mostly cgi]. In high school, my drafting teacher would have us work on Technical Illustration during Spring term. I fell in love with the concept of emulating three-dimensional objects with two-dimensional media; and expected to be a Technical Illustrator for the rest of my life. Didn’t happen as planned…
For us to imagine new ways of understanding life and Creation, we need a different ‘vocabulary’ with which to describe our observations. This happens continually in the sciences, in the field of Physics. Physicists now accept the concept/fact that light operates as both a particle and a wave—two concepts that were impossible to consider before their mental ‘vocabulary’ was able to rearrange their understanding of their observations. Non-scientists experience the same sort of effect in language.
For centuries, mathematicians have understood how to locate a point in space, using the three axes within a square space [x, y, z coordinates]. Basic geometry.
It wasn’t until the launching of communication satellites around the Earth that we had a Global Positioning System; using three separate satellites to locate any point in space. The GPS project was launched by the U.S. Department of Defense in 1973 for use by the United States military and became fully operational in 1995. It was allowed for civilian use in the 1980s.
We can also locate the position of any star [largely nebulae] in the sky. The Constellations with which mankind is familiar were ‘graphic’ representations of pattern recognition. The human ability to find faces in tortillas and pancakes, the grain of wood, and the random patterns in floor coverings.
One of the shortcomings of our ‘advancement’ and ‘invention’ is that we still see the Universe from our own perspective. A tabloid in the UK seems determined to have the Earth colliding with asteroids. Nearly every day I see headlines about new Black Holes and galactic collisions that are occurring as astronomers view these events through space telescopes. The articles almost always forget to mention that these events being witnessed in our time frame actually happened millions of years ago. The light from these events is just now reaching us. Possibly habitable planets tens of light years away from us. Only, we are nowhere near being able to have humans leave our solar system, much last travel at velocity near the speed of light…
Soul Nebula
The center of the Universe is nowhere near us.
We are in a low-rent corner of the Milky Way Galaxy. One of the multitude of Galaxies in the Universe.
- Illustration Tip #22:
Next year, I think I will simply skip August; and go from July to September.
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Tags: faith, freelance illustration, hope, illustration, intolerance, Jesus, mental-health, Nerve Pain, Neuropathy, pain, persistence, personal excellence, Polyneuropathy, self-employment, surviving
Chronicles in Ordinary Time 