Is it God is Love? If God is love, then what’s the remaining of what is not love in this world?  In other word, what is the rest of existence?  Or is it Love is God?  ? Or neither? Why? 

Love or God

Which one can you live without:  love or God?  If you have a choice between Love or God, which one would you choose and why? 

Saturday Morning Rant

Some of you may know that one of my goals is to finish my last year of education for ministry. Education for Ministry is a four-year program provided and administered by the School of Theology, the University of the South.  Well, I have finished the course.  The certificate is very beautiful.  But I am not sure what to do with it.  I enrolled in education for ministry to learn more about the history and theology of Christianity.  I have learned more about Christianity than I wanted to know. 

In the past two thousand years, Christianity has done more harm to humanity than any other religion that I have known.  In the name of God, truth, it has been slaughtering, burning, and killing people for the sake of the people’s good!  And when the murderer is murdering you for your own good, then he has no guilt at all.  On the contrary, he feels he has done a good job.  He has done some service to humanity, to God, to all the great values of love, truth, and freedom.  Christianity had created in people’s mind the idea that war too can be religious.  A crusade, a holy war is okay and that there is nothing wrong with fighting for God against the devil.  Jesus Christ would be sad to know that we killed and divided our brothers and sisters in his name. 

I realized that we are humans and humans are not perfect.  We make mistakes, many mistakes.  Maybe it is time we find the courage to question the beliefs, creeds, inhibitions that Christianity is teaching.  Bishop John Spong is right, “… Christianity must change or die.”

I have never understood the concept of actively converting others to Christianity.   Why do we need to be a religion with the most population?  Why do we need to have more Christians?  Is more mean power?  Why do we need to have power? 

Galileo & the Pope

Galileo wrote a treatise explaining his reasons, evidence, and other proofs when he found out that the sun does not revolve around the earth as it appears.  The reality is just the opposite:  the earth revolves around the sun.  But Christian love is such that the people representing the church dragged the sick and dying seventy something years old man from his bed to the court of the pope.   

The pope said, “You have committed the gravest crime, because the Bible says, and everybody knows, that the sun goes around the earth.  Either you have to change your opinion, or death will be the penalty.”

Galileo, even in his old age, sick and dying, must have been a beautiful man, a man with a sense of humor.  He said, “Your holiness, there is no problem.  I can write what you are saying.  There is just one thing I want to make clear to you—that my writing is going to be read neither by the sun nor the by the earth.  They will continue in their old way, as they have always done.  The earth will continue to go around the sun.  You can burn my book or I can change the paragraph.” 

The pope said, “You change the paragraph.”

He changed the paragraph and wrote, “According to the Bible and according to the pope and according to the ordinary humanity, it appears that the sun goes around the earth.”  And in the footnote he wrote, “The truth is just the opposite.  I cannot help it—I cannot convince the earth and the sun to follow the Bible.  They are not Christian.”  The footnote was discovered only after his death; otherwise he would have been crucified by the Christians who go on making so much fuss about the crucifixtion of Jesus.

What do you think about it?  Why was the pope so insistent?  If science has discovered it, shouldn’t the Bible have been corrected? 

Fate

What is fate?  Fate is a noun and is also a verb.  My Franklin Language Master defines fate as a noun as “the cause beyond human control that is held to determine events: Destiny” and fate as a verb as “to fix or determine beforehand.”

Fate gives us solaces.  We are saved from taking responsibilty with fate.  We are saved from feeling inferior when things don’t go our way.  Fate determines that it has nothing to do with us when we don’t achieve our goals.  It also determines that it has nothing to do with the hard work of those that achieve their goals.   So, neither achieved or not achieved, we are not inferior nor superior. 

Do you belief that your life (success, failure, richness, poverty, sickness, health, life, and death and so on) is determined by fate?  Knowing that your life is based on fate, that it has already been decided for you, then why should you bother about anything?  Why worry?  Knowing that Jesus, God, Higher Power, or some unknown power will take care of you, why should you or anyone take responsibility for your life?  Why should you be fully responsible for your actions, thoughts, and being?

Struggling with the topic of sex

I would like to wish Ron Baby a happiest birthday! I look forward to spend many many many more birthdays with you baby.

My stepson’s virtual girlfriend is visiting from Canada for the first time.  He talks about sleeping with her.  Travis is 14 years old and the girlfriend is about the same age, maybe a year or two younger.  His father says no.  But I have mix feelings about this.   

I think Travis should be dating as much as possible.  I encourage him to date, to meet other girls without having sex.  His father says, “Sex comes with a lot of Karma,” and I agree.  Besides, his father and I are not ready to be grandparents.  I told him that sex is sacred.  It should be saved for the right time, the right place, and the right person.  But Travis is the only person that can decide for himself the right time, the right place, and the right person, not me or anyone else.

On one hand, I discourage sex at a young age.  On the other hand, I don’t want to encourage him to rush into marriage because he wants to have sex.  This is all the wrong reason to get marry.  People should not be in a hurry to get marry.  Rushing to get marry is dangerous.  It only brings divorces and a life of long misery.  People should meet and explore to find their soul-mates.  We are living in a post-technological age.  Many things have changed.  Old teachings that were developed in older days were a necessity then, but no longer a necessity now.  Now men and women can live together without the need to be married.  Taboos and inhibitions were no longer relevant. 

That which I cannot change, accept.  Accept with joy.  So when Travis confirms all is right for him, sex for the first time should be a special event.  And a special event should be celebrated.  A comfortable bed and an environment of relaxation should be available.  No loving parents would feel comfortable knowing that our children are loosing their virginity in the back seat of a car or behind the trash can dumpster, risking that they may get caught by the police, neighbor, and our friends.  May be it is time we drop our taboos and inhibitions. 

If you have a fourteen year-old asking you for a permission to sleep with his or her girlfriend or boyfriend, what would be your response? 

Anger

I would like to wish Ron Baby a happiest birthday! I look forward to spend many many many more birthdays with you baby.

It is interesting watching my child fight with her friend.  One moment, she is really angry with her friend.  Then the next moment, she is happily playing with her friend again as if nothing ever happens.  When she is angry, she’s not bothered by what Buddha, Christ, or any teachings says about anger.  She gets so intensely angry that she becomes beautiful in her anger.  She cries, screams, and shakes as if her world is coming to an end.   Then all is gone, no hanging grudges, resentment, hostility, victimhood… of any kind . 

This is a way to live.  We have a lot to learn from children.  We can learn about living in the moment so totally that nothing is left to carry in to the next moment.  We can learn to live in the moment of anger, then move through it totally, unscratched.  Anger in itself is not bad.  It gives a tone to life.  It makes life more flavorful.   

If we don’t allow for our emotions, we will live the moment only partially.  We cannot live and love totally.  Our smile will not be genuine because our mind continues to hang on to the repressed emotions.  Our whole life becomes a hangover.   We are not completely free to be here and now.  The past has cast a shadow on us.  Only when we can be totally with our emotions is when we can be totally happy and totally loving toward others. 

Improvement begins with self acceptance

Accepting who we are is a difficult concept because it goes against what we were taught. We were being conditioned not to accept who we are. From the beginning, we were told how we should be.  We were programmed to improve ourselves. 

In trying to improve ourselves, we subtly live with an anxiety.  We create an inner conflict battling between the state of who we are and who we should be.  How can we be at ease with the “should” and an ideal to fulfill?  It is impossible to live totally because the mind keeps grasping for future improvements.  By the very nature of our desire to improve, the future never comes.  When the future comes, it comes as the present moment.  Tomorrow will come as today.  But we’ll be too busy imagining a better state of affairs and miss the here and now.  And we remain in anxiety.  This is how we lived for centuries.  Once awhile we have a man escaped out of the trap of society.  That man is called a Christ, a Buddha. 

When we stop trying to improve ourselves, life improves us.  In that state of relaxation and acceptance, life starts flowing through us.  Improvement will happen at the stage of relaxation and acceptance of who we are.  God wants us to rest into our own being and not in somebody else’s being.  We should allow for improvement by God.  When we are trying to improve upon ourselves, we basically are trying to improve God.  And trying to improve God is like trying to improve the flowing of the river from the natural downstream to the unnatural upstream.   This is almost impossible.  And if it is possible, it is a waste of time and energy.   

What do you think would happen if you allow for improvement without trying to improve yourself?

Have you observed the quarrel between the husband and the wife?  The husband is mad because he is not getting what he thinks he wants.  The wife is upset because she is not getting what she thinks she needs.  They fights over stupid and trivia things from picking a vacation place/date to the sex to the remote control of the TV.  Both husband and wife think they have been hurt and deceived by each other.  Where is the love?  Both want.  Both are like beggars begging for love from each other.  Nobody bothers to give.  Everybody feels upset, tense, and empty. 

The couple may get a divorce.  The husband may decided to leave the relationship.  He may want to get a new partner.  But the question is not of finding another person, the question is of love.  Love fulfills.  People are just excuses.  His relationships with the next person depends all on him because whatsoever he was doing to the previous partner, he will go on doing the same thing with the next partner.  The problem is not in another person though it appears like it is.  

Is the basic foundation missing?  Are we too busy building a house without a foundation?  A structure without a foundation will collapse.  And we know how many times our love has failed and yet some of us still repeating this again and again.  Love is a state of being.  Love is not a need but a sharing.  And until we are able to be alone with ourselves, how can we share? 

The Search

Everybody is searching.  The poor is searching.  The rich is searching.  The single is searching.  The married is searching.  The wise is searching.  We spend our lives hopelessly searching. We search for what we think we want.  And when we have what we want, we no longer want what we have.  There is always some unsatisfactory and discontentment.  What have achieved now becomes meaningless.  We start searching again.  We continue to search for happiness in money, power, prestige, love, God, meditation, inner peace.  Everybody is searching and nobody knows exactly what for.  How can we find what we are looking for if we don’t know what we are looking for? 

It is as if there is a black hole in the human consciousness.  Nothing seems to help toward its fulfillment.  The very search has to be understood because the search doesn’t allow us to be here and now.  It always leads us somewhere else.  The search is a desire, an idea that what we are looking only exists in someone else and not in us.  And we believe that if we keep on searching we will get it, but later on in our lives and not now.  We tell ourselves maybe after we read one more book.  Or maybe after we get another college degree.   Or a better job that would give us more money. 

Have you define your search lately?  Do you know what you are searching for?