If you can’t stay up that late anymore.

One of the functions of humor is to help all of us take ourselves less seriously.

But political satire has every bit as important a blade to wield as political analysis.  People who were apprehensive about Palin’s appearance on a comedy show were-so because they see nothing remotely “funny” about her candidacy;  rather do they see unmitigated disaster for our country should McCain-Palin manage to wheedle their way into the White House.

Alec Balwin, who takes a stab at diagnosing the discomfort of viewing the “real” Palin appearing on SNL, doesn’t seem to get that, but he does get the “humor is as humor does” approach to reality.

Laughing in the face of appalling danger is difficult on a good day;  on a really bad day, it’s well-nigh impossible.  But humor can be a safety valve to prevent the building up of pressure from the intense struggle for genuine human progress. Through humor it’s possible to get the point and the insight as it  mitigates the impact of rigid fact, or relative truth.

The delicious irony then, of watching Palin parody her own refusal to answer questions, but sit-dance like a political puppet to a prega-nant Amy Poehler parodying Palin, well; guess you have to go there only if you dare.

All humor aside, one thing is for certain. Hearing Sarah lie on the teevee day after day through that tightly-pinched voice box of hers will never make me want to see her on SNL ever again, let alone in the White House.

It was late; my eyes were bloody red tired; I needed some music to get me focused for one last paragraph. But the debul must be fuckin’ with me. Who else could slip Wayne Newton’s “Dake Shaen” into my iTunes?!
Anyway. I put it in the trash, and played this.

A little out of sync maybe.  Maybe insipid to some. Lyrically, not all that inspiring, but yes, everybody is changing, like it or not.  Change is the watchword of the universe, after all.
And I wondered;  why can’t the electorate look like this?  Why can’t earth-shaking, paradigm-shifting change occur this election?

What would it be like to live in a true blue liberal land?

Moral choices.  The highest moral choice anyone can make is the choice of the highest possible value.
And that choice— regardless of wildly divergent intellectual or philosophical diversity— will  always be to choose to do the will of God, consciously, or unconsciously.  The problem is, of course, too many of us haven’t any clue what is of highest possible value. That’s why people watched “Dancing with the Stars” instead of the last presidential debate. That’s why people yell  “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” back at John McCain when he says, “Who is the real Barack Obama?”  That’s why this world is so backward, barbaric, and beleaguered.

But still. What a thing it would be to watch a presidential election unfold a blue map like the one above; state by state, filling in a blue victory— not for “Democrats” over “Republicans,” but for hope, fairness, progress and cooperation— over hate, anger, fear, and class culture warfare.   An unfurling of a blue field of fifty white stars unified and working together to form a cohesive nation of Americans, united for truth, justice and the American Way. . .

Oh;  wait. . . I remember now. That’s just a tee vee dream. . . foisted on us by. . .

Superman.

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Examine this picture carefully. This is not a Photochop.  At least six or more full grown males are uh, shall we say, “focusing their glossolalia” upon a young female child. This is not “worship.”  This is not “prayer.”  Nor is it remotely religious just because someone claims it is.  But it is a “practice” protected by our constitution, no matter how foolish and weird it appears to the rest of us.

If you are a parent, or have had the responsibility of raising a human being from infancy through childhood, you have had the opportunity to observe language become comprehensible to mind. It is truly an amazing process to behold to watch mind achieve self-conscious understanding.  And it teaches you this:

Every human being born into this world has spoken in tongues.
It’s called baby talk.

Pentecost is without doubt one of those events that Christianity has largely turned into a disgusting mess of human dogma.  A Urantia Book CLIFF NOTES synopsis of what really occurred goes like this:

[Read more →]

Sarah has seen “pictures” of human footprints inside the tracks [of dinosaurs],” and that means men walked the earth with them.

Palin is “Religulous,” but Maher is “RiDICKulous.”

Bill Maher’s new moovie, Religulous, is not going to make it on Sarah Palin’s “to do” list this year, or any other. And it’s a shame too, because Sarah Palin, if she had been willing to talk to Maher, would have been just the sort of interview he should have put in the film. Because Palin is one of those people who at least used to think— and may still— that men and dinosaurs coexisted on earth approximately 6,000 years ago;  about 65 million years after most scientists say they were extinct. So what’s 65 million years between friends?  Probably the difference between the cognitive power of, say, a moosasaurus, and your dullest college graduate of today.  And even though Sarah used four different schools to get through college, she has apparently retained the intellectual keeness of an un-schooled moosasaurus.

As if Sarah Palin’s recent cerebral dribbling with Katie Couric wasn’t sufficient evidence to cause even intransigent Republicans to recoil in shock, add “Young Earth” stupidity to the list and you might even get a seizure or two from punDicks like BoBo Brooks and George Will.  Oh— wait. . .

In America, Palin is free to believe whatever she wants about dinosaurs or incoherent babbling in tongues.

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The most extraordinary book to ever appear on this planet happens to be so circumstantially insulated from the ordinary channels of inquiry that even after a half million copies are loose in the world it remains a great cosmic mystery. I refer to The Urantia Book, about which there is so much to say yet it is so difficult to begin, that in my thirty-six year acquaintance with it I have yet to find even a remotely convenient way to do so.

Suffice it to say then, this time: It is the soul-satisfying banquet you’ve been waiting for; it is the sustenance of eternal life; it is the revelation a billion minds before yours would die to see; it is the current apex of human and divine cosmology.

This excerpt appears in the book as an “acknowledgment”:

“In formulating the succeeding presentations having to do with the portrayal of the character of the Universal Father and the nature of his Paradise associates, together with an attempted description of the perfect central universe and the encircling seven superuniverses, we are to be guided by the mandate of the superuniverse rulers which directs that we shall, in all our efforts to reveal truth and coordinate essential knowledge, give preference to the highest existing human concepts pertaining to the subjects to be presented. We may resort to pure revelation only when the concept of presentation has had no adequate previous expression by the human mind.

“Successive planetary revelations of divine truth invariably embrace the highest existing concepts of spiritual values as a part of the new and enhanced coordination of planetary knowledge. Accordingly, in making these presentations about God and his universe associates, we have selected as the basis of these papers more than one thousand human concepts representing the highest and most advanced planetary knowledge of spiritual values and universe meanings. Wherein these human concepts, assembled from the God-knowing mortals of the past and the present, are inadequate to portray the truth as we are directed to reveal it, we will unhesitatingly supplement them, for this purpose drawing upon our own superior knowledge of the reality and divinity of the Paradise Deities and their transcendent residential universe.

“We are fully cognizant of the difficulties of our assignment; we recognize the impossibility of fully translating the language of the concepts of divinity and eternity into the symbols of the language of the finite concepts of the mortal mind. But we know that there dwells within the human mind a fragment of God, and that there sojourns with the human soul the Spirit of Truth; and we further know that these spirit forces conspire to enable material man to grasp the reality of spiritual values and to comprehend the philosophy of universe meanings. But even more certainly we know that these spirits of the Divine Presence are able to assist man in the spiritual appropriation of all truth contributory to the enhancement of the ever-progressing reality of personal religious experience– God-consciousness.”

[Indited by an Orvonton Divine Counselor, Chief of the Corps of Superuniverse Personalities assigned to portray on Urantia the truth concerning the Paradise Deities and the universe of universes.]

Enjoy.

Becoming the Trusting Child

IN OUR SEARCH FOR THE WAY, some attitudes are more helpful than others. When you were a small child and were gently pushed ahead by your mother, you had a knowledge that you were being safely guided through the unknown. That was a spacious open faith; an intuitive trust in a being you loved. Try to recapture today a feeling only half remembered deep within your memory, and in your imagination lie back in confidence and face the future with an open heart, knowing the Divine Presence that is gently pushing you is loving and kind; true, beautiful, and good.

Give out love; give generously of it, but keep in your silence. Build an area about yourself of a shock-absorbing substance, make an image of protection that will neutralize the natural alarms you may be called upon to experience. Laugh and be joyful, for that is healing to you and those around you who despair. Be humble, and human, and tender; be selfless and patient with the forgiveness that permits you to go to the altar; be simple. In fact be the trusting child pushed ahead, having the knowledge that you are in safekeeping, in loving hands.

If you can live like this in the midst of everyday confusion, then you have nothing to fear. Fast and pray; keep in this core of light within your within-ness and you will be free from dread and ache and fear. Fast in the mind, pray by accepting the joy of God and keep within where he abides. Go your way, blessed, before the holy company of the Divine Gift.

Restated from Letters of the Scattered Brotherhood 1948

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The hope of a better nation— a better world—
is bound up in the progress and enlightenment of the individual.

• • •

In between multiple plugs for natural gas, pharmaceutical companies who want to help me find free drugs, and Preparation H, Timeh the Russert potato-head opined on why the remaining super-delegates are not moved to give The Clint a reprieve on her life support.

The Clint
“If you want my guns you’ll have to pry them from my cold dead fingers.”

But there may be a more idealistic reason super-delegates want to get out of the emergency room, where The Clint must conduct her campaign from here on. The super-delegates hear Obama loud and clear when he talks about how “we” will end the old politics of division: “We will end it by telling the truth, forcefully, repeatedly, and confidently. . . even if it’s coming from an imperfect messenger.”

Rare though it might be, telling the truth isn’t entirely novel for politicians. We may have the attention of the 81% of Americans who believe we’re headed in the wrong direction, but it will still depend on just how much truth the American people truly want to hear.

The truth is powerful stuff; Jesus said knowing the truth would set you free. Can you imagine what kind of truth you’ll be hearing from John McCain in the next five months? Will it measure up to the truth you’ll be hearing from Barack Obama during that time?

Just the fact that Obama is perceptive enough to see that speaking the truth to power— which is really what he means— is essential to changing our nation’s direction, is practically revolutionary on its face, given the commonplace lying of politics today, and indicative of the “new politics” that must come to pervade our culture as true ethics for the twenty-first century.

The next five months will give Obama plenty of time to shape the new direction our country must head, and there will be plenty of time to contrast the truth of his vision for America with that of McCain, the self-proclaimed man of the twentieth century. The distinctions should be powerful and striking; McCain, if he can remain lucid, will be debating a man with a confident grasp on the morals and ethics for a new century; Obama will be debating a man with a death grip on the outworn ethics and corrupt morals of the past century.

Social and economic change will require many months, but the moral and spiritual changes that are quietly underpinning the swing of our ship of state in a new direction can be embraced immediately, even though the social repercussions of the Obama phenomena may be rippling across the social fabric of the United States for decades to come.

. . . And from someone who can be president.

But no wonder most Americans don’t recognize Truth spoken to power when they hear it.

They’ve never heard it from chimpy.

Evolutionary religion— the various religions of man— first provides the assurance of faith, and eventually the confirmation of conscience. The next, and progressive phase of the experience of religion, has to do with continuous spiritual growth— achieving an increasingly higher spiritual state. Revelatory religion provides the assurance of faith, plus the truth of a living experience in the realities of revelation. Increasingly in this progression the truths of revealed religion are expanded, and increasingly we come to know the truth of supreme values, divine goodness, universal relationships, eternal realities, and ultimate destinies.

Evolved religion rests wholly on faith. Revelation has the additional assurance of an expanded presentation of the truths of divinity and reality, and the still more valuable testimony of the actual experience which accumulates in consequence of the practical working union of the faith of evolution and the truth of revelation. Such a working union of human faith and divine truth constitutes the possession of a character clearly on the road to the actual acquirement of a spiritualizing personality.

Revelation unfailingly enlarges the ethical horizon of evolved religion, while it simultaneously and unfailingly expands the moral obligations of all prior revelations. But their are obligations consequent upon the illumination of epochal revelation. Revelation makes such a profound impression upon a person’s moral nature that they finally reach that place of mind and that attitude of soul where they freely conclude that they have no right not to believe in God.

The FACT of religion consists wholly in the religious experience of rational and average human beings. And this is the ONLY sense religion can be regarded as scientific, or even psychological. The proof that revelation is revelation, is this same fact of human experience: the fact that revelation synthesizes the apparently divergent sciences of nature and the theology of religion into a consistent and logical universe philosophy— a coordinated and unbroken explanation of both science and religion— thus creating a harmony of mind and satisfaction of spirit which answers the questionings of the mortal mind, which craves to know how the Infinite works out his will and plans in matter, with minds, and on spirit.

Revelation compensates for the absence of a higher spiritual viewpoint by providing a technique for achieving unity in the comprehension of the reality and relationships of matter and spirit by the mediation of mind. But true revelation never renders science unnatural, religion unreasonable, or philosophy illogical.

Revelation is a compensation for the many frailties of an evolving philosophy. Theology deals with the intellectual content of religion; revelation deals with the philosophic aspects. Religious experience is the spiritual content of religion. Notwithstanding the mythologic vagaries and the psychologic illusions of the intellectual content of religion— the metaphysical assumptions of error, and the various techniques of self-deception, the political distortions and the socioeconomic perversions of the philosophic content of religion— the spiritual experience of personal religion remains genuine, and valid.

Reason, through the study of science, may lead one back through nature to a First Cause, but it still requires religious faith to transform the First Cause of science into a God of salvation; and revelation is further required for the actual validation of such a spiritual insight.

Finally, Revelation teaches us that, to start such a magnificent and intriguing adventure through space by means of the progression of time, we should begin by the organization of knowledge into idea-decisions; next, mandate wisdom to labor unremittingly at transforming self-possessed ideas into increasingly practical, but nonetheless supernal ideals, even those concepts which are so reasonable as ideas and so logical as ideals, that the Indwelling Spirit dares so to combine and spiritize them as to render them available for association in the finite mind that will constitute them the actual human complement thus made ready for the action of the Truth Spirit of the Sons, the time-space manifestations of Paradise truth— universal truth. The coordination of idea-decisions, logical ideals, and divine truth constitutes the possession of a righteous character— the prerequisite for your personal admission to the ever-expanding and increasingly spiritual realities of the worlds to come.