Service Without Gods

Where do ethics come from?  Where does responsibility to other people originate?  With religion? With your god? From a following of a religious teacher? In obedience to a set of rules?
Too many times we read the mission of a service organization that is full of reference to gospel and following Jesus or it being faith based.  But if you strip the Jesus and God and gospel and faith out of it, what is left?  Are you doing 'good' to curry favor with your god to ensure your salvation or your good standing?  If so, is it really service to others, or merely service to yourself? 
Why do you want to help, to be a 'do gooder'?  Is there something you are trying to 'pay back' bcause someone did good for you?  Is there something you are trying to 'make up for' because you did harm?  Does it just feel good?  Or is it just who you are?
And why do we have to explain?  "What motivates you?" Why do we have to have answers for that?  Shouldn't it just be how we are?  Shouldn't it just be 'regular' and not stand out as especially unique?
A mother feeds a child, a father takes a hand, a grandmother gives a hug, you sit down next to a person.  It's what we do.  Offering help is just that. 
If you think a person doing good wants some recognition, go ahead and ask them.  But if they seem reluctant to explain, let them be.  Don't ask for reasons or explanations.  Just say thanks, if you must, but even that might not be necessary if doing good and right are just who we are an what we do. 
Maybe instead of asking why or even thanking, we should just take the example and do something good ourselves. 

We Become What We Do

We think we are formed, that we have fully developed personalities, value systems, and ideologies. We think who we are is fairly fixed and stable, that once we have achieved a certain status, become a 'good person', that we are that for all time. We think that we do things because of who we are.
But I want to suggest that it is the other way around. We are who we are because of what we do.
Another way of saying that is if you do not put into practice your principles, you may as well not have them. If you think you are a kind person, but do not do kind things, you are not. If you think you are a creative person but do not do creative things, you are not. If you think you are a fair person, but do not involve yourself in causes that lead to justice and fairness in the world, you are not.
We are what we do, and what we do shapes us. If you think you are the kind of person who picks up litter, yet sometimes you walk past it, you gradually become less the sort of person who does that. You become the sort of person who is not bothered by walking past litter. If you pick up the litter, you become a person who does that more often and values that.
Sometimes, we feel powerless to change a thing, so we do not speak up or take action. But in letting the situation that we do not like continue without any attempt on our part to make change, we become the sort of person who accepts that bad situation.
If we think ourself an artist because we have a degree or used to paint, we might not be an artist anymore. If we worked on a painting or sketched up some ideas in a journal today, we worked at being creative and we are an artist.
If we think ourself a good friend, a good family member, yet we did not interact with any of the people that matter to us, we might be on the way to disconnecting. If we worked at a relationship today, we are becoming more connected to the people that matter to us.
We might think ourself to be an adventurer, but if we have not just returned from, are on an, or are in the planning phases of an adventurer, we might have lost being that.
Our actions and words either build up or tear down. Which kind of person do we want to be? We become that person by doing things that that kind of person does.
You are what you do. What have you done lately?
Who do you think you are?
What did you do today that spoke that? What did you do today that denied that?
What will you do tomorrow to make yourself more the kind of person you want to be?

Are Humans Warlike?

It has been suggested that humans are inherently warlike and that our future as a species will always include war. Some agree with me by saying "Yes, there will always be evil in the world that we will need to fight." But is war ever an answer to any evil? Or is it just a counter-evil? Are there other options? Are there always other options? Do we seek hard enough for options?

I listen to popular music and look around at society and what we do with our time and what we value and how we motivate ourselves and what we care about, and I am left agreeing that yes, humans have an insatiable desire for conflict that will always lead to war somewhere and at some time. I don't like that answer, but I can find nothing to justify any other opinion.

We love to rally ourselves together into a larger force and that rallying usually, in order to be FOR something, needs to be AGAINST something else. We are not just FOR a cleaner environment, we are AGAINST big oil and cancer causing chemicals and litter and suburban sprawl. We are not just FOR better health, we are AGAINST cancer and influenza and mental illness. We cheer on sports teams even more energetically if they are battling a long time rival that we can be clearly against. The more succinctly we can put a label and a cause on the thing we are against, the happier we are and the more 'good' we think we have done against it ant its 'evil'.

We love to have heroes and heroes have to have a foe and that foe has to come from within an enemy camp. Sure we can have a teacher as a hero, but often even that hero is most known for fighting AGAINST something like gangs in the school or a certain learning disability as opposed to just teaching more and better.

We tried team building in corporations but if the team was FOR a better product, the concept did little to motivate. If the team was placed in opposition to come competitor outside company, or if internal teams could be challenged to excel in come metric against internal teams, the concept lead to harder work and better quality. The 'enemy' had to be in place for the team to rally!

We love to insist that there is a 'force' of 'evil', but often the things we describe as evil are just the same things we do or reward in others. The Muslim terror bomber is giving their life for their God that wants them to act out against what they perceive is an evil of a world gone too materialistic, i.e. US, and yet, we see THEM as evil. At the same time, we revere the 'good' saints who give their lives literally as martyrs for their god or give their lives over to the service to their god. Maybe there is not evil at all, but just an exaggeration and perversion of normal human desires to accumulate goods, to accumulate territory, to protect turf, to protect family. The desire for power in the business world or in a service organization is called ambition and drive and is regarded as a good thing, but the desire for power in some sort of anti-government group is given other labels. But when the same mechanism is at work for something we do not agree with, how can it be called evil when it is admired in another context?

It is easy to think of a world divided by good and evil, but it is more difficult to accept that maybe the person we label evil is doing the same things we are but due to different motivations. It is easy to bomb and shoot, but it is more difficult to find ways that we can peacefully coexist over mutually desired outcomes. Can we find ways to convince the 'enemy' to disengage in behaviors we don't like by finding motivations for other behaviors?

When you get right down to it, most forces we call 'evil' are doing what they are doing for reasons that look and sound a lot like ours, to improve a situation for their people, their families, to glorify or defend their god. In fact, sometimes, they see us as the force of 'evil'. It hardly seems like violence is the answer in that case and it hardly seems like there will or even should be a clear 'winner'. Perhaps tolerance and conversation and more tolerance and more conversation would lead to a discovery of more in common with each other and less judging and labelling?


We somehow think our bombing and shooting is 'good' but can it ever really be?


Peace is hard work and I am frankly not sure we as humans really want it. We love a cause, we love our heroes, we love to have an enemy, we love to have things we can label 'evil' in contrast to the 'good' that we believe we possess and which possesses us.

Maybe if we ADMIT we love our war, then we can work harder to not use it? If we keep insisting we hate war, will we just keep allowing ourselves to justify using it in yet another 'exceptional' case, this one last time.

Do we indeed love war, and at what cost? Young lives lost, young bodies mutilated, young minds scarred. What will it take to make our love of the cause, the hero, the glory of victory, be outweighed by the love of our own individual people? What will make us give up our warring human ways?

Roof Architecture and God

Where did Anson Johnson and Jay le Rondein and such modern architects get their inspiration for the low flat topped horizontally oriented style that they are so well known for? In 1947, a group of American architectural students took a southern European field trip that included Andelania, an island off the coast of Spain. This large island of volcanic mountains had only flat roofs on their homes and offices and buildings. The building codes of the independent island state cited concerns about rain and snow runoff harming people outside the building and undermining the foundations of the buildings by dumping too much precipitation too close to the building itself, so the flat topped roofs were slightly concave to collect the rain water and snow melt water and channel it through plumbing to be deposited far from the building. In fact, the towns' first sewer systems were to carry this roof rain water away from the buildings and were only later copied to carry waste water away from homes via underground plumbing systems. In early times, the rain water went through underground piping while household sewage was carried out of town in barrels and dumped. Later, a piggyback system was build in a layer on top of the rain drainage system to carry the household waste. The architecture students of the '40s liked the aesthetics of the horizontal flatness of the buildings an the layers of the multistory buildings. They found it to be an interesting contrast to the sloping and vertical nature of the surrounding cliffs and mountains of the island, and carried the images back home to their American architectural studios where it played in a rebellious and innovative way against the overdone steeply pitched roofs of the Victorian and Gothic and Colonial Revival houses popular at the time. The completely flat roof did present problems of excessive snow accumulation, so the style quickly evolved into the low pitched roof of the suburban ranch style, with just enough pitch to shed snow but not so much as to echo the steepness of the traditional residential steeply peaked houses so popular then.

Only when architectural historians visited the island in later years was the true origin of the flat roof uncovered. In much earlier historic times, the population of the island worshipped Vol, a god that was thought to reside inside the volcanoes. When Vol was angry, legend said, the earth would shake and tremble. If Vol got angrier still, a dome of one of the island mountains would begin to swell and bulge. If Vol became even angrier, ash and fire and lava would spew from the dome and cover fields and roads and houses and towns and kill wildlife and livestock and people. At the first sign of displeasure, the people would hold meetings and attempt to figure out who among them was displeasing the volcano god. If someone had plowed a field the wrong direction, and had pointed the rows directly toward the volcano god, it was decided that Vol was angry that the person did it to mock him, and that person could be declared the source of the trouble and killed at the base of the rumbling dome. These 'trials' escalated as the volcanic activity escalated, with sometimes whole villages sacrificed to appease the god. In early times, shelters consisted mainly of a ramada type architecture of post supporting beams that supported thatching of reeds and rushes and grasses to shed rain. One village higher on the slopes, where snowfall was prevalent, had adapted a peaked shape to their roofs to more effectively shed the snow. This shape for houses was becoming popular when the volcano of that peak began to show activity. The usual violators were sought out and sacrificed but the volcano erupted one day in late summer anyway. The first thing to light on fire from the burning cinders blasted from the volcano were the peaked thatched roofs. Coincidentally, as the lava flowed down from the dome above, this city was engulfed and a nearby village that had not adopted the peaked roofs was spared. A swelling in the land above the village diverted lava flow to either direction around it, but it did appear from the village as though some guardian hand might have caused the flow to go to either side. This was the origin of the prohibition against peaked roofs. They were for many centuries seen to offend the volcano god because they were thought to be an image of his shape and therefore a mockery of the god himself. Eventually, when Christian missionaries in the 1890s converted the Vol worshippers to Catholicism, the beliefs in Vol and the sacrifices to him were ceased. But still, when the village wrote up its 'modern' building code ordinances, scientific reasons were offered up for various dangers and disadvantages of sloped roofs, and flat roofs were mandated by law. To this date, the cities and the state still mandate flat roofs, and manage to find various engineering data sets which they cite in order to support this preference.
It is a certainly good thing that religion and ancient myth are never allowed to enter into the laws of the obviously much more advanced and civilized country that is the United States of America.

The Reason For The Season

Axial tilt: My friend Benia brought to my attention that axial tilt is the reason for the season. Our earth revolves around the sun with a rotational axis that is akimbo to the plane of its orbit. This means that as we revolve, we have seasons. If our axis was perpendicular to our rotational plane, we would have a planet nicely layered with climates that ranged from hot at the equator to cool at the poles, a smooth gradient, and within each band, a uniform climate throughout the year. Each of our days would be exactly 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness. Other than changing star patterns as we went around the sun, there would be no reason to note the passing of a year, one revolution. But we sit tilted, 23.44 degrees off perpendicular, so that during part of our rotation, up here in the northern hemisphere, we tip toward the sun and as we rotate, more than half of our 24 hours are spent in light, and less than half in darkness, so that the surface can warm up for longer than it cools down, resulting in warming temperatures. During the other half of our rotation, we are tipped away from the sun, with a longer period in darkness than in light, allowing the surface to cool. So we owe our seasons to axial tilt. The change in temperatures happens gradually, as the energy in the atmosphere accumulates, so that the temperatures lag behind the times of daylight. So even though the change has snapped from days getting to shorter to days getting longer, we have our coldest bleakest leanest time yet to come. Yet because the change to days growing longer HAS occurred, we know that it will indeed warm up on schedule. And past civilizations have known these colder seasons as times of less plenty, of dwindling resources such as green plants and plant seeds to eat and less game that is out and about to hunt. And so, people have recognized that the days got shorter, then again got longer, and watched carefully to count out those turning points.
The point where the days ceased to grow shorter and began to get longer again represented a sign of hope to people that the warmer seasons were going to return again, and food and warmth would be plentiful again. And so they marked that time with a festival. December 21 is approximately the day on which this turn takes place, and archaeologists and anthropologists and sociologists agree that nearly all societies scheduled holidays around this time of year. Indigenous Scandinavian peoples held feast to a goddess of fertility and sanity on the winter solstice; the Greeks celebrated a feast to Bacchus. We are perhaps most familiar with the Jewish Hanukkah and the Christian Christmas, coincidentally the same day that the Romans marked winter solstice. Many cultures begin their new year on this winter solstice date and celebrate it less as a religious holiday than as the marking of the beginning of another year. Most cultures celebrate with a feast with symbolic foods, many celebrate with gifts, such as in India where sweet treats and sweet fruits were and are exchanged. Many of the New Year celebrations give nod to the celestial nature of the passing of one year and the beginning of the next with some sort of tradition that involves light or the sky, such as flying kites in India, fireworks in China, and candles in Scandinavia. Celts and Druids and many others build markers so that on the exact dates, the sunlight would shine in alignment with some mark. Zuni, May, and Hopi marked this winter solstice as the beginning of the new year with plant and fire rituals and feasts.
Gifts are symbolic of our interdependence on each other and on the abundance of the seasons that are promised to us with the lengthening of days. Light and fire symbolize the sun on which the cycle and life depends. Foods and feasting celebrate the return of abundance as well as our relation to each other.
So whatever your religion, you probably celebrate something this time of year, whether a god or goddess or saint or spirit is honored, or it is a celestial event, the passing of one year to the next. But the giving of gifts, the lighting of special lights, the preparing and sharing of special foods are all ways that we celebrate hope for the future and recognize that it is in the lengthening of the days and the return of warmer seasons that will bring us abundance, but also in our dependence upon each other and our associations with each other that we find our greatest satisfaction and joy as people. Celebrate the season of the lengthening of the days in whatever ways you wish and treasure the people around you who make your life worth living.

People Who Hate

I know people, people who are considered sane and rational and reasonable, who hate people without cause. Oh, they think they have reasons, but they have no cause.There are people who make judgements about other categories of people based on stereotypes instead of actual experience. There are people who make judgments about categories of people based on the mean-spirited words of someone who wrote a letter some 1800 years ago and who himself had no actual cause to make such statements. But even if he did, should we not make up our own minds today, based on personal experience and modern scientific, sociological and psychological and biological, data?There are people who hate and who insist on speaking their hate because they are guaranteed the freedom to speak it. While technically correct, they are not ethically correct, for what is the value in speaking hatred against a category of people?There are those who would do violence based on their hate. And there are those who only speak their hate and insist that they would never harm anyone. Yet, in speaking their hate, they give validation and support to those who might actually commit the harm, and therefore share in the blame.If you spread hate and suspicion and rumor and ill word about a category of people, you are doing wrong. No matter what your reasons.If you have been done harm by an individual, speak ill of that individual if you must. Better that you forgive them and lose your hatred and stop speaking ill of anyone.If you have been done harm by an individual from a category of people, and you can prove for certain the ill was done to you due to their being of that category, go ahead and speak ill of the group as warning to others. But only if you are certain that others in the group are likely to do ill because of their inclusion in that category. If others are not likely to do ill because of inclusion in that category, you do them harm to speak ill of their group just because of the individual that harmed you.And listen to this: If you think another who is doing you no harm and doing others no harm is somehow an affront to your god, that is none of your business. Their actions do not harm your relationship with your god and they do not harm you in anyway, so it is none of your business.You may have the right to say what you want and have all the reason in your own mind to speak hate, but when you do so you are acting in violation of ethics and morality, no matter whether you think you have your god on your side.Speaking hate is wrong.Spreading hate is wrong.Hating is wrong.I can't change how you think, but I can tell you that if you keep speaking hate, I judge you immoral and unethical. And if there is a god like the one you claim to believe in, you god will judge such groundless hate to be immoral and unethical as well. Of that I am certain.

Shopping at the Kiosk

Shoppin' at the St. Mary's Chapel Self-Serve Religious Trinkets And Pamphlets Kiosk

Saints Medals













Keychain Rosaries














Plastic Dashboard Jesuses














Palm-size Crucifixes

A Parable About the Parable of the Mustard Seed

Jesus is said to have said that the mustard, the tiniest of seeds, grows into the largest of trees, where birds rest. The mustard seed is about one twentieth of an inch across, but seeds of many other plants are much tinier. The seeds of the prairie beebalm are about a thirtieth of an inch long and seeds of the prairie shooting star are about a fiftieth of an inch. Mustard is not a tree. It is not even woody. It is not even a perennial. The two forms of edible mustard are annuals and about three feet tall. The bur oak tree of the prairie grows to fifty feet on sandy hillsides with less rich soil and to ninety feet on prairies with thick deep loamy soil. As for the birds, small songbirds may stop briefly to pick at the mustard seeds but the plant is not the sort in which a bird is likely to stop to perch for a rest. In your spice drawer, the common celery seed and the poppy seed are considerably smaller than the mustard seed, and the nutmeg does indeed grow on a tree that grows to about 30 feet tall. But, sorry, mustard isn't the tiniest seed, it does not grow into the tallest tree, and birds do not rest there.
This little parable is repeated in Matthew, Mark and Luke. If that repetition proves Jesus really said it, well, Jesus was a terrible botanist. If the authors got it wrong, because one wrote it wrong and the others copied, one must wonder what else they got wrong. In the end, you might say that whether you have faith in a 'god' has little relation to the accuracy of the book that your belief system is based on. That might be true insofar as faith is concerned. But insofar as specific truths about our world are concerned, one has to wonder how much the book can be trusted.

If you are using your religion's book to be mean to other people, to discriminate against them because they believe in another religion, or to deny them rights because of something your book seems to say about them, you should realize you are on pretty shaky ground. Either your Jesus was wrong about every thing about the mustard plant and its seed, or the people who wrote about Jesus were wrong to say he said that wrong stuff. So the parts of that book that you use to allow you to be mean to people might be wrong too. If you use your religion to be mean to people, you are wrong. Jesus was a terrible botanist, or the authors of the bible were terrible biographers, terrible historians. The information contained in the mustard seed parable is simply not factual. Put another way, it is in error. Put another way, it cannot be taken literally. Did Jesus get it wrong or did his biographers get it wrong? Either way, if you are using things in that book to justify your meanness to other people today, what does that say about you?