God Is Not 3 Guys

Our Goddess Mary 1, July 20 Maxine Moe Rasmussen: Years ago I had a split-second vision of a large (not large as in heavy, large as the mountains around her) woman rising from a nap in a valley among the mountains. The message received was that She was awake and things would be different now. Ever since that vision I've noticed how the feminine face of God is becoming more and more apparent. The broad scope of religious history demonstrates an irrepressible need for a divine Mother. Extremely ancient myths and materials from archeological digs tell us that the Goddess was supreme and Her worship widespread, if not universal, in human societies around the globe for thousands of years before the male deities took over. Among the oldest art objects found are forms of the female body—thighs, buttocks, genitals, breasts, and pregnant bellies depicting Woman as the Source of Life. Goddess figurines numbering in the tens of thousands have been unearthed from Ireland to India by archaeo...

Virgin Birth, Immaculate Conception? July 7, 2011 Historian Simon Schama in Newsweek deplored the fact of, . . . the Founders routinely canonized in the current fairy-tale version of American origins that passes muster for history by those who don’t actually read very much of it. . . . Thomas Jefferson denied that Jesus was the son of God. Worse, he refused to believe that Jesus ever made any claim that he was. While he was at it, Jefferson also rejected as self-evidently absurd the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection. . . . . . .[Jefferson also] argued, generations of the clergy . . . invented the myth that [Jesus] had died to redeem mankind’s sins. . . . He thought the Immaculate Conception a fable. Were Catholic theologians questioned today, most would also deny literal belief in these doctrines, as I do. But with them I would insist that religious doctrines are not just silly nonsense, as atheists aver. There’s more than I can say about this here—interes...

Republicans of conscience, May 19 The Republican Party used to be an honorable party, but today it is corrupted by the Tea Party. I promised to write about Republicans of conscience. Here are a few. David Frum, conservative journalist and former speechwriter for George W. Bush , is angry at “conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio” who whip Republicans into “such a frenzy that deal-making [is] impossible.” He points out that the Health Care Act, what the right calls “Obamacare”: “. . . builds on ideas developed at the [conservative] Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.” So what Republicans of today denounce as “socialism” is a rather conservative Health Care Act largely based on Republican ideas. David Stockman, the budget director responsible for engineering the Reagan tax cuts, the largest in American history, now says all the Bush tax cuts should be eliminated—even those on the mi...

Bobby McFerrin defies patriarchy , June 20, 2011 Bobby McFerrin, a ten-time Grammy winner who improvises in various musical traditions, was interviewed by Krista Tippett. We got to talking about the heavy patriarchal element of, you know, religion . . . I thought, well let me write something with the feminine gender . . . because when we think about God's love it should encompass, you know, the mother and father . . . the feelings of a man, the feelings of a woman. They are different, you know. . . . I just wanted to remind people . . . some of them might not have had great relationships with their dads. And also mothers too, you know; some of them don't have great relationships with their mothers. But sometimes we forget just the feminine element in religious service. And I just wanted to bring that out. He brought out the feminine when he set Psalm 23 to song: The Lord is my Shepherd, I have all I need, She makes me lie down in green meadows, Beside the still waters, She...

Lord Martin Rees, cosmologist, astrophysicist, and recent past president of Great Britain's scientific Royal Society, is an atheist, but for me Krista Tippett’s conversation with him held more spiritual meaning than a typical church service does. He has little interest in science versus religion battles, but his reflections on scientific discoveries imply the existence of spiritual reality. Rees said, There's evidence, which has come about in the last 10 years or so, that even empty space, when you take away all the dark matter and all the atoms, still exerts a kind of force. It exerts a sort of push or tension on everything. Immediately I think of spiritual reality, which physical science ignores but for which it has encountered evidence since the dawn of the quantum age. In the manner typical of scientists, this possibility never occurs to Lord Rees. He speculates about purely physical possibilities. This therefore means that even empty space has a kind of structure, and we ...

When I started this subject a month ago, I thought I’d have two posts. This is six posts later. I can’t stop stewing about this. “America, land of the free” sounds hollow today, and “Free enterprise” sounds hollow. The misnamed “free” market actually enslaves most when it grants unlimited power to the already powerful—those with hundreds of millions to invest, not in job-making enterprises, but in more-money-making ventures for themselves alone. Money is power. We see money power flaunted when Congress dismantles regulations on industry, when it grants tax privileges to the wealthy, when it fails in fairness. Unregulated, the market lets some people exploit others, acting out the truism, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We need reasonable regulation to limit power, rules to govern the game of buy and sell. Undeniably, our society presently fails in this: massive inequalities; crumbling infrastructure; education and health services in trouble; underfunded police and fire departme...

Wealth disparity in America disturbs me more than religious wrongdoing. I’m particularly upset that our public air waves are drenched in rhetoric from the right, the tax-cutting extremists who blast social programs that make life tolerable for some of the poor. Facts I wish our media would broadcast: • Incomes in the U.S. are less equal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. We have roughly the same inequality as Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador. Latin American incomes are actually equalizing, but inequality continues to increase in the United States. • Our income tax code essentially ignores top incomes—those making hundreds of millions, even a billion dollars a year! These billionaires are taxed at the same low rate—35%—as those making $373,650 a year, less than half a million! Our tax code fails to distinguish between them. Insane! • The richest 1 percent owns 34 percent of our nation’s wealth—that’s more than the entire bottom 90 percent, who own just 29 percent of the countr...