Happy Thanksgiving!

I am just writing because I am greatly annoyed about all of the absurd laws in religion. Like one is that you are not obligated to go to church if the priest is practising an immoral lifestyle. First of all, no one is practicing a perfectly moral lifestyle, and second, who the fuck has the right to dictate how and when you should go to church. That should be a personal choice only, and if it is dictated, or there are rules for it then people are going because they feel they are obligated too, and not because they want to, and that surely means they will get a lot less out of it. It is hard enough to be truly present in church when you want to be there, so how can you be present if you don't want to be there, and are just going there because you feel you should. There may be a church full of bodies, but there are most likely only a few minds present. ARRRGHHHHHH what the Hell??? I guess this is reason number 200 why I am atheist.

Second pet peeve is the close-minded assumption that atheist can't be thankful or feel blessed. Well you know what? I AM AN ATHEIST AND I AM THANKFUL and feel blessed. I am thankful for the generosity, kindness and love of my friends, the people I live with, my family, and for this beautiful earth that provides me with what I need. I am thankful for people that are selfless and giving, and for the Lovers of humanity!! I am thankful for the thinkers and the honest, and for people who accidently begin the most incredible movements simply because of an inkling of love. I'm talking about Jean Vanier who began the wonder that is L'Arche, I am also thankful for all the other Lovers and Thinkers of this world that put there foot down, and went the opposite way of the world, which is the way of Peace and the Path to justice and liberty for all!!!!!!! Not just for you, Christians, for Atheists, Agnostics, Apatheists, Christians, Deists, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Wiccans and all of the other people of the world, for Humans everwhere to have inner peace, aka freedom, liberty. . . and all that jazz.

Also, to quote a movie that was silly but suprisingly true and lovely called 100 girls, is that there are too many -ists in the world (also isms) and if we want to be -ists, we should be humanists because we are all humans and that is highlighting our sameness and not our differentness that is so damn divisive.

Love,

Abby

What was I going to say????

The unexamined life is not worth living says this one dude. I forget who though, crap. hold on. It was Socrates!! Also Herman Hesse wrote a book regarding this, and I am about to read it after I finish reading the Jungle by Mr. Sinclair. I'll be right back. . . . duties are calling. . I'm back. before i continue, quote of the day:
Me: I keep farting and i have no idea why (to no one in particular)
Ralph: I know what it was, it was probably that cheese.

Anyway the unexamined life is not worth living. We talked about this at a retreat for L'Arche assistants last week. My examination of my life, and my feelings lead me to be very confused about certain events in life. I was afraid of love, and of relationship, and now I see why. . . it is so hard, and annoying and it hurts badly sometimes. If i didn't have this relationship I would not have this pain, yet I would also be without the joy and learning. . what am i going to do. . . shoot

The Lovers in my Life

The fantastic place I live in. The folks I live with are (names changed to protect the fantastic) Hank, Ralph, Rudy, Lisa, and John. My home is L'Arche, an intentional community for people with and without developmental disabilities. The folks with DD are our core members. They are the core of our community, and from them we learn love, welcome, celebration, forgiveness, compassion and directness. The folks without a developmental disabilities (but not without disabilities) are called Assistants. So that is who John and I are. L'Arche is unlike a group home in that it's purpose is to intentionally build home and family to ensure that ALL involved have the chance to reach their highest potential, self whatever. Mr. Tolstoy said that to love God is to love the highest possible potential in all things. That means we have to see the person's highest potential hiding in their deepest self. We have to have faith that each person can reach their highest potential, and we have faith that the way to that is confidence, which is only reached through the ability to love and be Loved. That means we can't look at each person through their disability. We can't group people together and view them as a group, we have to look at and LOVE each, INDIVIDUAL person. We have to get to know them, be with them, BE with them, and talk with them. We have to know them, and love them, and teach them, and learn from them. We have to share with them, do with them, be a part of their life, and share a part of our lives with them. The core members are there for us, and we are there for them, and the core members are there for eachother and us assistatns are there for eachother. We all have our weaknesses and our strengths, and we must love and respect those strengths and weakness. when we realise we have both, and realise which particular strengths and weaknesses we uniquely have, and others uniquealy have we realise we are ONE body and we need eachother to live and grow, and love. we can exist on our own maybe for a tiny bit but we need others to really LIVe.

Confessions

I confess that I think I am atheist but i am not really sure, i know i was til i was 10 or so, then i just believed because thats all i knew, for the longest time until i thought i knew everything. i am agnostic in terms of a non-personal creator god, like maybe i am slightly deist or something.

i dont' want to be atheist because i still beleive in religion. and i beleive in majesty, holiness, love, kindness, beauty, awe, surrender, ecstasy and agape. i believe in confession, forgiveness, and turning the other cheek.

i confess that i am more passionate about the Christ and his way of truth, compassion, understanding, kindness and unconditional holy love.

i confess that i desire the spirit of the Christ and the Buddha, and Mother Theresa, Gandi, and Thich Nhat Hahn.

i confess that i love the bible in all of its inherent oddity and randome hate, but i don't like those parts, but i realise its all very human and i love humans.

i confess that i desire nothing more than to live in complete and total unconditional, ego-surrendering love for all of my brothers and sisters.

i confess that all beings have inherent worth equal to the Buddha and the Christ.

I believe in imagination, creativity, and understanding.

oh i forgot. so about those books i am reading for class, well i probably should be reading about them rather than talking about them, lol. but anywhoo. i'd like to talk about my philosophy of education

i believe very strongly that educating for change is important. i believe that education could go a long way in our pursuit of peace, liberty and justice for all. i believe knowledge is power. i believe our students should be learning in a way that is tailored to their own needs (i believe in individualized education). i believe the education should be child centered, but the curriculum should be society centererd (what do our children need to know to be compassionate, kind, informed, productive, loving members of our society). kids have innate intelligence, compassion, imagination, kindness and love. we need to cultivate these lovely lovely traits whilst teaching them how the world works. We need to teach them how the government works, how we got to that government, and what different people think and beleive. It has to be done in a way that is interesting and relevant to them. Memorization that leads to forgetting in five seconds is NOT acceptable. How about when they get to the upper elementary grades having the kids look at newspapers and then talking about the geography/history/economics/religion behind it??? how about having mock elections (FOR EVERY election), how about having kids create ideal societies, and then looking at real societies with similar premises?? How bout having kids read historical novels and primary sources? How bout sharing with them the controversial nature of remembering history? how bout teaching them real literature, help them to expand their minds, and talking about the values/ideas in it? Or letting them choose out of a whole bunch of books, and having them read only a bit at a time????????????????????????? And the basics of science are clearly neccesary, but leave the expert stuff to the experts, because too much info will lead to forgetfullness (and most def, have tonnns of debates) or have kids argue a side in a journal or something, or make them write a paper, after researching. . . yea there is a lot of stuff you can do. . . .

gosh

so last night i published a blog and it didn't upload or whatever!!!!!! so now, all of my thoughts are lost, rather they are still jumbled in my brain somwhere. . anyway. . some funny stories

on Saturday, we had spaghetti for dinner! I put the leftover sauce in a container and opened the fridge and was putting it in when it fell out of my hand and went everywhere!!!!!! Hahahaha!! It was so funny, as i kept finding more and more sauce, i thought about the time when Peter (family guy) went into the outhouse and said that he didn't think the hole went anywhere then a bird knocked it over, and he is like "OHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, its EVERYWHERE, its in my eyyyeee" hahhaha. i could not stop laughing, even though it took me like 20 minutes to clean it up. Then, we went out for ice cream and i realised i still had it all over my foot and leg. hahaha

on sunday, at church, well sunday school, i spilled coffee all over everything because i overflowed the cup! now who does that??

and monday, I put the leftover macaroni in a bowl, and put another bowl on top of it, because i don't have any fancy containers. well just as i was about to put it in the fridge, the top popped off and went flying and so did the bottom, and so did its contents. ohhhhhhh man! as i was picking it all up i was again dying of laughter and wondering how on earth this could be happening again!

Wallrighty then

The following I wrote on Monday the 15th, I found it it was in the drafts section, Yayy


Soooooooooooooo today I am going to talk about good and evil. we talked about this in church the other day. What is evil?? For me it is depriving someone the right of life, liberty, freedom and the pursuit of happiness. It is denying someone's humanness and need for love. It is action without compassion, and thoughts without understanding. It is the absence of justice. Is there absolute evil?? I don't know. It depends. Killing is evil. Even in a war. It is denying someone the right to live, and denying the humanness of the person. It is denying the fact that evil is something that cannot be stopped/harnessed through killing. When we kill someone, or condemn someone, who are we condemning?? The person right?? Did we consider the person's background? Did we consider that we could have been in the same situation if we had been born into that person's life? Do we think that killing that person will make the situation right? And that being said, do we really have free will? I'll let you ponder that. I'll let you ponder all of this. Peace, yo.

Interesting reads

So right now I am reading about 10 books, ridiculous, i know!! most of them are for class, and i tend to get bored quickly so I go back and forth. Also, dumbly I am reading two other books, well sorta, and one more too. But anywayyyyyyyyyyyy the school books. I learned that video games, and television are not as horrific as I thought, and now, I am reading a book on the importance of cultural literacy. the dude makes the argument that we have to have some common knowledge in order to have social justice, a true democracy and in order to communicate well. now, clearly, i am all for justice and democracy, i am after all, a democrat and my purpose in life is to work with others for justice for all. well anyway there is this lonng list of 5000 things that literate people know. well apparently, I am not literate. but neither is anyone in my class, and it is a grad class, so clearly not all people know all those things. i want to know who made up that list. and why don't i know those things. some i know i was taught but i forget, others i never even heard of, i'll give some examples later. I learned that whilst our IQ's were going up, our SAT scores were falling, which means we are better problem solvers, but have smaller vocabularies. Hmmmm conundrum?? I don't know. I definately agree with Hirsch, we need better cultural literacy in order to be able to vote, read the newspaper, and understand what the media is telling us, and be smart enough to see past any potential bias. We need to understand our culture, and others and we need to be able to read other people's emotions, and perceive their background knowledge, but still, some of the stuff on the list is ridiculous, bunches of it we can just look up, but a lot of it is important and justified, so I am going to look stuff up, see what it is, and see if I can communicate more clearly with others. weeeeeeeelllllll see.

ponderings about god in the garden

Well it just took me about 96 years to figure out how to write a new blog, but clearly i just figured it out.

Yesterday, whist eating a delightful sandwich by the pond, I read a quote I have read many times before. "One is closer to God in a garden than any other place on earth" or something like that. Well now, I have seen that billions of times before, and many times stopped to ponder it. Who wrote it?? Why??? Is he/she right?? The verse is anonymous, so we cannot figure out why he/she wrote it. But I have to say I quite vehmently disagree. I mean gardens are places that people plant things, and people create. Wouldn't one feel closer to God in the Grand Canyon, or in a rainforest, or holding a new baby, or playing with children, or feeling an overwhelming sense of Love???

And then I thought, why am I even pondering this??? I am pretty sure I do not believe in a personal/Creator God. . . why is this even on my mind still?? Im thinking God didn't create the garden people do (well God created the flowers, and people planted them there) but everything in the Rainforest is untouched by humans and then I was like WHOA hold the phone, I don't even believe that God Creates, well I don't even know if I believe in any sort of God. Why does this idea of God have such hold on me??

When I was a small child, I think I was atheist. I use to lay in bed pondering what eternal nothingness would be like (I imagined a black tunnel, me just chilling there with my back to the wall, forever and ever) I wasn't even bothered by it, I just tried to imagine it, and then I kept coming back to the idea that I would be dead, and wouldn't even know. . . see I remember doing this, and then I also remember being taught about God and heaven, and even unquestioningly beleiving in God at one point (actually no. . I thought the pastor was God, so clearly I was wrong, lol) anyway thats all for now, peace!!!!!!!!!!1