Bill Maher's New Rule: Atheism

While I support most all of what the Union Gospel Mission does; am a fan of several of the regular preachers there; sympathize with complaints many preachers have about how Christianity is treated; and, as a Skyhooks Buddhist, myself, I believe there likely is something, somehow that pulls us up [that is, we didn't just push up out of the muck]; Bill Maher makes all-valid points in his defense of Atheism in this video -- and is hilarious in doing so.

For some Buddhists Buddhism functions as a religion.  For me, it doesn't since I have no unassailable  beliefs on why life exists and how the universe operates.

Daniel Reich

click notice to enlarge

The notice at right is self explanatory.

Jefferson Bethke's poem, Part II

[See Part I of this two-part series, here.]

A few days ago, Jefferson Bethke was on the national TV show "CBS This Morning" where he discussed what he meant in his rap/poem "Why I hate religion, but love Jesus."

Bethke was wholly impressive, composed and eloquence on the show.

A Catholic priest, Father Edward Beck, was on the show and seemed derisive toward Bethke, even as he did not misunderstanding the rap or disagree with the message.  Beck remonstrated Bethke for powerful, perhaps-loaded words he thought Bethke used.

A prime issue of Beck's was Bethke's use of the words "religion" and "church," giving them different  meanings in a point he made.  Bethke explained that his usages are in sync with that of preachers he admires. For Bethke, religion has to do with 'false religion,' the often-hypocritical culture of the people in the leadership and congregation of a church group AND the extraordinarily destructive ways Christianity has been used historically to foment war and NOT aid the poor; whereas one of the meanings of church, in Bethke's usage, is as the institution when it is in perfect accord with Jesus's teaching, attempting to bring the lost to salvation. [In the context of his rap, Bethke's meanings seem self-evident -- so I am unclear why there might be any controversy here.]



A lot of what Bethke says in his poem/rap is wonderfully well stated. [The text of the piece is posted at the rapgenius website, with links there to sources or explanations for most of the lines in the poem. The video of the rap is posted there, and below in THIS blogpost.]

A middle section of the rap eloquently states the central message that Bethke is delivering:

Because if grace is water, then the church should be an ocean
It's not a museum for good people, it's a hospital for the broken
Which means I don't have to hide my failure, I don't have to hide my sin
Because it doesn't depend on me; it depends on Him
See because when I was God's enemy and certainly not a fan
He looked down and said "I want ... that ... man"
Which is why Jesus hated religion, and for it he called them fools
Don't you see so much better than just following some rules
Now let me clarify, I love the church, I love the Bible, and yes I believe in sin
But if Jesus came to your church would they actually let him in?

The metaphor of "not a museum but a hospital" is brilliant and provocative, as is the call for people to see beyond any list of "rules" -- to adapt, instead, to the spirit of the teachings.

A criticism of Bethke's words is that they are not taut and crisp with perfect meter and rhyme.  Also, he sometimes seems not to have found "the best word," from time to time to convey his meaning.  Too, his rap is not planned, somehow, leading, say, from something familiar to something with more depth or complexity in the course of what's said.  It doesn't have a path, but is instead didactic and somewhat repetitious in its message.

A gentler touch, with more showing and less finger wagging would probably serve Bethke well.  [But what do I know?  The guy's a sensation.]

Also, he is writing his rap at age 22.  He is sure to be fully amazing in what he composes in just a few short years.  We should keep an eye out and an ear pricked up for whatever comes next.  Bethke is certainly to be congratulated for his moxie, sensitivities and raw talent.

Jefferson Bethke's poem

Jefferson Bethke

Since I have spent A LOT of time in Homeless World Sacramento where most of the homeless guys have a family background that is Christian, and where most of the guys, themselves, too, say they are Christian, I thought I would embed this poem that has, I understand, gone viral on the Internet.

I found it via elephant journal, a mostly Buddhist online publication, that does its thing in Boulder, Colorado, a famously Buddhist (and liberal) city -- home of Naropa University. [I consider myself to be a Skyhooks Buddhist -- someone who is a secular Western Buddhist who believes we aren't 'just' pushed up from the muck, but somehow "pulled up," a product of spirit or consciousness, or some damn as-of-now-mysterious-and-unexplained thing, too.]

I am, myself, ambivalent about Bethke's poem.  I think it nice that he wrote it and filmed it, but I don't think he is precise about his message.  He is "trapped" in a meter-and-rhyme scheme that requires quick lines of text -- which has him saying some things that are clever at the price of logic or completeness.  Nonetheless, WAY TO GO, Jefferson.  Quite an accomplishment, particularly for someone as young as yourself [22 years old; didn't know you were THAT new to the planet].

Anyway, Readers, listen to "Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus" and let me know what you think in the comment section.  In a few days, I'll put up a follow-up post.  <-- UPDATE:  The follow-up post, Part II, is now online.

Words of Martin Luther King, Jr.

… the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” [Applause]

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin [Applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. [Applause]

…

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism.
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== Text above is taken from the book that is pictured.  Frustrating for me, I cannot tell you from which speech this text comes, due to omissions in the preview of the book and unnumbered pages at Google Books.  http://books.google.com/books?id=sOmOA8jgKvwC

sacHO now on Google Plus

Find your mouse and grab your hat.  Make the click in a second flat. Make your way to the 'puter and have a look.  To see sacHO -- Sacramento Homeless, that is -- now on Google Plus.

So come on down.  Befriend us, or love us, or +1 us or be non-plussed.  Whatever suits. Watch as Sacramento Homeless takes over the world, or something well short of that. See you there! (Well, not really; the Internet doesn't work quite that way.)

A Bee Editorial and a faked 'fact' to stoke donations

I am forever disgusted that "the truth" of what homelessness in Sacramento is like, and what undergirds the politics, and what the skanky homeless-help charities are like, never gets to the public.  Instead, the public gets from the charities and the Bee and SNR bleetings that the homeless are pathetic or secret Jesuses or a crowd of children or all viscious psychopaths.  Whatever works to represent the homeless in a way to make coffers overflow or stoke sympathy or entice the weary (and should be wary!) public is used, the truth be damned.

The hopeless Bee, today, in another of its Board Editorials from Fantasyland, "Editorial: Don't forget homeless women and children," laudably writes about mothers and kids (yes, solo homeless men do, indeed, get too much of what attention there is), but at the center of it all are fake "statistics."

From the ed:

…housing for poor families remains in desperately short supply. As [Michele] Steeb [CEO of St. John's shelter] and [Chet] Hewitt [president and CEO of Sierra Health Foundation] wrote [in a Bee Viewpoints piece Wednesday], St. John's shelter turns away 320 women and children every day. The county's two other shelters that cater to mothers and fathers with children, Sacramento Area Emergency Housing Center and Volunteers of America, report similar upticks in the number of families they must turn away every night as well.

That 320 figure is wholly bogus.

As I wrote as a comment to today's editorial:

The "statistic" "St. John's shelter turns away 320 women and children every day" is misleading and a concoction -- with an emphasis on the 'con’ part. There is not a hoard of whimpering people standing outside St. John's every morning and Michele Steeb jolly well knows this and the Bee is journalistically irresponsible to suppose anything like it is true and to fail to verify – really, “correct” -- that false claim. Ms. Steeb and the Bee, each, have an obligation to the public to present information that helps Sacramentans see the truth of what’s going on – not to fake facts or the situation to stoke public sympathy for homeless people and funnel donations to Ms. Steeb’s or any other charity in the homeless-“help” industry.

That 320 figure almost certainly represents people on a waiting list. While some of these women and children may be in desperate situations, many are certainly adequately housed or in OK shelters but hope to make a lateral or upgrade move to St. John’s in the future. Other people are OK, but maintain their spot on the waiting list because it’s easy to do and because they like to keep their options open. Too, there are sure to be women and children reduced to living in their car or on the streets who “jump the waiting list,” and get into St. John’s or receive motel vouchers.

J’accuse: The homeless-“help” industry needs to stop using untruth and skanky marketing techniques to fill its coffers. And it would if the Bee would do its job by ferreting out the truth of what the homeless circumstance is and report on what the charity industry that uses homeless people as props is really like. Just because they surround themselves with homeless people does not mean that homeless-charity executives are angels. Indeed, most are are the furthest thing from angels. The very furtherest thing.

The great tragedy -- and it very much is a tragedy; homeless people die on the street; mentally ill people die early, very often from hypertension-related reasons; drugs and alcohol drag people to the grave -- is that if the public had access to the truth of the circumstance of homelessness and what 'the life' feels like, this understanding would motivate a tsunami of real (and less expensive) help to bring meaning and happiness to suffering people's lives.

And then I found this in my email archives. From April of 2009, Michele Steeb wrote the following to me with respect to her report of a high "turn away" number:

Hi, Tom. Thank you for your email. The numbers you are referencing can be qualified as follows. There are ~300 women and children who are requesting a place today at St. John's. Yes, some are on the waiting list at other shelters, and some are in other shelters currently, but given that we are a program that assists families in getting back on their feet, versus a true shelter, we know there are folks who are expressly interested in on our Program. We would need to manually go through the list to try and determine how many are on the street, or living in their storage unit, or living in their car to provide you with those numbers, and btw, that information changes minute by minute. Someone on the street can get in touch with an old friend who says, "You can stay with me until a place opens up in the Shelter..." Moreover, just because someone is in a home doesn't mean they are safe. Many of the families on our waiting list are waiting to escape violent situations... or are staying with family/friends having escaped, but are in a temporary situation.      Does this answer your question?    Michele Steeb   Executive Director

Michele Steeb: You stink.

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Update:  Today, Jan 13, 2012, a link to this post was sent to the Editorial Board which consists of the following Bee staffers:  Rex Babin, Cheryl Dell, Stuart Leavenworth, Pia Lopez, Dan Morain, Gary Reed, Foon Rhee, Ginger Rutland, and Joyce Terhaar.