Religion – A Repost

This is a repost of An Opinionated Man’s from 4/22/15 “Why the Word of God Hurts”.

I have gone public with my belief or lack of belief in organized religions.  This article says a lot of it very well.

http://aopinionatedman.com/2015/04/22/why-the-word-of-god-hurts/

Namaste,

Scott

 

The Problem? Well, It’s Not Really Women…

Source: US Library of Congress – http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3g00000/3g05000/3g05500/3g05585v.jpg Copyright: Originally copyright by American Press Association, published 1912

I watched a video today that shook me pretty hard.  I use Google a lot and I see the auto-complete trying to guess at what I am wanting to search.  It is often funny and totally outlandish.  Here is a very disturbing video article that is not funny.  I am not going to say anything more before you watch this < 5 min. video.  We will talk afterwards:

Women – According to the World’s largest Search Engine

Okay, now we talk.  It is not enough to say I was disturbed at the results shown in the video.  I was appalled.  Hundreds of years have passed and our “society” still thinks of women as trash, pieces of meat, objects, not people at all.  I know not everyone is that way.  Also, I am not picking on just the men; there are women who believe this, too.  Many of these totally false identifiers of females come from TV, movies, books, and passed-down ideas.  However, many of these ideas come from religious beliefs.  Do you think I am just talking about Middle Eastern Religions?  Heck no.  There are many religions here in the US in which the core beliefs are that men are the powerful ones; they are the ones who should control it all; they are the ones who are knowledgeable.  And in many cases, those beliefs are interpreted to mean that men can whip, beat, and demean their wives and daughters.  We have so many factions in our own society who believe women are second-rate citizens who do not / should not have many of the basic rights our general society claims they have.  Employers still underpay, overwork women in many occupations and a woman, usually, has to go extra distance to “prove” she is qualified over a man.

I am a stand-up guy; I fully believe that women are people deserving of, at least, equality with men.  I realized not long ago that one of the problems I have with finding someone on dating sites are that many women on these sites want the “bad boy”; they want the guys who are tough and rough.  The problem is that many of those men, not all, are not only rough, but they are the ones who help perpetuate the ideas that women are less than men.  We live in a time when it seems that the women who are not allowing themselves to suffer under these “less than men” issues are the ones so often labelled as “feminists” (not necessarily a bad thing), whores, loose, and so on.  It occurs to me that many men would be upset if women were truly given equality and not just a word-of-mouth thing, but true equality.

I say “Let them be upset!”

Namaste,

Scott

Unburdening Myself

I sit here today and things have hit me; thing that needed to get a bit to me have done so. I am melancholy; I am sad; I am enlightened. I am all those things and more.

I sit here today and think about:

Buckwheatsrisk and her abuse;

Mulberry Whine, who has survived the loss of a child for a year;

Sam, who lives wonderfully in a world that might well drive me mad;

Soma, who has a handicapped child she loves so much;

Niltsi, who suffers painfully;

The Enfant Terrible, who suffers – I can see it in her writing;

Grace, who suffers but braves it wonderfully;

there are others.  I commented the other day that I had landed in the right place; I had found people like me.  That is true.  We all have suffered; we all have sacrificed.

Some of us have overcome by taking up a cause; others have overcome through poetry; still others have managed by painfully writing their feelings, putting them out there for others to read.  We have all suffered.

I have spoken of unburdening myself more on this site and was told to “go ahead”, we’re not going anywhere.  So I tell (retell) you all how hard it was growing up and always feeling guilty and bad and as if all of it were my fault, though I could do nothing to stop it.

I tell you how horrible it was to think that I could only have something if I either had to over-sacrifice to get it or have someone give it to me (because of either pity or because I was able to make them think I was good).

Living a life that is mentally horrible because of the way you felt about yourself is not really living at all.

Yet, I learned and I grew and I continued to suffer, but all to a reason.  During the learning of that reason I helped raise two children who have, in spite of it all, become successes in their own rights; I have met some wonderful people who have been true friends; I have met others who were, somehow, hurting worse than myself – and I helped many of them.

Most of all, I met God and, though He didn’t change throughout it all, I did.  I grew and I fell and I grew some more, then fell harder.  This process which I could call the “Humpty Dumpty Jack and Jill” method of learning brought me to so many walls and hills that I am surprised I am alive; that is thanks to God, who never took His eyes or hands off me.  He helped me grow and evolve into someone who is now pretty happy and even a little proud of himself, physically a mess, but staying in there.

And, I think of all these people I read with everyday, these blog posts, all of you who, in spite of the problems, write just like I do.  We share ourselves and put ourselves out there to the world – and that is scary!

To myself and to all of us, I say “Wow!”

Namaste,

Scott