One of the humans at the dogpark was telling me about his visit to the home of a "very religious family." So religious that he was warned ahead of time not to say the words, fuck, shit, ass, or any of the wonderful verbal expressions of our culture. The religious people would be offended.

So he goes in and behaves himself very well, only to find that he is in the home of the most obnoxiously racist religious family he has ever had the misfortune of meeting. Instead of fuck shit and piss, it's niggers, chinks, and injuns. He described them as some of the most offensive people he has ever come across, and he excused himself from their company.

This is an extreme example of what I have been noticing in the christian community (the only religious community I'm familiar with).... I will call it inappropriate offense. I have found that people, we can even use my own family for an example, are very offended by the words people say, like my personal favorite, clusterfuck. They're also offended by things like drinking or believing in gods who aren't only children. Sometimes they're offended by the way people dress or their haircuts.

But I don't notice many who are offended by overuse of water. Or the perpetuation of unrealistic standards of beauty. Some of them don't find racist behaviour offensive, or the demonization of homosexuality. They're usually not offended by the spiritual abuse committed in churches against intelligent people attempting to balance intellect with spirituality. The list could go on.

I understand that everyone has values, and they're different everywhere you go. But when a human with no interest in the divine encounters "spiritual" people and finds them atrocious, what is wrong with this picture?

Sunday afternoon was a wonderful day at the dogpark. The sky was perfectly blue and the grass is turning that beautiful golden yellow. I found a spot near the creek and lay on my back, golden grass around my view framing the blue sky with stunning contrast, Abu and Puja playing around me, jumping over me, rolling next to me... it was a moment of complete contentedness.

Eventually I noticed shimmering streams of silver.... geese, with the sun just low enough to reflect off their bellies. There must have been twenty individual groups, what amounted to a huge flock, their flight formations morphing and blending, crossing one another.....

You know, I'd never have seen that if I hadn't been looking up. I love the sky.

demiurge that.

I find it suspicious that a book written by Moses would claim that the jewish people are the chosen people of God. I sometimes wonder if it was a claim designed to inspire the people with a sense of pride and dignity after all those years in slavery. I wonder if in the reality that includes gravity God really loves those people any more than any other people.

Sometimes I think that the Old Testament Hebrews invoked the name of God to justify repeated genocide. I mean, it's obvious that the hebrews weren't of any superior moral fibre. Moses had gone up the mountain for what..... a couple days, and already they had built themselves a fake god to worship. At that rate, had moses not ruined the party, I can only imagine that a couple of weeks would have brought them to fornicating with donkeys and burning their children, just like all the other humans were doing.

With my christian background, it feels like questioning the chosen nature of the jewish people is a little like standing out in a field with a lightening rod on a stormy night, but I propose that all humans are equally "chosen." This is not anti-semitism.... it's just.... a whole bunch of people on planet earth who are essentially the same, though different in culture.

I might add, all of these people are very talented with the killing. And lets face it, the Hebrews did a lot of killing in the old days. Supposedly God commanded them to completely wipe out the hittites, jebusites, amorites, hivites, philistines.... to name a few. How many men, women and children did that work out to?

As I've been looking into the subjects of reincarnation and karma I'm faced with a pattern of attrocious acts seeming to balance themselves out. I wonder sometimes (please don't burn me) if modern persecution of the jews has anything to do with ancient persecution of many people groups BY the jews.

That's not to say that cruelty from one person to another is ever warranted. My feeling is that if not stopped, violence can only escalate. All I'm suggesting is that wiping out the canaanite people was NOT ordained by God, and therefore subject to the naturall balancing of the universe.

I have noticed similar patterns in other places. Take Zimbabwe. We have a whole bunch of white people who march in, colonize, seize land, mistreat the locals and seem to think it's their divine right to do so. It's preposterous really. But then, many years later, black africa rolls over, takes the land back, and kicks the whites out. The white people now undergoing persecution in zimbabwe are feeling sorry for themselves, and I certainly don't advocate said persecution, but lets face it.... you are sitting on land that was stolen.

What was Hitler really, other than a man who believed that God told him to wipe out a certain people group? In that way, how is he different from, say, Joshua?

I understand that I'm playing with fire here, but I'm only trying to attain some degree of objectivity. In our society we have people that we use as posterboys for evil, and Hitler is one of them. Then we tell christians that everyone gets to go to heaven and they say things like "even hitler? what kind of system is that?" When all the while, misguided though he was, christians hold up pillars of the faith like moses and joshua and... oh i don't know... david.... who slaughtered all sorts of people groups with the same justification as Hitler. Segregation and purity of the chosen race, and the mandate of God. And I'll remind you that Hitler claimed allegiance to the very same God as the Jewish people.

One of the very first ideas I learned when researching gnosticism, one that I balked at, was that the God of the Old Testament, while real, is not the True God, but an evil defector. Lately I don't balk quite so much, in fact, it seems plausible. It also seems plausible that this Demiurge, as they call it, is alive and well in the modern world, hard at work in Rwanda, Sudan, and the middle east. Perhaps he is bent on the total destruction of human kind, and the hearts of men give him ample leverage.

There is so much bloodshed in the history of humanity, perhaps utter annihilation is the only answer to the balance required by the universe. Or perhaps I'm mixing up too many ideas. I don't know. It's sunday.

I always feel defensive on sunday.