Category Archives: Religion

A Nice followup

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This is a nice followup to mariner’s post, ‘Good News’. It is published by Axios:

It’s Giving Tuesday โ€” the annual day when people across America and around the world donate to the causes and organizations they care about.

  • It also kicks off the holiday giving season, and charities see donations continue to roll in through December.

๐Ÿ“ˆ The big picture: Americans are giving more. Last year, Giving Tuesday donations hit $3.6 billion, a 16% jump from 2023.

  • The generosity didn’t stop at cash: The number of Americans who donated goods jumped 32% and the number who volunteered ticked up 4%.

Zoom in: Writing a check isn’t the only way to participate in the season of giving:

  • Here are four other powerful ways to give back:
  1. ๐Ÿฉธ Donate blood. “Of the approximately 62% of Americans eligible to donate blood, only 3% do so each year. But someone needs blood every few seconds in America,” Vox reports.
  2. ๐Ÿฅซ Donate food. Many food banks and pantries across the country say they’re still seeing surging demand even after SNAP benefits have been restored. Check out Feeding America’s list of items to donate to food banks and which ones to skip.
  3. ๐Ÿ“š Donate your skills. If you can code, ask local charities if they need website help. If you love to read, pick up volunteer shifts at your library. If you’re on top of your own shoveling, offer to clear an elderly neighbor’s driveway.
  4. ๐Ÿ’Œ Donate your good cheer. Several organizations are seeking volunteers to spread joy โ€” especially during the holidays. A Million Thanks mobilizes people to write letters of gratitude to service members and veterans. Love for our Elders collects letters for older adults. Cards for Hospitalized Kids distributes handmade cards to children in hospitals in all 50 states.

Try it! Many families weave giving back into their holiday traditions. Consider a group volunteer outing or spend a Sunday afternoon writing letters and cards together as you gather with your loved ones this season.

Bottom up is best!

Ancient Mariner

Jesus scrolled

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Mariner’s local church is having difficulty sustaining its congregation. This is a common phenomenon across the nation. But the inevitable has happened – Jesus, meet Chatbot. Mariner cries in his heart as the true faith fades from practice: Use God’s love to spread Grace throughout the world.

An unnamed church was meeting to decide how to disperse leftover money upon closing. It was suggested to give it to charity. The response was “absolutely not!”

See you somewhere in the universe, Jesus, but not on this planet.

Here is an excerpt from the Axios article:

1 big thing: Chatbot Jesus saves souls and time
By Russell Contreras and Isaac Avilucea
Photo illustration of Jesus holding a cell phone in the painting
Photo illustration: Lindsey Bailey/Axios. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
A new digital awakening is unfolding in churches, where pastors are turning to AI to reach worshipers, personalize sermons, and power chatbots that resemble God.

Why it matters: AI is helping some churches stay relevant in the face of shrinking staff, empty pews and growing online audiences. But the practice raises new questions about who, or what, is guiding the flock.

  • New AI-powered apps allow you to “text with Jesus” or “talk to the Bible,” giving the impression you are communicating with a deity or angel.
  • Other apps can create personalized prayers, let you confess your sins or offer religious advice on life’s decisions.
  • “What could go wrong?” Robert P. Jones, CEO of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, sarcastically asked.

State of play: The U.S. could see an unprecedented 15,000 churches shut their doors this year as a record number of Americans (29%) now are identifying as religiously unaffiliated.

  • Megachurches are consolidating the remaining faithful, but even the most charismatic pastors struggle to offer private counseling with such large congregations.

Zoom in: In recent months, churches have been deploying chatbots to answer frequently asked questions such as service times and event details, and even to share scripture.

For the full report, see:

https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-ai-plus-d22a8098-9105-4548-8975-1aeb376eb9f0.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axioslogin&stream=top

Alexa, write a bedtime prayer for me for tonight.

Amen.

Ancient Mariner

He is back

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Mariner. Nobody special, just mariner. He has been visiting for a few days with long-time friends who live on a gorgeous property among the mountains of Arkansas. One could write tomes about the differences between Arkansas and Iowa. The most memorable difference is roads. In Iowa, one can be lost on long, unending gravel roads in the midst of endless fields without a home in sight. In Western Arkansas, the roads are first wrapped around a stick a lot like a spool of wire and then, in that curly state, they are laid down in a continuously elevated and sunken series of very tightly curved roads. Homes are scattered along the road but typically are hidden in the continuous forests.

While visiting, his friend Tom brought up a Biblical issue mariner had not come across in all his years of rummaging in religious tales: The holiday name ‘Easter’ is derived from an early Assyrian goddess Ishtar, a goddess of birth and fertility. Her symbols were an egg and a rabbit, hence Easter. The Roman Catholics firmly deny this, of course, but there is no smoking gun in the history books – just gossip. If the reader is interested, there are many web sources. Just type ‘Ishtar and Easter’ in your search engine.

Another piece of scholarly information mariner retrieved from his search engine was that dark chocolate and red wine trigger freshened brain attentiveness. Maybe over the ages that was a DNA patch so you could remember where the cork is. Similar to Ishtar, type ‘red wine and chocolate’ in your search engine.

On to a more important observation mariner noticed from a comfortable chair and a glass of red wine within the tunnels of alter ego Nosey Mole, is that Trumpians, other republicans and the democratic party and progressives, too, all are beginning to fragment. This situation could move three different ways: 1- The government will continue to crumble, most likely leaving political control with the Trumpians after the 2028 election 2- delete current election practices to the point that the outcome will be unstable and debatable 3- Corporate domination of society will be entrenched enough to virtually stop any democratic precepts from moving forward – AKA money wins.

Please, please be very careful who you vote for in 2028.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

Sailing

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Sailing is an excellent metaphor for many of life’s experiences. There are the times when preparing to sail is overwhelming in its endless detail and distractions; there are times, while underway, when the weather changes a sailor’s plans; there are long periods of time when there is no one about except the sailor, the boat and the sea.ย If ever humans lived a sailing life, it is now.

A course on the ocean of reality has unpredictable weather, even hints of hurricanes and monsoons. Reality is driven by unknown weather confronted by a boat built in the past on dry land. Our boat’s energy and purpose comes from using the boat’s sails to interact with the waves and winds of reality – providing purpose, function and survivability.

How easy it is to use the sailing metaphor in the daily life of humans. We learn early in life that reality is not often kind and may even be determined to cause difficulty at the daily level. Yet humans must sail on, destined to fulfill purpose in life and even to physically survive.

Where is a sailor’s security while on the ocean? It is the boat, of course. It is also true that a human’s psychological self needs a ‘home base’ to feel secure. What is home base for a sailor? the boat. What is home base for a human? family and friends. It is family and friends across a lifetime that have helped build your boat. It is your family and friends that have shaped your sails and built a rudder to steer you through reality. But don’t feel life is their burden – you built the hull and mast. Yet, family and friends are a known and integrated base in the midst of the storms of reality.

If there were only one tool a sailor could take on a sail, it would be a compass. How would one know they were sailing in large circles? It is quite fortunate that sailors have a compass. It’s like using a GPS to get to the port of Maragogi, Alagoas in Africa. Fortunately for humans, the planet has an online network that can tell someone in what direction they are going just by using magnets.

If only such dependability were so with human culture. Just like a family provides direction and stability, one would think society would help, too, being a derivative of friends and family. Perhaps, every once in a while in some short sixty year period, society is stationary enough to live a pleasant life knowing where a person is and who they are supposed to be.

Such a time is not today. The disruptions, storms, abuses and ignorance that lie about today are like a miles-wide plastics and trash dump floating on the ocean of reality. No one knows where to go or when. No social identity is secure. Our rudders, whether boat or person, are clogged.

Now is one of those times when a sailor is alone with his boat for long stretches. The sailor must have a bonded relationship with his boat from which to draw confidence. Yes, the same is the situation for a human today. Only from our bonded relationship with family and friends can we draw confidence and security while sailing the oceans of today’s reality.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

 

 

 

There’s a weed in the garden

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If the reader has ever had a garden, they know the real trouble spot is weeds. Weeds sneak into the lawn or garden as tiny, well behaved plants; they may even have flowers. But gardeners know very quickly the nice little plant becomes boisterous, obnoxious and quickly trashes the garden, replacing it with something akin to messy unraveled hair and hides the garden plants beneath a flood of growth.

It’s too bad but AI is a new weed. Today AI has some appealing functions, especially as a source of entertainment and has new toys to play with on the computer – like writing all your letters to your mother. A cute little weed but beware: AI can take over the Amazon Forest while the reader is on a cruise!

Today, AI has been identified as a weed that will take over our understanding of how the world operates. It is just a conversational item now but in five years it will devastate the labor and white collar job market. An early indicator: Amazon is about to lay off 16,000 workers; the ‘weed’ is spreading.

The arts, that is, visual arts like painting and acting and writing, already show signs of abuse by the pushy weed. Even learning how to write with pen and paper may disappear from the school curriculum. To the other extreme, if the reader’s computer has kept up with system updates, they can read and write in any language. That is the weed offering some false greenery to hide the influence it is gaining in the garden.

Exactly like Creeping Charlie, AI literally overnight can take control of the garden. AI decides where it will grow, how rambunctious it will be and never consults the gardener.

At the moment, there is no nation in the world that has enough weed killer to control AI – especially the United States which has no operating federal government. AI will continue to grow, even competing with global warming as the largest disruption in the Anthropocene Epoch.

If the reader needs advice, consult Alexa.

Ancient Mariner

 

Bits from home

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Mariner’s philologist friend and he have a special dictionary of stressed or highly truncated words that are intriguing. His friend’s latest contribution is ‘supwier’. Usually, mariner gives the reader time to deduce these aberrations for themselves but supwier may require immediate assistance:

SUPWIER (supp’ wi-err) — “What’s up with her?”

A view of mariner’s garden will observe that it has not rained in his town for more than two weeks so he has had to water his nine little gardens. The plants, however, have not been fooled by temperatures in the nineties and have begun to close shop for the season – only special autumn flowers and every known weed continue as usual. As all the garden catalogues suggest, now is a good time to plant the brassica family of green vegetables.

Since establishing four new toad ponds (trays), his garden looks more like a zoo. Coupled with the ripe pecan tree, squirrels abound. The countless crowds of sparrows and wrens have discovered every pond and have new neighborhood pubs to frequent. A new visitor is a feral Aegean house cat (grey with vague stripes).

Mariner calls on his religious friends to take up the slack and immoral behavior of our governments regarding the homeless and indigent; they who have been viciously and without cause cut off from food. One would think our destitute citizens understand that living in a Gaza world is normal. Remember that the word ‘convenient’ is not part of the process. Do something today!

Ancient Mariner

 

 

He is a sick man not fit to represent me

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Trump Canceled 94 Million Pounds of Food Aid in the United States.

The cancellations began in mid-May, when over 100 orders of 2% milk bound for 31 states were halted.

The records show 4,304 canceled deliveries between May and September across the 50 states, Puerto Rico and D.C. Each truck here represents a delivery that would never arrive to feed communities.

All told, the deliveries accounted for nearly 94 million pounds of food. The true loss is likely greater, food banks said, because not all of the yearโ€™s deliveries had been scheduled.

The Trump administration canceled 10 orders for the food bank totaling over $400,000 of pork, chicken, cheese, dried cranberries, dried plums, milk and eggs, records show. The food bank has struggled to keep up with demand following the cuts and a decrease in private donations. Staff told ProPublica they used to distribute 25-pound packages of food, but over the summer, some packages shrank to about half of that weight.

Reported by ProPublica, a nonprofit, publically supported news agency.

This is the same person who sells Trump-branded Holy Bibles.

Ancient Mariner

 

The Age Shift

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Anyone who studies ancient history of any kind runs into a phenomenon called an Age. Ages are slow – really slow. Depending on which field of history one is studying, for example Earth science, Ages can last as long as millions, even billions of years. For most human periods since the last Ice Age, an Age will require 2-5,000 years to live its time. If one clocks in at the earliest existence of economic/political times in human history, an Age averages about 1.5 to 2 thousand years and is growing shorter at the speed of a half-life algorithm [the next step is approximately half the value of the previous step].

Abstruse, he knows. Let’s do a few examples:

ึŽ The last ice age lasted a little over 20,000 years.
ึŽ Bronze Age lasted 1,300 years.
ึŽ Iron Age lasted 700 years.
ึŽ Classical Era lasted 1,000 years (historians call them Eras now).
ึŽ Medieval Era lasted 1,000 years.
ึŽ Early Modern Era lasted 300 years.
ึŽ Modern Era has lasted 2,000 years but has begun shifting rapidly since about 1900AD.
ึŽ On their own initiative, current humans created a new age for us: the Anthropocene Epoch which replaces the Holocene Epoch, beginning at the end of the last Ice Age 11,700 years ago.ยน

This is a lot to explain in order to suggest that religion is subject to the Ages as well.

– – – – – –

Was ‘religion’ part of all the ages? Yes, actually. In purely Homo terms, religion is part of the human survival makeup as much as dogs and wolves have an innate understanding of their role in the pack. One of the earliest discoveries of a caveman family, back before the Ice Age, showed evidence of caring and sharing: a male had a destroyed leg in the prime of his life. He was cared for for many years, being fed, sharing family time and, eventually, buried carefully in his cave. No Popes needed, no choirs, no congregation, no architecture. In its physiological role, religion is feelings and caring and sharing with others. This behavior is key to survival.

Funny that Jesus spoke of the same primitive behavior 20,000 years later as the path to salvation. Mariner has never forgotten the documented event where a mother gave her baby to another person to avoid having the baby eaten by lions in the coliseum – the mother’s fate. Religion is innate feelings necessary for survival – even if Interstates, airplanes and smartphones have stretched the definition of ‘family’.

So, religion as we know it has been waylaid by the Greeks who needed administrative positions for their ‘gods’ and especially the Romans who worshiped grandeur. Western Europe didn’t help much either with excess social discipline. Then the Age of War (20th Century) distracted everyone from innate survival practices because Homo was and is in the midst of an ‘industrial toy’ age. New is better.

Welcome to the Industrial Age or maybe the new version, the Technological Age. So how much are church buildings selling for these days?

Ancient Mariner

ยน Wikipedia.

Where the West began

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Mariner’s normal inclination is to see the world through the eye of a sociologist. The core of sociology is the study of results from human social patterns and aspects of culture associated with everyday life.

During the last few months in a very unhurried way he seems to be researching the Middle East as the birthplace of nationalism, the birthplace of comprehensive theology and the first region to openly implement neutral colonialism – all significant roots that support today’s cultural operations. What makes it even more interesting is the existence of East/West trade routes and the eventual social and economic incursion by Greece, Rome and Russia.

At its height, the Persian Empire encompassed all of the Middle East: modern-day Iran, Egypt, Turkey, and parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was also known as the Achaemenid Empire. To make it convenient to this post, the term ‘PE’ will be the euphemism. In ancient times PE was controlled by czarist kings who proclaimed themselves Gods and ruled over the most brutal nations in history. It is fascinating when one realizes that virtually the entire social/political/economic/religious structure of today’s Western Alliance began in the Persian Empire.

Mariner’s favorite example is the first creation of an independent supreme God which began in Lycia, a small nation in the PE across the Aegean Sea from Greece. Her name was Cybele, the female god of creation [BLOG Apr 7, 2016] who later existed as Rhea, Mother of Gods in Greece, then as Sybil, Mother Of Gods in Rome, to Mary, Mother of Jesus in Christianity. In addition, many of today’s Jewish/Christian rituals and religious practices are similar to rituals in Zoroastrianism – the first unified religion in the PE – a time when Israel was one of the nations of PE.

The other creation of note, at least for this post, is the birth of colonialism. One of theย  PE Kings, Cyrus II or Cyrus the Great [mentioned in last post], allowed all the nations within the PE to carry on with local practices in religion and daily life. This included allowing those nations to make trade deals between member nations with a general oversight from PE. If this insight were stretched a bit, it could also be the origin of republics – just like the United States!

Mariner apologizes for making the reader suffer such detailed stuff. It keeps him occupied while coping with another PE creation: Donald.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

 

 

Wow! A real religion debate

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Salvation versus Grace. Both are defended by the Bible – Grace especially by Father Brown on PBS when he’s hearing confession from a murderer. The idea of Grace traces back to Cyrus The Great, King of Persia from 559-530 BC.

Cyrus was the leader of the Achaemenid Empire that overtook the Babylonians. There were four powerful kings with rule over the Jews during their captivity including Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Darius, and finally, Cyrus the Great. The first three kings chose to assimilate the cultures they conquered into their customs, their culture, and their ways of life, but Cyrus, instead, as leader of the Medo-Persians, chose to allow various cultural and religious groups to return to and maintain their own identities – an unusual act of Grace.

The Old Testament makes note of this in Ezra 1-4. The Jewish perspective was that God had banished the Jews for misbehavior but through Cyrus, had permitted the banished Jews to return. An act of Grace on God’s part as well as Cyrus II.

*****
Salvation relates to the narrative of God’s redemptive actions throughout human history, culminating in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as depicted in the Bible. Here is a fun word for readers: Heilsgeschichte. It is the theological term that describes God’s plan to save humanity from sin and its consequences.

Since everyone has sinned, everyone eventually will face the death penalty. Since the wages of sin is death, salvation is the paycheck issued by God that people receive for what they have earned. Death is what we all have earned by our deeds. Consequently, when all of us die, we want God to grant us salvation because of the good deeds we have performed to compensate for our sins. Historically, Judgment Day was the third day after death, as was the case with Jesus and also a popular tradition begun in Ancient Persia. In the case of Father Brown’s murderer, that murderer has a lot of work to do to gain salvation. Grace only lets him try again.

Ancient Mariner