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Malala is the young Pakistani woman whose pursuit of education resulted in her being shot in the head at point blank range by the Taliban. Like other religious bullies through the ages, the Taliban thought shooting this outspoken young woman would send a message to all who think that woman should be educated.

Ironically, the Taliban were right. The shooting sent a shock wave around the world. Men and women everywhere realized the importance of solidarity on behalf of the 66 million girls denied education world wide.

Mala was just 15 years old at the time of the attack. Now she is recovered and is back in school still speaking fearlessly,

“God has given me this new life, I want to serve the people. I want every girl, every child, to be educated.”

Amy Jones and Texas Buddha were sitting on his back porch watching lightening bugs on a humid Austin evening.

Amy decided to put TB on the spot. “Do you believe in God?”

Finishing a sip of iced tea, TB answered, “In my way of understanding, one does not believe in religious symbols, but through them into a deeper sense of reality. Every symbol reveals some things obscures others.”

Amy thought for a moment, “So what does the symbol God reveal?”

“The symbol God can be used to remember that infinity which is always outside our widest allegiance, that primordial depth which is always beneath our deepest emotions, and that playful mystery which is always between our clearest distinctions.”

“And when does the symbol God obscure reality?”

“Whenever it is used to prove a theory, justify a cause, or replace human relationships.”

Attention Kmart shoppers!

All you who would rather save a dollar than a life,

There is blood on isle 9.

And today only,

You can hear the screams,

Of factory workers who died in collapsed buildings,

To bring you the new Barbie Dream House.

And who worked dusk until dawn,

At unlivable wages,

To bring you these T-shirts,

Three for ten dollars.

And whose dark brown fingers,

Have brought your children,

This blue eyed doll.

On isle 7,

We have a tribute to the brave marines,

Willing to invade any who would break our yoke.

Willing to crush their hopes ,

Or as we like to say,

Willing to protect American interests.

Why do the heathen rage?

When their servitude,

Creates American jobs,

And make products cheaper for our own poor?

Thus do we play,

The poor against one another,

Rather than curb the appetites of rich,

Whose God is their belly.

And who have subcontracted out with murderous indifference

Their crimes,

They who are the innocent executioners of our manifest destiny.

Why do the heathen rage?

Do they not know,

Whether it is for the pride of a Reagan,

Or the hope of an Obama,

That enslaved workers,

Have always been the invisible hand of the market?

Attention, Kmart shoppers,

You who would rather save a dollar than a life,

Please avoid isle 13, where a mysterious stranger is crying out,

That we have fattened our children for a day of slaughter.

And that the mark of beast,

Is the corporate logo,

On our clothes.

Note: I wrote this after reading the list of companies that refused to sign the Bangladesh Factory Safety Accord

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/17/bangladesh-factory-safety-accord_n_3286430.html

I have been doing a sermon series on the historical roots of Christianity. Tomorrow we will take the following verse from Matthew:

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for you souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

To illumine that text, we will look at their parallel in the figure of Sophia in Sirach:

 “Come to me, you who desire me, and eat your fill of my fruits”

“Put your feet into her fetters, and your shoulders and carry her, and do not fret under her bonds. For at last you will find the rest she gives, and she will be changed into joy for you. Then her fetters will become for you a strong defense, and her collar a glorious robe. Her yoke is a golden ornament, and her bonds a purple robe.”

I hope comparing these passages will make it clear that Jesus was not speaking in a vacuum, but was often paraphrasing the Wisdom (Sophia) of Proverbs and of other ancient scriptures left out of the Protestant canon (like Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon.) Further, we will see that the wisdom literature of our canon is heavily influenced by earler roots coming from Egypt.

We will also notice how reducing the imagery down to male vocabulary makes some of the poetry harder to understand.

At this point, I suspect my three points will be that Jesus is not calling us to belief but to awareness, not to religion but to life, not to obedience but to love.

I have been listening all week to conservative talk show hosts contend that the IRS has a bias against conservative nonprofit groups. While I agree that the IRS was wrong to target Tea Party groups, I also think it is important to keep some perspective. The IRS does have a duty to investigate whether nonprofit groups are front organizations for political lobbying. The guestion is, are they being fair.

I decided to explore the question of prejudice by seeking a neutral standard. I decided to put conservative nonprofits on one side of the ledger and liberal nonprofits on the other. I then simply asked the question, “how much of the money each side raised received a tax exemption?” It seemed to me, that tally would be a fair test.

Here is what I discovered at opensecrets.org:

“Of the 21 organizations that received rulings from the IRS after January 1, 2010, and filed FEC reports in 2010 or 2012, 13 were conservative. They outspent the liberal groups in that category by a factor of nearly 34-to-1, the Center for Responsive Politics analysis shows.”

So conservative nonprofits are outspending liberal nonprofits 34-1, and still feeling mistreated. That total does not include some of the biggest conservative spenders like Karl Rove’s group that has yet to be approved, but is already raising money. I do not know the answer, but our democracy faces a tremendous crisis that the IRS was trying to address in these investigations. Citizens United has allowed corporations to empty enormous sums of “dark money” into our political process and hide behind tax exempt groups. I agree it is unfair to single out conservative nonprofits, so the only options I can think of are to either wave tax exempt status for everyone, or open all groups to the same kind of rigid scrutiny.

http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2013/05/conservative-groups-granted-exemption-vastly-outspent-liberal.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpensecretsBlog+%28OpenSecrets+Blog%29

The Reverend Clovis Jones and Texas Buddha were playing guitar. Amy listened while she babysat her infant cousin John Henry. At one point, the infant dropped a rattle outside the crib and began to cry. Amy reached for the rattle, “John Henry, you still have a crib full of toys. Why are you crying for the one thing you can’t have?”

Without stopping his playing Texas Buddha shouted, “Young John Henry is teaching you the ‘one moment glad, three moment sad’ rule.”

Sensing he might get a sermon out of it, Clovis stopped playing, rested his hands on his guitar and asked, “what is the ‘one moment glad three moment’ sad rule?

“Possessive desire can give us tunnel vision. When we obsessively desire something we do not have, it is hard to fully appreciate the wonderful things we do have, thus we are not as happy as we were before our desire to possess something. Then, when we obtain the object of our desire, we worry about losing it. That is our second moment of unhappiness. Finally, when the object of our desire passes, as all things do, we can again be made unhappy by remembering what we no longer have.  That is the ‘one moment glad, three moments sad rule’.”

Amy objected, “But I don’t want to live without desire!”

“And you shouldn’t live without desire,” Texas Buddha agreed, “Just remember at all times that what you love belongs to life and not to you.”

The American Family Association has chosen some strange targets to pick on over the years. They have successfully bullied 7-eleven to stop selling Playboy, Ford to stop advertising in gay magazines, several national chain stores to stop saying “Happy Holidays” and to say “Merry Christmas.” They have called for boycotts against Archie comics, Google, Walt Disney, McDonalds and even Hallmark Cards.

The AFA even attacked an anti-bulling campaign for schools:

“Anti-bullying legislation is … just another thinly veiled attempt to promote the homosexual agenda. No one is in favor of anyone getting bullied for any reason, but these anti-bullying policies become a mechanism for punishing Christian students who believe that homosexual behavior is not something that should be normalized.” Bryan Fischer, director of issue analysis

As if all of that weren’t pathetic enough, now the AFA has decided to begin a campaign against the American Association of Retired People (AARP). And what is the sin of that “fringe group,” as the AFA calls them? On their website AARP has added a place for people to get information that might be useful to elderly GLBT people and their families about the special needs those people might have. The AFA has accused AARP of promoting the “homosexual agenda.” They have said the group is offering “special rights for immoral behavior.”

So here’s my question, and I think it would make a great game show. “Who’s more perverted?” Which is sicker, an elderly group, which seeks to serve all the needs of retired people, including GLBT retirees; or a religious group that can’t seem to keep its mind off of other peoples’ groins, even after they have turned elderly?

http://www.alternet.org/what-planet-conservative-group-targets-aarp-promoting-homosexual-agenda

“I feel so lost.” Amy Jones muttered as she helped Texas Buddha in his garden. “I just don’t know where to turn. My father says there is a God, but I can’t believe it. Why would God hide from me? I try not to think about it, but I have this restlessness. I have no idea where to begin searching. I don’t even know what I’m searching for, but I can’t get rid of this longing for something. What should I do?”

TB scanned his garden. His eyes fell upon a lone caterpillar on the very tip of a leaf of mint, “Do you see that caterpillar?” Amy nodded. “Like you, it feels a terrible and wonderful longing. It does not need to find a teacher in order to become a butterfly. It only needs to give birth to something already written inside itself.

“Whatever is meant by the word “God” is not something we need to find. It is what is driving our search. We are children of the universe. Our instruction manual is written in our bones. Teachers and books do not give us the call. They only help us recognize it.

“What you are looking for is what has given you birth. You are like a grape and the whole universe is your vine. Whatever is meant by the word “God” is not hiding from you, but waiting to be manifested through you. The guidance you are looking for isn’t in my answers, but in your own questions.”

We all have 20/20 vision for seeing flaws in the beliefs of others and cataracts when it comes to seeing our own. Marx was an expert at showing the frailties of the Christian religion, but Freud rightly saw a kind of religion hidden in Marx’s dialectical materialism. Freud, himself, ridiculed religion, but has since been accused of having superstitions of his own. Even the severest critics of human folly, look out at the world with the same fallible eyes.

Christians look at the Hindu God Ganesh and laugh at belief in a supernatural helper who is part elephant and part human. Most Christians will live and die in the faith without ever noticing that their angels are half human half bird.

Rejecting God does not save us from this tendency to project and deny aspects of reality. Ayn Rand laughed at the silly beliefs of religion and labeled her approach “objectivism,” but she believed we should surrender responsibility to the invisible hand of the market, which sounds suspiciously like a god. The list is endless of thinkers who saw themselves as the end of ideology. The scientific method is an irreplacable guide to truth, but it cannot lead us to meaning. We can only find meaning if we care about something in life, and once we care about anything at all, we are no longer completely objective. And only an emotionally stunted person would wish objectivity at the cost of a world denuded of any value.

E.O. Wilson diagnosed our problem as having evolved to believe in one kind of truth, but having discovered another. He believed there was no way to reconcile the world of scientific objectivity and religious subjectivity, but I believe that is precisely our most important task today. I believe the future of our species depends on building a bridge between our hearts and our minds.

Science has delivered humankind from slavery to superstition, but like the surface of Mars, it has no breathable atmosphere for living. To construct a world without science often leads to madness, but perhaps the strangest madness of all is to believe that one has no beliefs.

(Mayberry,USA) The sheriff’s department was caught eavesdropping on the local newspaper here in Mayberry. Sheriff Holder assured us that their purpose was not to deprive the Mayberry Gazette of free speech, but simply to ensure that whistleblowers did not inform the people of Mayberry what their government is really doing. The crowd seemed relieved to hear it.

When asked what he knew about the eavesdropping, Sherriff Holder said he had given the case to Deputy Fife, and so had no idea what was going on. When asked if reporters could talk to Deputy Fife, we were told that the deputy was investigating the case so he might not be able to answer our questions either.

One reporter asked, “So Deputy Fife will be investigating himself?” “No,” the sheriff answered, “I will look into this myself.”  When asked if it was proper for the department accused of malfeasance to be investigating itself, the sheriff responded, “I cannot answer that question at this time because of the ongoing investigation.”

We thanked the Sheriff for his openness. As far as this reporter is concerned, this is case closed.  -Goober Pyle, of the Mayberry Gazette