Deepak Chopra is Full of It!

According to Deepak Chopra, "Religion is belief in someone else's experience. Spirituality is having your own." Chopra, in my opinion, is full of crap. Let's go to the dictionary.

A "religion" is a system of belief shared by either a group of people or professed by an individual. This system of belief informs ones actions and behaviors. A religion may be practiced as part of an organized church or association of practitioners. It may feature a belief in a deity, but it does not have to. Atheism, for instance, could be said to be one's "religion".

The term "spirituality" on the other hand, lacks a definitive definition that everyone accepts. Social scientists call spirituality "the search for the sacred" which pretty much means anything you want it to mean. In practice, spirituality generally is treated as a vague feeling of some nebulous connection to some higher spiritual plane by those who claim to be spiritual.

Look, I can buy spirituality as the "search for the sacred", if it results in your actually finding something sacred to believe in. If on the other hand, spirituality is a catch-all term for "believing God, if he happens to exist, approves of pretty much anything you do and most likely won't extinguish you from the university by refusing to prolong your wishy-washy life any longer than the usual threescore and ten, then I don't find being "spiritual" of any practical use.

Every person primarily sees himself or herself as one who serves or one who is served. We either see our primary duty as either to give to the world or to take from the world. The servant, who follows a religion, serves his beliefs whether it be the Golden Rule or the Ten Commandments or whatever tenets his faith offers him as guidance for his life. One who is merely spiritual may drift with whatever winds blow down from above or below as the case may be. Because he has not tenets to his faith, the so-called "spiritual" man may, as Chopra puts it, create his own beliefs from whatever handy materials that suit his own inclinations.

The spiritual man has the luxury of believing whatever is convenient and rejecting anything that doesn't make him "feel" that vaguely self-satisfied emotion that seems to be a primary feature of being "spiritual".  We are in the midst of a paradigm shift where things related to the spiritual life are concerned. We seem to be moving away from a belief that one's spiritual life should be based on reasoned principals which shape our actions and behaviors accordingly. What is being offered instead is a spiritual life based upon, not reason and principal, but upon feelings and opinions  created by our own actions and behaviors, prejudices and personal comfort.

One way, the spiritual life derives from God's guidance. The other way, the spiritual life derives from ourselves and what feels right to us as though we were the god, providing ourselves with guidance. That's pretty much what Chopra says in the quote I led with.

The world is being turned upside down. Soon those whose religion comes from God rather than from themselves, may fall off the planet. I suspect the Second Coming will be timed to catch them.

© 2014 by Tom King

SHOULD They Change the Washington Redskins' Name

This time let's make it something more appropriate for a DC football team.

They're still going on in the mainstream press about changing the name of the Washington Redskins.  Well, I think they should change it. Redskins is too good a name for a team from DC. I have several names that spring to mind.   

How about the Washington Politicians? I for one would thoroughly enjoy seeing them trounced repeatedly under that name. That name probably wouldn't help their win/loss record much, but then, who cares?  After all, it's Washington DC. They're like the Fabulous Freebirds of American Cities. Naming your sports teams for politicians probably isn't a good idea, though. Not if you hope to win regularly. Remember, the Texas Rangers were once the Washington Senators and look how long it took them to shake that stigma and get into the playoffs.  As a Cowboy fan of long standing, I wouldn't mind if Washington got beat up on for a few decades.

But I have lots of cool suggestions for the Washington Redskin name change:

1. The Washington Politicians (logo - a big chicken in a pot)
2. The Washington Bureaucrats (leave the helmet blank - they'll never be able to agree on a logo)
3. The Washington Interns (the uniforms would come with Chap Stick and knee pads)
4. The Washington Media Consultants (they could wear those stylish black trenchcoats everybody in Washington wears)
5. The Washington Lobbyists (the team logo could be a martini glass)
6. The Washington Corporate Shills (team logo - a stack of cash)
7. The Washington Insiders (again - black trenchcoats but with sunglasses)
8. The Washington Parasites (a half donkey/elephant motif I'm thinking or possibly a tick because I'm not sure anyone would recognize a picture of a leach)
9. The Washington Political Hacks (Keith Olbermann in dark glasses)
10. The Washington Talking Heads (the head of Dan Rather)
11. The Washington Pundits (Dick Morris and James Carville silhouettes - one on each side)

Ooh, I know.  How about this?

The Washington Progressives  

(This could be their helmet)

The possibilities are almost endless.

I know - What with the latest round of debt ceiling extensions we could call them:

The Washington Wastrels

How about this helmet design for:

The Washington Lobbyists

Or my favorite....

The Washington Parasites

So many entertaining possibilities, BUT this is the best one I've seen yet.  It solves the problem entirely without changing the team's name. Just need a new logo!





© 2014 by Tom King

One is a Tragedy: 10,000, a Statistic

Thousands are dead in Muslim-led violence against Christians in Bangui last summer and it's started up again.

C. Africa Crowd Lynches Fleeing Muslim

What the headline does not say is that all this comes on the heels of a wave of horrific Muslim violence against Christians after last year's coup which replaced the elected president with a Muslim usurper.  Except in that bit of violence, it wasn't the death of a single guy who fell off a bus fleeing from angry people that the Muslim para-militaries had been persecuting. 

The anti-Christian violence last year resulted in thousands killed or wounded for no greater crime than being Christian or living in a Christian village. The difference is that along with the rest of the world, Christians are appalled at the brutal death of the Muslim man, but for the death of the many Christians last year, news outlets were virtually silent and unsympathetic. It is said that one death is a tragedy, tens of thousands of deaths is a statistic. This fact makes those who restrain themselves and their fellow believers from murdering wholesale, vulnerable to being cast as monsters in the "if it bleeds, it leads" modern media. The media excels at wringing public tears from personal tragedies. They are utterly hopeless at making people feel the same pitch of emotion over the systematic murder thousands. The violence does get reported but in sweeping general terms. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, the individualized pathos has been missing - until now.

No doubt someone in the media will use this story to gin up sympathy for persecuted Muslims and try to pin it on Christian hate-mongers. The story does make a last minute mention of the fact that the Muslims were doing far worse to Christians last summer. It also hints that not all of the participants or even the persecuted were, in fact, Christian. Other media outlets will not be even close to that accurate when they tell the story.

To be fair the media has semi-consistently reported  on the violence against Christians (back on page 10 or 12), but it's all seemed rather without any real enthusiasm. There's an almost embarrassed tone some journalist get when they're talking about Christians who have been wronged, but then they get downright teary-eyed over an Israeli missile attack on a Palestinian village/terrorist missile launching base or a Muslim beaten to death by a mob, some of whom come from Christian villages. The media may appear to give coverage to both sides of the story, but reporters learn in journalism school, just how to tune the data to fit the story in your head and just who they ought to tune out. It would be nice if we could get as much outrage out of the Muslim media over the persecution of Christians as you get from Christian media over persecution of Muslims.

Jesus said that if they persecuted Him, we could expect they would persecute us. All that we really can do about that is pray for them that persecute us. We're under orders to do so from our Commander.

© 2014 by Tom King