Unpure?

 My friend, Rabbi Chuck, answered a religious question I had by quoting the first line of a morning prayer: My God, the soul You placed within me is pure.  This is a tenet of both Judaism and Islam, but runs counter to Christianity, which maintains that God gives us an unpure soul.  Christians must be baptized to rid their soul of that evil.  That just seems so wrong to me.  Why would God want a world filled with unpure souls?

On Religion

 

I was baptized a Methodist as a baby, sang in the Episcopal children’s choir, was confirmed in the Evangelical and Reformed Church, converted to Roman Catholicism, joined a Presbyterian church, and completed the circle by joining the North Ontario United Methodist Church.

Being a Christian requires a leap of faith which I have never been able to do.  Being doubtful, I assumed the name Thomas when I became a Catholic.  I accept the Bible as a record of the memory and lore of people of that time, not necessarily accurate, as the writing was done after the fact, and has been translated and interpreted many times since.

I reject the doctrine of original sin and the Adam and Eve story.  Without the concept of original sin there is no need for a savior, least of all for one born of a virgin.  I believe in the doctrine of the “Golden Rule” and find that Christians have been the worst offenders of it over the centuries.  Witness the destruction of the Mayan civilization, the Spanish Inquisition, anti-Semitism, anti-gay, etc. all in the name of Christianity.

I believe there is an unknowable controlling the universe that some identify as “God” or “Allah” or “Father”, they assuming that we humans were created in it’s likeness.  But I believe, because he had no better idea, man created God in his own image. 

 

More from Books

 From “Here All Along” by Sarah Hurwitz:

“We consult the news sources and engage with the social media that confirm our own points of view, and algorithms just keep showing us more of what we like.  As a result, we’re becoming narrower-minded and more convinced of our own unimpeachable rightness.”

“This belief that every single one of us is created in the image of God has been cited as the defining Jewish idea, the beating heart of the entire Jewish enterprise.  And you don’t have to believe in any kind of deity or higher power to appreciate its implications.  Drawing on an ancient Jewish teaching, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg argues that this idea is shorthand for the three fundamental truths, which he deems the ‘three inalienable dignities:

1.    We are each of infinite worth – no one is expendable, and we cannot quantify the value of any human life.

2.    We are all fundamentally equal – no human being is any more important than any other human being.

3.    We are each totally unique – there is no one else like us, and no one is interchangeable with anybody else.”

“Other than monotheism, there is no universally accepted Jewish creed or article of faith defining the Divine.”

“When we stray from our tradition of questioning and wrestling, we can easily slide into extremism, believing that we alone possess the truth and distorting the Divine image to fit our own small purposes.  This is a most unfortunate form of idolatry.”

Some book excerpts

 Books can teach us a lot, if we are willing to learn. I read a lot, and sometimes capture thoughts I find. Here's an excerpt from “Here, There, Everywhere” by William Least Heat-Moon:

“After all, a human life proceeds kaleidoscopically. We accumulate memories often deliberately and always ineluctably, and over time see them form the pieces of who we are. Who remembers his life in wholeness or in its entirety? Shaped by fragments, we are bipedal kaleidoscopes of endlessly shifting arrangements more random than we may wish to admit.”

From "History Matters" by David McCullough - "To be indifferent to history isn't just to be ignorant, it's often to be rude, to show a form of ingratitude." "We are raising generations of young Americans who, by and large, are historically illiterate. And that has to change. There is no better way to understand who we are and why we are the way we are and where we may be heading than by reading history from the hands of good writers. I can't imagine a world without books." (Yet we find some segments of government that want to ban books. GB)

B Charles

 

B Charles

We had become good friends when he died, all too soon, but Rabbi B Charles Herring made a lasting impression on me.  He was just plain Chuck and he helped me over a sticky point in my religious training.  I use the word ‘training’ loosely, since it has been going on over the past 70 or so years, both in formal settings and informal.  In Chuck’s case, very informal;  we used email.  I had been thinking about the Christian doctrine of Original Sin.  It didn’t make sense to me that everyone was born into a state of ‘sinner’ so I asked Chuck about it.  Without giving me specifics, he gave me the opening line of a Jewish morning prayer: My God, the soul that You have placed within me is pure.  In other words, the Jewish religion rejects the concept of Original Sin, and I do too.  But that is the foundation upon which Christianity is based.  So my conclusion is that I am not a Christian.

Music

 

I’m not a Christian (more about this later) but I like their music, whether oratorio, hymn or gospel.  I ran into gospel by tuning into the Gaither Homecoming series on TV.  Bill and Gloria composed quite a few gospel songs, my favorite of which is “God on the Mountain” especially when sung by Lynda Randall.  To give you an idea of the theme, here is a bit of the lyrics:

“For the God on the mountain, is the God in the valley
When things go wrong, He'll make them right
And the God of the good times
Is still God in the bad times
The God of the day is still God in the night.”

Back to Two

 I like this one because of the simplicity of just two colors.

And Further On

 This was a four-color print, and I learned something new.

Moving On Up

 I thought I'd try my hand at a multicolor print, so I read a few articles about the technique and watched some videos, and this is the result:

I used the reduction process.  The lightest color is printed first, in this case it was yellow:

Then the next color was orange, so I had to remove all the areas on the block that were to remain yellow.  This shows the design carved out of the block.

The last color was brown, and this is what was left on the block for the last printing:

So it was an interesting bit of carving and printing.  I printed a set of 5 and added a new skill to my repertoire/