“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Where Do We Go From Here?”
It’s that time of year once again. Posting Nina Paley’s excellent sticker (h/t to lulutsg!) sent me scurrying to the far corners of the web, and I found this little Christmas tidbit courtesy of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities:
in 1659, a law was passed by the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony requiring a five-shilling fine from anyone caught “observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way.” Christmas Day was deemed by the Puritans to be a time of seasonal excess with no Biblical authority. The law was repealed in 1681 along with several other laws, under pressure from the government in London. It was not until 1856 that Christmas Day became a state holiday in Massachusetts. For two centuries preceding that date, the observance of Christmas — or lack thereof — represented a cultural tug of war between Puritan ideals and British tradition.
The law makes for strange bedfellows. In this case… I expect I’ll be waking up next to the younger Reverend Mather. And, perhaps, I’ll finally learn why they called him “Increase!”
A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
— Albert Einstein
Since 1993, The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension has been bringing you esoteric and visionary knowledge (and a lot of other crap, too). That tradition continues with their recent posting of a six-part interview with Peter Lamborn Wilson, better known in some circles as Hakim Bey.
Mrs. Betty Bowers – America’s Best Christian™ – explains traditional marriage:
Do NOT miss this!!!
This report from Al Jazeera news channel shows documentary evidence of U. S. soldiers at Bagram Air Base reviewing their plans to distribute copies of the New Testament of the Christian Bible in Pashto and Dari, the two main languages spoken in Afghanistan:
Lt. Col. Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, preaches to soldiers during services at the chapel at Bagram that their job as Christian is to “hunt people for Jesus.” A U. S. military spokesperson told the Huffington Post that the Bibles were confiscated so that they could not be distributed to the population.
(h/t: Think Progress)
For what it’s worth – links to a couple of interesting Bay Area Astrologers who publish on the web:
Barry Perlman, a.k.a. AstroBarry, based in San Francisco; and Rob Brezsny, who publishes Free Will Astrology from Santa Cruz.
The man whom many of us may remember as “Hakim Bey” is still online, still writing, under his “real” name, Peter Lamborn Wilson:
Coins might “really” be worth only their weight in metal but the temple says they’re worth more and the king is ready to enforce the decree. The object and its value are separated; the value floats free, the object circulates. Money works the way it works because of an absence not a presence. In fact money largely consists of absent wealth-debt — your debt to king and temple. Moreover, free of its anchor in the messy materiality of commodity currencies, money can now compound unto eternity, far beyond mere cows and jars of beer, beyond all worldly things, even unto heaven. “Money begets money,” Ben Franklin gloated. But money is dead. Coins are inanimate objects. Then money must be the sexuality of the dead.
His regularly-updated posts can be found on Reality Sandwich.
