Racism’s real damages are inflicted below the surface.

Generations are subjected to cultural water-boarding,

Billions of good people, especially children,

worry that long-term lies about their inferiority include grains of truth.

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John Donne’s  “Meditation XVII“

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Substantial History of Diverse People Thriving Together on your Land

To Ukrainians and “Russian” Ukrainians, Tartars, Cossacks, Greeks, Armenians, Romanians, Poles, unnamed communities including religious, remember there’s real history of diverse peoples thriving together on your land.

Reptile, insect, and primate natural histories show that controlling territory is vital and disruptive. The powers and benefits gained by territorial control are rarely shared equally by resident peoples. The cultural tectonics’ fostering humanity’s thousands of ongoing, festering, and bloody land claims are easy to compile. Yet there’s a real success story here.

Success Story

Billions of Homo sapiens are willing to peacefully coöperate with previously unknown or disrespected neighbors in our global hood. A message for Sri Lanka, Korea, India, Afghanistan, Turkey, Rwanda, Belgium, Spain, USA, and China (every nation) is to remember how civilization at its best demonstrates muscular progressive capacity for diversity to flourish in its midst.

The Crime in Crimea

The crime in Crimea is forgetting humanity’s frequently demonstrated capacity to redefine neighborhoods, and then get along. The territorial crisis in Ukraine, along with many others, can be peacefully resolved.

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Blend into our lives like life in living tree trunks

Encompassed, restricted, contained

Bound in wood flesh

Enslaved by mammal inadequacy

Yet saturated by spring’s volition

Growing sacred freedom

In progressive rings

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“Until the late nineteenth century the question of woman’s ability to profit from or even survive higher education was controversial. Vassar College opened in 1865 was often described by its first president as an experiment.… as late as 1871 an MD at Harvard Medical School published a book on the dangers of higher education for girls, he doubted the achievement was worth the cost from their psyche and procreative powers.”

From: Carl N Degler, In Search of Human Nature, Oxford University Press 1991

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Rednecks are a complex subject. The word redneck is used to describe independent country folk and angry racists. Some folks proudly call themselves rednecks, while others remain angry with them.

Groups of early unionizing US miners were called redneck because they wore red scarfs to show support for workers’ rights. Seventeenth century Scottish Presbyterians were called rednecks for a time when they wore red scarfs to signal commitment to their version of religious freedom.

A growing number of crayon colors suggest neck color wisdom for humanity. The first Crayola Crayon Box in 1903 had just eight colors in it; Black, Blue, Brown, Green, Orange, Red, Violet and Yellow. Crayola’s 2006 150-crayon pack has 118 colors plus 16 Glitter and 16 Metallic crayons.

Who wants a box of crayons with one color in it?  Ridding ourselves of color differences is a bad if not impossible idea. Forget about reducing humanity to one neck color to sort things out.

Our human color range is expanding. Humanity has red, brown black, white, and yellow necks, plus a billion blends between. Civilization’s coloring box challenge is enhancing community cooperation, while every citizen freely features colors of their own. Civilization’s future will be bright and colorful. Check out Crayola’s new “Ultimate” pack with 152 crayons.

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An active constituency insists that civilization would be better off with no religion. This anti-religion constituency has grown in numbers. They claim religion is mumbo-jumbo. They remind people about centuries of dastardly behavior, violence against weddings and worshipers, pilgrims and patients, students and children committed in the name of some religious brand. They remind us that even today, religious people continue to inflict an encyclopedia of horrors upon their own kind.

They observe that religion’s dance with power and money is like a year-round prom.

Reverse Witnessing

A friend recently offered his selection of anti-religious propaganda online as if he totally agreed with it. He “witnessed” in reverse. He cited as a fact that “most scientists are anti-religious.” Yet his anti-religion narrative is based on mumbo-jumbo fantasies of his own. If the“delete religion” campaign is successful, who does the anti-religion constituency imagine is going to do a better job of managing civilization?

Doesn’t removing one power always means replacing it with another?

The anti-religion constituency often fails to take responsibility for centuries of dastardly behavior committed by nonreligious people, including Stalin’s gulags, Hitler’s camps, and Mao’s blood Red Book, which were violent crusades for “secular divinities”.

I ask my anti-religious friend, “aren’t the put downs emanating from religion one of the qualities you find most objectionable”?

Avoid put-downs when possible. Follow your own better ways.

His “opinionating” reminds me that some religious and anti-religious people are inclined towards righteous judgment, too easily condemning perspectives other than their own.

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So why my tears on Mother’s Day? Tears on Mother’s Day because I miss the way mom was to me in infancy, childhood, adolescence, college, and towards my marriage, children and grandchildren. I’m sure mom misses lots too.

Tears on Mother’s Day because I remember my wonderful grandma Annette Needleman, Auntie Rose Skurka, mother-in-law Mary Ferguson Shugart, and my mom’s sister-in-law Natalie Langner. What a blessing for me to be nurtured by such loyal, loving, smart, practical and faithful citizens of humanity.

We capitalize Mother’s Day, but we don’t capitalize sacred mother? What happened to female divinity? There’s evidence of mother God worship going on for tens of thousands of years. People stomped Earth mother worship out of existence comparatively recently.

Infinite divinity extends infinitely beyond our mammal genders. Now is a practical time to give up on male only club divinity. Women make up half the human family. Gender alliances need re-balancing in families, neighborhoods, nations, and globally. So let’s open every job group to all, for example let everybody share in human mothering. God knows we need as many nurturing mothers we can find.

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An overwhelming majority of people living on Earth believe their god offers them an afterlife. The accuracy of this statement is based on the number of people who belong to a religion that claims life after death is a certainty. Among the many existing religions featuring some form of afterlife are Christianity (2.5 billion adherents), Islam (1.5 billion) and Hinduism (1.1 billion). That’s more than 5 billion of humanity’s 7 billion people.

Where Do Dead People Go When They Die?

The opportunity for sincere believers to improve their circumstances after death is a common feature shared by many religions. Convictions regarding the afterlife develop over time as world religions offer and revise revelation, dogma, doctrine and interpretation. Is there life after death? If your answer is yes, then where do dead people go when they die? What’s it like for them there? Thousands of simple and elaborate answers to these questions have been documented.

The eminently successful Kingdoms of the Pharaohs survived for up to 4,000 years. Their religious convictions changed over that time. Around 2000 B.C. some Egyptian priests produced the Book of the Dead, purporting to describe what happens after death and, most importantly, how the deceased could take advantage of their afterlife opportunities. The Book of the Dead was a personalized guidebook for a successful living in the hereafter. Thousands of copies were sold.

Bad Deeds Weigh a Heart Down.

The main event after death was when the jackal-headed god Anubis placed a person’s heart on a scale and weighed it against a feather. The heart’s weight determined what happened next. Bad deeds weighed a heart down. Light-hearted people moved on to a heavenly banquet. Many Egyptians had themselves buried wearing a small stone beetle-shaped ornament called a scarab, which they believed would hide and reduce the weight of their deficiencies.

Egyptian beetle scarabs are on display in museums around the world. The scarabs are man-made faith technology designed to avoid divine retribution for bad deeds. On the scarab these words appeared: “Oh heart rise not up against me and condemn me.” From the Book of the Dead, a more elaborate version of the spell pleaded “Oh my heart which I had upon Earth, do not rise up against me as a witness in the presence of the Lord of things; do not speak against me concerning what I have done, do not bring up anything against me in the presence of the great God of the West …”

Pray that the Scarabs of Modern Medicine Intervene to Save Us

Imagine what these Egyptians were thinking as they waited for their hearts to rise or fall. The closest any of us may get to this experience is waiting for the results of a cancer test, while we pray that the scarabs of modern medicine intervene to save us.

No scarabs can hide these truths about humanity. The destructive consequences of abusive and violent human behavior may last for centuries. The legacy of hate between nations, tribes and religions has an afterlife. Many of the species driven into extinction by humanity are gone forever. Plastic litter may not decay for thousands of years. The half-life of some nuclear waste is counted in millions of years. Certain truths are too perilous to ignore and may betray us.

There’s More to Life than Afterlife.

Our progeny is destined to share our hereafter. The amulets protecting humanity grow ever more complicated. While we wait for our salvation, there’s work to be done. Enjoy historic recordings by Johnny Cash and Marian Anderson singing “I Got Shoes,” the spiritual that inspired this post, especially this refrain, “Everybody talkin’ ‘bout heaven ain’t goin’ there.”

Johnny Cash: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXWVFQtr4ow

Marian Anderson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBgiIIp9v2c

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