NOT someplace I want to go. I despise the Mormon Church for what they did with Proposition H8 in California, and I refuse to stay in a Marriott Hotel anywhere since they're owned by Mormons. I have to make the trip because it's for a very good client and we want to keep them happy, but I will spend as little as I can there.
I should acknowledge, the older I get the more I despise the world's religions. They all seem to have been hijacked by people who use them solely to advance their own prejudices and hatreds. And there's nothing new about it. Just looking at the history of Ireland shows centuries of oppression by Protestant England against the Catholics mainly because they were Catholic...to the point where it veered very close to genocide. In fact, the infamous Potato Famine did not have to lead to the starvation deaths of a million Irish Catholics; meat and grain were still being exported to England and around the world and politicians of the times blamed the victims for their misery because they weren't Protestant. And this was long after Catholicism had been outlawed in the country and it had been made a crime to teach Gaelic in any way, form or fashion.
Using religion as an excuse to slaughter goes back thousands of years. Just check out the Old Testament of the Bible. And the history of the Crusades, where Christian Constantinople was sacked by the knights because it was the wrong kind of Catholic city. And Jews were forced to become Catholic in Spain during the Inquisition. Even recently in Indonesia, Christian men were forced to convert to Islam or be killed and today in Egypt Muslims are attacking and killing Christians even as Muslims and Hindus attack and kill each other in India and Pakistan. All of them claiming "my god's real while yours is a lie."
I have no problems with the teachings of Christ; Matthew 5-7 is an excellent guide on how to live your life as a decent person whether you be Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh or Gaia oriented. I try to follow it...but I'm way too human most of the time and at best have never batted better than 300, as regards it. That may be great for baseball, but it's lousy when it comes to the real world. Unfortunately it's the best I can do right now, considering the vileness of the GOP and the wimpiness of the Democrats in response.
So now I'm headed for a theological state, and considering I'm a gay liberal who considers Mormonism to be little more than a cult, I'm hoping it will be nothing more than an interesting time. I'll spend my off-hours reading or working on POS and ignore the state as much as I can. Should be fun.
I should acknowledge, the older I get the more I despise the world's religions. They all seem to have been hijacked by people who use them solely to advance their own prejudices and hatreds. And there's nothing new about it. Just looking at the history of Ireland shows centuries of oppression by Protestant England against the Catholics mainly because they were Catholic...to the point where it veered very close to genocide. In fact, the infamous Potato Famine did not have to lead to the starvation deaths of a million Irish Catholics; meat and grain were still being exported to England and around the world and politicians of the times blamed the victims for their misery because they weren't Protestant. And this was long after Catholicism had been outlawed in the country and it had been made a crime to teach Gaelic in any way, form or fashion.
Using religion as an excuse to slaughter goes back thousands of years. Just check out the Old Testament of the Bible. And the history of the Crusades, where Christian Constantinople was sacked by the knights because it was the wrong kind of Catholic city. And Jews were forced to become Catholic in Spain during the Inquisition. Even recently in Indonesia, Christian men were forced to convert to Islam or be killed and today in Egypt Muslims are attacking and killing Christians even as Muslims and Hindus attack and kill each other in India and Pakistan. All of them claiming "my god's real while yours is a lie."
I have no problems with the teachings of Christ; Matthew 5-7 is an excellent guide on how to live your life as a decent person whether you be Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh or Gaia oriented. I try to follow it...but I'm way too human most of the time and at best have never batted better than 300, as regards it. That may be great for baseball, but it's lousy when it comes to the real world. Unfortunately it's the best I can do right now, considering the vileness of the GOP and the wimpiness of the Democrats in response.
So now I'm headed for a theological state, and considering I'm a gay liberal who considers Mormonism to be little more than a cult, I'm hoping it will be nothing more than an interesting time. I'll spend my off-hours reading or working on POS and ignore the state as much as I can. Should be fun.
2 comments:
I did a bicycle tour in the Four Corners region. When we got to Utah, things became very different. In one small town, the owner of a cafe had the coffee locked up. She gave the key to a kid of hers to get it so she could make us coffee. Locked up? I know they don't drink coffee but it's not meth.
Another eerie thing was the women. They were mostly blond or dyed to look and no matter what the hair color, they all had black eyeliner around their eyes, like raccoons.
We, the group of us, would ask for wine for dinner but in these small towns in Utah there wasn't any alcoholic beverage of any kind, yet every eatery would serve water in a wine carafe. The ones with a grape bunch pattern pressed in its glass bottom. We asked, once, why do you have these wine carafes and no wine? No answer.
Once we got to one of the large resorts, they did have wine. You had to buy it at another place in the hotel, then they would open it there and you had to take it back to the dining area. So strange.
We went to a rodeo while there. This is a resort where there are a lot of tourists from everywhere. Most of the rodeo participants were ex-Mormon missionaries that lived in that area. And when they gave the name of the contestant, they would also name where he did his mission, that was followed by really rude comments about the place they were in and aren't they glad to be back in Utah.
I was glad when we left Utah. I begun to feel like we went into another dimension and would we ever get back.
Okay, now I'm spooked.
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