Category Archives: Tolerance

Vespers

02 Thursday May 2019

Posted by in Russian Orthodoxy, Sexuality, Tolerance

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I am listening to Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Vespers (All-Night Vigil) on YouTube. It is, of course, serene, uplifting, beautiful.

All I can think is that the world has had all the secular materialism, moral relativism, and professions of nonbelief that it can take.

Chastity, for unmarried men and women, is a virtue to be practiced, not a sexual fetish, i.e, a perversion, to play at. There I’ve said it.

Had I children of school age, I would not send them to public schools. I fear that public education no longer schools children in leading virtuous lives. I think it has taken me fifty years, my entire adult life, to unlearn the misguided moral teachings of public education, or to grasp moral teaching, on my own, within the context of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

I guess that is why I find Russian Orthodox Liturgy so compelling. The Communists sought to destroy religion. They failed, because the Voice of God cannot be silenced, The secularists are seeking the same objective in America today, under the fig leaves of tolerance and religious freedom. There are a surfeit of “useful idiots” in politics, law, and education who assist in this cultural holocaust. And I mean precisely that. Books are banned in school, e.g. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. That is close to burning a book. I think of the Heinrich Heine quote, “Where they burn books, they eventually burn people.”

We have become afraid to be intolerant of evil.

Blogosphere, My Happy Home

18 Sunday Nov 2018

Posted by in Relationships, Tolerance

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There are times when I feel closer to the people I have never met in the blogging world than I do to my friends, family, and acquaintances in real life. And I wonder, would my blogging friends really accept me if they knew me?

I am a Catholic, heterosexual, Republican, old, white male. To many people, in Orwellian Newspeak, that makes me “ungood”. Yet I have always reached out to people who were different from me.

Every word I used to describe myself is a superficiality. Yet we seem to be a world consumed and divided by those surface differences. I notice this when I watch real time pictures and video from around the world on YouTube. I have watched video from Russia, post Communism, and the people walking on the streets and playing on the beaches look no different from us. We could be in America, except the signs are in Russian.

We can have our differences as long as we promise not to kill each other. Is that so hard?

I read in the blogosphere of people in nonconforming, unconventional relationships. They seem to love their partners as much as I love my wife, in my typical, monogamous, male/female-paired marriage.

May be after the highly amped-up stupidity of the last two elections, I am all burnt out. These hills are ones I don’t want to die on.

Is it Safe To Go Back In The Water?

08 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by in Politics, Tolerance

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Thank Heaven this election is over.   The full out assault on the intellect and the raw emotional pandering was more than I could handle. Party affiliation is irrelevant. This is is how the politics game is played these days.  Absent any real religious or spiritual connections that characterize our culture today, politics serves to give a veneer of cosmic right and wrong to our lives.  My beliefs are those of ultimate good. the politicians I like are the warriors of virtue. The other guys, the opposition,  in our polarized little universe, are the bad guys. They can burn in Hell, if we believed there was a Hell.

I gave up on The News years ago. It is all manipulation and propaganda.  So how do we find out what is factual, what isn’t?  I don’t know.  That’s the vexing part.  Consider that we have Congress Members who don’t even read the bills they vote on, and it doesn’t matter whether the Congress Member/Slacker is one we support or not. That is dysfunctional.

I was watching the line at the polls the other day. Our congressional race was close.  There was nothing that indicated who the voter was going to vote for just by looking at them superficially. And if we opened up their body cavities , we could not identify their political affiliation, and surgically excise it.

Maybe a little more tolerance is in order.  And the more we dislike a given politician, the more we should accept the people we know who support that politician.  And I specifically mean the people we know that like whom we consider the “bad guys”.  We all get manipulated into hating and the more virtuous you think you are, the more susceptible you are to manipulation. Think about that.

Short Post

04 Friday May 2018

Posted by in Family, Relationships, Tolerance

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Last night’s post The Truth really opened up some space for me. Telling the truth about my loss and my feelings are helping me work through this horrific experience.

Growing up in a political family, I learned to take political disagreement with a grain of salt. So when I encounter inflexible and hateful ideologues in the real world, I don’t know how to deal with them.

So I still want everybody in the Whole Wide World to love me for the lovable old curmudgeon that I am, just as I love pretty much all comers.

We went from day time highs of mid sixties to lower nineties within a day of each other, it seems.

Had the ball joints replaced in the ’98 Mercury Grand Marquis, my Dad’s (Junior) old car. I want it to run forever

Approval/Disapproval

06 Tuesday Feb 2018

Posted by in Politics, Relationships, Tolerance

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How do we listen? What filters do we have activated at all times? When we hear or read something that raises our hackles, are we quick to decry what bothers or offends us, then dismiss the speaker or author as undeserving of our attention and respect? Do we consider a point of view that disturbs us to be as valid as our own? The person holding such a view may be unable to consider any other option. For example, a person may base a prejudice on a fear. That fear, unless dealt with constructively and lovingly, will continue to shape a viewpoint until the person holding that viewpoint abandons it. We can’t change the way other people think. Only those “other people” can change their way of thinking. Do we help or hinder that process by the way we react? Then again, maybe we are the ones where the change needs to occur. It is a disturbing paradox that our intolerance of intolerance may be precisely what perpetuates such intolerance.

Where did we learn to think the way that we think? If we consider ourselves open-minded, are we even aware when or how often we close our minds?

Hanging out with outlaws and outcasts is no big deal anymore. How do we assess the respectable people of this world? Do we give the full measure of respect to the worthy bourgeoisie whose tithes to the church where the AA group meets do more to keep the doors open than our relatively paltry rent does?

Contemplate how and why you determine a person’s worthiness.