[FRIAM] Everything she knows...

[Steven A Smith]

Frank -

Thanks for offering up Anne La Mott's clever words here.  Whether she
can match FriAM's pedantic dives into obscure (and to some trivial or
irrelevant?) topics is up for question, but she certainly has a much
more humorous delivery than most of us and can be nicely pithy.

Glen -

Your question demonstrates that you are a more careful/thorough reader
than I.   I somehow skimmed over the Maher/Graham allusion and even had
to Google Graham to find out what HE was about.

I've only recently "discovered" Bill Maher...  and after listening to
him semi-regularly for several months was still surprised to find out
that he calls down the wrath of some on the left.   Once again, maybe I
wasn't *listening* close enough, or maybe I was guilty of letting some
of his more egregious statements roll over me out of my infatuation with
the general thrust (and boldly wry style) of his message, similar to the
way Trumpists seem to do for/with him (though their sins of omission
seem much larger in quantity and quality?).

I *have* heard him go off on *all religion* and once alerted to it (and
read some quotes from his screeds against Islam) recognize he has a
special place in his heart filled with fear (and judgement?) of their
(extremists?) religion.  

I am personally a strong Athiest in the sense that I have few if any
doubts that the anthropomorphising of whatever the mystery of existence
and beauty might be is a projection... (wo)Man making God(dess) in
his/her own image.  I find the stories of afterlife or repeated lives to
be at best interesting metaphors for how the meaning of the lives we
live might be tied to human history and future.  I find the
anthropomorphised God(desse)s of Western (and many others) culture to be
a potentially useful way to tap into archetypicals understanding of
ourselves.

I also see that a great deal of horrific activity has been executed in
the name of various religions, but also suspect that those horrors were
not *caused* by religion so much as possibly "excused" by it.   I
suspect many of the folks involved in those "horrors" were both
malnourished in some way (even the "wealthy") as children and even
adults and quite possibly *suffered* their own "horrors" whilst growing
up (I've been watching GOT and might be conflating *that world* with our
own real metal-age feudal history.

- Steve

On 4/15/19 8:33 AM, glen∈ℂ wrote:
> On 4/14/19 7:06 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>>       11.  God; Goodnesss, Love energy, the Divine, a loving animating
>> intelligence, the Cosmic Muffin. You will worship and serve
>> something, so
>> like St. Bob said, you gotta choose.  You can play on our side, or Bill
>> Maher's and Franklin Graham's. 
> Would anyone care to explain the "our side" versus that of Bill Maher
> and Franklin Graham?  My guess is that she sees Bill Maher as a
> fundamentalist, too, albeit an atheist fundamentalist?  Or perhaps
> both Graham and Maher are Islamaphobes; so the "them" would be those
> who use religion to stoke fear?
>
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