Friends of Bear Mailbox

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Wed, 22 Aug 2001 12:00:00 GMT
Received from a friend via email:

The Modern Humorist - 1040 Schedule W - What your tax form will actually look like under GW's new tax plan. Hehe. [brianf]

John Bergstrom's Attack Cartoons - Spine - Cartoon commentary on GW's stem-cell decision. Hohohohohohohohoho.

Friends of Bear Mailbox contains photos of some wooden statues that appeared over last weekend right next to the Bear Mailbox that I photographed a while back. There are three statues, a bear, an eagle, and an Indian holding an eagle on his raised hand. The best two photos are below. Click on either for the full 1024x1280 pixel image scaled down by the HTML to 512x640. Click on that image for the full-size version.

ghjm at kuro5hin - What religion for geeks? - geeks have a hard time with faith. Which religion should they follow? I posted the following: [kuro5hin]

Sprituality more rational than religion

I am one of the geeks to whom you refer, a hyper-rational sort.

I have never been able to believe that life could be explained as simply a chemical reaction. There is no rational reason for my belief, I just couldn't believe it. I was brought up in a Presbyterian church. I went to church because I liked to sing in the choir. I was willing to wait through the sermon because I got to sing afterwards. I got nothing else out of attendance at church.

At the end of my drug days (1982), I discovered meditation. Washing dishes was a meditation for me. Lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling when I couldn't sleep after a night of freebase (now called crack) was also a meditation. Then I found a spiritual teacher and started meditating consciously every day. I'm no longer doing that practice. Now I practice remembrance (zikr) on every breath. It seems to work for me.

I can't tell you what will work for you, but the difference between spirituality and religion is that religion asks you to believe, to have faith, whereas spirituality asks you to do and observe, to learn from experience. Faith works for some. Experience works for others. I don't believe anything I haven't personally experienced (though I don't always behave that way). Everything else is somebody else's story, a piece of fiction. The universe is vastly huger than our western scientific model of it. The human bodymind is a wonderful instrument for learning about that universe, once you learn to play.

I have personal experience with the Shri Ram Chandra Mission (srcm.org) and Sufi Order International (sufiorder.org). Both have served me well. Both also have their problems, but you solve this by taking from them what works for you and ignoring the rest. There are myriad other groups offering good spiritual teaching, or you can just sit in your room. Sincerely ask for what you want, look for it always and everywhere, and it will come.

God is really the only game in town, though you don't have to use that name nor do you have to believe in anything.

P.S. Lest you think I'm holier than thou, I run a political weblog where I often talk about killing fascists. A bit of therapy for me, I suppose. Lots of anger to work out here.

I updated BlogMax to make it work in XEmacs 21.4 on Windoze.

Washington Post - Jailed Under a Bad Law BugMeNot - The Post editorializes about the DMCA. They think that Mr. Sklyarov was unjustly arrested. They're right of course. Hopefully some of the congress critters are reading. Kuro5hin discussion here. [kuro5hin]

Newsforge - EFF: Russian programmer to appear in California court: Dmitry Sklyarov will appear tomorrow in federal court in San Jose. Protests are planned. Directions in the article. [newsforge]

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