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Long before there was discrimination against blacks, there was discrimination against white southerners. When large numbers of these country people moved north during World War II, they were aggressively excluded from neighborhoods, jobs, and homes - not because of their skin color, but their accents. ↗
All countries think that God is on their side in war. USA prays that God bless America in the war, but God is not the exclusive property of a certain country, God do not belong to a certain country. The truth is that God is the inner light of every living being, which is why the scriptures of all religions says that it is wrong to kill. The inner being of all living beings is the door to God. We are all children of God. People are very tired of wars and it is time to end the eternal wars. But power maniacs who want to dominate the world, say that God is on their side against the heathens, the godless people, so that the soldiers feel that they are justified in killing people. In USA, many solidiers from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are now commiting suicide when they come home, because they can not handle their feelings about what they have been forced to do during the war. I remember when I applied for community service as an alternative to military service when I was 15 years old. To assess my right to alternative community service instead of military service, a military psychologist travelled to my birth town in the north of Sweden and checked into a suite at the most luxurious hotel in the town. During a three hour tough interview and psychological investigation, the military psychologist made an assessment of my right for the alternative service. During this three hour psychological investigation, I presented God as a light, which is the essence of every human being. God is the consciousness in all living beings, and therefore I can not engage in a training which means to learn to kill people. This military psychologist was very tough during this three hour interview, but in the end he loved me. In the conclusion of his psychologist assessment, he wrote that the “candidate is a young man, who presented his arguments with methodical calm” - and then he recommended the alternative community service instead of military service. ↗
I let the front door slam shut behind me and the fly screen rattle. It was as if each door was kicking me out of the old life I'd lived in that house. I was being thrown out into the world, new. The broken, leaning gate creaked open, let me out, and I gently placed it shut. I was gone, and from down the street, maybe fifty yards away, I looked back for a second at the house where I lived. It wasn't the same any more. It never would be. I kept walking. ↗
#into-the-world #leave-home #old-life #slam-shut #thrown-out
The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this: Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes. The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again: Oh, boy–they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch _that_ time! And that thought had a brother: “There are right people to lynch.” Who? People not well connected. So it goes. The visitor from outer space made a gift to the Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels. So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn’t possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was. And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections. ↗
He set his hand over her lips, stopping her words. “I sent you away once.” His fingers trailed down her cheek. “There are some things that cannot be made right by simple apology. It’s not simply marriage I intend. It’s a promise. I will never be without you again.” Her heart thudded wildly in her chest. “I was hoping I could avoid the bit in the proposal where I lay out all the advantages of the match to you. There aren’t nearly enough of them. The truth is simply this: you can find a better man than I. God knows you wouldn’t have to look very hard. But I don’t believe you can find one who loves you more.” She sucked in her breath. “Love will never magically make me whole. It won’t heal old wounds. But when I’m around you, I do not feel as if I must be alone. I smile when you’re in the room and I laugh when you’re happy. I feel as if I’ve come home to you.” He slid his fingers up her arm, around her back. “There isn’t one part of me that you’ve flinched from. I don’t know why you’d marry me, but I know why I’m desperate for you. Nobody else on earth would bring me to myself as you have. ↗
#home
The journey of a thousands suns begins today. Some may question whether the journey is worth the sacrifice and danger. To them I say that no sacrifice is too dear and no danger too great to ensure the very survival of our human species. What will we find when we arrive at our new homes? That's an open question. For a century, deep-space probes have reported alien lifeforms, but thus far none of which we recognize as intelligent beings. Are we the only biological intelligence in the universe? Perhaps our definition of intelligence is too narrow, too specio-centric. For, are not trees intelligent, who know to shed their leaves at the end of summer? Are not turtles intelligent, who know when to bury themselves in mud under ice? Is not all life intelligent, that knows how to pass its vital essence to new generations? Because half of intelligence resides in the body, be it plant or animal. I now commend these brave colonists to the galaxy, to join their minds and bodies to the community of living beings they will encounter there, and to establish our rightful place among the stars. ↗
#colonization #extra-terrestrial-life #generation-ships #humanity #singularity
Reading Chip's college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England winters can be very cold. The curtains he'd bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric with a backing of foam rubber. They were heavy and bulky and stiff. "You'll appreciate these on a cold night," he told Chip. "You'll be surprised how much they cut down drafts." But Chip's freshman roommate was a prep-school product named Roan McCorkle who would soon be leaving thumbprints, in what appeared to be Vaseline, on the fifth-grade photo of Denise. Roan laughed at the curtains and Chip laughed, too. He put them back in the box and stowed the box in the basement of the dorm and let it gather mold there for the next four years. He had nothing against the curtains personally. They were simply curtains and they wanted no more than what any curtains wanted - to hang well, to exclude light to the best of their ability, to be neither too small nor too large for the window that it was their task in life to cover; to be pulled this way in the evening and that way in the morning; to stir in the breezes that came before rain on a summer night; to be much used and little noticed. There were numberless hospitals and retirement homes and budget motels, not just in the Midwest but in the East as well, where these particularly brown rubber-backed curtains could have had a long and useful life. It wasn't their fault that they didn't belong in a dorm room. They'd betrayed no urge to rise above their station; their material and patterning contained not a hint of unseemly social ambition. They were what they were. If anything, when he finally dug them out of the eve of graduation, their virginal pinkish folds turned out to be rather less plasticized and homely and Sears-like than he remembered. They were nowhere near as shameful as he'd thought. ↗
