Tales of Ordinary Madness

My good friend Sunil asked me the other day why I was so harsh on religion. If I remember the timing correctly he was responding primarliy to the “Crazy vs Religious” cartoon I posted below. Sam Harris summed it up for me very well in the video below, but I’d like to paraphrase. If I came to you and insisted that there was inside of me a giant invisible machine powered by invisible winged monkeys that generated the very energy that kept all of life going, you would dismiss me a crazy person. This is a totally rational response to what I have claimed. Unless I can provide some shred of evidence, I should be dismissed as a kook. However, religion is given a pass when it comes to rational thought. Challenge religion to produce any evidence of its claims and suddenly you are guilty of oppression and religious intolerance. Claiming that a man walked on water, or rose from the dead, or flew off into the sky on a winged horse, or parted the sea is no less crazy than my winged monkeys whodrive the giant love engine. As I’ve said before, how can we as an rational animal be expected to advance, when we insist on bringing the boogey man from the past along with us.

As long as religion continues to attempt to change laws or prevent archaic laws from being changed (like preventing two consenting adults from legally marrying), I will speak harshly of religion. As long as religion keeps attmepting to prevent birth control from being taught in schools or preventing condoms from being distributed to a contintent whose population is being decimated by AIDs, I will continue to speak harshly of religion.

I totally want to hang out with Satan.

I could watch it over and over and over again

So, I’m not sure that I totally understand the usefulness of “micro-blogging”, but given the immense amount of interest around it, I’ve decided to give it a try. I know twitter is the most popular site right now, but I refuse to use it for several reasons. Mainly because the service seems to be down more than it is up, but also because once your content is put into twitter, it’s theirs. They have been given a ton of venture capital money and the only way they can make money is with YOUR content.

Identi.ca is different. Identi.ca is based upon an Open Source application called laconica licensed under the GNU AGPL. You control and own all your content. Don’t like Identi.ca? Fine, grab your data and set-up your own Laconica server.

We’ll see how my micro-blogging experience goes. Right now Identi.ca is still rough around the edges and they are still in the process of adding some features that Twitter has had for a while.

If you’d like to see my Identi.ca feed, you can see it here: http://identi.ca/cteodorski/all

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

This video moved me in a way I can’t explain. It’s so easy to be us versus them, but so easy to forget it when you see people together sharing the same silly experience.

I used to practice with my Sanghavery regularly. I would regularly attend Tuesday night sittings and wouldn’t miss an opportunity to attend the twice yearly retreats.

And then something happened….

Part of what happened was the Sangha moved to a new home. The home they found puts them in a part of town that is far from convenient for me, it’s very difficult for me to get from work to sitting in a reasonable time, especially if I have any thoughts of eating dinner beforehand.

Part of what happened was that I allowed myself to get too busy. I’ve started back to school, working on my Masters, I’ve become a father, and we bought a house — all within the last year. Balancing this all with a job that often requires more than 40 hours a week is difficult.

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the practice and how much I feel I benefited from it. I’ve also been reading “The Art of Power by Thich Nhat Hahn” which has me longing again for the practice and for my Sangha.

Unfortunately, my schedule in the near future doesn’t look like it will allow.

What is a busy Buddhist to do?