Male behavior

 The categories of male behavior

NOTE: These categories can be fluid

Good man

Nice guy

Semi-asshole

Asshole

Dumb ass

Dickhead

Prick

Flaming asshole

Major league prick

Thug

Brute

 

From: 100 Lives (Condensed)

Face it. She was born trailer trash. Kitsch city. No kind of learning ever interested her. From high school on she dressed like a prostitute, but was really quite selective in who she went to bed with. If it was shiny, red, yellow or soft to the touch, it was part of her wardrobe. Shoes were her passion, a passion she supported by her job as a welder. She aged gracefully, and assiduously avoided acquiring any taste. She died on her own terms in her own home. Shortly before she died, she allowed St. Vincent de Paul to pillage her house for anything they could use.

Yearning

 At the moment that homo sapiens buried their dead in graves, filling them with signifiers of life, human beings evidenced a yearning for the infinite, for something beyond life, for God.

The fundamental issue is not a belief in God or not, but whether and how we acknowledge and respond to this yearning in our lives.

Answer me this

 

Harry and Meghan

 

Visual

 We most deeply appreciate any of the arts when we have an understanding of the language(s) that underlies their creation. We think of ourselves as primarily a culture of the word and build our educational system on then. In fact, we are also a culture of the image. We are swimming in them daily.

Since American education is so thin on teaching the visual language, many people have a relatively superficial appreciation for visual art. They don’t ask more of it than that it be pleasant decoration. As a result, the visual world is not explored as a source of aesthetic richness or complex storytelling, but a means of seduction for commercial ends.

God is beyond us

 God is beyond us. The most anyone can say is that they know the extent of the God they have worked to understand through prayer, effort, study and life experience. In this way each of us carries a piece of God to rely on. The complete understanding of God can only happen beyond human life.

The search for God by humans has resulted, like all human endeavors, in a rich and diverse collection of God images. At this point in human history will still live with the idea of a whole bunch of gods fighting it out in heaven for supremacy. So that’s how we let it play out on earth.

Why don’t we ask ourselves what all these gods might have in common? What does the god beyond all our humanly created gods want for us? Expect of us? Why would god not embrace the richness, beauty and strangeness of all human creation? What could we possibly lose by loving god through all the God personas we have created.

No God who loves humanity should be the source of hate and prejudice. Every God should calm the yearning that calls us to stretch our humanness beyond itself to  meeting with God. Every culture’s authentic search for god has wisdom for us.