I gave up rug for lent.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

85. Good idea, Warren. I'm glad this got kicked for this year.

The intellectual dishonesty of some of those people is stunning. But not surprising. Logic and reason do not easily, if ever, penetrate their skulls. You can't even pin them down about their beliefs they are so busy defending. They actually say "You can believe anything you want and be a Christian." That is utter bullshit and we all know it.

I say this as a secular humanist, Unitarian-Universalist identifying person reading lots of Buddhism for years and years. Raised as a casual Presbyterian, which was basically a social club for liberal, educated people. I am so glad that nobody threatened me with hell, or acted like literalist fundies, when I was growing up in one of the most educated types of Protestantism. I liked to sing in the choir and went to Sunday School to try to get dates with cute guys. Didn't work very well. I didn't really ask questions, I just used it as a social club.

It was in my senior year of college (1979) that I discovered UUs and found out where I belonged. I belonged in a church that accepted everybody, for real, and was full of atheists, agnostics, and questioners who liked to get together on Sunday morning without having to hear the destructive message and mass delusion of Christianity.

I attended and graduated from a small, prestigious Presbyterian college with a damn good liberal arts education, which included a couple of amazing religion courses. Courses that opened my mind tremendously because they were about sociology and anthropology of religion, not about doctrine or brainwashing the students in the proper denomination.

The professor, who I have mentioned many times before as a truly wonderful professor, is a Princeton Seminary graduate who is an expert at ancient languages, not to mention Latin and Greek. So he knows his history. The religion department at the school I went to no longer requires all students to take 6 hours of religion, but they do have a Division of Asian Studies now.

The only one of the Abrahamic religions I have any tolerance for is Reform Judaism, because they seem to be a lot more sensible and reality oriented than the others. And some cool cultural traditions, like being well educated and accomplishing a lot. It's okay to be a Jew and get angry and shake your fist at god, and even make a comedy routine out of it. And it's okay to not be a Jew that is attending shul regularly, but still treasure the cultural traditions. Twice I tried to convert to Reform and got rejected because the rich doctors on the board of trustees didn't like that I wasn't employed. I volunteered to do work around the shul for no pay. And it never occurred to the board that one of them might have given me a job. The rabbi was cool, but I knew I wasn't wanted there because of the snobby board, so I stopped going.

I used to enjoy going to a Mahayana Buddhist temple in the big city and listening to the monks and nuns giving lessons to the English speaking group.