Posts Made By: Christine Canelos Welsh

God is….

We have been taught to think of God as an entity that created us but remains separate from us, above us. Therefore we have come to think that, if we are created in God’s image, we are separate from the birds and insects and other mammals, *above* the rest of the world around us. We want to believe that the world was purposely created for us, so we ignore the fact that we are just one more beast that happened to arise and fill an ecological niche. Because of this we think we somehow own it or can control it. We’ve been fighting brutal wars over it ever since.

Over the centuries we have been evolving religions to back us up in the matter. But God does not write books, build churches, require rituals, or observe holy days. Those are human constructs, attempts to describe and relate to an “above us” God. When we say that God will judge us, we are really judging ourselves, and each other.

I was once told that if I wanted to see the creator, I needed to look no further than the creation. God is motion, gravity, all the laws of physics, and time. God is air to the birds, water to the fish, earth to the worms, and the fire in the core. God is in discovering order out of chaos, reason out of the illogical, and the gradual solving of the mysteries that have previously eluded us. God is in the questions we haven’t even thought to ask yet.

Sometimes I think the atheist is closer to God than the believer, because the atheist suspends all that his fellow human beings want him to believe about God. He seeks to understand the mechanisms of the universe by looking directly *at* the world around him and not *above* it. Yet he still marvels at how it all works. God is your relationship with the universe.

God, simply *is*. In the beginning God grew the heavens and the earth. Everything since then has been up to us.

Take good care, all.
Christine

Oh you guys.....we've been over this already haven't we? So what if Bush has trouble putting together a cohesive sentence. There have been MANY good leaders that were not necessarily good public speakers.

I don't happen to think Bush is one of them though.
;-]

My personal favorite (although I can't find it verbatim) is when Bush spoke before a large gathering of union reps and said that the problem with unemployment was that there were not enough jobs. I remember thinking, "who let this guy out without his speech writers?" What made it even more interesting to me was that he was receiving thunderous applause from a union group at the same time he wanted to prevent the employees of the new Homeland Security department from organizing. Go figure.

Is that a fish-eating grin on that baby, or what!
:-]
clc

Stunning! A National Geographic moment for sure - wow! Don't you love it when it all comes together like that?
Would you mind if I copied this for my wallpaper?
Regards,
Christine

I've been around, Bill, I've just been hanging out in the photography-related forums -- much nicer environment over there! A friend forwarded your comment to me so I thought I'd stop in and say hello.

P&R&P long ago lost its appeal for me. Have been sorry to see it degenerate into such a vituperous morass. It's become impossible to have a useful conversation there. It's a shame really, there used to be some really stimulating, challenging and useful discussions there. I miss it.

Better skies lately - YES! We've actually been doing a lot of observing out here, imagine that! Our club had a great public Mars watch with about 200 public viewers attending and the local community college observatory is reporting attendance in the thousands over the last two weeks - holy mackerel! A group of our club members also had the pleasure of an observing session at Yerkes Observatory - way cool! Other than that I've been working on the A.L. Herschel list whenever I get a chance to get away from Suburbia.

What have you been up to lately?
regards,
Christine

Cute shot, Kurt! My step-daughter likes it too. She wants to know if you have any pictures of armadillos!
Christine

Okay, help - I'm technologically impaired. How do I make the image smaller?

I did see that portion of the thread and no Mike C., I don't wonder about it at all - I took him at his word.

I find this a useful site, even if I don't post on the some of the other forums, I read them and try to learn from them. This is the one that happened to suck me in. I don't buy or sell equipment here because I try to be content with what I have. I also like to see things first before I shell out what little money I have to spend on this hobby.

Maybe that person is not OCD and doesn't come here on an hourly or daily or even weekly basis. Or just maybe he didn't come back because he didn't appreciate being grilled about his identity or how he came to post in this forum.

(Now, if he would have signed off "sempre fi" that would have been different!)

Poetry, ah yes....

What sparks this recent proclivity
Toward poetic creativity?
Can blame be assigned
to some planets aligned,
Or to meteor shower activity?

Off the top of my head I would guess that the advantage would be that an individual has a better chance of surviving if the tribe as a whole survives. Therefore you have to be fair with things like distribution of food, clothing, firewood, etc. among its members. Interesting to think about.

Maybe because it's "safe" to do so here. We are not face to face with each other, and if things get out of hand we are not about to come to fisticuffs over it. In spite of the sometimes underhanded trolling and overt insults, this is not truly "personal". Most of us will never actually meet and so we are faceless words across a screen.

Not so much angry, I don't think, just trying to be heard in a world that seems as if it could not care less about what we think. If someone reacts, at least someone is paying attention. So we flail away at the keys because it feels better than thinking that no one is listening at all.

Seen on a bumper sticker: If you are not angry, you are not paying attention.

Peace, yes.
Christine