Of Avatar and Catholics... and Other Christian Arrogance

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

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As I said here,  I've been, over the past couple of weeks, noting incidents of jaw-dropping arrogance, in the name of Christianity. Having been raised in the Episcopal Church, with its emphasis on ecumenicism and tolerance, I always find this kind of thing rather jarring. So, as promised, here's a quick round-up. Sadly, I think this could be a regular feature.

The Vatican vs. Avatar:

The Vatican has weighed in on mega-blockbuster "Avatar" and given it the thumbs down. Some of the criticism is fair. The story is a little "simplistic." It is a James Cameron vehicle, after all, so it's somewhat formulaic. Anyone who expected otherwise from "Avatar" would be disappointed. It is still wildly entertaining and cinematically spectacular. (See it in Imax 3D, if you can. You won't regret it.)

Of course the chief criticisms from the Vatican newspaper and radio are ideological, not artistic.

Pat Robertson on Haiti's Pact with the Devil

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

I've been cataloging a number of recent, arrogant, public pronouncements, offered in the name of Christianity. More to come on that, but Pat Robertson's latest hateful outburst requires a stand alone post.

In the aftermath of this horrific tragedy in Haiti, one which may have caused as many as 100,000 deaths, Pat Robertson is, once again, blaming the victims, and citing their sinful nature. What's the problem in Haiti? A pact with the devil, according to Robertson. Citing no source for the information -- perhaps God has been bending his ear again -- he announces that Haiti turned to Satan, in hopes of ending the tyranny of French Imperialsm. He's not so certain about what French leader was oppressing the Haitians, but he's quite certain about the whole deal with the devil thing.

"Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it," he said on Christian Broadcasting Network's "The 700 Club." "They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a deal."

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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

Shamanism and Autism

The Horse Boy is both a book and a movie about Rupert, Kristin, and Rowan Isaacson's ride across Mongolia in search of traditional shamanic healing for Rowan and his autism. The story is exquisite and heart-breakingly beautiful. Rupert explains, "As a family we did something crazy. We ended up going half way across the world in search of a miracle." And they found one. Rowan is still autistic and he did get healed of three of the worst presentations of his symptoms. This week, shaman and host, Christina Pratt, draws on her experience with autistic children and Rowan's story to explore what this tells us about the relationship between shamanism and autism. It does not tell us that horses and Mongolian shamans cure autism. But it does show us that a true relationship between a child and his/her personal power animal, the parent's willingness to heal themselves, and aspects of shamanic healing together can give parents real hope and new options for healing.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010 at 2PM Pacific

http://www.modavox.com/7thWaveNetwork

All episodes are now available in the iTunes Podcast Library.

Review: Battlestar Galactica -- The Plan

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

The following review contains spoilers. Previous posts on the new "Battlestar Galactica" can be found here.

The makers of the makers fall before the child.
Accessing defense system.
Handshake. Handshake. Second level clear.
(It's begun.)
Accepting scan.
Love outlasts death.
(Been a long time coming.)
Apotheosis was the beginning before the beginning.
Devices on alert. Observe the procedures of a general alert.
The base and the pinnacle.
The flower inside the fruit that is both its parent and its child.
Jump.

~ The Hybrid

"The center holds. The falcon hears the falconer," intones the hybrid, as she coordinates the attack that would annihilate the 12 colonies of Kobol. But, of course, the center does not hold, and the plan begins to unravel almost immediately.

Doctor Who and Grandmother Spider

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

(The following is my attempt to shamelessly ape the stylings of Christopher Knowles. It is my first such attempt. Developing...)

An interesting article on how the forming Earth avoided falling into the sun caught my eye this morning. I read it with avid interest to see if, perhaps, it pointed to a giant arachnid queen organizing the particles of the developing planet, a la Doctor Who's "The Runaway Bride" (Season 3, Episode 0).

I fully admit to having been stuck to my leather couch during the two day Doctor Who marathon on BBC America -- the lead in to David Tennant's swan song.  It kept sending my husband screaming from the living room, so I recorded a few to watch later. I was that engrossed by it. Something to do with the paucity of new Doctor Who content this year, although the specials have been quite special.

Zecharia Sitchin: Where Creationism and Evolution Collide

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

There's a little write-up on Zecharia Sitchin in the New York Times metro section the other day. It definitely treats him like a curiosity, but there's no such thing as bad publicity, I guess.

In Mr. Sitchin’s Upper West Side kitchen, evolution and creationism collide. He is an apparently sane, sharp, University of London-educated 89-year-old who has spent his life arguing that people evolved with a little genetic intervention from ancient astronauts who came to Earth and needed laborers to mine gold to bring back to Nibiru, a planet we have yet to recognize.

Outlandish, yes, but also somehow intriguing from this cute, distinguished old man whom you may have seen shuffling slowly down Broadway with his cane, and thought, “Is Art Carney still alive?”

. . .

“Well, you could start by calling me the most controversial 89-year-old man in New York,” Mr. Sitchin says. “Or you could just say I write books. I understand you’ve got to have an opening sentence, but describing my theories in a sentence, or even something like a newspaper article, is impossible. It will make me look silly.”

Mr. Sitchin has been called silly before — by scientists, historians and archaeologists who dismiss his theories as pseudoscience and fault their underpinnings: his translations of ancient texts and his understanding of physics. And yet, he has a devoted following of readers.

His 13 books, with names like “Genesis Revisited” and “The Earth Chronicles,” have sold millions of copies and been translated into 25 languages. “And Albanian is coming,” he notes, spooning the Taster’s Choice into two mugs.

You get the idea. He's one of the many endearing, eccentric Manhattanites the city takes such pride in displaying.

The complete works of Zecharia Sitchin can be found in the bookstore.

Hollow Earth and Sonic Boom

Lately I have been noticing the odd synchronistic doubling that happens from time to time. Some people notice it with numbers, seeing double and triple digits repeatedly. That happens for me, too, but I also see the same words, expressions, or pictures pop up. I still haven’t figured out quite what this means. I think I am in a flow state, or where I should be, or it is a message of energy alignment, like breadcrumbs on a path guiding my attention so that I can find the way. I first noticed I had stepped into this kind of energy a few days ago when my family and I watched G-Force. One of the Guinea pigs was named Darwin. That same evening, Charles Darwin popped up in a novel I was reading and again while I was online.

Today I found a comment in my e-mail from a blog reader that was full of links to videos about a Crystal Child. Most likely, they found me based on a search, because I have written about having a Crystal Child. I began to open some of the links and discovered a series of videos featuring a young woman named Jessica Schab. The videos are in a series and the main topic is 2012, something of interest to almost everyone. I was curious to hear what she had to say, so I began listening. By the beginning of the second video, I began to get a bit restless and considered moving on (My, how high-speed information has jaded me – it takes something really good to keep me on any site past 10 minutes.) when the phrases “tip of the iceberg”, “sonic boom”, and “earth’s core” and “hollow earth” came up. The other day, for no reason I could think of, I remembered a time about 24 years ago, when my daughter’s father and I were walking around a park with our daughter in her stroller. We experienced what must have been the aftereffect of a sonic boom, although I can’t recall hearing any sound – just feeling and seeing a freight train of energy that moved through and past us quickly. I shared the memory with my daughter and it prompted me to do a search on sonic booms, where I learned what we had felt and seen is known as a boom carpet. Something inside me has always felt it was related somehow to UFO and ET experiences that began during that time period. In the last few days, my daughter and I had a discussion about the earth’s core and I had expressed the feeling that it is probably hollow and filled with people. And yesterday I posted “the tip of the iceberg” in my blog post. So, when all these repeated themselves, my spidey senses tingled and I decided to listen further. I got to the end of the fourth in a series of videos and couldn’t find the next, so I followed the link on YouTube to Jessica’s website, which has me sidetracked now from watching more video content while I explore her site a bit. Then I decided to type up this post before my attention wanders further. Here’s Jessica Schab’s site – enjoy!

Thank you to Congreso de Ciencia y Espíritu for sharing the videos of Jessica Schab.

Originally posted to Dunnea.net

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New WINGS Update from Karen Bishop

Creating the New Reality...Completing Step One

Our foundations may also be beginning to take shape. Things in our lives may be experiencing a re-structuring in order that they now fit us in every way, or at least, support the new endeavors and new “us” that is now emerging. Backing out occurred so that we could “come back” to our true and authentic selves. Because of this, we may experience a time when we simply do not wish to connect to anyone, as we need to be free and clear, in order to experience our true selves, and anchor in to that energy, before we begin to connect to others. Being in the presence of many others at the same time can thus feel like a great irritation, like we are swatting at flies, or at best, make us unusually irritable.

We are in a very New World now. We left the old world energetically in September of 2009, and as the weeks progressed, the entire planet split off and moved somewhere else in order to begin again. “But things still look the same to me!” you may be thinking. We had to start somewhere. We could not start with nothing, as that space of nothingness can be very uncomfortable for many, as some of us well know. So then, we held the “illusion” of the old reality in our conscious minds. What we remember and still hold in our minds, is what we will see. This is how energy works. We are basically in some kind of new reality “overlay” right now. A sort of duplicate of the Old World while we begin to create the New World. Nothing can exist unless we think we see it. I wrote a lot about this in my first books, and it is so nice to finally be back to that energetic space once again as a planet. And when we hold the Old World in our conscious minds, it will not only continue to exist, but will continue to create itself with where it is.

So then, what is happening is that we are keeping the Old World alive right here, while we begin the process of creating the New World. It is quite amazing to see how this process will unfold. First, we begin creating within ourselves. We restore ourselves to our true and authentic selves, or rather, who we came to be when we were born into a physical form this time around. The first phase of the ascension process spun off as much density as possible within us, so that our true and authentic selves, or what I commonly refer to as our “gold nuggets,” are what remained. And even so, we may have found that we are still uncovering aspects of ourselves which are out of balance with the New World. It seems to never end… aye!

In case you missed Bishop's New Year's update, being that it was New Year's Day and all, it can be found here.

Tip of the Greed Iceberg

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This morning I booted up the computer and headed to Yahoo to check an email account. The first thing I saw was this article about destroyed merchandise in trash bags a young woman named Cynthia Magnus discovered in Manhattan behind H&M store and a Walmart on 35th street. The story made the New York Times.

Recently, during a family shopping trip to our nearest Walmart, I looked at the stores we were passing – Target, KMart, Old Navy – all touting deep after-Christmas discounts, and thought of all the unused, unsold clothes, shoes, etc. still sitting on shelves and racks. I said to my daughter, “I wonder what happens to all that unsold stuff?” To which she replied, “Big Lots.” I said, “No, Big Lots doesn’t buy up all that stuff. Maybe some of it gets sold in bulk to third world countries. I hope so.” I then recalled the trashed merchandise I had seen in my own time. Slashed shoes in the dumpster behind the Fayva Shoe Store in Riverhead, New York. Books with their front covers torn off in dumpsters behind book stores. For all I know, this practice continues, because I still see notices in some paperbacks informing me that the book may be considered “stolen” if I purchased it without its cover. The book sellers remove the covers and return them for a credit when unsold and then trash the rest of the book. And I personally worked for a company that followed the same trashing practice. In the 1990s I worked for Waldbaum’s Supermarkets on Long Island and saw massive quantities of perfectly good food sent down the garbage chute, including an entire refrigerated truckload of turkeys after one Thanksgiving. When I asked the management why all this food had to be thrown away rather than donated to people, I was told it was due to insurance regulations. Tropical and decorative plants from the produce and floral departments were also trashed. Now, concern over donating some outdated food that might be spoiled and sicken someone, leading to a lawsuit has some validity; however, where do tropical and decorative plants figure into that equation? Often, I attempted to take home the plants and despite the fact that they were being tossed into the trash, I was repeatedly told I could not take home the trash plants!

Graham Hancock: Underworld

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

Hat tip to documentaries 2 be seen and to Graham Hancock, who has been busily scouring the web for available content related to his body of work, and posting links on Facebook. Many of them I've found and posted previously. Some not and the following is a new find. It's the documentary of Underworld on google video. The sound quality is not that great, but it's still very worth viewing. (Underworld, the book, is available in the bookstore.)

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"Why Shamanism Now?" with Christina Pratt

The Power of Dance

"The difficulties we face can motivate our greatest growth and healing," says our guest Marsha Scarbrough, author of Medicine Dance: One woman's healing journey into the world of Native American sweatlodges, drumming meditations and dance fasts. "But you have to follow whatever healing path inspires you, no matter how crazy!" This week Marsha will share what she has learned about the power of dance to heal from her work with Native American teacher, Beautiful Painted Arrow/Joseph Rael and Ayo Adeyemi Nigerian master drummer/ Yoruba ceremonial leader. In indigenous cultures, dance is not a performance. It's a meditation for the dancer. The movement itself is prayer. Dance and rhythm are the means by which shamans can repaired or restored vibration. Since we are actually vibration rhythm, dance, and ritual can be used to heal us. The possibilities to create global and personal healing are endless when you have a group trance with positive intention, rhythm, and the power of dance.

This Week's Guest:
Marsha Scarbrough

Marsha Scarbrough's is the author of Medicine Dance: One woman's healing journey into the world of Native American sweatlodges, drumming meditations and dance fasts. Along the way, Marsha traveled with Buddhist teacher Joan Halifax, danced with movement guru Gabrielle Roth, earned a brown belt in karate from martial arts legend Tak Kubota, participated in healing ceremonies with Native American mystic Beautiful Painted Arrow/ Joseph Rael and produced workshops for Nigerian master drummer/ Yoruba ceremonial leader Ayo Adeyemi. Marsha and her book can be found on her website: www.medicinedancebook.com.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010 at 2PM Pacific

http://www.modavox.com/7thWaveNetwork

All episodes are now available in the iTunes Podcast Library.