#beginning is addictive because it is simple "there is this evolution of conciousness going on...bla bla bla"********* *---passing off "me first" as spiritual evolution "when it comes to relationships, we are so demanding that we're making them nearly impossible"" "I talked to the preast about this for a long time"...so we can be short on the important detais in this book. 1. progressive discovery 2. detail skipping devices like "I talked to the priest about this for a long time" and mention bits from the ?????? Maybe introduce the ennegram. it has cool roots like the "manuscript" and is taught by Catholic priests
posted by Scott Pugh 7/9/2000 12:24:23 PM
Horoscope Take off your rose-colored glasses as soon as you can. Focus on work issues and cooperative ventures that will bring real and concrete rewards. Although you want to be kind, nice, and polite to all, you may have to cut away some dead wood. Go up and around obstacles that will impede your progress. You can't afford any more delays. Find a nice way to reward people for past efforts on your behalf. ******************** everyone dragged into the quest are from flakey backgrounds "I worked with troubled teens" "I work at a mystical book store" "i play dungeons and dragons" What a crewe! Author's Note For half a century now, a new conciousness has been entering the human world... America's increasing apathy has caused no one to show up for anything. Low voter turnout. Fewer at sunday school, no casual visits... http://salon.com/books/feature/2000/07/07/bowling/index.html fewer letters to the editors and members of Congress. This is no time for low union membership. Cubicles. Selfishness. . Since 1968, "civic engagements" of every sort have plunged by 20 to 40 percent across the American board, irrespective of race, creed, class, income or marital status. People are beginning to really suck. are less Masonic, less Jaycee and less in league with women voters. If formal religious worship has fallen only 10 percent, participation in the social life of the church or the synagogue, from Bible studies to potluck picnics, has dropped by a third since the '60s and a half since the '50s The figures are likewise down, by 10 to 20 percent in the past two decades, for fishing, hunting, camping, skiing, jogging, swimming, tennis, softball, football and volleyball. All the women playing sports (after Title IX) and all the children playing soccer (now that there are college scholarships), all the 12-steppers and all the New Age encounter groupies, don't make up for huge defections elsewhere in the culture. More than twice as many adults have dropped out of league bowling in the past 20 years than have ever been in all of the self-help programs combined, including Weight Watchers and Alcoholics Anonymous. While the gross numbers may be up for memberships in professional societies, the proportions are down, considering how many more professionals there are now. (For instance, the ratio of lawyers to the rest of us has doubled since 1970, maybe because the rest of us no longer trust anybody unless we have a legal contract plus our personal pit bull. But the American Bar Association's "market share" of this excess fell a third in the same three decades.) The picture's even bleaker if we look for members who do more than merely pay their dues. And don't tell me that you're a card-carrying member of the ACLU, the Children's Defense Fund, Greenpeace and Amnesty International. So am I. And neither of us has gone to a single meeting of any of these organizations. Instead, we've written a check for a lobbying group with a professional staff in Washington or New York. We could be living right next door to each other and not know that we are "members" of the same interest group. We are, instead, "consumers" of a direct-mail cause. In other words, like a bunch of hippies, we are dropping out. Unless, that is, we happen to have been born between 1910 and 1940 -- in which case we belong to Putnam's "long civic generation" and can be counted on to do a lot more good than those narcissistic baby boomers, who, when they aren't pushing money through their modems, are probably watching soft porn on cable television. When handing out blame for our antisocial funk, Putnam assigns the biggest chunk to self-involved boomers, the next biggest to time-stealing television and smaller percentiles to mobility and urban sprawl (relocation, the lonely commute), financial anxiety (fear of falling, downsized syndrome), workplace blues (what we used to call the alienation of labor), working mothers (there goes the PTA) and a general agnosticism or paranoia about reality itself. He sees little evidence that the behavior of government, the decline of the traditional family or the advent of rap music and the Internet has much to do with it. He should at least have mentioned the designated hitter in American League baseball. Medical studies suggest it's healthier to get out of the house: "As a rough rule of thumb," Putnam tells us, "if you belong to no groups but decide to join one, you cut your risk of dying over the next year in half. If you smoke and belong to no groups, it's a tossup statistically whether you should stop smoking or start joining." http://www.salon.com/books/feature/1998/09/cov_21feature2.html The L.A. that aspired to be a "Caucasian triumph" over nature, organized labor and lesser races can't be blamed on something as anonymous as sprawl. It was the conscious product of federal housing policy based on home ownership, suburban segregation and the subsidized construction of working-class houses like mine. http://www.losingmyreligion.com/ Places highest in religious affilations are also hightest in murder. Praise the Lord, Pass the Ammo! In light of all the school shootings these days, are Christian values the answer? Within the 50 states, there is no evidence that a God-fearing populace equals a law-abiding populace. The Bible Belt has more than its share of both praying and killing. Louisiana has the highest churchgoing rate in the country, but its murder rate is more than twice the national average. The same pattern generally holds in the rest of the South. Tom DeLay's Bible-toting state of Texas has a murder rate triple that of Massachusetts, which is "ungodly" enough to have elected two openly gay members of Congress. New York, the very symbol of godless depravity, is perfectly average when it comes to extralegal slaughter. In Washington state, where Sunday morning slugabeds are more common than anywhere else in America, murder is 38 percent less common. House Republicans have also failed to notice that the school shootings have not occurred in hotbeds of secular humanism -- say, Berkeley, Calif.; Cambridge, Mass; or New York City -- but in towns that Norman Rockwell and James Dobson would be proud to call home. Pearl, Miss.; West Paducah, Ky.; Jonesboro, Ark.; Edinboro, Pa.; and Springfield, Ore., are not exactly Madalyn Murray O'Hair country. Littleton was fertile ground for evangelical churches. The United States is the most religious of all the industrialized nations. Forty-four percent of Americans attend church once a week, compared with 27 percent in Britain, 21 percent in France, 16 percent in Australia, and 4 percent in Sweden. Yet violent crime is not less common in the United States -- it's more common. The murder rate here is six times higher than the rate in Britain, seven times higher than in France, five times higher than in Australia, and five times higher than in Sweden. Japan, where Christianity has almost no adherents, has less violent crime than almost any country. There are a few advanced nations that have high rates of church attendance and low rates of violent crime -- Ireland, Italy, and Belgium -- but they're the exceptions. Within the 50 states, there is no evidence that a God-fearing populace equals a law-abiding populace. The Bible Belt has more than its share of both praying and killing. Louisiana has the highest churchgoing rate in the country, but its murder rate is more than twice the national average. The same pattern generally holds in the rest of the South. Tom DeLay's Bible-toting state of Texas has a murder rate triple that of Massachusetts, which is "ungodly" enough to have elected two openly gay members of Congress. New York, the very symbol of godless depravity, is perfectly average when it comes to extralegal slaughter. In Washington state, where Sunday morning slugabeds are more common than anywhere else in America, murder is 38 percent less common. House Republicans have also failed to notice that the school shootings have not occurred in hotbeds of secular humanism -- say, Berkeley, Calif.; Cambridge, Mass; or New York City -- but in towns that Norman Rockwell and James Dobson would be proud to call home. Pearl, Miss.; West Paducah, Ky.; Jonesboro, Ark.; Edinboro, Pa.; and Springfield, Ore., are not exactly Madalyn Murray O'Hair country. Littleton was fertile ground for evangelical churches. If there is any apparent correlation between the prevalence of Christian devotion and law-abiding conduct, it's the opposite of the one claimed by Republicans: Religion and violence seem to go hand in hand. That doesn't mean faith actually causes murder. But it does suggest that when Republicans contemplate the Ten Commandments, they should pay more attention to the ninth, which prohibits false witness. ... Praise the Lord, Pass the Ammo by Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune
posted by Scott Pugh 7/9/2000 9:29:41 AM
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posted by Scott Pugh 6/17/2000 7:41:54 PM
fuck you Nick
posted by Scott Pugh 6/16/2000 9:53:40 PM