Workplace Musings: The Million Dollar Question
(Michael posted Feline Friday this week, it is a video that he took with our camera. We have joined the legions of YouTube.)
Every Thursday morning I get up at 5:30 and get ready for work, which starts at 7:00. I get off work at closing time, which is between 19:30 and 20:00. (My usual shift is 15:00 until closing.) I don’t really mind though, if I work a 13-hour Thursday I get Friday off, which gives me a three day weekend. Besides that it is for a good thing. My co-worker’s mom has ovarian cancer and therefore has chemo every Thursday, naturally she wants to be there for her mother, so I take her shift.
I normally waste spend my time reading or typing up recipes (I recently got a nifty if somewhat buggy program to digitalize my favorite recipe.) It is nice to be able to bring my laptop to work, all the time before afternoon rush hour in a parking garage is excruciatingly slow (all 10-hours of it.) Anyhow, I thought it would be a nice change to do the random stream of consciousness thing throughout today. (ie: type up whatever comes to mind and then proof-read a dozen times.) I am not exactly sure why this seems like a good idea but here goes…
I received a million dollar bill “for my salvation” today. It is actually quite clever. Other then being on standard printer paper and for a million dollars, it looks like real money. But if you flip it over:
See all the little text around the back? Just in case you cannot read it, it says:
The million dollar question: Will you go to Heaven? Here’s a quick test. Have you ever told a lie, stolen anything, or used God’s name in vain? Jesus said: “Whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Will you be guilty on Judgment Day? If you have done those things, God sees you as a lying, thieving, blasphemous, adulterous-at-heart. The Bible warns that if you are guilty you will go to Hell. That’s not God’s will. He sent His Son to suffer and die on the cross for you. Jesus took your punishment upon Himself: “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” Then He rose from the dead and defeated death. Please, repent (turn from sin) today and trust in Jesus, and God will grant you everlasting life. Then read your Bible daily and obey it. www.livingwaters.com
Spreading the Christian goodwill and cheer I assume? I wonder if I can take this bill with me to the Pearly Gates and bribe Peter… It is clever though, I must give them that, even if it is “for my salvation” as the lady said. The signatures say things like “Department of Eternal Affairs” and such under them and the scales stamp on the front say “Thou shall not stray” in itty bitty letters. I love the details. I wonder why they choose Cleveland for the bill, was he a bible thumper as well? I am quite amused.
Still I would be lying if I said it didn’t bother me at least a little bit. Part of me thinks, what gives people the right to think they know what is best for me? Especially when you do not even know me? If I would have known what the purpose of the bill was, I would have said I was not interested in their soliciting. Of course I suddenly understand the lady’s horrified expression when I said (jokingly) “I wonder if this will work in the vending machine!” Hehe. Then apart of me forgives them and that is the part that makes me want to shower them with love, no matter their opinion of me.
This bill as innocent as it might seem makes me realize why so many non-Christians I know are scared of Christians. The vocal minority of Christians tell us constantly how we are going to Hell if we do not worship their God. Sometimes it almost feels like we do not live in a country with separation between church and state. Of course we do, and that is why I can wear my pentacle in public without fear of being physically harmed. (Honesty time though: I still hide it for job interviews. I could not prove discrimination until after I was hired so it is better safe then sorry in conservative Spokane.)
I do not believe preaching through fear is an effect conversion method. Sure most people will say whatever you want them to hear if you scare them enough, but they will not believe it in their hearts. Is fire and brimstone truly less frightening then love? Isn’t Jesus all about love rather then turning you into Satan’s barbecue?
I am not saying Christianity is wrong by any stretch of the imagination. Whatever works for you is right for you. Everything is right and everything is wrong. (Did I ever mention I was a Discordian for awhile? F’nord!) We have to find what is right for ourselves, spirituality is a personal experience. Awesome if Christianity works for you (I seriously do mean that) it just does not for me at this point in my life.
Ah Christianity provokes so many lovely questions, don’t all dogmatic faiths though? Would you love to know it all? Now that is the million dollar question.
Personal I do not think even the “gods” know it all. Even Yahweh did not foresee Eve’s curiosity regarding the apple, nor the snake goading her on. He did not see Adam partake in it. Yahweh only realized what they had done upon seeing them clothed, he realized it through the power of reason; which is a phenomenal thing, but not all-powerful.
I use to have my own theory about the snake in the garden. What if God was the snake and He wanted Adam and Eve to be more like him (after all they were supposable made in his image, so wouldn’t he want them to reason things out?) Then kicked them out of the garden to learn? Maybe the bible has it wrong and Adam and Eve left because they sought knowledge. Of course if we are going to go down that road, we could start with Satan. It is said that greatest trick Satan ever pulled was convincing us he did not exist, but perhaps his greatest trick was convincing us he was God. Maybe God (who we currently see as Satan) wants us to be individuals, where as Satan (who we currently see as God) wants us to be sheep following him. It makes more sense to me that way. So much for my salvation.
For some reason this all reminds me of the Tarot. More specifically The World card. In a standard tarot deck, “The World” is the final card in the high arcana. It represents the end of a journey. I find it odd that this card was chosen to represent finality because to me, the world is only the beginning. If I ever understood everything about the world, (and I do not think anyone – no deity, no spirit, no man nor any woman does) I would then begin to look beyond it. I already do look beyond it! The universe is so vast, I cannot fathom how many new questions lay beyond every answer. And then there must be something after the universe.
I love finding a new question almost as much as I enjoy discovering its multitude of answers. I appreciate the intensely interconnect journeys in between the answers. Connect the dots is a pretty accurate metaphor for the current phase of my life. I like wondering what the eventual big picture will look like. Will I ever have all the answers? I doubt it. Does that bother me? Not one bit. I would cease to exist from the sheer boredom of knowing all. Besides that, I do not think there is an absolute answers.
Returning to the bible tangent though; whoever wrote Adam and Eve’s story perfectly represented one of the most basic human desires - the want of knowledge. Adam and Eve had The World but gave it up for knowledge. In essence they gave it up for questions and the pursuit of answers.
Sometimes I wonder what Jesus was like as a child. Looking for a purpose in his life, trying to understand why he was chosen to be the son of a god. I doubt he leaped from the womb fully grown and full of knowledge and purpose, I think he had to find it just like the rest of us. He had to grow into his abilities and probably went through his own troubled years. The bible does not speak of his teenage years. Sometimes I wonder if he was a little hellion who ran across water to get away from his mother when she was about to punish him. Demi-god or not, everyone has a Mother.
At some point in time I remember having a debate with a man I use to know, his name was Crispii. We were talking about the Now and Jesus. The Now to Crispii was the mental state of being completely in the present moment without any reflection on the passed or future, I think athletes call it the Zone. Crispii believed it was the ideal state to be in and that when Jesus lived, he lived almost exclusively in the Now. I disagree.
Not that humans aren’t able to live only in the current moment, but I think it is unlikely. If we lived only in this moment we would never make progress. Accounts tell Jesus thought of the future and the salvation of his followers, that surely is not solely present tense, the Now. Though living only in the Now is an inviting concept.
At this exact moment in time, this Now, with my present knowledge as it is, I am “sure” there is an order in it all. Focusing only on the Now I can feel the energy, the flows, myself a seed in the river of the universe, chaos. Chaos is only order on a scale beyond our current perception, everything is interconnected. If I knew and understood all that was happening everywhere in this one instant (“all-knowing” I suppose) I believe I could predict the next instant. Leaving the Now, I wonder what my Now will be like in 10 years. In 10 minutes even.
I am (for the most part) content with leaving the huge universal chaos for reflection at a later time though. I am still trying to figure out the smaller chaos, what is the spectrum of human emotion? How did that sock ended up under the litter box? What is my purpose? My purpose probably isn’t rambling on about my pseudo-scientific theories of the universe on a Thursday afternoon. But meh, why not?
I wonder how much control the higher ascended beings (deities if you prefer) have in the affairs of anyone below them on the soul’s evolutionary ladder. Maybe these higher beings are just aspects of ourself’s waiting for the rest of our soul to catch up. Whatever they are I think they can help and guide but not have a physical hand it in. They do not create the miracles but they can incite us to create them ourselves? The man who pushes the child out of the street to avoid getting hit, the woman fights breast cancer, the volunteers who find the group of people lost on a mountain, those are all man made miracles.
Moments like that are what keep me on my meandering path and seeking the answers. So often in life we spend time looking everywhere but at ourselves. I do not want to pass myself by.
Oo lunch time.
I’m cutting this off here, at least for this blog post. This was the end of this particular thought pattern in my ramble musing. The next part of what I wrote is relatively unrelated. I do not expect anyone to have read this far but let me know if you have! I’m just nosy about people’s attention span to my musings.
The next thought pattern is vaguely related to the Wicca, books and my teenage years. It is much shorter Perhaps if someone is interested I will post it. I might anyways.
April 26th, 2007 at 10:49 pm
When I was in high school, some old men from some such religious group (I should note I went to a catholic high school) would stand outside of the front doors when class got out in the afternoon handing out “tickets to heaven.” They actually said “admit one” on them. Now to me this is more stupid than the “repent” people… because hey, I have a ticket to heaven, so I can go push old ladies into the street and rape and pillage everywhere I go…. and still get into heaven because I have this ticket! Yea I don’t have much respect for organized religion anymore.
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April 27th, 2007 at 1:20 am
Ah, remember that the World card can also be a beginning and birth, which would fit with the idea of Adam and Eve leaving the garden to seek knowledge in a way…btw, I enjoyed this post, and I often read your lovely and insightful ramblings…where mine are rather pointless, ha, ha. Peace to you in your contemplations. -Eala
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April 27th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
Some people got a lot of nerve on preaching to others. I don’t know why some people thinks if your not a christen that your an evil person. “Evil comes in all religions”
I even question my own beliefs because I think own my own.
I don’t believe in separate place (Heaven and Hell) when we die. But I believe there is one spirit world and types of spirits live there.
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April 27th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
I have one of those bills. It was stuffed in a book I was looking through in the new age aisle. I laughed when I found it and continued looking. A few books later I found another one. It seems someone had stuff them radomly in the books. At first I thought it was funny, but the more I thought about it the more I got pissed. I couldn’t help but wonder how someone would have felt if I had stuffed little pieces of paper in Bibles and Christian books that said things like Blessed Be, and The Goddess Loves You. Or Perhaps Born Again Pagan. I am sure they would be shocked. Oh well at lest I got a new book marker.
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April 28th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
[...] http://www.michaelandjaspenelle.com/archive/2007/04/26/workplace-musings-the-million-dollar-question Personal I do not think even the “gods” know it all. Even Yahweh did not foresee Eve’s curiosity regarding the apple, nor the snake goading her on. He did not see Adam partake in it. Yahweh only realized what they had done upon seeing them clothed, he realized it through the power of reason; which is a phenomenal thing, but not all-powerful. I use to have my own theory about the snake in the garden. What if God was the snake and He wanted Adam and Eve to be more like him (after all they were supposable made in his image, so wouldn’t he want them to reason things out?) Then kicked them out of the garden to learn? Maybe the bible has it wrong and Adam and Eve left because they sought knowledge. Of course if we are going to go down that road, we could start with Satan. It is said that greatest trick Satan ever pulled was convincing us he did not exist, but perhaps his greatest trick was convincing us he was God. Maybe God (who we currently see as Satan) wants us to be individuals, where as Satan (who we currently see as God) wants us to be sheep following him. It makes more sense to me that way. So much for my salvation. [...]
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April 29th, 2007 at 7:54 am
[...] those of you who saw my last long (looong) discussion about The Million Dollar Question, this is the continuation of it from after [...]
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