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Posted by Steve on 11/12/2008, 3:00 pm, in reply to "My Great- Aunt Sybil"
69.140.59.X
: This reminded me of my Great-Aunt Sybil. She
: was a Bible-belt southern Baptist minister,
: in Oklahoma. No smoking, drinking, dancing,
: cards, etc. Fundamentalist. When my
: great-great-grandfather died we all flew to
: Okla. for the funeral and stayed with her.
: I'd heard about her but had never met her.
: She was warm and wonderful. In the kitchen
: after the funeral, to everyone's surprise,
: she gave a bottle of wine to my mother to
: open, saying she didn't drink, but she knew
: Mother and her sisters enjoyed it. I was 14
: at the time, knew of her beliefs, and was so
: impressed!
:
: Many years later on a trip across the
: country, my now-husband and I, who had been
: living together without-benefit-of-clergy,
: stopped to visit her. Knowing her beliefs,
: we were prepared to take separate rooms, but
: without a word she put our things in one
: room.
:
: It's a tricky thing to judge people by their
: labels, even the Southern Baptist
: fundamentalist one. There are good-hearted
: people in every faith, I've learned, who
: live the spirit of their beliefs, and there
: are the other ones, the rigid and often
: nasty ones, who make the most noise.
------------------------
Yes, there are good-hearted people in every faith and tradition. At the same time--from a social justice perspective--we are all of us responsible for what we aid or abet, silently or explicitly.
Fundamentalist religion is a toxic, corrosive element in America today. Examples of this are everywhere, the most recent being the Mormon Church's efforts in rolling back social equality for lesbians and gay men in California--as evidenced by the church's spearheading of the recently-passed Proposition 8. Any Mormon who did not speak out against their church's involvement in that issue is partially to blame for the resulting travesty of justice.
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"The Tao is basically utterly open. Utter openeness has no substance. It ends in endlessness, begins in beginninglessnes".
-Li Daoqun
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