Kuan Yin, Bodhisattva of Compassion
Sacred Pleasure... cannot even begin so long as one is caught in the crushing wheels of suffering... nor can it begin while anyone is still victimized by the crushing violence of obsolete theologies and the spiritual judgments theyconsistently give rise to : we need a Jubilee break from violence, oppressive theology, and judgment (say, how about fifty years worth)...
Every religion has its fundamentalist "wing"... which would forever and always keep pleasure "grounded" in reproduction lingo... (how many of us humans must there be before there just might be enough!?) Likewise, every religion (is this true?) begins with a bias against women... and the men who presumed superiority over the spirituality, insights, and wisdom of women (and who also, very conveniently, wrote all of the Holy Books of religions) both resented and were afraid of the natural earthiness and the sacred capacity of women for nearly unlimited orgasm...
This insult to ump-teen generations of women has carried over into a judgment against other men: men who have a natural physical-spiritual hunger for pleasure with other men... Indeed, pleasure itself is invalidated in nearly every "traditional" theology: to delight in the pleasure of sexual orgasm, of intimacy, with the person (s) of their heart's choice, is sin to the justifiers of hate, manipulation, and domination... To be a woman: to be gay: to be lesbian: to be bisexual: to be queer in any way from the dominated norm is sin...
It would be needlessly silly to list the examples of thousands of years of male religious violence and oppression... World history, and most especially, the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is little more than a history of the worship of the Unholy Trinity: Profit, Privilege, and Power... The Unholy Trinity is the "god" of religion: pain is made perfect in abject submission to male power, male privilege, and male profit... It is always violent: whether by means of usury, slavery, or burning at the stake: the Unholy Trinity is the obsessive fetish of male-created religion...
On the other hand, there is Jesus: the Mystic-Master of the Transformation of Consciousness! An honest reading of the Gospels reveals Jesus to be a radical feminist, an earthy-aware being, and one deeply commited to a preferential option for the poor: a person not in submission to power, not in service to profit, and completely uninterested in privilege... That Jesus was male, was incidental to his being: and precisely because incidental, he was a free man: a human being liberated into his Divine Possibilities!
It isn't so much that we need a female image of the Divine, but perhaps that we should be free from all images! What is, after all, an image but a work of imagination? Now, imagination, like sex, is holy... but it is also limiting, isn't it? And the problem with men and male-driven theology is the need to manufacture a god, and supporting theology, that sustains the myths of the Unholy Trinity... Jesus would have both you and I free: free to live the exploration of our possibilities as human beings...
Jesus' interest in sex is that it should cause no harm: responsible adults intimate with other responsible adults: this that, here or there: it doesn't matter so long as there is no harm... It is the height of arrogance that people who marginalize women, justify greed, and in recent ump-teen decades raped thousands of kids, should possess the theological gall to condemn other people who are simply motivated by desires of intimacy in creative ways that are not the "norm"... So what?!
Finally, there is the mystic-image of Kuan Yin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion... Shouldn't the Christian, the Jew, and the Muslim hunger to be known as the religions of compassion: by the practice of compassion towards neighbors, strangers, and enemies, all alike? Kuan Yin is Jesus in disguise... just like the homeless man in the gutter...
Sacred Pleasure... cannot even begin so long as one is caught in the crushing wheels of suffering... nor can it begin while anyone is still victimized by the crushing violence of obsolete theologies and the spiritual judgments theyconsistently give rise to : we need a Jubilee break from violence, oppressive theology, and judgment (say, how about fifty years worth)...
Every religion has its fundamentalist "wing"... which would forever and always keep pleasure "grounded" in reproduction lingo... (how many of us humans must there be before there just might be enough!?) Likewise, every religion (is this true?) begins with a bias against women... and the men who presumed superiority over the spirituality, insights, and wisdom of women (and who also, very conveniently, wrote all of the Holy Books of religions) both resented and were afraid of the natural earthiness and the sacred capacity of women for nearly unlimited orgasm...
This insult to ump-teen generations of women has carried over into a judgment against other men: men who have a natural physical-spiritual hunger for pleasure with other men... Indeed, pleasure itself is invalidated in nearly every "traditional" theology: to delight in the pleasure of sexual orgasm, of intimacy, with the person (s) of their heart's choice, is sin to the justifiers of hate, manipulation, and domination... To be a woman: to be gay: to be lesbian: to be bisexual: to be queer in any way from the dominated norm is sin...
It would be needlessly silly to list the examples of thousands of years of male religious violence and oppression... World history, and most especially, the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is little more than a history of the worship of the Unholy Trinity: Profit, Privilege, and Power... The Unholy Trinity is the "god" of religion: pain is made perfect in abject submission to male power, male privilege, and male profit... It is always violent: whether by means of usury, slavery, or burning at the stake: the Unholy Trinity is the obsessive fetish of male-created religion...
On the other hand, there is Jesus: the Mystic-Master of the Transformation of Consciousness! An honest reading of the Gospels reveals Jesus to be a radical feminist, an earthy-aware being, and one deeply commited to a preferential option for the poor: a person not in submission to power, not in service to profit, and completely uninterested in privilege... That Jesus was male, was incidental to his being: and precisely because incidental, he was a free man: a human being liberated into his Divine Possibilities!
It isn't so much that we need a female image of the Divine, but perhaps that we should be free from all images! What is, after all, an image but a work of imagination? Now, imagination, like sex, is holy... but it is also limiting, isn't it? And the problem with men and male-driven theology is the need to manufacture a god, and supporting theology, that sustains the myths of the Unholy Trinity... Jesus would have both you and I free: free to live the exploration of our possibilities as human beings...
Jesus' interest in sex is that it should cause no harm: responsible adults intimate with other responsible adults: this that, here or there: it doesn't matter so long as there is no harm... It is the height of arrogance that people who marginalize women, justify greed, and in recent ump-teen decades raped thousands of kids, should possess the theological gall to condemn other people who are simply motivated by desires of intimacy in creative ways that are not the "norm"... So what?!
Finally, there is the mystic-image of Kuan Yin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion... Shouldn't the Christian, the Jew, and the Muslim hunger to be known as the religions of compassion: by the practice of compassion towards neighbors, strangers, and enemies, all alike? Kuan Yin is Jesus in disguise... just like the homeless man in the gutter...
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