Maddie's Musings

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Maddie's Musings they say I'm straightforward and kinda blunt. TRUTH. I say what I mean and mean what I say...

Hi I'm Madison James, formerly an investigative journalist at The Washington Post, that is before I became disillusioned with modern politics and retreated to the wisdom of the woods at my beloved Walden Pond in Concord, MA and embarked upon my own magical mystical coming of age adventure chronicled in the book, "In The Wake Of Chaos"

"The “billionaire boys club” is teaching Trump what he can accomplish with a side-eye glance and a gassy grimace. The on...
14/12/2024

"The “billionaire boys club” is teaching Trump what he can accomplish with a side-eye glance and a gassy grimace. The only redeeming factor in the quick surrender of Zuckerburg and Bezos is that they have finally, irreversibly revealed who they are. We no longer need to waste time wondering or hoping whether they will help defend democracy. They will not."

- The Hartmann Report on Substack

08/12/2024

THE PROVISIONAL BALLOT DEBACLE:

"The HAVA law requires that voters getting provisional ballots be told this, but in actual practice in Republican-controlled states this is almost never the case. (Although, even when it is, the percentage of people who’d be willing or able to take time off work to jump through all these hoops is tiny.)"

no words...
07/12/2024

no words...

NC Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin is trying to disqualify 60,000 voters who followed the rules and were told their votes counted. | Opinion

06/12/2024

Why are we here? This is the question that has driven humankind since the beginning of human reflection—when the first cave dwellers began to ponder the night sky. Can we ever really know the answer to this question?

The doubters say no. They argue that our existence is too complicated for the human mind. Or they go further and proclaim de facto that life has no meaning. They reduce the whole universe and our individual life journeys to the absurd. They say all that we see around us in nature and life sprang from literally nothing… for no purpose at all.

Yet, The Celestine Prophecy Novel describes a consciousness through which we can discover life’s meaning. It postulates that every day, more people are waking up and asking that question. And when you seek answers, scriptures say, you always find.

You see, once we ask if there is purpose, something is unlocked in our souls. A different sensibility opens in our minds. We can see higher meaning in the beauty and energy of nature, and in the journey of humankind itself, revealing a purpose behind our long struggle from wondering tribal peoples to village dwellers to nation states, to the throes of creating a global and galactic awareness that we are all part of.

But most of all, we can detect meaning in our own individual journeys, because questioning the purpose of life always awakens the first hint of intuitive calling in our hearts.

This intuitive nudging exists in all of us, especially in adolescence and early adulthood. At the oddest times, we sense that we have something special to do with our lives, some important contribution to make, some truth to tell, some creative endeavor that will somehow energize our existence and thrill our souls.

This feeling is so pervasive that the older adults in our lives sometimes caution us rightly to go slowly, to listen, and to learn the ways of the world before we jump. The wise want us to search beyond the ego for hints of our true dream.

Yet, this inner searching is happening more now than ever. Our sense of mission can be encouraged and nurtured because another Authentic Spiritual Experience is being recognized in our lives. What is this experience? It is Synchronicity, the experience of meaningful coincidences that miraculously lead us forward toward our dream… if we pay attention. This experience shows us that we aren’t alone in life. A Divine force is helping us.🙏✨

03/12/2024
"It isn’t that the American people didn’t buy what Harris was selling; they didn’t know what she was selling. The increa...
29/11/2024

"It isn’t that the American people didn’t buy what Harris was selling; they didn’t know what she was selling. The increasingly powerful right-wing media championed her opponent’s message while distorting hers. And millions of Americans bought it.

As The New Republic editor Michael Tomasky wrote, “It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer.” The right-wing media now controls the agenda.

For those of us who grew up on a steady diet of truth-telling, it’s gut-wrenching to see this mega misinformation machine grow into a multi-headed monster."

-Dan Rather

17/11/2024

"Jesus was a 1st century Middle Eastern Jewish man. The fact that the Christian religion claims his name and became the dominant religion of the Western world is not the fault of Jesus."

16/11/2024

In the aftermath...and in the wake of chaos...what will love create?

15/11/2024

As you know, I once was an evangelical megachurch pastor and my pastoral career stretched over many years. Eventually, I could no longer teach Christian doctrine with a good conscience and realized this teaching was not truly changing people’s lives… and so I walked away from the whole enchilada.

Below are 14 things that the misguided religious establishment doesn't want you to know. Speaking for myself and my personal experience, I was not able to see or admit these things to myself. I truly got into ministry initially because I wanted to make a difference and help people, and I relied upon the belief-system I learned as the proper framework to achieve this. It took a lot of post-religion reflection to see the ways this belief-system was hurting people.

I offer the below list in hopes that you might disentangle yourself from harmful beliefs and attitudes impacting your life.

14 things the misguided religious establishment doesn’t want you to know:

1. Toxic religion is rooted in fear, especially fear about the afterlife. It leverages the false doctrine of hell to win converts and demand holiness. The fear of God's disapproval, rejection, abandonment and punishment is another hallmark of toxic religion.

2. Clergy have no innate authority. Holding a church leadership position or having a theological degree does not imbue a person with special divine authority or superiority. The terms "anointed", "called", or "chosen" or titles such as "pastor", "priest", "bishop", "elder", "evangelist" or "apostle" do not confer any innate authority on an individual or group.

3. We hold sacred what we are taught to hold sacred, which is why what is sacred to one community is not sacred to another.

4. The stories in our sacred books aren’t history, nor were they meant to be. The authors of these books weren’t historians but writers of historical fiction: they used history (or pseudo history) as a context or pretext for their own ideas. Reading sacred texts as history may yield some nuggets of the past, but the real gold is in seeing these stories as myth and parable, and trying to unpack the possible meanings these parables and myths may hold.

5. Prayer doesn’t work the way you think it does. You can’t bribe God, or change God’s mind through obedience, devotion, or groveling. The underlying theistic premises of prayer are untenable.

6. Anything you claim to know about God, even the notion that there is a God, is a projection of your psyche. What you say about God—who God is, what God cares about, who God rewards, and who God punishes—says nothing about God and everything about you. If you believe in an unconditionally loving God, you probably value unconditional love. If you believe in a God who divides people into chosen and not chosen, believers and infidels, saved and damned, high cast or low caste, etc. you are likely someone who divides people into in–groups and out–groups with you and your group as the quintessential in-group. God may or may not exist, but your idea of God mirrors yourself and your values.

7. Religion is a narrative into which a person is born, conditioned and indoctrinated. Born in Nagpur, you're probably Hindu. Born in Nishapur, you're probably Muslim. Born in Nashville, you're probably Christian. Born in Narathiwat, you're probably Buddhist. Born in Nesher, you're probably Jewish. People become Christian because they are raised or evangelized into it. It's not like they sat down and critically investigated a menu of alternative views about ultimate reality and the meaning of life.

8. Theology isn’t the free search for truth, but rather a defense of an already held position. Theology is really apologetics, explaining why a belief is true rather than seeking out the truth in and of itself. All theological reasoning is circular, inevitably “proving” the truth of its own presupposition.

9. Becoming more religious cannot save us. Religion is a human invention reflecting the best and worst of humanity; becoming more religious will simply allow us to perpetuate compassion and cruelty in the name of religion. Because religion always carries the danger of fanaticism, becoming more religious may only heighten the risk of us becoming more fanatical.

10. Becoming less religious cannot save us. In fact, being against religion can become it’s own fanaticism. Becoming less religious will simply force us to perpetuate compassion and cruelty in the name of something else. Secular societies that actively suppress religion have proven no more just or compassionate than religious societies that suppress secularism or free thought. This is because neither religion nor the lack of religion solely nullifies our human potential to act out of ego, greed, fear, hostility, and hatred.

11. A healthy religion is one that helps us own and integrate the shadow side of human nature for the good of person and planet, something few clergy are trained to do. Clergy are trained to promote the religion they represent. They are apologists not liberators. If you want to be more just, compassionate, and loving, you must do the personal work within yourself, and free yourself from the conditions that lock you into injustice, cruelty, and hate, and this means you have to free yourself from all your narratives, including those you call “religious.”

12. Religious leaders claims that their particular understanding and interpretation of their sacred books should be universally accepted. Religious leaders often say, “My authority is the Bible.” It would be more accurate for them to say, “My authority is what they taught me at seminary the Bible means.” People start with flawed or false presuppositions about what the Bible is, such as: the Bible was meant to present a coherent theology about God or is a piece of doctrinal exposition; the Bible is the inerrant, infallible and sole message/"Word" of God to the world; the Bible is a blueprint for daily living. Too often religious leaders make God about having "correct theology." There are a lot of unhappy, broken, hurting, suffering, depressed, lonely people in church with church-approved theology.

13. If your livelihood depends on the success of your church as an organization, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that you will mostly define and reward Christianity as participation in church structures and programs. Christian living is mostly a decentralized reality or way of life, not a centralized or program-dependent phenomenon. Church attendance, tithing, membership, service, and devoted participation, become the hallmarks of Christian maturity.

14. You are capable of guiding your own spiritual path from the inside out and don't need to be told what to do. You naturally have the ability, capacity, tools and skills to guide and direct your life meaningfully, ethically and effectively. Through the use of your fundamental human faculties such as critical thinking, empathy, reason, conscience and intuition, you can capably lead your life. You have the choice to cultivate a spirituality that doesn’t require you to be inadequate, powerless, weak, and lacking, but one that empowers you toward strength, vitality, wholeness, and the fulfillment of your highest potentialities and possibilities.

Jim Palmer

13/11/2024

"Radical change...requires radical thinking"

The people have spoken.Actually, what Heather Cox Richardson  said is MUCH more accurate: “We now have a propaganda ecos...
13/11/2024

The people have spoken.

Actually, what Heather Cox Richardson said is MUCH more accurate: “We now have a propaganda ecosystem that has people angry about things that are not real.”

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