G-20: Life or Knowledge … April 18, 2014

Jonathots Daily Blog

(2206)

Right there in the middle.

It’s hard to miss. It’s not hiding from us.

It’s called life.

And life is where ability, faith and our daily bread of situations merge together.

• It’s meant to be abundant.
• It is intended to be fascinating.
• It is not free of hassle, yet within the struggle is a great learning gift which further enriches our experience.

Anything that deters us from eating of the Tree of Life and gaining strength, wisdom and energy is counter-productive to our humanity and destructive to our character.

So as the story goes, God placed this gift of life right in the middle of all the activity. It wasn’t hidden at all. Like every other possibility in the Garden of Eden, it was “good for food and pleasant to the eyes.”

Yet is was absent of distraction. That particular misleading element was found in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And this tree was useless to our human escapade because knowing what’s evil does not give us the function of improving our situation. After all, since we are not gods and do not control our Olympus, we end up being at the mercy of despair.

God offers one piece of advice to his free-will creatures: having the knowledge of good and evil, which appears to offer elements of being wise, only introduces futility, which makes us exhausted to partake of life in the middle of our existence.

Adam and Even didn’t get it.

They listened to the voices screaming for self-improvement and pursued a knowledge which made them feel they were naked and vacant of the capacity to change their situation for the better.

Though many of my friends and even family members argue with me continually about television shows, movies, books and even blue-tinted comedy routines which offer a view on the bleak side of life, insisting that this is an element of maturity lending itself to greater understanding, I have to shake my head and say that the knowledge of evil does not make me a god.

It makes me a victim.

Jesus told us we should “be as little children.” So anything that comes before my eyes and into my heart which is not suitable for a child of eight years only ends up pointing out to me the deficit in my society, the weakness of my character and the vacancy in my soul.

Just like Eve, we are pressured into believing that we are deprived of experience by a God who refuses to allow us to explore our sensibilities.

But all that Adam and Eve achieved was a weirded-out feeling–that the things they had been participating in and enjoying were now somewhat dirty, nasty and needed to be hidden.

“Why do you think you’re naked?” says God to a frightened Adam.

Who told you and me that it’s “adult” to watch men beating up women? Or solid citizens losing their minds and becoming criminals? Or sexuality being reduced to the mere visualization of humping?

Yet this is what is chosen.

So on that day, whether completely truthful or partially a metaphor, when man and woman chose knowledge over life, two things became evident: (1) we, as a species, have to learn to escape evil to find the good and munch on life; and (2) a plan of salvation to light up the road to that discovery would be necessary.

Yes, Good Friday was a bad thing that happened because human beings thought it was possible to become gods through knowledge.

It is life that makes us powerful.

It is life that welcomes intelligence.

And life is always right there … in the middle of what we’re doing. 

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We Are Not Malala… October 13, 2013

Jonathots Daily Blog

(2035)

Adequately enraged by the story of a fifteen-year-old Pakistani girl who is shot in the head by a religious zealot on a school bus just one year ago, the American public has, this week, welcomed the brave lass into our hearts while simultaneously expressing disdain and indignation for the treachery. People all over the globe have begun to respond, uttering the mantra, “I am Malala.”

It’s one of the things we do best in this country–put a spotlight on injustice.

Of course, unless it is our own.

Do I think it’s possible for a young girl in this country to be shot in the head by a fanatic simply because she’s pursuing education and trying to gain some footing in her generation? Probably not.

But we do fail to give equal pay to women for equal work. In so doing, we create a backlog of single mothers who struggle to maintain solvency with their children, who are often cruelly abandoned by the men who had the testosterone to father but no will to parent.

We also willingly foster and fund an ongoing gender bashing via our movies, television shows and comedians, who preach the implausibility for the male and female of our species to get along in any way, shape or form. May I ask who, generally speaking, receives the major amount of blame for this feud? Is it not the female?

Hundreds and thousands of churches in this country refuse to allow a woman to speak in the pulpit–to preach a sermon about the goodness and mercy of God, who by the way, is no respecter of persons.

We have taken the nastiness of pornography, which used to be relegated to small shops on the side of the road, only open for a counterculture which indulged in such activity, and now have turned it into art–acceptable behavior for everyone, even though it is used to abuse women and place them in a painful, subordinate position.

In the course of one week of prime time television, nearly a hundred women are beat, abused, raped, murdered and dismembered, as the plot for detective shows or any program that wants to sensationalize cruelty to the daughters of Eve.

Yet we will pause in the midst of this ongoing revenue of insanity to posture ourselves as a civilized culture that would never think of shooting a teenage girl in the head because she was on her way to school.

Again, perhaps not.

But there are many other ways to mutilate the spirit of a human being other than creasing the brain with a bullet.

The only way we can become Malala is if we “take the log out of our own eye” on this issue of gender equality, and set an example for the world of how human beings are meant to be treated, no matter what their sexuality.

For I do not know the difference between gunning down a young girl and raping her spirit by using rap music to call her a bitch, a whore and then turning around and refusing to allow her the chance to stand toe-to-toe with her brothers.

No one is perfect on this issue. Each one of us has grown up with bias and prejudice, but because I love my country, I would ask for us to do less chest-thumping of superiority, and more gazing into the mirror, to find our soul on an issue that plagues the world.

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