the IRS...

The whole article is worth reading but in case you don’t, here’s the summary…

An eight-year campaign to slash the IRS’s budget has left the agency understaffed, hamstrung, and operating with archaic equipment. The result: a hundred-billion-dollar heist.

Corporations and the wealthy are the biggest beneficiaries of the IRS’s decay. Most Americans’ interaction with the IRS is largely automated. But it takes specialized, well-trained personnel to audit a business or a billionaire or to unravel a tax scheme—and those employees are leaving in droves and taking their expertise with them. For the country’s largest corporations, the danger of being hit with a billion-dollar tax bill has greatly diminished. For the rich, who research shows evade taxes the most, the IRS has become less and less of a force to be feared.

The story has been different for poor taxpayers. The IRS oversees one of the government’s largest anti-poverty programs, the earned income-tax credit, which provides cash to the working poor. Under continued pressure from Republicans, the IRS has long made a priority of auditing people who receive that money, and as the IRS has shrunk, those audits have consumed even more resources, accounting for 36 percent of audits last year. The credit’s recipients—whose annual income is typically less than $20,000—are now examined at rates similar to those who make $500,000 to $1 million a year. Only people with incomes above $1 million are examined much more frequently.

color...

Color is mind-dependent. Unlike length or shape, color doesn’t exist on its own. It is “relational,” as some philosophers say, maybe better thought of as an experience than as an attribute. And probably we should say that color happens rather than exists.

David Kastan and Stephen Farthing

tolstoy dropping the mic.

Socialism, Communism, Anarchism' Salvation Armies, the growth of crime, freedom from toil, the increasingly absurd luxury of the rich and increased misery of the poor, the fearfully rising number of suicides-are all indications of that inner contradiction which must and will be resolved. And, of course, resolved in such a manner that the law of love will be recognized and all reliance on force abandoned…

That, however, will either annihilate the Christian religion, which is indispensable for the maintenance of the State, or it will sweep away the military and all the use of force bound up with it-which the State needs no less.

Leo Tolstoy (around 1908)

church, temple, and mosque.

It is so important to taste, touch, and trust such moments. Words and complex rituals almost get in the way at this point. All you can really do is return such Presence with your own presence. Nothing to believe here at all. Just learn to trust and draw forth your own deepest experience, and you will know the Christ all day every day - before and after you ever go to any kind of religious service. Church, temple, and mosque will start to make sense on whole new levels-and at the same time, church, temple, and mosque will become totally boring and unnecessary. I promise you both will be true, because you are already fully accepted and fully accepting.

Richard Rohr

this president...

The following is from Andrew Sullivan. You may not agree with everything he says - I don’t - but it’s hard to disagree with this summarization of our current president. The full article is worth reading.

There are few historical guides. It is hard to think of a precedent for a president who endorses violence against political foes, sees the Justice Department as his own personal prosecutor, calls the press “the enemy of the people,” tears children from parents, brags of multiple sexual assaults, threatens to lock up his opponents, enthuses about war crimes, “falls in love” with the foulest dictator on the planet, refuses to divest of personal holdings in office, lambastes allies, treats the Treasury as a casino, actively endorses the poisoning of the environment, destabilizes NATO, baits minorities, lies incessantly, and oversees a resurgence of the white nationalist right. Any single gesture in any one of these areas would have been political death for most previous presidents. But we live in a time when we have come to expect that all this can now empower and even reward an American politician, rather than ruin him.

Also - make sure to vote.

mlk

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."

great people...

Great people will always be mocked by those who feel smaller than them. Yet a lion does not flinch at laughter coming from a hyena. A gorilla does not budge from a banana thrown at it by a monkey. A nightingale does not stop singing its beautiful song at the intrusion of an annoying woodpecker. 

 - Suzy Kassem 

7 minutes.

This footage from a 1939 pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden - with about 20,000 people in attendance - is worth watching. 

Keep in mind, Hitler was already in power when this occurred. Already building concentration camps. 

lovin is a lot funner.

Here's a recent text conversation from a friend. 

Friend: Do you believe that if a person does not accept Jesus as the Son of God/died/crucified, etc... they will go to Hell? 

Me: I believe in the parable of the Sheep and the Goats. 

Friend: I'm not sure what that means. Do you believe it's possible for a Muslim to go to heaven?

Me: Yes, for sure. Because Jesus said it was possible. (I then sent him the parable of the sheep and the goats.) So, if you believe in Jesus, you believe Muslims can have eternal life. If you don't believe a Muslim can have eternal life, you don't believe in Jesus. 

Friend: That's what I told my friend.  He said no way

Me: Well tell your friend this one. “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to." 

Friend: He's stuck on what Paul said.  The only way to heaven is professing Christ. 

Me: Yeah I’m down with that. But your friend isn’t professing Christ. Christ said Muslims could go to Heaven.

Friend: Where does it say muslims can go to heaven? My friend hates Muslims. 

Me: That parable I sent you makes no mention of believing in Jesus and/or the cross and/or accepting Jesus and/or any of the things your friend says are required for Muslims to get in. It says people who feed people and clothe them, etc… have eternal life (not heaven but that's another discussion). I mean, seriously, ask your friend to explain that.

Friend: I agree.  I wouldn't want anyone to go to hell.  Eternity seems like an awful long time to suffer

Me: I wouldn’t make my worst enemy burn for 10 minutes. I can’t imagine a God who would for eternity. And I can’t be nicer than God.

Friend: I wasn't sure.  Thought maybe I had it all wrong

Me: Well I mean you might. And I might. But, your friend might too. :)

Friend: True dat!  I've fought my whole life.  Lovin is a lot funner.

the creator risks.

For the Almighty, therefore, to create is no small matter: it is no picnic, but an adventure, a risk, a battle, to which he commits himself unreservedly.

Teilhard de Chardin

Risk is a requirement. 

we were wrong.

Some of my favorite articles begin with "we were wrong..." 

One of my more recent favorites was about the moon, and where it came from. 

We were wrong. 

It wasn't a surface collision from a Mars-sized body and Earth it was more like a massive collision that nearly vaporized Earth some akin to "a sledgehammer and a watermelon". 

Two things:

1. We are still wrong about all kinds of things. I am wrong and so are you.

Tread lightly. 

2. That big beautiful orb in the sky at night came from great destruction. 

Beauty finds a way. 

(Bonus recent wrong: Giraffes are actually four different species.) 

they're not coming back.

Hokey “young adult” ministries, clunky social media, static notions about gender, deeply skewed perceptions of sexuality, out-of-touch clergy with political axes to grind, and little to no evidence of religion as a meaningful presence in their daily lives do nothing to lure back those who have left.

If religions are still asking what they can do to bring the religiously unaffiliated back, the better question might be this: what can religion do without them? Because all evidence points to this conclusion: they are not coming back, and given what they’re being presented, why should they?

Kaya Oakes

the internet is killing you and instagram is giving your soul cancer.

Anyway, the point here is that the Internet is poison. It is a point I have made before and will continue to make again until you people FINALLY LISTEN TO ME. You won’t, though, because you’re too far gone. You need the poison like you need the air. “If I don’t have another reason to hate myself today,” your stupid brain tells itself so quietly that you can’t even hear the conversation, “I’ll just die.” And then you think, “Gee, let me look at Twitter,” and you’re sad for the rest of the day, but you don’t know why. It is because all the promise of the Internet turned out to be lies. 

 

Alex Balk

 

 

If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation. Christian leaders seem to think that they need more distraction to counter the distraction. Their services have degenerated into emotional spasms, their spaces drowned with light and noise and locked shut throughout the day, when their darkness and silence might actually draw those whose minds and souls have grown web-weary.

 

Andrew Sullivan

drama

I'm not a fan of dramatic people: those who create, stir up, and crave drama in relationships, work environments, or any other form. (I realize I probably react to it negatively, because it's in me and I'm a producer of it, more than I want to be. We hate in others what we see in ourselves.)

But it still really gets under my skin. And when you start to realize how much drama is created in our world, you realize how much we crave it. 

I just came across this study - a way to measure our desire and need for drama. The more we agree with these statements, the more we need drama in our lives. I was struck by how many of these questions have spiritual connotations and answers - or at least could. 

1. Sometimes it’s fun to get people riled up.
2. Sometimes I say something bad about someone with the hope that they find out what I said.
3. I say or do things just to see how others react.
4. Sometimes I play people against each other to get what I want
5. I always speak my mind but pay for it later.
6. It’s hard for me to hold my opinion back.
7. People who act like my friends have stabbed me in the back.
8. People often talk about me behind my back.
9. I often wonder why such crazy things happen to me.
10. I feel like there are people in my life who are out to get me.
11. A lot of people have wronged me.

Perhaps most interesting was the one statement that indicates a lesser need for drama and the spiritual connotations with it. 

I wait before speaking my mind. 

persistence

Jerry Weintraub is, by far, the most confident, crazy, unique, story-teller/story-liver person I have ever heard of and his book is pretty amazing, to say the least. 

He writes: 

Persistence— it’s a cliché, but it happens to work. The person who makes it is the person who keeps on going after everyone else has quit. This is more important than intelligence, pedigree, even connections. Be dogged! Keep hitting that door until you bust it down! I have accomplished almost nothing on the first or second or even the third try— the breakthrough usually comes late, when everyone else has left the field.

All kinds of people write all kinds of similar quotes: keep trying, persist, don't let the rejections get you down but when Jerry writes it, and you read his story, it has a greater impact. 

A few days after reading the above quote I was with my spiritual director and we were talking about a particular issue I'm still struggling with, going back and forth, trying to find some clarity. He told me I'm not praying enough about it, thinking enough about it, spending enough time on it. 

He said I need to be more persistent with God. 

It's funny how willing - or at least convinced and motivated - I am to bring persistence into  every part of my life except my interactions with the Divine. I think that needs to change. 

the archives

For a huge variety of quotes and some thoughts from 2013-2014, check out my now, very out-dated, tumblr.