TonioTimeDaily

Side note: "I love being a Secular Jesus Follower. That means I am Christlike without religiosity." - Antonio Myers

1. Understanding — There are two aspects of skillful understanding, the first is the recursive inclusion of the Four Noble Truths.  That is, the last of the four truths refers to the eightfold path, and the first of the eightfold path refers to the four truths.  Such tying of these ideas together may seem redundant, but really attests to the criticality of understanding the problem at hand as an important step in seeking ways to address it.

The second aspect of skillful understanding is that of karma, or “volitional action”, which was a significant departure from the predominant view of the Brahmin religion of Gotama’s time.  Rather that being seen as a ritualistic purification of one’s spiritual self by a religiously sanctified intermediary, karma was instead altered to be self empowered pragmatic action to impact one’s life.

As we can see in the world, our actions lead to outcomes.  Gotama suggested the critical factor in cause and effect was the ethical quality of our intentional actions, and that such actions would come to fruition in like ways.  Seen from the naturalist perspective, words and deeds and even mental states of kindness and compassion tend to have more beneficial results than their negative counterparts, and these effects in turn condition further results.

2. Intention — In keeping with Gotama’s idea of the key role played by intent on the quality of what we say and do, the second part of Wisdom is around the kinds of skillful intention more likely to produce beneficial results.  Primarily, Buddhism encourages a less grasping and more generous attitude, positive intent or good will, and a transparent interest in not causing harm.  Note that these are not empty admonishments, but demonstrable factors that can create the conditions of a better life.

3. Speech — Perhaps the most challenging steps on the Buddhist path is the first aspect of ethical behavior, that of skillful speech.  The most coarse examples of this are speaking truthfully, in ways that foster harmony, with gentleness, and in a constructive and open fashion rather than less constructive ways like gossip.

This is not limited to the spoken word, however, and can mean any means through which we communicate, including the written word, body language, and our very expressions.  We should also endeavor to initiate communication when our intention is positive, and do our best to select the right time to speak.  The acronym THINK, standing for is it True, Helpful, Inspiring, Necessary, and Kind, is a good rule of thumb.

4. Action — The second component to ethical behavior is around our physical acts, building on the theme of positive intent.  Again, we see guidance to take no actions that have a reasonable expectation of harmful results.  Generous actions rather than taking what is not given or outright theft is also encouraged, as is careful consideration in our sexual engagements.

5. Livelihood — The third aspect of ethical behavior pertains to how we make a living, suggesting that we not use the constraints of working in a particular role as an excuse for not adhering to the ideals of leading a constructive and beneficial life.  Of course there is a much greater diversity of careers in today’s world than in Gotama’s time, and one should consider the results of one’s job with a critical eye of Skillful Intention as a guide."

"Compersion vs. jealousy.

Emotions do not exist on a hierarchy, meaning one is not “better” than the other. All emotions that we feel as humans are good and natural — it’s what we do with them that counts. Anger can be productive when managed effectively, and so can an emotion like jealousy. Our emotions are a roadmap to what’s important to us and what may need extra attention. Jealousy in a consensually non-monogamous relationship happens, especially when many of us are deeply programmed for monogamy. Comparable to an emotion like anxiety, jealousy may remind you of that alarm that goes off in our brains when we sense a threat or danger.

Compersion is the opposite of jealousy — it is a sense of happiness for a partner when they have a new sexual or emotional experience. Essentially, you feel happy for someone about something that has nothing to do with you, like maybe when your ex gets married. Compersion is a skill that takes lots of practice for many — after all, jealousy is evolutionary and biologically part of our make-up. Learning how to practice compersion takes a dash of patience, empathy, and some cognitive reframing. Cognitive reframing can include reminding yourself of the relationship agreements mentioned above, reasons why your relationship is secure, why you trust your partner(s), etc. Compersion, regardless of the label on your relationship, will only serve it well. And if you find yourself experiencing jealousy, don’t be so hard on yourself. Perfection is an illusion in every form.

Whether you’ve been in consensual non-monogamous relationships before or you’re simply pondering on it, you did it! You immersed yourself, in some capacity, into something that the greater public may insult and frown upon and, that dear, takes strength in itself. That means you have the muscle to overcome any nuances or challenges that this open relationship throws your way. After all, you aren’t arriving empty-handed — you’ve got plenty of tools in between these lines."

"Both went to their temples at the age of twelve, where they are said to have astonished all with their wisdom. Both supposedly fasted in solitude for a long time: Buddha for forty–seven days and Jesus for forty. Both wandered to a fig tree at the conclusion of their fasts. Both were about the same age when they began their public ministry:"

“When he [Buddha] went again to the garden he saw a monk who was calm, tranquil, self–possessed, serene, and dignified. The prince, determined to become such a monk, was led to make the great renunciation. At the time he was twenty–nine years of age… “Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about thirty years of age.” (Luke 3:23). Both were tempted by the “devil” at the beginning of their ministry: To Buddha, he said: “Go not forth to adopt a religious life but return to your kingdom, and in seven days you shall become emperor of the world, riding over the four continents.” To Jesus, he said: “All these [kingdoms of the world] I will give you, if you fall down and worship me” (Matthew 4:9). Buddha answered the “devil”: “Get you away from me.”

Jesus responded: “…begone, Satan!” (Matthew 4:10). Both strove to establish a kingdom of heaven on earth. According to the Somadeva (a Buddhist holy book), a Buddhist ascetic’s eye once offended him, so he plucked it out and cast it away. Jesus said: “If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out, and throw it away;.” (Matthew 5:29).

"Jesus devoted his life to speaking, helping, supporting, defending, empowering, healing, freeing, and loving everyone, especially saving those who were in desperate need from the hands of oppressors, rulers, officials, mobs, and those who intended to harm, kill, and destroy — because Jesus was a protester.

Throughout his life Jesus protested and brought awareness about gender inequality, religious hypocrisy, political corruption, racism, hate, segregation, empowerment, and social injustice. Christ humbly sacrificed and served to advocate for the outcasts, protect the poor, shelter the homeless, uplift the exploited, show hospitality to stranger, energize the weary, and love humanity.

Jesus was mocked, ridiculed, abused, intimidated, and arrested because he dared to become a protester. Eventually, he was arrested and put on trial, and then he was publicly humiliated, mocked, and severely tortured.

It was in this context where his greatest demonstration of protest happened: dying on the cross, where God incarnate proved to the world that love trumps evil, grace trumps revenge, mercy trumps cruelty, generosity trumps selfishness, hope trumps fear, and God trumps Satan.

So today, when politicians — and the masses that follow them — promote racism, hate, bigotry, deception, and oppressive policies that are inhumane, immoral, violent, and blatantly anti-Christian, we must ask ourselves: What would Jesus do?

Will followers of Christ follow in his footsteps and be bold enough to speak against, act against, and protest against sin? Contrary to our religious assumptions about righteousness and holiness, sometimes the most Christ-like thing we can do is protest.

Christianity isn’t political power, military might, safety, wealth, control, fame, or comfort — it’s emulating Jesus. After Jesus departed and the disciples started their various ministries, founding the church as we know it today, most of the earliest believers were ruthlessly hunted down, arrested, persecuted, and horrifically killed for following Jesus, martyred for being Divine protesters.

Defending the gospel for the sake of humanity — people love and created in the image of God — was the reason Jesus protested. Are we willing to do the same? God help us."

"It’s a vision that’s frighteningly close to the jihadist goal of enacting Sharia law.

If your starting point for the Christian faith is that members of other faiths have no rights and non-Christians are technically insane and that you have a God-given duty to control government, media and society-at-large, then yeah, anything less than that probably feels like “persecution.”

The irony is that this viewpoint draws heavily from what’s often referred to as college campus “snowflake culture.”

This relatively recent campus phenomenon is characterized by students demanding potentially controversial curriculum be labeled with “trigger warnings” and that “safe spaces,” physical refuges from potentially scary ideas, be provided by the institution.

Snowflake culture is equally unpopular on the political left and right. Conservative pundits regularly mock the whole system and President Obama openly took the idea to task in 2015.

Although adherents to Dominion Theology would no doubt be infuriated by the comparison, it’s easy to draw a line straight to the “snowflake movement.” Both ideologies desire to control the choices and behavior of others and to use force to do it."

"Did you hear about the pastor who was arrested for not marrying a same-sex couple? What about the publisher that got sued for refusing to censor anti-gay verses from the Bible?

Both of these stories have been exposed as fakes of course, but that didn’t keep hundreds of thousands of conservative Christians from sharing them online this week. When I pointed out to a friend that the story he had just shared on social media wasn’t true, he replied, “well it might as well be. Christians in this country are under attack.”

It has become a familiar refrain. We hear it every Christmas when an unsuspecting store clerk wishes the wrong Christian “happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.”  We hear it whenever a high school drops its traditional pre-football game prayer out of respect for those students who may be Jewish or Muslim or non-religious.  An entire industry of books and films has blossomed in the red soil of the American Christian persecution complex, with the first “Gods’ Not Dead” installment caricaturing and vilifying atheists and the second set to expose liberal efforts to “expel God from the classroom once and for all.”

Now, most of the time, this phenomenon falls into the frustrating but relatively harmless category of culture war posturing, but lately, as the apocalyptic, fear-based rhetoric continues to ratchet up in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision regarding same-sex marriage, and as that rhetoric continues to target and demonizes LGBT people, it’s been doing some real harm. Just last week I received at least a dozen messages from friends and readers who told me the response from Christians to the Supreme Court ruling confirmed for them what they’ve known in their hearts for a while: they don’t want anything to do with Christianity anymore, not if this is what it’s all about.

So what I’d like to suggest to my fellow Christians is that perhaps taking up the cross means laying down the persecution complex. A spirit of fear and entitlement does more to obscure the gospel than elucidate it.  Here are some reasons why:

Not only do American Christians experience complete religious freedom in this country, we also enjoy tremendous privilege. More than seventy-percent of the population identifies as Christian, as do the majority of our representatives to congress and every single U.S. president. Our churches, whose steeples dot every cityscape and small town in the land, are exempt from paying taxes, and unlike many people of other faiths, we don’t have to worry about fighting with our employers to take time off to celebrate our religious holidays as they are largely taken for granted."

"ROME—“Marie” was placed in a French Catholic boarding school for “young girls from good families” when she was in the fifth grade. She remembers a nun who would come to her class every day to choose a student to help her with Mass. But the nun wasn’t looking for someone to help her. She was looking for a victim.

“I was 11 and looked 9. She would choose me once every two or three times,” she recalls. “She would take me to her office, lock the door, and then draw the curtains. After which she would put me on her knees to make me read the gospel according to Saint Paul or another saint, while she squeezed me with one hand to her chest and pulled down my panties with the other hand. We were of course in pleated skirts and not in pants. It terrified me and paralyzed.”

“Marie” couldn’t talk to her devout Catholic parents about the abuse until a friend convinced her to do so. The result, she says, was catastrophic. “You are really a pervert, a vicious liar. How dare you say such things?” her parents told her. In fact, her parents had told the nuns that she was being sent to boarding school because she needed to be tamed. “I was truly [a gift] for this nun... because she knew full well that she did not risk anything.”

The abuse lasted the whole year. At the age of 35, “Marie” told her mother again about the abuse. “My mother blissfully told me that it was impossible for a nun to whom she entrusted her daughter to abuse a girl,” she says. “Female pedophilia exists and unfortunately the media never talk about it.”

“Marie” was certainly not alone. Dozens of other victims of priests, nuns, and Catholic school personnel in France form the basis of a 2,500-page report released Tuesday by a special commission led by Jean-Marc Sauvé. While 80 percent of the victims were young boys between the ages of 10 and 13, many young girls were abused as well, and not only by priests. Nuns used crucifixes to rape little girls or forced boys to have sex with them, too."

"Thompson: How do misconceptions play a role in the way we view sex work as work or not, and protecting the rights and lives of those in the industry?

Love: The stigma is that sex work isn’t a real job. People [don’t] really understand the amount of unpaid labor that sex workers do, or the fact that you are doing marketing and advertising and web development and photo editing and video editing and social media marketing. It’s like you’re doing all the things and yet people still don’t see sex work as work.

People still view women who do this work as hoes and sluts and loose women, not as businesspeople who are taking part in this multi-billion dollar industry. People still think that you don’t pay taxes on sex work That’s harmful because that mentality and behavior trickles into everything else—housing discrimination, the ways in which people are criminalized in children and family court, and so many other systemic issues from houselessness to depression. When people are not able to house themselves because they’re being discriminated against because of their job, or if people are treated unfairly in children and family services because they are putting photos and videos up online of themselves in order to feed their kids, that can lead to a whole nother set of issues."

"Thompson: How is your better understanding of this matter playing a role in diminishing the fetishization and degradation of disabled people and being more of a safe space?

Love: I’m a parent of two adult children, and having a grandson who is also neurodivergent certainly informs my work. We have a large number of people in the collective who also identify as neurodivergent or disabled, and there are more of us than people think. There are a lot of folks who are coming to understand that their brains and their bodies just work differently. Having very reasonable expectations of people, asking people about their bandwidth to take on certain projects, and picking up the slack when people can’t and not holding it against them—that’s one of the ways in which we try to level the playing field.

We invite people to be vulnerable when necessary, approaching them with compassion and asking them what’s going on and if we can support them in any way, and not penalizing people for not being able to take on something at that point in time. We all experience moments of exhaustion. Even if it’s not disability-based, we all have these moments where we just need somebody else to pick up the pace and it doesn’t mean that we’re not capable. It just means that sometimes we need help.

I encourage other people to do the same thing. Just because someone is struggling today doesn’t mean that they’re not gonna ever be able to do the work. It just means that today they are struggling. If we can continue to take the compassion that we would want for ourselves, and extend that out to the rest of the world in a very meta way [so] that the work in general becomes easier, whether it’s sex work or otherwise."

Side note: "LGBTQIA+ people do the same sexual positions, sexual acts, and everything sexual thing you can think of that heterosexual, cisgender folks do."

"You may have heard references to “being sex-positive” or “the sex-positivity movement” in popular culture. Various celebrities have brought attention to this movement by speaking out about their beliefs and personal experiences regarding sexuality, sexual health, body positivity, “slut-shaming,” and sexual assault.

So, what exactly does it mean to be sex-positive? While the definition may vary slightly from person to person, sex-positivity generally refers to having a positive attitude about sex, respecting others’ sexual preferences and consensual sexual practices, and treating sex as a normal, healthy part of life, rather than a taboo topic or something to be ashamed of.

Although sex-positivity may seem like a recent phenomenon, similar schools of thought can be traced back to the late 1920s when the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud addressed such concepts in his papers on sexuality and psychosexual matters. Sexual liberation was popularized in the 1960s and early 1970s during the sexual revolution, or the “free-love movement.” Supporters of free love rejected traditional views on sexuality and believed that sexual relations between consenting parties should not be regulated by law. They advocated for freedom of sexual expression in premarital sex, pornography use, public nudity, contraceptive use (like birth control pills), gay liberation, interracial marriage, women’s rights, and other sex-related issues.

Today, the sex-positivity movement looks a little different. Sex-positive advocates often use social media platforms to share information on safe and consensual sex, sex education, and body positivity. There is a wide breadth of topics in the contemporary sex-positivity movement, and different people may emphasize different points. However, these are some of the main areas of interest in the current movement: