MacTheWolf (imported) wrote: Wed Jun 26, 2013 8:12 am
Thanks janekane. No Pacific Garden Mission here and I don't consume alcohol. I think I tend to be more Buddhist than Christian
I don't consume alcohol either. Nor do "I" make much of it either. The gut bacteria tend to ferment what resides in the colon, that is why the liver has alcohol dehydrogenase. Not for imbibed alcohol, but for alcohol produced by fermentation in the gut, especially in the colon. The hepatic portal vein conveys fermentation-produced alcohol to the liver, where, in the absence of imbibed alcohol, the often legally drunk hepatic portal vein alcohol concentration is reduced to essentially undetectable levels in one single pass through the liver.
Along with my testicles, my colon was snatched from me in the summer of 1986, both for cancer risk reduction. Since my 1986 colectomy, my liver alcohol dehydrogenase enzymes have had no worthwhile duty to perform; foods that would otherwise have a tendency to ferment do not hang around long enough to give my liver alcohol dehydrogenase any useful work.
As for consuming alcohol, in 1963 and 1964, near the end of those years, a successful salesman team where I worked (originally Crossley Associates, which became, while I worked there, the Crossley Sales Division of Hewlett-Packard, and then became the Midwest Sales Region of Hewlett-Packard) gave every other employee a bottle of an alcoholic beverage, in 1963, I got a bottle of White Horse Scotch Whiskey and in 1964, a bottle of Schenley O.F.C Canadian Whiskey. I have them now, never opened, in their original packaging.
I never intended to suggest consuming alcohol, yet, perhaps there is merit in the notion of any port in a storm.
And, the word, "Jesus" in "Jesus! Save me!" may be a profane epithet for someone and a sacred name for someone else. It is not for me to specify for another person whether the sacred or the profane is more accurate, or more relevant, or more useful, for any particular person, in any particular situation.
While I find that I am a religious person, one who finds the Bible to be a useful book, much as I find the Koran, in English translation to be useful, or the Bhagavad Gita, or the Upanishads or Benjamin Hoff's "The Tao of Pooh" and "The Te of Piglet," and the Talmud to be useful, I remain unconvinced that all, or most, or more than a tiny number of, religious persons would, on meeting me, deem me to be religious.
I find it not for me to use my religious ignorance as a tool with which to beat anyone up, or to beat anyone down.
I suppose I would be a good Buddhist if I could ever make useful sense of the first of the four Noble Truths of Buddhism, that life is suffering. Because I have lived all my life observing that whatever happens has to be necessary and sufficient, I do not suffer from life experiences; I adapt to life experiences as I learn of my response abilities; I have never had any responsibilities because having them would mean that I would have to live through the future in the past, something I find absolutely impossible.
I suppose I would be a good Christian if I had ever experienced any estrangement from the giver of life; such estrangement (sin, as some might call it) seems to be an experience of which I am incapable of having.
Whatever my unexperienced suffering, whatever my unexperienced sins. Mac, I would never do to you what you report others are doing to you.
Telling the truth in a world of apparent deception may be difficult to impossible unless it is understood that, for example, if one is endangered by homelessness, and the truth is that one prefers to survive, then masquerading as a wannabe repentant drunkard may be the only achievable way to actually be truthful.
I find the likely truth to be that people who have been so badly hurt that they have become insensate not only to their hurts but also to the hurts of others may, in hurting you, be telling of their learned insensitivity to hurtfulness in the only way they have left to tell of it.
Acquired insensitivity to harm may be the ultimate of human tragedies. And the fundamental basis of every dogmatic, doctrinaire, authoritarian, tyrannical, coercive, abusive established religion that there ever will be?
One of my skills is crying. One of my precious skills is weeping in grief and sorrow. That precious skill may be what protects me from suffering in the presence of terrible difficulties.
I do not ignore harm, I do not pretend away harm. I embrace harm, the better to know about harm, the better to be familiar with harm, the better to understand harm, the better to learn how to prevent harm.
