Centers

I'm not getting any younger. Right now when I think about dying, I think it's over, you're done. I'm okay with that. That's the way the Universe operates. Things are born, they live a useful life, they die. Galaxies, stars, people. I'm okay passing the torch to my sons and grandchildren.

But if there was an afterlife, I can't see it as it is usually pictured: God, as an all powerful force running everything. That's too much like the way things are run in this life. Seems like if we have to endure the powerful centers in this life, we ought to be able to endure a Mad Max, Han Solo existence in the afterlife.

Centers. If there is a dominant center, there's always the outliers that don't benefit. Like in my town of Albany, downtown is the city's elites baby. They spend millions sprucing up historic buildings and maybe the rest of us in other neighborhoods will get some trickle down effect. But it doesn't fool anyone. Average people cant afford to shop down there because all they have is expensive boutique stores. The mayor is all about upscale. My center is a Dairy Mart and Pizza Now, four blocks away. If I need clothes or food I bike or walk 20 minutes to Target or Grocery Outlet.

Then there's these political and economic capital cities where the political, corporate and religious elites suck the life out of the rest of the country. They say you can't have a country without borders. What they mean is they can't control the people close to the border without a tight border. Border walls aren't meant to keep people out. They are to keep us from interacting with our neighbors on the other side. Washington sucks taxes out of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California and sends next to nothing back to the poor towns along the border.

I nust read this story in the New York Times about how the Mexican League baseball team in Nuevo Laredo plays half their games in Laredo. Even in these tight border times, fans and players flow back and forth. Because down there, there aren't Mexicans and US citizens, they are friends and neighbors and business partners. They have everything in common with the people across the river and nothing with the hacks in Mexico City and Washington, D.C.

Some Native American tribes have creation stories of people coming up out of the ground to people their tribal grounds. This is the way I think it was with God coming into the Universe, bubbling in like spring spreading and sharing energy from the bottom up. The idea of an all powerful God, even if he's helping the oppressed, is a mirror creation of the rich and powerful, starting with the first shamans, to control people. Defused power at the fringes may be messy and chaotic, but at least it is among friends and neighbors and close enemies and not some corporate drones thousands of miles away.

Worth of all persons

Some denominations have a principle: all persons have worth. It doesn't say most people; it doesn't say 99%; it says all. But the same people that profess the worth of all persons, think it only applies to people of their political persuasion. They post pictures of Judge Kavanaugh's law clerk supposedly making a white supremacist sign. As conservative as Kavanaugh is, it still makes no sense that he would hire a white supremacist and from what I read, she is half Hispanic and her grandmother is a Polish Jew. But apparently conservatives have no worth, so they feel they can post disparaging photos without any basis of truth. If all people have worth, even Hitler had worth, at least to Eva  Braun.

That's why people keep God around. Because then they can say, that person has no worth, but in God's eyes, all people have worth. But if you can't say all people have worth, don't put words in God's mouth.