Michael Steele on Rachel

It’s late, I can’t sleep and I’m re-watching tonight’s Rachel Maddow show. The interview with outgoing RNC chairman Michael Steele is interesting, but Steele seems to be as blind as ever about his mismanagement of the RNC the last two years. Maddow, god love her, is essentially softballing on the finance irregularities the show’s been reporting on for more than a year.

I suppose it’s asking too much for a reflective Steele to allow that it wasn’t just the power brokers in the party with an agenda against him: some of what went wrong were choices he made. Maddow is usually less willing to let that kind of evasiveness slide.

So, rather than asking Steele on the show to discuss issues that – as Maddow’s own reporting points out really beg some explanation – instead we get half the interview on the fact that Steele didn’t appear on the show. Steele laid the blame at unnamed folks within the party who – Steele says – also forbade him from appearing on his “buddy” Bill Maher’s show.

See? Pretend the last two years of red meat tossed at the party’s base didn’t really happen; Steele’s been a closet moderate all along. No, really. He watches Rachel and everything.

Pretend the incredible disappearing chairman didn’t really happen. Did the same minders forbid Steele from being in front of a camera for the whole election cycle? There’s a ton left just barely unsaid that begs a followup, which, atypically we just didn’t get.

Maddow is usually so spot on with this kind of interview. A bit of a disappointment, this, I’m sorry to say.

Deities and Deity Worship

Reposted from Krishna.com
http://www.krishna.com/deities-and-deity-worship
No copyright infringement is intended.

Deities play an important part in most temples of Krishna. But what is the significance of Deities and Deity worship? One thing to understand is that all the images or Deities in the Vedic pantheon, as found in the temples, are made according to explicit details and instructions found in the Vedic texts. Then they are installed in the temple in an elaborate ceremony wherein the Divine personalities are called to appear in the form of the Deity. Some of the Deities are demigods, while others, such as Krishna, Vishnu, or Ramachandra, are forms displaying various pastimes of the Supreme Being.

Some people, however, do not believe that God has a form. But many verses in the Puranas and particularly the Brahma-samhita establish that the Supreme Being does have specific forms according to His pastimes. These texts also describe His variegated features, which include His spiritual shape, characteristics, beauty, strength, intelligence, activities, etc. Therefore, it is considered that the authorized Deities of the Supreme that are shaped according to these descriptions provide a view of the personal form of God.

Those who have no knowledge of God or His form will certainly consider the temple Deities as idols. But this is because they think that the Deities are simply the products of someone’s imagination. Of course, there are those who say that God has no form, spiritual or material, or that there is no Supreme Being. Others think that since God must be formless, they can imagine or worship any material form as God, or they regard any image as merely an external representation of the Supreme. But images such as those of the demigods are not additional forms of an impersonal God, nor are they equal to God. All such people who think in the above mentioned ways have resorted to their own imagination to reach such conclusions and are, therefore, idolaters. The imaginary images and opinions of God that are formed by those who have not properly learned about, seen, or realized God are indeed idols, and those who accept such images or opinions are certainly idolaters. This is because these images or opinions are based on ignorance and are not a true likeness of the Supreme Being’s personal form.

Nonetheless, God is described in the Vedic literature, which explains that God is sat-chit-ananda vigraha, or the form of complete spiritual essence, full of eternity, knowledge, and bliss, and is not material in any way. His body, soul, form, qualities, names, pastimes, etc., are all nondifferent and are of the same spiritual quality. This form of God is not an idol designed from someone’s imagination, but is the true form, even if He should descend into this material creation. And since the spiritual nature of God is absolute, He is nondifferent from His name. Thus, the name Krishna is an avatara or incarnation of Krishna in the form of sound. Similarly, His form in the temple is not merely a representation, but is also qualitatively the same as Krishna as the archa-vigraha, or the worshipable form.

Some people may question that if the Deity is made from material elements, such as stone, marble, metal, wood, or paint, how can it be the spiritual form of God? The answer is given that since God is the source of all material and spiritual energies, material elements are also a form of God. Therefore, God can manifest as the Deity in the temple, though made of stone or other elements, since He can transform what is spiritual into material energy, and material energy back into spiritual energy. Thus, the Deity can easily be accepted as the Supreme since He can appear in any element as He chooses. In this way, even though we may be unqualified to see God, who is beyond the perceptibility of our material senses, the living beings in this material creation are allowed to see and approach the Supreme through His archa-vigraha form as the worshipable Deity in the temple. This is considered His causeless mercy on the materially conditioned living beings.

In this manner, the Supreme Being gives Himself to His devotees so they can become absorbed in serving, remembering and meditating on Him. Thus, the Supreme comes to dwell in the temple, and the temple becomes the spiritual abode on earth. In time, the body, mind and senses of the devotee become spiritualized by serving the Deity, and the Supreme becomes fully manifest to him or her. Worshiping the Deity of the Supreme and using one’s senses in the process of bhakti-yoga, devotional service to the Supreme, provides a means for one’s true essential spiritual nature to unfold. The devotee becomes spiritually realized and the Deities reveal Their spiritual nature to the sincere souls according to their spiritual development. This can continue up to the level in which the Supreme Being in the form of the Deity engages in a personal relationship and performs reciprocal, loving pastimes with the devotee, as has previously taken place with other advanced individuals.

At this stage, having darshan or seeing the Deity is not simply a matter of looking at the Deity in the temple, but to one who is spiritually realized it is a matter of experiencing the Deity and entering into a personal, reciprocal relationship with the Supreme Personality in the form of the Deity. At that stage, you may view the Deity, but the Deity also gazes at you, and then there is a spiritual exchange wherein the Deity begins to reveal His personality to you. This is what separates those who are experienced from those who are not, or those who can delve into this spiritual exchange and those who may still be trying to figure it out. For those who have experienced such an exchange with the Supreme or His Deity, at this stage the worship of the Supreme Being in the Deity moves up to a whole different level, with no limits as to the spiritual love that can be shared between the devotee and the Deity.

Adding some oldies but goodies…

In my ongoing efforts to consolidate the 219 blogging/social media platforms I’ve tried out and abandoned over the last three or four years (sigh), I’m reposting some oldies but goodies from elsewhere that ought to be kept around now that I’m safely back in the comfy chair that is my old Blogger account. Hehe.

Gun control…please? Please, people…

I’ve listened to right-wing bloviation blaming the victims. (Check Salon. I’m not willing to give these idiots a click through). With that, I don’t feel it’s out of place to speak up.

Can we please, please dispassionately and intelligently re-examine the Second Amendment? Is it possible – just POSSIBLE, mind – that a provision that made sense to the framers more than two centuries ago might not have the same relevance in our modern democracy? While we’re at it, can the NRA ratchet down the hypocrisy and stop pretending that gun ownership is under some kind of organized assault at the hands of the evil, nasty left? The NRA is one of the most massively funded, and widely successful lobbying organizations in history. But their default position – even as Glorious Leader feels like the most appropriate first response to the Virginia Tech shootings is to throw some red meat action their way – is to act like this will be the end of guns for all those law-abiding members of the citizenry who really, REALLY need an assault rifle. For hunting.

The Right in this country goes into heat threatening a new Constitutional amendment to ban abortion, prohibit gay marriage and make flag burning a crime punishable by death just about every 14 seconds these days.

Can those of us on the Left get over our fear of upsetting these idiots and start calling for a serious re-examination of the right to bear arms?

Avarosis can suck it (though he’s probably too much of a man to admit that he’d actually like to)

Susan Striker wrote a well-thought rebuttal to the crap Avarosis Salon piece I wrote about a couple of days ago, that makes several of the points I was trying to make much more coherently:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/10/11/transgender/

Striker corrects Avarosis bullshit view of queer history, for one thing, and rightly calls him on the claim that trans-inclusiveness isn’t something being forced on the queer community “from above” as Avarosis has repeatedly tried to claim (apparently he’s really on a roll over on his own blog; I’m loathe to give the idiot the clicks, but some of the comments to Stryker’s piece on Salon are fairly telling).

I suspect, though, that what’s really going on here is that Avarosis is one of a long line of “straight-acting” gays who really wish the gay movement would get back to providing him with fuckable nuggets of appropriately butch, straight-acting man candy instead of peskily bothering with equality for queers Avarosis has no particular interest in sleeping with.

Fundamentally, this comes back around to the question of just what we really mean by equality. Straight acting fags assume that conditional tolerance is good enough, but that comes at the cost of genuinely supporting gender variant people (gay, bi, straight or otherwise) who can’t or won’t conform to social expectations of gender. You simply cannot claim to “support” the rights of transgendered and transsexual persons while simultaneously claiming that they’re expendable in your quest for “pragmatic” political action. There’s no such thing as a scarcity of justice (to steal and rephrase an excellent point from one of the Salon commenters). Justice for all means absolutely everybody, which is an idea that even conservative gays like Avarosis ought to get behind, but he (and they) won’t…because the dirty little truth here is that he simply doesn’t believe in justice for everybody.

Hmm. Maybe it’s time.

I hate to say this, but maybe the trans community needs to organize itself, separate and apart from the gay (and here, I think I very specifically mean gay-as-in-gay male) community.

I’ve been debating the pragmatic vs. idealistic argument with regard to the ENDA with several people, and I’m slowly coming to the realization that relying on the gay community for anything at all is probably going to end only in frustration for transfolks. The ironic thing is that gay people themselves have been told the same thing for decades. This exact argument – precisely the same – has been used by supposedly progressive Democrats in the past with specific regard to nearly any gay positive state or federal legislation. For more than two decades – or, nearly the entire time the US has had a visible lesbian and gay civil rights movement – gay people were told by (supposedly) well meaning straight folks in positions of power that we’d just have to wait for our time to come, and that now just wasn’t the time to try and pass a hate crimes bill or add “sexual orientation” to a nondiscrimination law. We’d have to wait until society caught up. We swallowed this until we simply refused to keep swallowing it. A generation of people my age and younger, who grew up in a post-Stonewall world, radicalized by AIDS activism were simply unwilling to wait for society to catch up.

What painfully short memories we have.

Or maybe there are just more folks like John Avarosis out there in the world and I’ve been giving the gay community credit it doesn’t actually deserve. Maybe most gay people really only care about protecting against sexual orientation discrimination and nothing else. Folks have made this claim, publicly, before – Somewhat famously, Roseanne did, not long ago, and was excoriated for it in gay circles.

Maybe it’s true.

Maybe it’s time for the trans community to stop asking for acceptance from a GLB community that from appearances doesn’t understand T* folks, and actively resists trying to. I’m ashamed of us queers for even coming to this place, but I’ve been beating my head against a wall with gay people who (I’ve said) really ought to know better.

You know what? We ought to know better.

But we don’t.

We don’t want to. Or, at least, we sure as hell seem not to.

I wish this wasn’t where my head was at around these issues, but for better or worse this is where I’m at.

But I’ll tell you this: the first pissed-off trans person who gets radicalized around ENDA – or whatever the next signal event happens to be – and starts a separate movement will have a few queer supporters throwing dollars his or her way. Because, ultimately, if it really does take a separate trans* movement to pry open the brains of the queer community at large, the organized GLB money machine won’t be getting any more of mine.