Monday, April 3, 2023

Break week, Freedom, Gods.

This is last week's post. But now it is this week! The tyranny of time! I just had a very busy weekend, preparing an interactive story, puzzle, adventure...thing, for my weekend volunteer class. It's getting towards the end of the year, so we decided to do a fun summation activity, pulling in things we've learned throughout the year. Unfortunately, I had to write it, pack, and spend time with my wife's family that was only overlapping with us being in town for that one day, so it was extremely full, I didn't finish packing until about 10 Saturday night, and then I didn't finish working on the 'script' for the adventure until most of the way through the day of traveling yesterday. I was tweaking things right up until it started.

So now I'm taking a breath. Back in Connecticut, for Passover. I slept for like ten hours last night. Something about traveling. You're mostly sitting but it still manages to be exhausting. Perhaps because you're sitting so much. I notice when I sit at the computer for an hour + without really moving, I feel significantly worse than if I get up every 15-30 minutes just to move for a few moments. When I remember, I set a little app on my phone to ding every 15 minutes to remind me to at least stand up for a second. It makes an unexpectedly large difference. Even more so if I actually take the time to move for a minute after standing. It can be hard to pull myself away from what I'm doing though. Sometimes I keep reading when I stand up, I just walk around a bit with my laptop.

Anyways, there is a lot to do, but I'm kind of already in the 'creating activities for kids' mode, so when my parents were talking about how to make Passover fun for the kids, it made me start thinking. Thematic games, stories, etc. Currently, I'm thinking about the story of Passover. It's really got a lot to do with freedom, doesn't it. Freedom and slavery. But it's also a spring-equinox-adjacent holiday, so there are some tones of the spring harvest and rebirth themes of the season. 

I also always have a kind of sour-faced reaction to the fire and brimstone, rock and roll depiction of God that you often get in the Old Testament. I don't agree with the idea of an omnipresent, omnipotent God who gets angry and smites people and plays favorites. 

My God is love and compassion and peace and unity. My God is one with many faces, and accepts all peoples religions and ways of worshiping, they're all approved of, provided they do not damage that flame of unity. And even if they do, it's that part that's not good, not the whole thing. 

So the message of "our God is the right one, he beat up the other people's Gods, and killed their people, because they didn't choose the right religion" is distasteful to me, as is, "we prayed to God to gangster our enemies so did." 

Bad things happen to people, but I guess I just find the karmic perspective more palatable than some omnipotent being that happens to behave like an angry, jealous, prejudiced person. Maybe there are forces that smite out of anger or because you ask them too, but I don't acknowledge them as God. It creates a bit of dissonance, when reading about it at the seder. I try to figure out what I think might have actually been going on, but I don't have the resources to do that with any degree of certainty, or even probability.

I should end this now, lots of other stuff to get done, (and another post to make, for this week.)

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