Synchronicity - What's your experience of it?

[yoshy]

something sentient you mean?

Yep, or at least whatever the word would be for the universe itself having sentience lol.

Most people do find comfort in the idea of "something else", a "higher power". i mean the idea that we are born to trudge through life and laugh a bit and cry a bit and hate a bit and love a bit.. and have to style our hair 25,000x and make dinner 30,000x and then just have it all washed away into forgotten meaninglessness when we die, is kinda a bummer.

No doubt about the above. Atheists like myself often dedicate ourselves to a particular worldly passion. (Not saying religious dedication isn't passionate just to be clear that wasn't a comparison!)

Check out absurdism: the "absurd" refers to our belief that the universe is inherently meaninglessness, but that very fact means we create our own meaning! Even if you don't want to read the philosophy books about it, I highly recommend Albert Camus's fiction. Specifically, The Plague and The Stranger are two amazing books.

The book The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt finds similar evidence. He identified 3 axes of happiness, and one is closeness to the "divine". Divine though is used more purpose and community. So in his work, 'divinity" doesn't depend on a deity or supernatural beings at all. Religion or least belier a high power, though of course, was and is the main component of the "divinity" axis for the majority of the world currently. The book is a little outdated, but I think it's still worth it.

(disclaimer: the people we affect positively do go on and hopefully pass those traits on to other generations.

Spoiler

Of course the negative ones get passed on too but im trying to keep things happy.

)


https://genius.com/The-police-synchronicity-i-lyrics

I really do like the idea of goodness being passed on. There is a genetic trait for fear so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a complicated genetic component for kindness. (Though I love the sentiment whether or not it's science or religion.)

 

[Ann K]

The Christion religion teaches "love thy neighbor", and the parable of the good Samaritan clarifies that this extends across group boundaries (Samaritans and Jews hated each other). Churches are imperfect embodiments of religions.

I'm an American, and what we see right now in our country is (generally from the southern protestant churches) a concerted support of Donald Trump and his worst policies, an opposition to any black or brown people, a virulent hatred of anyone who is homosexual or transgender, and a suppression of the rights of all women. All these things are spoken about openly from the pulpit, and many more such as the "evils" of speaking any language but English and of getting one's children vaccinated, as well as the long-simmering Protestant-Catholic clash.

We have not yet reached the levels of the Holocaust, or of Israel's attack on Gaza, but there certainly isn't a lot of "love they neighbor" coming from those churches right now.

 

[JMartJr]

There are certainly churches that have gone down that path. There are also those that have not. Just to post some sources to back that up:

Police arrested about 100 clergy demonstrating against immigration enforcement at Minnesota's largest airport Jan. 23, and several thousand gathered in downtown Minneapolis despite Arctic temperatures to protest the Trump administration's crackdown.
...
The clergy were issued misdemeanor citations of trespassing and failure to comply with a peace officer and were then released, said Jeff Lea, a Metropolitan Airports Commission spokesman. They were arrested outside the main terminal at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport because they went beyond the reach of their permit for demonstrating and disrupted airline operations, he said.

Rev. Mariah Furness Tollgaard of Hamline Church in St. Paul said police ordered them to leave but she and others decided to stay and be arrested to show support for migrants, including members of her congregation who are afraid to leave their homes. She planned to go back to her church after her brief detention to hold a prayer vigil.
...
The Rev. Elizabeth Barish Browne traveled from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to participate in the rally in downtown Minneapolis, where the high temperature was minus 9 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 degrees Celsius) despite a bright sun.

"What's happening here is clearly immoral," the Unitarian Universalist minister said. "It's definitely chilly, but the kind of ice that's dangerous to us is not the weather."

https://www.ncronline.org/100-clerg...on-enforcement-subzero-minnesota-temperatures

People are packing church sanctuaries across the state (North Carolina -- JM) to learn how to "protect our neighbor, heal the sick, feed the hungry, and welcome the stranger," Lansdale said, speaking from experience as she is working to organize clergy across Greensboro and the state.

"They're stepping up because we all belong here and to say 'If you want to get to our immigrant neighbors, you have to get through us.'"

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/baker-pastor-charlotte-north-carolina-ice-cbp-dhs
(My church was one of the ones where folks met and organized as described here. I put in time standing at Manolo's Bakery, discussed in the article, to stand between the folks there and anybody that might come to harass them. It seemed like the right place I ought to stand, as their storefront is decorated with kites! But I digress...-- JM)

Faith groups in Louisiana are mobilizing along multiple fronts in response to an ongoing surge in federal immigration actions targeting New Orleans.

Clergy and congregations from across the religious spectrum are organizing protests and know-your-rights training for citizens as more people share video recordings of Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel operating in their communities.

That's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the calling and actions inspired by the urgency of the moment, said Leigh Rachal, executive director of the Louisiana Interchurch Conference, a coalition of denominational and other faith groups such as the African American Episcopal, United Methodist, Evangelical Lutheran and Episcopal churches in addition to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and the National Baptist Convention of America.

"Across traditions, our sacred Scriptures teach us that our role is to welcome strangers and uphold the dignity of every single person. It is important in these times to lift that collective voice and to remind one another of the importance of how we treat one another and that the image of the divine is in each of us," said Rachal, who also serves as a commissioned pastor in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

The motivation to organize also has an emotional edge for clergy as they learn of masked agents swooping into New Orleans with the brutality ICE has demonstrated in Chicago, Los Angeles, Charlotte and the Triangle region of North Carolina.

"It makes me sick to my stomach. It makes me angry, to be honest," said Marc Boswell, senior pastor at St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans, about the ongoing action dubbed by authorities as "Operation Catahoula Crunch."

https://baptistnews.com/article/new-orleans-clergy-organize-interfaith-opposition-to-ice-raids/

Edit to add -- I meant to include this from our friends over in the Methodist Church (I'm a Presbyterian but I try to get along with everybody! ^_^)

Leaders and members of more than 600 congregations of the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church have signed onto a full-page ad in The Charlotte Observer condemning aggressive conduct by federal immigration agencies.

The ad, signed by more than 800 congregants and clergy across the conference's 640 churches, appears in the Feb. 4 print paper. The ad was paid for by individual donors. It calls the treatment of immigrants during recent ICE raids "aggressive, undisciplined, illegal, and inhumane." The ad follows the killing of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota by federal agents in January.
...
Bishop Ken Carter, the resident bishop of the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church, said the ad was born out of a grassroots desire from congregants who saw what was happening in Charlotte and across the country and wanted to take a stand. They didn't want their silence to be misconstrued as approval, he said.

"This is more people trying to reckon with how I live as a person of faith, on the one hand, where I say that I love people. I love all people because they've been created in God's image, no exceptions," Carter said. "... and then on the other hand, how do I live within my heart and within my life with what I see happening in my country. People are trying to reconcile those two things."

Last February, the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church joined two other faith groups in suing the Trump administration over changes that allowed immigration officials into churches. (Emphasis added -- JM)
...
"It's more an act of loving our neighbor," he said. "We love our country. And we want our country to be a place, as we have been for years, … where people can come and have liberty and justice."

https://www.charlotteobserver.com/living/religion/article314544649.html



Where churches and other congregations are failing to take a stand, or are taking the wrong one,they deserve criticism, I believe. But I hope we'll be cautious not to tar with too broad a brush.