God Distances Self From Christian Right THE HEAVENS—Responding to inflammatory remarks made by Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock during a debate Tuesday night, Our Lord God the Almighty Father sought today to distance Himself from both Mourdock and the entire right-wing fundamentalist Christian movement, sources confirmed. “I want to make one thing absolutely clear: Mr. Mourdock’s comments from last night in no way reflect my position on this or any other issue,” said the Divine Creator, speaking at a press conference this afternoon to address Mourdock’s remarks that rape-induced pregnancies were God’s intent. “And furthermore, I would like to take this opportunity to say definitively that I, God, do not officially sanction or condone the words or actions of anyone involved in the fanatical, conservative Christian faction that Mr. Mourdock represents.” “That includes members of the Christian Right themselves—if they could stop talking about me entirely, that would be preferable,” God added.
America’s next top mortician: “It really improves your life to be around corpses” When we think of morticians, we certainly don’t imagine a bubbly, self-effacing 28-year-old woman like Caitlin Doughty. But that’s who you’ll encounter in “Ask a Mortician,” the YouTube series she has been posting over the past year in which she discusses death, decomposition, funeral practices and grief. The darkly funny shorts — there are 12 installments to date — have drawn in 434,000 views. Following the death of Whitney Houston, Doughty introduced her lay audience to the term “skin slip,” which refers to the skin of a corpse detaching from the decomposing flesh beneath it (it happens quickly if a person expires in warm water, as Houston did). Doughty uses her gallows humor to lighten the mood to great effect. “Ritual and working with a dead body really helps you come to that,” she says. “I’ve never heard of people having a bad experience with that sort of thing. Doughty is not alone in advocating franker and more accepting attitudes toward death.
Claire Felicie’s photographs Marines’ faces before, during, and after Afghanistan. Behold is Slate's brand new photo blog. Like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter @beholdphotos and on Tumblr. Find out more about what this space is all about here. How do life-changing experiences concretely impact the way we look? Does tragedy truly show up in our eyes and brow? Yes, some of the shifts in appearance are environmentally induced; there's nothing other than the scorching Afghan sun to blame for those new freckles and bronzed noses. What's interesting about this project is that you can convince yourself that someone changed dramatically from middle to right, only to compare right to left and talk yourself out of it. Felicie came up with the idea for this project when her 18-year-old son decided to join the Marines. “They were saying they were good; they were fine,” Felicie says. The book version of Here Are the Young Men (a reference to the Joy Division song) will be out in 2013. Previous Features on Behold
When You’re Feeling Overwhelmed: Create a To-Live List “The only pressure I’m under is the pressure I’ve put on myself” ~Mark Messier It was enough. I was lying in the bathtub with the water up to my nose when I realized that I couldn’t go on like I’d been going. I had been working incredibly hard over the few months prior, so hard that I had forgotten why I was even doing it. That’s why I had escaped into the bathtub, without any books or magazines to distract me from myself. I thought back to when it all began, to the beginning of the year when I was just another college student. I had just moved out from my parents’ house. I didn’t want to grow up just to get by. I wanted to live. I knew there was a little spark in me that would turn into a big fire if I fed it the right thoughts and worked hard. When I learned that there were blogs like Tiny Buddha, solely devoted to your quality of life, I was ready to listen. I decided that I would become an entrepreneur. I wanted to change the world. So I went on and buried myself in work. Accept what is.
Manifesto for Disorder Picture: Public DomainR: Will you test me as my Fool, so that all may understand?C: I will.R: Will you test me as my Jester, if none else will criticize?C: I will. from “The Insubordinate Ritual”, Liber Kaos by Peter J Carroll. Chaos and disorder are to be embraced by Governments, Bureaucracies and Businesses who seek to become ‘Antifragile’. Taleb maintains that living things and complex systems are all antifragile to some degree. Followers of the noted occultist, Peter J Carroll, will no doubt be aware of his advocation of a remarkably similar principle in the incredibly influential ‘Magical Pact Of The Illuminates of Thanateros’. Furthermore, it’s likely many Disinfonaughts will be aware of the archetypal role of ‘The Jester Who Tells The Truth”. Nick Margerrison 0Share 6Share
Game Changer As I write this to you, Smoove is in pain. This is not the heart pain I expose to the world week after week in this column. No, today Smoove is in body pain. Let me break it down for you. I am currently lying in an all-white bed, in an all-white room, in an all-white hospital. I should also point out that Smoove is on pain medication. However, it has been a difficult time. The pain and boredom have been difficult to bear, but I have borne them stoically. A special shout-out also goes to my main man Darnell for the flowers he sent. I have only two complaints about my stay. As to why I have been hospitalized, I find it unnecessary to describe the circumstances of my accident. Smoove must remain silent. Still, the agony inside me burns. Questions remain: What if Smoove doesn’t fully recover? These questions, and others like them, have shaken Smoove B to his very core. Yet I must admit a small part of Smoove would be relieved if the invisible hand of the Lord were to take me out of the game.
Newborn Loses Faith In Humanity After Record 6 Days SCHAUMBURG, IL—In a turn of events that has stunned the worldwide medical community, local infant Nathan Jameson, born just six days ago, has become the youngest person ever to permanently and irrevocably lose all faith in humanity. “This shatters all previous records,” University of Chicago psychologist Douglas McAllister said Monday. “In all of documented medical history, there is no case of a newborn taking less than four months to develop the mental faculties required to grasp the full extent of this existential nightmare we call life on earth.” “Considering he already comprehends harsh realities that many people spend their entire fleeting, shallow existences attempting to deny, Baby Nathan is quite the little miracle!” he added. “For a baby, he sure is an insightful little guy,” Nathan’s mother, Melanie Jameson, told reporters. “We’re awfully proud to have such a precocious son,” she added, her face displaying no genuine emotion. “My God, what a depressing development,” she added.
Cindy Wigglesworth: Ego, Part 1: Ego Is Like a Hyperactive Robot When you are driving along the road, do you sometimes engage in a conversation with yourself? I do. I wish I could run a tape recorder on my brain. My internal arguments would be a bit embarrassing to replay -- but they are part of being human. Watching my mind at work has been such a humbling and wisdom-building process. It is amazing how my ego can see "danger" in harmless situations. The robot metaphor is powerful because our egos often run on automatic programming. Here is a theoretical example. The rumor mill is now off and running! Why do we stir up such drama? But there are two serious problems we experience with this ego-fear system: 1. 2. Our ego dumbs us down to keep us safe. So what is the solution? We can learn to calm the ego and put "Higher Self" in the driver's seat of our lives. When I feel my own drama story rolling out, I breathe, and then I thank my ego for being alert and wanting to protect me. For more by Cindy Wigglesworth, click here.
A Modest Proposal: A Day of Atonement for all the World's Religions | Think Tank 2013 was another year that featured plenty of religious conflict. School of Life co-founder and author Alain de Botton proposes a solution that may seem novel because we happen to act on it so rarely. When you have offended someone, you need to apologize. In Judaism, a day is set aside just for this purpose, and Botton says Judaism is "one of the wiser religions in this regard." Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, is the holiest day of the year for Jews. Botton says this ritual is so important because we're simply not good at apologizing on our own. And so in the current context we might push Botton's argument to its logical conclusion: should there be a day of atonement between all of the world's religions? Watch the video here: What's the Significance? In the political context, apologies are often seen as signs of weakness. I love Israeli people, I love peace. & I’m not ready [to] die [in] your war. Image courtesy of Shutterstock
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or “Moral Injury”? “My God, what have we done?” combat soldiers sometimes gasp as they see those they or comrades just killed, especially when they include innocent children, women, and other civilians. “We knew that we killed them/…the terrified mother/ clutching terrified child,” writes former Lieutenant Michael Parmeley in his poem “Meditation on Being a Baby Killer.” In l968, Lt. Parmeley led a combat platoon in the American War on Vietnam. He receives benefits for what is clinically described as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). “My gunner…started to cry,” Parmeley writes. Parmeley and I have participated in the Veterans’ Writing Group for twenty years. Would the best description of what Parmeley has be a “disorder?” “Moral injury” is a relatively new term to refer to what veterans and others experience, especially those who saw combat or violence. “Moral injury” places the cause on war itself. What are we teaching our children? I was also a young officer in the U.S.
The Second Coming of Psychedelics Ric Godfrey had the shakes. At night, his body temperature would drop and he’d start to tremble. During the day, he was jumpy. He was always looking around, always on edge. His vibe scared the people around him. He started drinking and drugging, anything to numb out. Years passed before a Department of Veterans Affairs counselor told him he had severe posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Counseling helped a little, but the symptoms continued. Then one of his Seattle neighbors—a woman who also suffered from PTSD—told him about a group of veterans who were going down to Peru to try a psychedelic drug called ayahuasca, a jungle vine that is brewed into a tea. The next thing Ric knew, he was crawling into a tent on a platform out in the middle of the Amazon jungle. “Your body will not keep it in you,” Ric recalled. Three years later, Ric Godfrey says he hasn’t had a single symptom of the shakes or night terror since he came back from the jungle. Psychedelic drugs are back.
India: Why do Hindus not spread their religion Some chores linked to less sex | Humans Maybe it’s the apron. Couples in the United States in which the men do more chores around the house have less sex than those in which the husbands don’t do the dishes and laundry as much, a new study finds. The findings appear in the February American Sociological Review. The division of labor in the typical U.S. household became more egalitarian between 1965 and 1995 says study coauthor Sabino Kornrich, a sociologist at the Juan March Institute in Madrid. But the new study, a snapshot of more than 3,500 heterosexual married couples in the United States in the early 1990s, finds that wives were still doing four-fifths of the household chores traditionally associated with women: doing dishes, washing clothes, cooking, cleaning and shopping. Against this backdrop, the new analysis finds that men reported having sex 5.2 times per month on average; women said their average was 5.6 times. Some scientists remain unconvinced that less work around the home by the man is a turn-on for a couple.