Jude's comments (member since Jul 28, 2008)

Jude's comments from the True North group.

goin with 9 oldies i know i would enjoy re-reading:
a variety of lengths & weights, some i can just open to any page,
& one nearly unforgiveable not-read-yet

Engine Summer - John Crowley
Love & Sleep - John Crowley
Ridley Walker - Russell Hoban
Welcome to Hard Times - E.L. Doctorow
The Eros of Everyday Life - Susan Griffin
Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner
Two or Three Things I Know for Sure - Dorothy Allison
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess - Leonard Shlain
The Collected Stories - Amy Hempel
One Writer's Beginnings - Eudora Welty

fortunately the sharks have found each other & are off playing by themselves. apparently at least one unenviable fantasy-life, too...

ok anthony: i think the essentials are still there.

the original poster is all about evolution.

ETA

and editing.

it is SO hard to hear other people while talking to yourself with your fingers stuck in your ears.

Yes Carlie, you are on your very own page - yours is the only voice here that has been accusing, deflective & possibly sarcastic. The heart of your passion appears to be not life but the sins of others. This reduces your presence here to that of a foil at best, a baiter at worst.

carlie - no one who describes the choice to terminate a pregnancy at any point after the moment of conception as murder gets to talk to me about spin. or compassion. or fairness. or christ. or respect. or agendas. or labels.

BunWat wrote: "Its not easy for some people to understand that respecting someone else's right to make their own decisions means respecting it even if you don't agree with their decisions. But if I respect your personal sovereignty only so far as I agree with your choices, then I don't actually respect it at all."

ah, bun. perfect.

observation - back to my early rant and writing i've done elsewhere - when writing i personally still hear "pro-life" and then write "anti-choice." It still takes a little time and work to name the position rather than the spin. i am not making a personal request, but for those of you interested - and for whom the change actually reflects how you feel of course - i suggest trying to do this when you speak and write elsewhere.

i loved the Incredibles too!!!!!! sarah vowell makes it into movies, too! yay!

brooke - thanks for yet another specific & telling application of reason. really.

if you can bear to see it again, or if you have never watched it, i recommend "If These Walls Could Talk -1." ("2" was about dykes, "1" was about abortion - a series of stories taking place over time in the same house.)
The first story is the one that still makes me go hollow to even think about -the first time i saw it i was shocky for days. Demi Moore as you have never seen her.

the book that actually pushed me the hardest about termination is John Irving's The Cider House Rules. it snuck up on my complacency and distance- it changed my life.

gail-

the nature of the organization and the nature of the passions involved in the public face of each side is so stark.

this is not to say that there haven't been idiots trading name-calling outside the clinic, but by and large pro-choice activism really is rooted in respect for a specific population and anti-choice is dedicated to controlling that same population. pro-choice in the end affirms individuals, anti-choice is often reduced to judgement, accusation, shaming: their only respect, such as it is, is for the unborn. I say this with sorrow and near-pity - i cannot imagine being so cut off from reason and reality.

i try to imagine a scenario in which lives *i* valued are legally despised and ended with no sense of their humanity - and i still can't imagine using terror to make my point, but i hope i will never have to find out.

ETA:

"Abortion is not a cerebal or reproductive issue. It is a matter of the heart. For until one understands the heart of a woman, nothing else about abortion makes any sense at all"
Dr. George Tiller


ETA - big XPOST with Bun & Gail. self-conscious now but gonna leave it up

ok. rant for rant. "pro-abortion" is a red flag. i don't think of Sherri as someone who actually waves such flags on purpose, especially since i agree with every other word she said.

Part of the problem - any political problem actually - is about framing the terms. Vocabulary is a war that the opponents of choice win every single time a member of the media says "Pro-life."

No one ever says "Anti-choice" as if it were a neutral term. Ever. The opponents of choice have succeeded to the degree that even folks like Sherri end up using "pro-abortion" as a disclaimer before describing some of the contexts of choice.

"Pro-abortion" is not a position - people are not lined up behind any of this because of a passion for or against procedures. It is a vision of life, of humanity - of what it means to be human. Some people's vision of a woman's autonomy, a woman's right to control what comes in and out of her and when, includes the choice to terminate a pregnancy in that vision of what being fully human amounts to for a woman. Without that choice, her womb belongs to someone else by right of their conviction that the humanity of a fetus trumps hers.

Other people see the sacred nature of of humanity beginning at the moment of conception - so that no matter how or when or to whom that conception occurs, any thought of termination is a contemplation of murder.

I know life - some kind of as-yet-unviable life - occurs at conception. This event takes place within another life - a viable ( hopefully adult) life. I remember when i thought that the decision to terminate a pregnancy was a matter of conscience, but that only a malformed conscience could ever decide to do so. I remember the year that i finally really and truly got why the word "choice" is at the center of one side's vocabulary, and the often cynical, manipulative and hypocritical phrase "life" is used by the other.

I remember realizing that what i had thought was my heart's own understanding of the sacredness of life had in fact actually been shaped by a faith-based community that really did value women first and foremost as mothers, different in a soul-splitting way from the body of both christ and his church. i remember beginning to finally take responsibility for what they had taught me was my soul, but turned out to be my conscience.

smiling. i was about to rush to re-affirm my compassion and respect for those who truly and dispassionately believe in the utter humanity of a sperm 1 second after contact. they are not the people spewing hatred at the women seeking termination, so i don't think i need to.

i know women - and men - who have spent their careers counseling and comforting women seeking termination. These providers are not like murderers. They are most like midwives. they are there for a woman in crisis, a woman on the brink of losing her life or her mind or her family or her sanity or her safety or her independence to an unintentional or forced or mistaken or yes, careless consequence of a moment in time.

jesus said that by their fruits you will know them. i have seen the faces and the voices of those who have used this war against women as cynically and violently as Bush used 9-11, and i have seen the lives of those who have comforted and supported women looking for choice. there is simply no comparison. the nature of the organization and the nature of the passions involved in the public face of each side is so stark.

i have lost my train of thought here thinking about the women here at Preterm in cleveland sobbing and praying for compassion and going back to work full of pride and determination. It ain't about hating babies, folks. It's about loving women - and believing that a woman has more of a right to choose to terminate a pregnancy than anyone else has a right to tell her how to live the rest of her life.

well, what they never address is that this particular "potential life" resides within females, and that controlling of that functionality is at the psychic heart of this pathology. i am NOT saying that a belief in life from conception is always false, ignorant or hateful - it is the true conviction of many gentle intelligent people.

but the violent campaign has always been about maddened people looking for a war, not righteous people who have truly found god. blood is not an accident - it is the point. the only concern of the polite & political soft-spoken haters now is bad publicity: he was truly worth more to them alive than dead.

not the matter of faith-based perspective kind, the actual gunning down a man outside a church kind. if this is being discussed elsewhere, feel free to take this down.

crazy in glass houses: my dream colony

subconscious desire to anthill-poke

This surprises me. I had assumed you lettered in ant-hill poking.

So is it a Christian book?

no - she's all gooey woo-woo. the church of Julia Cameron and her connections to all that is groovy and successful.

::ok jude is really not allowed to talk about JC anymore.::

JC !
omakemestoppleeeez

(btw - currently the secularity of the word "spiritual" is being reclaimed. cf among other things The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality)

more to the point, as i said, i rely on a number of spiritual ( in the faith-based sense) teachers and writers - Pema Chodron & Trich Nhat Hanh for instance, and i study yoga at a center that is completely grounded in a specific school - Satyananda.

Smiling. ya know - i don't think i made anything about myself clear to you and it doesn't matter. bottom line -she's put herself out there as a teacher of a spiritual practice. Her practice does not require faith in any sort of divinity to be effective, and in my opinion her smug arrogance is distracting. Or it was - thanks to yoga and meditation i would prolly just read the exercises now, once i realized her voice was not useful to me.

(edited for word choice)

Cameron ( TAW author) is like many apparently well-intentioned but unwittingly disrespectful people who when they detect signs of integrity, generosity or compassion in my behavior or speech, insist that I actually do have a relationship with god, i just don't know it. They are always smiling and cheerful when they say this, and i love a couple of em and i take it as meant. But just imagine me saying to a devout and cheerful person of faith testifying to the joy , happiness & strength that god has brought to their lives: " Oh that's really just self-awareness and the human capacity for connection: that is just you, you just don't know it."

I never would. Ever. What matters to me is the integrity, the compassion and the use of intelligence for self-reflection and supportive connection. You wanna call it god & prayer, you wanna give some agency outside yourself credit - fine - cause either way , each of us has done the work - and the work is what counts.

Losing my thread. Cameron is this way about god all the way through the book: so oblivious to the very concept of it not being divine that she has only smug dismissiveness and condescention for anyone who does not realize that it IS god, that what you do is worthwhile BECAUSE of the divine and the sooner you acknowledge your divinity ( and the author's ;-> sorry!) the better your life and your art are gonna be.

ick. Cause i read people of faith, i listen to them. i learn from them. I translate the language of faith effortlessly into the tasks of a value-driven life. She does not sound like the people of faith i respect. she is not humble and she trades in charisma. Oh i've talked too long about this.

Jude is traditionally a man's name. The song about John Lennon's son - whose nickname was Jude - saved me form the nickname "judy/i," which had never fit me. I used it legally for years, and then in my thirties got my Judith back, and gladly answer to both.

ETA - might help to remember that when an atheist talks about people of faith, s/he is talking about people, cause there is no god to talk about. For me at least this leads to an assessment of behavior, not a questioning of the existence of god, or an examination of god's qualities or literature. Jesus said "by their fruits you shall know them." I look at the fruit. Cameron -oh! - Cameron is not organic ;->!

More than reserving, really -- sort of clinging to it tightly in a way that is probably unfair and unhealthy.

now that's what i suspected! :->!

i might like you too!

seriously - i think he is genuine. & i think you oughtta try to enjoy it instead of being so afraid to...?