36/40

77% Weekly Newsletter





The 77% Weekly



The Religion-Outside-The-Box Newsletter






November 2006 – Issue 36/40



In This Issue

 






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Greetings!

The 77% Weekly:
The Religion-Outside-The-Box Newsletter
helps
people find and be with (the) God (of their
understanding) 40
out of 52 weeks a year.


Religion-Outside-The-Box
is a non-denominational,
internet-based, 501c3 tax
exempt religious congregation.







Apples are blue.
 

If someone told me that most apples
are blue, I wouldn’t get upset.

I’d just
know that they are mistaken, incorrect, wrong. It
wouldn’t change my belief that apples are usually
red, sometimes green, and occasionally
yellow.

“Oh well,” I’d think to myself, “they
believe that apples are blue. So what?”

But
what about if someone told me that I am ugly,
stupid, egotistical, or something similarly
negative? As long as I know that these unloving
remarks do not really apply to me, there’s no point
in getting upset.

I’d simply think that they
had said something just as silly as apples are blue.

With love,

Some follow-up thoughts/questions. (Some of these
are addressed in the comments on the streetprophets site where the
article also went up last week.)

  • How strong is a
    person’s mind to decide what they choose to beleive? If you
    are told long enough by enough people that something is so,
    how difficult is it to think otherwise?
  • What does it
    matter to me what others say about me if I know that (the)
    God (of my
    understanding) loves me?
  • How do we hold
    onto a view of God that isn’t the one that is our parents’?
  • How do we hold onto knowing what it is that God
    wants from us when others are telling us God wants
    otherwise?
















With much love,








Rabbi Brian

Religion-Outside-The-Box




Refractory Anxiety

I am supposed to arrive at the wedding rehearsal at 4 p.m. I planned on arriving 15–20 minutes early. Because I don’t like being late. However, I took a wrong turn. At the intersection of the I-5 South and the I-405 South, I went the wrong way. Now, I’ll have to turn around in a mile and a half and

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No words. No words.

To offset our discomfort about our upcoming visit to the Terezín (in German: Theresienstadt) concentration camp/ghetto, Emmett and I fall into making dark jokes. Gallows humor. “Do you think they still give free tattoos upon arrival?” “Want to wear matching pajamas for our tour?” Dark, ugly jokes.  Because reality is just too overwhelming. The feelings are too overwhelming. So we

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Has anyone seen my keys?!

Jane and the kids misplace keys. Not me. I don’t. I always return my key to the keyrack. That’s where they go. When the key isn’t on the hook, which happens from time to time, I find it on some surface in the house. Usually, the kitchen table. Then, without fanfare, I pick it up, hang it up, and restrain

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77% Weekly Newsletter
77% Weekly Newsletter