Same. When were you at the JCC? I spent a goodly amount of time onstage at the Kaplan Theatre back in the eighties.
Gods Will will away remain a mystery. At times, you think you're in his will, and then in a different season of your life, you will start to feel that everything you do is in iniquity. We sin everyday, day in and day out. Something vast in your life like marrying the wrong person is no bigger of a sin than accidently slipping a wrong word at the wrong time to God. Its what you do with that mistake is what counts.
Not really sure what I am. I guess I'm like those who do what I think is right and avoid doing what I think is wrong. I haven't really had a huge desire to work with my "religion" yet, although I assume that will eventually get met w I probably should have been a Catholic since that is what my two sisters and mother are as well as how I originally was brought up, but for some strange reason, I quit going to church at a young age. (like 9 or something). This thread is kind of ironic for me since some of my friends and I had a religious discussion today at school. Two of my Catholic peers dicussed the beliefs with a Baptist friend of mine, and then they asked me what I was. Then again, with The Passion of the Christ in the news, I'm sure there are now a few more dicussions about personal beliefs than normal, something my detective skills tell me.
Mid 90's. I taught art. I haven't seen it, but I understand they have done a lot of renovation/expansion since then. I think the theaters were involved.
I hesitate labeling one's faith because each person's faith is wholly personal and individual. You simply can't sum up one's beliefs of the mystical with an -ism. But, in the spirit of the thread, I'll add that I embrace ideas from agnosticism, secular humanism, Buddhism and the beautiful teachings of Jesus Christ.
What do you want, a definition? Or a more in depth explanation? Or an argument? Your choice, but I don't think my statement was all that confusing.
An argument about your belief? Don't think so. Was just confused because you implied that you believe in god but said you were agnostic. That's all. Don't even need to reply. This thread's topic is definitely of a voluntary variety.
Sunni's also have 4 main denominations actually. The Wahabi sect, that would be the ruling family of Saudi Arabia. Then there are 3 others: Hanafi, Shafa'i, and Hambali. There are no real theological differences between any of these 4 sects, just a difference in how certain things are interpreted, and how strictly or how loosely they're enforced. I'm a Muslim, Sunni:Hanafi.
Yeah, art classes/camps...mostly painting. Children around the 9-12 age range. My training is not enough to teach adults, I can only teach them art history.
Thanks for asking (warning: you might be sorry you did)... I was just killing some time, mining my favorite website here for new fun, and voila -- a chance to blab about something at least semi-real, relatively consequence-free! Ever since I read the Tao Te Ching and some Chuang-tzu, years ago, I've felt like I'm mostly Taoist in perspective... I'm a pre-school teacher, and I find that it has been helpful to bear in mind when working with the little folk that "the Tao that is spoken is not the true Tao"... It doesn't do to be too literal-minded with them all the time, seems to me... I grew up basically hating adults, and carried that with me for a long time into my own adulthood... before some lovely adult friends pointed out to me that adults WERE children with a few years packed on... "OH," I reasoned... intellectually obvious, but emotionally hard for me to see... Anyway, so for some time now I have been working on appreciating adults the way I have appreciated children -- which means, for me, trusting that we all have very good reasons for being the way we are, and that before I try to "help" someone with my "wisdom", or whatever, I need to learn something about how they got to where they are... mostly listening, asking questions, not rushing... hoping that maybe I'll ask a helpful question and some light, unknowable to me, will go off privately in their head... yadda yadda yadda... Two important corollaries in my "religion": "All people are fighting for their lives at all times" (a paraphrase of a quote I read somewhere -- it means to me "hey, this ain't that easy, we're all pretty quickly confused and overwhelmed by this immense world, give 'em a break"), and "people are basically doing the best they can", meaning that yes, they may INTELLECTUALLY know better than to do what they do, but that, in my perspective, knowing INTELLECTUALLY better than to do something is almost ALWAYS trumped by emotionally NOT knowing better -- that it's predominantly about gaining EMOTIONAL knowledge... so that you DO "feel bad when you do something bad", not because someone tells you you should (the intellectual approach) but because your experience has shown it to you... and on and on... I was raised in an intensely Lutheran household, so that I felt a bit brainwashed, and fought for years to overcome that -- therefore these issues came to fill up a large part of my brain, therefore I can go on ad nauseum about this stuff -- I have only very recently come to realize that it is probably nothing inherent in Christianity that I was rebelling against, more the WAY it was "presented"... Well, this was fun for me anyway, and as Kurt Vonnegut said -- "thank you for your sweetly faked attention." I am also part Vonnegutian... this has been number 26 in our pamphlet series... maybe I should just start a website, that way I could have just posted a link...
