[ Happy holidays ]

ENGLISH [ bajá un poco para la versión en Español ]
A friend sent me a link a few weeks ago that I hadn't had the chance to share with you and I think it is very important to do it in the eve of this very important holiday for Christians which is celebrating the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ because we sometimes just say "Merry Christmas" without even knowing if the person we are saying that to is a Christian or if Christmas has a meaning to him/her or not, and so we should learn to tolerate and respect the beliefs of everybody to the point where it's possible and say "happy holidays" in case you're not sure :P.

I will share an extract from the site I got the link to, post the link to an image and a smaller version of it and will also translate it to Spanish and make this post both in English and Spanish. For those of us who believe in Christ please let's remind ourselves what this celebration really is about and let's not get sad and melancholic on this date, you don't like it when your someone around you is sad on your birthday so why would He? ^_^

here's the link: http://servicioskoinonia.org/posters/
here's the extract:

The famous metaphor of the elephant being touched by blind men who want to define it is normally attributed to Hinduism, but is vindicated also by Jainism and by Buddhism. The blind men try to define the elephant with their best will, but they can't make themselves an exact idea of it. And it is useless for them to argue, because they are all right in a way. What they must do is share, to complete each other. An ideal metaphor for the inter-religious dialogue.

Our illustrator -in this case Fernando Bernabé- has preferred to paint a female elephant, for a matter of gender perspective, and makes us observe that the official wise men have historically been men...

here's the image:
huge - small
Happy holidays everyone !

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ESPAÑOL [ scroll up a bit for the English version ]
Un amigo me envió un link hace un par de semanas que no había tenido la oportunidad de compartir con ustedes y creo que es muy importante hacerlo en la víspera de esta importante fiesta para los Cristianos que es celebrar el nacimiento de nuestro Señor Jesucristo porque a veces nosotros sólamente decimos "Feliz Navidad" sin si quiera saber si la persona a la que se lo decimos es Cristiano o si la Navidad tiene o no un signficado para él o ella, así que deberíamos aprender a tolerar y respetar las creencias de todos hasta el punto en el que sea posible y decir "felices fiestas" si no se está seguro :P.

Compartiré un extracto del sitio del que me mandaron el link, el link de una imagen y su versión más pequeña y también lo voy a traducir al Inglés para postear tanto en Español como en Inglés. Para aquellos de nosotros que creemos en Cristo por favor recordémonos a nosotros mismos el verdadero significado de esta celebración y no no spongamos tristes o melancólicos en esta fecha, a ustedes no les gusta cuando alguien a su alrededor está triste en su cumlpeaños así que por qué habría de gustarle a Él? ^_^

acá está el link: http://servicioskoinonia.org/posters/
acá está el extracto:

La famosa metáfora del elefante palpado por los ciegos que quieren definirlo es atribuida normalmente al Hinduismo, pero es reivindicada también por el Jainismo y por el Budismo. Los ciegos definen al elefante con su mejor buena voluntad, pero no pueden hacerse una idea cabal de él. Y es inútil que discutan, porque todos tienen su razón. Lo que deben hacer es compartir, para complementarse. Metáfora ideal para el diálogo inter-religioso.

Nuestro dibujante -en este caso Fernando Bernabé- ha preferido pintar una elefanta, por cuestión de perspectiva de género, y nos hace observar que los sabios oficiales han sido históricamente varones...

acá está la imagen:
enorme - pequeña
Felices fiestas a todos!

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[ My princess's thoughts ]

Well my girlfriend wrote this on her blog, I liked it and thought it would be a nice thing to share with ALL my readers XD. [ I'm keeping its original format ]:

The aspects of me as a Christian goth

It's been nearly 12 years since I've been a Christian and 14 months since I've been a goth (though I did have some traits also a long time before that, I didn't know anything about "gothicism" and what it was yet, so I can't tell that it was earlier.) And here is my view on how both these aspects closely relate...

A goth is, to a certain extent, an outcast of the society, partly for he choses so himself and partly for he's not accepted by it... though nowadays I can't say it's still quite valid as "gothic" has been becoming a popular trend. I hope it will pass soon so that media and pubertal kids who change their image according to magazins will leave gothic alone again. A Christian in these times is an outcast as well. Especially here in Europe (when I don't count Asian countries where Christianity never had a strong position) and especially here in Czech Republic. Why just here? There has been an opposition against the Catholic church for centuries, starting with the Hussite wars. But these tendentions began to expand in the later decades of the 19th century, when the Czech nation craved for independence from the Austrian - Hungarian monarchy. Then who was a real Czech patriot has to be against the Habsburger and that automatically meant against the Catholic church, which also was a support of the state. Then with time somehow this disliking for Catholicism expanded against also other Christian churches and Christianity in general. Possibly what helped affirm this were 40 years of the Communist regime that systematicallyfought against Christianity, but more relevant is that already decades before that began, the faith was weak in this nation (if it hadn't been weak before, it wouldn't be broken by the regime - see Poland, where it still stays.)

Both a goth and Christian seek for more than what this world can offer. They can see that material things, fame, popularity will not make them happy. We can see how everything is passing, we realize that even our own lifes last just for a while to pass away as well. Therefore we want to be in touch with our soul, search for what lies there and what it truly desires, so that we can live our life genuinely and authentically.

They both also know that it is necessary to accept the whole reality of the world and life, including pain, sorrow, sadness, anxiety and death. We must face the fact that this is no perfect world (though once it was and it will be again, but that is beyond human possibilities) and that painful things will come. It is up to us to embrace them and possibly later see that they had a meaningful place in our life and that they formed us as a human being.

Also both gothicism and Christianity bring freedom. Freedom to be our own beings, to accept ourselves the way we are with both positive and negative traits, to stop worrying about what others think of us, to gain inner independence from others' judgements. Also freedom to believe in our ideals and stay faithful to them even when we are alone and everyone else around thinks differently. We don't have to accept their "norms" if they clearly aren't good or if they aren't the good thing for us; we just need to be ourselves and not to be bothered by not fitting in.

[ Left turns into Right ]

For decades, and even centuries, the dominant ideology in the minds of western civilization has been established by people in power positions using social pressure and dissuasion, principally using mass media in whichever form it existed at the respective time. Particularly in "Latin America" [ please do notice this is a wrong way to describe it and that's why I use the quotes ] this has been so since the first half of the first millennium of the Gregorian Calendar when one of the first big Mesoamerican civilizations was at its peak, the Teotihuacán civilization in Mexico; I must say that when I watched a documentary about it on National Geographic Channel I was very impressed by how the state/government of that culture controlled the people by even making them paint political murals inside their houses! Making that government possibly the first 1984 [ a book written by George Orwell in 1948 that later became a great movie by Michael Radford ] in the history of America [ When I say America I am not referring the United States of America, when I refer to the United States of America I will say "the United States of America" because that is its name ].

It might be true that the inspiration of 1984 was the "totalitarianism" and "democratic socialism" [ obviously capitalist terms ] going around in the Soviet Union with Stalin, but it is also true that some of those ideas that the government, described by the author in the book, used to shape feeble minds [ being the most important one to control mass media ] were used and are being used by capitalism in order to get their ideals inside people's minds. In this sense, the leader[s?] of this socio-political-economical movement have gotten control of a huge amount of mass media throughout America, newspapers, TV news, even the Internet of course, just so that they can manipulate and influence people's opinion as well as distract them from serious stuff with phony and/or irrelevant news/events.

Having said all this, if you live in America or have some interest in American politics, you might have guessed already where this post is heading towards: RCTV. Those simple four letters that have been around my head [ and not because I want them to ] for weeks now. If you don't know what I'm talking about then let me guide you into this: I don't know how long ago the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, announced that "the state" wouldn't renew the broadcasting license for a TV station called Radio Caracas Televisión and would stop their transmission on May 27th [ and so he did ] because their news/programs/etc were anti-constitutional, put in other terms, they are capitalists and he is a socialist so they were airing stuff he didn't want Venezuelans to watch. All the supporters of that channel around the world started criticizing Chávez and calling him a dictator and such, saying he was acting against free speech and every other attack to "freedom" you can think of. In my country, El Slave-ador, they have been talking over and over and over and over about this, ASDER [ Salvadorian Association of Radio Broadcasters ] and AIR [ Inter-american Association of Radio Broadcasters ] have been showing advertising all over the place [ radio, TV, newspapers, fliers ] and being so annoying about it, repeating again and again why we should never vote for the national socialist party or we could lose our "freedom of speech" [ right ] just as it is happening in Venezuela.

Well today I had it, this was all I can take, all these people are doing is because they no longer can keep getting their capitalist ideas inside Venezuelans' minds. They don't care about freedom of speech, they don't care about the people working on that station losing their jobs, they don't care about Venezuelans, they don't even care about their own mothers, all they care about is their money and how a socialist Venezuela endangers their stupid [ spikette2108's adjective ] way of life, all they care about is that they lost against Chávez, all they care about is they won't influence and distract Venezuelans anymore, so stop bitching around with lies! if you're gonna put some advertising then let them say the real reason for them but don't try to sugar-coat it with "freedom of speech" stuff because you have been stealing it for decades! you control almost all the mass media and only show the news that are not threatening to your ideals! how is that freedom of speech?.

After stating all this stuff against capitalism and particularly capitalists, the logical conclusion is that I am now about to support Chávez and congratulate him on blocking the channel, well of course that I won't!. It all appeared to me so clearly while he was giving a speech at a university in Venezuela, he talked about hegemony and how there was a "political scientist" [ I don't remember the name ] who said that it was obtained throughout many generations and years and how a crisis of power takes place when there's a rising hegemony that hasn't been completely established and there's a falling hegemony that hasn't completely fell; then I thought, who needs hegemony when you are doing things right? who needs to control people's thoughts, dreams, aspirations if you are ruling a country from a humane and Christian perspective thinking on helping every single person? who, capitalist or socialist, needs to shut up somebody because he thinks differently if he is doing a good job as a president?; all Chávez is doing by shutting down that channel is becoming the people he hates, the hater turns into the hated, left turns into right.

Both of them, left and right, have committed and will keep committing free speech violations until there is a humane, social-oriented, Christian-based way of capitalism/socialism.

[ hate ]

I was listening to a song today by Creed that said

"(...) I'd sacrifice all those nights if i could make the Earth and my dreams the same, the only difference is to let love replace all our hate(...)"

I thought that it was very logical to want such thing to happen, i thought that it would help a lot to this world if that happened, that it was a perfectly normal wish; but then i started wondering about it, because i've always said that sadness should have the same value as happiness, that depression must be an equally valid emotion as bliss and that society shouldn't tell you which of them to look for in life, they shouldn't force you to try to be happy, some of us feel very comfortable being depressed and there is always people trying to cheer you up instead of letting you feel however you want to feel since both of those emotions are a gift from God, both are a manifestation of His glory of His creation, which other of God's creations is as perfect as humans? [ maybe just the universe ] then why should we stop humans to enjoy those emotions that God Himself gave us? [ whether they are "bad" or "good" emotions. Having said this, i started wondering if [ based on the same principle ] hate could have the same meaning as love and if this was so, then we couldn't force people to replace their hate for love because we would be stopping their free will, we wouldn't be letting them enjoy a feeling that God gave us.

The answer to the question i asked to myself is NO, hate can never have the same meaning as love, for the simple reason that hate is not an emotion/feeling [ what is the difference between those two? is there any? ] created by God, hate was created by humans [ stupid us ]. If you take a second to think on it you will see that hate is not something immediate, something spontaneous, you have to judge an action or an act or person before hating it/him/her, being this judgment the result of a long thinking process or the result of a quick thought [ a reaction ] is what makes it a human-created emotion which i would not consider natural, but social; we've learned it through time and tradition [ stupid us ]. I believe love, on the other hand, is not a meditated emotion; it's true that real love takes a long time to build up but it all starts with a small thing, with a spark if you wanna call it, and that small thing is not a judgment of an act or a person at all.

Since we humans are a highly self-destructive breed we created hate to hurt everybody involved in the structure hater-hate. It is strong enough to make you experience a physical reaction whenever you see somebody or something you hate, an unpleasant physical reaction most of the time so it's a very masochistic feeling which it can get the hater to physically/psychologically hurt the hated and in which case the circle is complete and the structure could begin again with a small switch of roles.

Despite this, we can't force haters to stop hating but still we must show them that it is not the right path to take if humanity wants to survive any longer on this planet, hate has been the cause of great material loses, wars, deaths, etc. So, in conclusion, we can say love and hate are no equally valued feelings [ as are happiness and sadness ], since something created by humans will never compare to the perfect creation of God.

[ Loud people ]

I hate loud people, and I hate it even more when there are a lot of loud people together, that indistinguishable bunch of words is so disturbing; humans should be designed to communicate in half duplex instead of full duplex. Actually I think we are but we try full duplex anyways...we bastards.

[ Bugs ]

I like to think some humans are like those flying insects, they want to reach the shinny bright thing ahead, but when they're there they get burned with it and they die.