my_body_is_a_temple Piso Mojado your body is a temple 050531 ... Piso Mojado how easy it is to forget! 050531 ... Piso Mojado what goes into it, what adorns it, where it lives, who can enter it, what its purpose is, what holy spirits it recognizes and praises 050531 ... stork daddy please someone throw out the moneychangers. 050531 ... falling_alone thats why i would sacrifice my health with the risk of ink poisoning and ornate it with these lovely pen drawings on my hand. 050601 ... birdmad sacrilege and desecration have been so much fun, though. if LaVey was any where near right and i am my own god, then i'll blaspheme against myself too. (if it's good enough for everyone else's gods, it's good enough for me) my past is my mythology and my bones may yet make interesting ruins 050601 ... Iconoclast_Y The body is also food. A human is as much subject as object. This is not evil, this is no reason to become a cannibal, it is merely a fact of nature. An acceptance of this is a sure acceptance of life's many gray areas (which occupy most of it), and from the viewpoint of the Natural System (be it deified or not) it is no worse or better for, i.e. a crocodile to to catch a human (ouch!) than another beast. Why should we live forever? Recent religions (post-Homer) increasingly preached the immortality of the Human. An eternal Human is as absurd a notion as an eternal Tiger! It is selfish and egotistical to want to ascend above Nature: infact it logically derives from Selfishness not Selflessness, the latter being preached by all current Religions. Being eaten is a characteristic of animal existance, and any simplistic analysis reveals that humans are animals. Note: this is biology not theology! It is from this viewpoint that God's grace is so utterly glorious and undeserved a gift and only by the gift is there any 'rightness' to living eternally. The Sadduccees never believed in an Afterlife, nor should it be a necessary prerequisite for piety, which it too often is!! Which brings me back to the point: the human body is as much person as dinner. If you substituted your boyfriend's flesh (yuck!) for beef and told your guest the dinner was a Franco-African dish called 'Gazelle Tartare', no culinary reason for gastronomic displeasure would exist (provided she enjoyed Sashimi and Rare Steaks!). Isn't this a gruesome cause to stay in your place, to not commit hubris! Leave world rule to God, not to us! That the body be a source of personal self-esteem, humbleness and service is the implication of hard, hard facts and not a little faith! I suggest you read: Ruether, R.R. "Gaia and God", San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992. 050602 ... Piso Mojado hmmm. being eaten is part of animal existence: what are some possible ways in which we are eaten (i'm thinking metaphorically here)? 050602 ... skyburst777 still standing bombed in a war forgotten 050603 ... a thimble in time we are eaten by time. we are eaten by money. we are eaten by anxiety and fear and laziness. we are eaten by false hope and lack of imagination. we are eaten by dreams that we never bother to make into memories. we are eaten by the matrix. 050619 ... dandy the body is a temple that requires tithes of genuine attention, mindfulness, compassion for others and yourself, discipline for clarity, avoidance of self-pity, maudlin, self-righteous, preferring a temple that is humble, or else it exacts punishment in pains of spine, mind's mental confusion, cravings for communion with food, women, or men, and wine to try to offset the imbalance and reach wholeness again with the pantheon of competing values otuside ourselves 050619 ... . can I come inside you? 050620 ... emmi my_body_is_MY_temple 051023 ... . . 061108 ... the sanity assassin haunted and decaying but goddamn, it was a party in its day 210829 what's it to you? who go blather from