Reverend Russ

10/17/2024

My latest spirituality blog is all about AI - Artificial Intelligence. Is it conscious or not? Will it become conscious? How long before we become enslaved to the Robot Overlords?

The biggest thing in technology these days is Artificial Intelligence (AI).

10/12/2024

Rationality tells me that Harris/Walz should win. Trump and Vance have only doubled down on their message of fear. They lost the White House in 2020. They underperformed in the 2018 and 2022 mid-term elections. Do you really think that ranting about immigrants eating dogs and cats, etc, is actually going to increase their voter base?

That is the rational view of this.

The emotional view is the possibility of what another Trump presidency would look like. Project 2025 is "Mein Kampf" for the 21st century.

All things come from the Tao, and that includes both the fear of Trump and the hope of Harris. Fear leads to destruction and death, where hope leads to life and love. Which do you think is more persistent?

In a universe where the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics suggests that life and evolution should not be, life emerges, persists and evolves. The social consciousness is all part of this.

What we can all do is vote and continue to live lives of compassion. It is enough.

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In case you are unfamiliar with the Tao, a recent blog I wrote is a pretty decent introduction.

Talk about spirituality with someone and it quickly gets into what they think God is.

09/16/2024

My latest spirituality blog gets in deep.

I want to talk about how we manage to live with death, dying and grief.

09/06/2024

My latest blog entry is all about making practical, everyday use of spirituality. I write in a way that most do not. I want to make this topic to be sensible, rational and something we can put to use.

Talk about spirituality with someone and it quickly gets into what they think God is.

08/16/2024

I saw this meme and it prompts me to share with yʻall a great story.

When Katie and I married, she had Karl, her 9 year old son with her. Weʻd been together about a year or Karl really hadnʻt made any real friends and was lonely. So I hatched a plan to help with that.

It was a Sunday evening. Katie had played a concert that evening and got home around 10 PM. I had the car loaded with everything weʻd need for a 3 day trip. When she got home, I told Karl to get his coat and that we had to go. Total confusion on his face of course. We were on the road about 15 minutes and he had gone to sleep. Good...

It took us about 6 hours to drive to Disneyland in Orange County. We arrived at about 4:30 AM at a motel directly across the street from Disneyland. We parked in back and poured Karl into bed. We woke him up around 9 AM. He was in a foul mood of course. He was that way much of the time.

When we woke him up I told him that I hadnʻt told him much about "my side of the family." I told him that there had been a death in the family. It was my Uncle Donald who had passed away and that I was required to bring my whole family to the reading of the will. I told him that this is what we were going to do first thing, and that the rest of the day weʻd just have fun and that he didnʻt have to go to school. Karl was still confused, but he went along with it.

As we walked out of the motel, Karl was walking along, looking at the ground, shaking his head back and forth. Foul mood, right? The Disneyland sign is 3 stories high and he doesnʻt see it. We crossed the street and were half-way across the parking lot when he finally looks up and sees the 3 story high Disneyland sign.

At that point, he looks at me and says, "Hey Russ. Uh... Do you think that after the reading of the will, we could go to Disneyland?" Thatʻs when I told him that Disneyland is the reason we were there, that we were playing hooky, and that the story about my Uncle Donald was just a story.

We had a GREAT time. A memory for a lifetime.

07/17/2024

We've been in Hawai'i for a year and a half now. I'm doing weddings, renewals of wedding vows and hospice work. We have both decided to learn to speak Hawaiian. I am not one of those people gifted with language learning skills, but I am persisting. We started out with DuoLingo and have now enrolled in a live, on-line class.

For me, a big reason to learn Hawaiian is that it is the language of Hawaii. Were you to move to Portugal and buy a home there, you *could* get by with just English, but you'd want to learn Portuguese if you ever really wanted to be part of the community. It's the same here in Hawai'i. Learning the language is much more than just learning to speak in a different code. It's entering into a different way of looking at life and the world.

One thing that really struck me as interesting is that 'olelo Hawai'i (Hawaiian Language) has no gender specific pronouns. There is no separate He, She, His or Hers. The pronouns used for them are without gender. So you use the same pronoun for both genders.

Aloha has different meanings depending upon the context. I can mean welcome, love, hello and goodbye.

Because of this, there is no longer an issue of people identifying as straight, gay, gender fluid or whatever. Quite frankly Hawaiian culture is much less complicated than Mainland American culture. Most I meet here are kind, welcoming and friendly. Especially when they find out I want to learn their language and culture.

07/12/2024

I want to educate folks about what seems to be the most common scam practice here on FB. Often times people think they've been hacked and that someone has gotten their FB password. It does happen, but what is mostly happening is that cyber scum and creating fake accounts in your name. That's what happened to my wife recently.

What they do is go to your profile and download images they find there. They then create a new fake account that looks like you and then use it to make friend requests of people, gain access to FB groups, etc.

There's not a lot you can do to prevent this, but what you can and SHOULD do is review your FB profile security settings. In the upper right hand corner of your screen, you'll see your FB image. Click on it and go to:

Settings & Privacy ->
Privacy Center ->
Review Settings ->
Manage audience settings ->
Profile Information

Review all of these and think about who you want to give permission to see what.

There are a number of things to look from scammers. The most visible is the address labels they use. In the image here, you can see ".button.kb" as an address for Katie. The key thing to look at is the last 2 letters, ".kb" That is the top level internet domain, just like .com, .net, .us or .uk. In this case, ".kb" is the top level domain for the nation of Kiribati, a sovereign nation in Micronesia, in the central Pacific Ocean.

Whenever you get any kind of unexpected e-mail, FB message, text message, or message from any other social media platform, look at the top level domain in the return address. Anything other than .com is open to suspicion.

06/14/2024

Recently I was accosted by a Christian neighbor who just found out that I'm an Interfaith Minister. Because I'm not Christian, she asked me where I was going after I die.

Here in Hawaii, we buy a lot of our food from local growers and fishers. Not only is the food truly farm fresh, the farmer is getting all of the money and we are directly supporting families. One of our farmers recently found out that I did weddings and wanted to know more about my spiritual beliefs...

06/05/2024

My latest blog is about the personally directed spiritual path, which is based upon observation. It is the very nature of being agnostic that you want nobody else to tell you what to believe. This means that what you know must come from you observe and feel.

It is my intention with this blog to invite people to take full ownership and responsibility for their spirituality. It is the difference between finding your own answers, as opposed to taking on faith what someone else tells you to believe. While there is wisdom to be found in traditional religions...

01/22/2024

My latest spirituality blog is out. This time I'm talking about soul. Do you have a soul? Are you a soul having a physical experience? Are you afraid of death? You know. The easy subjects.

(apologies to James Brown)

01/10/2024

Digging deeper into Identity.

Who are you?

For some time now the blog has been discussing personal identity. It is Question #2, which is: “Who am I?” The answer is quite simple. The greatest spiritual truths are simple. You are you. You are not anyone else. You are you. The problem is that we can’t seem to leave that alone. That isn’...