This is My Church, a Center on Sunset Boulevard, for some of us, this is as close to church as we can get

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No stained glass windows or altars, no mystical statues, no confessionals. Re quality of video, I see now, I need to put my arm somewhere stable so the camera doesn't shake, but this is how we do church in East Hollywood, CA:





Will go next Friday and try to shoot this better. Also the people are the interesting part, have to show more of them. Still, I love the way Patrick sings, that's Patrick singing...

This Is Me

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Life On Earth is a Fluke, Enjoy It While It Lasts, Yet I Call Myself Spiritual

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It's so strange. I pray, I believe in Something, yet just wrote this to a friend:

I think Earth is an accident and life here is a fluke and someone higher up watches it, watches us as if we are a laboratory.
Humans mistake a sense of being watched for something mystical, but the higher place is very physical, just on a dimension we can't see from Earth...

My religion is Cosmology or maybe even Astronomy, more than it is something magical and mystical. I know that with a Universe this big there has to be more, and I know I've been around longer than since 1948 when I was born here, as I remember things in history at a visceral level.

But I don't know much more, as the rest takes place on a plane we cannot find from Earth.

I believe all this, and yet call myself spiritual. I'm a Christian who thinks Christ was a brilliant, futuristic, compassionate, caring person who prayed and studied and meditated and came up with a better way to live, and we are all better off if we live the way he envisioned.

But I don't believe in any of the woo-woo mysticism of Christ or God. As to miracles, I think that when a throng of people are elated through group prayer and the words of a charismatic leader, they can think they are satisfied from only a whiff of loaves and fishes being passed through the crowd, that's the miracle. I think he walked on water because that sea was so dead, full of saline and oil, the water was thick enough for a very lightweight person (one who has been fasting praying and meditating for a while) to appear to be walking on top of it.

Jesus wasn't a spirit, he was spiritual.

Christianity is hundreds of years of stories being passed on by excited individuals with little media to use to document things. So the stories, of course, changed over time, then later were written in stone, by groups who had agendas, like Fourth Century Romans.

I believe all this very unethereal unreligioius stuff about God and Christ, and yet-

A Gospel music song comes on and I'll jump right in, enter it, and live in bliss for five minutes or so.

I think the Bible is thousands of years of humans trying to describe the spiritual life, so you read the Bible to figure out the best way to live on Earth.

In the Bible you find out what has been working for thousands of years, the wisdom of those who took the trouble to write things down before there were even pens or pencils, they were so driven to record what they saw and believed.

So my Sundays are left for the joyous cosmology of unstructured life on Earth, with lots of Gospel music and action that is something other than work, because humans do better when they take at least one day off out of every seven, in other words a Sabbath, as someone figured out thousands of years ago.

(Unfortunately for me I live here where TV production never stops in Lala Land in 2010, so I'm working on Ax Men Season Four this Sunday morning and can't take the day off, maybe that's why this is only as spiritual as I can get right now, gotta go back to work.)

PIC: For Religious Freedom, the Right to be Atheist, My Grandparents Came to the USA

In 1900 Wadja and Janik Jendrzewski moved from Poland to Indiana and opened a bakery.