Balinese Children

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Here’s a slideshow of shots I took of kids while in Bali.

I was able to get quite a few, and some of the shots are two frames of the same kid that I took zoomed in or out.

I could be wrong, or paranoid, but I felt that when I squatted down to take photos of kids, nearby adults would callout a warning for them to disband or walk away from me. It wasn’t callouts of panic. It was gentle words and the kids simply slammed the brakes on the cute.

For a few moments after squatting down, kids would attract toward me. But then suddenly, and unexpectedly, they would move quickly away.

I made up stories in my mind as to why. One thought was they didn’t want photographers “profiting” from their kids without giving something in return. “Stealing their souls,” I thought.

Or maybe they were seriously finished with their games.

This is going to sound all, “Did you know how poor kids are in third world countries,” but one group of kids —  that I didn’t get one decent shot of — was playing with a wad of tape. I kid you not. They were having a blast. It looked to be a mix between dodgeball and catch.

One other interesting bit is about the girl with her arm in a sling. I stopped my driver to take a photo, and I wandered onto someone’s yard (where the little puppy barked at me from Wednesdog). The girl with the sling showed up and I took her picture.

In the car, our driver told me some poor kids are made of glass. Which I took to mean that kids with inferior diets have brittle bones.

Before I left the little girl, I gave her a bunch of rupiahs, not knowing my driver would tell me that.

It made me feel a little less guilty for what may have been construed as trespassing.

Outsider observations on Hinduism

Hinduism is the predominant religion of Bali, but not of Indonesia. Indonesia is mainly Muslim.

Bali is a little diamond in the rough.

Hinduism is a religion that I don’t begin to understand. I knew it was polytheistic. And my dad told me before I left to watch out for the offerings that are everywhere on sidewalks.

But none of it makes sense until you get there.

There are statues of gods everywhere. They guard bridges. They stand in shrines with yellow umbrellas and draped in little sarongs.

In front of every business and in front of things you don’t realize are sacred, there are these little woven baskets full of rice, flowers, trinkets, incense and various gifts to the gods. They are for good luck and good fortune.

One time I saw bottles of beer near the offerings. Thirsty little buggers.

I’ve read stories that during Jesus’ quiet years, he was off traveling through India, and he picked up Hindu traditions, and brought them back to Israel and integrated those ideas with Judaism.

After visiting a Hindu culture, it felt more plausible.

Hinduism is what Christianity wants to be, but in full practice, and not just in metaphor.

One of my biggest criticisms of Christianity when I was growing up was that everything was metaphor. You bathed in the blood of Christ. You drank and ate Jesus’ blood and body. Your sins were cleansed. Hymns are chockfull of actions and ideas that you don’t really do. They are “spiritual”, and not actual physical acts.

You offer yourself as sacrifice, but not really. Not literally. It’s a figurative act.

Can you sing, “Bor-ing.”

Because of that, Christianity always felt like empty gesture. It still feels like that as an outsider when I visit church with friends or family.

But not the Hindus in Bali. When they say they are bathing for forgiveness, they are literally bathing. When they offer sacrifices, they are literally offering sacrifices (not just money) to their shrines, to their lives. They offer sacrifices every day.

It almost feels and looks genuine.

A culture of compounds

During a day trip in Ubud, our last destination during our trip, I asked our driver as many questions about his religion as I could.

He told me that families bind together, from babies, to brothers, sisters, moms, dads and grandparents. Many Balinese live in compounds, which are areas with wall boundaries. Your families wealth is indicated to others by the size of your compound and most importantly, the size of your shrine area to the gods.

In the “Grapes of Wrath” sense of the word, families go through life together, helping each other from birth to death. This is a commonality found in South Asia.

This is what the Amish attempt to do. They shun technology, electricity and phones so that they’re forced to visit rather than call. I admire this about the culture.

While Americans go out of their way to isolate. Unless you live in a large city, you live with your close family, you commute alone. And you sleep in a large-ish house.

Knowledge, fertility, farming, there’s a god for that

Unlike the current culture of evangelical Christian, the Balinese value knowledge.

There was a spot in the temple for every element of your life. Knowledge. Cleansing. Fertility. A god for having a baby boy. And a god for having a baby girl.

There is applicable dress to showing your religiosity. Much like here in the states, religion is a familial and social point of binding and growth. Only in Bali, and much like Islam and some Catholic sects, they do it every day multiple times a day in a very public way.

Honoring tradition

Unlike Christianity, Hinduism doesn’t seem to evolve with the times. At one time, people literally bathed in blood, but that wouldn’t fly today. So people stopped. People still get baptized, but when a Christian says, “I was cleansed at church in the holy spirit,” it’s figurative.

Christianity has secularized itself, and yet screams at everyone that it wants to stay traditional.

Christianity should take notes from the Hindu culture. Hell, it looks to me like Hinduism is what Christianity wants to be, but is just too afraid to realize.

So while the rest of us secularists are worshiping progress … get your traditions back, Christians. It looks and feels less fake.

George W. expands his direction and target audience

Regular reader, blogger and interim Le Café Witteveen rockstar George W. announced today that he’s opening up his blog to more topics, namely parenting.

George has, what, a zillion kids now. And surely having a zillion kids and living as an atheist has some kind of learning and teaching potential.

How many times did your parents, or some sitcom parents, say something like, “Parenting doesn’t come with an instruction manual.” Parents often take the generational memes of their parents and pass them along to their kids.

That’s most of the reason why Christian moms and pops raise their kids to become Christians. Muslims, Muslims. Hindus, Hindu.

It seems as natural as cats raising cats. Or giraffes raising giraffes.

Doesn’t it?

I know there’s some offensive syntax above that someone is going to get all Richard Dawkins on me about.

But most of us don’t have non-believing parents. And that idea of the Instruction Manual gets tougher with the absence of this huge part of lots of our upbringings.

I’ve given the idea of atheist parenting a lot of thought. And I would be proud to exchange bible verse memorization for poetry memorization. In fact, I would have bible lessons, and koran lessons. But we’d learn math, science, English, French, etc.

There wouldn’t be a limit put on what could be learned or taught.

But since my efforts for fertility have turned up dry, I like the idea of living vicariously through George.

So go get ‘em, Gee Dub. We’ll all look forward to it.

In case you missed it, here’s the link for George’s blog.

Sleepy Balinese man

Moving through some of the images from the trip, I found this little gem of a man sleeping in a little Balinese style cabana.

Thought you’d like to see it.

The below image is an odd one, too. I caught this kid’s eye right as he was coming down with his little coconut machete knife. A little to the left, and the guy would be one thumb short of a pair.

Notice the little, non-sexual-in-any-way spurt that’s squirting from the coconut ball.

The Nepalese man, a monkey hat, Yeshua the Buddhist Hindu and you.

Last week, Tina and I were walking around New York. On 9th Ave, between 37th and 38th streets and we passed a store with these super cute ear flap beanie knit hats of animal heads.

As we were trying on the hats on the street outside the store, the store owner popped out to talk to us. He explained the hats were made in Nepal, and that as fast as he can get them, he sells them. He must have just received a shipment, because when we went in the store, there were bags of them all over, and he was pulling them out to shelve them.

We liked that the guy wasn’t pushy at all. He genuinely seemed to love these hats. And like a child excited about new toys, he wanted to show us each and every version of the hat.

There were monkeys, cats, dogs, gorillas, beavers, lions, tigers, and bears. Oh my.

We bought the monkey hat above, but we could have bought just about all of them. I’m kicking myself for not buying a white Yeti hat. It was so fucking cool.

If I was the murdering kind, this monkey hat is so cute and Tina is so protective of it, that I would have to hire a hit man to take her out so that I can have the hat for myself.

The Nepalese shop owner was named Biswa. As we shopped around his little store, we chatted with Biswa about travel. Tina explained that we were hoping to travel for her mega birthday that’s approaching.

“Maybe we should visit Nepal,” I told Tina. Biswa’s face lit up, and he told us — through a rather thick accent — how beautiful the country is. Biswa explained that [world] traveling is knowledge. It expands the mind. It teaches you in a way the classroom never will.

Write down your experiences

Biswa told us about his daughter who is college age and has traveled to seven different countries in the past year. His only requirement is that she writes her experiences down.

“We travel to where the food is,” he told us. “Food is what drives us.” This was a metaphor for so much. We need sustenance to live. We work for what? Money?

No, we work for food. Without food, there is no life. Without life, there is no knowledge.

As a gift for her birthday, Biswa explained he is making a book of his daughter’s journals to give to her.

We all want to be connected to animals

Biswa told us while we were both trying on hats that people love animals, and that they disarm us and sooth us in a way that no other thing can. He said, “Have you noticed that you could be angrier than you’ve ever been, and when you see a dog on the street, suddenly you aren’t angry any more?”

We agreed.

“We strive to connect with animals, because we are all one,” he continued.

I wanted to hug him.

Meditation bowls you over

He was also turned on by how much Tina and I liked a set of singing meditation bowls he had on display. He showed us how to properly use them, and we probably spent a few more minutes than we needed playing with them.

I am not a fan of woo, but I loved these bowls. They were beautiful, and listening to them and feeling their vibrations was calming and inviting. They were musical instruments in a way.

Tina explained to Biswa that she’s attracted to Buddhist and Hindu culture, but she admits that she knows very little about them. Biswa told us that he was raised Hindu, but he finds it harder to practice than Buddhism. He said that the philosophies of hinduism are harder to follow.

Yeshua and his hindu and buddhist past

The last thing we talked about before leaving the store was the traditional view of Jesus from within Nepalese (and other Southeast Asian) cultures. If you don’t know, the Southeast Asian culture teaches that Jesus’ lost years — between 13 and 30 — were spent traveling through hindu and buddhist cultures in India, Nepal, Tibet.

Read the wiki here.

As Biswa explained to us, Yeshua’s views were direct derivations of ancient thought predating Jesus and Christianity.

This view is dismissed by Christians, but it is probably the coolest explanation as to where Jesus pulled his ideas from. One of the best takes on this story is in the book Lamb, the Gospel according to Biff, by Christopher Moore. You should read it. It’s hilarious.

Biswa explained that his culture teaches that Jesus got his ideas traveling, claimed to not like them, but taught Hindu and Buddhist ideas to his followers, and Christianity claimed it as their own.

As an atheist, it blows my mind that this kind of information exists, and it’s dismissed so easily as diabolical mimicry. Yeshua’s personal messages were amazing. The conclusions that Christianity made about Jesus, they really aren’t that great. Eternal life. Heaven. Hell. Thinking about these things fully really isn’t that fantastic.

I happen to appreciate Jesus’ message, and so does Tina. It’s the supernatural elements that Paul and others added that aren’t as cracked up as believers like to think they are.

Walking south on 9th. 

As away from the store, we talked about Biswa, the experience, and how we should probably have spent more time talking to him. We should have recorded the conversation. We should have shared it with others. We desperately wish more people would open their minds others ideas, cultures and beliefs.

“We just learned more in a ten minute conversation with Biswa than we have in 1000s of conversations in the past 10 years,” I told Tina.

And then we passed a load of Jewish families as walked.  I turned to Tina and said, “You know, the Christians hate other ideas so much it’s pathetic. I mean, they hated the Jews so much — despite that Jesus was Jewish — they changed the Sabbath day from Saturday to Sunday so not to be anything like them.”

Isn’t that the truth. Christianity has stripped Jesus the Jew with Buddhist and Hindu influences out of everything, and — stereotypically — all they’re left with is the old testament God/Jesus/Holy Spirit of greed, destruction, bad stories, bad ideas and negative influence.

They call Jesus the bread of life. Have you ever had ancient Jewish bread? It’s bland and unsatisfying.

That’s why I’m an atheist. The food is much more exciting, satisfying, and tastes a helluva lot better.

Yesterday’s quote of the day

Yesterday, a comment from lolahbf revealed exactly what many Christians I’ve spoken to have admitted to me verbally, but never written.

You see, lolahbf thought this was a Christian blog based on this post. My sarcasm duped him/her.

He/she wrote:

if I wasn’t born into a Christian family, I would have hardened my heart and never found God.

That’s the truth whether you’re a Christian, Buddhist, atheist, Hindu, Muslim, or crackhead.

If you weren’t born into a Christian family, you would NEVER find god, not the Christian god anyway. 

I thank lolahbf for responding to the post, because this person had the nerve to admit what many Christians think, but never say.

 

 

Becoming a Hindu just got a whole lot more appetizing …

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Someone just posted this “Graphing Religions and Income” graphic on Facebook, and I had to repost here. Click to enlarge.

Data came from a Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey conducted in 2007. Pew conducted similar, though less comprehensive, surveys in 2010 and this year found comparable results.