Maybe England will lend us one of the royal family so we can set up a constitutional monarchy of our own. Or perhaps one of the other, less embarrassing royal families from Europe. That way we can avoid all that bothersome civil infighting over who gets to be king and what-all.
I suppose Coulter might be considered an alternate, if one of the others gets sick or somesuch. Including her outright would just mess up the whole symmetry of the metaphor, though. Sacrifices must be made!
Or maybe, if Coulter wanted in on the Four Horsemen/Evangelists action, we could arrange a cage match.
Oh yes, because insinuation, personal attacks and gross caricature will always do in a pinch, where otherwise rational debate and all its unpleasant complexities might be required. Much better to divide the world into Everyone Who Agrees With Me (Good and Right Conservatives) and Everyone Who Disagrees With Me (Evil and Wrong Liberals). I can see the Four Evangelists (Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Hannity and Beck) have spread their seed on fertile ground, here. I especially like the equation of environmentally concerned people, in all their potential variety, with the classic "pathetic weak homosexual" stereotype. Because of course Edward Abbey was such a "pansy" (to name just one). And you of course have no political agenda at all, what with insisting on such simplistic dichotomy.
Well, back to the original point, you assume that I must be under the group demonized by you and yours as "liberal" when it might in fact be entirely wrong. Making assumptions of that kind and then casting a blanket aspersion on anyone who disagrees with you gets us nowhere. You assume that anyone who might qualify themselves in any way as "liberal" is someone you are going to dislike. Also, simply because someone disagrees with you, you automatically dislike them? Well, then, a classic example of the sort of polarized crap that prevents reasonable dialogue (in other words, the original post of yours to which I was responding). There is a whole political spectrum out there that wants nothing to do with "conservatives" (you and yours) or "liberals" (not me and mine) as defined within US politics. Self-righteous much? People who live in glass houses...
Oh yes, it must be mere rhetoric. And how awful of "liberals" to be concerned with minimizing environmental damage and finding better, more efficient ways of doing things that don't threaten large portions of the biosphere. Seriously? Why don't you jump in your Humvee and drive on down to the lake for your nightly nuclear waste dumping / burning of Obama in effigy, eh? How's that for gross and inaccurate mischaracterization combined with a little straw man for flavor?
Will it have patron saints? Can John Travolta be named as one of the Outer Heads of the Great Order of Disco (OH GOD)?
Deepak Chopra gives me the heebie jeebies, though.
Really? I'm not the only one, then? For some reason I have always gotten a weird sleaze vibe from him. Can't really say why, he just creeps me out.
Gah! Ick! My eyes! My brain! The humanity!
I practice yoga, and acknowledge that it was developed in the Indian subcontinent. However, I see no reason to limit it as a specifically "Hindu" expression. Certainly it is embedded in Hindu spiritual practice, but cultural syncretism is the order of the day, whether purists like it or not. My initial introduction to the actual practice of yoga was through Thelema (and specifically thanks to Book 4). I started with the asanas in that document, and moved on to learning from professional yoga teachers. All of them were "white people," but that did not bother me particularly, as bona fide Indian teachers were not exactly common in the small college town where I lived at the time. Better to learn from someone in person rather than trying to get it from a book.
As far as the "junk" comment goes, I don't know enough about Chopra to say one way or the other what he is referring to. I agree with Eran Rathan that the similarities in these various practices overcome any localized cultural trappings, probably because they are all working on the same thing--the energetic processes peculiar to the human body. If the localized cultural trappings are what Chopra is referring to, then he certainly could have phrased it a little less rudely.
Eh...not relying on Jan Fries, just saying that I believe he has made some good points in that regard. As to the rest, I see no disagreement there. My point is that I do not feel that the thoughts and experiences of ancient pagans ought to limit my own approach to this particular spirituality--that it seems to stand to reason that my approach to the gods need not be limited by the writings of anyone, at all. As a guide, as part of a general conversation, as a way to shed light, certainly this is all to the good. My beef is with the notion that just because someone (even a very intelligent someone) put pen to paper (or stylus to tablet...) over a subject, that their word is better than my experience and ability to reason for myself over the operations of the divine.
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Ruckus