Seeking and Finding Wholeness

This History Channel series premiered last December 29, 2008. Each of the documentaries discusses the history of one of the seven deadly sins starting with lust, envy, gluttony, sloth, greed, and ending with anger and pride.

The list of “Seven Deadly Sins” is important in the Christian theology, but interestingly, they are actually not found in the bible. It was first written by a monk in 375 AD with 8 dangerous thoughts (not sins). In around 590 AD, Pope Gregory the Great narrowed the list into 7 “Deadly Sins”.

I will write no comments on these videos, just do yourself a favor and watch them to learn more about these concepts and the evolution of ideas that so many accept as laws and take as norms. So, I highly suggest you watch this one.

You can purchase the series from the History Channel store. Alternatively, rent this from Netflix or any local video store, borrow it from a friend. Also, you can watch the Seven Deadly Sins online for free via veoh, youtube or google videos; click here for a pre-set Google video search.

To make things easy for you, I inserted 5-minute previews from veoh of the seven documentaries below. You can watch the full video episodes on veoh, visit veoh or download.com and install their Web Player Beta in your browser.

Just make sure you watch them. The documentary episodes are well done, and very easy to follow, I must say. If you watch all seven, one after the other, you will notice a lot of repetition, but remember this originally aired one episode a week so repetition provided a background for those who missed the previous episodes.

Seven Deadly Sins (Lust)

Watch 1-7 Seven Deadly Sins (Lust) in Educational |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Seven Deadly Sins (Envy)

Watch 2-7 Seven Deadly Sins (Envy) in Educational |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Seven Deadly Sins (Gluttony)

Watch 3-7 Seven Deadly Sins (Gluttony) in Educational |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Seven Deadly Sins (Sloth)

Watch 4-7 Seven Deadly Sins (Sloth) in Educational |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Read more…

Why do people think Jesus had a European looks (long soft blond hair and green/blue eyes)?

The above photo is the face of Jim Caviezel, who plays Jesus in the movie “The Passion of the Christ,” is similar to many modern-day images of Jesus.

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Do you remember your childhood memories of Jesus?

Do you remember seeing images of him in bibles, posters, Sunday school literature or seeing conceptualization of Jesus in statues?

If you are White or Hispanic, Catholic or Protestant (even Orthodox or Evangelical,Born Again, Baptist etc) you just may remember a blond Jesus with long hair.

One famous image of Jesus was a painting by Warner Sallman, called “The Head of Christ” (1940). It showedd Jesus with flowing blond hair and blue eyes. He’s clean-looking, safe, passive, and even feminine to a degree.

This is Sallman’s Jesus:

Let us take a look at more conceptualizations of Jesus from around the world,

The image above is from a popular Children’s Bible (popular in the 70′s), Jesus had blond, blue-eyed Jesus throughout

The image above is of Jesus is from Ethiopia, from the 17th or 18th centuries.

Read more…

Food for thought,

Which of these has more of an effect (influence) on the other,   media outlets (movies, TV shows and ads) or actual real life / culture?

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My view is that media has a bigger effect on culture than culture has on media. TV and media have a lot of power on many people to a degree where these shape people’s beliefs, behaviors, and culture.

Simply put, people see it on TV, in fashion shows, in music videos, in ads, done by celebrities, owned by modern-day mystical figures, adopted by friends …  and people mimic.

Media has the upper hand on culture, not vice-versa.

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What do you think?

Leave your answer in a comment.

Winona LaDuke, is an Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe) enrolled member of the Mississippi Band of Anishinaabeg and is the mother of three children. Winona is the Program Director of Honor the Earth and Founding Director of White Earth Land Recovery Project.

Leading Honor the Earth she provides vision and leadership for the organization’s Regranting Program and its Strategic Initiatives.  In addition, she has worked for two decades on the land issues of the White Earth Reservation, including litigation, over land rights in the 1980’s.  In 1989, she received the Reebok Human Rights Award, with which in part she began the White Earth Land Recovery Project.

In 1994, Winona was nominated by Time Magazine as one of America’s fifty most promising leaders under forty years of age, and has also been awarded the Thomas Merton Award in 1996, the Ann Bancroft Award, Ms. Woman of the Year Award (with the Indigo Girls in 1997), the Global Green Award, and numerous other honors. A graduate of Harvard and Antioch Universities, she has written extensively on Native American and environmental issues.

Her books include: Last Standing Woman (fiction), All Our Relations (non-fiction), In the Sugarbush (Children’s), and The Winona LaDuke Reader.

To show respect to all of her work, I post this article about Winona LaDuke under the Best Of category.

For more information, visit: http://nativeharvest.com.

Have you ever day dreamed about not owning a house, not having to pay rent or mortgage or the never ending utility bills? How about living in the jungle or in a small cabin on some serene hill? Have you ever wished you could climb a mountain, finding a cave and converting it into your residence?

How would you like a small tent or a tipi (tepee) as a place to sleep and rest while having the whole wide world and nature as your real home? ….. Have you ever imagined that?

Have you ever wondered how you would fair without modern life amenities such as electricity, hot water, the internet, personal automotive vehicles or huge grocery stores?

Have you wondered why? Why you live in a city, why you have to work and why we use money?

Have you imagined different systems of living than the ones we live in and rely on nowadays? What would it be like to un-institutionalize yourself from all these systems?

Are homeless people homeless for the same reasons? Is it a life choice? Is it your right to make that choice?

Watch this video about Michael, a homeless person living in the hills around Fairfax, California. It has him talk about his experience, why he is homeless, what it is like to be homeless in Fairfax.

In this interview, Michael says “its my choice to be here right now, i wouldn’t trade [this for anything else]“. He also says that living in nature is a “really healing thing”.

If the video above is not working try watching the interview here:  http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-258613 Make sure you read the comments under the video as well.

Watch Trailer:

Watch the trailer for the documentary entitled “Oceti Sakowin: The People of the Seven Council Fires” below.

Read more…

This is part 4 of the series of articles entitled “The People of the Seven Council Fires – Documentary Summary“. Find part one here, part two here, part three here.

This article is about Family and the new way of life the Oyate were forced into.

Relationships are very important to the Oyate. If you were an Oyate you can make new relatives, by adopting someone as a relative, as a mother, son, sister or brother.

Social structure

The social structure is one of an extended family.

The men assume the role of the protector, provider and leadership.

Women

Women maintain the household. Women are viewed as nurturers & educators.

Women educate the children until a certain age, when boys go with men mentors and women stay under the womens’ mentorship

Grandmothers are usually the educators of the young

Women owned the house and tipi

Ethnic Cleansing

The Lakota were men of peace, lived in balance with creation and addressed all creation as relatives, they were relatives with the white buffalo

The Lakota was the last of tribes to resit the US military, odds and numbers were against them and eventually they worse faced with a new way of life.

Treaties were made and broken. Land was taken. People were forced into farming, and into boarding schools that were basically functioning in a Catholic school system. Further, families broken apart and separated, men and women and children separated.

Their roles were taken away. The women could no longer teach and nurture their children who were taken away from them; the men had no buffalo to hunt and mentoring to give.

The rationale for the boarding schools was, as Carlisle founder Richard Henry Pratt often said, to “kill the Indian and save the man.” But the actual reason was economic: By taking away the children, the U.S. government was able to take away and maintain control of the Indian land base.

Alcohol & drugs came into their lives when reservations started; the buffalo was replaced by rations as part of a government ration system.

The Oral tradition ended; now Cathlic nuns taught children and provided the children protection, someone else was providing for the children.

It was against the law to be Lakota from 1880 to 1978 !!!

In the 1950’s 100% of the Lakota denied their indiannes and they did not speak in Lakota.

Read more…

28 support poles around the sundance arbor

This is part 3 of the series of articles entitled “The People of the Seven Council Fires – Documentary Summary“. Find part one here, part two here.

This article talks about numbers. Numbers are sacred to the Oyate people.

The Number Seven

The numbers 7 and 4 are sacred thus are integrated in everything.

Seven (7) is used for social units or the structures of things
Four (4) is used in ritual
4 multiplied by 7 = 28.

The number twenty Eight (28) combines both ritual and social. The Oyate have 28 sundance lodges (or 28 support poles around the sundance arbor – sorry I’m a little confused about this particular one), 28 divisions in circle, and the months have 28 days (since they are lunar months)

The number 7 can be broken into 1, 2 and 4 , giving each of these numbers some significance.

Stay tuned for part 4 which will talk about Family

This series of articles are categories under “Religion / Atheism” and are tagged with “Ancient”.

End of part 3

Note: These articles were written in recognition and in high respect to those who inhabited these lands before me, to those who coexisted and protect the land, and to their spirituality, culture and legacy. My small contribution to bringing the truth out about what happened to the original inhabitants of North America.