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the-cloud-walkers-hut · 4 years ago

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Finding Sense

It makes the most sense to start this off with the story of my spiritual journey. First of all, I just want to say that I don’t expect any followers. I don’t expect pins or comments; I actually haven’t had a tumblr in years so I barely remember how to manage this thing :’-)

But lately, I’ve been desperate for a space in which I could be candid about my spiritual beliefs and stay connected to them. I’m an extremely busy college student; I double major, I’m an intern, I’m an events coordinator for other clubs, I’m a mentee. There was a point when I also worked 15 hours a week at my school dining hall on top of that, and it was a lot. I felt like I barely had any time to even *think* about anything else besides the endless sea of deadlines in my wake. At the same time, I was also diagnosed with PTSD and trying to patch up my mental health with what little hours of free time I had. I was so drained, and more than anything, I really missed my spirituality.

The connection I felt to my guides at one point was something unlike anything else I’ve experienced. I looked up at the stars at night and felt something looking back- something that cared, something that rooted for me. I had no doubts, no skepticism of what lurked beyond our world. I had pure faith in my guides and in the structure of the universe I’d learned from my studies.

Let me start from the beginning now. I was born in a really weird religious dynamic; my mother was an atheist for a large portion of my life (I think she’d identify as agnostic these days), and my father was a very traditional Christian. We never went to church together, however. I have older half-siblings that I would attend church with from time-to-time, and I really tried my best to be connected to God because I was deeply afraid of the idea of nonexistence. So from around the ages of 10-20, I was an off-and-on Christian. I would attend youth group from time to time, I would try to speak tongues, I would try to pray, but I could never shake the feeling that there was an emptiness above me. There was no one listening, no one blessing me the way my relatives thought they were being blessed.

I also felt somewhat uneasy with some of the lessons my youth pastor would teach us. For example, we had one day where my pastor preached about abandoning those who were not “godly” enough. If your friends partied, smoked weed, had premarital sex, or just generally did not believe in God, it was time to distance yourself from them so that your godliness could stay intact. I hated the idea of that, of abandoning those I love just because they don’t think the same as me. My closest friends were Buddhists, amazing people with hearts of gold that my pastor would recommend me staying as far away from as possible.

And then this past year, I ended up in a group of women reading a book on female empowerment through Christian ideals. I can’t remember what it was called, and I actually don’t want to say as I’d like to keep anonymous on here for now. Anyways, I was looking at this opportunity as a way to reconnect with God whom I’d felt disdain for because of my youth pastor and because of how unresponsive I felt that He was to me.

We made it through about 10 chapters of the book and I was very rapidly losing my mind. It was a horrific book of gender roles and condemning the LGBTQ+ community. It simplified women so much that it boiled the entire gender down to “girls who want to be pretty, have a strong man, and feel like a princess”. It supported the idea that women are the support, the right-hand-man to the leader of the house, which was the man. It deeply disapproved of men who were not strong, who were not the leaders, who showed any lick of emotion. And the whole time I had to hold my tongue because everyone in the group agreed with every judgment the book made. I quickly exited that group and realized that I deeply despise organized religion. Now let me say, I don’t despise those who are in an organized religion. I think Christians are good people. I think those who participate in organized religions are good people. I respect their beliefs, though I disagree heavily. But I deeply hate the influence organized religion has over politics or social norms, I hate the God-fearing point of view, I hate tithing. I overall just hate the weaponization of organized religion and how some use their religion to pass hateful judgments. It’s not something I can be a part of, and I know that so many Christians and those of other organized religions are amazing people who are accepting, loving, and kind, but I truly believe organized religion give those who are not accepting, loving, and kind an excuse to spew harmful judgments on others.

So with that being said, I was in desperate search of something else. It was at that time that I started watching YouTubers like West Indie Ray and Sadhguru and I realized that my spirituality doesn’t need a name. I can believe what I’d like without a label; I can have a blend of philosophies that resonate with me because we are all on different spiritual journeys. That’s what I think all of us who believe in a higher power need to recognize. It is okay to be on different paths. It is okay to disagree with how others view the worlds beyond ours. What is not okay is condemning others for their way of thinking, forcefully trying to convert them to your way of life to “save them”, or disowning them for not being as godly as you.

My interest in spirituality deepened to the point where I finally sought a reading. I went to a metaphysical book and crystal store at a nearby port town, and I received my first *serious* tarot reading. I asked for guidance on how to connect with my spirituality, and the cards gave a very clear answer. All three cards that I pulled had to do with spiritual practices, which the tarot reader was surprised by herself. It’s been a while so I can’t remember the exact reading, but it gave me the tools I needed to start self-studying. The cards recommended that I study dreams, align my chakra and meditate in the moonlight. So I bought a crap ton of books from the store and started my intensive spiritual studies.

One of these books was Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian Weiss.

This book changed me.

Have you ever read or watched something that resonated with you so deeply, it just felt like a truth? You had no questions, you had no doubts in your mind that this was undeniably correct? Maybe not, but that’s exactly how I felt, and it was the first time I’d ever read spiritual literature that made sense. The idea of living many lives, each one with the intention to teach you something so that you can elevate to the next plane of spirituality made so much sense to me that I literally felt myself changing. I felt that a new stage of my life was unraveling, and I was so beyond excited to finally be connected.

I spoke to my guides, my masters, and they spoke back. They spoke back with images in the sky, sudden thoughts, dreams. It’s been a struggle to fight back my skepticism and accept these instances as true messages, but I feel that I’ve come to a place where I can now fully embrace it. I have guides watching over me, they are listening to me and they are responding. All I ever wanted was for God to show me He was listening, but I never heard from Him. I believe now that it’s because I was always calling the wrong name.

So tying this back to why this Tumblr exists. Like I said, I’m extremely busy. Regular life and responsibilities has severely hindered my ability to practice my spirituality or continue my studies, and frankly, I feel really disconnected at this point. Starting this blog will not only keep me accountable for making time for spirituality, but I think it also signifies the next turning point in my life. Skepticism does not hold me back anymore from my guides; I fully and willfully accept that I am here with a lesson to learn and that I’m being shown the way. I hope that if you come across this blog and have a similar story that this blog can help you reconnect as well :-)

***I want to finish this off by reiterating: I do not judge those who practice organized religion. I myself don’t believe in Jesus, but I would never try to prove Christians wrong for believing in Him. As I said, we are all on different paths, and if Christianity is the path that works for them, I am grateful they have that space. My tiff is with organized religion itself as a concept, and my opinion of it solely comes from my own experience. If you like organized religion, that’s great. I feel like religion can be such a toxic topic as people try to force ideologies onto you, and I want to make sure this space is never that. Believe in your journey, believe in what resonates with you, and I’ll be happy for you <3

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gibsongirlselections · 5 years ago

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If John Roberts Isn’t a Conservative, What is He, Exactly?

We are told that ours is a government of laws and not of men. But is it? Those rote words of assurance are called into question by the sad saga of President Obama’s executive initiatives for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, and by President Trump’s ill-fated effort to reverse those actions through his own executive authority. The outcome should be alarming to anyone who cares about constitutional government as pieced together by the American Founders.

The alarm is particularly acute in relation to one man, Chief Justice John Roberts, who seems bent on ensuring that the Supreme Court, as currently constituted, never tilts toward conservatism with any consistency. He was nominated for his current position by President George W. Bush because of his conservative record, but it isn’t clear—and has never been clear, when we look back on it—precisely what he stands for, aside from his own extravagant ambition.

Joan Biskupic, in her biography, The Chief: The Life and Turbulent Times of Chief Justice John Roberts, recounts that Roberts, as he was angling for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit, wished to remain aloof from the conservative Federalist Society, even as he accepted the Federalists’ endorsement for the position. The endorsement was helpful in getting him considered for the court nomination by the second President Bush in 2005, but it could have proved problematic at confirmation time. Roberts’s political conundrum was explored by The Washington Post’s Charles Lane at the time of his nomination to the appeals court.

��Roberts burnished his legal image carefully,” wrote Lane. “In conservative circles, membership in or association with the [Federalist] society has become a badge of ideological and political reliability….But the society’s alignment with conservative GOP politics and public policy makes Roberts’s relationship with the organization a potentially sensitive point for his confirmation because many Democrats regard the organization with suspicion.”

So he sought to fuzz up the matter, even to the point of being “irked” when a Post business reporter identified him as a Federalist member. He asked for a correction, though he had attended society meetings regularly and had cultivated an ideological alignment with the organization for years. Thus do we see a man seeking to obscure his true convictions, whatever they may have been, in an elaborate finesse. Nothing particularly unusual about this in the annals of Washington politics. What’s alarming with regard to Roberts, however, is that he’s still doing it now as Chief Justice of the United States—and doing it in ways that reveal an airy disregard for some of the fundamentals of the American system. In the DACA case, a clear presidential violation of the U.S. Constitution doesn’t seem to bother him in the least.

At issue in the DACA case, DHS v. University of California, was whether Trump could employ his executive authority to reverse previous executive actions by Obama to extend a kind of immigration reprieve to so-called Dreamers who were brought to the United States illegally as children, through no fault of their own. There is widespread support throughout the country, including within the Trump administration, for extending some kind of legal status for the Dreamers. But the question that emanated from Obama’s action was whether the president could constitutionally issue such an order on his own, thus bypassing Congress. The answer clearly is no.

Obama himself acknowledged that constitutional reality on numerous occasions before he decided to take the action anyway. Under pressure from his liberal supporters to wave his executive wand over the Dreamers, he repeatedly refused on the basis of his not having the authority to do so. “I am not king. I can’t do these things just by myself,” he said in 2010. In March 2011, he added that with “respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case.” Two months later he added that he couldn’t “just bypass Congress and change the [immigration] law myself….That’s not how democracy works.”

Even after Obama reversed himself on the constitutionality question in 2012, no one ever disputed in any serious way the reality that federal immigration laws, enacted by Congress, don’t confer upon the president any authority to suspend execution of those laws. Indeed, Congress had rejected previous efforts to pass new laws enabling such an approach to the DACA issue.

Then the judiciary gave further clarity to the matter when Obama sought to follow up his 2012 DACA actions with a 2014 executive initiative designed to give an administrative amnesty, along with some federal benefits, to certain parents of Dreamers—up to 4.3 million illegal immigrants. In the same series of actions, Obama also initiated a substantial expansion of DACA.

The courts struck down both. After Texas and 25 other states sued the administration over this second overreach, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a nationwide injunction against it. The president’s action, said the court, “does not transform presence [of illegals] deemed unlawful by Congress into lawful presence and confer eligibility for otherwise unavailable benefits based on that change.”

The Supreme Court subsequently affirmed the Fifth Circuit ruling and the injunction—as well as the well-established principle that Congress has full constitutional authority over immigration law. The president must bow to that. Obama was right the first time.

Based on those rulings, and an opinion by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions that the rulings demonstrated that DACA also was illegal, President Trump in June 2017 exercised his executive authority to terminate Obama’s DACA policy. In other words, he used his executive authority to reverse an unconstitutional executive action by his predecessor.

He was stymied by the Court. And the man who threw the wrench into it was Roberts, who joined the four liberal justices and wrote the majority opinion. Studiously avoiding the constitutional issues involved (a Roberts hallmark, it increasingly seems), he argued that the problem was that the Trump administration hadn’t properly followed the niceties of federal laws requiring certain rule-making procedures, with notice and comment-period requirements. Never mind that the Obama administration hadn’t followed any such procedures either in promulgating its previous unconstitutional rule-making.

This is astounding. Justice Clarence Thomas, in a spirited dissent joined in part by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, called the majority decision “mystifying” in that DACA was “unlawful from the start, and that alone is sufficient to justify its termination.” He also took issue with Roberts’s quibbling assault on a Justice Department memo that sought to justify Trump’s actions based on the DACA illegality. Thomas faulted the Roberts ruling for requiring the Trump administration to “overlook DACA’s obvious deficiencies and provide additional policy reason and justifications before restoring the rule of law.” This, he added, “will hamstring all future agency attempts to undo actions that exceed statutory authority.”

As The Wall Street Journal noted, this is an “invitation for executive mischief, especially by Presidents at the end of their terms. They’ll issue orders that will invite years of legal challenge if the next president reverses them.”

We know why the four liberal justices jumped on Roberts’s reasoning as their vehicle for retaining DACA even in the face of its clear unconstitutionality. Based on years of judicial activism, it seems clear that they don’t care about such things; it’s the outcome that animates them. But what was Roberts’s motivation? Difficult to say, except that he seems to delight in making mischief through jesuitical tangents seemingly designed to avoid getting to the heart of the constitutional issues brought before his court.

There are enough instances of this kind of judicial review to call into question what Roberts actually believes in. His first dramatic tilt came in his famous 2012 actions in the case involving Obama’s Affordable Care Act, in which Roberts accepted the unconstitutionality of the act’s “individual mandate” under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause but justified it, through contortions of logic, as a tax.

As Biskupic writes in her biography, “Some conservatives believed he was not voting his true sentiment, but trying to shore up his reputation and institutional legacy.”

Then there was Roberts’s bizarre majority opinion in last year’s case involving the administration’s desire to ask a citizenship question in the census. While acknowledging that the executive branch has broad discretion on what questions to ask, Roberts declared that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s rationale for wanting the question “appears to be contrived.” Because of timing pressures, the ruling effectively thwarted the administration’s interest without actually addressing the merits of the case; and it did so by peering into Ross’s head and purporting to discern what he was thinking. When laws are assessed based on that kind of rationale, the concept of “a nation of laws” is in serious danger.

In the current court session, Roberts also orchestrated a 6-3 decision stretching the language of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include under the law’s protections sexual orientation and gender identity, notwithstanding that Congress had specifically rejected such actions. The Court, with Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch joining the liberals, essentially amended the statute from the bench, something Roberts had repeatedly criticized during his Senate confirmation proceedings.

But it is the DACA case that truly reveals Roberts’s willingness to tinker with the law and trifle with the Constitution to serve his institutional ends, whatever they may be. His actions left in place an unconstitutional executive-branch action by throwing up artificial roadblocks against a constitutional effort to undo that unconstitutional action.

Back when Roberts engineered the Affordable Care Act decision, The Wall Street Journal perceived what was emerging on the Court. “One thing is clear,” said the paper. “This was a one-man show, and that man is John Roberts.” Today that perception looks more and more like the central reality of the Supreme Court’s internal dynamics. That isn’t good news for conservatives.

Robert W. Merry, former Wall Street Journal Washington correspondent and Congressional Quarterly CEO, is the author most recently of President McKinley: Architect of the American Century (Simon & Schuster).

The post If John Roberts Isn’t a Conservative, What is He, Exactly? appeared first on The American Conservative.

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