Dreaming In The Deep South

RUFUS WAINWRIGHT - ZING! WENT THE STRINGS OF MY HEART LYRICS

nobody@vox.com(dreaminginthedeepsouth) — Thu, 15 May 2008 19:01:01 -0700

RUFUS WAINWRIGHT - ZING! WENT THE STRINGS OF MY HEART LYRICS

http://www.metrolyrics.com/zing-went-...

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Judging the Ladybugs

nobody@vox.com(dreaminginthedeepsouth) — Sun, 11 May 2008 21:16:59 -0700

Cathedral

Cross Posted to Alive on All Channels

From ReUnion News

Nafs

April 29, 2008 by Peter

The ‘Nafs’ in the Sufi paradigm refer to a group of ‘everyday’ force signals.

We begin good work when we consciously try and clean ourselves of these ‘Nafs’, particularly in tandem with ReUnion clearing.

Take on an alertness as to when the ‘Nafs’ come up in you, and do your best to dissolve them with forgiveness and love…..

Being proud of one’s spiritual state
Arrogance
Envy
Miserliness
Being vengeful
Denying the giver of gifts or belittling the gifts
Being dissatisfied and complaining about one’s state
Ceasing to have hope for God’s Mercy
Being sure of God’s punishment
Condoning tyrany and helping tyrants
Speaking against decent people
Being hungry for approval and compliments
Fearing criticism
Setting traps for others
Fawning over people for personal benefit
Being happy about disasters that fall upon people
Taking pleasure in people’s suffering
Gossiping
Being a hypocrite
Being a coward
Not keeping one’s word
Believing in bad luck
Leading a life of no responsibility
Making excuses
Not keeping to one’s path due to laziness
Lamenting the loss of things
Not accepting one’s error and continue insisting on it
Being afraid of poverty
Making oneself depressed
Taking pleasure in belittling others
Being disdainful of the poor
Forgetting about one’s own shortcomings and being preoccupied with the shortcomings of others
Excluding from one’s heart the love of God

***

And another excellent sermon posted by Kim Fabricius

A bargain with God?

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

Not long after I became a Christian, a friend of mine gave me a collection of sermons by Karl Barth. The collection was appropriately entitled Deliverance to the Captives; all the sermons were preached towards the end of Barth’s life in the city prison in Basel. One sermon in particular shocked and overwhelmed me. It was entitled “The Criminals with Him”, and took as its text a verse from Luke’s passion narrative: “They crucified him with the criminals, one on either side of him” (Luke 23:33). “Do you know what this implies?” asked Barth. “Don’t be too surprised if I tell you that this was the first Christian fellowship.” And Barth went on to conclude: “In reality we all are these crucified criminals. And only one thing matters now. Are we ready to be told what we are? Are we ready to hear the promise given to the condemned, [and] to ‘get in line behind’ [them]?”

“Get in line behind them?” I thought. Hang on a minute, Karl! I know you’re big on grace, but aren’t you getting carried away, isn’t this taking grace a bit too far? I mean isn’t this unjust, criminals at the front of the queue to the kingdom, evil folk ahead of the good? I was particularly miffed at what Barth preached because I myself came to Christ – or rather Christ to me – out of a rather sordid existence, having lived for a time on the streets of Amsterdam and London, homeless and broke, begging, taking drugs, shoplifting just to survive. I knew what kind of people wheeled and dealed there, the crime and the violence. And now Barth tells me that I’m going to have to get in line behind this scum? And, adding insult to injury, observe: Barth made no distinction between the penitent and the impenitent thief – both were going to precede me. And, in fact, these weren’t just thieves, they were what we would now call terrorists.

MORE>>

A great Flannery O'Connor tale at the end:

Do you know Flannery O’Connor’s short story entitled – succinctly – “Revelation”? It is about one Mrs Turpin from the deep South. Mrs Turpin is a hard-working, upright, church-going farmer’s wife. One day, at her doctor’s office, she is bad-mouthing the white trash and lazy blacks she has to put up with. Suddenly a mentally disturbed girl in the waiting room throws a book at her and calls her a “wart hog from hell”. Visibly shaken, Mrs Turpin returns to her farm, unable to get the girl’s offensive words out of her mind. “Wart hog” indeed! For Mrs Turpin knows that she is a good person, certainly far superior to red necks and “niggers”, and she reminds God of her rectitude, as well as of all the good work she does, especially for the church. Then she angrily asks, referring to the girl’s outrageous insult, “What did you send me a message like that for?” And then, suddenly – revelation! As she stares into the pigpen, Mrs Turpin is given a glimpse of “the very heart of mystery,” and she begins to absorb some “abysmal life-giving knowledge.” She has a vision of a parade of souls marching to heaven, with white trash, blacks, freaks, lunatics and other social outcasts up front, leading the way, and, taking up the rear, folk like herself, “marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behaviour. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”

Yes, religion is a bargain, but revelation is no bargain, revelation is grace, it is free. Nothing is necessary, all is a gift. We have no rights, we are never owed, and we are never one up on the bastards and undeserving. That “scum” I thought I’d left behind – I didn’t: it was me too, and I took it with me. But no matter: God’s sun shines and his rain falls on the good and the evil without distinction. As Oxford Regius Professor of Divinity Marilyn McCord Adams puts it: “Expecting God to be interested in invidious distinctions among us would be like our judging the ladybugs to see which had paid us the appropriate honour!”

God is sheer, exuberant, overflowing, prodigal love, inside and out, from top to bottom. May God grant us the insight and wisdom that Mrs Turpin takes home with her that fateful night: “In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.”

(Faith & Theology)

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Theological Reflection

nobody@vox.com(dreaminginthedeepsouth) — Sun, 11 May 2008 17:04:33 -0700

Mother Mary

~POEM

The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morning

in the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather

plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs the body's world,
instinct

and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,

to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is --

so it enters us --
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;

and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.

`MARY OLIVER
FROM "DREAM WORK"

****

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart ... try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Ranier Maria Rilke

***
This post begins with the poem that Anna read to us last week. This week, we'll move into this poem, and into some of the work that came out of our reflection of vocation, calling and spiritual gifts.

***
“The other side has religion, and we need some,” said the Rev. Susan B. Thistlethwaite, president of Chicago Theological Seminary. “We need a more robust understanding of the role of religious values, values that prevent us from compromising the sanctity and dignity of human life. The left, because it is largely secular, did not do enough as the working class was finished off. And now the same thing is happening with the middle class. It is the loss of the left’s spiritual resources that has crippled the movement. The left forgot that nations, like individuals, have souls. Once you sell your soul, it is hard to get it back. History is not linear. History is about constant struggle. It is the struggle, if you come out of faith, which matters.”

****

"St. Francis de Sales was once approached by a disciple who said to him, "Sir, you speak so much about the love of God, but you never tell us how to achieve it. Won't you tell me how one comes to love God?"

And St. Francis replied, "There is only one way and that is to love Him." "But you don't quite understand my question. What I asked was, "How do you engender this love of God?" And St. Francis said, "By loving Him." Once again the pupil came back with the same question, "But what steps do you take? Just what do you do in order to come into the possession of this love?" And all St. Francis said, was, "You begin by loving and you go on loving and loving teaches you how to love. And the more you love, the more you learn to love."

And in our own day, Martin Buber has spoken in the same vein, replying to the question:

"What are we to do?" "What is to be done?" If you mean by this question, "What is one to do?" there is no answer. One cannot help himself. With one, there is nothing to begin. With one, it is all over. He who contents himself with explaining or asking what he is to do, talks and lives in a vacuum.

But he who poses the question with the earnestness of his soul on his lips and means, "What have I to do?'" he is taken by the hand by comrades he does not know but whom he will soon become familiar with, and they answer, "You shall not withhold yourself."

Thus again, the Way will teach you the Way, and the Way is learning not to withhold yourself. The Way is learning to be with life, in life, one with life,, more and more. And there is nothing else to be learned. And for this there are no techniques. We must not, therefore, look to a conference on religion and psychology to relieve us of the task of living our own lives. There are many who look to psychology or psychotherapy or to spiritual writing for answers, and this is all right up to a point, but pushed too far it becomes an escape from oneself, from one's own reality. If you keep asking, "How shall I do it?" you are not meeting your own life situation. Only your own life can teach yo how it is to believe. If we turn to psychology or to religion because we are afraid to face our own life, to sweat and to toil and to shed tears and to learn to love in the context of our own existential situation, then psychology and religion become obstacles to reality....."

Bernard Phillips, The Search Will Make You Free
quoted in Eighth Day of Creation by Elizabeth O'Connor

*****

Elizabeth O'Connor says in 'Eighth Day of Creation":

"When we talk about being true to ourselves --- being the person we are intended to be -- we are talking about gifts. We cannot be ourselves unless we are true to our gifts...

We ask to know the will of God without guessing that His will is written into our very beings. We perceive that will when we discern our gifts. Our obedience and surrender to God is in large part our obedience and surrender to our gifts (and how we would use them in response to God's love for us).

A primary purpose of the church is to help us discover our gifts, and in the face of our fears, to hold us accountable for them so we can enter into the joy of creating."

***

(Note, most of these quotes and excerpts were published on my blog "Alive on All Channels."
The cartoon was pinched from Mad Priest's blog)

*******

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To Wrap Up...

nobody@vox.com(dreaminginthedeepsouth) — Sun, 11 May 2008 16:48:44 -0700

Merlin & his archnemesis

"The fierce power of imagination is a gift from God"
--Kabbalah

"Love God as God is a not-God, a not-mind, a not-person, a not-image.
--Meister Eckhard Sermon 12

"O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed."
--Gerard Manly Hopkins
"No Worst, There is None"

"Sweet are the uses of Adversity
which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
--Shakespeare

Why is it so important that you are with God 
and God alone on the mountain top? It's 
important because it's the place in which you
can listen to the voice of the One who calls  
you the beloved. To pray is to listen to the 
One who calls you "my beloved daughter,"
"my beloved son," "my beloved child." To pray is to let that voice
speak to the center of your being, to your guts, and let that voice
resound in your whole being.

    --Henri Nouwen

**
Lucifer falls, Alice falls, so does Icarus. Humpty Dumpty falls.
The giant in "Jack and the Beanstalk" falls. Jack and Jill fall. The Titans
tumble earthwad for nine days straight. Elpenor slips headlong from Circe's.
roof. Adam and Eve supposedly fall, though in fact the theological idea of a
lapse into sin is Christian in origin, the necessary precondition for rapture. We must
fall so that Christ can raise us. Read Genesis, however, and you'll see that the authors
of the Hebrew scriptures, their imaginations defined perhaps by the long horizons of
the Fertile Crescent, conceive of expulsion in lateral terms. The central metaphor
is not descent but exile. Still, the experience of falling is so fundamental that is lends
itself to moral and existential embellishment.
Witnessed or not, an accidental fall entails a loss of dignity. Our upright posture most
distinguishes Homo erectus from that class of creatures that the Bible identifies as
"creeping," and no animal is creepier than that enigmatic serpent whose curse it is to
crawl upon the ground, just as no animal topples more easily than we do. Quadrupeds
wobble and trip when newborn, but rarely thereafter. Just think what a horrific sight it
is to see a racehorse go down. Implicit in the biblical stories is a kind of hierarchy of being
that seems to mirror the human body cosmologically. I suspect that Zeus and Baal and
Yahweh Himself may be associated with mountaintops and clouds in part because our eyes
are among our own most altitudinous organs. To be human is to defy gravity. To be a
snake is to embrace it. The snake is thus our anatomical opposite, though when we fall
-- or sleep, or have sex, or die -- we assume a serpentine posture, a fact implicit
in the symbolism of Genesis.
Only with the Hellenic distinction between the body and the spirit could we imagine the
dead ascending like helium balloons into the sky. The flight of Icarus is not merely an
allegory about human ambition. It is an allegory about our ambition to slip our mortal
bonds. Only the soul may ascend; the body must plummet. To be earthbound is to be
deathbound. In the theater of battle to fall means to die. The same logic governs the
collapse of architecture and empires, those collective attempts to defy gravity and time.
But there is also a pleasure in falling, in giving in, in assenting to gravity's pull. Although
we can fall into disgrace, we can also fall into a trance, or sleep, or love. What these
experiences have in common is the surrendering of the will -- to music, or to unconsciousness,
or to another. These are all varieties of bewilderment. In the absence of pain, falling ill
can accord some of the same pleasures as falling in love. There is a voluptuousness to
illness, the eros of the infantile. Even seemingly disastrous falls can be accompanied by
the joy of relief or the exhilaration of chaos.
***
"Contact! Contact!" Thoreau shouted at the heavens from atop Mount Ktaadn. "Where
are we? Who are we?" And the heavens did not reply."

From "Falling; Confessions of a lapsed forest Christian" by Donovan Hohn
Harpers Magazine, April 2008

****
Do you know Flannery O’Connor’s short story entitled – succinctly – “Revelation”? It is about one Mrs Turpin from the deep South. Mrs Turpin is a hard-working, upright, church-going farmer’s wife. One day, at her doctor’s office, she is bad-mouthing the white trash and lazy blacks she has to put up with. Suddenly a mentally disturbed girl in the waiting room throws a book at her and calls her a “wart hog from hell”. Visibly shaken, Mrs Turpin returns to her farm, unable to get the girl’s offensive words out of her mind. “Wart hog” indeed! For Mrs Turpin knows that she is a good person, certainly far superior to red necks and “niggers”, and she reminds God of her rectitude, as well as of all the good work she does, especially for the church. Then she angrily asks, referring to the girl’s outrageous insult, “What did you send me a message like that for?” And then, suddenly – revelation! As she stares into the pigpen, Mrs Turpin is given a glimpse of “the very heart of mystery,” and she begins to absorb some “abysmal life-giving knowledge.” She has a vision of a parade of souls marching to heaven, with white trash, blacks, freaks, lunatics and other social outcasts up front, leading the way, and, taking up the rear, folk like herself, “marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behaviour. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”

Yes, religion is a bargain, but revelation is no bargain, revelation is grace, it is free. Nothing is necessary, all is a gift. We have no rights, we are never owed, and we are never one up on the bastards and undeserving. That “scum” I thought I’d left behind – I didn’t: it was me too, and I took it with me. But no matter: God’s sun shines and his rain falls on the good and the evil without distinction. As Oxford Regius Professor of Divinity Marilyn McCord Adams puts it: “Expecting God to be interested in invidious distinctions among us would be like our judging the ladybugs to see which had paid us the appropriate honour!”

God is sheer, exuberant, overflowing, prodigal love, inside and out, from top to bottom. May God grant us the insight and wisdom that Mrs Turpin takes home with her that fateful night: “In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.”

(from Faith and Theology)

***

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Enneagram - More Resources

nobody@vox.com(dreaminginthedeepsouth) — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:19:23 -0700

Mimi's show

More Enneagram resources, for those who have enjoyed this tool.

http://www.9types.com/

which links to
Riso-Hudson Enneagram Type Indicator (RHETI)

as well as

The New Enneagram Test

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Vocation and Calling

nobody@vox.com(dreaminginthedeepsouth) — Thu, 08 May 2008 22:09:06 -0700

walking path England

This was a version of Common Lesson Five (EfM) done by John deBeer's model of vocation discernment and calling.

This exercises uses as its texts, Psalm 139 (CHERISHED); Corinthians 12:1- 12 (GIFTED) ; Exodus 2:11-3:10 (PASSIONATE); Ephesians 4: 1-16 (COMMITTED); and 1 Corinthians 12: 14 -31 (COMMUNAL).

deBeer draws from James Fowler's work in creating a model for vocation in Weaving the New Creation (San Francisco: Harper, 1991).

Elizabeth O'Connor , in Eighth Day of Creation

"When we talk about being true to ourselves -- being the person we are intended to be -- we are talking about gifts. We cannot be ourselves unless we are true to our gifts...

We ask to know the will of God without guessing that His will is written into our very beings. We perceive that will when we discern our gifts. Our obedience and surrender to God is in large part our obedience and surrender to our gifts (and how we would use them in response to god's love for us.)

A primary purpose of the church is to help us discover our gifts, and in the face of our fears, to hold us accountable for them so we can enter into the joy of creating."

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Myanmar

nobody@vox.com(dreaminginthedeepsouth) — Thu, 08 May 2008 21:47:20 -0700

Myanmar.after#2

From Monastic Mumblings

Litany for Myanmar

Almighty and gracious God, we come to You with our hearts full of prayers both spoken and those that cannot be put into words. As the ancient psalmist wrote You are our refuge and strength, the light in the darkness, and so with confidence we offer our prayers to You for Myanmar, striken by violent powerful winds, rain and terrifying, destructive ocean surges. Gather them and us under Your wings, calm all our fears and keep our faith strong.

Lord hear our prayers.

At a time like this we stand in awe of the power of nature - the wind and the sea - with its terrible capacity to destroy as well as to save and we are reminded of our vulnerability as human creatures who inhabit this vast earth. We bring to You in prayer our questions, our humility and also our trust in this hour of need.

Lord hear our prayers.

We pray for those who grieve the loss of family, friends and neighbors, for those who are injured, those separated and searching for family, for those who have been traumatized.
We ask for Your continued healing presence in their lives and we commend to Your care all those who have died.

Lord hear our prayers.

We give to Your loving care all those who are involved in rescuing people and those caring for the injured in hospitals and clinics. Be especially with all the churches and people as they minister in Your name to the people. May they be the Christ Who serves with wounded hands,and stretch out their hands to serve. Sustain them through this time of tremendous loss and stress.

Lord hear our prayers.

We commend to Your care all those are working in debris removal and cleaning up. We especially pray for those burdened by unimaginable losses and who have found themselves like refugees in their own country. May shelter and clean water and food and medicines and comfort be supplied as quickly as possible.

Lord hear our prayers

We pray for those - especially the poor, who live along the coast and delta and whose livelihoods have been lost or impacted by this disaster and ask that You would raise them up and bless them. We pray for those whose workplaces have become unsafe and who face an uncertain future and ask that they may find the assistance they need

Lord hear our prayers.

We pray for those communities that have been devastated that they may live and learn and support one another and have joy in their lives once again. May this disaster bring people together to rebuild their cities, and to fill their lives with justice, their plates with food and their streets with music,. Bring them peace and healing from all evil.

Lord hear our prayers.

We pray for those traveling, who feel homesick and far away from loved ones and their homes at this time; those who are trying to get in contact with family and who are worried and frustrated and who long to embrace their families. Comfort families across the distance.

Lord hear our prayers.

We give thanks to God for the blessings in our lives, especially the gifts we so often take for granted until they are in danger of being taken away from us - the gift of family, friends, a home, our possessions. Most of all we praise God for the gift of life itself.

Lord hear our prayers.

We also pray for all people of the human family all around the world affected by other natural disasters. O God, Great Shepherd of the sheep, gather us all in Your arms and lead us safely within the one fold of Your love.

Lord hear us, Lord hear our prayer

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You Can Taste It

nobody@vox.com(dreaminginthedeepsouth) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:49:15 -0700

Entrance to Hell

INFINITE THOUGHT

"Undergoing a seriously bad bout of insomnia/jetlag coupled with excruciatingly unpleasant dreams, I start to wonder what cinema would look like if dreams were not a common feature of psychic life. Dreams are extraordinary lies: the death of a friend, the disintegration of teeth, the taste of blood, the guilt felt at the accidental death of someone in your care are real, physically felt phenomena. The tears cried in dreams create the same exhaustion as tears cried in waking life, and the unpleasantness and terror that lingers after witnessing a violent death or spending what seemed like several hours wondering around with a mouth filled with vomit, blood and broken teeth remains with you during the day. You can taste it. Just as the false movement and emotional wrench of much cinema creates a kind of depthless empathy and pity for the reflection of a world which doesn't exist, dreams too invent pathos for a nonreality, but one which is unfortunately, and tiresomely, caught between the confines of your own skull. The combined boredom and discomfort of listening to the dreams of another is a kind of fear of this confined subjective illusion, the infinite space of a claustrophobic...nutshell."

***

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DNA

nobody@vox.com(dreaminginthedeepsouth) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:48:37 -0700

Dna

This is pretty cool.

***

From Father Jake Stops the World:

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Some Resources for the "Nature and/or Nurture" Debate

In a recent discussion, Peter O. left this comment:

I'm not asking you to defend your sexuality. I'm asking others to defend their assertion that homosexuality is a biological/genetic phenomena.

First, for us less scientific types, IT sets the stage:

...As a professional geneticist (although not one who studies homosexuality; my gig is cancer research), and a professor who teaches the subject, may I point out YET AGAIN that someone does not understand genetics.
Almost no complex traits can be traced to a single gene. Okay? NONE. Not even blue eyes/brown eyes, although they are pretty close. Certainly nothing as complex as behavior.
Even in fruitflies.
Nothing complex is solely nature or nurture, but both. You may have the genes to be 7 feet tall but if you aren 't eating a good diet you won't get there.
There are plenty of studies showing that human sexuality exists on a continuum, not a binary. It's extremely complex.
However, there are also plenty of studies showing a very strong genetic component to homosexuality; it may not be the single gene absolute concordance that the conservatives want (see preceding) but it is vastly, vastly higher than chance.
Go read Pubmed if you want the citations...The VAST majority of medical and psychiatric opinion is clear on the subject...

With that in mind, here are a few resources that were mentioned in that discussion, as well as additional items that have been suggested in this thread:

Developmental Biology, by Scott F. Gilbert.

Quirks and Quarks,: Searching for the Gay Gene, by CBC Radio.

What Mental Health And Medical Experts Say About "Curing" Gays, by Outfront.

The Robert Spitzer Study by the Rainbow Alliance.

TVC Presents Deceptive and Misleading Information about the APA, by the Rainbow Alliance.

On "left handedness," from Barry and IT.

Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, by Bruce Bagemihl.

Evolution's Rainbow and A Plea for Diversity, by Joan Roughgarden.

This is just the beginning, of course. Suggest resources in the comments, and I'll add them to this list.

J.

Posted by Jake

ALSO

For anyone interested in learning more, I recommend the animated site DNA from the beginning which is free on line from Cold Spring Harbor (a mecca for genetics). This is a great intro to classical Mendalian genetics (the monk and his peas) as well as molecular genetics and cytogenetics.
IT

***
MORE FROM COMMENTOR 'IT'

Okay, let's talk about left-handedness. It's a very useful analogy in many ways.

As a behavior, it's much much less complex than sexuality, but still exists on a continuum, with a few people being truly ambidetrous, and most being either strongly left or strongly right in their preference. The rate of lefthandedness are low, and reasonably constant across popuulations as best as can be told (although given the strictures against it this isn't completely clear).

Handedness also occurs in animals, by the way, with some species of flatfish preferring to go on their right side, some on their left. most parrots are left-footed when they hold food to eat, but again, there are exceptions.

There has been traditionally a strong bias against lefthandedness, and still is in some cultures. we know in our own culture, people were punished for being left handed, and forbidden from using their left hands, which in many cases caused severe sequelae. For example, stuttering was often associated with enforcing right-handed usage on a left-handed child.

Thankfully, this forcible "reprogramming" has been rejected by the medical profession and doesn't happen in the west any more.

However, there are still strong social strictures against left handed usage in many other cultures, so it seems prudent to expect abuses still continue.

Second, there is no "gene" for left handedness. the inheritance pattern does not clearly follow simple genetics. Although there is an inherited tendency, with some families having a high frequency of lefties, lefthanders also arise spontaneously in otherwise right handed families. but it doesn't follow a binary left-right inheritance pattern of a simple trait.

One intriguing speculation to explain the frequency of lefthanders and the inheritance pattern is that there IS a gene for right handedness. However, if you do not inherit this trait, you are not necessarily left handed. Rather, your handedness is randomly assgined, so you may end up either right or left. So the phenotypic choices are right handed, or random. The preponderance of right handedness in the population represents the allelic frequency of that right-handed allele.

Now, add to that the complications of human genetics including multi-factorial traits, epigenetics, variance in expressivity, penetrance, enhancers, and suppressors, and you may get a small idea of why simplistic views of genetics simple can't work.
IT

****
My own family is 'liberally' salted with both homosexual and left-handed people. Also, left handed homosexuals.
Also migraine sufferers and schizophrenics and alcoholics. Knowing that and providing peer support (in a manner of speaking) among the siblings and offspring has been interesting and helpful all around.

We are spiritual beings, not in a vague 'new age' kind of fuzzy way, but right down to the roulette going on in our inmost parts. We are in communion with our God and with each other. With and through one another we are wending our way amidst this mine field of the many stranded wilderness.

Metaphor doesn't mean imaginary. It's just another level at which stuff is true.

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Eyes Wide Open

nobody@vox.com(dreaminginthedeepsouth) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:04:15 -0700

Eyes Wide Open

http://edoc.vox.com/library/photo/6a0...

More than 400 pairs of boots representing US troops from California who have died in the war in Iraq were placed on Grace Cathedral's labyrinth.

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