Gary Bergeron

@regthefronkeyfarmer Oh well, now I’m de-modded maybe @unseen will talk to me again 😜

Enco, there was one day when the boys decided to drive into town (there are no actual roads to the marae, you just drive over scrubby sandy bumps till you get to a road) to get Fish & Chips and sliced white bread. The fish was covered in thick batter so I opened one up and ate the white meat inside the batter case. One of the boys eyes lit up, he…[Read more]

Strega wrote:
@regthefronkeyfarmer Apparently I’m no longer a moderator (!) so you’re on your own if anything gets rowdy

Bring it on if you have a god on your side!! 🙂

Seriously Strega, that is not good enough. You will always be more that a participant to us all !!! I am making protest signs. We need more god mods!!

@regthefronkeyfarmer Apparently I’m no longer a moderator (!) so you’re on your own if anything gets rowdy 🤣

Thanks, Reg!!

Reg, one of these days that’ll be a reality 🙂

Strega, I will meet up with you in a hour or two…..

Enco, Jake…. I’ve spent thirty minutes deciding how to choose a small window into profundity. I’ve landed on a Māori experience.

Each tribe has its own “marae” which is their sacred community building where they attain a sense of ‘belonging’. It is prohibited for non-tribe members.  I was adopted as sister, and embraced into the shared flow of…[Read more]

Have a great week!

@Enco the tribes I lived with were NZ Māori, Fijian Pacific Islanders and a little with the Aborigines in Australia. Not part of any group or organisation – I went by myself, and bearing in mind the potential risks, I probably ought to be dead several times over, by now.

Stories about all of them, that changed my perceptions of almost…[Read more]

@Enco

”We Homo Sapiens just surround our wars with ideology and religion” is quite a profound statement.

This fits in with the behaviours of some of the far flung tribal groups I’ve lived with. For them, religion is a comfort, not a cause. They still have aggression, but the dividers between ‘them’ and ‘us’ are more commonly tribal root orientat…[Read more]

If they are doing it themselves it is not FC.

Facilitated Communication sits at the intersection of hope, identity, and perceived injustice, which makes it unusually resistant to evidence. When you watch FC in action, it can be convincing. The person appears to be communicating fluently, even sometimes at a level far beyond what anyone expected. The problem is that this impression is exactly…[Read more]

Thank you, Reg!!!

Have a great week!!

I was deplatformed as a child… now everyone’s an expert. 

– Reg.

@fullermingjr No religion is rational by the very definition of the word rational – derived from logic and reason etc.

A religion is by definition a faith based construct, for which belief  is required, not reason.

A Venn diagram of Religion and Rationality would barely touch at their potential meeting point.
I suppose Religion could be…[Read more]

Modern workplaces bring together people with fundamentally different worldviews, be they religious, secular, scientific or ideological and then ask them to cooperate as if those differences don’t matter. But in reality, they do matter. The trick is deciding when they matter at work and when they don’t.

For me the issue is never “belief vs belie…[Read more]

“It’s a very collective society, not huge on individualism like in the US.”

People tend to think in terms of community, family, and shared identity. There’s more value placed on cooperating and supporting each other. I would say that social norms often lean toward “we” over “me”.

But it is also a liberal society. We do have a small but vocal…[Read more]