guilt

If your children know who God is they will know who they are, regardless of where you or they call home.

I don__ want anything else bad to happen,_ she whispered, her voice choked with tears. ____ so sick to death of bad things happening, of seeing bad things that happened in the past! And I__ guilty of so many things. I__ sorry that I killed Mrs. Matthias and wrecked her stupid greenhouse back in the Eighties and I__ sorry I left you here alone while I went around the world.___ wasn__ alone though, I knew you were doing what you wanted to do and that you were still alive, so I wasn__ really alone, I knew you were still there somewhere,_ Alecto told her. His damaged smile and downcast, sorrowful eyes were draped in the shadow of the night, saving Mandy the trouble of seeing.

It's exhausting, the energy it takes to unknow a truth.

You invoke a new futurewhen you envision your pastin the light of your present.

You kill by consent, every time you let something_ pervert the balance when you have the power to stop it.

Like every other house-renting, paycheck-to-paycheck, heel dragging working American, it wouldn't matter if I stepped in it by accident or was pushed, or simply whiffed it as I walked by. With the powers in play, guilt or innocence had nothing to do with anything.

When we first begin to take power more directly, after long having kept our relationship to it underground...it is natural that we experience anxiety, even guilt, at putting ourselves first. These feeling let us know we are taking action; they do not need to stop us.

And yet, sometimes facts are no more than pitiful consequences, because guilt does not reside in our acts but in the intentions that give rise to our act. Everything turns on our intentions.

Mind chatter: a clatter of left-brain rains of doubt, worry, guilt, shame in a thunderstorm of fear. Forgive the chatter, clear your mind.

If in poetry court she was calledto testify on matters whereI was condemned to imprisonment: parking my egoat a broken meter, line violations, forced rhyme,dealing stanzaics to children, shootingoff my mouth, getting cute, for even thislatest attempt at verse, she would tell the whole truth,she would admit from the pitof her unsung brilliance,from all of the paintings and poemsshe herself has been makingand storing in the vast empire of her singing soul, your Honor, my daughter is guiltyof plagiarizing my cells.

We always make the best decision we can based upon what we believe in that moment. When I was growing up, my father and I experienced a lot of tension with each other for many years. He had bipolar disorder and it was very difficult for him. As I got older and went through my transformation of consciousness and really forgave him__nd forgave myself and forgave the world__y father started showing up in my awareness as an angel. He got happier and happier and our relationship began to improve. People would say, __our dadhas really changed a lot,_ and I would say, __y mind has really changed._ My father was just reflecting that back. In fact, he came to me one day and said, __avid, I__ sorry. I was not a very good father. I didn__ do the things that a good father should do.__ replied, __onsense! I don__ believe that for one instant. You did the best you could and I did the best I could. You didn__ let me down and I didn__ let you down. We__e not going to buy into that guilt trip anymore.__e lit up when I said this. His whole demeanor changed and he instantly reflected love back to me. That simple exchange completely rearranged our view of everything that had taken place during those early years. None of it mattered anymore. We had been mistaken about many things because we couldn__ perceive truly while we were going through our time together.

The sickest part of this whole story is that I tried really hard to make up for what I thought I did to her, after she started talking to me again. I loaned her money whenever she needed it, I gave her rides whenever she called and needed to get somewhere, I did my best to pretend like David wasn't in the room with us when I was at her house, I did whatever I could that I thought might show her that I loved her and cared about her, and I never meant to hurt her. It took a while before I realized that would never happen. She'd never love me like a mom is supposed to. She would never be there for me like I tried to be for her. She would never apologize for anything or admit that she was wrong.

Right now, it felt like there was nowhere for his thoughts to alight that wasn't rife with land mines of regret or anger or guilt.

Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says maybe 100,000. Richard Dawkins thinks maybe a quarter-of-a-million. I'll take 100,000. In order to be a Christian, you have to believe that for 98,000 years, our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25 years, dying of their teeth. Famine, struggle, bitterness, war, suffering, misery, all of that for 98,000 years.Heaven watches this with complete indifference. And then 2000 years ago, thinks 'That's enough of that. It's time to intervene,' and the best way to do this would be by condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate parts of the Middle East. Don't lets appeal to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization. Let's go to the desert and have another revelation there. This is nonsense. It can't be believed by a thinking person.Why am I glad this is the case? To get to the point of the wrongness of Christianity, because I think the teachings of Christianity are immoral. The central one is the most immoral of all, and that is the one of vicarious redemption. You can throw your sins onto somebody else, vulgarly known as scapegoating. In fact, originating as scapegoating in the same area, the same desert. I can pay your debt if I love you. I can serve your term in prison if I love you very much. I can volunteer to do that. I can't take your sins away, because I can't abolish your responsibility, and I shouldn't offer to do so. Your responsibility has to stay with you. There's no vicarious redemption. There very probably, in fact, is no redemption at all. It's just a part of wish-thinking, and I don't think wish-thinking is good for people either.It even manages to pollute the central question, the word I just employed, the most important word of all: the word love, by making love compulsory, by saying you MUST love. You must love your neighbour as yourself, something you can't actually do. You'll always fall short, so you can always be found guilty. By saying you must love someone who you also must fear. That's to say a supreme being, an eternal father, someone of whom you must be afraid, but you must love him, too. If you fail in this duty, you're again a wretched sinner. This is not mentally or morally or intellectually healthy.And that brings me to the final objection - I'll condense it, Dr. Orlafsky - which is, this is a totalitarian system. If there was a God who could do these things and demand these things of us, and he was eternal and unchanging, we'd be living under a dictatorship from which there is no appeal, and one that can never change and one that knows our thoughts and can convict us of thought crime, and condemn us to eternal punishment for actions that we are condemned in advance to be taking. All this in the round, and I could say more, it's an excellent thing that we have absolutely no reason to believe any of it to be true.

In even a clear heart, some righteous acts of the harder kind can stir up a sediment of guilt, but that is not a bad thing. If allowed to be, the heart is self-policing, and a reasonable measure of guilt guards against corruption.

If you are filled with guilt and shame, it's because your heart remembers God but your head seems to have forgotten Him.

Colour outside the lines, live outside the box. Don__ let anyone tell you what to do, or not. Don__ be afraid, listen to your heart. Heaven is a state of being _ of one-ness, and Hell is a state of being _ lost. We simply need to live as we best define ourselves, find our own ways of being who we are in our world. There is no requirement - only freedom of choice. We should not be judged if we are doing what we think best according to our perceptions at any given time. Guilt should be discarded, moved beyond - what matters is who we choose to be in the next moment, given what we might have learned. We continually create ourselves anew. Forgiving someone is a great way to show love, and forgive yourself too for the hurt you held onto far too long. Take back the energy you have wasted on these things and reclaim your power to be your next best self. Honour the past but refresh, expand, renew, fulfill. Heaven is within us, always reachable.

During the day I negotiated buying mom and pop companies and incorporating them into our larger network. Sometimes we let the original owners stay on as consultants. Rarely, actually, if I__ being honest and, even when we did, it never usually lasted for very long. Mostly, those once proud owners would see the box store makeover of their businesses and decide that retirement in some warm locale really did seem the better option. Did I ever feel guilty looking at these hardworking people and taking everything they__ assembled? Not even a little. Would you feel guilty handing someone hundreds of thousands or, in some cases, millions of dollars to go do whatever tickles their fancy?