Saint Brian's Chronicles

The Lucky Negro

2012-01-27T20:17:00.008-05:00

Just a short post this time.

This situation with Gignritch and Romney is very interesting. It seems to me that they are almost unbelievaly starting to destroy the eventual primamry winner's chances in the general election. All the while, Obama is starting to rise, or perhaps I should say, rise faster since he has been rising a bit in recent weeks...

What I particularily like is how the two of them, Fatso and Ken, are making each other look so amazingly incompetent. Moon bases and an eventual Lunar State, claiming the moon basically for the US? All that is going to do with your base of bottom-feeding vindictive ignoramuses is infuriate them! They HATE science! And now they think that you're a total flake! Which, hey, you are!
Or would you prefer the Incredile Plastic Man with the ever-shifting stance on every issue that exists, who couldn't personify the uncaring rich more if he wore a monacle and a top hat? His version of 'I feel your pain' is 'I feel the pain of all those poor corporate people, who are more people than real people are, making their pain so much worse!'

Plus, both of them are lying and getting caught in lies here, each and every day, which eventually even percolates down through a christian mind shield if it's apparent and obvious enough. Which these are. Right now, the two of them both look like screaming liars and utter hypocrites. More so than usual even, I mean.

Plus plus, and to me this is the sweetest part, the economy is improving in spite of all the best (worst) efforts of the republicans to keep it in a stinking mess!

And if that is happening, noody's going to come close to Obama in the general. They'll have no chance.

How did Barack Hussein Obama ever get so lucky?

Anyhow, assuming that Obama wins again, can you even *imagine* the rage and frustration on the religious right? They'll be gnawing off their own feet! The whole tea party will dissolve down into a pool of it's own rancid venom...

I can't wait!

Santorum Saturates Iowa!

2011-12-30T21:08:00.012-05:00

Dan Savage was brilliant, as it turns out, to make 'santorum' mean 'ass juice.'

There's just so many possibilities!

*****

Santorum is running somewhere between Romney and Gingritch...

Santorum surges... explodes in Iowa...

Santorum comes from behind. (Simple, yet elegant)

Santorum has unexpected burst

Santorum bottoms out

Santorum campaign leaks to press

Santorum Smears Romney's Magic Underwear

Santorum streaming video

Santorum in bed with Big Oil

Evangelical voters satisfied with Santorum

Santorum offices evacuate lower level

Marcus Bachmann prefers Santorum to Bush

Santorum dips in polls (homonymously cute, no?)

Barney Frank blasts Santorum!
(I have to credit my wife for that one)

Also:

Great name for a Gay Bar: "The Sanctum Santorum"

BADUMP-BUMP!

The Bible is Psychotic

2011-11-15T11:15:00.018-05:00

Luke 19:27 Jesus Christ said to His disciples: "But those, mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me. (KJV)

Ahh, dearest loving Jesus must have been having a bad day.

***

I am here to put forth a theory. It's a very unpopular theory, to be sure. But it needs to be said.

The Bible is psychotic. Absolutely flaming psychotic. That's my theory. And I can back it up.

Think about it, really think.

***

psy·cho·sis
[sahy-koh-sis] Show IPA
noun, plural -ses [-seez] Show IPA.
1.
a mental disorder characterized by symptoms, such as delusions or hallucinations, that indicate impaired contact with reality.
2.
any severe form of mental disorder, as schizophrenia or paranoia.

schizophrenia
[skit-suh-free-nee-uh, -freen-yuh] Origin
schiz·o·phre·ni·a
[skit-suh-free-nee-uh, -freen-yuh] Show IPA
noun
1.
Psychiatry. Also called dementia praecox. a severe mental disorder characterized by some, but not necessarily all, of the following features: emotional blunting, intellectual deterioration, social isolation, disorganized speech and behavior, delusions, and hallucinations.
2.
a state characterized by the coexistence of contradictory or incompatible elements.

***

If the Bible were a person, holding *all* of the many beliefs found within its pathological pages, they'd be a raving psychotic, a complete lunatic, because the Bible is in two halves, one of which is diametrically opposed in tone and direction and even philosophy to the other half, *and also* let us not forget that the Bible contains *many* other individual instances of self-contradiction within its pages. Even the four gospels do not agree on many important points, so 'gospel' meaning 'truth' begs the question 'which truth?'

The Bible tells us that it is the Word of God Himself, so we Must Believe in All Of It At Once. Or we're bad and evil and will go to hell after we die. And so we have Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild, with His Father Yahweh in Heaven who is never, ever meek and mild, is absolutely always *incredibly* strict and authoritarian, but you have to believe that really, they're one thing, one being, one God. And if that isn't enough to finish the job of dissolving your mind, we even have a terrible Revenge Jesus in Revelations at the very end of the book. Just in case you weren't fucked up enough up to that point.

This is the very definition of (forced) schizophrenia. To firmly believe in contrary things at the same time, is mental illness. There is no doubt about it. It's just a fact. The Bible is 'committing schizophrenia' on its readers. On its victims.

The Bible causes schizophrenia. The more literally you take it, the more sick you become. It's really that simple. And just because it's group schizophrenia doesn't excuse it. Actually it makes it far more horrifying. In fact, when you really think about it (and you have to really think about it,) you come to realize that it is entirely possible, even likely, that the Bible is the root cause of much of the mental illness present in Western (and Islamic) society. It is the Rotten Tree from which all the diseased branches grew. It is the Official Alternative to Reality.

I can't think of a better training program to produce schizophrenia. There just isn't one. The Bible, over and over again, presents sets of things which self-contradict, and yet *demands* that the reader believe in every last word of *both* of the pair of things presented, perhaps even with other differing things thrown in that contradict those two things, demands you believe absolutely all of it, all together, the whole mishmash, *or else God will fuck you up forever* (because He loves you!)

It's not possible to believe in the bible literally and not be a psychotic, a schizophrenic basket case. It demands, on pain of damnation, that the reader hold contrary beliefs in their head at the same time, permanently. And not just contrary *beliefs,* but even contrary *moral convictions!*

Or else.

Isn't coercive morality fun?

So go forth and do unto others as you would have them do unto you and love thy neighbor, while of course taking an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth along the way. Just remember to take the eye from them *lovingly.* Remember that God loves you more than anything, which is why He demands strict obedience or else He will torture and burn you forever.

So have fun, boys and girls! God loves you! (But it's a fearfully horrific kind of love, hope you don't mind...)

I want to end on a cheery note. So let me inform the gentle reader that, according to the Bible, practically all Christians are *absolutely* damned to hell anyhow. For how many Christians, what percent, believe in *all* of Leviticus? How many Christians would kill their son if he came home drunk and rebellious? Heck, how many Christians do at least some sort of work on the Sabbath? (Which incidentally, in the Bible, is on Saturday, so there's that too...) They think little of ignoring those parts; indeed they think little of ignoring whichever parts of the Bible they find just too offensive (or too nice!) for their bent and fractured belief system, hence, they're eternally damned by Biblical definition, period. The Bible says so. It's a Biblical Fact. So get used to it, Christians! God is going to love you all the way to hell. Take comfort in that, and remember to bring the ice.

(It was cheery to me)

Jesus Loves Bullies

2011-11-08T13:03:00.008-05:00

New Anti-Bullying Law In Michigan allows exceptions for 'religious conviction'

An anti-bullying law that makes exceptions if the *bully* has religious convictions about it? Really? REALLY?

Um, wouldn't that be just about all anti-gay bullies?

What, are they going for the title of 'Most Infuriating Legislation?' Because this makes me want to punch a random Christian in the head.

Lately it's not so much that religion seems harmful. No, those days are long gone. Nowadays it seems that religion has just become outright malicious, and proud of it. The mask is off. It's gone 'overt.' It just doesn't seem to give a fuck anymore. It's just 'going for it.' For all the glory and the power, amen. Screw everyone else, we're Team Jesus. Pay no attention to the fact that we act like we hate his guts; we're using his name so it's all cool. Rejoice! Now roll over and play dead for The Lord, we're coming with our jackboots on!

Religion doesn't even try to hide its evil side nowadays, counting on the fact that the public is conditioned to tolerate it reflexively. Sure I have hopes that it won't last, that the more horrific their behavior becomes the less credence the public will give them, but hey, we're fucking stupid, so that's probably not going to happen anytime soon. We need to have a religious revolt of a different kind; a revolt against the mental shackles and chains of religion. We need to free our minds from this ridiculous mental slavery, this mental computer virus called 'faith.' After all, it's utterly revolting.

I have no problem with freedom of religion, but that doesn't mean that it's free to dominate every area of the country and repress all others who disagree. Nobody's free to restrict the freedom of others, although that's what they believe they're entitled to do.

'Entitled' is a big word for them. And I mean that in two ways: Importance, and spelling difficulty.

I have no problem with Christians that keep their religion to themselves. I wish there were more of them. They're not the problem. They might even be part of the solution, if they grow a pair and fight back against this Antichrist that pretends to holiness.

This new law is execrable. What I fervently hope is that some Muslim student beats the ever-loving crap out of a good, clean, whitebread Evangelical Christian boy, and uses his legal religious exclusion to get off scot-free.

How on earth could anyone let this happen? Have they no hearts whatsoever? This is *condoning* bullying, even encouraging it! People are dying, killing themselves, because of this issue of Christian bigotry, and so of course, this law enshrines and protects it as religious freedom. Anything to promote more hatred in the name of the Prince of Peace, I guess.

Hypocrisy is a strong word, usually. But in this case, it is far too weak to be applicable. I'll go with 'evil.' Or even perhaps 'Evil,' as in, metaphysical Evil. If such a thing exists, this is it. What can be worse than evil believing itself to be good, and thus feeling good, about being evil?

This is just plain ugly. Here we have a group of people that are so very entitled and so very self-important and so very inflated with false pride, that they make the Pharisees of the Bible seem pious and humble by comparison.

Comfortable in the unshakeable belief that they are Chosen and Superior to all others, that they are literally by definition decent, upright, Godly people, they are thus free in their minds to become the polar opposite of all that, and never even realize it.

They are the evil that they fear. They are the Antichrist. They spin in circles of self-delusion, and can no longer see reality. They have decided to construct their own version. They insist.

Nothing could be further away from Christ's message than these wasters, these destroyers, these haters. They are the Cautionary Tales, demonstrating what can happen to a person when they come to believe that they no longer need to think.

Believing themselves to be blessed, they curse themselves. And in the process, curse us all.

Christian Morality Comes From God

2011-09-02T13:26:00.046-04:00

Christian Morality Comes From God.

God being the very worst father archetype there is.

So in the Christian home is reflected how God speaks and acts in the Bible.

Hence, we have:

"Because I said so!"

"I brought you into this world, and I can take you out!"

"Children should be seen and not heard"

"Spare the rod, and spoil the child"

"How DARE you question me?!"

...and so on...

In the home, as in the bible, the 'God' or 'Gods' of the house in righteous indignation demand strict obedience or else dispense immediate harsh punishment or at least threats of such. Even threats of 'going to hell.' Even accusations of 'being evil.' Be good, or else face the harsh consequences. The child is thus taught that 'might makes right.' Such 'ultimatum parenting' teaches what I like to call 'coercive morality' to children. Morality based not in love, but in fear of consequences. Morality, which isn't.

Comparing this 'coercive morality' to actual morality is a lot like comparing the more modern methods of dog training, involving reward and praise, to the old-school method of just beating the dog when it does something bad. The former produces a happy and loving dog that wants to please, whereas the latter produces a cringing man-hater that snaps at the least provocation.

The parent, like God, demands respect while acting in a manner that is not respectable, demands love while acting in an unloving manner, demands devotion while showing no devotion in return.

In many cases the child is even told some variation of 'you must love God even more than you do Mommy and Daddy.' And if the child quite logically then asks 'Does that meant that you love God more then you do me?' the answer will invariably be 'yes, of course!' Shattering. The self-image of the child is reduced over and over again, by the punishments, the manipulation through guilt, the lack of perceivable love and kindness and tolerance, and even by just reading or being read the Bible where it clearly tells us of how incredibly inferior we all are, no matter how we may strive to overcome it.

The child is taught to be proud of being a Christian, and just for being a Christian, by telling them of the inferiority and even 'evil' of everyone else and how automatically good they are just for believing in God and Jesus. That just by believing in them with 'all their heart and soul' and by loving them, they are good people, excellent people, and God loves them and so will find them acceptable rather than throwing them into a fiery pit for all time like He will do to all those evil 'others.' You're special and chosen, just for believing. Nothing more required, really. Doing good works in the world, good actions, are superfluous to the goal of eventual salvation; it's blind belief alone, re-labeled and re-packaged as 'Faith,' that provides the keys to the Gates of Heaven. Faith. Not good action nor loving kindness nor helping others nor 'loving thy brother.' Faith.

Unadulterated Purina Ego Chow. What a crock of shit.

The child sees in the home that conflict resolution is best done with either violent rage or guilt. Or lies. Because after all, the parents see in the Bible that God often gets Wrathful or Jealous and does quite a lot of Smiting, so why can't they? He's 'Our Father Who Art In Heaven' and so it's not much of a leap to suggest that the parents take their examples of proper parenting from Him. Of course they do. The proof is in the pudding.

Plus Santa (Jesus Lite) was a years-long lie we all lived through. Our very first lie. Our introduction to the behavior pattern. A fantastic way to teach kids the acceptability, even the desirability, of not telling the truth. The parent, like Christianity itself, is not afraid to lie to the child as long as it causes the desired behavior or belief, and eventually, the child notices this. It will affect him or her for the rest of their life.

The child learns to not dare to ask questions. The child learns to be obedient rather than an independent thinker, looking outside themselves to authority for direction rather than looking within themselves for inspiration.

The overall logic of the parents' actions in general is often weak to nonexistent, and yet the parents will brook no questioning as to their reasoning, so the child is never taught that logical thought can avail them anything but punishment. So the child, logical by nature, soon learns to discard logic in favor of blind belief. Blind belief in the parents is stressed in the home as blind belief in god is stressed in the bible. The child is taught that blind belief trumps logic and reason and even science, and is the very best, most desirable thing in the world to aspire to.

In the home, it is demonstrated to the child time and again, that someone that loves you can also commit hateful and even harmful actions against you, and this is because they love you. You know... like God does.

Maybe I should call it 'mindfuck morality.'

And most people in the country come from Christian homes. Think about that for a minute.

So I ask you, is there any fucking wonder that this country has left morality and empathy and love in the dust in favor of selfishness and greed? We're practically ALL victims of child abuse! The only reason we don't think we are, is because it was a part of the abuse to convince us that it wasn't abuse at all. In fact, it was a part of the abuse to convince us that this system is the very best moral system that exists or could possibly exist, the only True Morality in the whole world, and a direct Gift from God. Something to be proud of.

We've been sold a turd as a diamond.

***

Mystery of why the country is such a moral sewer: SOLVED.

This Just In: Earth Older than 6000 Years.

2011-06-10T16:27:00.014-04:00

Well let's see what's in the news today...

Ancient Babylonian Tablets Translated

Wow, 90 years to compile an ancient Babylonian dictionary. Fascinating. I once learned the Babylonian numeration system in a college class. Turns out it wasn't even 'base 10.' It was based on the number 60. Hard to manage in your head...

It would seem that here we have a series of clay tablets which tell a complex story of a complex thriving culture that pre-dated the writing of the Old Testament. The tablets are approximately 4,500 years old, and speak of a three-thousand-year-old culture that contributed greatly to the flowering of ancient Greece and Rome, and thereby our western world.

A three-thousand-year-old culture.

Let's do the math, christians. The tablets are how old? Hmm... 4500 years. And how old a culture do they speak of? 3000 years.

Now I'm not sure whether today's christians still do arithmetic. I mean, they've convinced themselves that most of modern science is completely wrong on the say-so of such authorities as a bloated ex-drug-addict radio host so filled with open hatred that it almost literally oozes out his ears, because hey, he's so credible and all as compared to accredited scientists who've studied really really hard for all their lives; and they also believe that the world is only 6000 years old because of some rheumy religious moron's interpretation of the 'begats' in the bible, which is itself an ancient hodgepodge of various mostly anonymously-written texts based on oral traditions that were compiled and edited by corrupt Roman politicians with hugely vested interests in maintaining earthly power.

(Why, that's at least half as reliable as how Harold Camping so accurately determined the exact date and time for armeggedon!)

That's why I figure that it's not out of the realm of possibility that they've abandoned arithmetic as well. If not, they will after they finish reading this post.

Therefore for the convenience of those who have faith instead of intellect, beliefs instead of ideas, I'll provide the solution...

It means that the earth absolutely has to be *at least* 7,500 years old. 4,500 + 3,000 = 7,500. Years. 7,500 years. Old. The earth. You listening?

And further, that culture didn't just spring up instantly when the world was 'created' either. A culture doesn't develop like that, now does it? It takes quite a while for cities to form from a primitive agrarian culture, and even longer for a primitive agrarian culture to develop from even more primitive hunter-gatherers. So let's say at least a few more thousand years. Over ten thousand all total, most likely, at the minimum.

So there it is, christians. Read it and weep. Or deny it to yourselves, as you are wont to do. It's just another pesky fact, after all. Shouldn't present a problem to true believers like yourselves. You've already denied several million; what's one more?

(sigh)

So then, tell me why it must be wrong. Why it *has* to be wrong. Why it is *certainly* wrong.

I mean, it has to be wrong, right? You certainly can't be. Not with god on your side... With god on your side, you can't be wrong. God is infallible, and the bible is his revelation.

I mean, just ask Harold Camping. He's never wrong, either.

Newsflash: The Antichrist, Identified!

2011-05-17T01:54:00.012-04:00

Check out this article:

New Christian Army, born in the USA

So some Arab country like the UAE or whoever can now hire Eric Prince's guaranteed Muslim-free All-Christian army to put down those pesky pro-democracy revolts that keep cropping up! Or whatever repression you have in mind! We're flexible...

Hey, fantastic.

***

But you know what?

Here's something scary:

Prince of Darkness

Prince of Blackness

Prince of Black Ness (Loch/Lake)(identified with monster)

Immortal Prince = Eternal Ruler

Eric, (Name etymology, >Norse: Eternal Ruler) Prince of Black Lake

Eric, Prince of Black Lake

Eric Prince, of Blackwater

***

How brazen. It's like the Purloined Letter. Right there in front of you. How appro-poe.

***

So my christian brethren, there it is. Now is the time to shout it from the rooftops! "The Antichrist has been found! The Adversary has been located! He's already building his army!"

"And shit, he's one of us!!!"

You... You... You Autoretard, You!!!

2011-05-09T17:24:00.006-04:00

Am I wrong to miss being able to just call people 'retards' with no political fallout?

I mean, I don't ever want to disparage the mentally handicapped. Truth is, the last person that I'd ever call or even think of as a 'retard' would be someone that is actually mentally handicapped. I don't even go there in my head, not ever...

I'd also hate myself if I ever hurt the feelings of some poor innocent mentally challenged person by calling some random republican or christian (or perhaps more properly 'christorepublican?) a retard. I'm not 'that guy.' I can't stand people that are that ignorant.

However I can't stop using the word. Can't a word evolve beyond the connotations of its origins? The way that I think of it, it tells the recepient 'you are acting as if you have a physical/developmental cause for your lack of reasoning ability as do some unfortunate individuals in our world, *however* you do not have such a cause. Instead, you chose it. You've chosen to be ignorant. They have no choice; you do.'

It's still insulting to the mentally handicapped, though, isn't it? No getting around it.

Damn. Great and satisfying potential new usage possibilities for a word ruined by the undeniable offensiveness of its origins.

*****

Hmmm...

I'VE GOT IT!

I'll create a new word!

"AUTORETARDED"

***

So then, why oh why are most christians in our society so incredibly autoretarded? Discuss...

(I feel so liberated!)

Fact VS Belief? No Contest, Or So I Believed

2011-04-23T18:19:00.010-04:00

I think I can finally find some peace with the fact that I'm not going to be able to change christian minds by sheer force of will nor strength of invective.

This article helped me to understand what I'm up against:

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science

***

It helps to understand why they can never understand me.

***

Of course I already knew some of this, but it's nice to see it so well laid out. I knew they were not reachable, and that it was the power of an emotional belief over an intellectual fact, but this traces out the rationale of it all better for me than I had for myself.

Why, I might as well try to 'write my name in the snow' in Siberia. From here.

So, enjoy. Talk amongst yourselves.........

Oh, and PS: Mike, this one's for you.

***************
PPS: On a related note, that of the triumph of christian religious ignorance over both intellect and common decency, here's an amazing thing.

Not in a good way.

What kind of world do they envision?

Or is that the problem, that they do not envision any world, since the bible lays it all out for them? After all, if you 'know how it all ends' then you obviously have no power to change it or affect it in any way by your personal actions... it's not up to you to make the world a better place, is it? It's up to god. And he's decided to scrap the whole project.

How utterly love-less they are.

The Religious Mole

2011-04-19T20:29:00.007-04:00

Ya know what I can't stand? What really irks me?

Fake atheists. Religious 'moles.' Christians who, transparently to any real atheist, promote themselves to Christians as atheists who see Christianity as persecuted, persecuted of course by 'other' atheists!

Like S.E. Cupp for instance.

Her book

Her website

What a Godhole!

She gets a lot of face time on various media outlets, too. She's a total lie. A construct. A religious, Christian 'mole.' A self-promoting self-centered plastic woman.

And her angle is that 'she's an atheist' so we can't doubt her on this stuff. It's the very source of her supposed 'credibility' and so far, the only one I haven't seen fall for it, more or less, was Bill Maher. However, if you read the press, most people seem to think he lost the argument! Soo...

How incredibly annoying.

I just needed to vent. Thanks.

Deus Ex-pectorate

2011-04-03T23:18:00.021-04:00

I was just talking to my wife...

I noticed on Sesame Street (of which I watch far too much for the good of my sanity,) that the characters on 'Abby's Flying Fairy School' (another right-winger nightmare, that title) during a discussion of what people say when someone sneezes, stated that the choices were 'bless you' and 'gesundheit.'

Both of which I believe relate to the christian god.

So in fairyland where there are trolls and pixies, they also say 'bless you' when a someone sneezes. Apparently the christian god is also a part of their mythos, along with gerbilcorns and macaronisauruses.

Which got me to thinking... What should atheists say when someone sneezes? We tend to say 'bless you' due to cultural pressure, but that's really going against our beliefs, or rather the lack of them. Plus, it makes me feel slightly 'unclean.' And hypocritical. Very hypocritical. I know that's not a problem for christians, it being their way of life and all, but it bothers me a great deal.

We atheists need a word or a phrase that can be said in response to a sneeze that is as secular, as atheistic, as 'god bless you' is religious and theistic.

We need a sneeze phrase with No God Included.

So I was going to ask you all here to come up with something... maybe make it like a little contest or something like that. "What would be the most appropriate thing for atheists to say when someone sneezes?" Sounds fun, right?

But then I went and googled the question, and the number one response that I found, is I think just too good to beat.

The number one thing, and indeed in my opinion the best possible thing that atheists should say when someone sneezes is:

"Shut your god-damned mouth!"

Perfect.

***

However, since it doesn't fly in polite society, again due to cultural pressure (in other words, two millennia of social brainwashing,) I suppose we still need a 'nice-sounding' atheist sneeze phrase. Any ideas?

A Puzzle For You

2011-03-30T17:14:00.010-04:00

Hello my droogies!

I needed a change of pace from all this talk of religion, so I decided to actually attempt to harness all the considerable brainpower and variety of viewpoints on this blog to do something constructive instead of just the usual mutual mental masturbation.

Let's instead try to find the solution to a really hard puzzle. And if we do solve it, perhaps do some good in the world. Maybe even solve an old murder case.

No, really. Excited yet?

First, you might want the background information:

FBI: Help Us Crack This Code and Solve a Murder Case

That's right, when I set a challenge, I shoot for the fucking moon.

Here's the deal. Nobody can solve this code. FBI cryptology experts have been stymied by it now for twelve years. And yet, when I look at it, I can't look away. So I thought that I'd introduce it here, as a post, so that all of you can discuss it and share the pain. Perhaps we might even solve it; who knows?

Here's the actual code:

(click to enlarge)

Have at it!

I'll start. I notice that it seems that the two letters 'se' have some special significance, perhaps indicating the end of a word.

And afterwards when we've exhausted ourselves in this sisyphean manner, we can go back to religion.

Or maybe not. I haven't decided yet. Consider this my 'intermezzo.'

Narrative World

2011-02-26T14:25:00.023-05:00

Wanting to be right so bad that you come to actually believe that you are right, is not the same thing as actually being right. If you can't tell the difference, you're hopelessly lost, and no one can help you anymore.
-StBtG

Beliefs are thoughts that the ego fell in love with.
-StBtG

***

This is an article about the two worlds we live in on this planet.

What two worlds?

Well, there is the consensual reality that we mostly tend to agree upon, with attendant facts and data that can be used to prove or disprove our theories.

And then there's Narrative World.

Narrative World is a world where the narrative rules over the facts. The love of the narrative is too intense for mere facts to be allowed in to interfere.

In Narrative World God is real. (In fact, only in Narrative World is God real)
God is so real in fact, that to even doubt in Him is considered wrongheaded, a 'sin.' To suggest that the facts do not support His existence, is to be ostracised and scorned. Facts and data have no power in Narrative World, you see. All that matters is the story. Facts are heresy; logic is a crime. Only the story is real.

Religious people are married to their story. They just fucking love it, more than they even love themselves, and that's an awful lot. You cannot even assail it without intense personal scorn being directed back at you. You can't suggest that they might be in error... what's wrong with you? Literally, they equate belief in their narrative with being 'good' as opposed to 'evil' and in their minds it's an eternal war between the two. No gray areas allowed. So if you're a skeptic, in their minds you are personally evil. Case closed. As are their minds.

Some narratives are childishly simple. 'Believe in God or else go to hell, period.' Fear is the ruling factor here. Of course egotism enters into it as well, the 'I'm right and you're wrong and I'm special and you're not and I'm going to heaven and you're going to hell' mentality. Schadenfreude abounds in Narrative World. All the petty emotions thrive there as well. After all, even God is petty and small and oh-so-humanly flawed, admitting personal jealousy and wrath openly, even gambling with people's lives on a whim. Indeed it would seem that 'Tis all a checkerboard of nights and days, where God with men for pieces plays...' And apparently, that's okay. No amount of overt examples of raw Biblical evil are enough for them to see their God in a bad light. He's always good, even when killing little innocent children. Somehow that must be good too. It's a mystery, and it's all God's plan for us and we're just not meant to understand it.

(One wonders how these people hold their shit in, since the functionality of even a simple sphincter muscle must surely be beyond them.)

(Oh right, it comes out their mouths, I forgot...)

However some narratives are ridiculously complicated. (For good reason!)
Thomas Aquinas (God's official liar and archetypal ass-smoke-blower-upper extraordinaire) for instance constructed huge and impressive edifices of logic upon the shifting sands of faith to 'inexorably' lead us to belief in God, and did so in such a seamless manner that later generations of christians are completely incapable of seeing that all those pretty words and logical-sounding sentences aren't ultimately based on hard fact as they sound like they must surely be, but are instead based upon what amounts to nothing more than childish wishful thinking. Their love of the narrative utterly clouds their perceptions of reality, and the more complex, more logical-sounding narrative in this case allows even relatively intelligent people to be caught like flies in amber.

We are human, fallible emotional animals at best. So at what point is the lure of the narrative so great that we are willing to forgive it for not meeting the test of facts and data?

At the point where it provides more meaning to our lives than just living them in consensual reality does. The fact that it's empty meaning based on wishes and dreams matters little if at all. The religious just don't know the difference. They do not want to know. They are (have been kept) far too ignorant of reality to glean any real deeper meanings out of it, and are far too lazy to learn to now, nor do they see any need to, so they crave the simple, children's fairy-tale version. It's like a nice, warm bottle of milk, lulling them to a comfortable sleep. Forever.

And they want everybody to join them in their slumber. In fact, they *insist.*

***

A part of the religious narrative is of course that all other narratives are false, including consensual reality's 'narrative.' This can become quite comical when religion's beloved narrative meets reality in a head-on collision. Heliocentrism comes to mind. Hell, all of the findings of modern science come to mind, for that matter. Religion has been dragged into the modern world kicking and screaming all the way, like the retarded child it is. It never agreed with science or even basic observations of the world, it always had it's own ass-backward ideas instead, and it has always, always been wrong. Pathetically wrong. And it's still trying with no better results. This is because, by nature, religion is viciously stupid. It ignores reality in favor of fantasy; what better definition of 'stupid' does one need? Today's religious people even go so far as to vilify learning and knowledge itself, to scorn them as effete and effeminate somehow. The 'real Christian man's' way is apparently to kill and fuck (and fuck over) one's way through life whilst blaming one's 'sinful nature' for one's flaws and still maintaining the belief that somehow they're still 'going to heaven' because after all, they do still believe in God and they do ask to be forgiven their many sins, which are then magically erased from their souls and from their consciences. Convenient. After a while, they even forget to ask. They assume forgiveness for whatever they might do, since hey, they're *christian* and that's how it works, that's what Jesus does. It's magic, no doubt. Magic, plus a heavily flawed system of pseudomorality that is ultimately coercion-based with heavy appeal to egotism, and therefore can produce no good thing in the world without an evil taint to it.

When one 'absolutely knows' that one is 'good' with no doubt left in one's mind, it frees one up to do considerable evil in the world. This is the boon of religion. Sure you're an evil fuck but you believe that you poop Ben and Jerry's, and that's all that matters. You get to sleep at night, guilt-free, no matter what heinousness you've comitted or contemplate comitting. You'll even eventually get to the point where you're *proud* of it.

That's because religion is Purina Ego Chow.

I am always amused at the christians who vehemently deny (irrationally) that Hitler was a christian. I mean, he certainly acted like one. He definitely *believed* in his own righteousness completely, and manipulated his people through their christian faith. He thought he was an instrument of God in fact. Pretty typical, actually. He just got more power than most do; it's not that many other christians alive today wouldn't do the same thing if they had the opportunity. So why then, can he not be a 'real christian?' Because nobody that evil could be? That's what they'd like to believe, but I know differently because I do not live in Narrative World. It's easier to be evil if you're also religious. Look around.

***

You see my droogies, being right, as in being correct more often than one is not correct, as it turns out requires living in consensual reality enough to observe it dispassionately and draw conclusions from it. However, merely believing that one is right (and good, and just, and holy, and so on...) is more than good enough for those who are lost in the psychosis of their religion. Sure, they're wrong about just about everything, but they're ignorant of that fact too, so it's okay. Ignorance is indeed bliss to them, and a nightmare to everyone else. Because, they vote like they see the world. Ass-backwards.

I find myself wishing that the religious folk come to an agreement to ignore *all* science. Got diabetes? Pray it away! Go ahead... surely you have enough *faith* for that to work. No? Aww, too bad, so sad.

Hey, I can dream... And at least, I don't mix up my dreams with reality. That would be religiously stupid of me.

We Suck

2011-01-19T03:19:00.005-05:00

So I've finally figured it out.

We suck.

No seriously, look at
this article.

See? We suck. Sad.

We are, as a country, a self-centered narcisistic lot with delusions of grandeur. We seem to have come to the unspoken concensus that believing we are NUMBER ONE, is somehow indistinguishable from actually being number one. We've grown sloppy and bloated, and we just don't give a shit anymore.

And I'll sing my sad, sorry song yet one more time here, and tell you that yes, absolutely, I blame the fucking religion. The religion, coupled of course with a ravenous pack of amoral Republican wolves who play the stupid sad sorry lot of religious fools like an out-of-tune saxaphone. This duality, the fools (sheep) and the wolves, is why we are in such a sad state of denial as a country. Heck, we've practically made blind patriotism a religion. Or perhaps more correctly an addendum to the already-existing religion.

We are the Lotos Eaters. We are asleep.

WAKE THE FUCK UP.

There. I've said it.

***************************
For those who cannot use the link provided, here is the article in full from Explore, the Journal of Science and Healing (http://www.explorejournal.com/home) minus references:

Volume 7, Issue 1, Pages 8-12 (January 2011)

5 of 13

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Trends That Will Affect Your Future … A Portrait of American Societal Health

Stephan A. Schwartz

The SchwartzReport tracks emerging trends that will affect the world, particularly the United States. For EXPLORE, it focuses on matters of health in the broadest sense of that term, including medical issues, changes in the biosphere, technology, and policy considerations, all of which will shape our culture and our lives.

Article Outline
• Abstract

• Tax Cuts

• Povertry Rate

• Moving In

• Prison Population

• Physical Health

• Hunger

• Justice

• References

• Biography

• Copyright

When Benjamin Franklin—the only founder who drafted and signed all three of the documents that brought the United States to life, the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris (September 3, 1783), and the Constitution—dreamed of the America he would like to see develop, the imagery that came to his mind was of a middle-class, largely urban culture made up of immigrants who were technologically sophisticated, family oriented, joyful, and upwardly mobile. And when he thought about how they might happen to become that society, it wasn't just the people he thought about. He also understood the importance of infrastructure as a factor in creating a middle class. He felt so strongly about this that he used his will to continue to support his plan for America beyond his death. He left specific bequests for public works and created the microlending model that has proven such a powerful transformative force, leaving what today would be several hundred thousand dollars1 each to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia. The infrastructure money was to be used specifically to build such an infrastructure and nurture such a middle class. He explained his intent was to create that “Which may be judged of most general utility to the Inhabitants, such as Fortifications, Bridges, Aqueducts, Public Buildings, Baths, Pavements or whatever may make living in the Town more convenient to its People and render it more agreeable to Strangers, resorting thither for Health or a temporary residence.”2

This is classic Franklin. He defines a goal, and a process for achieving it, but leaves any personal cherished outcomes as to how this should happen unstated. Franklin put his money on creating civic amenities—the kinds of things now seen as the prime targets for budget reductions—because he knew they are essential for a healthy city. His genius allowed him to conceive of the impact over time that parks, sanitation, and hospitals would have on the lives of all the city's people. He knew that each interaction with clean water, or decent medical care in an emergency, or a place to go for a picnic improves the quality of life and lifts morale. People think in larger terms, attempt more. Are more optimistic. The interaction each individual in the city has with these amenities might seem small and not terribly important, but in aggregate, over time, they are a powerful force in shaping a city's character through their impact on the lives of citizens and visitors alike.

How different that view is from the policies that seem to govern so many municipalities, states, and even the federal government today. Ultraconservative Grover Norquist voices this worldview: “I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”3 What he does not say, and what is not acknowledged, is that such a vision of governance can only be attempted through the radical reduction of the social safety net Franklin recognized as so important, because philosophically this worldview sees no role for government in doing such things.

So do these anti-Franklinian ideas really work?

A large percentage of politicians apparently think so and, through their voting, have attempted to create this Ayn Rand world, with the Bush tax reduction for the rich as one of its crown jewels. Just about this time last year, I wrote an essay “The Vanishing Middle Class,” which dealt with what was happening in 2009 as a result of pursuing those kinds of policies.4 I talked about Franklin's view and the truth of what was happening, noting:

University of California, Berkeley, economist Emanuel Saez had reported that, in 2007, the disparity between the richest and the poorest reached a level never before seen, going all the way back to 1917 when modern tax data began to be collected. According to Saez's study, the top 10% of earners in America received 49.7% of all the income earned in the United States. To give this context as recently as the 1970s, the top 10% earned around 33% of all the income earned in the United States—a 17% shift. This contrast becomes even starker when only the super rich are considered. According to Saez, ‘The top 0.01 percent of earners in the US are now taking home six percent of all the income, higher than the 1920s peak of five percent, and a whopping six-fold increase since the start of the Reagan administration, when the top 0.01 percent earned one percent of all the income.'4

Or, put another way, as of 2007 the top upper-class 1% of households owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers).

A year later, these trends have continued, and every one of my markers has become more distorted in favor of the top at a cost to the middle class and the poor. There are a hundred ways to show this breakdown. Here are seven, by which I hope you will see that I am not selectively picking my data to make a polemic case, but describing the actuality of American society just when it transits the midterm elections. Perhaps it will provide some guidance for the choices we now must make.

Tax Cuts
Just as they did in 2000, the Republicans are running, as I write this, on an economic platform centered on tax cuts, and proposing that the Bush cuts be made permanent for the richest Americans. The 2008 income tax data are now in, so we can assess what their economic theory is worth, and how it fulfilled its promise that tax cuts would produce widespread prosperity, by looking at all the years of the George W. Bush presidency. This is what David Cay Johnston, on the faculty of Syracuse University College of Law and Whitman School of Management, and Pulitzer Prize–winning tax analyst, concluded, based on the IRS data:

Total income was $2.74 trillion less during the eight Bush years than if incomes had stayed at 2000 levels (all figures are in 2008 dollars). In only two years was total income up, but even when those years are combined they exceed the declines in only one of the other six years.

Even if we limit the analysis by starting in 2003, when the dividend and capital gains tax cuts began, through the peak year of 2007, the result is still less income than at the 2000 level. Total income was down $951 billion during those four years.

Average incomes fell. Average taxpayer income was down $3,512, or 5.7 percent, in 2008 compared with 2000, President Bush's own benchmark year for his promises of prosperity through tax cuts. Had incomes stayed at 2000 levels, the average taxpayer would have earned almost $21,000 more over those eight years. That's almost $50 per week. Just measuring the second through seventh years we find that total income was still nearly $2 trillion lower than if 2000 level income continued.5

Povertry Rate
That same US Census data also described what has happened to the nation's standard of living, comparing just the latest time period—2008 data with that of 2009. Here are some of the highlights:

Some 43.6 million people were living in poverty last year—the highest number since 1959, five years before President Lyndon Johnson declared his War on Poverty. The poverty rate was 14.3 percent, up from 13.2 percent in 2008 and the highest level since 1994. Hispanic households took the hardest hit: Their poverty rate rose 2.1 percent from 2008's level, compared with a 1.1 percent jump in the rate for blacks and whites. (The US government considers an annual income of $21,756 to be the poverty line for a family of four.)

A record number of Americans, 50.7 million, were not covered by health-care insurance in 2009. At the same time the survey was being taken, Congress passed President Obama's contentious health-care reform law.6

Moving In
From the 50s until about five years ago, one of the strongest American familial trends was for children to grow up and move away. It was a central part of the nuclear family ethos. That is now reversing thanks to the grinding down of the middle class through unemployment, job loss, and reduction in income even when a person is employed.

From 2005 to 2009, family households added about 3.8 million extended family members, from adult siblings and in-laws to cousins and nephews. Extended family members now make up 8.2% of family households, up from 6.9% in 2005, according to Census data released in September 2010.

“Clearly, a big part of that is the economic recession and housing costs,” says Stephanie Coontz, cochair of the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonprofit research association. “We're seeing a shift away from the 1950s and 1960s mentality against extended families, when ‘modern’ women did not take in aging parents for fear of hurting their marriage.”7

And this shift involves far more than blood relations. “For the first time in more than a century, more than half of people aged 25 to 34 have never been married. The number of people in non-family households—those whose members are not related—grew 4.4% from 2005 to 2009, faster than the 3.4% growth for family households.”7

Prison Population
According to the Pew Research Center's Economic Mobility Project, the US prison population has more than quadrupled since 1980, from 500,000 to 2.3 million.8 The American Gulag is now larger than the 35 largest European countries combined. The incarceration rate in the United States—753 inmates per 100,000—is five times that of the United Kingdom—itself an anomaly at 151 prisoners per 100,000. France, which is next, stands at 96, with Germany at 88. This means more than one in 100 Americans is in prison, and one in every 28 children in the United States has a parent behind bars—up from one in 125 just 25 years ago.7

It probably won't surprise you to learn that a family with a parent in prison on average earns 22% less the year after the incarceration than it did the year before. After all, who wants to hire an ex-con in a tight labor market? And children with parents in prison are significantly likelier to be expelled from school than others; 23% of students with jailed parents are expelled, compared with 4% for the general population.

“Both education and parental income are strong indicators of children's future economic mobility,” the survey notes. “With millions of prison and jail inmates a year returning to their communities, it is important to identify policies that address the impact of incarceration on the economic mobility of former inmates and their children.”7

In all, 2.7 million US children have parents behind bars, and “two-thirds of these children's parents were incarcerated for non-violent offenses,” the study notes.7

And when you break the statistics down by race, it just gets nastier. There are large disparities. Among black children, fully one in nine, or 11.4%, have a parent in jail. For Hispanics, the number is one in 28, and for white children it's one in 57.

I hope marijuana law reform passed in California, because this alone could help reverse these trends, simply by reducing the 858,000 arrests in the United States in 2010 for marijuana. That's marginally down from the 2007 peak of 872,000. It is notable that more than 50% of these arrests are nonviolent violations involving marijuana.9

The cost to states of this human warehousing now exceeds $50 billion per year, or one in every 15 state dollars expended.7 What is worse is that a growing number of small towns and cities now look to the gulag for their economic well-being. Like something from an Orwell novel, it is a complete cycle: one group of Americans lives on the incarceration of another group of Americans. And although it would appear illogical, it goes on even though it is well-known that the children of incarcerated parents face a much harder struggle in life. The gulag that incarcerates their parents, in the process, also often condemns the next generation to a life in jail.

Why would any society do this? Well, from the point of view of those who live on keeping them, and who mostly live in low-crime areas, isn't this exactly what is wanted? Thus, we have created a lobby whose rice bowl is dependent on the gulag. It is a truly Dickensian reality that few talk about for fear of being labeled “soft on crime.” It is a form of willful ignorance on the part of politicians and citizens alike.

Physical Health
In 1950, before the inception of the present illness profit industry, the United States, compared with the world's other leading industrial nations, was fifth with respect to female life expectancy at birth, surpassed only by Sweden, Norway, Australia, and the Netherlands.10 In 2010, the United States position concerning female life expectancy had fallen to 46th.11 And when both men and women were combined, it went to 49th.12, 13 Americans live 5.7 fewer years of “perfect health”—a measure adjusted for time spent ill—than, for instance, the Japanese.14

Is this the result of lack of spending on the part of the United States? Most emphatically it is not.

Health policy expert Uwe E. Reinhardt, the James Madison Professor of Political Economy at Princeton University, headed a team that specifically considered this. They found, “per capita health spending in the United States increased at nearly twice the rate in other wealthy nations between 1970 and 2002.”15 As a result, the United States now spends well over twice the median expenditure of industrialized nations on healthcare, and far more than any other country as a percentage of its gross domestic product.15

Peter A. Muennig, assistant professor of health policy and management at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, in New York City, and Sherry A. Glied, professor of health policy and management at the Mailman School of Public Health and currently on leave as assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services, analyzed Reinhardt's and many other studies in a groundbreaking exegetic survey of healthcare.16 They concluded:

We found that none of the prevailing excuses for the poor performance of the US health care system are likely to be valid. On the spending side, we found that the unusually high medical spending is associated with worsening, rather than improving, 15-year survival in two groups for whom medical care is probably important.

We speculate that the nature of our health care system specifically, its reliance on unregulated fee-for-service and specialty care may explain both the increased spending and the relative deterioration in survival that we observed. If so, meaningful reform may not only save money over the long term, it may also save lives.16

Hunger
It doesn't get much more basic that not having enough to eat. It is hard to think of America as a place where large numbers of people are facing hunger as a daily reality for themselves and, even worse, for their children. That happens in Africa, or maybe Asia, but surely not here. You think not? Millions of our fellow citizens routinely are forced to make life decisions based on whether they or their children will eat or go without to pay for housing or medical bills. And even the slender pipeline of assistance that does exist is problematic; 70% of emergency food centers face threats to their survival.

According to a study from the nation's largest food bank operator, the number of Americans in need of food aid has jumped 46% in three years, including a 50% jump in the number of children needing food assistance and a 64% increase in hunger in senior citizens' homes.

According to the largest study of domestic hunger ever done, Hunger in America 2010, a study based on more than 61,000 interviews with clients and surveys of 37,000 feeding agencies, “hunger is increasing at an alarming rate in the United States”17:

1.Feeding America is annually providing food to 37 million Americans, including 14 million children. This is an increase of 46% over 2006, when we were feeding 25 million Americans, including nine million children, each year.

2.That means one in eight Americans now rely on Feeding America for food and groceries.

3.Feeding America's nationwide network of food banks is feeding one million more Americans each week than we did in 2006.

4.Thirty-six percent of the households we serve have at least one person working.

5.More than one third of client households report having to choose between food and other basic necessities, such as rent, utilities, and medical care.

6.The number of children the Feeding America network serves has increased by 50% since 2006.17

“Clearly, the economic recession, resulting in dramatically increasing unemployment nationwide, has driven unprecedented, sharp increases in the need for emergency food assistance and enrollment in federal nutrition programs,” said Vicki Escarra, president and CEO of Feeding America, which operates some 200 food banks across the country.

“It is morally reprehensible that we live in the wealthiest nation in the world where one in six people are struggling to make choices between food and other basic necessities,” Escarra said in a statement.

She added that “these are choices that no one should have to make, but particularly households with children. Insufficient nutrition has adverse effects on the physical, behavioral and mental health, and academic performance of children.”18

Feeding America's report is far from alone in reporting this food catastrophe.

“The Food Research and Action Center found that nearly one in five in the US—18.5 percent — report having gone hungry in the past year, up from 16.3 percent at the start of 2008. Households with children were even likelier to experience hunger, with nearly a quarter reporting hunger in the past year.

“Perhaps worst of all, the Feeding America study finds that 70 percent of emergency food centers are reporting “one or more problems that threaten their ability to continue operating.”18

Justice
I have placed this last because I hope you will agree with me that where there is not justice, there is not civil society. It has always been my safe port that no matter what else happened in America, I always saw the justice system as fair. Perhaps you feel the same way, and will be as appalled as I was when I read the World of Justice Project (WJP) report, Rule of Law Index 2010.19

To understand why I think this report is such a big deal, perhaps it will help to say who funded it: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Neukom Family Foundation, the GE Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and LexisNexis. I list them to make the point that this is the pinnacle of nonpartisan philanthropy, not some political think tank with an agenda. We can trust the data.

The project, involving 900 researchers from 35 countries, who have polled 35,000 individuals, in addition to searching each nation's records, presents itself in this very Franklinian way:

“Establishing the rule of law is fundamental to achieving communities of opportunity and equity—communities that offer sustainable economic development, accountable government, and respect for fundamental rights… . The rule of law is the cornerstone to improving public health, safeguarding participation, ensuring security, and fighting poverty.”

When the WJP talks about the rule of law, they spell out very carefully what they mean. They refer to “a rules-based system in which the following four universal principles are upheld:

•the government and its officials and agents are accountable under the law;

•the laws are clear, publicized, stable, and fair, and protect fundamental rights, including the security of persons and property;

•the process by which the laws are enacted, administered, and enforced is accessible, fair, and efficient;

•access to justice is provided by competent, independent, and ethical adjudicators, attorneys or representatives, and judicial officers who are of sufficient number, have adequate resources, and reflect the makeup of the communities they serve.

With this as the basis for its analysis, the Rule of Law Index 2010 then lists what it calls the 10 “factors,” which break down further into 49 “subfactors.” These descriptors are the basis upon which the Rule of Law Index 2010 evaluates a nation's justice under the rule of law. The outcome of this exercise is a quite extraordinary assessment “of the extent to which countries adhere to the rule of law—not in theory but in practice [emphasis added].”19 Here are the 10 factors; they all sound very “American”:

•factor one: limited government powers

•factor two: absence of corruption

•factor three: clear, publicized, and stable laws

•factor four: order and security

•factor five: fundamental rights

•factor six: open government

•factor seven: regulatory enforcement

•factor eight: access to civil justice

•factor nine: effective criminal justice

•factor 10: informal justice19

As I started reading the report, I assumed that whatever other self-inflicted wounds we have brought to ourselves as a nation, our justice system was still solid, and that the United States would rank at the top of the world's list. Surprise. The WJP groups countries by regions as well as such considerations as income level, then evaluates them, dropping factor 10—“informal justice”—because it is does not involve law. Not surprisingly, the United States is grouped with North America and Western Europe, and there are seven nations in our bloc: Austria, Canada, France, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and USA (Table 1). These are the nations where the survey was carried out for the 2010 report, with other countries to follow in later reports.

Table 1. Nine-Factors Ranking Analysisa

Nations Factor One Factor Two Factor Three Factor Four Factor Five Factor Six Factor Seven Factor Eight Factor Nine
Austria 3 3 4 1 1 6 3 3 1
Canada 4 4 3 3 4 4 4 5 6
France 6 5 5 4 6 5 6 6 4
Netherlands 2 2 2 5 3 2 2 2 3
Spain 5 6 7 7 5 7 7 4 7
Sweden 1 1 1 2 2 1 1 1 2
USA 7 7 6 6 7 3 5 7 5

a
Countries are ranked from one to seven.

For the United States, it is a death's head portrait of the reality that lies beneath the smug rhetoric we use to hector others about justice and the rule of law. I am embarrassed. We all should be. This has haunted me since I read the report. If America is not a leader in justice, what are we? I could pick a dozen other trends, from closing libraries, to depaving streets, to decline in educational performance, but do we need to go further? If America were a patient, what would you tell him about his lifestyle and habits? What would you see as his prognosis?

On the basis of data, it is impossible to say America's societal health is good. On the basis of that same data, we can also conclude policies based on cutting taxes, without recognizing that it is in the societal interest to assure a decent quality of life for all, are destructive. We know enough to see that democracy cannot function properly without a healthy and vibrant middle class, and to prove to ourselves that we are killing ours. We need to change course—not on the basis of political ideology—but on facts. Facts about what does and does not work.

It is the middle class that holds the key, just as Franklin saw all those years ago. The middle class has enough money to dream, but rarely enough to do it alone. Success requires working together, finding compromises. And that's what most of us say we want. According to research by Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University, 92% of Americans would choose to live in a society with far less income disparity than the United States, choosing Sweden's model over that of the United States.20 The America Benjamin Franklin imagined while sitting beneath his mulberry tree in the courtyard of his house in Philadelphia over two centuries ago.

References

Okay, so maybe Obama doesn't suck...

2010-12-22T19:51:00.004-05:00

I may have to re-examine the suckiness of our president. Apparently he was saving all the good stuff up for two years till after he lost the midterm elections, in the Lame Duck session. Who knew? What a chess move!

Actually, I think when he read that he sucked, he re-evaluated himself as a person and made some course corrections. And I had no idea that he even followed this blog. Good thing.

Now DADT falls, and we have a START treaty with Russia? Okay.......

Wow.

Republicans who made fun of me saying that he sucked, eat my shorts, I guess is all I have to say. I'm glad that I was wrong. I wish I was wrong like this all the time. And besides, none of your politicians are worth a plug nickel in the first place, not a one of them. All narcissistic assholes, the lot. Why, even Obama when he sucked, didn't suck nearly half as much as even the least sucky of what the right wing has to offer.

So now he'll likely be re-elected, methinks. Amazing.

I'm happily stunned here.

OBAMA SUCKS!

2010-12-08T01:39:00.008-05:00

Well, as it turns out, he does. The results are in. There can no longer be any doubt.

So, what is he? What's his scam? Just the old 'quest for power and glory?' Wouldn't that motivation necessitate him actually PERFORMING well?

I can't believe that he's so unlike his campaign platform. His first DCC convention speech was amazing, his oratory inspiring and moving throughout the rest of his campaign...

What the hell is he? SATAN?

A mole? A closeted republican? An 'agent of the New World Order?' An 'Illuminatus?' Just one of the muppet pastors, er, puppet masters?

Another black lap dog, like Michael Steele?

Or a really incredibly well-spoken moron? Like, the bestest, most well-spoken moron that ever lived on the planet? The ultimate drooling idiot-savant of politics, if you will?

Or hey, conversely, is he just SO much smarter than all of us poor knuckle-dragging huddled masses types that somehow he's merely seeing the larger picture here whereby he clearly perceives a path to actually accomplish the optimum amount of good in the world by playing it as if he were a fucking turncoat ball-less uncle Tom village idiot now? Play the game that way (and play it so very well) and thus somehow against all 'common sense' actually manage to WIN in the end, perhaps years from now, through his a almost-scary Capablanca-like understanding of the game of politics?

Sure, that must be it... Sure it is. His intellect is too godlike for the likes of us poor cretins. I'm just not smart enough to grasp his breadth of vision. His perception is so much more holistic and global than anyone else's is... why, he's some kind of supergenius polymath president, that's what he is. Maybe even from Krypton.

Yeah, right. Sure, that has to be it. That's how I'll sleep tonight.

***

So obviously, color me disillusioned here.

And hey, by the way, you christian republicans voodoo-worshipper mumbo-jumbo types, your guys are still no better, and considerably more overtly EVIL. They don't even try to hide it anymore. They're like Palpatine in that third movie. They've really let themselves go, and they just don't give a fuck anymore, because they know they hold they winning cards. Which is all they care about in this sad world.

Of course, upon reflection, perhaps overt evil such as they exemplify is actually the lesser of the two kinds, in that the evil which is not overt and obvious but instead is subtle and inspiring, that kind of evil more easily gets in the door to REAL POWER, where it can thenceforward really fuck things up in a much more global way.

***

Right now, the nightly news is like a ridiculous tragi-comedy. If Obama is as fake as he seems now, then who to ever, ever trust again?

What a life, huh? I guess I'm still learning just how very unbelievably extremely DEEP the river of eternal bullshit runs in this reality. Hell, we eat, drink, sleep and breathe it in every second of our lives, few ever ever realizing how much more complex reality is than they imagine it to be. And perhaps it is better to sleep thus, than to awaken to truth such as this.

I'm sure that the lowly rat-tail maggot never realizes that it's natural habitat is liquid raw sewage, either. Why, if one of them ever did, it'd go insane, wouldn't it?

Welcome to my reality. Hi, howarya?

***

On a more positive note, my personal life is incredibly SWEET right now, in the new house with baby and wifey, got it just where we want it and we're really happy with it, and of course the previously mentioned terrarium is absolutely amazing, looks better than most zoo exhibits I've seen showcasing similar biota, and it is a living, respiring, (and unfortunately excreting) work of art. One that consumes like, sixty individual cricket lives every day. As it turns out, I'm like, the Klaus Barbie of the Gryllidae. All of them sitting there in their little cricket cage, not unlike a shower stall.... awaiting their fate, all unbeknownst.........

God, I'm sick.

But then again, it's a sick world, as it turns out.

River Tank Aquarium

2010-11-22T14:00:00.015-05:00

(Click on pics for larger versions)

As I've mentioned, I've been constructing a terrarium. A really huge one. An aquatic vivarium, to be precise. It's a 95 gallon bow-front triangular tank, in which I've built up the back with hidden risers and then rocks on top with a land area consisting of gravel and a sunken rectangular planter in the back. I've had to install a triangular rigid black wire screen in the back for a basking heat light and an exhaust fan to provide the reptiles with a hot basking area in the rear with lower humidity than the rest of the tank. There is a submersible heater and powerhead filter (overkill!) and I've planted live mosses, sphagnum and frog moss and such, and pothos, and wandering fig, and a phalenopsis orchid, and even a small patch of venus fly trap. I have two lizards; a bahama anole (that exact type of little brown lizard that is scampering around absolutely *everywhere* in Florida) and a long-tailed grass lizard, and a nice assortment of tropical fish. Oh, and one aquatic african frog, too. And a White's tree frog.
The water part, in front, is about ten inches deep, and is tinted dark (blackwater) by the peat and tannin in the driftwood. It's natural, and doesn't hurt the fish. Right now, the fish are a few basic ones, because they have a good chance of not living through the first month due to the progress of the nitrification cycle. Eventually, I'll have some really great, unusual tropical fish in there too. A mudskipper for instance, is a necessity.

So here's a few pics for you to get a sense of the thing. This tank is HUGE. That bowed glass front measures 48 inches from side to side and two feet in height, and if I try to reach the back corner reaching in from the front, I can't even do it. It's over a yard away.

The plants are really taking off, of course, in such a greenhouse environment, so it's only going to get greener. Also, those plants underwater are live plantings as well.

Eventually, perhaps another lizard, maybe a gecko. And a red-eyed treefrog. Yeah. And a school of cardinal tetras.

The Divine Brat

2010-10-31T17:59:00.007-04:00

"There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness."
-The Dalai Lama

“We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That is all.”
-Kalu Rinpoche

"Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me...)
-God (aka: Yahweh)

***

Since I don't really believe in the supernatural, I see a 'spiritual' person as a person that is very non-egotistical, is very empathetic and loving, is almost impossible to anger, is completely selfless, and lives in the moment rather than in the past or the future, thereby being ready to accept whatever life has to offer and to enjoy it all to its fullest, even the sad parts. A person who has genuinely attained an inner serenity.

Such a person almost invariably causes joy in those around them.

Given that definition, you can see why I so strongly differentiate 'spiritual' from 'religious.'

My readers may note that my idea of what constitutes a spiritual person is a very hard thing to attain, but is attainable, since such people have existed and do exist. Some Buddhist monks get there. Also some Christians and indeed some few people of every disparate faith, or even of no faith or belief at all, do seem to occassionally make it to that point.

Basically, the introspective ones get there, sometimes.

One may also note that my definition of a spiritual man is the very diametric opposite of the Old Testament God Yahweh. He's a self-centered egomaniacal small-minded wrathful self-righteous vindictive jealous asshole.

And that's supposed to be great somehow? Something to love? Something to emulate?

More like a cautionary tale. “Now Johnnie, don’t kill ants with that magnifying glass! You wouldn’t want to end up like GOD, now would you?”

(Little Johnnie pisses pants and promises to be a good boy, mommy)

I think it is a point worthy of pondering that a mere man, as noted above, can, albeit rarely, get to a much more spiritually evolved point than can the Christian God and most of His followers put together. Don’t you?

Of course, this is because Christianity is not a spiritual path. It is more like an immature misbegotten attempt at one at best. Something a child would think up in response to being told about the nebulous concept of spirituality from an adult… “I am too spiritual! I am! I am!”

(In a Trelayne voice, of course)

(Time to come in now, Yahweh…)

***

(The reader should also note that I am not even close to my own definition of what constitutes a spiritual man, nor do I claim to be)

***

For my readers like Botts (where is he, anyhow?) and all other more spiritual, less dogmatic (nicer/saner) Christians, I would add that most (but not all) of the portrayals of Jesus Christ in the Bible coincide with my definition of a spiritual person.

So there's that.

I certainly don't see that as somehow special to Him, though. As noted above, a mere human can most certainly attain it, too. It’s not easy, I’m told, but it’s definitely possible.

But not Yahweh. Not the Old Testament God of the Hebrews. No way. Lost cause, that one. He's way too immature. Way too wild. Still at the “Id” phase. He needs a SPANKING more than any kid I ever knew, and I’m even against corporal punishment. What a little snot He turned out to be!

I guess it’s only natural that an all-powerful orphan with no one ever around to discipline Him ever would turn out to be the Ultimate Immoral Spoiled Brat with no respect nor love for anyone but Himself.

Why, He even went and had a Son out of wedlock like that and all. So on top of everything else he’s kinda ‘white-trashy’ too.

And poor Joseph. Being cuckolded by your own deity has to suck. Who do you beat up?

***

Too bad He didn’t have a mommy and a daddy to raise Him up right. Take Him down a notch when He got too full of Himself.

Maybe if He had parents, decent loving parents, He’d be a little more like "Our Lord" and a little less like “Our Lord of the Flies..."

Sad, really. He had such potential. What a waste.

What's wrong with this picture?

2010-10-24T22:21:00.019-04:00

Looks like a nice pastoral scene, a boy on a farm, all dressed up in his Sunday best. Or is it?

Look closer... Click on the images for more detail.

Have you figured it out yet??? Need more time? I'll wait....

......

.....

....

...

..

.

Time's up!

Okay, ready?

He's FUCKING DEAD!

(no, really, he is)

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

......

Isn't it interesting how mores and societal norms evolve over time? In the day this picture was taken, people were so much more inured to death than we are today. To them, death was everywhere, all the time. That's why you had a bunch of children.

Just imagine...................................................................

'So yer tellin' me little Billy dropped from the typhoid this morning? God's will be done, Amen. Let's just prop him up right quick before he starts to turn, and take one last portrait so we can remember what the little feller looked like in the confused haze of our memories of our other six boys and four girls. Mildred, go get the twine from the kitchen cupboard...'

Someone had to pose this boy's corpse and tie it into place. The parents actually wanted a picture of him taken like this after his passing, and so posed him strung up like a puppet.

Damn.

I guess you could say, they posed him with rigor.

(Late Victorian tintype, circa 1875-1900, post-mortem photograph)

(Also just about the creepiest photo I've ever laid eyes on!)

Hey, just wanted to share... now you can go back to your regularly scheduled discussion of far more weighty matters, such as whether even primordial singularities can ever acheive the density of the religious mind. Or how many famous philosophers can dance in the head of a single Christian apologist.

PS: And apparently it can be yours for the low low price of $375.00 (or best offer) right now at EBay. (Which of course was where my wife ran across it, made a small 'meeping' noise in her throat, and now can not even look at it for one second, she's so creeped out.)

Sleep well, my droogies. Try not to think of him.

And the Stupid just goes on and on...

2010-09-28T14:24:00.014-04:00

The religious man has no trouble believing the ridiculous and only wonders why he's so much better at it than everybody else is. This he takes as a sign from God.
-Saint Brian the Godless

********

What is it with Christianity's seeming determination to dumb down the world... Now apparently 'Darwinism' is a 'devilish Gnostic plot.' Who knew?

What the heck is WRONG with these messianic mouthbreathers? I seriously doubt that the glorification of utter stupidity would have been something that pleased Jesus. But hey, who knows...

Here, read it and weep... weep if you give a damn about human intelligence and progress. Weep if you care at all about logic and reason. Weep if you love science. Because I am weeping. The highly contagious mental disease of Christianity is neutering our minds one by one with it's creeping pernicious ignorance, and we sit by and let it happen. If it has its way, we'll be a country of drooling idiots in a half-century, sitting around in our own feces singing hosannas.

(If I sound bitter, I am)

The article:

********

Darwinism: devilish Gnostic myth dressed up as science

By Linda Kimball
September 24, 2010

(Renewamerica.com)

Today all people whose faith in God the Father is genuine face a seemingly insurmountable problem with what seems like an overwhelming weight of evidence that evolutionism is true and the Genesis account of creation is false. Mockers and scoffers abound, scornfully accusing the faithful of believing in "an invisible being in the sky and that a dead guy from 2000 years ago is coming back soon...instead of believing in reality," as one scofflaw said recently.

However, the real issue here is not "superstitious, backward Christianity" vs. "enlightened reason and science," but about one creation account (Genesis) vs. another creation account (Darwinian evolution). The truth of this claim can be seen in the following quotes:

"...one belief that all true original Darwinians held in common, and that was their rejection of creationism, their rejection of special creation. This was the flag around which they assembled and under which they marched.... The conviction that the diversity of the natural world was the result of natural processes and not the work of God was the idea that brought all the so-called Darwinians together in spite of their disagreements on other of Darwin's theories. (One Long Argument,1991, p. 99, Ernst Mayr (1904–2005), Professor of Zoology at Harvard University)

"We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." ("Billions and Billions of Demons," Richard Lewontin (b. 1929), PhD Zoology, Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at Harvard University)

In other words, terrible-willed evolutionists have a Cosmic Authority problem, and this is why they rally around Darwinism and force its absurd, counterintuitive teachings upon gullible, misinformed Americans while simultaneously ridiculing and otherwise psychologically terrorizing creationists, among whose numbers are many of the defenders of America's founding traditions.

Commenting on the Cosmic Authority problem of many atheists, Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy and law at New York University, confesses:

"I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind." (The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me To Faith, Peter Hitchens, pp. 149-150)

Just what is Darwinism anyway?

At bottom, Darwinism is a Gnostic myth, notes Dr. Wolfgang Smith, physicist and mathematics professor at Oregon State University:

"...As a scientific theory, Darwinism would have been jettisoned long ago. The point, however, is that the doctrine of evolution has swept the world, not on the strength of its scientific merits, but precisely in its capacity as a Gnostic myth. It affirms, in effect, that living things created themselves, which is in essence a metaphysical claim....Thus...evolutionism is a metaphysical doctrine decked out in scientific garb....it is a scientistic myth. And the myth is Gnostic, because it implicitly denies the transcendent origin of being; for indeed, only after the living creature has been speculatively reduced to an aggregate of particles does Darwinist transformism become conceivable. Darwinism, therefore, continues the ancient Gnostic practice of deprecating 'God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth.' It perpetuates...the venerable Gnostic tradition of 'Jehovah bashing.'" (From Old Gnosticism to New Age I, Alan Morrison, SCP Journal Vol. 28:4-29:1, 2005, pp. 30-31)

Gnostics

Historically, Gnostics have always been notorious God-haters to the extent of consigning Him to hell. The early Church Fathers called them the "lawless ones," as they were idolizers of their own minds, rebels against all authority, immoralists, hedonists, and builders of alternative realities (utopian fantasies) requiring the death of God, for the heart of Gnosticism is "man is god."

While the infamous Tower of Babel was history's first Gnostic project, the Soviet Union and Socialist Germany are modern versions. In his book "Science, Politics, & Gnosticism," esteemed political philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901-85) identifies progressivism, positivism, Hegelianism, Marxism, and the "God is dead" school as modern Gnostic movements. All of these movements are firmly grounded on the Gnostic myth of Darwinism.

In their rage against God the Father, modern Gnostics refuse to be created in His spiritual image, thus they conceptually "uncreate" themselves through reductionism, which in the words of Wolfgang Smith, means that they speculatively reduce themselves to "aggregates of particles." Reductionism is a tenet of the philosophy of materialism.

Materialist philosophy is neither new nor scientific, but one of the most ancient superstitious beliefs in the world. The ancient version held that matter has always existed and everything that exists consists of matter. According to the modern version, invisible dead-matter spontaneously generated itself from nothing, and then by way of evolution magically produced everything else. To believe this is to believe that the nothingness within the magician's hat spontaneously generated the bunny.

If evolutionism was a gas-powered generator, then spontaneous generation would be its indispensable fuel, admits Ernst Haeckel, pantheist mystic and ardent defender of Darwinism. In the following quote, observe that Haeckel confesses that spontaneous generation is not scientific but rather metaphysical. Furthermore, this metaphysical doctrine is the essential replacement for creation Ex Nihilo — the miracle of creation in other words:

"...spontaneous generation appears to us as a simple and necessary event in the process of the development of the earth. We admit that this process, as long as it is not directly observed or repeated by experiment, remains a pure hypothesis. But I must again say that this hypothesis is indispensable for the consistent completion of the non-miraculous history of creation, that it has absolutely nothing forced or miraculous about it, and that certainly it can never be positively refuted. It must also be taken into consideration that the process of spontaneous generation, even if it still took place daily and hourly, would in any case be exceedingly difficult to observe and establish with absolute certainty as such. This is also the opinion of Naegeli, the ingenious investigator, and he, in his admirable chapter on Spontaneous Generation, maintains that "to deny spontaneous generation is to proclaim miracles." (The History of Creation v.1, 1892, p. 422)

Ray Comfort quotes evolutionist Stephen Hawking, who in essence affirms that "the nothingness within the magician's hat spontaneously generated the bunny:"

"According to professor Stephen Hawking, God didn't create the universe. Instead, nothing created everything. However, Hawking has violated the basic laws of science. In an extract of his latest book, The Grand Design...published in Eureka magazine in The Times, the professor said: 'Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.'"

"It is embarrassingly unscientific to speak of anything creating itself from nothing," remarked Comfort. "Common sense says that if something possessed the ability to create itself from nothing, then that something wasn't nothing, it was something — a very intelligent creative power of some sort. "

Comfort concludes:

"Hawking has violated the unspoken rules of atheism. He isn't supposed to use words like 'create' or even 'made.' They necessitate a Creator and a Maker. Neither are you supposed to let out that the essence of atheism is to believe that nothing created everything, because it's unthinking." (Hawking Breaks Atheists Rules, Comfort, www.worldviewweekend.com)

So as it turns out, spontaneous generation is yet another "just-so" story. However, the importance of this particular fairytale is that it is the irreplaceable metaphysical foundation of the larger Gnostic myth of Darwinism. Without spontaneous generation, Darwinism...indeed all evolutionism...falls apart, leaving only the miraculous creation Ex Nihilo.

Furthermore, the respected scientist Louis Pasteur definitively disproved spontaneous generation just three years after Darwin published his book "On the Origin of Species:"

"... Darwin's celebrated tome On the Origin of Species, which had been published just three years before Pasteur's experiments, sought to discredit the need for God to create the species by showing how one species can transmute into another. But Darwin's account left open the problem of how the first living thing came to exist. Unless life had always existed, at least one species — the first — cannot have come to exist by transmutation from another species, only by transmutation from nonliving matter. Darwin himself wrote, some years later: 'I have met with no evidence that seems in the least trustworthy, in favour of so-called Spontaneous Generation.' Yet, in the absence of a miracle, life could have originated only by some sort of spontaneous generation. Darwin's theory of evolution and Pasteur's theory that only life begets life cannot both have been completely right." (The Fifth Miracle, 1999, p. 83, Paul Davies (b. 1946), Director of BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science)

The Darwinian Deception

Colin Patterson writes that after studying evolutionary theory for many years, he finally "woke up and realized that all my life I had been duped into taking evolutionism as revealed truth in some way." Patterson goes on to say:

"One of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view, or let's call it a non- evolutionary view, was last year I had a sudden realization for over twenty years I had thought I was working on evolution in some way. One morning I woke up and something had happened in the night and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years and there was not one thing I knew about it. That's quite a shock to learn that one can be so misled so long. Either there was something wrong with me or there was something wrong with evolutionary theory. Naturally, I know there is nothing wrong with me, so for the last few weeks I've tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people....Question is: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, that is true? I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time and eventually one person said, 'I do know one thing — it ought not to be taught in high school.'"

"Evolutionism and Creationism" November 5, 1981, p. 2, Colin Patterson (1933–1998), Senior Paleontologist at British Museum of Natural History

When C.S. Lewis pointedly observed that the entire edifice of the so-called "science" of Darwinian naturalism has but one purpose, to keep the supernatural Creator out, he was merely confirming admissions made by Lewontin and many other Darwinists. In sum, Darwinism is a deception perpetrated by self-worshipping swindlers who have been "pulling the wool" over the eyes of the uninitiated masses, to use Lewontins' own words. (The Oxford Socratic Club, 1944)

Deceptions Have Consequences

Long before Darwinian Gnostics systematically liquidated in excess of 200,000,000 men, women, and children on behalf of communist and socialist utopian fantasies, George Romanes sought to warn the world of the coming catastrophe:

"Never in the history of man has so terrific a calamity befallen the race as that which all who look may now behold advancing as a deluge, black with destruction, resistless in might, uprooting our most cherished hopes, engulfing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless desolation.... The flood-gates of infidelity are open, and Atheism overwhelming is upon us." (George Romanes, A Candid Examination of Theism,1878)

More recently, H. Enock wrote:

"No wonder that Brig. General F.D. Frost stated in the Fundamentalist, January, 1950, p. 21: 'There is no doubt about it that the doctrine of evolution is the greatest curse in our educational system.' Whether we read Ward's Dynamic Sociology, or Russell's Code of Morals, or Briffalt's Immoralism or some other book written by the Behaviorist School, — they all seem to endeavour to justify and base their conclusions on the bestial nature of man. This philosophy seeks to.... reduce man to the level of animal nature. The surging unrest, the broken homes, the frustrated lives, the increasing divorce cases, the multiplied number of criminals are but the inevitable outcome of the acceptance and practice of this evolutionary doctrine." (H. Enock, Evolution or Creation,1966, pp. 1146-1147)

Evolutionism "should not be taught in high school." Indeed. Gnosticism is the spiritual disorder of our age and Darwinism and spontaneous generation are its toxic roots. Conceptual murderer of God the Father, inverter of reality, hater of humanity, uplifter of Satan as the first "free thinker," destroyer of truth and all that is good, normal, and decent; bringer of chaos, blasphemy, hedonism, pathological lying, genocide and other evils too many to be listed, Gnosticism has all but destroyed America and the West.

In his book, "The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me To Faith," Peter Hitchens, brother of the infamous atheist Christopher writes:

"...the Bible angers and frustrates those who believe that the pursuit of a perfect society justifies the quest for absolute power. The concepts of sin, of conscience, of eternal life, and of divine justice under an unalterable law are the ultimate defense against the utopian's belief that ends justify means and that morality is relative. These concepts are safeguards against the worship of human power." (Rage Against God, p. 135)

The Western civilized nations rose to greatness on the wings of just one spiritual faith ...Christianity. Unalienable rights come from the transcendent Creator and not from weak, easily corrupted men. Through abandonment of its spiritual roots, the West — which today is a Gnostic-West — is moving inexorably toward its death.

America is the West's last best hope, observed Mark Steyn. Yet America is itself pathologically infected by Gnosticism and near death. Gnosticism must be destroyed. To do this we must tear it out by the roots. This means Darwinism must be uprooted and exposed for what it really is: a Gnostic myth.

********

Nooooo Linda, this means that your little pet cult of *Christianity* itself must be uprooted and exposed for what *it* is: A *dangerous* and highly contagious intentionally induced mental disease that produces narcissistic self-satisfied entitled morons like Linda Kimball here, with her pathetic delusions of superiority and intelligence, and no sense of what is real and what is not real left in her silly fluffy little Christian head. Her mind has been neutered by her religion, which is after all nothing more than institutionalized paranoid schizophrenia for the masses dressed up as a spiritual path, nothing more than a control mechanism, a mental computer virus constructed to conquor minds. People like her are completely and utterly disconnected from reality, and all they want is for the rest of us to follow suit ASAP. Now 'Darwinism' (evolution?) is a 'devilish Gnostic myth!' A who? Gnostics? You Christians haven't stopped fighting the Gnostics? I would have thought killing them all off would have satisfied you murderous bastards, but apparently not. A Gnostic myth. Really? What's next? The Big Bang Theory is a Cathar plot? Oh, those rascally Cathars...

How very fucking stupid.

I find this paragraph particularly telling:
"In other words, terrible-willed evolutionists have a Cosmic Authority problem, and this is why they rally around Darwinism and force its absurd, counterintuitive teachings upon gullible, misinformed Americans while simultaneously ridiculing and otherwise psychologically terrorizing creationists..."

Simply reverse the terms, replace 'evolutionists' with 'creationists' and vice-versa, and 'Darwinism' with 'Christianity,' and you have the actual truth of the matter. The creationists perceive (force themselves to perceive) reality precisely backwards and in reverse, because if they ever did not, if they ever saw reality as it actually is, then it would be revealed to them that it is actually their corrupt, stunted ideology which is backwards and reversed.

I miss Carl Sagan

2010-09-15T01:30:00.012-04:00

"It is self-evident that the insane are willing to resort to things that the sane cannot even consider nor sometimes even imagine. Therefore they always have the element of surprise."
-Saint Brian the Godless

***

And now a quotation from someone considerably more famous, and rightly so:

"If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship. My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if such a traditional god does not exist, then our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival in an extremely dangerous time. In either case the enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species."
-Carl Sagan

I miss Carl Sagan. A clearer mind and better communication skills are seemingly impossible to find amongst today’s spokesmen for the side of science, which is basically identical to the voice of reason in our society. He was clever, thoughtful, had a disarming manner, and he knew how to make science interesting, even to a lot of people not interested in science. I wish there were a lot more like him. Of course if wishes were fishes I could put on a far better 'feeding the poor' show than Jesus did.

I have always liked the above Sagan quotation; however I see that even Carl, intelligent as he was, missed the obvious.

The part that I refer to is this interrogative sentence:
“If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing?”

YES, Carl, YES. That is PRECISELY what today’s Christians, many of them at any rate, believe!

Your audience in that quotation, or rather the Fundamentalist Christian portion of it, not only believes that God wants them to be sodden blockheads, they believe it so deeply that they compete to be the most sodden blockhead of all! Of course they don’t actually think of themselves as sodden blockheads in those exact words. No, they’re the faithful, the flock, the True Believers, the Chosen Ones, the righteous God-fearin’ common folk that just ‘know’ in their bones that prairie wisdom and so-called ‘common sense’ along with religious faith of course, are in every way preferable to logic and reason, proof and evidence. And so of course therefore, science is rendered that much pious malarkey, all bets are off, up is down and black is white. That loud slamming sound was the closing of their minds. Their reality has just trumped your reality, Carl. You lose.

(After all, as we all know, momma grizzlies and such don't truck with no book larnin' when a wink and a nod suffices as long as Jesus is in your heart)(Katie Couric rot in hell!)

Now Carl, what to do? Your whole logic is stymied! Your eloquence is wasted on those most in need of it. What you thought was the undeniably obvious, turned out to be anything but.

You’ve underestimated our stupidity as a species, Carl.

It’s not your fault, though. I find that the reverse of old Bertrand Russell’s saying is often true as well. You know the one: “A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.”

Conversely and unfortunately for you Carl, a clever man’s understanding of the mind of a stupid man is limited by the fact that he is too clever to imagine being that stupid. At a gut level, he can't believe it's possible.

Too bad you’re dead, Carl. You were perhaps sufficiently brilliant to solve this conundrum for me, the “How to reach them” conundrum. I can’t seem to find any satisfactory solution. And it's not like I haven't tried. At first I thought there was a chance, but it's like their minds reset every Sunday or something. Any progress is deleted on a weekly basis.

(sigh)

(Oh well, at least you left us Cosmos. And that Jodie Foster movie.)

And Carl, not to make you spin in your grave, but they vote! How they vote! More even than in your day... They vote in droves! They vote in direct inverse proportion to their intellects! They are worse than sheep; they are lemmings, and not how lemmings actually are, no, but how they were incorrectly portrayed in that film by Mr. Disney. They listen to any caucasian that knows the secret word (Jesus Christ) and then they vote like maggots on a carcass, whipped into their dipterous larval frenzy by everyone and anyone from national-level right-wing politicians down to bloviating A.M. Radio personalities, their rabid pastors, myopic internet blogs, and that ever-present cable television version of ‘Pravda,’ Fox News. (Otherwise known as 'The Retarded Network') (Yes, I fucking said it!)
They osmotically absorb their fork-tongued hyperbiased non-reality-based talking points from their chosen Officially Sanctioned Disseminators of Truth, whichever one makes them feel the most special, and oh by the way, they pay attention to actual facts and verifiable truth about as much as an orca pays attention to a drowning gnat.

They not only can never think for themselves; they are so far away from ever even being able to imagine thinking for themselves that they’ve convinced themselves beyond a shadow of a doubt that that they already do. And that's enough for them. And for those who helped convince them. For they exist embedded in a matrix of reality-denial, a support-group of fellow dunces.

Mutual ignorance can have a peer-bonding effect. Who knew?

They are under the induced delusion (one among many) that a lack of knowledge is amply compensated for by a surfeit of blind belief, as long as you call it 'faith.' Proud of their ability to ignore the obvious, they persist in their beliefs in the face of any evidence to the contrary. (What evidence?) You see Carl, in their estimation the people like you, the realists, the science and logic based persons, are the actual ‘sodden blockheads’ because they (you) (we?) ‘understand, but worship nothing’ so to speak.

They are the blind insisting on their superior vision here, Carl.

And sorry to be the bearer of sad tidings Carl, but they are not impressed with you. Never were. All you ever were to them was a voice of the opposition, the hated adversary science, and therefore evil, so basically ‘don’t let the door hit you on the existential ass on your way to hell’ is how they feel about you. Sure, you were a visionary to many people, but not to them, never to them. To them, you and your kind, are anathema.

The bungled and the botched have decided that the rational reaity-based people are insane, and they breed faster than we do and are more organized than termites. It's like a cancer. It's scary, Carl. This country is seeing a rise of agressive religious anti-intellectualism that is like nothing I've ever seen before in my lifetime.

We’re fucked, Carl.

It's a Jewish Country.

2010-08-25T15:10:00.027-04:00

(A flight of imagination)

The United States of America is a Jewish country. It was founded by Jews. More than 85% of the population is Jewish, with small minorities of Muslims and Christians and a smattering of other faiths. That’s the mix in this country, as everyone knows.

On September 11th, 2001, as we are all so painfully aware, a group of radical right-wing Christians from other countries hijacked two airplanes and flew them into the World Trade Center, destroying it, along with thousands of American lives. Mostly Jewish lives of course, although quite a few Muslims and even a few dozen Christians died in the attack that day.

Now a group of so-called ‘moderate’ Christians actually want to build a CHURCH a few blocks away from the attack site. Right near the ‘hallowed ground’ of ‘Ground Zero!’

This is obviously a terrible thing to do, right on the face of it. The sensitivities of all those good American Jews who lost friends and relatives, mothers and fathers and sons and daughters in the 9/11 attacks are being trodden upon; they can hardly be expected to sit by while a so-called moderate Christian group tries in such an obvious manner to put stick into their eye. Why, it's practically spiteful.

What are those ‘moderate’ Christians even thinking? We’re good enough to tolerate their religion here, and of course they have a constitutional right to build their church wherever they want to, but really this is too much!

Why, the very idea of Christians building a church there is a lot like a group of neo-Nazis wanting to build an ‘Aryan cultural center’ right next to the Wailing Wall!

Sure they say that they’re moderate Christians and not radicals like those who killed so many of our people on 9/11. And they say that they’re trying to ‘build bridges’ between our two communities by doing this. But this is a bridge too far. If they really were sensitive to our needs here, sensitive to our Jewish feelings, then they’d build it somewhere else, right? They'd get the hell out of there. That place is reserved for us. For Real Americans who feel the pain of 9/11.

If they want to get us to like them, best to go away, build somewhere else, and not bother us like that, not hurt us like that, no?

So it's in their own self-interest to go away. It's a 'win-win.'

I mean, after all, they should know how scared we all are now of their religion. If it can even be called a religion; why, it's more of an ideology or a political movement when you really look at it.

So why try to build it there of all places, if not to taunt us?

I mean, c'mon! Christianity is the religion of those who attacked us! They did it for their religion! For Jesus! That’s what they said! So obviously we need to take a closer look at this Christianity, be more aware of it, be more proactive. Looking at history it's obvious that Christianity is a religion of conquest and war, a religion of hatred and death, no matter that some of them insist that it's really a religion of peace and love of others. Sure, some of them claim to be ‘moderates’ but you can’t trust that, as evidenced by how many Christians right here in this country have become radicalized. They’re very active on the Internet, and they recruit American Christians to their side from their terrorist safe-havens in Rome and England.

And Texas.

No, they should know; they should realize that the best thing they can do for themselves is to build that church elsewhere. They need to know their place. They can’t pretend that only some of their most radical believers do these horrible things anymore. We're onto them now, thank God for Fox News. They can’t pretend that they’re Good Americans like us anymore; we know better. They must accept their share of the blame for what they’ve done, all of them, and build it somewhere else.

Not in my backyard of course, but somewhere else.

It's not that I have anything *against* Christians of course. I'm not a bigot. I'm just thinking of them here.

It's for their own good.

***

(And also, some people are saying that the President is a closet Christian and carries the ‘seed’ of Christianity! His mother, apparently, was 'one of them!' Pass it along...)

Shalom.

Good Book, Evil Book

2010-08-20T16:33:00.016-04:00

As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.
-Voltaire

Beliefs are terrible things, since they're very often wrong, and even when they're right the world goes and changes on them and they never, ever adjust to that cold, hard fact.
-Saint Brian the Godless

***
Is it possible that the Good Book, the Bible, Old and New Testaments, is in reality an Evil Book, the source for much of the ills of society?

The Bible is hailed as the Word of God in Christianity, and many believe in it as such. The literal Word. From His mouth to your ears.

Er, eyes.

Presented for your convenience, in case you’re ever tempted to think on your own. No need; it's all in the Book. In fact, right there in the Book it clearly says not to think on your own, not to believe anything that even hints at contradicting the Holy Word in the Holy Book. Unless of course the thing that's contradicting the Bible is also something written in the Bible; then it's fine and dandy. You just hafta believe both in such cases. Good luck.

Obviously I think the Bible is a heavily flawed work, both technically and morally. One of the main ‘evils’ that I see in it is its internal inconsistencies, its self-negating paradoxical and illogical statements or sets of statements, all of which are expected to be believed; nay, demanded that they be believed at the cost of your Immortal Soul and entrance tickets to the Big Amusement Park in the clouds.

The Bible presents contraries, statements which utterly contradict each other, together in one book, and demands that they both be believed at the same time, or else. It does this again and again, over and over, which causes believers to eventually slowly lose their minds, and never suspect a thing.

That's how we get Republicans.

Allow me to illustrate:
-God is love; He loves you more than anyone else does, and He'll send you straight to hell if you don't believe that.
-An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but turn the other cheek while you're doing it.
-Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild, 'Love Thy Neighbor' Jesus, Lamb of God, returning with a Sword in His mouth and a fiery halo or something like that, come back as the Lion to slaugther off the evil ones. (More on this one below)

The depths to which all this mindbogglingly stupid self-negating (in more ways than one!) religious programming affects (distorts, even) our society at the most basic levels is not always obvious, either. We're mostly pretty much blind to it. Heck, it's been going on practically forever, so most folk just accept it as the way it is.

Take the confusing dichotomy of God the Father (OT) versus God the Son (NT). The first is an authoritarian super-hypocritical murdering genocidal misogynistic hateful over-reacting all-powerful and all-knowing Father Figure, the Ultimate Father Figure in fact. Our Father Who Art In Heaven. So, we think of him as Dad, the ultimate Dad, a really strict and mean Dad, who loves us (somehow; we can't realy understand that part, 'cause it's a *mystery* and all) but will fry our asses forever in a heartbeat if we give him one iota of crap. A fearful Father Figure indeed. An archetype, in fact.

An archetype designed to scare the shit out of people. As was needed at the time.

Embedded firmly in our group psychology and thus in our society as a result, from this how many wives and children over the centuries were beaten and abused by fathers (small 'f') who were only acting like their archetypal Ultimate Father Figure Himself (Big 'F') would act, indeed DID act, over and over again, in the Bible? How many were just following God the Father's Divine Example that He set in the Bible (and then said not to follow?) (heh heh)

A lot of them, I assure you. It's not like it's done consciously.

God is the hypocritical Father who says "Do as I say, not as I do, OR ELSE!!!" but just like all defective fathers who say such absurd things to their children, *their examples are far more often followed than their words.*

So thus we have God the Ultimate Bad Example of what a Father Should Be. Or God the Ultimate Good Example of what a Father Should Not Be.

Amen. Just what society ordered.

But wait! Not enough confusion yet!

Let's introduce God the Son, Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild! Who in fact, is credited with *many* great words and statements. Many poignant examples. Many good works. Much real Truth with a Capital ‘T.’

He sounds a bit nicer. More approachable. A decent sort. And He did say a lot of 'good words' in that book there.

And yet, are these ‘good words’ in the Bible which are attributed to Jesus Christ, the very person that Christians named their faith after, at all *prioritized* over all of the other horiffic mishmash in that so-called Good Book? Does one ever hear the Christian say "Well, Jesus Christ Himself said to be gentle and loving, so that must trump Vengeful God in the Old Testament where he smites everything in sight all the time' so I'll ignore that part and live by Jesus' words of peace and love."

Hardly ever happens. Unfortunate, that.

So we have crazy hypocritical Old Testament Yaweh God with his Gentle, Loving Son, *but they’re both God!* No difference. Canya dig it?

What a mindfuck.

How to know then, whether to be severe, or gentle? Vengeful and wrathful and jealous, or loving?

One can and should follow Jesus, of course. His path seems more correct somehow, than that of His sadistic Father in Heaven. I mean, any real God should be, at the very minimum, good, no? Or why bother?

But then again, *which Jesus?* Ahh, dilemma.

Most of the New Testament is all about "gentle Jesus meek and mild," but hold on a second! Just in case you were thinking that one should obviously choose Jesus' path, that of peace, since after all, the religion's named after Him, hold your horses! As previously mentioned, we also have Revelations Jesus tacked on at the end of the Book, coming back to smite about the place with a sword depending from his mouth and fire and death and punishment and the Final Conflict, and all that great horror movie fodder at the end times. Just in case you were starting to think that Jesus was a non-violent, loving God.

How rapturous! Can't forget about Him, now can we? I guess we saw shades of Him back when gentle Jesus cursed that fig tree to die for not happening to be in fruit at the time, or telling his followers to bring those who do not bow to Him before Him and kill them. What seemed so out of character at the time makes sense at the end after all, apparently.

How conveeeeenient, too. Now we're free to just choose being an asshole.

Are we confused yet, my droogies?

To reiterate, we have the Mighty God of Gods, Yahweh, mean and nasty and an immortal all-powerful psychotic maniac God who loves us with eternal torture, along with his polar opposite all-loving non-judgmental hippy tree-hugger boozing and carousing son, who is nonetheless completely identical to His Father Yahweh (nevermind how,) but who WAIT, has yet another polar opposite psycho 'version' of Himself who will come back at the end times, and He won't be the Lamb anymore but will return as the Lion and basically beat the everloving crap out of evil, including of course, people like me, because He’s tired of taking our shit, and besides, that lamb schtick only got him killed.

This means that if a Christian is a mean, selfish bully by nature, not a problem, he can simply justify it with Gods #1 and #3, can't he? No need to even read the parts about 'love thy neighbor' when all that mushy stuff isn't really what Jesus/God was all about. That Jesus is a pussy. Macho Jesus Rules! Now where's my glock?

(I’ve actually heard ‘good Christians’ maintaining that Jesus wasn’t really about loving all others; that such is just a common misperception)

***

Let's examine the 'fruits' of the Book for a minute.

Is the Christian religion a true religion of *peace?* Absolutely and emphatically not. Constantine introduced the idea of a 'just war' and ever since then, why, any old ruler can get the Christians to fight, to kill, to even embrace cruelty and the torture of others, and to give their lives for the cause not of God, but of the ruler. It's easy; all the ruler has to say is "I am inspired by God" or whatever variation of that is appropriate to the audience. And demonize those who they need the flock to hate. That's how it was designed, after all. And looking back through history, we have bloodbath after bloodbath to thank the religion for. Over and over again, the Religion of peaceful Jesus found it necessary to slaughter.

It's an evil Rorschach test, that Bible. One can see whatever one wants to in it. It's way too cloudy, too unclear, and since it tells you right there in it that it's the word of God and that you must believe every last damned word of it as if The Burning Bush had whispered it right into your cockleshell ear, the result is a schism from reality in the minds of the believers.

Their brains break, in other words.

They lose their minds, lose all touch with reality, and pursue happiness in a selfish delusional ego-world wherein they’re practically the Master Race, chosen by God, and destined for paradise, while all others are evil and deserve the hell they’re destined for

Halleluiah. How nice.

And we wonder why there are so many nutcases and idiots in this country? They’re being manufactured on an ongoing basis, by belief in a self-contradictory and hypocritical philosophy; A philosophy whose Good Book, is anything but.

Are You Self-Aware?

2010-08-07T03:35:00.003-04:00

“In other living creatures the ignorance of themselves is nature, but in men it is a vice.”
-Boethius

***

This is not one of my usual posts. It's me wanting to generate a different conversation.

Other bloggers post their posts and do not seem to want to encourage lengthy conversations. For me, I prefer the resultant converstions to my own posts.

So I ask you, are you self-aware?

If you are, how can you tell? How do you know that you are?

What do you think the term means, if anything?

Do you think that a religious person can be self-aware?

Can an atheist be?

In my opinion, the beginning of self-awareness is whan a person starts to realize how incredibly fallible they are. So then, humility might be considered the beginning of self-awareness. Or not. Tell me I'm wrong.

From humility comes a lessening or perhaps better to say a contraction of the ego, which removes many blinders. With humility comes the realization that perhaps it's not a bad idea to *question one's self.*

And from there, the whole world opens up.

For as Burns said, 'O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!' *

In other words, it's a good thing.

If not, then what?

2010-07-11T18:12:00.003-04:00

I've been bored with my usual pontification lately. I have I think adequately expressed most of my opinions on the subject of the interface between faith and reason and all the conflict between them, at least for the time being, and so I think I'll try something different. Something more interactive. Something more disturbing.

I'm asking a question of you my readers. It is partially inspired by a comment made a while back by one of you (Eric) about how a good debater should be able to take the opposite side of the issue. I didn't agree at the time and it still goes against my grain, but I've thought about it, and it seemed worth pursuing at least as a discussion. It may reveal things about us; or it may just bore you all to tears and make you hate me as a person. I have no idea, but what the hell...

And so, the question is this:

If your belief or idea or concept of reality, of the universe, of this world and our place in it, were revealed to you to be totally and utterly incorrect, if you somehow found this out to be true (hypothetical, so don't ask me how, but you find it out *for sure* and you *must believe that you've been wrong all along* whatever it might have taken for that to happen) then what other concept or view of reality do you think is most likely to be true? In other words, what would be your second choice, your 'second best guess' as to the TRUTH OF IT ALL, if you had to look for one?

I have one rule: If your current belief is naturalistic or scientific, your new adopted view must oppose that, i.e., must be supernatural or theistic in some way; and the reverse is also true. If your view is currently a 'supernatural' or 'theistic' view, then for the purposes of this discussion only, you must embrace a naturalistic or scientific viewpoint of some sort.

Relax Christians, it's only a hypothetical discussion; I promise to not take your souls and eat them with jam. (Muah hah hah...)

I'm not sure whether my 'All is mind; all is a communal dream' Big Brain (hate that name) speculations count as entirely supernatural or naturalistic, so I'll let that type of thing slide in either direction. Or perhaps better to say, all 'supernatural or partially supernatural but non-theistic' concepts can be taken by either side of the argument as an alternative, as their 'second best guess.'

So I've set the rules for this little discussion. Of course as usual, we are not constrained to be limited by these rules, but in the beginning I hope we can have a discussion at least loosely based on them. So say, if you're religious and absolutely refuse to take a non-religious view, I really don't care if you merely take the view of a different faith, a different religion. I'm mainly after a discussion of alternate views, so I'm not that particular. However you can't just take a different sect of the same religion. If you're catholic, you can't pick 'methodist.' It must really be a different view, is the salient point.

And after that, as usual, anything goes. The conversation can evolve or devolve as chance will have it. And eventually someone will post the equivalent of 'hey lardass, write another post' and I will...

As for me, I have to take the naturalist position as my 'primary' theory of reality, and as for my 'second best guess' well, you all know it already, my "Big Brain Speculations.' I'll refrain from discussing them again here, unless someone else brings it up.

So come with me on a journey outside your comfort zones, my brothers and sisters...

MY FIRST GUEST SPEAKER

2010-06-18T15:55:00.006-04:00

Well, some people have mentioned that I should have 'guest speakers' on here to give the place some variation, so here's my first one. He's a rather bright man from Württemberg, Germany, who shows a lot of promise.

So without further ado, my first guest speaker; let's have a round of applause for Albert Einstein!

***

Religion and Science
The following excerpt was published in The World as I See It (1999).

by Albert Einstein

Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and desire are the motive forces behind all human endeavour and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present itself to us. Now what are the feelings and needs that have led men to religious thought and belief in the widest sense of the words? A little consideration will suffice to show us that the most varying emotions preside over the birth of religious thought and experience. With primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions—fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, death. Since at this stage of existence understanding of causal connexions is usually poorly developed, the human mind creates for itself more or less analogous beings on whose wills and actions these fearful happenings depend. One's object now is to secure the favour of these beings by carrying out actions and offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition handed down from generation to generation, propitiate them or make them well disposed towards a mortal.

I am speaking now of the religion of fear. This, though not created, is in an important degree stabilized by the formation of a special priestly caste which sets up as a mediator between the people and the beings they fear, and erects a hegemony on this basis. In many cases the leader or ruler whose position depends on other factors, or a privileged class, combines priestly functions with its secular authority in order to make the latter more secure; or the political rulers and the priestly caste make common cause in their own interests.

The social feelings are another source of the crystallization of religion. Fathers and mothers and the leaders of larger human communities are mortal and fallible. The desire for guidance, love, and support prompts men to form the social or moral conception of God. This is the God of Providence who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes, the God who, according to the width of the believer's outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the tribe or of the human race, or even life as such, the comforter in sorrow and unsatisfied longing, who preserves the souls of the dead. This is the social or moral conception of God.

The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of fear to moral religion, which is continued in the New Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples, especially the peoples of the Orient, are primarily moral religions. The development from a religion of fear to moral religion is a great step in a nation's life. That primitive religions are based entirely on fear and the religions of civilized peoples purely on morality is a prejudice against which we must be on our guard. The truth is that they are all intermediate types, with this reservation, that on the higher levels of social life the religion of morality predominates.

Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. Only individuals of exceptional endowments and exceptionally high-minded communities, as a general rule, get in any real sense beyond this level. But there is a third state of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form, and which I will call cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to explain this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.

The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvellous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear in earlier stages of development—e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learnt from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer especially, contains a much stronger element of it.

The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no Church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with the highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as Atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.

How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are capable of it. We thus arrive at a conception of the relation of science to religion very different from the usual one. When one views the matter historically one is inclined to look upon science and religion as irreconcilable antagonists, and for a very obvious reason. The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events—that is, if he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously. He has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion. A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man's actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it goes through. Hence science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear and punishment and hope of reward after death.

It is therefore easy to see why the Churches have always fought science and persecuted its devotees. On the other hand, I maintain that cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest incitement to scientific research. Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion which pioneer work in theoretical science demands, can grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labour in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics!

Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a sceptical world, have shown the way to those like-minded with themselves, scattered through the earth and the centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man strength of this sort. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.

You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a peculiar religious feeling of his own. But it is different from the religion of the naive man. For the latter God is a being from whose care one hopes to benefit and whose punishment one fears; a sublimation of a feeling similar to that of a child for its father, a being to whom one stands to some extent in a personal relation, however deeply it may be tinged with awe.

But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.

***

Now, a lot of people have insisted that Einstein was a religious man. As you can see above, Einstein was religious in the traditional sense of the word like I am an Egyptian Princess. His 'religion' was more akin to feelings of awe at the grandeur of nature and the immensity of the universe, and had little or nothing to do with any deity as such.

I find this excerpt useful in examining his views on the subject, especially the part about the 'religion of fear.' It would appear that Mr. Einstein would not approve of Pascal's Wager and those who believe due to that threat to their 'eternal life,' nor would he approve of what I call 'coercive morality,' or the fact that much of the Christian moral system is based in fear and threat.

So Christians, can we finally *stop* claiming that Einstein believed in God or 'got religion' in his later years? This is a blatant lie, an attempt to claim him for one of your own, to lend credibility to a belief system that doesn't have any. It's transparent and childish and silly. So basically, cut it out. If your religion cannot stand without lies, then what kind of a religion is it anyhow? Jesus Christ, if He is indeed real and not a myth, does not need your lies. In fact, I doubt very much that they would please Him at all, if He's anything like the 'press releases.'

PASTOR DISASTER

2010-05-20T19:11:00.012-04:00

"The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

***

Yesterday I got my Google News Alerts in my email inbox. One of the terms that I have an alert set for is the word “Pastor,” mostly for my own amusement. Each day I invariably get about ten articles in that email, and invariably at least a few are about some pastor somewhere that committed an ‘immoral’ act that has gotten him into trouble.

Yesterday it was four out of ten articles. Five actually, but two were about the same (Newark) pastor molesting girls. Three is about average.

Here are the articles that were notable:

PASTOR OF AURORA CHURCH BILKED THREE OUT OF 475K

LONGVIEW PASTOR GUILTY OF SEX CHARGES

A NEWARK PASTOR ACCUSED OF KIDNAPPING AND SEXUAL ASSAULT

PASTOR SENTENCED TO FIFTEENYEARS PROBATION FOR MOLESTING YOUNG RELATIVE YEARS AGO

I see this sort of thing every day, in my news alerts and on television. It would seem that there is more to it than just random chance. After all, being a pastor brings with it moral responsibility, or so it is advertised. A pastor is a leader of the people, with a congregation that looks up to him. It is a position of moral leadership requiring people of high moral fiber, so one would assume that morally they would be superior as a group. Not so. If pastors as a group were actually more moral than average, this would be reflected in reality by them not being in the news so often for moral turpitude. So for some reason, a group of people that is supposed to be more moral than average, is clearly less moral than average. For some reason the position is attractive to the morally flawed.

My question is this: Since everyone knows what being a pastor is and what it entails, is there anything in this description that would attract a morally defective person to become one?

What type of person would be attracted to a position of moral leadership, a position where one is looked up to by many people and thought of as possessing a sterling character just because he is in that position?

Yes, of course, such a position would attract the type of person that was morally flawed, simply because in such a position they can masquerade as someone of impeccable character with little effort. They know instinctively that most congregations are on the whole rather gullible and are essentially only looking for the good and not the evil in their leaders, so by becoming a pastor or priest or church leader, or even just loudly proclaiming themself a good and faithful Christian with all the trappings, they can pretend to being that which they already believe (or perhaps hope) that they are: a moral person destined to go to heaven. Someone that is loved by all, holy and revered and respected, and thereby superior to others simply on the merits of that. Also, being a leader of any sort puts them above the congregents as well, even though they share the same faith, so the most self-centered of the believers will rise to the top like cream.

It's like Purina Ego Chow. Irresistable.

In Christianity in general, homosexuality is deplored, so if you happen to be gay and in a Christian family or church, you are intensely ashamed of it. Basically the Christian position is ‘if you are gay, pray it away.’ Of course at the end of all that, you’ll still be gay, jut deeper in denial about it. You’ll even pretend to yourself that you’re not. You’ll do anything to escape the truth about yourself. You might say to yourself for instance “I am not a gay person; I am a straight person because I can successfully resist my lust for another man…’ I’ve heard that one several times coming from Christians so it can’t be an anomaly. Of course the same holds true for being heterosexually lustful and unfaithful to your wife. These people who believe themselves to be truly righteous, who must be seen as righteous, simply cannot accept the fact that they are not, that they are just normal human beings with lusts and desires. Or in many cases, such as the pederasts, an abnormal human being with abnormal lusts and desires.

Becoming a priest or pastor or church leader or even just being very public about your Christianity is an excellent way to hide your darkness from the world. Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, was caught when he used his church’s computer to create a floppy disk message to the police. He was hiding for years, by being a leader of his congregation. For the truly evil man always looks for ways to masquerade as good, and what better place than a church?

We also see this phenomenon on a lesser arc with politicians who claim to be devout Christians just to throw off the dogs of morality, as it were. How often do those who speak out the loudest against some form of moral flaw later proven guilty of that precise failing? On and on, over and over again, we see them fall one by one. Mark Foley, Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, George Rekers… The list goes on and on.

It makes so much sense, common sense, that a person with a huge moral failing (or just the belief that they have one, such as being gay) would be attracted to a position whereby they can pretend that they do not have it and be believed. Religion provides such an escape since it encourages blind belief, even tries to make it into a good thing by re-naming it 'faith,' so the people will believe in the pastor without looking too closely at him. It's their nature.

Of course, not to harp on it too much, but this is all traceable back to the flawed Christian moral system itself, based in coercion and not in empathy. We’re all victims of it, even those of us that are not religious. It permeates the very fabric of our society. It’s inescapable. Most of us were at the minimum raised by parents steeped in it, so most of us have memories of the incredible unfairness present in the Christian home. “Because I said so” and “Do as I say, not as I do” and “do it or else” are not ways of successfully bringing up a child in this world, unless one is aiming at bringing up a hypocrite.
They are however, almost exactly direct quotes of the Christian God in the Bible. This is God’s parenting style. How blind are we as a people that we cannot see that what we’ve been taught to believe is the ne plus ultra of moral systems, is in reality a totally defective sham that actually leads us down the path of iniquity, all the while believing that it’s the path of righteousness?

The blindness is due to the selfsame Christian religion, in that it actively discourages people from educating themselves in the ways of the world and only sees fit to teach them about an ancient text riddled with huge flaws. If the people weren’t blinded, they’d be able to see what they are falling for, and the religion simply can’t be having any of that.

***

Here’s an excerpt from a different book. Oddly this one is a metaphysical text on Kaballah:

“The evil within one’s self usually poses as the good as well. It has truly been said that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions.’ –The paving stones are more often the good intentions we carry out than those we do not.
The human mind is capable of incredible subtlety in the dodging of the facing of its own iniquity, though if one is very self-observant one can sometimes detect the qlippoth (demons) within through the manifestation within one’s self of any strong irrational dislike. The hidden maggots of one’s own soul are usually projected in righteous indignation upon others. The beam in another’s eye is usually the reflection of the mote in one’s own. (…)”
-Gareth Knight, ‘A Precise Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism’

I see a lot of truth in that quote.

God is Eternal... Wanna Buy Some Swampland?

2010-04-27T13:39:00.005-04:00

(The "Vast Dream" Revisited, or the Big Brain makes a comeback as God...)

I still don't get it.

Christians say that the universe couldn't have been here forever, so it must have had a beginning. There was once nothing at all, and then *poof* there was a universe. Hard to explain all right. I agree.

(Which is why I maintain that there was always something, and not nothing)

However let's say that there was once nothing, and then there was something, like they say.

This they say proves in some way that there had to have been a creator god to start the ball rolling.

However, they absolutely refuse to even discuss where said creator god came from! In fact, they maintain that said creator god is eternal and has always been here!

This makes zero sense. How can God be eternal, if the universe cannot be? Either one is, I think, equally unlikely. In fact, it's more unlikely that it's God that is eternal, since God is a being.

Now here's the rub: I can imagine *something* coming from nothing, as in, a vacuum fluctuation. A huge one. That is actually possible. But not a fully formed deity. Such a thing cannot just arise out of nothing. A deity is an organized personality, so something needed to organize it. A vacuum fluctuation would just release energy and particles, but creating a God is harder than creating a man, no? Such a thing just doesn't appear out of nothing, already organized into a vast hypercomplex personality with powers and desires.

God, if he exists, had an origin, rest assured. Even a deity doesn't come from nowhere, or just exist forever. For one thing, this would mean that before God decided to create this universe, He waited FOREVER. A literal eternity, and then He made His move. Sure.

The idea that God has just been around forever is a huge cheat. He cannot have been. However, it seems even less likely that He just popped into existence out of nothingness. So, we can conclude from this that God is highly unlikely to exist at all, at least as advertised.

Unless... (Here I go again) Unless instead of a creator God, there is just a mind, a mind that has always existed, and NOTHING ELSE. In other words, this universe would not 'really' exist like we think it does; it would all be the dream of that eternal mind. This means that even questions of time wouldn't apply to the mind itself, since it dreams the time as well. It has to dream in a sequence, not 'all at once,' so it has to introduce the concept of time into the dream for changes to happen in it.
Or rather, we do. Because in this concept here, we are the ones really doing the dreaming, and not God, not the mind. We comprise the mind. It is literally us. Everything, even the 'inanimate' objects, are just made up of consciousness.

However, this is not in any way like the God of the Christians.

If God is a vast mind in which we exist as dreams, then said mind might be all there is, anywhere. No real matter, no real energy, no real space. Just a consciousness. A discorporate consciousness. Or perhaps rather, a discorporate data 'field' on which consciousnesses naturally arise.

Such a thing is surely possible as unlikely as it sounds, and it is not nearly 'as impossible' that a mind has been around 'forever' since in this scenario, the mind is all that ever was, all that is, and all that ever will be.

Of course, if this is true and everything is all a part of one vast consciousness, said consciousness would not in itself be 'self-aware.' Not like a deity, in other words.

More like maybe a huge computer database on which we are the only files, we meaning this whole universe. The database itself has no 'will' or 'consciousness,' it merely holds and stores information which does. As in, us.

Now as unlikely as this may seem to those conditioned to only believe in this reality as it appears to be, it does basically solve ALL questions. All of them. No, really.

Is the universe infinite or finite? It can now be infinite, because in a dream, there is no boundary. You can always think of something else being 'just over that horizon there...' And if we expect to find something, we will.

Is there life after death? What death? You are a pattern of consciousness which in our communal dream, dies. However that pattern is not dependent on matter and energy to exist since its 'real' existence is as a pattern of consciousness, or data. So it is free to die in the dream and wake up in another dream, for all we can know. At any rate, it is not bonded to matter, because matter isn't real, either.

This sounds like nonsense, I realize. However it's only when you get past how silly it sounds that you start to realize just how very possible it all is.

If it is true, wouldn't that be funny? Here we all are, so convinced that it's all matter and energy and that we have a good handle on what reality is, and then we would have to change our entire perspective on all of that. We'd have to get rid of what I like to call 'reality-bias' or the conditioning we all have to believe that reality is as we see it. It wouldn't be easy for most people to believe. Impossible is the right word, I think.

When you look at what science is finding at the quantum level, the seeming contradictions, the ‘quantum strangeness,’ the fact that it seems that matter is almost completely empty space, the phenomena of entanglement, the wave-particle duality and the collapse of the wave-form having something to do with our observations of it, and so many other things, they all seem to be hinting at something, and this is what I think they might be hinting at.

It’s just an opinion. I’m not starting a religion over it or anything. I just maintain that it’s a hell of a lot more likely that we seem to be giving it credit for.

It’s certainly a lot more likely than God.

Are You Proud Of Your Humility?

2010-04-25T17:32:00.024-04:00

"The Modern Christian Credo: 'Since we're definitely going to heaven, let's start looking down on people now just for practice...'"
-Saint Brian the Godless

***

The Christian system of morality, being based in coercion and not in teaching genuine empathy, and thereby promoting an egocentric rather than an 'other-centered' worldview, is as noted here before, heavily flawed. It too often accomplishes that which it pretends to guard against. It produces a type of love based in fear, a type of empathy based in self-centeredness, and a type of humility based in pride. It teaches people to look outside themselves for evil, but never within.

Let’s face it, it’s hard to be humble when you know that you’re right. It’s hard to be humble when you’re one of the chosen few that are beloved by God. It’s hard to be humble when you know that God is going to save you when so many others will not be saved. (heh heh) It’s very hard to be humble when you know that you are a good and righteous person, beyond a shadow of a doubt, and that those who disagree with you are evil, because you belong to the Right Faith and they do not.
Hey, let’s face it; it’s hard to be humble when you’re a Christian.

Franklin Graham is in the news lately. He’s the son of Billy Graham, so he definitely has a lot of name cred. Mr. Graham is in the news because he is of the opinion that Islam is an evil religion, and is not afraid to say so. (He should look in a mirror sometime…) The Pentagon disinvited him to one of their Prayer Services due to this. So now he’s the darling of the right and Sarah Palin; ‘the poor soul, censored by the Obama Socialist Regime for merely telling the ‘truth…’’

One of his comments during all of this stands out to me. He mentioned that he loves all Muslims and wants to let them know that they do not have to strap explosives to themselves in order to get into heaven; they merely have to give up their own evil religion and accept Jesus Christ as their Savior.

Way to go, Frankie boy! Now, that’s what I call Pride with a Capital ‘P.’ In his overweening pride, he has, in reverse, actually managed to echo Osama Bin Ladin himself, who said that if the West wanted the terrorism to stop, the first thing it had to do was to ‘convert to Islam.’

You see, Mr. Graham is not in doubt as to his humility. He knows perfectly well that he is good, humble, righteous, and loving. And he knows that he knows best here. He knows this, because his faith in his religion tells him so. It informs him of his goodness and of the wickedness of others. It is his guide and his very being is based in it. It’s what helped him to be what he always wanted to be, after all, a good and righteous man. A humble man of God. Heck, he'd even be the first to tell you that he's only a wretched sinner, because he loves how humble that sounds. So, by 'knowing' all of this, by believing in this manner, he has no need to question himself in any of these areas ever again. He’s covered!

Good thing too, because it allows him to concentrate on ‘saving’ everyone else so they can be as perfect, as acceptable to God someday, as he is now. God willing, of course.

Mr. Graham is now free to be proud of his humility.

What Mr. Graham is missing for some reason here is that if one is proud of being good, of being humble and proud of acting humble and of being thought of as humble by others, then one is still as caught in the grip of pride and egocentricity as if they were an outright braggart braying their virtues to the world.

I guess that's why pride is the deadliest of all sins, and also the root of all evil. It's so deceptive. When you try to fight it you wind up playing right into its hands, unless you are really aware of what's happening and unless you are able to question yourself with an open mind. Sadly, this is actively discouraged by Christianity, both the ‘self-questioning’ and the ‘open mind’ parts.

Real pride is not necessarily overt. Real pride does not always show itself. The man who openly brags about his accomplishments is one example, but so is the man who does not brag solely because he knows that it would not look good to do so, and the second type of person is much more common.

And so also is any man an example of pride that truly believes himself to be humble; for no truly humble being would be able to know that they themselves are humble and remain so. It is not possible for a truly humble person to know in their own mind that they are humble, for such knowledge is the very death of humility itself. Such knowledge is the seed of pride. Such knowledge ends the process of self-questioning and self-examination which is the very key to genuine humility.

So basically, the proud man believes himself to be humble, but the humble man knows himself to be proud.

Christianity, by teaching that evil is always easy to see and to define and that pride is something obvious, does the faithful a great disservice. By painting the very subtle as simple and overt, it leaves it’s believers in a state of vulnerability. They always look to the sins of others, while being totally blind to their own. This allows them to actually become proud, evil wretches in the world, all the while being absolutely convinced that they are the diametric opposite of all that.

Once a man truly *believes* that he himself is definitely not evil (or is definitely good) and therefore that he would not do anything that was evil, that’s precisely the moment when he becomes capable of doing real evil. Real evil, the darkest kind of evil, always comes wearing sheep’s clothing. Real evil always masquerades as goodness. Just look at the Catholic Church. This is not because Satan likes it that way either; it is because Satan is a (very twisted) myth designed to cover up the fact that the real source of evil in the world is merely living and breathing people who are convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that they themselves represent only the highest good and that they know what's best for everyone else, too.

People just like Franklin Graham. Or Osama Bin Ladin, for that matter. Or maybe... you?

WHY DID GOD LIE TO US?

2010-03-19T17:22:00.007-04:00

"Religion is The Great Lie that perpetually re-tells itself"
-Saint Brian the Godless

***

Why did God lie to us?

***

This is what we've figured out by ourselves, with our own eyes and brains, using logic and reason, which is to say science:

The Earth is at least 4.5 *billion* years old, if not more.

The Universe is at least 13 billion years old, if not more. Quite possibly much more.

Starlight coming from the very nearest of the stars, traveling at 186,232 miles per second, takes about *four and one half years* to get here from there. A very long way off

The farthest stars are thirteen billion light-years away. The light that we see coming from them is 13 billion years old. How did God make it, if the universe is young? In mid-space traveling to here so we'd think it were old? He thinks of everything, that deceptive, cagey God of ours. What a good liar! Of course He is, He's good at everything.

Dinosaurs died 65 million years ago. But many species became our birds. This is established science now. The birds are the remnants of the dinosaurs, which is easy to see that if you really look at them.

First "people" (Ramipithecus) 10 million years ago or less. They only stood three feet high.

First appearance of homo sapiens (That's us): about 130,000 years ago or more. Which is a lot longer than the bible tells us.

First human civilizations, villages, towns etc.: 130,000 years ago or more

Recorded History: About the last 5000 years or so. This is a very brief period of time when you look at how long we have been here. We've been here 26 times longer than we've written about it. What we know of history is only one twenty-sixth of the story of mankind. I find that amazing.

Christ: If He even lived at all, lived about 2000 years ago.

Christianity, about the same obviously.

One Hundred and Thirty Thousand Years of people being pretty much the same as we are today, sans our technology of course. We really know about only 5000 or so of those, except for archeological digs. Only two thousand years of it under Christianity. And even today, this minute, there are over 600 living religions on this world. Multiply that by two hundred thousand years. That’s an enormous number of religions and belief systems. All of them claimed or still claim to be the one, true religion, too. But we're the right ones. Yeah. We got it right, finally. Sure we did.

One can see how unlikely it is that the Bible is correct. By many, many different yardsticks it doesn't measure up to the easily observable facts. So, it's not literally true. This is a simple answer to a simple question. Logic dictates that it is not true in a literal way.

My original question was, "Why did God lie to us?" By this I mean, if He put things here that point clearly to the Bible truths not being true at all, isn't that a deception? However, if the Bible isn't true, and if He was responsible for the text of the bible, He lied there. So, either way, dishonesty from God.

The only other option possible is that science is right after all, and the Bible is allegorical, which doesn't reduce its beauty or value one whit. But many Christians will accept nothing less than complete victory in this argument. Their way or the highway. Afraid that if the Bible isn't true word-for-word, then their Faith means nothing. That, to me, is the real sin here.

Another point that I can make is that even in the Bible, God has been caught in a lie. It's in there. God hardened the heart of the Pharaoh, which can only mean that if God had not done that, the Pharoah would have been lenient with the Israelites. Hardening someone's heart against something is a deception, pure and simple.

So let's dispose once and for all with this Bible that everyone believes is so infallible in spite of it being rife with logical contradictions and outright hypocrisies, not to mention so much hatred and pride and self-righteousness and all the terrible examples that God the Father gives us as His Children to follow. We're long overdue. We've outgrown it, truly we have. It is only holding us back, keeping our thinking in the bronze age. It retards us, quite literally, and quite intentionally.

Christians = Children scared in a self-imposed darkness.
Science = The Light Switch

Got it now? Good.

Now go forth and multiply. Oh, and divide, subtract, and add as well. Get some education, come back, and then we can have an adult conversation. Tell me why God lied.

A Question of Feelings

2010-03-02T19:42:00.009-05:00

I have a more-or-less simple question here for my Christian readers and Christians in general, regarding feelings:

Can you loving Christians who are commanded by your God Yaweh and His Son Jesus Christ to love others as you love yourselves and to love thy neighbor, admit one thing here?

Imagine if you will one day your child comes home from school and tells you about the neat Islamic prayers they had to say that morning while bowing to Mecca. Oh, it’s a regular thing now. They’ll be doing it every day from now on. Deal with it; it’s the Law. Plus the kids love the bowing.

Just imagine it. I bet you can, because some of you are misinformed enough to actually believe that this kind of thing is what Obama is really secretly all about. So imagine it.

Now can you please admit to me that you can understand that the way you would FEEL if the US Government did that, made it a law that all the schools made your kids say Islamic prayers and had your children bowing towards Mecca every day, or even just taught them to embrace pro-Islamic positions on important political issues that you care about, or even if you forget the Islam thing and they just taught them the many benefits of being an *atheist,* must be and indeed is of course identical to in every way and exactly the same as how I would FEEL if it were the law of the land that my children’s schools made them pray to Jesus every day or taught them your religion’s position on important political issues that I care about?

Can you please admit that much? You kind-of have to, really. I mean, what’s the difference? They’re logical equivalents. Of course I would feel the same. It is the same.

And so then you might as well go on to admit the obvious here. That of course you know this, but you do not care. That you believe your way is the only right way, and so my way is by default wrong and evil and therefore not worthy of your consideration. As bad as it would make me feel, my feelings are irrelevant to you.

You cannot love me enough to give a damn.

Isn’t that it, really?

Hey, just wondering.

***

Oh, and to those that think this is a trick question: Not all questions that require you to admit that you are in error are trick questions. You might actually be in error.

Heaven forbid!

Coercive Morality; Love Me Or Else!

2010-02-13T16:54:00.016-05:00

"Fear of God is a barrier to real morality, not a path to it."
-Saint Brian the Godless

"Learn to think before you learn to believe, or you’ll soon believe that you don’t need to think.
-Saint Brian the Godless

"Jesus Christ is good enough to hide an awful lot of evil in a man."
-Saint Brian the Godless

The Christian God is Mysterious. We cannot even guess His ways. He loves us, His most prized creation. He loves us over all else. We are as His children, and He is our Father in Heaven, as the prayer goes.

However, while He tells us not to judge others (through Jesus) it appears that He does so not because it is wrong to judge others, but because He reserves *that pleasure* for Himself. He not only judges us all, but feels free to act upon that judgement and relegate our poor souls to a place of eternal torment when we die, and also from time to time feels free to hasten that demise in certain circumstances if we displease Him enough.

His actions belie His words, and vice-versa. We are in essence told to 'do as I say and not as I do' by God.

So what does this teach us? Where does that leave us psychologically as a society that is admittedly largely based in the Judeo-Christian mythos?

It teaches us that a being who is willing to absolutely lay us out and fry our ass until the stars go out, willing to torture us forever for just the 'act' of not believing in Him with zero evidence, willing to kill people instantly for just being curious or for other silly 'mysterious' reasons that only HE knows, a being that can and has laid waste to whole cities and even committed genocide and even nearly destroyed the whole world once except for one family, loves us. Somehow, that horrifically fearful and easily provoked being loves us in spite of all that. Loves us more than anything, so much so that He'll send us straight to hell if we give Him one ounce of 'lip.'

It makes people believe that love can involve abuse. It teaches the abusers that it's okay to abuse, and it teaches the abused that they should just 'shut up and take it' because He (he) knows what's best for you, because He (he) loves you in spite of the beatings or whatever.

And that one thing my friends, has sown one hell of a lot of domestic misery in the world. Think of the psychology of it, really think about it, and you'll know that what I'm saying is true.

God sets very bad examples for us, and then we do our best to follow them. It's not even conscious. Of course we do. He's God. The Ultimate Father Figure. And like all parents who tell their children to just 'do as I say and not as I do,' we His children invariably do as he does and not as he says. Actions always speak louder than words, after all.

So we have 'Divine Sanction By Example' of such things as Wrath, Self-Righteous Indignation, Pride, Murder, Jealousy, War, and all sorts of abuse, both physical and psychological. No, God does not tell us to do these things to each other. God does them (or has done them in the past) to us Himself.

It's been wonderful for our collective mental health. Just watch the news sometime.

It is the nature of genuine morality based in empathy that it cannot be taught at gunpoint. Even less can it be taught by threat of eternal damnation. It cannot be coerced in our children, nor can it be coerced in God's Children. What can be taught us by coercion, is fear.

Macho Christ Will Kick Your Ass!

2010-02-06T20:12:00.009-05:00

An interesting article in the New York Times recently:

Flock Is Now a Fight Team in Some Ministries

A pertinent excerpt:

"Recruitment efforts at the churches, which are predominantly white, involve fight night television viewing parties and lecture series that use ultimate fighting to explain how Christ fought for what he believed in. Other ministers go further, hosting or participating in live events.

The goal, these pastors say, is to inject some machismo into their ministries — and into the image of Jesus — in the hope of making Christianity more appealing. “Compassion and love — we agree with all that stuff, too,” said Brandon Beals, 37, the lead pastor at Canyon Creek Church outside of Seattle. “But what led me to find Christ was that Jesus was a fighter.”

The outreach is part of a larger and more longstanding effort on the part of some ministers who fear that their churches have become too feminized, promoting kindness and compassion at the expense of strength and responsibility.

“The man should be the overall leader of the household,” said Ryan Dobson, 39, a pastor and fan of mixed martial arts who is the son of James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, a prominent evangelical group. “We’ve raised a generation of little boys.”"

Promote kindness and compassion? Heaven Forbid!

Is it me, or are they just getting stupider?

Now I don't have anything against Mixed Martial Arts. I took karate for years, off and on, along with other styles of self-defense, and I enjoyed them very much and got a lot out of them as a person. That isn't the issue here.

These churches are choosing to attract young people, immature people, with an immature message of violence and agression. They are using the appeal of machismo to attract young people who don't know any better, when they should be teaching them to control these immature impulses and lead a more loving and peaceful life. Ironically, most really good martial arts schools would never consider trying an appeal to juvenile machismo in an attempt to increase their membership They have too much integrity, which is why they're the really good schools in the first place. Martial arts, at it's core, is more about attaining inner balance, the Yin and the Yang, than it is about kicking ass and taking names.

I guess the churches figured that they'd appeal to the dark side of people in order to bring them into the light or whatever. Great idea; in order to appeal to the unevolved personality, devolve yourself down to their level instead of attempting to inspire them to rise to yours. Too bad this totally negates the very meaning of their existence as followers of Jesus Christ like it does and all, but hey, business is booming, so who cares?

IS THE DINESH BLOG DEAD?

2010-02-03T15:15:00.002-05:00

Is the old Dinesh D'Souza blog finally dead? All I get when I try to go there now is an AOL opinion news page.

Let's meet up here... sign in and we can at least continue the conversation.

Hope to talk to you all soon.

-Saint Brian the Godless

My Son the Manifestation

2009-10-25T13:50:00.013-04:00

This is a tale of unlikelihood transcended.

First, a preamble: I am not a witch, warlock, demon or angel. If I am anything unusual at all, I am by nature an experimenter who keeps an open mind.

In recent years I have been experimenting with my own mind, in the manner of many who have gone before me.

Oh, it wasn’t my idea, not at first. I didn’t seek this out.

It all started with my synchronicities. I didn’t ask for them. But they started, at about age 35 or so, and they’ve continued apace until this day. (I am 48 at present)
There are far too many to dismiss with random chance and the bell curve. If I were to focus on any one, I might explain it away easily enough, but taken together they force me to at least consider the possibility that there is more to this reality than readily meets the eye.

For more background on this, see my “Big Brain Speculations,” if you haven’t already.

To summarize, I have been forced by what I have seen happen in my life in recent years, to at least consider the possibility that this reality, this universe or what have you that we all find ourselves in, is not based in matter and energy as it so readily appears to be. I have instead found myself seriously considering the possibility that this reality, everything we can perceive, is instead made of thought, or if you prefer, data. We only think that reality is matter and energy and that we are as well, because all of it, ourselves included, is thought or data. Or even ‘spirit’ if that floats your boat. At this most basic level there’s little difference between them. In other words, I have been entertaining the idea that reality is a dream. Similar to our sleeping dreams, yet very different in that we are all dreaming it together.

This is where my thoughts have led me. A lonely place, to be sure.

So naturally I have to test this all the time. It’s too unbelievable for me to just accept, even though my ‘experiments’ are the very thing which led me here.

The nature of these experiments of mine is usually that I attempt to influence reality in some way by merely thinking about it. Oh, not in the “abracadabra alakazam” magical sense, but instead more of attempting to change my subconscious picture of reality, since in the course of my mental experimentation it became apparent that if our thoughts influence reality at all, it is our subconscious thoughts that do so and not our conscious thoughts. The idea is that if I can change my own deep beliefs, change my ‘picture’ of reality, then the dream that is reality will resonate with that and also change. So they’re basically various techniques that taken together amount to controlled self-hypnosis.

>Synchronicity alert! (Intermezzo)

I felt that since I am in the middle of writing about this very thing, it’s only right to report to you a synchronicity that I’ve only just experienced ten minutes ago as I write this. I think if you can imagine having this sort of thing happen to you all the time you might feel more sympathy for my search for alternate explanations of what is going on with reality.

It went like this: Tonight I was sharing some of the music of my youth with my wife, a la YouTube. Fantastic thing, Youtube. For some reason I found myself thinking of Traffic with Steve Winwood, and so I let her listen to the band "Traffic’s" “Low Spark Of High Heeled Boys” one of my all-time favorites, and damned near a half-hour long, too. Steve Winwood is amazing. And what better name for a drummer ever existed than “Reebop Kwaaku Baa?”

Then I looked at the other "Traffic" songs listed there on YouTube and I played her another one that I recalled from my early days, named “John Barleycorn Must Die” and then in answer to her confusion explained to my darling wife the legend of John Barleycorn, the death and rebirth of the barley seed being an allegory of *our* death and re-birth… Then about twenty minutes later after she went to bed I picked up the novel that I am currently in the middle of reading, (re-reading actually, from twenty-five years ago) “Time Enough For Love” by Robert Heinlein, and started into it again. Well, four pages after the point where I picked it up again I read that the main character Lazarus Long had lost a couple of mules while on a pioneering excursion, and one of them was named, you guessed it, John Barleycorn.

John Barleycorn? Really?

I hadn’t spoken anything of the legend of John Barleycorn nor the song of the same name to anyone nor even thought of it in many years, perhaps decades, and then when I do, well twenty minutes later there I am reading it again in a random novel. It’s like an echo in reality. Sure, I had read that novel before, but a quarter-century ago, and there is absolutely no way that I would have recalled the name of a mule lost in transit from that long Heinlein story after all these years. I hadn’t even remembered that there were mules in the story, much less their names. I was thinking about the band "Traffic," and not the novel that I'd be getting back to in a while.

I really do get this all the time.

>End of Synchronicity Alert. Back to my son.

Originally when my wife and I decided on having a baby I thought that it could not hurt if I ‘affirmed’ in my mind that such would indeed happen. I constructed what used to be called a “sigil,” a physical symbol representing my son-to-be, even including his name, which we had already picked out. Connor. Lover of hounds, or perhaps lover of wolves. This is how one can influence their own subconscious mind. By constructing real-world representations of their desire in symbolic fashion. Anything that has emotional resonance works. By this I mean that employing ‘props’ makes the self-hypnosis more effective.

So I put a good amount of effort into the construction of a sigil representing my hopefully-soon-to-be-conceived son Connor. A symbolic representation, drawn on paper, carefully folded, with other ancillary actions performed. The more important I made it on my mind, the more likelihood of it affecting my reality, or so the theory goes.

Oh and yes, this is indeed called “Magic” or even “Magick” by some, but it’s really just a controlled form of self-hypnosis through symbolism and emotion. I prefer to think of it as focused meditation with the aid of props. I’m no Merlin. Just a humble experimenter. As one author calls it, I am a psychonaut. Or just a psycho. I'll leave that to you to decide.

So my wife got pregnant, tested pregnant the very next day after my experiment. Then she miscarried a month later. So much for all of my meditation. Or so it would seem.

We then tried various doctors, and the verdict came in. It was highly unlikely that we could ever get pregnant naturally. In fact, they were amazed almost to the point of disbelief that we had managed to get pregnant even the one time.

Our remaining options were artificial insemination, which we tried, and tried, and tried again, and after the many times that that didn’t work, all that remained to us was ICSI in-vitro fertilization, the proverbial “test-tube baby” At about twelve thousand dollars a try. After our insurance, which is fortunately a very good plan, it would still be the better part of four thousand dollars a try. And all that we had to spare in our bank account was about four thousand dollars.

We had run out of options. All that we had left was ICSI, but all we could afford was one try, one attempt, when our doctors all told us that we would likely need between four and six tries to get pregnant.

To gamble with all that remained of our savings on that one attempt which was likely doomed to failure, or not? That was the question facing us.

Now I have to say that while the first mental experiment was a failure in that the baby did not survive, it still produced (so to speak) a pregnancy, and an unlikely one at that, and right on cue, so I wasn’t giving it up yet. After all, this sort of thing costs me nothing to try. There’s no fee attached to meditating. And I still had the sigil that I used as a focus from the first time.

So in what in retrospect seems a truly foolish and even crazy thing to do, I decided that the one ICSI attempt would have to do. Moreover, I decided that it would work. So we scheduled it and went through the process. I had decided that I’d darn well make it work the one time. Looking back at it, it was brash overconfidence.

So I tried my meditating again. This time however I put a lot more effort into it, emotional effort as well as intellectual. I employed mental imagery from Judeo-Christian mythology in my visualization, since that was what I’d grown up with, hoping that it would have the most significance to my subconscious mind, and even employed fire at the end to rather dramatically destroy the sigil, imagining that I was ‘releasing it’ into the world. Drama is the key to this sort of thing, if there’s anything to it at all. There is no ‘magic’ in a sigil or in visualization. It’s all in the mind of the person doing it. In the person’s conviction, in their ability to truly believe something that is essentially unbelievable, just enough for reality to echo it in response, much like what I think happens when I get my odd synchronicities.

It isn’t easy to suspend one’s own disbelief. However, at the end of my little ritual with my sigil and visualizations when I lit the fire and attempted to muster as much conviction as I could, I had the distinct, albeit fleeting impression of *something* happening, almost like a distant sound in my head, gong-like almost, for the lack of a better description. I immediately *seized* on that fleeting echo, ‘pretending’ that it was real and symbolic of a successful completion to the operation, all in order to more effectively convince myself that something happened, causing myself to believe in it all the more so because of it. Even if nothing happened, I did a very good job of convincing myself that it had, is the point.

Did it *work?*

All I can do is list the ‘results,’ if such they were. I still can’t really believe that this stuff can work, but here’s what happened afterwards. Once again my wife tested pregnant, the very next day. Of course that’s when she would have tested pregnant since we’d gone through ICSI, so nothing miraculous in that. The fact that the one attempt worked was a one out of four or five shot however, and the fact that it turned out to be a boy (as I had affirmed) was another fifty-fifty of course. So approximately a one-out-of-ten, or a ten percent shot that it would have worked as it did. Plus a very healthy baby testing off the charts on height and in the 95th percentile in weight. A big, healthy boy named Connor, who looks enough like me at that age that he could easily be my clone. We’d selected the name in advance of it all of course, and I’d employed it in my meditations, so that’s his name.

Here’s the strange part, or one of them at any rate. I knew it would work right after I ‘heard’ that ‘sound’ in my head at the end of it, and I knew that it would be a boy. I just knew it. Now maybe I could have been wrong, but I had definitely defeated my own doubts in this matter, as I had set out to do. Did the fact that I had defeated all of my doubts influence the outcome? Who can say? Most would deny it, as being irrational or even crazy to even think it. Myself, I’m not so sure. It *felt* like something happened, and the results are exactly as hoped for. No evidence that I made it happen, but none that I didn’t, either. Also, I’d done this sort of thing before and always had pretty good results with it, although never with something so important as a baby.

So that’s my story, incredible as it may sound. And incredible it will remain to most of my readers I think. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I wasn’t the one involved.

I like to think of it like the Shakespeare quote. “There are more things in heaven and earth…”

Minor Update, April 13, 2010:

I neglected to mention that I also visualized him looking just like me only with his mother's eyes, bright blue. I even spoke of it often with my wife before the first pregancy and subsequent miscarriage.

My eyes are hazel.

He is the exact image of me as a child, so much so that I've got the rather uncommon experience I think, of looking at the living face of myself as I used to see it in a mirror as a very young child. I cannot tell you how eery that is, and still very, very cool at the same time.

And yes, his eyes are bright blue. We can be sure now because he's over 9 months old. Cue the Rod Serling intro...

A Prayer

2009-09-25T00:11:00.026-04:00

"The oddity
Is that the sanity
Of humanity
Is in short commodity"
-Saint Brian the Godless

***

This post was Hypochrist-Inspired on another blog which shall remain nameless and somehow still survives post-mortem in a sombie-like state somewhere between real life and putrefaction, with a little of the flavor of both.

...

A Prayer**

Lord Jesus, you represent the Divine Mind,
And the source of all intelligence and knowing.
Guide our nation at this critical moment,
As the immoral hypocritical Republicans attempt to scuttle health care.
Give our elected Democratic officials the intelligence to know
That religious conservatives are petty and self-centered as a species.
Give them the wisdom to realize
That Christians only TALK about love and morality, then do the exact opposite.
Give them the strength to resist the idea
That Republican Christian Conservatives are worth even the powder to blow them to hell,
Or that they are in any way real followers of Christ.
Give your people the courage to speak up
And to hold Republican public officials accountable for their hatred, hypocrisy and mental retardation, even unto incarcerating them for their sins.

Save us, Lord Jesus, from a culture of stupidity created and encouraged by those who claim to follow you yet aren’t smart enough to even know what that means,
And let every reform in our public policy
Be based on love for others and genuine selfless morality rather than greed or self-righteous pandering to the ignorant for personal gain,
In the light of your Infinite Cosmic Consciousness,
For you are and always were so much better than those who co-opt your good name out of Pride and Arrogance and not in Humility.

A-Fucking-Men.

(**My prayerful response to "Prayer and Testimony Will Shape Health Care Debate" by Fr. Frank Pavone)

***

You know, my ultimate, best prayer, the one that I really would most like to come true, more of a wish or a dream than a prayer really but still... My most sincere 'prayer' would be that those who believe that they are Christians and yet somehow are still capable of adjusting their inordinately flexible morality in such a way as to be able to support an unjust war in Iraq (no connection to 9/11 whatsoever,) those who are totally comfortable with the idea of our country torturing people, those who can somehow find their way to not supporting something so obviously good for America (not to mention Christ-like) as universal health care, those who spread blind kneejerk hatred for others with whom they disagree up to and past the point of actively demonizing them and even speaking of violence against them, those who value prenatal life a thousand times more than they do post-natal life, those who do not care one whit about the less fortunate but are always the first to claim that they do, those who go to church and pretend to themselves that just that, mere membership and attendence in a church is all they need to do in life in order to 'be saved,' those who consistantly claim the moral high ground whilst dwelling in the swamp of egotism, indifference and depravity; and those who in general pay only lip service to a spiritual path which they claim to be on, named after a man (Jesus Christ) who apparently acted absolutely nothing like they do, will one day (hopefully soon) wake up in the morning and have a mind-shattering "Aha!" moment that goes something like this: "Holy Christ On A Popsicle Stick, What the hell was I thinking? I've completely soiled the very name of Jesus Christ in every conceivable way! Doh!!!" and from that point forward feel actual genuine *painful* empathy for their fellow humans all over the planet regardless of faith or race. You know, like any decent Atheist does.

However if they truly were to realize all of that in one moment and had to suddenly digest what incredible jackasses they've made of themselves in their shallow overweening pride, it is doubtful that they would survive the experience. A plaque of exploding hypochristical heads would sweep the globe.

I like to call it "The Crapture."

Hopefully they'd manage to do it on the fouth of July, so that the percussions could be explained away as fireworks. Their last patriotic act. How fitting. I must admit that I would be there in the front row with my hand over my heart.

THE HYPOCHRIST

2009-07-13T21:11:00.006-04:00

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of strange vagina, I shall fear no evil
For my Rod and my Staff are comforted…”

Thus Mark Sanford prayed in earnest for guidance from the Lord, and the Lord answeredeth him with a painful priapic episode that could only have been divinely inspired, even if it might have been Viagra induced. It was true love, as true as the love of Capulet for Montague, if that involved hot latin titties in the moonlight, too.

And thus Mark Sanford enteredeth into the realm of the Hypochrist. For to be unfaithful is perhaps a sin, but one I wouldn’t normally care about that much in an elected official, it being their private business…
…unless of course the person involved was actively promoting his own flawless Christian morality all his life, used it to get elected, and even had gone so far as to speak out against the very idea of homosexual marriage, as a threat to traditional marriages…
Traditional heterosexual marriages like that of say, Mark Sanford.

He publically flayed his wife, virtually assassinated her in front of the entire world (nice job, that) and probably destroyed his children in the process as well. But at least he’s not a homo. After all, they’re yucky and sinful in the sight of God. Whereas philandering self-righteous bloviating hypocrites who cheat on their opposite-sex traditional wife are obviously okay with the Lord, and no harm to the family unit either, unless you consider publically nuking your entire family unit harmful to it.

Ted Haggard is a similar sad story of a man rising to power by speaking out against the very things that he practiced in his private life. So of course is Larry Craig. It’s a type, and unfortunately a fairly common one.

There is a special brand of hypocrite about in the world nowadays. Oh, they’ve been around for millennia, but their star has been on the ascendant lately. Their voices have been more strident. More frantic. The voices to which I refer are those of the Hypochrists, our modern-day Pharisees.

Pontificating on their ‘superior’ morality which they supposedly derive from God rather than common sense, they fail and fail and fail again to actually demonstrate any of it, thus proving it illusory. They are always the ones attacking the morality of others while they fail miserably to be even remotely moral themselves. They call themselves Christians while they consistently act in a diametrically opposed manner to anything that Jesus would have done or even would have remotely approved of. And they inform people of other faiths or of none at all how inferior and wrong they are, while they demonstrate not only inferiority and wrongness themselves, but even bring it to the point of a psychosis.

And they can’t even understand why we non-Christians would be so angry at their hypocrisy, their condemnation of others for that which they do themselves. They don’t see it at all. They can’t see the sheer humor in the Larry Craig saga, or the sad ridiculousness of Mark Sanford. This isn’t just stupidity; it’s *phenomenal* stupidity! Comedians can’t even improve on it for the sheer humor factor, it’s that stupid.

These are people who have made a deal with the devil of ignorance. They’ve chosen to believe rather than to think. And they are taught that those who choose otherwise are to be reviled. Their entire belief system is all about making them feel good about being ignorant and attacking knowledge whenever possible. They bond with each other in the foxholes of the war against logic and reason. (No atheists in those foxholes, that’s one thing they’re right about)

Their belief system serves not to help them grow spiritually as one might think, but instead to inflate their egos to the point where they feel absolutely certain of their superiority over others, any others, all others not so conditioned, all others that believe or think differently. And thus it retards whatever spiritual growth might have been possible, for in order to grow spiritually you can’t be an egotist. You can’t just ‘know’ that you’re right all the time, or what room for growth can there be?

They are like trained monkeys, most of them. Triggered by keywords that their masters have programmed into them. No thought, no analysis is required of them; merely their condemnation of whatever they’re trained to condemn, and of course their voting for whomever they’re trained to vote for. And they obediently oblige, since to them hate is love and right is wrong, black is white and God is Satan.

(Or Santa. One of the two. I get them mixed up. But whoever they’re worshipping, it’s no God of goodness and Light, that’s for sure.)

They share the common bond of being hateful, small, and petty. Their senses of humor reflect this, usually involving slurring people or ideas in a manner reminiscent of mean-spirited spoiled semi-literate children. Lately we hear them ranting against little Malia Obama, for wearing a peace-symbol shirt. Calling her and her family thugs and saying that her mother likes to make monkey noises to her and such. Unbelievable.

It’s very hard not to hate them.

Not hating them has occupied a lot of my time lately.

Because they’re practically asking to be hated.

And yet, if I hate them, it lessens me and not them. It doesn’t faze them at all. It pollutes me and they learn nothing. In fact, they would only interpret my hatred as proof of their rectitude, of their righteousness, of their 'superiority' to me and others like me.

They love to hate. It’s their hobby, their comfort, their favorite pastime. The more they hate and demonize others, the better they feel about their own sorry sad shallow selves in comparison.

I don’t want to fall into the trap of hating them. It’s too easy. And yet perhaps I already have.

How can one not hate such ignorance, ignorance raised to the level of a mental disease? An ignorance founded in a long tradition of ignorance, made unassailable by sheer repetition in our society… How not to despise the utterly despicable? How not to hate people who have made braying hateful asses out of themselves for God, and believe that they themselves are without flaw or sin?

And yet, by far my biggest motivation for *not* hating them, for trying to somehow love them too, in whatever way is possible, is that by hating them I will become more like them. This is an intolerable option to me.

Any suggestions?

The Additional Benefits of Reading

2009-05-13T13:22:00.027-04:00

“Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a dangerous enemy indeed.”
-Anne Rice, The Witching Hour

“The ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.”
-Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1964

“The connection between reading speed and comprehension; a film is made up of still images flashed in rapid succession to simulate movement. Slow down the film, and the movement and meaning slows and the film's impact is diminished. Viewers won't learn as much about the film as if it were shown at normal speed. With reading the same thing can happen. When a person reads word by word, like frame by frame, they are not reading on the level of ideas. You need to read on some level that's more conversational and allows things to coalesce into ideas themselves.”
-Doug Evans, Institute of Reading Development

“So please, oh PLEASE, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install, A lovely bookshelf on the wall.”
- Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

***

When I was a child I had a lot of excess energy. I was very inquisitive. I wanted to learn about the world as fast as possible. However my (very loving) family into which I was adopted was nothing like me in that regard. Wonderful people, but with all the curiosity and imagination of complacent basset hounds. They loved me very much and gave me a great childhood; however I was so different from them that I almost think sometimes that they thought of me as more of a curiosity than a child. Something to be wheeled out at dinner parties to recite religious-based poetry verbatim at the age of six. “Oooh, he’s so smart…” Well, compared to them, I guess I was.

“Dearest Loving Jesus, please help me to be good,
And do the things and say the things that all good children should…”

(It’s burned indelibly into my memory. I wish I could forget that shit.)

Fortunately they did one thing right. Almost as if they realized that they had little to offer me in the way of satisfying the black hole of curiosity that burned within me, they did the one thing that they could have in that pre-Internet age to set me on a path whereby I could do so myself. They taught me how to read. More than that though, and an important distinction, they taught me how to *love* to read. It was a big thing with my mom that I should both be able to read, and should love to read, even though she herself did not. I have to give her a lot of credit for getting that one right.

I remember that it was in the fourth grade though, that I really got hooked on reading. Like a pathetic junkie, I mean.

After that I remember spending days with the Hardy Boys. My standard rate was five of them in eight hours. Not bad for a twelve-year-old.

Once when I was about thirteen I actually threatened my dad that if he didn’t buy me a certain book that I had been waiting to read which was “just out in stores” that I would have to steal it. Like as if it would be his fault, so he'd better buy me the damned book or start me on a life of crime or something. To his credit, I didn’t get the book, and did get spoken to very sternly about my self-centeredness. Good job there, dad.

And then in conjunction with all of this, the Wonders of Science Fiction were revealed unto me by a used car salesman that worked for my uncle’s AMC dealership, where I would frequently spend time as a child due to the fact that my dad was the General Manager. I am forever indebted to Bill the car salesman who gave me his discarded pulp mags, and later some appropriately silly novels of Alien Invasion and other standard fare SF of the day that caught my interest. When I discovered Larry Niven (a four-book set given to me by my aunt at Christmas) I was hooked for life. And of course on television there was Star Trek to further fuel my imagination and oddly enough I think even shape my future morality to some extent. That was when I managed to convince my parents to let me watch it instead of them watching Lawrence Welk. Ahh, back in the day of one TV per family...

(As an aside, I have to recommend Star Trek to anyone as an excellent thing to park your kids in front of regardless of how bad that sounds. It’s like imagination gasoline with a positive message.)

Sometimes I think that if I hadn't found reading, I'd have long ago gone insane, or at the very least clinically depressed. It was everything to me as a child.

I have come to believe that developing a true love of reading is much more important that we realize. If you do not like to read, you do not develop your visual imagination anywhere near to its potential. With your visual imagination, in tandem with your logical ability (which we all have been trained to think is the more important by far) we have essentially two huge tools with which to accurately judge what we perceive in this world, rather than only one.

Visual imagery adds dramatic depth to the level of our understanding of what we are judging with our logical abilities, and thus how we perceive reality.

With a well-developed reading ability, when you are examining a logical problem you can better understand what the logical words you are saying to yourself in your head actually mean in relation to the “world out there” due to the fact that there is also a very detailed illustration in your mind that you are automatically manipulating to match the word descriptions of various things which occur to you in relation to your train of thought. This ability is like being in possession of a futuristic 3-D viewer in your mind that can show anything you desire it to, automatically, no effort involved. You do not have to think “I wish to visualize this sequence of events that I am now thinking of in verbal form” when you are a practiced reader, because you automatically access visual imagery when you think of verbal information. When you think of a verbal series of events, you automatically have the accompanying visualization of it to 'look' at as you do so. You’ve learned to visualize what you read in a book; this is automatically transferred to what you “read” out loud to your self in word form when you think logically about anything whatsoever. It's not that non-avid-readers cannot do this; just that they cannot do it nearly as well. By becoming an avid reader you have installed a bridge in your mind between verbal thought flow and visual imagery, and have subsequently strengthened that bridge with every new book that you have read.

People who have no great reading skills do not develop them because they do not read stories and novels and adventures and mysteries, cannot 'get into' such stories, because they were never coaxed to go beyond the tipping point where one starts to visualize what one is reading, and so it is my belief that they also automatically have a real handicap in being able to visualize day-to-day problems well enough to solve them optimally.

Often times when I cannot "see eye-to-eye" with someone, I feel that the problem lies in their inability to visualize what I am talking about as well as I am visualizing what they're talking about. Sometimes it even seems to me that they aren't capable of adequately visualizing what they themselves are talking about.

(I must always consider the possibility that I am the one in error of course, but still, even after that...)

Visual imagination is also a key to empathy since you must be able to first truly imagine the travails of another person in order to develop empathy in the first place, and you can’t do so without being able to accurately visualize what their day-to-day life is like, their situations, their dilemmas. Words alone, or even words coupled with the increasingly-normal-now sub-par power to visualize, just aren’t enough to really do that. With a well-developed visual imagination one almost automatically puts one's self into the other's place and imagines seeing out of their eyes for a bit. And once one does that, one is automatically empathetic to their lives and can better relate to them as fellow humans.

So teach your children to read, and then go that one step further and teach them to love to read. It’s one of the biggest gifts that you can give to them. Oh, and it won't be easy. There are a lot more distractions out there now than in my day. Do it anyhow.

-StBtG

WHAT A RUSH!

2009-03-01T05:21:00.015-05:00

I’m writing this right after having watched the Rush Limbaugh speech at the C.P.A.C. on CNN.

It was amazing. It needs to be standard classroom material in Abnormal Psych class.

I’ve never seen so much projection in all my life. And I was an usher at Showcase. Apparently most of what is wrong with the Democrat (sic) party and Liberals in general is exactly, precisely, amazingly, and completely coincidentally what we Liberals think is wrong with Conservatives. Of course their side is right in all of this, because they base their entire lives on their immutable beliefs, so naturally they trump mere facts whenever they meet them.

Rush’s message to conservatives here seemed to me, basically, that it’s not only okay, but desirable to never change anything about yourselves, never be nice to your political “enemies,” not to seek real bipartisanship, that egotism is a virtue instead of the ultimate cause of all evil, that Barack Obama is out to destroy America and that you all need to wish him to fail too, that it’s optimal to not care if others dislike you, and to me most salient given my past conversations about it, that *belief* is far more important that *thought.* To Rush, beliefs are sacred, to be clung to at all costs, or you are a deficient human being.

(Update to above paragraph: The reader should know that this is not mere conjecture on my part; he either directly said or strongly implied all that I stated above.)

And he did all of this, and so much more, while being very eloquent and humorous. Lotsa of one-liners and good old-fashioned (read: 1820) zingers. Granted that the appalling insensitivity and distastefulness of his humor renders it very unfunny to me. However, he really *reached* his audience, no doubt about it. He literally lit a fire in their shorts.

Most of which audience is of course in the double-digits, IQ wise… And the ones that weren’t have no souls. Just like Rush.

He was so consistently and frequently wrong, and very often *diametrically* wrong, about everything, and so pompous and proud about all of that, that I was usually in the middle of yelling at the television about how incredibly stupid and even nauseatingly disgusting his last statement was when I would realize that he was now already on to something even more ignorant and reprehensible.

The combination of eloquence, disinformation, hatred, and sheer verbal fire reminded me of Hitler. No really. Not a hyperbole this time. If the country were still stultified enough to fall for it, he’d be dangerous not only to us, but to the entire world, because the right wing would elect him President on the basis of his communications skills and ability to creatively insult Liberals alone. Then he’d go for Poland. Morgen der welt. He’s a skilled manipulator of belief with no real morality whatsoever, and he’s incredibly (considering how evil he is) popular and thus a potential serious danger to us all.

And perhaps he reminded me, ironically enough, of the Antichrist as well. I’m talking about the fundamentalist’s description of him here.

Now I’m sounding like him, I know, but that’s his skill. To precisely reverse things so it seems to his mentally-limited audience that we fellow Americans who are Liberals, are trying to do to them precisely what, in reality, their Conservative leaders (now including Rush apparently) have always in the REAL WORLD been trying to do to us.

Fomenting paranoia, xenophobia, racism and hatred that effectively is a real skill, and Rush has a tenth-degree black belt in it, I must admit.

Plus, the right wing Christians actually seem now to believe that the antichrist will be a liberal atheist. What a joke. As if. Their very description of him fits a Christian far-right-wing conservative best (Father of Lies, The Deceiver, etc.) and we already “know” that he’ll believe in God. After all, it says so in the Bible. (Now be properly awed and believe it or go to hell. Makes no nevermind to us.)

Now here’s what I see as the Silver Lining to this atrocity that the media is nice enough to merely call a speech:

I think I want Rush to succeed. Oh, not in his wishes for the country, not ever that. I want him to successfully convince the most self-righteous right wing side of the right wing to NEVER CHANGE THEIR WAYS. I seriously doubt that he’ll be convincing anyone else but those people, so there’s not very much real danger and a lot of potential for backlash.

I want them to all start now having the confidence to parrot everything that Rush said today, to everyone with a brain. Because we’re now in the MAJORITY, those of us who came equipped with one. And if the Conservatives were paying attention to reality instead of living in their usual state of allowing belief to trump all thought, they’d have long ago realized that there is actual change in the wind here. A change to a more intelligent country.

(Egad, the Conservative Anathema! Nobody will just believe shit anymore!)

We’ve started to open our eyes. It’s no less than that. And I don’t think I’m being too hopeful here. More and more people are spurning the hatred now, and as the eyes open, they can see the old ways for just what they are. They just weren’t paying attention before. But now it’s in their face. And it’s about to be kicked up three notches.

The CPAC attendees literally sucked it up. This is what they knew that they needed to hear! That they were all right after all, that they have *always* been right, and will always *be* right in spite of losing the election and being so unpopular. To create a good idea all you have to do is believe in it, and thus insist that it's a good idea, and is one, no matter what. To counter all objections to it, you merely turn up the Belief Volume and insist more convincingly.

In fact, Rush has now programmed his dittoheads (now including all in attendance at the C.P.A.C.) to specifically *not care* if *anybody* complains or disagrees with them, and never let it bother you or even touch you in any way if anyone is offended by what you’re saying. So I literally can’t wait to start to see the Now Revitalized Core of the Conservative Movement start to shred their credibility *en masse* now that all restrictions have been removed, even their humanity.

I think that many of the real die-hard right-wingnuts with the tinfoil hats will now be coming out of the woodwork and really showing their true colors as never before. They will have new resolve, inspired by His Pomposity’s certainty and rhetoric and inflammatory comments to believe in themselves now as never before. Now they’ve been programmed by the Master Programmer Himself to be totally honest about themselves and their bigoted, stultifying, changeless beliefs regardless of what others think or say about them. They will have heretofore unheard-of vigor and renewed *faith* in their cause, and a new, deeper commitment to their *beliefs,* for the simple reason that they have now been so totally and effectively sold on them themselves. The Bloviating Bovine has convinced them beyond a shadow of a doubt that they’re absolutely correct about everything, regardless of such silliness as facts, and they’ve been now told that if they just insist on that with no fear, no caring who they insult, no caring what the Hated Evil Liberal Media says since they’re evil anyhow, that they will somehow regain popularity. So declareth the Rush. So believeth the sheeple. Amen.

Really???

They have a better chance with the armed revolution that is suggested on Hannity’s site. (No, really, he has a poll about which kind of revolution the real Americans want now that it’s obviously time for one what with the black guy in the White House)

More on this as it occurs.

I can’t even find a link to his speech yet. You all really need to see it, if you haven’t already. Its evil raised to the level of an artform. The more emotionally perceptive you are, the more it fucks you up. If you can watch it and not scream, you’re a better man than I.

I want all readers to eventually relate back to me on this blog what you thought the most horrifying statement was.

There were so many, I think Keith Olbermann will do a whole week on it at least. And Rachel Maddow will just snap like a dry twig. She’s probably dead already, poor girl.

***
UPDATE: Here's part one of the speech.

Part two

Part three

Part four

Part five

Part six

Part seven

Part eight

Part nine

Part ten

Ron Christie defends the valorous Rush

DESPERATION OBFUSCATION

2009-02-12T13:20:00.008-05:00

By a lie, a man...annihilates his dignity as a man.
-Immanuel Kant

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time unless they are religious.
-Saint Brian the Godless

***

I’ve been having an email argument with a Christian biblical literalist, on and off for the last few days.

It’s been fascinating… And a lot of laughs. But this one was the best.

We were arguing about the supposed inerrancy of the Holy Bible.

And then he sent me this gem:

DO RABBITS CHEW THE CUD?
Leonard R. Brand
Chairman, Department of Biology
Loma Linda University

Origins 4(2):102-104 (1977).
Related page — | IN A FEW WORDS | Leviticus 11:6 is sometimes used as an example of an error in the Bible; it states that hares chew the cud. Hares are not usually known as cud-chewing, or ruminating, animals. Is this really an error in the Bible, or did Moses know what he was talking about?
When a cow swallows a mouthful of grass, it goes first of all to one compartment of the stomach referred to as the rumen. The culture of microorganisms that exists in the rumen digests the grass and converts much of it into nutrients which the cow can utilize. Then the cow brings the microorganisms and leftover grass back to her mouth, one mouthful at a time. She chews it and sends it on through the rest of her digestive tract. Thus the cow really doesn't subsist directly on grass alone, but also on the protozoa and bacteria that she breeds in her rumen (Carles 1977).

The process of digestion of grass by microorganisms is referred to as fermentation, and it occurs in many other animals besides the cloven-hoofed ruminating animals. Special forestomachs for fermentation are also found in kangaroos, whales, dugongs, hippopotamus, sloths, and colobid monkeys (McBee 1971). Other modifications of the stomach or some part of the intestines to provide a fermentation chamber are found in rodents, rabbits and hares, gallinaceous birds, horses, hyrax (McBee 1971), and in mallards (Miller 1976).

Some herbivorous animals consume part of their own feces, thus recovering fermentation products that have passed through the digestive tract. This process of reingestion of feces occurs in many rodents (Thacker and Brandt 1955) and in all genera of hares and rabbits (Carles 1977; Hamilton 1955; Kirkpatrick 1956; Lechleitner 1957; McBee 1971; Myers 1955; Southern 1940; Watson 1954; Watson and Taylor 1955). Reingestion of feces is an especially well-developed practice in Lagomorphs (rabbits and hares) and is important for their adequate nutrition.

Lagomorphs produce two kinds of fecal pellets which are produced at different times during the day. When the animals are active and feeding they produce the familiar hard pellets. When they cease their activity and retire to their burrows or resting areas, they begin producing soft pellets which they eat as soon as they are passed (Myers 1955). Rabbits reingest 54-82% of their feces (Eden 1940), which they apparently swallow whole, without chewing (Watson 1954). The soft pellets are composed of material from the fermentation chamber, which in the Lagomorphs is located in the cecum, a blind pouch at the beginning of the large intestine (McBee 1971). The soft pellets are composed mainly of bacteria, mixed with some plant material, and each pellet is enclosed in a proteinaceous membrane secreted posterior to the colon. These tough membranes remain intact for at least six hours after reingestion. When swallowed they pass to the fundus portion of the stomach, where they remain for several hours (Griffiths and Davies 1963). Other food that is swallowed moves past the accumulation of soft pellets and goes on through the digestive tract. The membranes around the pellets and a buffering solution in the pellets control the pH, so that fermentation continues in the pellets even though the rest of the stomach is acid (Griffiths and Davies 1963).

The process of cecal fermentation and reingestion helps the rabbit in several ways. Amino acids and proteins are synthesized by the bacteria in the cecum, using nonprotein nitrogen (perhaps urea). Amino acids are absorbed directly through the walls of the cecum and provide 4.4-21.8% of the animal's daily energy requirement (McBee 1971). Proteins synthesized in the cecum are carried to the stomach in the soft pellets. This protein is important to the nutrition of the rabbit. Experiments have shown that "nitrogen balance in the rabbit was reduced 50% if soft feces were not eaten" (McBee 1971). Fermentation and reingestion also improve utilization of sodium and potassium and provide 83% more niacin, 100% more riboflavin, 165% more pantothenic acid, and 42% more vitamin B12 than would be available if soft feces were not consumed (McBee 1971; Myers 1955).
Is this special digestive process analogous to the rumination, or cud-chewing, in cows? There are both similarities and differences between the two processes. The rabbits are different in that they do not have a four-part stomach with a rumen, and the material that reaches their fermentation chamber has already been chewed and partially digested. Cows and rabbits are similar in that they both have a fermentation chamber with microorganisms that digest otherwise indigestible plant material and convert it to nutrients. Some of the rabbit microorganisms are different from those in cows, but many of them are the same or similar (McBee 1971). Both cows and rabbits also have a mechanism to pass the contents of their fermentation chamber back to the mouth and then on through the digestive tract.
Madsen (1939) wrote an article entitled "Does the Rabbit Chew the Cud?" Southern (1940) concluded that reingestion has an advantage to the rabbit "equivalent to 'chewing the cud'." Griffiths and Davies (1963) concluded that "we consider that the fundus of the rabbit stomach, loaded with soft pellets, is analogous to the rumens of sheep and cattle."

Carles (1977) compared cows and rabbits and reached the conclusion that rumination should not be defined from an anatomical point of view (the presence of a four-part stomach), but rather on presence of an adaptation for breeding bacteria to improve food. On this basis he stated that "it is difficult to deny that rabbits are ruminants."

What is the correct explanation for Leviticus 11:6 — is it an error in the Bible, or is it evidence that Moses had a source of information far ahead of his time? Since rabbits and hares have a process that is so similar to cow rumination that it becomes a question of the technicalities of one's definition of rumination, it would be difficult to justify interpreting Leviticus 11:6 as an error in the Bible.

***
Salient part of above article: "The rabbits are different in that they do not have a four-part stomach with a rumen..."

WHAT?

So, because a rabbit eats its own shit, it’s a ruminant! Voila!

It HAS to be a ruminant.

Because the Bible says so.

Whenever belief comes into conflict with cold, hard facts, belief wins every time.

So what if the scientific classification of a ruminant is very clear? So what? All one has to do is look for the one or two scientists that disagree with convention and have their own agendas, being Christians themselves… And quote them as if they were a part of the mainstream. As if one uncorroborated source is equivalent in value to established, peer-reviewed, generally accepted science.

I find this particular Desperation Obfuscation uniquely entertaining. Because it would seem that ingesting fecal pellets is not the sole province of the lagomorpha. Many Christians do it too. And apparently they also think that regurgitation is the equivalent of defecation, and so it often is, for them. When they regurgitate scripture and dogma, it’s all crap to me.

Further note on above article:
The rabbit doesn't even chew the fecal pellet. It swallows it whole. So no cud chewing of any kind. Even if you define "cud" as their own poop.

PHARISEEING IS BELIEVING

2009-02-05T11:56:00.003-05:00

For among Judeans there are three forms of philosophy.
Now Pharisees are one sect, Sadducees another,
But in fact the third, called Essenes, seems to be the most reverential discipline.
- Josephus, Jewish War 2.119

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.
-Charlotte Bronte

***

PHARISEEING IS BELIEVING

Jesus warned people of Pharisees in the Bible, often speaking of them in a negative light. But what was it about them specifically that He found so offensive? He was actually quite clear on the matter:

***

Luke 18 (King James Version)
1And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint;
2Saying, There was in a city a judge, which feared not God, neither regarded man:
3And there was a widow in that city; and she came unto him, saying, Avenge me of mine adversary.
4And he would not for a while: but afterward he said within himself, Though I fear not God, nor regard man;
5Yet because this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me.
6And the Lord said, Hear what the unjust judge saith.
7And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them?
8I tell you that he will avenge them speedily. Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?
9And he spake this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others:
10Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican.
11The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.
12I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.
13And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.
14I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.

***

Luke 11:37-54 (King James Version)
37And as he spake, a certain Pharisee besought him to dine with him: and he went in, and sat down to meat.
38And when the Pharisee saw it, he marvelled that he had not first washed before dinner.
39And the Lord said unto him, Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the platter; but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness
40Ye fools, did not he that made that which is without make that which is within also?
41But rather give alms of such things as ye have; and, behold, all things are clean unto you.
42But woe unto you, Pharisees! for ye tithe mint and rue and all manner of herbs, and pass over judgment and the love of God: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.
43Woe unto you, Pharisees! for ye love the uppermost seats in the synagogues, and greetings in the markets.
44Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are as graves which appear not, and the men that walk over them are not aware of them.

***

Matthew 23 (King James Version)
1Then spake Jesus to the multitude, and to his disciples,
2Saying The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat:
3All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.
4For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.
5But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments,
6And love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues,
7And greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi.
8But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren.
9And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.
10Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ.
11But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant.
12And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.
13But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.
14Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.
15Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.
16Woe unto you, ye blind guides, which say, Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple, he is a debtor!
17Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gold, or the temple that sanctifieth the gold?
18And, Whosoever shall swear by the altar, it is nothing; but whosoever sweareth by the gift that is upon it, he is guilty.
19Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gift, or the altar that sanctifieth the gift?
20Whoso therefore shall swear by the altar, sweareth by it, and by all things thereon.
21And whoso shall swear by the temple, sweareth by it, and by him that dwelleth therein.
22And he that shall swear by heaven, sweareth by the throne of God, and by him that sitteth thereon.
23Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.
24Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.
25Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.
26Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also.
27Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.
28Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.
29Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous,
30And say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.
31Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets.
32Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers.
33Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?
34Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city:
35That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar.
36Verily I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation.
37O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!
38Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.
39For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.

***

So while the actual term “Pharisee” merely refers to a Jewish sect, when Jesus spoke of that sect in a negative light what part of being a Pharisee was he talking about? What common discerning features of the Pharisees seemed to really annoy Jesus?

In the first story it is plain that Jesus is pointing out how the Pharisee was too proud and thought himself superior to the lowly Publican. This is made especially clear in the last line: “for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.”

In the second story Jesus openly rants against Pharisee *hypocrisy.* He even uses the exact word, calling them “hypocrites!” with an exclamation point. He also speaks of their egotism throughout.

In the third similar example from Matthew again we see the phrase “12And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.” But we also have “13But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.” And many additional cries of “hypocrites!” to be found throughout.

I’m sorry that my “Luke’s” are out of order. I hope it’s not a sin or anything.

So what are our common denominators here? What is it about the Pharisees of His day that Jesus found so personally repellant?

Going by the Bible, the only source available, we would have to conclude that it’s a mixture of hypocrisy, egotism, and pride.

Now, I’ve spoken of the evils of Pride before. How subtle a sin it is. How the proud are never aware that they are the proud, and think of themselves as the humble. They’re even proud of being humble, ironically enough. And excessive pride naturally begets hypocrisy. So they do go rather hand-in-hand, is the point.

In order to really excel at being a modern Pharisee one has only to be proud of their religion, and how righteous belonging to it makes them, how much less sinful than those *other* people they are.

Speaking incessantly (and proudly) of Jesus and His path of love and inclusion and yet living the opposite one of pride and exclusion is in my opinion the defining hypocrisy of the modern Pharisee.

Judging others when you yourself are lacking is another distinctive feature.

To call one’s self a Christian requires nothing. But to actually be a Christian, you have to follow the path of Jesus Christ. And that path is the narrow path of love. Of loving all others, no matter how different they are, no matter what you think of their way of life, no matter how sinful they look to you.

Because it’s not our place to judge.

I’ve never been against the path of Jesus Christ. It’s a good path. One of the very best, in fact. There’s nothing better than all-inclusive love. Jesus is more than just all right by me.

It would seem however that the path of the Pharisee is much more popular nowadays.

The wide, easy path. The one that goes in a spiritual circle.

People are weak. The path of Christ is the difficult path, so it’s no wonder that so few Christians are capable of following it.

I wish they’d at least realize that they’ve strayed from it, but the pride keeps them blind to that forever.

For the ignorant are always ignorant enough not to be able to see that they’re ignorant, and the proud are always proud enough not to be able to see that they’re proud.

Such is the nature of human folly.

So to any Christians reading this: If you’re a proud Christian that feels that people of other faiths (or none at all) are somehow inferior…

Congratulations! You just might be a Pharisee!

THE FUNNIEST VIDEO CLIP CONTEST

2009-01-06T19:00:00.006-05:00

Yes, this is exactly what it sounds like.

Multiple entries allowed. Post the link(s) and we'll all get to vote on them. (No voting for your own)

I am not counting this as one of my regular posts. I just thought it might be fun, and we all need to laugh more, I think. Myself included.

So please post links to whatever video or film clips that you think are just too funny to remain continent while watching. Doesn't matter what it is, as long as it's funny. Any type of video, a section of a commercial, a home-made video, anything. I want to have to use a Depends here.

The best ones, let's say the top five for sure, will go into my photo gallery at right permanently. Lost forever in the plethora of well over a hundred confusing images where no-one ever goes. Because they're all afraid of the one hidden rickroll perhaps.

Hey, it's the best prize that I can come up with without spending money, and that's out.

I will not be posting any of the videos, by the way. All of my favorites are already hidden away safely in that aforementioned vertical Sargasso Sea of picture links on the right. I will be voting on yours, though. And keeping track of it all.

Oh, and while we're at it, what the hell...
If anybody has actually taken the time or feels like doing so now, please vote for your favorite photo link in my gallery. In most cases I've tried not only to find a funny (or interesting) video or picture or site, but also to select a picture that is not directly representative of it but relates to it in a humorous fashion.

If you've got a lot of time to kill, well, I've just solved your problem there......

***

Oh, and PS:
Let's not get too much into discussions of religion or atheism or spirituality or politics on this one. I just posted one yesterday for that, and there's still the Big Brain Blog at top right to post to... This one's really just for fun.

THE EVIL THAT MEN DO

2009-01-05T02:21:00.018-05:00

“As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.”
-Voltaire

“The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.”
-Joseph Conrad

“What is objectionable, what is dangerous, about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.”
-Robert F. Kennedy

Does Evil Exist?

Ask a Christian and the answer will be “of course it does.” And if you tell them that you're an atheist, they'll be happy to define you as part of it.

However the religious Christian defines evil as a metaphysical reality. Evil is like one of the two teams that we can choose to be on. And evil and good are in a constant struggle, the two teams being led by God and Satan respectively. Or is that Satan and God? Yes, that’s it. I get them mixed up sometimes.

Not being a Christian one might think that therefore I’d be likely to say that evil does not exist. And if one were talking about the above metaphysical variety as understood by Christians, you’d be correct. I don’t believe in God or Satan or the conflict between the two, so how could I believe in that definition of evil? To me that definition of evil is itself evil!

(Because it vastly oversimplifies the idea so that those who follow it and believe in it are likely to make errors of judgment that hurt others.)

I use the term evil often in my writings. However not as a metaphysical concept. I use it because it’s a useful word to describe what I would define as human behavior patterns that are harmful or deleterious to other people or to one’s self. These types of behavior patterns are the result (I think) of the person having a basic imbalance within themselves, within their psyche.

So I relate the idea of evil to an internal imbalance.

Now, how do I mean that?

Well, if a person is not properly balanced between their logical/rational side and their emotional/intuitive side, then their behavior will reflect that. Too much or not enough of either side, and the person is incapable of correctly judging reality, and by misjudging it can thereby easily make decisions that others would consider “evil.” But of course it’s not quite that simple. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

Everyone has an emotional side and a rational side. But the rational side must be developed (and constantly updated as well) in order to be accurate, and the emotional side also must be developed *beyond the point of self-centeredness* in order to be intuitive or to have access to the higher modalities of emotional function such as agape-type love of others. Mere underdeveloped (self-focused) emotionality with insufficient logic to moderate it is almost always both powerful and very counterproductive, and all logic with no higher emotion to regulate it is either stagnant or tends toward the pursuit of personal power, since where else would such a person derive their motivations from with no higher emotional desires?

As a person matures and hopefully starts to integrate their two sides and seek a balance, both of their “sides” start to come into tune with each other, and cause each other to develop in unison by mutual interaction. Higher feelings such as true selflessness, empathy, and agape-style love do not happen in the person that has not gone through such a process of self-rectification between all elements of the two polarities of the psyche.

Through such an *integration.*

An integration of the Yang and the Yin.
Of Masculine and Feminine sides of one’s own personality.
Of Logic and Intuition
Reason and Emotion
Descrimination and Loving Kindness
Thoughts and Beliefs
And so on, basically forever…

Here’s a very old alchemical maxim that relates to this process and the hoped-for results:

“VITRIOL”

The word, which used to refer to certain solvent acids and is usually used today only to refer to verbal (acerbic) anger, was used long ago as an acronym and mnemonic by the medieval alchemists for the very process of attaining enlightenment itself.

Thus in Latin, we have Visita Interiore Terrae, Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem. V.I.T.R.I.O.L.

In English this reads, “Visit the Interior of the Earth, There, by *rectification* you will find the Hidden Stone.” In modern English without the symbolic frills this means “Go within yourself, and by making things “right” and balancing (rectifying) what is there within yourself, you will attain enlightenment.”

So if Ultimate Balance leads to the light, perhaps then Ultimate Imbalance leads to the darkness.

We are, let’s recall, discussing Evil and not Enlightenment here.

The person that does evil never realizes that they are doing evil. They just think of it in some other way, since if it were evil *to them* they wouldn’t do it in the first place. Most if not all of them believe that they’re doing good and not evil.

Do you think Hitler knew that he was evil?

Of course not. Hitler thought that he was doing the highest good, even possibly that he was doing God’s work for Him…

How could Hitler lie to himself like that?

No internal balance whatsoever. Everything skewed toward the logical/rational side, since his higher emotional/intuitive side was underdeveloped, stunted even. Most of us have at least some development of our higher emotional side, but Hitler didn’t seem to. Powerful primitive emotions like anger and hatred and fear were all there, but not their higher counterparts such as empathy and love.

Such a person can’t even tell when they’re lying to themselves. And there would be no check to his ego; nothing to stand against his logical side when it informed his emotional/desire side, which only desired to “better mankind,” that it “had a plan…”

There was nothing within him to feel the horror and revulsion that he should have felt. It had either never developed, or had been excised. So all his emotional side could answer was “Why not?”

Now the interesting thing is, we all are motivated by our emotional side. Really, all motivation comes from there, no matter how logical we think that we are. We are creatures of emotion, even those of us who deny that to ourselves. That part of our brain, the emotional part, is much older than the rational part. Many of us make the decision to trust our logical sides more than our emotional sides, but even that is ultimately based in emotional desire, the desire to not be wrong all the time. The logical side is a newer acquisition, much more recent evolutionarily speaking. It’s so “new” that it’s almost like a tool that we can choose to use or not to, and not “really” as much a part of our very identity as our emotional side is, and therefore many of us choose to not use it to its best advantage, thinking perhaps that it’s less important, since we don’t really “feel” it. We should try to recall in such instances that after all, it is what differentiates us from the “lower orders.” For properly used, the logical side can shape and mold the emotional side so that it evolves to the point where it can feel the higher, selfless emotions, just as in the process the emotional side in return provides a constant flow of desire to attain a more balanced state and so regulates the logical side so that it conforms to the emotional side’s ever-changing (evolving) desired ideals... all while the logical side in turn is still shaping the emotional side and helping to direct it’s evolution, and so on. It’s a mutual process that is simultaneous and any one part of it is hard to even define without also describing at the same time all of the actions of the other parts. I think of it like a pendulum, or an oscillation back and forth between the two sides, each constantly checking the other.

***

So this is how I think of evil. A psychological imbalance, and perhaps also a spiritual one as well. Nothing to do with religion, however.

So what of Biblical Evil then? What of Satan, the Adversary? The Eternal Struggle?

I cannot begin to believe in some dark deity and a whole system of demons and subordinate demons and various mechanisms that was put in place to tempt us all to stray from the path of righteousness, all decreed somehow by a supposedly loving God. To me, that is by far more nonsensical than anything from the Brothers Grimm.

I’m afraid that I can see this Biblical Evil thing as no more than an elaborate story that was concocted for the poor, ignorant people so as to make them properly fearful and to assure that they forever remain properly ignorant, and thus obedient. I can see that this story of Satan and the Horrors of Hell and Damnation was carefully constructed so as to be the stick in a system of so-called carrot-and-stick conditioning that has sucessfully warped the minds of the multitudes. Warped their minds so as to believe that all the world’s problems are due to this deep dark fearful tangible external EVIL that is some orchestrated metaphysical reality decreed by God and executed by Satan so as to both test and tempt us while we’re alive and to punish us eternally after we die, so we’d all better be really faithful in God and not think of the details too much.

Evil exists, yes. But not the external openly horrific evil of some demonic Satan who wishes to torment us with his hell full of fire and eternal pain. That’s an evil mirage constructed by evil people so as to lead the good astray into their evil fear-based belief system. I see real evil in the internal imbalance of one’s own mind, thereby causing it to misjudge both itself and the outside world enough to do real harm, all the while honestly believing that it is doing the exact opposite.

The Pastor Warren Dilemma

2008-12-21T01:29:00.010-05:00

“A shrewd man has to arrange his interests in order of importance and deal with them one by one; but often our greed upsets this order and makes us run after so many things at once that through over-anxiety to obtain the trivial, we miss the most important.”
-François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld

"Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio."
(Nothing is so odious to knowledge as too much shrewdness)
-Seneca (Quotation best known from its use by Poe in "The Purloined Letter."

Much is being made about Barack Obama’s choice of Pastor Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church to speak at his Inauguration. Pastor Warren, author of “The Purpose Driven Life,” a book perhaps best known for defusing a deadly hostage situation (along with some methamphetamine of course) will be delivering the invocation.

(Incidentally, another copy of the book was found in Scott Peterson’s car…)

Pastor Warren is a vocal opponent of gay marriage, you see.

So the far left is up in arms that Obama would give such a closed-minded buffoon a podium at such an important event, and the far right is angry at Pastor Warren for even being seen as willing to stand up in the same room with Obama.

Both are good signs. Because Pastor Warren is the balanced choice. It makes sense that the balanced choice pisses off both extremes.

Obama needs to unite the majority of this country in order to get even a quarter of his agenda done, considering how ambitious that agenda it. This includes recalcitrant Christians that as of this moment are thinking of him as somewhere in between Osama Bin Obama, and Satan.

Pastor Warren, while having the common Christian myopia about gays, and having even publicly equated homosexuality to pedophilia and incest, is still a much more logical thinker than most of his Evangelical brethren, and far less hypocritical. And his church is enormous.

So he is the perfect bridge.

If Obama were to (for instance) speak to Pastor Warren about actually reducing the number of abortions drastically without making it illegal, I think that common ground can be found. And once the administration has Pastor Warren’s “blessing” as it were, a large percentage of Evangelicals will have something to think about. And they just might, too. Also, I do not see Obama ceding any ground to Pastor Warren’s side as regards the issue of Gay rights. He’s already made his move to the center on that issue by not technically backing Gay marriage while supporting Gay civil union with all of the equivalent perks.

Obama is as advertised, we are now seeing. He wishes to be a uniting force. We are not used to seeing anyone like this in American politics. We’re used to hearing people *talk* as if they were like this. Huge difference. The pundits are befuddled. Some of them seem angry and are apparently feeling betrayed. This will pass. He is not even the president yet, and already the country is straining at the bit for him to take over this leaking ship and steer it toward safer harbor. Or more like dry dock. Sometimes I think that some of the talking heads of the news business would like to see the President-Elect storm the oval office and physically decapitate Bush and proclaim himself President now, for the sake of the country of course.

(And oddly enough, looking at all the *horrific* “midnight regulations” that Bush & Co. is passing in their final days of power, they may be right; not that Obama really should behead Bush, but that, if he did, that we would be far better off, and that far more lives and treasure would be saved in the long run.)

If Obama were to alienate the evangelical community as the far left would have him do, perhaps justifiably, they can do a lot of harm to him. As it is, the RNC is already commencing its new life mission, to block whatever they can block, regardless of cost to the country, so as to try to “win” something, anything. They’re in the middle of one hell of an identity crisis, and they are desperate to gain back even a shred of their self-respect. (Perhaps if they acted respectably they wouldn’t lose it so easily) The Evangelical community would work with them against the common foe, as they often have in the past. Soulless people like Tony Perkins would come out of the woodwork and pronounce what is and is not moral to *us God-fearing folk* and would have no compunction in demonizing even a good man if it is in their political best interests. Florid-faced angry Caucasians would be on every television station casting aspersions on the very humanness of the man, spraying spittle sporadically as they splutter their specious spleen.

Pastor Warren is not of that ilk, which is why Obama chose him. He cares about the poor, or actually seems to. He seems genuinely to wish to live a Christ-like life, unlike so many who with debatable accuracy also call themselves Christians. He is reasonable on many issues, and is not an uncompassionate man, from what I can tell.

Now, I do not see Obama’s choice of the man in any way as an indication that he is moving toward the right. I see it as a validation that he will rule from the center-left, which is a far batter place to rule from than we’ve had in a very long time. He will accomplish this by not only creating a spirit of fairness and inclusiveness but also at the same time by, to paraphrase LBJ, having those who would stand outside his tent and piss in, stand instead inside and piss out.

I didn’t see it this way at first glance. It seemed an extreme choice. Pastor Warren after all, from the viewpoint of a gay American, is an espouser of hatred and ignorance. Indeed, his attitudes are appallingly closed-minded in many areas, in spite of his openness in some others. But at least he has his areas of openness. They’re hard to find in the Evangelical community. And it’s the very fact that he does represent or is at least related to by many people that hold hatred in their hearts for Gays and even for Liberals, that makes him such a valuable person to have “on the team.”

If he plays this right, both extremes will come around eventually, at least in part. And the middle will never have a qualm in the first place. So it would produce the maximum best-case-scenario result. Balance.

Obama knows that he cannot please all of the people all of the time. But then again, now that he’s been elected, he no longer has to. This is one tough, balanced, smart person that we’re dealing with here. Get used to it.

The "Big Brain" Speculations

2008-12-02T16:26:00.020-05:00

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
-Edgar Allan Poe

"In my head I know I'm me; no one else in here to see. But what if my head is just in my head, and everything else, living or dead, is just a dream that we all share? Could you believe or even care, that we're all one, and you are me and we're also all that we can see? Could you believe it, just a bit, that it's all in the head, but the head is it?"
-Saint Brian the Godless

"What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists?
In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet."
-Woody Allen

***

“The Big Brain”

Part 1: The Simplest Explanation for Everything:

What would be the simplest explanation for this universe that would account for the maximum number of observations that we've made of it? I used to ask myself this all the time. I felt strongly that the truth of it couldn't be something that we'd thought of before, since all of those theories have huge holes in them, even science’s theories in a way, though science is the best single way to look at the material world of all so far. But still science sees infinities in time and distance, and quantum paradoxes galore, along with things like the wave-particle duality and entanglement, which are hard to explain. So I thought about it obsessively for years and studied a lot of different sources, and this is what I finally came to think about our universe.

To me it seems that its all a vast mind, or very similar to one. A “Big Brain” with no body required. Or if you prefer, a kind of dream, only not like a “normal” sleeping dream. Now I know that's a hard thing for a Christian, or most anybody, to ever believe. But give me a chance to explain. If you’re unfamiliar with this sort of concept it will certainly appear eminently dismissible, but please bear with me.

Imagine it as if we're all complex thought patterns in a vast mind of some sort. We think of ourselves as matter, and the universe as matter and energy and space and time, but if it were all more like a mind, it negates the problems of the infinite. The universe would be as large as we think it is, and as old as we think it is... The more we looked, the more we'd find, but in a mind this is all interplay of consciousness and not the real traversing of space, so infinity is not a problem... We feel as solid matter and a rock feels hard and heavy, but they're consciousness or thoughts too, but since *we* are as well, the rock feels heavy and we feel solid to ourselves. As we've developed over the years we've formed this vast mind by our subconscious expectations of it, since it *is* us, and all other things as well. Thus it conforms to our expectations of it, follows logical rules, etc. We are individuals, yes, but only at the conscious and near-conscious levels. At the deep subconscious level we all share the same identity, as does everything else, since we're all made of the one thing, mind, in a world of the same. So, the person looking out of your eyes and calling yourself "me" is, at the deepest level, *identical* with the person that looks out of *my* eyes and says the same. God, or the universe, is One, and we're all a part of it, connected at every point. There's only *one* "sense-of-identity" in the universe. That's what that means. We just all have it and each of us thinks it is unique to us as individuals, but it's not. Now if in this vast mind or “dream” you manage to convince yourself that it's all due to an anthropomorphic God up in some nebulous heaven, this reality/mind will accommodate you and give you "signs" that you're on the right track, *even if you are not!* It will give you exactly what you expect it to in your deep subconscious.

(Or perhaps better to say, “our” deep subconscious...)

So this "dream" can be rather deceptive.

If I meditate strongly enough, I get the same types of signs, and I'm not a believer in any God whatsoever.. Strange coincidences, synchronicities, and actual events taking place that related to my meditation... Even at times, wish-fulfillment... You can produce this with prayers, if you *really* believe deeply. It won't matter that what you really believe in isn't true, either. You can pray to a big Shoe in the sky, and if you have enough belief, real-world phenomena can and will occur that seem to be an answer to your "prayers" with no God needed other than this universe, which in it's entirety, can be called God but more accurately is just the mind that we all call home. It's not a human mind, but it's composed of all human and non-human minds and all other things as well.

This seems simple enough to at least visualize if you have an imagination. Now tell me why it can't be true. You can't. Much like God, there’s no way to prove it wrong. However unlike God, there are actual scientific research results that point to it *possibly* being true, that seem to at least indicate that it’s not as unlikely as it seems on the surface. And it explains everything in the world. Not one thing left out. It's the only theory that can even come close to doing that. All scientific problems, the mind-body problem, the placebo effect, miracles, faith-healings, synchronicities, deja-vu, "signs," ESP, clairvoyance, all psychic phenomena including hauntings, and even your faith in your God.

It can’t be proven yet, but it looks like it might be provable in the near future, if it’s true, of course. The beginnings of proof are already there. Look at the quantum realm, with all its strangeness and problems, which vanish if we assume that the universe is all consciousness. But as of right now, it can’t be proven. Not yet. Neither can your God, or anyone else’s, but since it explains not only your God but all others, and science, and scientific fallacies and paradoxes, and indeed all unsolved “mysteries,” and actually even has hopes of being proven in time by science, it’s far superior to any other faith or religion. And it’s simple, when you understand it. By Occam’s Razor, it is most likely to be the correct theory, if you detach yourself from your habitual view of reality and just think of the probabilities from an un-reality-biased perspective.

For me, I was the agnostic almost-atheist that loved science and the scientific method, was completely skeptical of anything that even smacked of the paranormal, then at about age 36 started to get 'signs' or more accurately perhaps jungian type synchronicities in my day-to-day life, synchronicities that I soon realized always related to thoughts expressed when I was in an emotionally excited state, such as when I was joking around with friends. Oh, and since the friends involved saw them too and thought that they were creepy, I know that it wasn't just a delusion. All of this worldview of mine that I have expressed above came about in my mind as a *result* of my having these experiences and then investigating them with various thought experiments as my tools, all subjective of course, but compelling nonetheless. Very compelling indeed.

Part 2: The Design and the Designer:

We're the designer. All of us, together, designed this place, by our very attempts to observe and understand it, from time immemorial. We created the dream-reality within which we now find ourselves. It's not solid, dead matter and energy like we think it is; it's all just consciousness. All that exists is consciousness, a vast sea of consciousness in which we are patterns of consciousness within the larger whole.

The world's far from perfect because the designers are far from perfect.

There's no plan, other than seeking for it to make sense. That's why it makes sense. Because we need it to. That's why it looks designed. And the closer we look at reality, the finer detail we provide for us to see. The more powerful our telescopes become, the larger the universe gets. It's all in our expectations and we fix it in place with our logic and science.

That's where creation happens. In our observations and expectations. In our minds. It's all in our minds, but our minds are all one at the deepest level anyhow, so it all agrees. It has to. We're all one.

I know, I need to take my meds, etc... except that, it is not as crazy as it sounds.

What is this universe, if indeed God does not exist in an anthropomorphic sense and there is no personified creator, and if science has only part of the answer? I mean, weird things sometimes seem to happen that nothing can really explain. Psychic events. Healing through prayer. ESP. Ghosts. Out-of-body experiences. Sightings of the Blessed Mother. Or the devil. Stigmata. Personal "miracles" and occasional contacts with divinity or consciousness or spirit or SOMETHING that leaves us confused or exultant or suicidal.

What is this place? What is the most logical conclusion, when even science seems suspect, at least in explaining some phenomena?

I think that they most likely answer to that it that the entire universe is made of consciousness and not matter as we think of it. Like a vast mind of some kind. Or like a dream, if you will. Not a normal dream, but similar. More realistic, of course, for one thing. More consistent. More painful. More pleasurable.

But a "dream" in whose head? Who is dreaming it?

The only possible answer to that is that we are! In fact, it's a dream without a specific dreamer required, since to think one is required is missing the point of it *all* being a dream, including us. We *all* dream it together. We are the dreamer and the dream. It’s all “One.”

We are “reality-biased” knowing nothing else other than this “consensual” reality/dream, so we “naturally assume” that a body is necessary for a brain, and that a brain is necessary for a mind, because that seems to be how it works here in our reality, but if our reality is a mind or a dream and not a place, then the rest becomes superfluous.

We dream that we are bodies, and so of course we are bodies in our dream.

And since we're the most advanced life form participating in this particular dream, we're the best of the dreamers, the most able to construct a complicated dream like this, one that seems so “tailored” to us. No God required. We did it; as we looked at it, looked *for* it, it all became real, because that’s how reality works. We looked for something, and we dreamt it up as we looked, just in time to see it and think that we had nothing to do with it. The closer we looked, the finer the detail that we created. The farther away in space that our telescopes can see the more of the dream becomes real, the larger the universe becomes. We find new stars, but were they there before we had the telescope to look? What I’m saying is, incredibly enough, perhaps not.

And it's easy to see why some people think that God is real and claim to receive signs and communications to that effect, since if they believe it hard enough, reality will give them false evidence of it being true due to their preoccupation with the subject warping their vision of reality.

>>>UPDATE APRIL 25TH 2009 UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE:

Another way of thinking about the so-called "Big Brain" is to think of ourselves as dreamers by nature, pure and simple, nothing else to us really but that.

I read somewhere the Buddhists have this thing they call "Maya." It's a word that sort-of means the reality that we perceive that is a representation of what is real. The connotation that I got out of it is that all reality is a symbolic illusion, a story if you will. Or a dream; but not like sleeping dreams.

Perhaps we all are dreamer-beings by nature, and we all get to share in one dream and have as many others as we want to for ourselves. We have many dreams but we only have one common "interface" dream that we've all agreed upon is real. In the dream in which we all share and which we all agree is not a dream because it is not like our other dreams, rules have sprung up, because different dreamers had to reconcile and "average out" in order for there to be a consensus on "reality." So what we think of as reality is an illusion, another kind of a dream, but it is the only thing we've got, the only reality that we've ever had, and so we might as well think of it as real. It's as real as anything ever gets.

Oh, and one really important thing about Maya that I remember. The Buddhists have a saying about it.

"Maya seeks to deceive..."

I take from it to mean that since one's expectations can actually to an extent shape the dream as long as no serious conflicts arise, if one allows their expectations to dominate their thought, their expectations will be mirrored by Maya to some visible extent and thought to be proof of truth. Verification. So the religious man has the religious vision, but the vision was provided by Maya and not God, just giving the man what he's obsessed by... I've never expected the answer to the ultimate question to be the Christian God, not since I was a child. It became actually a silly concept in my mind. So Maya gave me a nice, generic, nonsectarian paradigm shift. If it is indeed for the better, then it will be growth. I have hopes. And even some pretty good subjective evidence.

(The only kind possible for something like this)

IS THERE IN TRUTH NO BEAUTY?

2008-11-17T19:45:00.019-05:00

"It is easier to perceive error than to find truth, for the former lies on the surface and is easily seen, while the latter lies in the depth, where few are willing to search for it."
-Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived, and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic."
-John F. Kennedy

"Science has promised us truth. It has never promised us either peace or happiness."
-Gustave Le Bon

IS THERE IN TRUTH NO BEAUTY?

(-Star Trek Original Series, season three episode title)

Today’s discussion is based on a simple question: What is Truth itself?

You have thirty seconds. No pressure.

…

Well, it certainly sounded simple, didn’t it?

This is indeed a complex issue, and so I hope you’ll forgive me if I ramble a bit. I will strive to not be too “disconnectedy.”

They say (whoever “they” are) that one man’s truth is another man’s folly. This seems to have a grain of “truth” in it, to me. The idea being that the Truth is a subjective thing. Or at least it is so in effect.

(Tangential conundrum, also derived from an old Star Trek episode: “This statement is absolutely true: everything I say is a lie…”)

(Don’t fry your brain over it)

At its most basic level, in the make-believe world of black-and-white, the truth is one of two choices, the other being falsity. Right and Wrong. Simple. Unfortunately the real world that we all live in is far from black-and-white.

In the world of mathematics, one plus one is always two. This then can be said to be a mathematical “truth.” However it is only so easily defined as such because mathematics is a “closed system” in that it is a ‘world’ that is in its entirety rigidly defined and explained by logical rules and axioms. It is implicit that the truths of mathematics are all within the contexts of mathematics. One cannot for instance, quantify love.

The real world is more complex by far than the mathematical one. One has to take the human variable into account along with a myriad of other factors. In many (if not most) situations, there is no black and white, there are only shades of gray to choose from.

How to choose? Therein seems to lie the difficulty.

The Truth can be defined as such only within the contexts of the question or statement involved. For instance, if I were to ask “Is your name John?” the context of the question is easily understood, as is the only true answer. Your name is either John, or it isn’t. If your name is not John, then it is not true that your name is John. And you can easily tell that your name is not John if it isn’t John. You would be in an excellent position to know what your own name is. In fact, you are the definitive authority on your own name. So if I were instead to make the statement, “Your name is definitely John” and your name is in reality Fred, then you can know that my statement is untrue. (But if you have amnesia...)

However if I were to state (for instance) that “I am certain that there is a God, and that He is Jesus Christ,” the definition of ‘Truth’ becomes more problematic.

If I am certain that it is true, then I can hardly be said to be lying as I maintain it to be true. But if it were to happen not to be true, then I am unknowingly telling, or at least repeating, a lie. And let’s face it; there either is or isn’t a God, and if there is one, then it either is or isn’t the Christian God. We may not be in a position to know yet, but these are the choices on the table, and all of them can’t be true. The possibility exists that there is no God whatsoever, and thus that all religions are wrong. If I cannot acknowledge this, then I cannot acknowledge reality itself.

If I try to investigate this question of God’s existence and even His divine identity using logic and science, agnosticism is the only rational result. Even complete atheism is assuming too much. There is just no way to tell, so there is just no way to tell, period. Anything more is, alas, wishful thinking. All indications may point to ‘no God or Gods,’ but in the end, there’s no real way to tell. So to claim such knowledge one way or the other is to be rather silly.

However the only real way to investigate the truth or falsity of anything, including the deity, is still by the application of logic and reason, and of course their avatar on earth, science. If these things fail, substituting faith is never a viable option. It may be an attractive option, but never a viable one.

The man of faith claims that he knows that his God is “true,” because of that very faith. In essence this is saying “I know it, because I know it.” This may sound fine to another believer, but to the unbiased it’s a complete absurdity.

One cannot claim the strength of one’s belief or faith as proof of that very belief or faith. This is a completely circular argument. It is less than senseless. It is ridiculous. If one believes something to be true, it’s still only a belief, and will not approach the strength of a truth until it is subjected to rigorous testing, and by that I mean logical testing and not religious. The believer certainly cannot point to scriptures as proof of their belief either, for the same reason. Scripture is a statement of faith, is designed to strengthen faith, and as such is hardly unbiased. The Bible is no more an unbiased view of Christianity than the Koran is of Islam. All religious texts are biased toward the religion that they represent, for what should be obvious reasons.

And I need unbiased, yes I do.

John Keats said in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” And yet, the truth is often ugly, or so it seems. And the beautiful is often a lie. The Easter Bunny is “beautiful” in that it brings eggs to little children and has a cute nose. Alas, it’s a lie. Bot flies are the Truth, and they lay eggs in little children's noses. Not much beauty there.

Perhaps the Truth is in reality always beautiful, but is perceived as ugliness by those of us that are incapable of understanding it. (Some can see beauty in even bot flies…) Or perhaps it is simply that while all Beauty may be Truth, the set of all Truth additionally includes much that is not Beauty. Maybe old Keats was saying that we should just ignore the ugly truths and concentrate on the beautiful ones in order to be happy. Perhaps even that we should concentrate on some beautiful “truths,” in spite of the fact that they may only be true in our minds.

Unfortunately if this is so, I’m one of those annoying people that can’t ever be happy with a pretty lie when I just know that the ugly truth is out there somewhere.

I think that in many real-life situations there is no precise formula to apply so as to always arrive at the absolute truth. To my mind it is usually a process of considering all possible options, of thinking laterally as much as you can, and choosing the best, “most true” option.

When confronted with a deep question with no clear resolution, to me finding the “truth” is and must be finding the best available option that works optimally in the given context, in our consensual reality. Note that I say “our” reality, meaning the reality agreed upon by the maximum number of unbiased observers. Note that I say “unbiased” meaning not followers of any particular belief system, as this would skew results.

(To those that would say that logic, reason, and science are also a belief system, my reply is “Yes, they’re the only one that gets real-world results, which is why I chose them over yours in the first place.”)

Getting back to religion as an example, if I were to choose a particular faith instead of my agnosticism and claim it to be true to the world and to myself, then I would be invalidating all the other many faiths by my choice of that one. I’d be saying that not only is my God true, but that all the other Gods are false. Yet, I can find no justification for doing this that doesn’t also work in the opposite direction, if I for example happened to be a believer in one of the other faiths instead of the one that I chose. This therefore to me seems a very bigoted and inherently flawed method of finding the truth. It seems mere wishful thinking, when you really look at it. The simpler and I think more “true” choice for someone like me in this situation is by default to reject all religions as highly unlikely, since there is not one that stands out as any “truer” than any other one, and to look back to consensual reality again for my answers. After all, none of the world’s religions are “necessarily” true, and indeed none of them have any real-world evidence of being true, except to someone that is already a believer in one of them and is therefore willing to accept the word of other heavily-biased believers or the evidence of their own biased feelings as their “proof” in lieu of actual verifiable evidence.

So what is Truth? To me the Truth is a word whose meaning is particular to the situation and context, because it is an indicator of the “least false option of all available options” and not some metaphysical absolute. Telling the truth as you know it may still not be telling the Truth. There is more responsibility to it than that. One must educate one’s self adequately in the given contextual paradigm in order to select the truest option, and if you haven’t done that, ignorance is no excuse. And one must doubt in all things, especially in one’s self, for the truth to eventually be revealed to you.

You have to learn to see the truth before you can tell it.

And to some people, that’s the hardest thing in the world.

RELIGUN NEWZ

2008-11-10T12:27:00.015-05:00

Well, let’s look at the headlines. Lots of funny stuff happening.

An eight-year-old boy recently killed his father and another man that rented a room at their house with a .22 caliber weapon. Execution style.

More fun than Halo, I bet.

The boy was previously brought by his father to visit his priest, to try to get the boy to not fear guns. Because it’s important to have your eight-year-old armed to the teeth. God says so.

I think it worked. He definitely lost his fear of guns altogether.

Praise Jesus and pass the ammo.

No doubt there’s more to the story. I’d be surprised if there was no abuse. And since he killed not only his dad but the other man as well, I’d be surprised if they weren’t both abusing the boy.

(Especially in a Christian home)

God goes so well with guns, for some reason. Like peas and carrots. And so well with child abuse too. Religious authoritarians love nothing more than having a helpless child that they can utterly control in every way.

Or wouldn't it be ironic if, instead of the abuse scenario, it was as simple as the father teaching the son to hate homosexuals, and then the son accidentally seeing his dad and this other man locked in a gay embrace?

Link

Oh, and on Election Day, the day that blacks finally achieved so very much after so very long, some of these very same blacks helped to institute a ban on Gay Marriage in California. Many of the blacks voted both for Obama and the ban. In fact, if so many new black voters hadn’t come out for Obama, it’s likely the measure wouldn’t have passed at all.

It’s like, we’re free, finally! Praise the Lord! At long last we can enjoy oppressing another minority!

Reminds me of the stories of when the Romans finally stopped feeding Christians to the lions and they immediately went into the stands to watch other people getting fed to the lions.

The only reason that so many blacks would vote against gay marriage, is of course due to the fact that the majority of them are Christians. And God says it's icky.

It’s so blessed and holy to get involved in your neighbor’s personal life like that. It’s what Jesus would have done. If he were a complete asshole that was nothing like how he was portrayed to be, that is.

Well, at least it’s nice to see that the white Christians and the black Christians can now both enjoy having a particular irrational hatred in common like that. Now they can bond over it, and the healing can begin.

Link

And let’s see. Any more religious hate out there? Oh sure, there’s the black church in Springfield Massachussets, burned to the ground minutes after Obama won on Election Day. Arson.

How much you wanna bet that it was burnt down by a member (or members) of a white church? Just sayin…

Link

You know, when I see horrific news stories involving hatred or abuse along with incredible stupidity, I always look for the religious angle. And all too often I find it.

I wonder why that is...

Oh yeah! I keep forgetting that religion, in its extreme forms, is a psychosis. This is not an exaggeration for effect. It’s literally true.

A psychosis is when you are no longer in touch with reality.

A better definition of fundamentalist Christianity (or fundamentalist Islam, for that matter) is hard to find.

Too many Christians live in a reality where gays are evil, Liberals are socialists, hate America and love abortions, smart people are not worth listening to, and God is all we need. Specifically their version of God, of course.

This reality in no way corresponds to actual reality, but this in no way distresses the believers. They’ve decided to believe it, so it becomes a minor technicality that it isn’t really so. They wish it so, they have decided that it is so, and so it is. No amount of logical discourse can change their minds, since their minds are not based in logical discourse. So with eyes turned toward heaven, they stumble through life feeling better about themselves with every stranger they oppress.

All religions, especially the more authoritarian ones, when extended to their extremes, become cults.

If you think about it, anything that offers rewards in the afterlife in trade for obedience in this one just naturally lends itself to evil ends.

The real nature of Pascal’s Wager is a con, not a bet.

I always wonder how a believer can see the evil that another believer is capable of, and just dismiss it as utterly unrelated to them. They should be able to see that that other believer that did the evil both believed in God and believed that he himself was sane. All insane people believe that they’re sane. All psychotics believe that they’re not psychotics. One would think that, due to observing this, they’d want to check and see if they’re really sane themselves once in a while.

Nope. No need to. After all, they have faith.

Why is it that the only two men that I’ve known in my life that I also know to have committed child abuse, were both practicing Christians? Did they not glean anything from their faith that might have stopped them? Sadly no, and it is my opinion that they instead gleaned something from their faith that enabled them. One of them is to my knowledge still offering up communion to seniors at the local nursing home. I rank him as one of the most evil people that I’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting, but his faith is unshakeable. So is his faith in himself, by the way. He’s fine with himself. A very proud man. One of the biggest assholes walking the planet, but he’s cool with it. That’s faith.

No really. That IS faith. That’s what faith can do to a person. Faith is only good and positive when it’s faith in something good and positive. The down side to that is, if you happen to have faith in something bad and negative, you’ll never know, since its faith.

Faith means you won’t ever question it. Or yourself. Ever again.

Oh well, I didn’t really want to rant against the Christians again. I hope that I’ve made it abundantly clear in the past that it’s only the fundamentalist and evangelical types that these occassional rants of mine really aply to anyhow. Christians that actually try to act in a “Christ-like” manner are not part of the problem. They are, in fact, part of the solution. Those that understand that loving thy neighbor doesn’t mean that you get to pick your neighbor, and that the path of Jesus is a difficult one precisely because it demands that you give up your egotism and learn to focus on loving others instead.

If only the other kind didn’t keep making the news. It gives the whole religion a bad name.

Empathy and Intellect

2008-11-02T14:01:00.005-05:00

“Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolution.”
-Kahlil Gibran

“When a good man is hurt all who would be called good must suffer with him.”
-Euripides

“The most valuable things in life are not measured in monetary terms. The really important things are not houses and lands, stocks and bonds, automobiles and real state, but friendships, trust, confidence, empathy, mercy, love and faith.”
-Bertrand Russell

“If you cannot feel the pain of a stranger, it cannot be said that you truly love anyone but yourself.”
-St. Brian the Godless

Empathy and Intellect

I doubt that anybody can deny that many of the worst people in our history were intelligent. Hitler may have been stark raving mad, but his intellect was not in question. In fact, in order to be truly evil on a global scale, it may even be said that one must be very intelligent indeed, for evil on such a large scale requires careful planning.

When I was a child I revered intellect like most Christians revere Jesus. I thought it automatic evidence of goodness, indeed as inherently good in and of itself. I was sadly mistaken, as I learned later on in life. Many of the smartest people around are the worst examples of humanity out there. They dedicate their intellects to the pursuit of their selfish and egotistical ends rather than to accomplishing good in the world. To me this seemed a conundrum when I first encountered it. Why, when you have intellect, would you ever devote it to selfish ends? To me, it seemed illogical.

I didn’t realize at the time that there are two components to the balanced person, two factors which must be in an equilibrium of sorts within the personality in order for the person to truly be a good and decent human being while retaining effectiveness in the world.

Empathy and Intellect.

The ancient Chinese depicted this by the familiar but not well understood Yin-Yang symbol of blended opposites, and even ancient Jews had the concept of Chochma and Binah, kabalistic symbols of the eternal balance between male and female, or positive and negative. The balance between the emotional mind versus the rational mind. Intuition and empathy versus intellect and logic. Lateral thinking versus vertical thinking. And even Liberal versus Conservative. Two poles or extremes, either of which by itself inadequate and harmful, but when balanced properly, the optimal most effective path in the world, both spiritually and materially.

We seem to have a good idea what knowledge and intellect is, and what an intelligent person is, but not so many of us understand empathy in equally clear terms. Very few of us give it the importance that it deserves in our minds, for it is the very seat of all human goodness. Without empathy, intellect automatically turns to evil ends, for without empathy logical reasons can be found to justify most any selfish action, even very heinous ones. Without empathy, there is no guilt. And without empathy, there can be no love.

What is empathy?

If a person sees a child suffering, they tend to feel compassion for it. This is a rather basic example of empathy, and most of us do possess it at this level. If a person sees another person carrying a heavy load, they might be inclined to help them with it. This is also a simplistic example of empathy at its most basic level. Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that.

Now it may be said that to be Pro-Life is a form of empathy, since you’re hopefully empathizing with the unborn life. But when you talk to some of the people that declare themselves Pro-Life, they often reveal that they are only so due to ideological reasons, and not due to actual real empathy on their parts, since they feel nothing for the poor and starving already-born children in our society, falling through the cracks, receiving inadequate medical care and education, often turning to a life of crime and drugs, and dying violently at a young age. These same “Pro-Life” people are also often Pro-War, which is actually anti-empathy, the very opposite of it. And the Pro-Life movement is noticeably unconcerned with the health of the mother, and her choices in her life, and she’s a person too. So they feel selective empathy, if any at all. Perhaps they do feel something for the “babies’” lives that are lost, but let’s face it, it’s a lot easier to feel empathy for an imaginary helpless baby than it is for an autonomous adult, albeit no more important in the scheme of things. They care about the unborn babies, but once they’re born they tend to forget all about them. This is not empathy at all. It’s self-serving at best. It isn’t based in love of others, but in love of self. And of course, also based in love of their particular religious dogma, which is basically the same thing.

Real empathy is elusive. It’s not something easily defined. I think it is perhaps easier to get a handle on if you simply think of it as love. Not romantic love and not love of family or a pet, but simply love for all others, based in the idea of universal brotherhood. Love for others based on nothing more than the knowledge that the other person is a person too, just another version of ourselves, trying their best to make their way in the world like we are, and as such deserving of our love, as we are of theirs. And it’s a type of love that allows us to feel their pain and to celebrate their happiness, as if they were a member of our family. In its ideal form, this type of love can and should extend not only to all other people, but to all other life.

To truly love thy neighbor must mean to learn to see life through their eyes, to learn to use your imagination to picture how they see life, in order to relate to them. In order to accomplish this it is necessary to temporarily give up your own presuppositions and prejudices and to instead imagine having those (if any) of the other person. You must imagine being them, literally, in order to truly empathize with them, in order to love them. It’s an acquired skill.

The ancient Jews used to say to be careful how you treat a stranger, because the stranger may be an angel in disguise. This begins to get at the idea of empathy. If we treated everyone as if they were an angel sent here to test our love for others, we would at least develop the behavior patterns that lead to real empathy.

Now what if you happen to be a fundamentalist Christian and are confronted with an atheist? You are commanded to love them, but how can you love an atheist? After all, they’re against everything that you’ve been taught is good and pure.

Well, the interesting thing is, real love, real empathy, transcends Christian dogma. It has to. All Christians have been commanded by Christ Himself to love their neighbors, to thus love all others, and here such a command is in apparent conflict with the rest of their faith. However it is a direct, specific command from Jesus Christ, so it must be of some great importance, and as such must take precedence over the rest of the Christian dogma when such conflicts arise. So the Christian cannot condemn the atheist nor attempt to convert him or her to their faith, in spite of how much they may wish to. This would not be love. This would not be empathy. This would be selfishness and egotism, since it is incredibly egotistical to think that you are fit to judge others. Jesus specifically warned against this, lest we forget. Judge not, lest ye be judged.

Empathy is an aspect of the emotional or intuitive mind. This is in opposition to the rational, logical mind. Balance between the two is the key to personal growth. When you learn to see things as others see them, you eventually learn to see how they see you. And once you can see how others see you, and learn to average out the impressions that others seem to have of you, you then possess one of the most important keys to your own personality that you can ever have: An unbiased view of yourself. Once you have that and internalize it, you naturally start to change into being more of the person that you want to be, instead of merely being what you started out as. You start to evolve.

Empathy in a world leader is of paramount importance, and yet is one of the rarer qualities exemplified in such leaders. Too much intellect without enough empathy to balance it makes the tyrant; the opposite makes the ineffectual dupe. There must be balance.

You see, the problem is that empathy isn’t the most attractive trait in a candidate. In our society it’s usually confused with wimpiness, and nobody wants a wimpy leader. This is because of the fact that empathy in its most extreme form, unchecked by intellect, is indeed wimpiness, just as intellect in its most extreme form, unchecked by empathy, is utter tyranny. The voters aren’t perceptive enough to realize that a certain amount of empathy is absolutely crucial in order to insure that the leader’s intellect isn’t easily turned to selfish ends, and thus they throw out the baby with the bathwater. They see black and vote white, never thinking that the optimal choice is a balance of the two.

Too often we humans, when confronted by a choice, see something that we don’t like in one option and reflexively choose the other without sufficient reflection on all factors involved. We get into a lot of trouble that way.

On the surface McCain looks pretty good. War hero, experienced, a “maverick…”
On the surface Obama seems a bit wimpy by comparison. But as you delve beneath the surface it is clear that the more balanced individual by far is Obama. To McCain, everything is a war, everything is a fight. It’s all he knows. Such a personality cannot empathize with anybody but a soldier perhaps. They certainly cannot learn to feel the pain of the middle class, and the poor. And thus, they will never do anything to alleviate their suffering. Obama has sufficient empathy to balance his stellar intellect, and that’s a lot of empathy. He’s non-confrontational, but can confront when he needs to, and very effectively. He’s not a Jimmy Carter, who was after all a brilliant man, but lacked enough rational side to balance his emotional side. Obama has the right mix. McCain is a study in one-sidedness. He’s incredibly imbalanced, with no discernable empathy whatsoever. He even looks stiff when he hugs his wife. And his temper is legendary. McCain is self-focused. Obama is other-focused. McCain went to war in Vietnam, and when he got back he went into the senate, parlaying his POW experience into enough pity to get him elected. Obama had the world at his feet when he graduated Harvard Law, and chose public service at the community level instead of self-aggrandizement. He chose a noble profession, and excelled at it. His whole campaign is other-focused. That’s why his appeal is so incredibly broad.

We face a choice this Tuesday. Let’s hope that we have the sense as a country to finally choose a person with some balance, rather than reflexively choosing an imbalanced one-sided man with the potential to harm this country at so many levels, just because we think our president should act like John Wayne rather than John Kennedy.

The National IQ Test

2008-10-24T18:17:00.006-04:00

"We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."
-Carl Sagan

"It is not always easy to diagnose. The simplest form of stupidity - the mumbling, nose-picking, stolid incomprehension - can be detected by anyone. But the stupidity which disguises itself as thought, and which talks so glibly and eloquently, indeed never stops talking, in every walk of life is not so easy to identify, because it marches under a formidable name, which few dare attack. It is called Popular Opinion..."
-Robertson Davies

"There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities. They will not bear discussion."
-Lord (John Emerich Edward Dalberg) Acton

"Wanting to be right so badly that you come to actually believe that you are right, is not the same thing as actually being right.
If you can't tell the difference, you're hopelessly lost, and no-one can help you anymore."
-St. Brian the Godless

The National IQ Test

Watching the McCain-Palin campaign in action has made me realize that this isn’t just a contest between Republicans and Democrats, it’s a contest between the belief-based mentality and the thought-based mentality. It is a contest between those who do not habitually question things deeply to determine their veracity, and those who do.

It is a contest between those that think the cherubs are soap, and those who can tell that they’re plastic. (See previous post)

Now I don't know about you, but when I watch politics I pay attention not only to my candidate’s statements but also to those of his or her opponent’s. I look into the statements of the opponent deeply, to make sure that I’m backing the right person. I seriously consider the possibility that the opponent may be telling the truth, so I look their statements up on the web, read a lot of (often conflicting) data about them, and check out independent sources as well as my candidate’s rebuttal. I watch various sources of cable news. I read many different websites. I make every attempt to stay informed about both sides of every issue and even the related issues, and then I decide who’s telling the truth and who isn’t. By then it’s usually pretty obvious. And if the other guy isn’t telling the truth and my candidate is, this is not only a plus for the credibility of my candidate in my mind, but a minus for the other guy.

Now to my mind, there’s no other way to be. How else can one cut through the “spin” and see the substance other than by being a hypercritical skeptic? But to many people it’s a lot easier than that. They go with their “gut” instead. This is another way to say that they vote based on belief and emotion rather than on careful and unbiased thought. And they are legion.

How else to explain the fact that McCain-Palin is even close in the polls to Obama-Biden when by all rights with the vast amounts of easily-detectable distortions and outright lies that they’ve been tossing out there at their opponents they should be national laughing stocks by now? Not to mention the difference in message, and the obvious difference in the intelligence and judgment of the candidates? And the obvious fact, the undeniable reality that Sarah Palin is not anywhere near being ready to be president of this great country, and never will be, and that her selection was a mockery, a slap in the face to thinking Americans everywhere.

Apparently there are an incredible number of people in this country that do not see the value of skepticism and penetrating thought.

Oh, I see that Sarah Palin is finally getting close to being a laughing stock. About time. I was laughing at her the day she was introduced as candidate and have only stopped to vomit occasionally since. How long do some people take to see through such an obvious total and complete lie? Her entire persona is a carefully constructed fabrication. She lives the lie. She is the lie. She’s a puff of smoke in front of a mirror. A piece of eye-candy with an arsenic center. It worries me that people have been taking so long to see through her, though. She’s not a very good lie. She’s on the level of the toddler that says they didn’t eat the cookie with crumbs still on their lips. Transparent as glass and thus all the more appalling that some people can’t see through her at all, and that they can vote.

But good old John McCain is apparently a better lie. Oh, I assure you that he is now indeed a lie, as much as Sarah Palin is. He just has his past honor and glory and “maverickiness” to fall back on to make the lie seem more real.

(Hey, it worked when he was running for senate)

When you consider how much he’s broken from that past recently, how much he’s changed, it’s hard to believe that anybody would fall for it, but they still do. It’s sad, actually. He used to have a modicum of honor, but he traded it all for a chance at the prize. He’s sold his soul as much as Judas ever did, seeking to trade his honor and glory for power and fame. How is this not obvious to all? The man’s an open book, for all that have eyes to see.

Neither John McCain nor Sarah Palin is a very convincing lie, as lies go. Neither one is very hard to see through, if you’re a thinking individual. They’re not hard to judge as people. They’ve made it very easy, in fact. They practically dare us to spot them. They’re laughably obvious. Ms. Palin in particular is a caricature of vicious stupidity coupled with an egomaniacal drive. If people looked on the outside as they really are on the inside she’d look like Quasimodo instead of a pageant winner. The loathsomeness virtually drips off her. Just look at what she inspires among her base. She has the basest base in the country. When she called herself a pitbull with lipstick, I really didn’t think that she meant it literally. As in, she’s one vicious bitch if ever there was one.

Why aren’t more of us laughing? They're both very funny! Why do any of us even consider voting for them, when our only reaction should be amusement at their pathetic, childish attempts to fool us into thinking that they're competent when they're so clearly not?

I have to put this thought out there: If so much of the Republican Party wasn’t so religious, I don’t think they’d be so gullible and willing to just believe in someone without adequately examining them based on a few claims that appeal to them. They’ve been conditioned to have faith and believe in things without proof or evidence, as long as it “feels right.” And it “feels right” when it agrees with their preconceived erroneous worldview that they’ve been conditioned into in the first place. It even seems that some of them have little regard for the truth anymore, as in, they can’t even tell it from the lies, and don’t seem to see the importance of trying to. To them, the truth is whatever they believe it to be.

And of course, McCain’s white. That figures in here heavily as well, I’m sure. More ignorance at work.

This election is an important test. It is an IQ test for the entire nation. And it’s not like the usual IQ test. It’s not scored. It’s “pass or fail.” It’s “are we too ignorant as a country to merit survival as a world leader or even as a country, or are we worthy to be that "Shining City on a Hill" for the rest of the world once again?

If we fail, unfortunately we will deserve the consequences. And I fear that they will be dire.
________________________________

More ancillary stupidity:

-Apparently a McCain volunteer carved a “B” into her own face and tried to say a black Obama supporter did it after he mugged her. She just admitted the hoax after a polygraph. How stupid was she? The "B" was reversed on her face, as in she carved it as it looked in the mirror. Drudge jumped all over it of course, since it showed how hateful we Obama supporters really are… And the right had a field day talking about it, how maybe it meant that people should think again about voting for Obama... The little psycho even got a call from the Queen Psycho herself, Sarah Palin!

Now with the truth out there, it only shows how psychotic McCain supporters can be and how rabid their campaign has become. Nice going there Matt Drudge, on vetting your sources or even caring about the truth. Nice going there McCain campaign for trying to foment hatred when you thought you had a chance. Too bad it backfired like that. Guess that's the risk you take when you try to appeal to American's nutcases.

-Also, Joe the Plumber was formerly Joe the Alaskan. He used to live there. Do you smell a rodent yet?

-And Sarah Palin just bought more clothes Monday. That’s in addition to the 150k that the republicans have already spent on her. She’s an expensive lie, apparently.

In never rains but it pours.

Christianity and Perception

2008-10-17T19:24:00.021-04:00

"You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough."
-Aldous Huxley

“Faith means not wanting to know what is true.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche

"Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything."
- George Bernard Shaw

"If you would be a real seeker after truth,
it is necessary that at least once in your life
you doubt, as far as possible, all things."
- Rene Descartes

"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wiseman knows himself to be a fool."
-Shakespeare, “As You Like It”

“Learn to think before you believe, or you’ll soon believe that you don’t have to think.”
-St. Brian the Godless

Christianity and Perception

I’ve told this story before, but not in this venue. I call it my “Soap Cherubs” story.

Oh, stop groaning…

“When I was ten my family used to talk about these two prized Italian carvings of cherubs that they had, hand carved in great detail out of soap. Being Italian themselves, they were rather proud of them.

One day I carefully dabbed some water on my finger and tested a wing. It didn't feel soapy at all. I then noticed mold marks. And a label "Made in Japan" on the bottom. I carefully bent a wing tip, and it flexed nicely. It wasn't soap. It was plastic. And it wasn’t carved. It was injection-molded.

I told my mom, tried to explain the facts as to why they couldn’t be soap, and it was like she couldn't hear me. I was just a kid, and she knew that they were soap, and I was just hitting her with way too much detail. Same with my aunt and my dad. But the cherubs weren't soap, and I know this today for a fact.

She didn't lie when she told me that they were soap all those times, but it wasn't true, and nothing that I could say could convince her that she was wrong. And yet she and the rest of my family were wrong. They just didn't see details in things like I did, so they were unable to see that the cherubs were not carved soap, even when presented with the evidence.

I learned that they were blind to many, many other things in addition to the "soap" cherubs that were not. One of them was the illogic of their religion.

Open your minds someday, people of faith. You're not seeing the plastic.”

Ahh, an oldie but a goodie…

Incidentally, I am adopted, a fact that has caused me much relief in my day.

I think this little (true) story of mine outlines the differences between the belief-based mindset and the fact-based mindset. The Christian mind versus the Atheist mind, if you will. Many Christians, having been taught to distrust or merely to ignore much of science, do not see the need to train themselves to perceive fine details well. They’ve been taught that the details of this reality are superfluous anyhow, since it’s all about the afterlife. Also that contradicting concepts can exist side-by-side. And that the Bible tells us all we need to know. And the most horrific, that to doubt any of this is not only wrong, but metaphysically evil, something you can go to hell for, thus making one of the bastions of intellect itself, critical thinking, a punishable offense.

But science teaches us to doubt in all things, including and especially yourself, at all times. That doubt in all things is the most intelligent attitude, and that the true skeptics are almost always the ones to find out the real truth eventually.

The two mindsets are diametrical opposites. And they are at war.

Having not studied science, many Christians cannot truly comprehend, cannot “internalize” things like vast spans of time, vast distances, the complexity of nature’s web of life, and our place in it. They are unused to the sheer mind-numbingly complex amount of fine detail that comprises even basic science, and thus for example see “irreduceable complexity” where the scientist sees the normal mechanism of evolution at work over vast eons of time, more than sufficient time to produce the contested results. The eye. The flagellum. Both easily explicable and even “common-sensical.” I can easily visualize the process of the evolution of a vertebrate eye, and I’m no scientist. I can intuit it from what I know about evolution and other examples of such appearances of complex traits. And incidentally, to think that a few light-sensitive cells would be of no discernable advantage to a creature living in a world of otherwise completely blind organisms is very “short-sighted” indeed. Same with the rotory mechanism involved in the euglena’s locomotive apparatus. Given enough time, the most complicated and seemingly improbable results are possible, and life on this planet has had an awful lot of time. A vast span of time. Eons.

An unimaginable length of time to some, unfortunately. If you think the world's only six thousand years old and therefore have trouble even imagining a million years, how can you ever hope to grasp the changes that can occur in four and a half thousand million?

Why can’t these Biblical Christians see how easily understood these “irreducibly complex” things are as the end result of this incredibly long process of nature weeding out that which does not serve the organism and its accentuation of that which does? Because they don’t have the tools to, nor do they ever want to posess them. Such tools themselves are considered sinful. Hence they are blithely unaware of so many of the fine details of this world, because you can only really learn to perceive these fine details by loving science enough for you to learn how to think in an ordered, scientific manner. You certainly can’t learn to see them by reading the Bible. When the Bible was written, nobody could see them.

(Which brings up the question of why, if the Bible was written by God, did He never mention in it anything more advanced than what the people of that day themselves knew...)

It’s actually an even more basic problem than human ignorance. It’s the age-old seemingly instinctual conflict between the belief-based and the reality-based. The people that turn away from the future and embrace the supposed security of the past, and the people that learn from the past and the present so as to create a better future.

As ever, when the "distant past belief-based mindset" meets the "future of our species fact-based mindset," it tries to kill it immediately out of fear of it eventually factually proving its precious beliefs wrong. Failing that, it hates it and calls it names, thus proving itself not only the most primitive modality of human thought, but also as you would expect from that, the most immature.

Names like terrorist, for instance. You betcha.

The Liberal Dictator

2008-10-12T19:25:00.005-04:00

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
- Kenneth Galbraith

"Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved."
-Aristotle

"As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality."
-George Washington

"Somebody came along and said 'liberal' means 'soft on crime, soft on drugs, soft on Communism, soft on defense, and we're gonna tax you back to the Stone Age because people shouldn't have to go to work if they don't want to.' And instead of saying, 'Well, excuse me, you right-wing, reactionary, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-education, anti-choice, pro-gun, Leave it to Beaver trip back to the '50s,' we cowered in the corner and said, 'Please don't hurt me.'"
-The West Wing (Television show)

“The Liberal Dictator”

Many conservative Christians label liberals as effete, snobbish, un-American immoral godless heathens ever in search of their own gratification, living by selfish “Darwinian” mores and dying alone with no solace of God or the afterlife to buoy them in their last hours.

According to them, we liberals are craven and pathetic indeed. Oh, and we’re all going to hell, of course.

Since religion has become inextricably intertwined with the conservative Republican Party we have to take that into account as well. Now they claim to have the moral high ground simply because they’re convinced that they’re the side that God is on.

Well, so was Hitler. “Gott Mit Uns.”

I’ve heard many Christian conservatives insist that Hitler wasn’t a Christian, that in spite of all the times that he claimed to be one and in spite of how he co-opted the religion and its symbolism for his Nazis, he was not a Christian, and even if he thought that he was, he wasn’t a “real” Christian, since no “real” Christian would act that way, would act in so “un-Christlike” a manner.

That seems a bit silly to me, since it reduces the number of real Christians in the world to like twenty-seven. But what the heck, I’ll play along.

Christians will also mention that Stalin, Lenin, and Pol Pot were all atheists. Which seems to support their point that being religious is not necessary to being a dictator.

And they’re right. Being religious is not a prerequisite to being an evil dictator. I will grant the point to them at long last. I finally agree. It can definitely help you to be a more efficient evil dictator, but it’s not a prerequisite.

Being a conservative is, though.

Hitler may have been a Christian, but even if he wasn’t, and instead was the “athiest” atheist ever to walk the planet, he most certainly was a conservative. There’s no denying that.

What of Stalin, Pot, Lenin, and all the rest of the known dictators past and present, religious and atheist?

All conservatives. It’s the common denominator.

In fact, the very definition of the word liberal runs contrary to the necessary tactics and philosophy of the dictator. It’s actually impossible for a dictator to be a liberal. There is no such thing as a liberal dictator. Not now. Not ever. Every single one in all of history has been a conservative. Authoritarianism is immiscible with liberalism. Like oil and water. They cannot coexist in the same individual.

Conservatives persist in maintaining that their way is the better path, that their way is the optimal, that their way is the only smart way to run a country. They continue denigrating liberals, and have made even the word “liberal” itself into a slur. A word that means “open-minded” and “forward-thinking” is now a slur. They foment anger and hatred and they just love the politics of division. They keep secrets from the people and approve of torturing our enemies. They attempt to repress the freedom of the press by making them out to be biased when they’re not. They refuse to testify when subpoenaed, claiming higher authority. And they have gutted our constitution and have given themselves as much power as they could get away with giving themselves, which turned out to be a lot. Not to mention the big one, starting an un-necessary war for a distraction. (oh crap, I mentioned it)

We were told that if we forget the past we’re doomed to repeat it, but the conservatives ask us to do just that.

Well, not me.

Instead, I’ll keep asking this question whenever a conservative tells me how worthless being a liberal is:

“Which one out of all the evil dictators, tyrants, and despots in the entire history of the world, past and present, was a liberal?”

I like the sound of silence that follows.

The Nature of Pride

2008-10-05T18:42:00.020-04:00

"I love the evil man who knows that he is evil more than the righteous man that knows he is righteous. Of the evil people that consider themselves righteous, however, the following is said: "They do not even turn away at the threshold of the underworld." For they imagine that they are being led to hell in order to redeem the souls there.
-Tales of the Chassidim

"The biggest egomaniacs always see themselves as being modest, along with every other good thing. It's inconceivable to them that they're really shallow and self-centered. That's precisely why they are."
-St. Brian the Godless

The Nature of Pride

One of the things you won’t have any trouble finding Christians to agree with you on is the notion that excessive Pride is a bad thing. In the Christian religion Pride is in fact considered to be one of the “Seven Deadly Sins” along with Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, and Envy.

As well it should be.

And yet do most people, including most Christians, truly understand the nature of Pride, and why it was considered such a Deadly Sin? I would say from my observations of people in general and Christians in particular that they do not.

Here’s what the Bible has to say about it:

“The LORD despises pride; be assured that the proud will be punished.
Pride goes before destruction and haughtiness before a fall. It is better to live humbly with the poor than to share plunder with the proud.”
Proverbs 16:5, 18-19
-Here we can see that to be humble we must relate to the poor and downtrodden and not with the successful and wealthy. Humility and grace are acts of lowering oneself to the level of the least among us, not raising ourselves to the level of the most powerful and wealthy. That way lies pure egotism.

"Anyone who wants to be the first must take last place and be the servant of everyone else."
Mark 9:35
-This hardly seems to refer to Joel Osteen and the Gospel of Prosperity, does it?

Jesus told this story to some who had great self-confidence and scorned everyone else: "Two men went to the Temple to pray. One was a Pharisee, and the other was a dishonest tax collector. The proud Pharisee stood by himself and prayed this prayer: `I thank you, God, that I am not a sinner like everyone else, especially like that tax collector over there! For I never cheat, I don't sin, I don't commit adultery, I fast twice a week, and I give you a tenth of my income.'
But the tax collector stood at a distance and dared not even lift his eyes to heaven as he prayed. Instead, he beat his chest in sorrow, saying, `O God, be merciful to me, for I am a sinner.' I tell you, this sinner, not the Pharisee, returned home justified before God. For the proud will be humbled, but the humble will be honored."
Luke 18:9-14
-This would seem to indicate that the Pride that the Bible describes consists of the type of thoughts and behaviors that serve to put ourselves above others, any others, even the very least among us. Even, and perhaps especially, those that we think are utterly wrong.
Incidentally it should be noted that in this passage Jesus chose to represent the Proud man as a Pharisee. The Pharisees were known to be strictly adherent to the scriptures and laws. They were the "Biblical Literalists" of their day.

Am I a victim of Pride? Most certainly. How do I know that? Because I have looked within myself for it, and have found it. Do I strive to eliminate it? Absolutely, with all my heart and mind. Why? Because I see what it does to others, and I also see that the others involved are always blind to it, and I don’t wish to fall into that trap. Pride is the most deceptive of all sins, or if you prefer, of all negative behavior patterns. It is the proverbial thief in the night. It is stealthy and almost invisible. Oh, it’s easy enough to see in others, but due to our human nature almost impossible to see within ourselves.

Now, as someone that battles with Pride, as we all should, I can also see that many Christians not only do not do battle with it, but actually mistake it for righteousness. They know that Pride is a sin of course, but they mis-define Pride in their minds as merely being too stubborn to believe in God as they do, and not as a general inflation of one’s ego that can happen to anyone, and which can in fact actually be due to one’s belief in God or in anything else for that matter. The problem here is that excessive Pride can form around any worldview that sets one’s self above any other groups. If I am told by my parents and my peer group that I am a member of the Chosen Ones, the Holy People that follow Jesus Christ and that this makes me a good person, and I come to believe that utterly, such “knowledge” on my part will inevitably inflate my ego and lead to excessive Pride on my part. It is not that dissimilar to being told for your whole life that you’re smarter than everybody else. Eventually you’ll come to believe it, even if it’s not true. And because it feeds the ego and because that feels so good, so "right," it’s pretty hard to resist if you don’t know the danger.

So I have to ask a question:

Is the man that knows that he is righteous, truly righteous?

If Pride is a sin, then by definition, he is not.

What of the man that maintains in his mind the attitude that he is not righteous, believes that he is just another sinner as we all are regardless of what we believe, and yet is not even concerned with that but instead simply loves people, all people, and strives to help them to the best of his abilities, regardless of whether he approves of what they believe about God?

If both men happen to be Christians, then which kind of a Christian deserves the name Christian more? And if the first one happens to be a Christian and the second man an atheist, who is in reality closer to God?

Belief and Faith

2008-09-30T16:50:00.000-04:00

"When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the
absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to
overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly
surprised at the weakness of his intellect"
-Sigmund Freud: The Future of an Illusion

"The religious man has no trouble believing the ridiculous and only wonders why he's so much better at it than everybody else is. This he takes as a sign from God."
-St. Brian the Godless

What is a belief?

If I think that I have a belief, I’m not sure. But if I believe that I have a thought, it implies certainty.

Belief is a tricky subject. The words “belief” and “faith” both imply thinking something is true without evidence. Most of their definitions seem to entail this. And yet, most believers see it quite differently, as beliefs somehow trumping mere thoughts, as in being preferable and somehow superior to them.

If I think that there may be a God, or even if I think that there is a God, I am still open to discussion. If new data comes in, I can change my mind easily enough.

But if I believe that there is a God and have faith in it, there can be no more discussion. My mind is closed to new data that may disprove my belief. Forever.

In the Christian mind, belief and faith are seen as very good things indeed. They are held up as the optimal mindset. In my mind however, they’re anathema to human growth, both personally and as a society.

As little children we are asked by our parents to believe in many things. In a Christian home, belief in God is a central tenet. You have to believe, or you’re bad, evil, and wrong. You have to love God with all your heart and mind, even if you can’t see Him or really talk to Him, and even if the things that He does make no sense. Even if there’s not one shred of hard evidence for His existence. Even if people that call themselves believers and faithful seem to do a lot of bad things in the world. Against all logic and reason, you must not question. You have to believe, or you’re bad, bad, bad.

There are benefits to belief and faith in God. They make understanding an incredibly and possibly infinitely complex reality, utterly simple. GodDidIt. Period. Next subject.

Having belief and faith makes thinking about one’s own death much easier. If you’re good, you’ll live on forever in heaven, playing cosmic badminton on clouds and watching people you didn’t like in life fry in hell on the widescreen. Such bliss! Of course, if you’re not good you burn forever in hell, because after all, God loved you and you spurned him, and he’s a jealous, wrathful, shallow God who cares about such things a lot. But of course you’re good. You know this because you believe in God, so you’re good by definition. So no need to worry about the place downstairs. You’ve got Pascal’s Wager covered.

So what end product does this produce in a person?

It produces a person that is absolutely sure of their own rectitude at all times. They know that they’re right about their God and about reality, and thus that all other faiths and non-faiths are miserably wrong, and even evil. They do not question themselves, since to do so is considered evil. If you have the audacity to question them about their faith, they automatically "know" you to be evil and perhaps even satanic, so it will only reinforce their own position. They see this life as a game, a conflict between good and evil, presumably represented as God and Satan. If you point to any crack in that logic, you’re the stupid one in their eyes. And on the side of Satan as well. Nice way to dismiss it.

The end result of this is a self-serving egomaniac, not a spiritual person. Pride kills real spirituality like Raid kills roaches.

The senselessness of all this, the affront to logic that it represents to any person not involved in the religion, is astonishing. And yet, the faithful “know” that God is real, and all the rest, to the exclusion of all evidence offered. “God works in mysterious ways.” How many times did I hear that litany as a child? Too many to count. If you rephrase it to more reflect the reality of the situation, the more accurate version reads “God works in illogical and seemingly evil ways completely contradictory to how we insist on seeing Him in spite of all that.”

If we sometimes marvel at pederast priests, or at serial killers that are leaders of their congregation, or at the hypocrisy of an abortion clinic bombing, we need to remember that we’re not dealing with people that think about things at all; they merely believe and as such are enormously handicapped in this life. They are blind to reality, having willingly rejected it. They are easily led, by anybody that knows the right keywords. They have been taught never to question themselves, so how could they know that they’ve let themselves become deviant? They can’t even see the reality that we’re judging them against, so how can they know when they’ve deviated from it into a self-congratulatory psychosis? They cannot.

So in that light, I have a question for all True Believers, those with Absolute, Unshakeable Faith.

Can you think, or do you just believe that you can? And how would you know if it was only the latter?

Where Do We Get Our Morality?

2008-09-25T14:59:00.000-04:00

Morality is doing what is right no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told no matter what is right.
-H. L. Mencken

Fear of God is a barrier to real morality, not a path to it.
-St. Brian the Godless

I’ve heard so often from Christians “We get our morality from God.” In fact, it’s common to hear them say that atheists have no real morality since they (we) do not believe in God. They say that we atheists do not have consequences so we have no reason to be moral. That we believe in evolution, survival of the fittest, which they interpret as “nature red in tooth and claw” and so they assume that our atheist morality is based on survival and killing off the competition. They believe that they get their morals straight from God, and that we get ours from the animals. This allows them to see atheists in a bad light, as inferior to their clearly superior and God-Inspired system of morality. Which, of course, is how they wish to see us. Seeing atheists as posessing real morality is antithetical to their deeply-held belief that they are morally superior to us for their belief in God. And they need that belief. It’s what keeps their egos inflated properly.

Atheists argue that morality evolved as a necessary trait when we “went social” in a big way. When we started to live in tribes and communities and cities. We always displayed “moral” behavior toward our children and families as do many lesser creatures, but now it has evolved to also extend to complete strangers due to the necessity of living in close quarters to said strangers.

Perhaps. I mean, we certainly developed empathy as a survival factor, caring about others, being able to imagine being the other person, imagining looking through their eyes at their problems and situation. It’s an extension of caring for ourselves and our children. And if you’re truly empathetic, morality follows, unless you are unable for some reason to empathize with all others. For instance, if something blocks you, such as a belief that says that others are clearly inferior to you, are evil, or are otherwise lacking in goodness and rectitude.

Someone, a Christian, recently asked me “So where do you get your morality from?” and without hesitation I replied “From my empathy and my imagination. I look around me and see the problems that confront us and separate us and I feel the loss, the sadness, of all of us not being able to get along, and then I imagine a perfect world somewhere in the future where such problems do not exist anymore. Then I work backwards from there to here again and can thus see what is serving us now and what is not. For that perfect world to occur, we have to learn to love all others, accept all others, and empathize with all others without reservations. Period. It’s obviously the answer. So, there’s my morality.”

My morality is thus based in my empathy and my imaginative ability to see what we need to do and how we need to act, in order for the world to ever be at peace. I may have evolved my ability to empathize and my imagination, but my morality wasn’t so much selected for directly as it was a necessary result of those two things being a part of me already. My morality exists because I can empathize with all others and can imagine a perfect future where we all do, and cannot see any other way to get to that future but to start working toward it now. And I can see that it’s the only correct path. So could Jesus. Not so much many of His present-day followers, unfortunately. Since they believe that their morality comes from God, an outside source, they often cannot see any need to develop it within their own hearts. For them, the fear of hell is their morality. And fear-based morality is not morality at all. It’s obedience under duress. Not a fertile source for the love necessary to really be moral. But an excellent source for the egotism necessary to look down on all others and find them lacking. And that’s no way to Love Thy Neighbor, in my opinion.

THE GOD OF LOVE

2008-09-18T15:24:00.000-04:00

Gentle Jesus meek and mild
How come your old man's so wild?
Killing people left and right
Showing off his godly might
Destroying mankind in a flood
Cursing us with boils and blood
Froggies rain down from the sky
All of the firstborn must die
You're so nice and kind and good
Always doing what you should
You never even talk of hate
So why is daddy so irate?
With him it's threats and death and fear
He never even sheds a tear
One small misstep, one tiny sin
And then he doesn't let you in
He sends you down to meet his friend
And there you'll meet your fiery end
(It burns your flesh both night and day
Until the last stars fade away)
He loves us not, or so it seems
Unless he loves to hear our screams
He made us to be what we are
And punishes us when we get that far
You are his son, or so they say
And yet you're both like night and day
I wouldn't want to get you mad
But are you sure that he's your dad?
-St. Brian the Godless

We’ve all heard the phrase “God is Love” but what does that mean, really? If the God of the Christians is love, exemplifies love, then I think we have a problem. Because we will have to redefine “love” as something that in no way prevents God from punishing many of us eternally with searing agony for merely doubting His divine existence. We have to redefine love as something that allows for the loving Creator torturing His creations. How can torture ever be love? Especially when you consider that the torture will never end, so it’s not as if it’s to teach you a lesson. After you learn the lesson, you’re still stuck in hell forever.

Christians love to talk about how Jesus is God incarnate. By God we must assume that they mean Yaweh. (Or Jehova if you follow the error of early German translators) If that’s so, then why is Jesus nothing like His Father from the Old Testament? Compare Leviticus to any of the Gospels in content and tone. The latter sound loving, at least the parts with Christ’s message delineated in them. The former couldn’t be more evil if it were written by Old Scratch himself. Your son gets drunk and loud sometimes? Take him to the town and have the men of the town stone him to death. Problem solved. Your slave needed a beating? If he gets up in a day or two, no harm, no foul. If you kill him, then you’ve sinned. So don’t kill him, just beat the living crap out of him. Avoid vital organs as you pummel. There’s even a quote about throwing the babies of your enemies to the ground, onto rocks. Dashing babies to death is somehow love?

Nowadays, getting stoned doesn’t mean what it used to…

Modern Christians (of the hypochrist stripe) seem to have no problem reconciling the two extremes in one identity. God is love, but God is also torture. God made us all to love him, but if we don’t, or if we simply can’t find enough evidence for His existence in the creation that He made in order to believe in Him, then our Loving Father has no problem consigning us to the cosmic incinerator, for the rest of time. Sure. No problem with that. It all makes sense. Providing of course that your logical mind has been neutered.

Y’ever burn your fingers? It HURTS. Now imagine that all over your body, all the time, forever. Foever. Forever. Somehow, that is love. God loves us, except when he decides not to anymore. He made us to be what we all are, and then punishes us when we aren’t what he wants us to be? Can’t He get it right?

It’s all well and good to say that the ways of God are mysterious, but logic is like mathematics. It’s implacable, even in the case of the Deity. If the Deity behaves contrary to logic as regards to the question of love, then the Deity is proven not to love, at least as we understand the word “love” itself. There’s no mystery about it. Love never involves torture. The two concepts are incompatible with each other.

The words of Jesus Christ indicate to me a philosophy of loving all others unconditionally. As a skeptic I might try to make a case that even Jesus Himself never existed as an historical figure (we have virtually no hard evidence that he ever really walked the earth) but I cannot deny the beauty of the words attributed to Him. And as a logical person I also cannot deny the ugliness of rest of the Bible. So where’s the disconnect? Why does this disparity exist? And it’s not only between Yaweh and Jesus, it’s also between the words of Jesus and the rest of the New Testament.

The simple explanation is the one that Christians cannot allow themselves to hear. That the transcendental beauty of Jesus’ philosophy was recognized by the early church founders and was seen as the perfect bait for a trap set to ensnare the minds of the simple people. Starting with Constantine or even before, these people were the early precursors to Niccolo Macchaivelli. The Old Testament already existed of course, and by writing a new one with Jesus as the star but with plenty of control mechanisms implanted into the surrounding texts, and connecting it to the old, they gave it gravitas. They made it credible. They needed a carrot, and found Jesus. They needed a stick, and there it was in Leviticus and the rest of the Old Testament.

It’s brilliant, really. And it still works like a charm. No better control mechanism exists. Macchaivelli would be proud. Or come to think of it, perhaps old Niccolo learned his dirty tricks from the masters who practiced and perfected them centuries before. The founders of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

Does Christianity Dumb You Down?

2008-09-15T20:10:00.000-04:00

"Jesus loves me, yes I know
Cause the Bible tells me so
That is all I need to hear
And so I know I'll never fear
Nothing else is in my head
Except a book by guys long dead
Science isn't telling me
What I can and cannot see
I never, ever take a look
Since I only own one book
Jesus is my only thought
When others ask me what I've bought
I’d rather pluck out both my eyes
So that I can't see the lies
That Science tells us are the truth
I think that Science is uncouth!
Telling me that things fall down
And how a cricket makes a sound
And how planets spin around the sun
And how the gears in watches run
I do not need to hear the facts
I only need religious tracts
And prayers to our Great Lord above
Who blinded me with Bible Love
It feels so good to be so dense
To live behind an iron fence
To shelter fragile minds from truth
(Indoctrinate them in their youth)
Feed them tales of God above
And all of His undying Love
And how he put things in this place
Plain as the nose there on your face
That seem to say that He's not real
That's just the lying Science deal!
He put them here to fool us guys
When we try to use our eyes
We know better, yes we do
Science is at best, untrue
At worst a strange Satanic plot
To show what is real, and what is not
Why should we care what is real?
We still have the Christian deal
Believe in God, at any cost
And look to others like we're lost
Hope for God to make it clear
When the Rapture cometh near
With nonbelievers left behind
You'll all be sorry that you whined
Of how we're descended from some beast
(I don't believe it in the least)
“No Thanks” I say to Science stuff
I think that I have had enough
Of facts and reason, Truth and Hope
I'd much prefer to be a dope."
-St. Brian the Godless

Does Christianity Dumb People Down?

Christianity needs it's believers to believe in it utterly and without reservations, but it cannot be proven in any way, being at its core completely unreal and fictional, so it necessarily must destroy a person's ability to reality-test. It accomplishes this by presenting side-by-side options to the believer which are contrary and negate each other, insisting that the person believe both, on pain of hell and damnation of course. So, God is Love, but if you doubt it He'll burn your ass in hell forever. This type of thing, over and over, will eventually erode the person's ability to even see what is real and what is not. Which is the point. The indoctrinated Christian insists on seeing the world as an expression of their belief system. They cannot merely examine the world and draw conclusions. They must make it conform to their beliefs. So when reality differs from their beliefs, they have to find a way to explain it to themselves somehow. They have to find a loophole. Thus we have the apologists, trying with all their might to make the unreal seem as real as the real.

For two millennia the religion has survived and flourished by convincing people that it's real. So it's pretty good at it by now. It has developed an "apology" for everything a rational person might advance as an argument. Christians often can spout chapter and verse of the bible in response to an argument. They've been told that the Bible is the Word of God, so while they personally won't tell you that they know everything, they will of course say that God knows everything, and since He wrote the Bible and they've memorized it, they can feel that, in effect, they do know everything, at least everything they need to know.

This is of course, PRIDE.

And it's funny. I've heard that it was a sin or something.

Opening Post on Religion from St. Brian

2008-09-15T18:24:00.003-04:00

"Religion is most like a computer virus for brains. It comes complete with instructions for development and propagation of the virus, and code that prevents the person from deleting it or noticing that it doesn't conform to reality. It is orchestrated, organized, and officially sanctioned psychosis, made easily digestible and palatable to the masses." -St. Brian the Godless

This is a place for discussion regarding the effects of religion in general and Christianity in particular on society. All are welcome.

In particular we will discuss its deleterious effects on intelligence in general and how religious adherents often behave in a manner diametrically opposed to their stated moral principles. We will discuss the idea of programming and how the only difference between organized religion and a cult is the number of adherents.

We will also delve into biblical parables and stories and discuss how tenuous they are in the face of logic and reason in this modern age.

Whether Jesus ever even really existed as an historical figure will also come up from time to time.

Cultural hot-button issues such as abortion and gay marriage will of course be frequent topics.

Also a topic of discussion will be the increasingly rare variety of Christian that actually does adhere to the words and actions of Jesus Christ as extolled in the gospels. I wanted to make particular mention of this sort of person since they're not a part of the problem society faces, they're a part of the solution. So my DISCLAIMER on this site is that I have nothing against "real" Christians, and bear then no ill will whatsoever. In fact I welcome them as friends.

Spirituality in general will also come up, more in contrast to religion than as a part of it, since in my opinion religion is the opposite of real spirituality.

++++++++++++++++++UPDATED!!!++++++++++++++++++++

Writing a blog is an evolving process for me in more ways than one. For instance, I'm trying to soften the tone of this place. On reflection my initial post here was a bit too hostile and narrow-minded sounding. I'd rather focus on discussion rather than casting stones when I'm far from sinless myself. (I hope all the Christian readers appreciate my usage of that last line there)

Thanks for visiting. Please don't hesitate to leave a comment.

-St. Brian