|
The
Four Clowns of the Apocalypse |

June 2009 |
Book Review:
Beyond Chutzpah – On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse
of History,
by Norman G. Finkelstein
12.01.08 The impetus behind Dr. Norman Finkelstein’s book
Beyond Chutzpah is Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard lawyer
and author of The Case for Israel, a book replete with
historical fictions and ridiculous assertions. Finkelstein
became exasperated with Dershowitz’s brazen lies, self-serving
drivel, and ridiculous distortions of reality not because such
behavior is particularly uncommon but because Dershowitz was
being assisted and promoted by the entire mainstream Jewish
establishment.
By
acting as Israel’s defense attorney Dershowitz is distorting
truth in order to shield a very guilty party from the criticism
and harsh condemnation they would otherwise be receiving for
their egregious behavior. Finkelstein recognizes that the
extremely biased rhetoric of people like Dershowitz is not
helping Israel or Jews, but is in fact is fuelling injustice and
will eventually lead to violent reprisals against Jews
everywhere.
New York Times reporter Chris Hedges has
observed regarding his stint in Gaza, “I had seen children
shot in other conflicts I have covered … but I had never
watched soldiers
entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport."
Israel was "the only country in the world," according to
B'Tselem, "where torture was legally sanctioned." Since the
beginning of the occupation in 1967, Israel has "routinely
tortured Palestinian political suspects" (Amnesty
International). Due to this "systematic pattern," Human Rights
Watch estimated in 1994, "the number of Palestinians tortured
or severely ill-treated"—often without even a pretense that
these detainees were guilty of any wrongdoing—"is in the tens
of thousands."
...
Israel is "the only democratic country" that regards political
liquidations as a "legitimate course of action" (B'Tselem),
placing it "among an infamous group of states that grossly
violates basic moral and humane norms that the international
community considers binding" (Public Committee Against Torture
in Israel and the Palestinian Society for the Protection of
Human Rights). Israel presents no evidence supporting its
charges against those targeted for assassination. The targets
typically don't pose any imminent danger and, alternatively,
could have been apprehended, while numerous bystanders have
been indiscriminately killed and injured.
...
Mainly on account of Israel's closure policy,
the West Bank and Gaza currently verge on a "humanitarian
catastrophe" (U.N. Commission on Human Rights). Finally,
Israel's "regime of separation" in the Occupied Territories
"is the only one of its kind in the world," according to B'Tselem, "and is reminiscent of distasteful regimes from the
past, such as the Apartheid regime in South Africa."
Yet, against this copiously documented record
of egregious human rights violations, Alan Dershowitz
contends, and purports to have proven, that Israel's human
rights record in the Occupied Territories is "generally
superb." [p. 221-222]
Since
about 1967 two myths have come to predominate: you cannot be
Jewish without also being a Zionist, and all criticism of Israel
is anti-Semitism. Finkelstein combats both of these myths,
primarily by countering the written and public statements of
Alan Dershowitz.
In The Holocaust Industry, this writer
documented that American Jewish elites didn't become enamored
of Israel until after the June 1967 war; when it became
politically and personally expedient to be a Zionist.
Likewise, they didn't discover the Nazi holocaust until
after the June war, when it proved useful for deflecting
criticism of Israel. Alan Dershowitz perfectly fits this
profile. He reports that it was only in 1967 that "I first
began to make the case for Israel on university campuses, in
the media, and in my writings" (p. vii)—that is, when it
required roughly as much pluck as for his counterpart at
Moscow University to make the case for Cuba.
…
"My friends from Brooklyn and I, who never discussed the
Holocaust when we were growing up, talk about it all the time
now." No doubt they do, since, in contrast to the
1950s, it's now politically convenient to invoke the
Nazi holocaust. Dershowitz's convenient love affair with
Israel and anguish over the Holocaust points to the ugliest
truth about his wretched book. Throughout the past year this
writer has stated in public lectures that The Case for
Israel is replete with egregious falsehoods. Yet the
biggest fraud is the
title itself. Dershowitz hasn't written a case for Israel. How could
anyone genuinely concerned about the Israeli people counsel
policies certain to sow seeds of hatred abroad and moral
corruption within? What he has in fact written is the case for
the destruction of Israel. Letting others—Palestinians as well
as Jews—pay the price while he plays the "tough Jew": isn't
this what Dershowitz's chutzpah really comes down to?
[p. 225-226]
Finkelstein tells the world everything that the
Jewish establishment doesn’t want us to hear. Not
surprisingly he is often under personal attack from
Israel’s blind supporters and their moneyed interests: they
can’t assail his facts so they resort to attacking the
messenger. The
main tool used by the Jewish establishment to stifle criticism
and shut-down free and open discussion about the roots of
conflict in the Middle East and Israel is, of course, the
slander of anti-Semitism.
Here are a
few examples of today’s “anti-Semites”:
One possibility the
[Nathan and Ruth Ann] Perlmutters
[publishers of the book The Real Anti-Semitism]
didn't entertain was that Israel might be in the wrong. Real
anti-Semites didn't just include usual suspects like the
National Council of Churches, which "called on Israel to
include the PLO in its Middle East peace negotiations," and
the United Nations, which "has become an arena for vicious
assaults on Jewish interests"—such as supporting a two-state
settlement. Rather, defined by the damage, however indirect,
they might inflict on Israel, anti-Semites, in the
Perimutters' lexicon, was a catchall for, among others, those
wanting to "scuttle the electoral college" in the name of
democracy, which would diminish the clout of American Jews
(concentrated in swing states) and concomitantly diminish
Jewish influence over Middle East policy; those calling for
peaceful resolution of conflicts and cuts in the military
budget, on account of which "nowadays war is getting a bad
name and peace too favorable a press"—plainly a disaster for
Israel; those opposing nuclear power, which would increase
"the West's dependency on OPEC oil … “
[p.28]
Despite the seriousness of the topic Finkelstein
maintains a sharp sense of humor that makes the book fun to read, and since so much of what he writes about
concerns
ridiculous statements and outrageous behavior perhaps laughter
really is the best way to deal with it. Indeed, the slander of
anti-Semitism leads to some absurd but highly revealing
situations:
[I]t's hard not to
savor—or not to be revolted by—the ironies of this episode: a
Jewish professor at a German war college defending the use of
torture is publicly reprimanded, after which the Jewish
professor, wrapping himself in the mantle of The Holocaust,
accuses of anti-Semitism those Germans deploring his advocacy
of torture and, explicating the lessons of The Holocaust,
declares that while The Holocaust forbids Germans (and
everyone else) from being perpetrators, it entitles Jews to do
as they please. [p. 48]
The malleable definition of anti-Semitism
deflects criticism of Israel, Jews, Israeli government policy,
and anything else the Jewish establishment wants shielded.
[I]f mainstream Jewish organizations lend
uncritical support to every Israeli policy, however criminal,
indeed, abetting the most virulent tendencies inside Israel
and muzzling principled dissent outside Israel; if Israel
defines itself juridically as the sovereign state of the
Jewish people, and Jews abroad label any criticism of Israel
anti-Jewish— the real wonder is that the spillover from
antipathy toward Israel to Jews generally hasn't been greater.
[p. 82]
Anti-Semitism is used to beat the German public
into submission:
If Germany was once the European hotbed of
anti-Semitism, it has now become the hotbed of philo-Semitism:
on the one hand, "politically correct," utterly cynical public
officials and media ferret out anti-Semites where a smattering
are to be found, resembling nothing so much as the medieval
witch hunts; and on the other, Israel's apologists, holding
Germany in thrall, exploit the Nazi horrors to strike down any
criticism of Jewish leaders or Israel, stifling public
discourse and stoking private resentment.
This isn't the first time German public opinion
has been manipulated into fighting a phantom "new
anti-Semitism." In 1981, as pressures mounted on Israel to
negotiate a two-state settlement with the Palestinians, the
Union of Jews and Christians issued a declaration entitled "On
the Danger of a New Anti-Semitism" at the German Evangelical
Churchday. It cautioned that "signs of a relapse into
hostility towards Jews are currently on the rise," alleging in
particular that '[b]ehind the criticism of the Israeli
government, . . . the old anti-Semitism is visible."
[p.36]
The ‘new anti-Semitism’ and the ‘War on
Terrorism’ are cut from the same cloth:
The consequences of the calculated hysteria of
a new anti-Semitism haven't been just to immunize Israel from
legitimate criticism. Its over-arching purpose, like that of
the "war against terrorism," has been to deflect criticism of
an unprecedented assault on international law.
[p. 45]
Finkelstein’s
analysis of the historical record is extremely informative, for
instance on the creation of Israel:
That a U.N. General Assembly majority approved
the Partition Resolution, Louis recalls, was due in no small
part to Zionist machination: "[T]he Zionists were able to
launch a campaign that left the President and officials at the
State Department reeling under a bombardment of letters,
telegrams and telephone calls. Truman wrote in his memoirs
that he never 'had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at
the White House as I had in this instance.' . . . Emmanuel
Cellar and Sol Bloom in the House of Representatives exerted
their considerable influence on Congressional colleagues, the
executive branch, the State Department, and in particular on
the United Nations representatives from the Philippines,
Liberia, and Haiti. Ten Senators sent telegrams to the
President of the Philippines, who also received the friendly
admonition of Felix Frankfurter and another Supreme Court
Justice. . . . The Cuban Ambassador, who remained
recalcitrantly pro-Arab, complained that the Costan [sic]
Rican vote had been bought with a $75,000 bribe. Niles [a
pro-Zionist adviser to Truman] used business connections in an
abortive effort to swing the Greek vote. Bernard Baruch let
the representatives from China and France know that nothing
less than economic assistance would be in jeopardy if they
failed to vote in favour of partition. Harvey Firestone
brought Liberia to heel. As Robert Donovan summed it up in an
understatement in his biography of Truman, intrigue was rife."
In addition, '[i]n 1947, there was not yet a solid
'anti-colonial' bloc" in the U.N. Finally, the "overriding
Russian aim" in supporting the resolution was not achieving
justice but “the disruption of the British Empire.” [p. 284-285]
Sadly, Alan Dershowitz isn’t the only clown on
the this pathetic stage. Abe Foxman and the Anti-Defamation
League (ADL) get some well deserved criticism for their
hypocrisy and disingenuousness as defenders of civil liberties:
Returning to this side of the Atlantic, Foxman
also waxes ominous on the "dark underbelly" of the Internet,
"where the virus of anti-Semitism is ready to be spread."
Although he professes opposition to government censorship, one
must take with a shaker of salt his avowal that "the best
antidote to hate speech, I've always maintained, is more
speech." In the very same pages he boasts that "ADL has worked
closely with several major Internet companies to establish and
enforce clear guidelines regulating what is acceptable and
unacceptable on their sites," and laments the fact that "some
Internet service providers have been less willing to establish
firm policies against hate speech." He cites as an egregious
offender Earthlink's "acceptable use policy," which "supports
the free flow of information and ideas over the Internet" and
allows for the distribution of "Hitler's Mein Kampf and
more than two dozen of Hitler's speeches. It's not illegal
activity, but the message is clearly hateful." Beyond the fact
that Hitler's Mein Kampf and speeches are primary
historical sources and clearly ought to be studied if
we are to learn from the past, it bears keeping in mind
Foxman's definition of hateful.
[p.55]
And now Elie Wiesel’s turn in Finkelstein’s
spotlight:
Wiesel professed bewilderment that "60 years
after the worst tragedy in human history," and although he had
been "convinced that anti-Semitism had died in Auschwitz," jew-hatred was once again on the
rise. In his OSCE speech, Wiesel similarly lamented that after
the war he "naively thought that, for years and years to come,
whenever a Jew would be seen anywhere in Europe, he or she
would be carried on people’s shoulders and enveloped by
everyone."
…
In his U.N. speech Wiesel called anti-Semitism
"the oldest collective bigotry in recorded history," as well
as one that uniquely combined all other forms of bigotry.
Everything about Jews is unique: anti-Semitism, the Holocaust,
Israel, Jewish nationhood and peoplehood ... Beyond its
repellent chauvinism, this intellectually hollow doctrine of
uniqueness serves the useful ideological function of allowing
Israel to claim unique moral dispensation: if Jewish suffering
was unique, then Israel shouldn't be bound by normal moral
standards. [p. 62] (italics added for
emphasis)
With so many people too cowardly and afraid to
speak up and risk being slandered as an anti-Semite the
Holocaust has subsequently been turned into an extortion-based
cash-machine by the Jewish establishment with a complicit
mass-media to legitimize the scam:
Just as it's too simple (and convenient) to
label accusations of Jewish responsibility for Israeli policy
anti-Semitic, so it's too simple (and convenient) to
label the notion of Jewish power anti-Semitic. Jews now rank
as the wealthiest ethnic group in the United States; with this
economic power has accrued substantial political power. Their
leaders have wielded this power often crudely, to mold
U.S. policy regarding Israel. These leaden have also utilized
this power in other realms. Under the guise of seeking
"Holocaust reparations," American Jewish organizations and
individuals at all levels of government and in all sectors of
American society entered into a conspiracy—this is the correct
word—to blackmail Europe. It was on account of "Jewish money"
that the Clinton administration went along with this shakedown
operation, providing—even to the detriment of U.S. national
interests—crucial support for it at every juncture.
And who can seriously believe that the pro-Jewish bias of the
corporate media has nothing whatever to do with the
influential Jewish presence at all levels of it? "It's
undoubtedly true that there are prominent Jews among the
producers, directors, studio executives, and stars in
Hollywood," Foxman concedes. "It's even true that,
proportionately, there has always been a relatively prominent
Jewish presence in the movie, TV, and record industries."
[p. 83]
Israel’s
state policy of assassinating opponents comes under harsh
criticism by everyone except the Jewish establishment. The true
intention of the Israeli government is not to seek peace but to continue war because they believe they can win
something from it.
The evidence strongly suggests that the
main, anticipated, and intended effect of political
liquidations has been to stimulate terrorist attacks.
"Whoever gave a green light to this act of liquidation knew
full well that he is thereby shattering in one blow the
gentleman’s agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian
Authority" Israeli journalist Alex Fishman wrote in Yediot
Ahronot after the November 2001 assassination of a Hamas
leader.
[p.140]
The unnecessary and hateful cruelties inflicted
upon the Palestinians by the Israeli war-machine could fill
volumes, yet most is never reported by the U.S. mass-media.
Disputing Israeli claims that this massive
destruction was inflicted due to military necessity, HRW found
that "armed Palestinian resistance ... was light, limited and
quickly overwhelmed within the initial hours of each
incursion." During one attack, the IDF destroyed, in a "time-consuming and deliberate act" lacking any military
justification, a zoo in Rafah: "The zoo was one of the few
recreational areas in an over crowded camp whose residents
have been denied access to the sea by Israeli settlements for
the past four years. Thousands of animals, including jaguars,
crocodiles, wolves, snakes and birds escaped from the zoo or
were killed during its demolition."
[p. 184]
Unfortunately,
most of Israel’s state violence is supported by the vast
majority of Israeli citizens.
When Israel's violent repression of the first
intifada reached new heights of brutality in 1989, more
than half of all Israelis supported the deployment of yet
"stronger measures" to quell the largely nonviolent civil
revolt (only one in four supported any lessening of the
repression), while "an overwhelming 72 percent . . . saw no
contradiction between the army's handling of the uprising and
'the nation's democratic values.' " (iii) Operation Defensive
Shield (March—April 2002), although wreaking devastation on
Palestinian society and culminating in the commission by
Israeli forces of "serious violations" of humanitarian law and
“war crimes" in Jenin and Nablus, was supported by fully 90
percent of Israelis. Beyond the emotional
support that Israelis have lent to crimes of state, it
bears emphasis that Israel relies on a citizen army to
implement policy: the collective responsibility of the Israeli
people accordingly runs much deeper than "moral complicity."
Finally, Israel couldn't commit such crimes without
unconditional political and economic support from the United
States, and it's the likes of Dershowitz who, through
shameless apologetics and brazen distortions, crucially
facilitate this unconditional support. What if Dershowitz's
home were subject to the
"benign form of collective
accountability" (p. 168) he urges for Palestinians? [p
177]
Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah is an
excellent book, thoroughly researched, informative, revealing,
and well written; anyone concerned about world events should
read it.
Beyond Chutzpah – On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse
of History,
by Norman G. Finkelstein, University of California Press,
2005, hardcover edition.
* * *
Here's some
revealing additional context for
Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah:
Klinghoffer's murder was properly viewed
with horror and is very famous. It was the topic of an
acclaimed opera and a made-for-TV movie, as well as much
shocked commentary deploring the savagery of Palestinians -
"two-headed beasts" (Prime Minister Menachem Begin), "drugged
roaches scurrying around in a bottle" (Chief of Staff Raful
Eitan), "like grasshoppers compared to us," whose heads should
be "smashed against the boulders and walls" (Prime Minister
Yitzhak Shamir). Or more commonly just "Araboushim," the slang
counterpart of "kike" or "nigger".
Thus, after a particularly depraved display of
settler-military terror and purposeful humiliation in the West
Bank town of Halhul in December 1982, which disgusted even
Israeli hawks, the well-known military/political analyst Yoram
Peri wrote in dismay that one "task of the army today [is] to
demolish the rights of innocent people just because they are
Araboushim living in territories that God promised to us", a
task that became far more urgent, and was carried out with far
more brutality, when the Araboushim began to "raise their
heads" a few years later.
We can easily assess the sincerity of the sentiments expressed
about the Klinghoffer murder. It is only necessary to
investigate the reaction to comparable US-backed Israeli
crimes. Take, for example, the murder in April 2002 of two
crippled Palestinians, Kemal Zughayer and Jamal Rashid, by
Israeli forces rampaging through the refugee camp of Jenin in
the West Bank. Zughayer's crushed body and the remains of his
wheelchair were found by British reporters, along with the
remains of the white flag he was holding when he was shot dead
while seeking to flee the Israeli tanks which then drove over
him, ripping his face in two and severing his arms and legs.
Jamal Rashid was crushed in his wheelchair when one of
Israel's huge US-supplied Caterpillar bulldozers demolished
his home in Jenin with his family inside. The differential
reaction, or rather non-reaction, has become so routine and so
easy to explain that no further commentary is necessary.
From: 'The
world' according to Washington, by Noam Chomsky, ATOL,
February 28, 2008.
Book review: Ken Smith’s Guide to the Bible, by Ken
Smith, 1995, Blast Books.
27.05.07 Some people claim
that the Bible is the most read book in the world. Although the
Bible may well be the most widely circulated book it seems that
most people have a Bible simply for appearances alone and
rarely, if ever, read what’s inside! That’s where Ken Smith,
author of Mental Hygiene and Raw Deal, enters the
picture. Ken Smith goes where the most devout Christians
fear to tread by reading and reviewing even the stuff they would
rather forget is in there, you know, all the glaring
contradictions, the terrible moral and ethical rules and
examples littering the Old Testament, and of course the just
plain bizarre.
Smith doesn’t take
what’s written in one version of the Bible as gospel but
actually reads several of them giving us some interesting, and
amusing, comparisons in the process. Ken Smith’s Guide to the
Bible is a short and revealing book that’s fun to read too.
Here are a few notable excerpts:
Jacob and his extensive family, from
whom the nation of Israel descends, are some of the sleaziest,
trashiest people in the Bible.
[Page 25]
Smith proceeds to
cite numerous examples, here’s a typical one:
Jacob becomes rich by cheating his
father-in-law out of his best sheep and goats. Jacob then
skips town with his booty and his women and tells Rachel and
Leah that his prosperity is an act of God. - Genesis 30:31-34, 37-42; 31:4-5, 8-9
[page 26]
Consider for a
moment that these characters are role models and heroes for
Jews!
God confesses that the only reason He
didn't kill all of the
chosen people while they were in the wilderness is that it
would have made Him look bad. - Ezekiel 20:13-14
God admits that He gave His chosen
people purposefully bogus laws and rituals in the wilderness
to make their lives miserable. - Ezekiel 20:25-26
God decrees that no matter how much
the chosen people may want God to go away and leave them
alone, He will never let them go. - Ezekiel 20:32-33
[all page 69]
On the colorful prophet Daniel:
Daniel's ravings are just the kind of
material that religious wackos relish; they sound so ominous
and important that they should mean something, yet
they're so opaque and muddled that they could mean anything.
They will never lack for interpreters; someone will always be
around, earnest, eager, and self-assured, to explain them.
The only appearance of the word
"intelligence" in the Bible is in Daniel, and only in the
archaic English of the King James Version. It means "favorable
regard." It has been revised out of every modern translation.
– Daniel 11:30 [page 74]
Explains a lot doesn’t it?
Paul explains that God specifically
chooses poor and stupid people to be Christians so that He'll
seem more powerful when the Christians triumph over rich and
smart people. - I Corinthians 1:26-29
[page 122]
More of the New Testament’s Paul:
... women should be silent in the
churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be
subordinate, as the law also says. If there is anything they
desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home...." - I
Corinthians 14:34-35 [page 126]
Much of the Holy
Bible is either blatantly contradictory or simply absurd
depending on how you look at it.
"Precious in the sight of the Lord is
the death of His faithful ones." - Psalm 116:15
Really more than
anything Ken’s book is just frightening when you realize that
millions of people actually believe the Bible, with some even
going so far as to take all of what's written as literal truth
and not simply as a parable, a morality lesson, or a weird
historic relic.
Quiverfull: When Missionaries Aren't Enough
19.11.06
Have you ever encountered stupidity so intense that it makes
your head hurt just trying to comprehend it? Well get out the
bottle of aspirin because all that and more is on display in
this startling article in The Nation magazine, Christian
Mothers Breed 'Arrows for the War', by Kathryn Joyce. These
Christian mothers are part of a loose movement that literally
interprets a line from the first book of the Bible (Genesis 9:7)
in order to have as many children as they physically can.
“As for you, be fruitful and increase in
number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it."
These people call themselves "Quiverfull".
They borrow their name from Psalm
127: "Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in
one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.
They will not be put to shame when they contend with their
enemies in the gate." Quiverfull mothers think of their
children as no mere movement but as an army they're building
for God.
Quiverfull parents try to have
upwards of six children. They home-school their families,
attend fundamentalist churches and follow biblical guidelines
of male headship--"Father knows best"--and female
submissiveness. They refuse any attempt to regulate pregnancy.
Quiverfull began with the publication of Rick and Jan Hess's
1989 book, A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship
of Christ, which argues that God, as the "Great Physician"
and sole "Birth Controller," opens and closes the womb on a
case-by-case basis. Women's attempts to control their own
bodies--the Lord's temple--are a seizure of divine power.
Quiverfull is the deleterious fusion of biology and human
stupidity in a wonderfully revealing package, just read the full
article and you’ll see why. Nonetheless, the political and
demographic situations these people are responding too, as well as the
underlying biological rules they're operating on, are in need of
deeper consideration.
Many belief systems spread their faith through missionaries that
canvas the planet to convert others from their wayward ways.
Quiverfull has gone one step further and decided to simply make
their own converts through biological reproduction (less room
for error). Hence the need for home schooling and cloistered
social lives so the new ‘warriors for God’ don’t get any
dangerous ideas from the outside world.
So, the most obvious reason for unrestrained reproduction in this
case is to spread the belief system, but there's also a subtext
of politics, culture and race too. By studying current
demographic trends it's evident that the conservative voters in
the United States have more children than the liberal voting
regions, think central versus coasts. Over decades voting
patterns will, hypothetically, become more religiously oriented
and socially conservative thereby moving the country towards
bans on abortion, homosexuality and every other hot-button issue
for Christian fundamentalists in America. The other motive in
play has to do with racial demographic trends.
Population is a preoccupation for many
Quiverfull believers, who trade statistics on the falling
white birthrate in European countries like Germany and France.
Every ethnic conflict becomes evidence for their worldview:
Muslim riots in France, Latino immigration in California,
Sharia law in Canada. The motivations aren't always racist,
but the subtext of "race suicide" is often there.
Reproduction rates for the White race are at below replacement
level in Europe and about break even for North America, with the
exception of Mormon Utah. Conversely, the developing world is reproducing very rapidly, growing in
numbers despite war, disease and lack of resources. It's also
worth mention that the technologically developed Asian nations,
such as Japan and South Korea, are running well below
replacement fertility rates.
A connection definitely exists between technological development
and reproduction levels but if we step back and establish some
historical context we can avoid the need for panic over the
narrow snapshot given to us by current demographic trends.
Actually most population concerns are blown out of
proportion. We have more people on this planet today than ever
before in world history yet our finite natural resources are in
decline. Fish stocks in the ocean, for example, are predicted to
be exhausted within 50 years and already many parts of the sea
have been over-fished and turned into deserts. Large fish
species are rapidly disappearing through rampant fishing to be
replaced with smaller and smaller ones. Conservation of natural
resources to sustain our current way of life is one very
powerful reason for limited, or no, human population growth.
Human reproduction rates can self-balance when people,
especially women, have the power to control it. Remember that
just fifty years ago the major crisis of the future, meaning our
today, was a global time-bomb of overpopulation. In actuality
the world’s population didn’t hit 10 billion in the year 2000
and in fact has tapered off. In the developed world the current
crisis is now under-population with birth rates below
replacement levels. Back and forth, back and forth. The point is
that planet Earth is already filled to the brim with people, we
don’t need more quantity we need better quality!
Any country that allows women the ability to control their
reproduction will not have a problem with over-population, while
regressive and religious countries that deny women the right to
control their bodies will have a major crisis with all the
ensuing problems of violence, resource scarcity, poverty, war,
disease, and so on. The process is like shifting gears, we're
going from the archaic method of survival to the modern method.
Instead of breeding for quantity, because of high death rates
from environmental factors coupled with a low standard of living,
we're moving towards reproducing for quality through fewer numbers
and a higher standard of living.
But overpopulation and resource scarcity are not concerns for
religious fundamentalists since, according to them, God will
provide and the Earth belongs to Satan anyway.
Pastor Heneghan of Gospel Community Church sees
the issue of population growth in more biblical terms,
specifically those taken from Genesis and Revelation. "Some
people think that what I'm doing--having eleven children--is
wrong. I don't really get into that much. The Bible says 'be
fruitful and multiply.' That's my belief system. They don't
believe in God, so they think we have to conserve what we
have. But in my belief system, He's going to give us a new
earth."
The Quiverfull movement is part of a reaction to modernity,
especially ‘feminism’ in this case, that many Christians equate
with all the ‘moral evils’ of contemporary society from divorce
and homosexuality to contraception and women competing with men
in the workplace.
People that aren’t burdened by religious beliefs tend to have
fewer offspring but they have more money and influence because
they recognize the issues and problems that affect us all right
now, they live for life instead of living for death and a vague
promise of benefits upon final arrival.
The more
that secular reality intrudes into the cloistered world of the
religious the more extreme they become in order to maintain a
separate identity and to react against modernity. In many ways
this is evident in the Middle East where extreme religious
regression is colliding with modern influences. Saudi Arabia for
instance was nothing but nomadic tribes 50-100 years ago before
oil made the king rich and turned tents in the desert into
cities. Severe regression in a religious package is not
surprising given the rapid pace of change.
This struggle is as old as technology. Many people try to turn
back the clock and recreate the past. Sometimes these
regressionists seize power and start wars, sometimes the whole
scheme implode into civil war, but they always fail one way or
another because all it takes is a small group of forward
thinking individuals to embrace the future and defeat everyone
else that rejects the new and innovative.
What’s the Appeal?
Probably the most glaring issue, and the
particular focus of the article’s author, is why the women
support this ‘plop ‘till you drop’ reproductive plan. There’s no
personal benefit to doing this, parents don’t need many kids to
care and provide for the family like they do for economic
reasons in the developing (non-modern) world. In fact having
more than three kids is a major economic burden on
families that pretty much guarantees the parents will live in
poverty for their entire lives. Too many children is also a
disservice to the future of the kids, depriving them of the
resources to get a quality education, at least without massive
state assistance. Kids and parents will be less healthy because
they're less able to afford health care for all of them. The
mothers are burdened most of all, even though in this case they
seem to be enthusiastic about their subservience to patriarchy
and voluminous breeding. Child-birth and large family
maintenance is hardly a walk in the park for fun, one has to
factor in a hefty dose of ignorance and social isolation to make
the equation balance out, in other words all they know is what
the Bible tells them -- they've been brainwashed into oblivious
happiness.
So why do this? Why have a dozen kids despite the
fact that it confers no economic benefit to the parents and
family, and despite the fact that it reduces just about every
other facet of healthy and modern life? It does give
the women a purpose in life and an established place in the
social framework. Like all religions it fulfills a need to
conform and be accepted into a social group, and a sense of
identity is achieved through adherence to an arbitrary belief
system. Religion is especially appealing to weak intellects
because it so neatly absolves the individual of the need for
critical thought and analysis of life’s problems since every
problem already has an answer pre-packaged in the Holy Book. And
if you can’t find it you just re-arrange the words to get the
'answer' you want to see.
The mental reasoning driving Quiverfulls is that
they're just doing it out of belief based on a religious
principal. But there are cultural and biological reasons
involved too expressed as racial competition and belief
competition. Whether they realize it or not what the
Quiverfulls
believe in is social fascism straight out of the Plato handbook.
In both Carlson's writings and in the work of
Mary Pride and the Hesses, this is reflected in their
description of patriarchal families as the basic "cellular
units of society" that form a bulwark against Communism, as
well as in the military-industrial terminology they assign to
biblical gender roles within such "cells": the husband
described as company CEO, the wife as plant manager and the
children as workers. Or, in alternate form, the titles revised
to reflect the Christian church's "constant state of war" with
the world: "Commander in Chief" Jesus, the husband a
"commanding officer" and his wife a "private" below him. And
the kids? Presumably ammunition, arrows, weapons for the war.
Troubling Times
This article really bothered me on a visceral
level; it's the alien stone-age nature of the
beliefs and behavior responses of these people. It’s the crude
primitiveness of it that's so shocking because it's such an
anachronism given contemporary problems and our technological development. ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ interpreted
to mean 'have as many babies as you can' is like the philosophy
of cave people from 15,000 years ago, it's what they desired
but couldn’t achieve because of severe environmental pressures
and lack of resources. Yet today this is what we can achieve but
shouldn’t desire! Just like the same cave-people wished they
could eat until they were fat as a walrus, but now we can
because we have the nutrient resources but shouldn’t because it
kills us. The genetic impulse to reproduce in unlimited numbers
is just like the genetic impulse to overindulge until obesity
and eventual death from the health complications of being
grossly overweight. Clearly, if biological impulse was the only
factor driving human behavior the human species would have gone
extinct millions of years ago. But we are still here because we
have this thing in our head called a brain, and when it's used properly we can make objective, rational
decisions that over-ride the short-term gains from impulse and
deliver long-term gains from planning and careful
decision-making. Imagine that.
Here where I live, in one of the more dimwitted states of the
American Midwest, we had a ballot issue this November concerning
the regulation of stem cell research. So, of course the
conservatives and the religious types were opposed to making
stem cell research legal, but in this case voting ‘yes’ wasn’t
quite that simple for you see the law to approve stem cell
research also makes human cloning illegal! So as it is now,
since the law barely passed, it is illegal to produce human
clones in this state. So my question is will parents that
produce identical twins be charged for breaking the law?!
Besides the humor involved in this absurdity, my point is that if
the
if some people
are so reactionary in response to their ignorance of natural
biological functions
already, and constantly in a state of panic over
the change inherent within modern life, what are they going to
do in 25 years when the stunning nanotech and biotech
breakthroughs of today become practical reality? We could be
exploring the stars and distant planets but instead we’re
battling the regressionist tendencies of millions of people that
spend their time scouring the Bible for trenchant insight while
trying to have more babies than the Mexican family next door so
they can vote America into a Christian theocracy twenty years
from now. As vast as our
human potential is, why should we be weighted down in the mire
by the most fear-ridden and narrow-minded?
Even for racial competition this doesn’t seem
like that great of an idea because it isn’t numbers that matter
as much in the modern developed world so much as it is command
of resources. Skill, intelligence and merit will take an
individual much farther than the color of their skin.
Former religious fundamentalists, and especially
their children, make some of the most militant atheists around
when they finally break free. If they want a war then the rest
of the world will be ready to oblige, but the final outcome won’t
be as black and white as Christian evangelicals and the rest of
the world’s religious fundamentalist think it will be. You can run from reality and
progress but you can’t hide from it.
1.
Christian Mothers Breed 'Arrows for the War', by Kathryn
Joyce, The Nation, November 27, 2006 issue.
The Jewish State by Theodor Herzl, 1896
Zionism is such a
major factor in 20th century events, and continues to
be a major force in the 21st century, that it only
makes sense to read what the source of Zionism had to say on the
topic. Born into a Jewish family in Budapest
Hungary in 1860, Theodor Herzl was responsible for authoring and selling the
concept of a state specifically for the Jewish people. Herzl’s
conception of a Zionist homeland for Jews came about from his
concern over the continual animosity and conflict between Jews
and Christians in Europe. Although intentions are often difficult
to discern from writing alone, Herzl seemed to honestly desire a
solution that would be acceptable to Europeans and that would
still be beneficial to Jews.
Although a
journalist by trade Herzl acts the part of a salesman through
The Jewish State, the sales pitch he published in 1896.
The author spins his arguments every way he can to make it seem
credible to his audience. Despite the questionable reliability
of some of his statements he does make many convincing points
and the overall message is a win-win argument for both Jews and
gentile Europeans. The book is often too long on details that
clearly were not going to matter greatly upon implementation, and
a little short on the important concepts. Like any visionary Herzl had to strike a balance between specifics and generalities
in an environment full of critics and pessimists.
In his analysis of
the ‘Jewish Question’ Herzl found many reasons for trying to
create a separate state for Jews, and one was his keen awareness
of the social vulnerability of Jews within a foreign society.
At the same time we continue to
produce an abundance of mediocre intellects who find no
outlet, and this endangers our social position as much as does
our increasing wealth. Educated Jews without means are now
rapidly becoming Socialists. Hence we are certain to suffer
very severely in the struggle between classes, because we
stand in the most exposed position in the camps of both
Socialists and capitalists. [Page 87]
Herzl was clearly
Influenced by turn of the century socialism and labor reform. He
firmly believed in a new labor standard of seven hour work days
and was so enamored with this idea that he even wanted it worked
into the new flag of Zionism:
We have no flag, and we need one. If
we desire to lead many men, we must raise a symbol above their
heads.
I would suggest a white flag, with
seven golden stars. The white field symbolizes our pure new
life; the stars are the seven golden hours of our working-day.
For we shall march into the Promised Land carrying the badge
of honor. [Page 147]
Like so much of the
Herzl’s Zionist dream the flag didn’t make it beyond the drawing
board.
Herzl threw out the idea of
negotiating with the Ottoman Empire for land. He also foresaw a
continuing obligation on the part of Europe to protect the new
Jewish state.
Palestine is our ever-memorable
historic home. The very name of Palestine would attract our
people with a force of marvellous potency. If His Majesty the
Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake
to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form
a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of
civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should as a neutral
State remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to
guarantee our existence. The sanctuaries of Christendom would
be safeguarded by assigning to them an extra-territorial
status such as is well-known to the law of nations.
[Page 96]
Zionism was a
heterodox notion for Jews, and even though he intended moving to
the new state to be voluntary it was not instantly popular in
the Jewish community at all. Herzl had to deal with multiple
impediments in tradition, such as Jewish culture being tethered
to the dead past. The entrepreneurial spirit was active but the
pioneering spirit lacking.
We have cradles, we have graves, and
we alone know how Jewish hearts cling to the graves. Our
cradles we shall carry with us—they hold our future, rosy and
smiling. Our beloved graves we must abandon— and I think this
abandonment will cost us more than any other sacrifice. But it
must be so. [Page 123]
Herzl thought that land for the Jews
could be gained through legal agreement, but then he was living
in the age of Empires where Sultans and Kings made decisions by
fiat.
But the Jews, once settled in their
own State, would probably have no more enemies. [Page
153]
Nor did Herzl seem
to think democracy would be desirable for the new Jewish state.
A democracy without a sovereign's
useful counterpoise is extreme in appreciation and
condemnation, tends to idle discussion in Parliaments, and
produces that objectionable class of men—professional
politicians. Nations are also really not fit for unlimited
democracy at present, and will become less and less fitted for
it in the future. For a pure democracy presupposes a
predominance of simple customs, and our customs become daily
more complex with the growth of commerce and increase of
culture. [Page 144]
The Jewish State
is an interesting visionary document that served to motivate
many people to establish that state, but it seems so
distant from the actual events that lead to the formation of
Israel that it’s difficult to know how much weight of importance
to put into it.
The state of
Israel’s trouble really boils down to the land that was needed
to start it and the deals that were made to gain it. Although
various regions of the world had been seriously discussed for a
Jewish homeland the religious argument for Palestine was the
easiest to sell to the Jewish community. After World War I the
Ottoman Empire lost and subsequently collapsed, with the British
Empire taking control over Palestine. Influential Jews offered
their support for the British Empire from their community in
return for giving them Palestine, i.e. the Balfour agreement.
The existing population in Palestine was not consulted on this
deal and this is where the, now infamous, conflict in the Middle
East begins. Very few Jews actually lived in Palestine before
the Balfour Agreement and the ones that did were culturally very
different from the Jews spread across Europe. Jews from Europe
began to move into Palestine and establish themselves with the
absolute religious belief that they and they alone had the right
to the land. Consequently, the real Zionism that built the state
of Israel was revealed during the infamous forcible expulsion of
the remaining Arab population of Palestine in 1948.
The problem
with Zionism, as is obvious today, is that by using religious
justification to seize Palestine, a potentially secular Zionism
was mortally undermined by religious beliefs. So,
while the state of Israel was hypothetically (but not in
actuality) better glued together by a shared faith, in fact it
instantly created widespread animosity through its formation
based on the theft of land.
This fact demonstrates one of the
fundamental flaws in anti-Semitism: it’s not who the Jews
are that generates the animosity, it’s what they do.
Anti-Semitism is a very dangerous delusion for Jews to maintain
because of the self-righteous way it so neatly absolves the Jews
of all blame for any and all actions. The standard Jewish
conception of anti-Semitism maintains that they, the gentiles,
hate us by their very nature so it doesn’t matter what Jews do
or don’t do. Few things are more pernicious than self-righteous
delusion, and an uncritical belief in religious superiority
offers this up in unlimited amounts.
Although he was not
referring to Israel, the Jewish state has become what Herzl
wrote about concerning despotism: The
mere preservation of obsolete institutions is a task severe
enough to require the enforcement of all the despotic measures
of an autocratically governed State. [Page 88]
Source: The
Jewish State by Theodor Herzl, Dover Publications, 1988.
Book review: Religion
Explained
09.07.06
Religion Explained – The Evolutionary Origins
of Religious Thought, by Pascal Boyer, 2001, Basic Books.
The author maintains that the true reasons why religion is
around are more complex and counterintuitive than most people
assume, hence this 300+ page book. Basically the author is
trying to do a Richard Dawkins’s Selfish Gene masterpiece
for religion but as seen through the lens of an anthropologist
and social scientist. Pascal Boyer's main hypothesis, and he has
a substantial and often counterintuitive argument to back it up,
is that religious beliefs and practices are a byproduct of the
way the human brain processes and attempts to explain perceived
events.
Religious
concepts are particularly successful because people represent
them in a way that makes use of capacities they have anyway. At
the beginning of this book, I mentioned that religious concepts
are parasitic upon intuitive ontology. If you have all the
inference systems that are found in a normal human brain, then
some concepts become particularly easy to represent and will
generate all sorts of salient inferences. This is what makes a
floating island or a bleeding statue or a talking tree likely to
have some cultural success.
[p. 202]
Religion Explained is an extensive work
that makes use of anthropological examples and an analysis of
how the mind develops and thinks in order to explain the origin
and function of religious beliefs and practices. Perhaps the
best way to review is to list what we do know and note what’s
still left out.
1. First of all we know, as we should have been
able to see even before reading this book with its heavy
emphasis upon comparative anthropological examples, religion is
not factually valid in and of itself because it comes in so many
forms that can be effectively interchanged and replaced. This is
equally true of rituals and similar seemingly arbitrary
manifestations of human culture. The actual social utility of
these things resides in the practice of doing them, for
instance in providing the benefit of enhanced social cohesion
and group identity.
2. The author makes a convincing argument that no
one is more religious than anyone else, i.e. that religion is
not a product of some special region of the brain, or even a
weakness within the mind (meaning intellectual negligence).
Religion, because it can be found around the world, is really a
byproduct of the pattern- forming methodology of the human mind
that has evolved over thousands of years of interacting with the
natural environment. Religious beliefs are like a mistaken
judgment, a misperception of cause and effect, events and
forces.
Our
evolution as a species of cooperators is sufficient to explain
the actual psychology of moral reasoning, the way children and
adults represent moral dimensions of action. But then this
requires no special concept of religious agent, no special code,
no models to follow. However, once you have concepts of
supernatural agents with strategic information, these are made
more salient and relevant by the fact that you can easily insert
them in moral reasoning that would be there in any case. To some
extent religious concepts are parasitic upon moral intuitions.
[p. 191]
Religious beliefs are a byproduct of the pattern-forming methodology of the human mind.
3. Morality is not a result of religious beliefs
but is actually the other way around; religion is an expression
of inborn moral concepts. Unfortunately, at this point the author
moves on without addressing the implications of universal moral
concepts. This is a glaring weakness, especially from the pen of
a self-described social scientist.
The study of the social mind by
anthropologists, evolutionary biologists and psychologists gives
us a new perspective on the connections between religion and
social life. Consider morality. In some places people say that
the gods laid down the rules people live by. In other places the
gods or ancestors simply watch people and sanction their
misdemeanors. In both cases people make a connection between
moral understandings (intuitions, feelings and reasoning about
what is ethical and what is not) and supernatural agents (gods,
ancestors, spirits). It now seems clear that Voltaire's
account—a god is convenient: people will fear him and behave—got
things diametrically wrong. Having concepts of gods and spirits
does not really make moral rules more compelling but it
sometimes makes them more intelligible. So we do not have gods
because that makes society function. We have gods in part
because we have the mental equipment that makes society possible
but we cannot always understand how society functions.
[p. 28]
It still takes more than what the author uses to
explain some elements of religion. One element is the ego, the
sense of self-awareness extended outward into the realm of
others. Religion clearly contains a significant element of ego
expression because it tries to answer the question of why events
happen to me personally. Events and forces within the mystical
religious realm are always personalized.
This leads us to a second explanation for the fact that people
explain so many events in terms of supernatural causes. The idea
is this: some events are such that they naturally suggest
questions (Why me? Why now?) that are simply not answered in
terms of ordinary causal processes. That is, people who do all
this know perfectly well that disease strikes most people at
some point or that mud huts will eventually collapse in a
termite-infested village. No one could be unaware of these
general principles. But general principles are just
that—general. That is their weakness. They have nothing to say
about particular cases. People are understandably concerned with
the particulars of each case, not its general aspects. Hence the
value of supernatural explanations, which are relevant to the
particulars of the situation.
[pages 196-197]
But it’s skipping a step, it's a mistaken
question to answer. The issue seems like ego displacement at
best, or paranoia perhaps. Why would one think the action of
random events to be not only malicious and intentional but also
aimed directly at oneself? Why, and how the leap?
Pascal Boyer brings
up an interesting point, although he doesn’t address it in this
manner, it seems clear that one should not participate in the
rituals of those they don’t approve of or wish to be associated
with:
Rituals do not create social effects but
only the illusion that they do. When people perform rituals,
they combine some ritual gadget—easily acquired because it
activates our precaution-contagion system— and a particular
social effect—for which they have intuitions but no good
concepts—in a single package. Thoughts about the social effect
and thoughts about the ritual sequence are combined since they
are about the same event. So rituals are naturally thought to
produce the social effects.
This illusion is strengthened by the fact that not performing a
particular ceremony, when others do, very often amounts to
defecting from social cooperation. For instance, once you attach
a particular ritual (initiation) to full cooperation between
men, or another one (wedding) to mate-choice, then not
performing the ritual amounts to a refusal to enter into the
same social arrangements as other people. In a place where
everybody signals their openness and reliability by keeping
their windows open, drawing your curtains is a clear signal of
non-cooperation. So the illusion that the ritual is actually
indispensable to its effects, although untrue if you consider
human societies in general, becomes quite real for the people
concerned, as their choice is between going through the actions
prescribed—which seems to confirm that the rituals are a sine
qua non—or defecting from cooperation with other members of the
group, which is not really an option in most human groups.
[p. 255]
Another missing fact is that isolated people have no examples
with which to refute established beliefs! What about cultural
context that builds the substrate for beliefs in the first
place? People will go through any routine no matter how
ridiculous it is when they have no other knowledge or examples
to compare to.
After reading Religion Explained I feel like the author
described how an engine works but didn't discuss the vehicle
using the engine. Is that meant to be a topic left up to the
reader to analyze, a second volume perhaps, or just a topic the
author is intentionally avoiding? Nevertheless, Religion
Explained is a fascinating book and certainly
well worth reading. No book is perfect but even with some of the
weaknesses this one has, in this case, they should at least lead
the reader to start asking more questions and thinking of ways
to build upon the bright ideas and interpretations that Pascal
Boyer presents to us.
Manufacturing Armageddon
Usually a graphic is made after the text is written in order to enhance
the conceptual understanding of the essay, but in this case it
was done the other way around. So to begin with c lick
on the image to the right to read it. The title is
Achieving Total
Dominance of the Information Battlesphere,
an unlikely string of words
that
serves as an example of typical Air Force jargon-speak, meaning:
give us a few hundred billion more dollars and we promise to conquer the
universe in ten years.
Multiple elements of American society are being
criticized in this art-graphic. The blatant, inconsistent and
arbitrary censorship of the content of an open news source is
meant to highlight the ‘we’ll censor the facts because we can’
attitude on the part of authorities and the complicity of
mainstream media in the charade, their quickness to roll-over
when ever government or special interests complain. In this case
the source text is from an actual New York Times article
that was simply too outrageous to just toss back into the
memory hole without getting some more use out of it. Now, the
source here is a NYT article but it could just as easily be
Newsweek and the recent blurb in their magazine conveying
allegations of Koran abuse by officials at the concentration
camp in
Guantanamo Bay. Although the story of abuse of the Koran
by officials was
conceptually correct, Newsweek still retracted the article after
massive pressure from the White House and a source that changed
his mind afterwards.
This
graphic is also a vignette of the effort that military and
partisan government institutions will exert just to warp and
spin objective events to fit their transitory agenda. The real
threat to the collective well being of American’s doesn’t come
from a handful of terrorists, it comes from a runaway military
and defense industry colluding with federal policy-makers and a
mass-media that is tasked with accurately informing the public
but is really only concerned with quick profits.
Pausing for a moment, let’s look back and try to figure
out just how we got into this mess in the first place. How did the
free, pluralistic and open society of the United States turn into an
empire that seeks to dominate Earth, space and everything in
between for interests of ‘national security’, whatever that
really means? First we need to get inside the mindset that
characterizes the motivation and direction that Empire America
is headed.
The Vietnam ‘war’ is an apt place to start. The
political and socially conservative mindset, so prevalent inside
the military, really believe that America lost the conflict in
Vietnam because the mass media, composed of “liberals”, reported
all the terrible things that were actually going on and
subsequently turned the majority of American public opinion away
from support of continued direct involvement in Southeast Asia.
In this view they didn’t lose because they were propping up
a succession of wholly corrupt and brutal puppet regimes in
South Vietnam, they didn’t lose because combat operations were
consistently killing, maiming and alienating Vietnamese and
world opinion, and they didn’t lose the conflict in Southeast
Asia because of the continual tactics of brutality and illegal
strategic actions, such as the bombing of Cambodia. No, this
conservative view of historical events believes that America
lost the (undeclared) war in Vietnam because Americans saw bad
things happen on their TV screens every evening. The black and
white mindset of the conservatives disregards the fact that,
yes, these bad things actually did occur in Vietnam, but
that's not important because brutality is an integral part of
war and war is good because, in the case of Vietnam, it was to
defeat ‘godless’ Communists. Vietnam was a good war because,
just like World War II, it was fought to defeat pagans, atheists
and other non-Christians. Similar, the current war in Iraq is
another good war because it is being waged against Muslims and
non-believers in Jesus, as well as to support Jews in Israel who
share a belief in the Old Testament of the Bible. Of course this
chain of thought and set of beliefs is total garbage, riddled
with ignorance, flawed assumptions, and flagrant logical errors,
but again it doesn’t matter to them because they can’t see
themselves and there is no internal criticism in belief.
In the aftermath of the Vietnam fiasco the United
States military had basically collapsed internally with morale
in the toilet and a public that had lost its enthusiasm for
large-scale conflict. Nor did they have any remaining desire to
be conscripted into active duty service. As the military was
rebuilt into a volunteer force the Christian conservatives
exploited the opportunity to integrate their beliefs into the
culture of the new military, and they succeeded to the point
that now soldiers pray together in groups under the lead of a
General or commanding officer before heading into combat or a
mission, and the Air Force Academy is so rife with Christian
fundamentalists that they are currently being sued for
discrimination. [1] Ironically, the all volunteer military means
that the active character and consequent culture of the
institution lacks a necessary element of social and economic
diversity necessary for preventing the rise of a dominant
monoculture that can wield undue influence out or proportion to
the wider national population with its views, beliefs and
opinions.
Along with altering the culture of the military,
a major push was made to tightly control the flow of information
in subsequent conflicts and prevent the leak of images and facts
deemed harmful to the continuation of another brutal conflict
overseas.
This task has two main arms. The first arm is the use of what’s
called psychological warfare to spread the propaganda message
that the Executive branch and the military commanders want the
public to hear, both at home and on the battlefield. The second
arm is the direct control of public media. The culmination of
this policy can be seen today with embedded news reporters in
Iraq, which serve as virtually the sole source of domestic
American information on the course of the conflict on the
ground.
The tight control of information, coupled with the
cultural shift towards Christian fundamentalism in the military
is clearly evident in the current war on Iraq lead by George W.
Bush, a ‘born-again’ Christian, in conjunction with the
Christian conservatives so influential in the United States
military. They're also backed by a considerable portion of the
American public that shares the belief in the noble quality of a
religious war in the Middle East i.e. West Asia. And if that
wasn’t dangerous enough, the same Christian Fundamentalists also
believe, as they interpret the Biblical book of Revelation,
that Iraq is the Babylon mentioned in that book, that Armageddon
is at hand and that this final battle will usher in the second
coming of Jesus and ‘rapture’ all the ‘born-again’ Christian
believers up to heaven, while the ‘anti-Christ’ takes over back
on Earth! Yes, the same people that control thousands of nuclear warheads on land, sea and air-based missiles
really believe
that an Armageddon conflict will result in their hasty ascension
to heaven so they can be with Jesus!
If this sounds too outrageous to be taken
seriously, hold on because it gets better. Not long ago a brief
flurry of concern erupted over the speeches to
church groups
(in military uniform) given by
Lieutenant General William Boykin, stating things like:
"Our
enemy is a spiritual enemy because we are a nation of believers
… His name is Satan." and
“Why is
this man [President W. Bush] in the White House? The majority of
Americans did not vote for him. He's in the White House because
God put him there for a time such as this."
[2] Well readers, by now you should know that making
inflammatory religious statements like that won’t get you fired
in the Bush administration, but it may well get you promoted. So
guess what? General Boykin is still around and busier than ever
having traveled from
Delta Force to the Joint Special Operations Command via the CIA,
to
Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for
Intelligence. [3]
Do we really want to be giving these people even
more billions of dollars? Do we really want them to have
space-based weapons that can obliterate any spot on the planet
in 15 minutes? Do we want people in positions of immense
authority, and responsibility who are convinced that ‘our’ God
is greater than ‘their’ God, and who believe with all their
heart and soul that America is a Christian nation to the
exclusion of everyone who isn’t, a Christian empire, a light
unto the world whose mission is to spread the gospel of Jesus
with a Bible or a bomb, and a nation that can do no wrong
because it is divinely sanctioned by God? Are they really
working to improve national security or are they actually
destabilizing international relations and making the world a
more dangerous place while blinded by religious zeal?
If the answer to any of those questions is no
then America and the entire world is faced with a very
serious problem: delusional maniacs with the zealous belief
in an impending Armageddon have taken control of the most
powerful and destructive military machine in world history.
1.
Christian fundamentalist bigotry reigns at US Air Force
Academy,
by Patrick Martin, WSWS, April 30, 2005
2.
God put Bush in charge, says the general hunting bin Laden,
by
David Rennie,
The Telegraph, October 17, 2003.
3.Thank
God for General Boykin,
by Tony Blankley, October 22, 2003.
The I’m Not Worthy
Syndrome
01.03.04 The Catholic Church has used
various tricks to emotionally exploit the flock for centuries,
but not always in the same way. Most notable is the use of
specific imagery to generate the desired reaction in the public. Before around 1400 the
primary aim was to convey the basic stories and allegories of
the Bible to an illiterate public. The art was mostly flat and
two-dimensional, fairly sterile as far as emotion; it was just the basic
storylines, enough for the public to get the message. But that
was acceptable because the Church didn’t have much competition anyway, so
both the public and the Church could afford to get a bit lazy in
the message department.
Inexorably competition
heated up and the Church had to adjust its propaganda. During
the 15th and 16th centuries the propaganda
tactics through art began to change away from just conveying a
simple story and allegory, which had all been beaten into the
public’s mind by now anyway, towards direct emotional exploitation. The
shift in propaganda tactics can be identified through the
chronological study of the religious art and icons that were
commissioned for public consumption. For example, although the Crucifixion has always been a common theme in Christian
religion it became a dominant one only gradually and as the Church
needed a new tool to better control the minds of the flock.
Around the 16th century the images featuring Jesus,
usually on the cross, became more graphic and gruesome while
simplified down to the basic thematic elements. Often they were crafted either as sculptures or three-dimensional looking paintings.
The technical quality of the
art improved as did the effectiveness of the propaganda.

1305 |

1317 |

1512 |

early 1500s |

1632 |

2004 |
And what was the point of
this? Why did the visual imagery change? The reason was to bring home the impact to the viewer with greater
emphasis, to make the public really FEEL the pain, to grasp the
torment Jesus suffered all just for a worthless nobody who deserves
to burn in hell, like you! This has a double impact on the
public, the first is to make them revel in the I’m not worthy
syndrome the other is to strengthen their faith in the
righteousness of their Christian belief. The effect of this
psychological warfare campaign on the public was to solidify the
monopoly of the Christian religion, to enhance the status of the
ruling elite, and to make the public more obedient and
compliant. When you're ‘not worthy’ you don’t ask
difficult or serious questions, you don’t make waves or
challenge the righteousness of the established beliefs or
authorities, you just blindly follow along with all the other
sheep.
Fast forward a few hundred
years to today; the psychological warfare campaign waged by
Christians and the Church establishment never disappeared, it has
just been on the defensive.
The Passion of the Christ represents a belated offensive
in this regard. Although traditionalist Catholic Mel Gibson’s
movie The Passion has generated quite a bit of hype and
controversy, usually centered on anti-Semitism charges, the
Christian opinion in America is pretty much unanimous on one
thing –
the quality, content or
historical inaccuracies of the film do not matter just as
long as it gets people interested in Christianity.
So stop and think about it,
Jesus lived for what, 32 years? Mel Gibson could have fixated
upon ANY element of Jesus' life but what did he pick? Gibson
intentionally chose to feature a man being tortured to death in
graphic detail for a full-length feature film. This is a perfect
example of the warped mentality and slave-based outlook of the
Christian mind. The believers will go into see this movie and come
out feeling exactly like they're told to feel, not how a
healthy, objective person would react. The ambivalent or unsure
will see this 'mystical' and 'spiritual' reaction in the
believers and start to wonder if maybe they should
believe the same thing too.
Even more enlightening is the fact that
the Churches have jumped on this movie like the starving dogs
that they are, buying up tickets to the tune of thousands of
dollars to hand out to their flock and boost initial sales
figures at the same time. Indeed the
profitability of the film is no longer in question.
Gibson's The Passion is
simply taking the Church’s main theme to its inevitable
Hollywood extreme. For Christians, the need to shock and awe
the audience into blind belief is greater than ever.
The Passion
is a film that, were it an objective documentary, could be seen
as a condemnation of the example punishment used in the criminal
justice system of the Roman Empire, but is instead used by the
director to dramatize and glorify violence to serve his
religious agenda. Billy Graham summed it up by calling The
Passion “a lifetime of sermons in one
movie.” Christians are using the most appalling exploitation and
brutality to recruit, propagandize and extend their own belief
system, even going so far as to sell jewelry and trinkets in the
process; Christ's crucifixion or Disney's The Little Mermaid
- you decide!
As far as Christians are
concerned (and remember this is supposedly the religion of love
and compassion) the more gruesome and the more painful the
visual message appears the better. The believers are to never
forget the suffering and anguish of their savior and their own
lowly place in the grand theological plan, for in every
communion service the spurting, oozing blood of Christ is
represented by the red fluid (wine or grape juice) and the
bread is his beaten, broken and lacerated body.
One should wonder how
the Christian church can continue to condemn violence in the
mass media now that the Church itself has become a staunch
advocate of this exact violence through Gibson's film?
As a testament to the
capacities of the human mind and the power of psychological
manipulation, witness stigmata, where believers becomes
so obsessed with a tortured Christ that they bleed on their own
bodies where (they think) his wounds were. The reasoning is that
the lower a believer can place himself or herself, the higher
Christ is magnified. The Passion is a cinematic version of
stigmata – let’s all bleed for our poor, wonderful martyr-savior Jesus.
Christianity:
Tool of the Slave Master
Whether its stigmata or some
other form of self-abasement, it’s all just more of the same
psychological warfare courtesy of the Christian religion with
the express purpose of creating a mindless and obedient flock of
tithe paying believers. 28.02.04
Addendum / Comment:
The Passion’s Impact on Modern Christianity
This movie is one of
those thought problems where the more I think about it the more
intriguing it becomes. Christians are crawling out of the
woodwork to go see this thing and practically every pastor and
preacher from here to East Jesus Missouri is pushing it like you
wouldn’t believe. But I’ve got a feeling that Mel Gibson could
end up being the worst thing to happen to Christianity since
Nietzsche. Ridiculous you say? Let me explain.
Gibson is an
exceedingly blunt person, he doesn’t seem to grasp the use of
symbolism and the use of implied events so critical to the
creation of a powerful and memorable film. The effect of his
brutal and unpleasant film is not one of nuanced subversion but
simply in your face anger, revulsion and moral superiority. The
problem for American Christianity is that by rushing to claim
‘ownership’ of The Passion they have become intricately
associated with a film that is not in their strategic best
interests to be associated with! Nor can Christians disown Mel
Gibson’s brand of extreme Catholicism, which they also blindly
supported, or the future religious movies he will now
undoubtedly produce as a follow-up!
Gibson through his
utter lack of subtlety has in effect ripped off the love and
compassion mask of Christianity to reveal the violent and
painful truth behind it. Christianity is a religion that
preaches love and brings hate, spouts kindness but delivers
pain, that promise heaven and delivers hell. None of this will
be immediately evident because the believers will continue to
act and say what they're supposed to express, but eventually it
will sink in. A division has been created and a polarization
effect is occurring. The
French newspaper Liberation aptly described Gibson's
faith as "a Shiite version of Christianity
. . . imbibed with blood and pain, reduce[ing] the message of
Christ to his death by torture." Christianity is now on a
path towards losing its mainstream appeal, at least in the
United States, and perhaps elsewhere too.
Who’s really the
lunatic, the atheist that has to stand out and build a
rational argument to withstand a constant barrage of believer
attacks every day, or the believer that can pick up any
religion and fit right in with a crowd? Who’s really spewing
the saliva, the atheist that talks about what he or she can
find and understand or the fire and brimstone preacher ranting
about things they can't prove to exist, or even matter?
Mysticism is Detachment From Life
01.10.02 Satanism, and its
popular appeal, bleeds into the larger 'death-culture'
phenomenon which has notable recent
manifestations within mainstream culture. This is partly
due to wider interest and partly due to a
consumer entertainment industry that will sell
anything for a dollar and needs progressively new
and shocking material to maintain a marketing
edge over the competition. As technology
inexorably replaces nature, natural balances are
upset and this change is no more obvious than the
human concerns with the black and white of life
and death, that most fundamental of forces that
afflicts us all whether we choose to ignore it,
obsess over it, or deal with it rationally.
The Satanist
counterculture is partly a reflection of our new
age of detachment from the reality of death and
the natural cycles of life. Death is detached
rather than real, something isolated, unnatural,
mysterious. Death is something to be packaged and
carefully marketed for public consumption, either by butchers and industrial machinery or the two-dimensional
celluloid fantasies brought to us by media moguls
controlling entertainment conglomerates. And
since death, just like nature, is no longer real but artificial, consequently the
public begins to believe that the effects of
death should be equally unreal. But everyone
secretly knows better - whether they accept it or
not. Many, from panic of the inevitable, search
for a loophole or a cheat code, whether in a cure
for cancer or a cryogenic freezer.
But whether one
revels in death or tries to escape it, neither
view is an expression of a healthy outlook. So
it's not just the counterculture with the
distorted views on death. All of this distortion
of natural events is the toxic waste product of
warped morality system, collective values that
promote the dis-equilibrium of natural events.
"It wouldn't be a bad
idea to accept that it happens [death], rather
than throwing all this money and resources into
trying to find the ultimate cure for ageing so we
can live for a couple of centuries. I find this
idea of attempting to overcome old age and death
medically rather grotesque and scary. I can't
think of anything more socially disruptive." [1] Socially disruptive is right.
But it has a certain twisted logic to it as the solipsistic
product of moral anomie. Irrational fear of death comes from
a culture of detachment and unfamiliarity with life itself.
Religious answers
have traditionally masked these issues. Holy
books and holy leaders gave pat answers in
simplistic terms - heaven and hell, eternal soul,
etc.
It was socially unacceptable to question
tradition and such claims were fundamentally
impossible to verify anyhow so most everyone
simply accepted them and went about their lives
quite satisfied they knew the ultimate answers
concerning the fundamentals of life, death and
afterlife. Today such traditional
mythology no longer suffices. An ignorant and
misguided public demands new myths to replace the
old. Consequently, death is being mystified and
mythologized all over again with the updated
packaging of death-culture and wayward medical
technology. The harmful
consequences are similar.
Repackaging the old
only offers us all a delayed redux of our present dilemmas. A
proper perspective is needed and the first step is demystifying
death and recognizing it for what it actually is - universal and
inevitable.
"Acknowledging
that there is an end to our personal history is a
powerful prompt. It makes us realise that lots of
other things have ends: friendships,
conversations, our actions. If you live forever,
there is no sanction on your behaviour." [1] It's not
necessary to craft complicated moral rules or
mystical answers in order to deal with death, and
by corollary life itself. The start is just
accepting it for what it is; death should not be
magnified nor should it be trivialized. Here in
the 21st century we have no excuse for failing to
be intelligent and mature enough to deal with
death, sans superstitious beliefs and foolish
rituals.
Barring those two
estimable qualities, people need purpose in their
lives, they need outlets for actions in mind and
body that are not idle wastes of mental and
physical energy but rewarding and personally
meaningful. You can never gain purpose by working
solely for someone else, trading time for money.
You can't buy purpose. No one can spend their way
into a fulfilling life - that brief respite
between the absolute singularities of birth and
death. Nor will anyone ever gain any purpose from
pop-culture or endless entertainment because it
solely exists as a means to escape life
not to deal with it, understand it or respect it!
Entertainment is as hollow as money - both are
illusions of escape, not solutions. Instead, read, write, think,
experience, question and learn because all of those things
invest in yourself rather than others; they provide a real and
tangible profit from the investment that can't be taken away. If
you just read this you've already started. Now keep it up.
1. From an interview of
archaeologist Timothy Taylor on death, New Scientist
magazine September 2002
|
The
Power of Faith |

April
2005 |
Religion, Crime
& Conformity
25.08.02 A recent newspaper
article on computer crackers made the intriguing
assertion that their obsessive personalities
share striking similarities to a mild mental
disorder called Asperger Syndrome. The antisocial
tendencies are what concern both the
psychologists and the legal system, but the real
issue is not what they do as much as how they do
it. Solving problems, learning technical tricks,
that's never wrong, but doing this to steal
information or to break into a secured system is.
As the
Sydney Morning
Herald newspaper article pointed out, one of
the common characteristics here is the socially
antagonistic mentality, the 'f**k you' attitude
as the paper so colorfully put it. But is this
mindless anger or a perfectly understandable
reaction to being thrown away by society? More
likely it's simply being rejected and ignored
despite having remarkable knowledge and skills,
but not always being able to communicate them
appropriately or find productive outlets for
expression. It's also about the lack of official
connections to get on that escalator to social
success. The system portrays itself as being fair
but it is clearly anything but; it discriminates,
it mitigates and it makes chronic capricious
rejections. Such problems I would posit are
almost universally a sign that society, either
intentionally or otherwise, does not have any
useful outlets for this form of creativity and
energy. Thus the few that do have these
remarkable mathematical and cryptographic skills
are relegated to anti-social, marginal tasks that
inevitably land them in trouble with the law.
I can think of at
least one historical example to this which
occurred 1000-1500 years ago in Europe during the
transition from the archaic religions to the more
rigid and orderly Christianity. Pagan religion
encompassed multiple views and opinions and the
disparate persons to match; it was like an answer
to a question that couldn't be answered. Dogma,
rigid rules, specifics -- all were anathema to
these pagan religions. But Christianity replaced
this with a singular answer and forced obedience
to that one view. So it was once declared by a
Christian priest in England that the old religion
offered no reward for true and faithful service -
heathen men were left with nothing to trust in
after death. The Celtic tribes succumbed one by
one then the Vikings and finally the Germans who
held out in certain parts of Prussia until the Middle Ages.
Christianity brought
order and rigid rules to these people, and that
brought gain and loss, but mostly it served to negate
the best and propagate the weakest. It nullified
the individual expression, the personal benefits
of breaking out and achieving your own success
and it penalized independent thought or
expression. Before it was true that one could
attempt to do whatever was in their power, but
afterwards it became more important that everyone
follow certain rules as well as the leaders who
defined those rules. Population increases and the
advent of cities had much to do with these shifts,
but the outcome was inevitable.
While population densities and the
concomitant need for rules and social order have grown, the fact
remains that society would never change if it wasn't for 'odd
people' and new perspectives. It's the mutation that matters and
anyone with a different or novel interpretation or world view is
a social misfit. If everyone fit in we'd never change anything;
we'd all be hopeless clones. A successful society must have an
allowance for 'misfits' it has to have elasticity to it
otherwise it will break because it can't integrate changes or
innovation. Anymore, conformity is both vastly overrated and
overemphasized. Conformity is often abused just like faith to
compel allegiance to flawed precepts. And if the cluster of
conformity is failing, then attaching yourself to it means
failure for you as well. Whether an active decision is being
made by the individual or not, the action to conform does not
always convey any benefit. It's simply easier to adopt a
collective identity than craft one of your own.
Rules and forces of
conformity outliving their usefulness only serve
to marginalize increasingly greater portions of
the population with obviously detrimental social
effects. Normal but aggressive behavior has very
few legitimate outlets anymore within
contemporary society. Males are
programmed to
compete even when no
apparent purpose is manifest. Indeed this helps
explain the popularity of sports and video games,
they are acceptable outlets, but fighting,
fratricidal competition and other destructive
behavior within contemporary, regimented and
carefully ordered society are quite common as
well. So everything not approved of by the
authorities falls under the broad canopy of
what's termed 'anti-social' behavior.
The expanding
popularity of old-fashioned paganism is an
understandable reaction to history and
contemporary events. The breakdown of monotheism
into new and less rigid interpretation is a
positive sign, but to turn the clock back and live a
pagan lifestyle is doomed to fail. While paganism
adequately addressed the technological and social
issues of millennia ago it's quite inadequate for
contemporary concerns. The past should be viewed
more as a teacher than as a role-model. Paganism
is a hollow exercise that will only repeat a failed
past. It's critical to construct valid and
beneficial outlets for all human energy, to
defeat dogma and structure allowance for dissent
and alternate ideas, otherwise useful and talented
individual will manifest their abilities as crime
and anti-social behaviour only creating a losing situation for
all involved.
30.09.01 Whichever Bible you're reading
Christianity is remarkably consistent on one point, revenge is
God's domain, not that of man.
"Do not take revenge,
my friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for
it is written: It is mine to avenge; I will
repay, says the Lord. On the contrary: If your
enemy is hungry, feed him..." Romans 12:19-20
President George W.
Bush and his loudmouthed ally, Italy's Berlusconi,
come immediately to mind. They claim to be proud
Christians upholding God's edicts while violating
everything their holy book commands of them.
Amidst rampant ignorance and zealous frenzy these
pseudo-leaders and much of their national
populations are so busy beating the drums of a
religious crusades and vowing 'superior'
Christian values will conquer Islam's
'inferiority' that they're blinded by their own
hypocrisy.
When they kept on
questioning him, he straightened up and said to
them, "If any one of you is without sin, let
him be the first to throw a stone at her. - Jesus said
in John 8:7.
If you want vengeance, if you want
justice, revenge or whatever the present hyperbole is, and you
wish to claim yourself a Christian, perhaps you should start by
studying the Bible?
The New Crusade
20.09.01 Who is planning this new war
anyway? The evidence points primarily to Vice President Cheney and General
Colin Powel, the same two who botched 'Desert Storm' by winning
the battle but losing the war. Furthermore, while addressing
public and media they referred to the asymmetrical nature of
this war on terrorism as being akin to
"the war on
drugs or poverty", and that the best way to
undermine and dismantle the terrorist structures around the
world is to use the method of
"hearts and
minds". Really! So now we're
repeating the successful failures of Reagan & Bush (war on
drugs), Johnson's (Great Society) and the conflict in Vietnam
(hearts and minds). Yup, nothing a few trillion dollars can't
complicate, but you always wanted to pay more in taxes anyway, right?
Is not the Bush administration
orchestrating the exact type of world war characterized by one
civilization against another that the terrorists wanted in the
first place? What President Bush so eloquently referred to as a
"crusade" coupled with the repetitive
references to
"war" leave little doubt as to the
emotional and motivational demeanor of this effort. The domestic
American response has already featured attacks on Arabic
(looking) people, and the vandalism of mosques, followed by a
halfhearted public reprimand and continued media stereotyping.
Isn't reactionary America just falling for the same type of trap
(sucker punch) set for the rescue crews arriving at the scene of the first
World Trade tower attack?
This simply cannot
be solved through a vigorous reapplication of the
covert intelligence operations that created Osama bin
Laden and his associates in the first place, nor
by means of force and destruction. A military
response is violence begetting violence; it will
only create greater destabilization to generate
anger, deeper desperation and poverty while
killing new martyrs, thereby focusing the anger and animosity of
another generation against American imperialism. A million Iraqi
children have already died from sanctions, and thousands
are homeless and starving in Afghanistan too due to
the effects of sanctions.
All that remains of
a hollow empire is show of force and military
might. The writing is on the wall, reason has
left the country, and sanity is quickly packing
its bags. This aberrant culture and its empire
has always been programmed for self-destruction, and now the
timer is finally running short.
Whither Atheism
08.07.01 & 29.01.10 What is the point of atheism? Is it
to be godless or anti-god? Are we telling the J-W at the door
we're atheist to get them to leave? Or attempting to turn
God-denial into it's own belief system merely supplanting one
deity with another? Why so much emphasis on rejecting God but so
little on rejecting Satan? How much should we really be worrying
at all about entities that cannot be disproved and have no
discernable connection to events in reality?
People approach atheism with
multiple intentions. Many atheists are actually more God-fearing
than your average churchgoer; they just mask the presence with
enthusiasm in dogmatic absolutes. In this regard, God is really as
real as that gray matter between your ears. God
is a product of that matter - the human mind -
and likely as significant as any other fantasy or
myth based on poorly understand transcendental
impulses and mental sensations. It's a deity
contrived into existence by the powers of the dim
primeval, ancestor worship, primate society, fear
and awe of the unknown, the uncontrollable. God is not gone, God is just
misunderstood; it's not a joke or a foolish idea
that ignorant people latch onto for lack of
education or proper inculcation. People read
and respect the Bible because they connect with
the spiritual elements, with spiritual sensations
they can detect but barely describe. The only practical option is to compete, because people will
continue to feel that transcendental stimulus and
it won't disappear even if the church and the
Bible do.
Atheism is not an
issue to approach with glib attitude or arrogant
righteousness because it's not a simple
issue of black and white, God or no God. Instead
atheism is to be approached with respect for
religion and mystical meaning coupled with a
genuine intellectual desire to conquer cultural
vestige. Someone who can move beyond what is
irrelevant and focus on that which is important
becomes more nimble of thought and more luminous
of insight, because the spiritual solution is evolutionary not
revolutionary. And in the end it may well be that an individual's
need for supernatural justification is inversely proportional to
their personal self-worth.
Religion on the
Brain
19.06.01 Verified
scientific research has highlighted the fact that
certain centers in the brain are directly
associated with transcendental experiences. Also,
depressed brain activity in the parietal lobe, as during
meditation or tedious church
service homilies, erodes the sense of self in relation to
others, creating a mystical sensation of 'nirvana'. In other
words all that spiritualism humanity has used and abused for
millennia is really all in the mind after all and has no casual
link to any substantive element of reality. Hmmm no website
author has ever presented that idea before. Imagine that,
religion is all in the mind!
As I've stated before, religion is
programmed into the human mind to varying degrees - it's a
receptor and it won't be going away anytime soon, although
certain people are predisposed to this illusion while others
less so, if at all. This scientific evidence is a fantastic
start to a new era because it grants empirical values to a
previously unverifiable subjective experience, the dark corners
of spiritual mystery that religious belief inhabits are
shrinking at an alarming rate. Now the next step is to transfer
these experiences from the ownership of Church back to the
individual, it may be devalued in a way but at least it won't be
used against us.
It's unfortunate but
true that the older one gets the more habitual
the ingrained and inculcated mind-modes become, and
the tougher it is to embrace alternates to those
damaging fantasies. Every non-nihilist approaches
this delusion to some degree with their arbitrary
values like faith in the justice system, the
purity of Jesus' love or the equality of man. And
this predisposition for the disease of religion
doesn't merely affect the ignorant or the stupid.
Indeed the supposed intelligent ranks of the
overeducated are often the most gullible, witness
the virulent spread of Politically Correct (PC)
mythology. And make no mistake PC is a religion
and one that typify the worst elements of zealous
faith and rejection of factual evidence.
Political correctness repels any allowance for
honest open debate, while remaining absolutely
certain of its own enlightened moral perfection.
PC pseudo-theology fails to deliver any example
of its stated improvements on society and yet
the devout followers must have faith in this
utopian future it will bring, they must worship
idols and gods that can never be criticized or
disproved, such as egalitarianism.
This mentality is
guided by emotion and not reason because logic
defeats their faith and fervent belief in
nonsense. 'Emotional robot' is an apt description
for anyone that intentionally and repeatedly
chooses to believe in fantasy over fact even when
presented with verifiable evidence to the
contrary. This denial is like some Star Trek
computer with fatally flawed software that's forced to reject
their own flawed programming or blow up in a shower of sparks
with a monophonic voice intoning 'does not compute' when faced
with a blatantly contradictory logic problem. Yet they manage to
avoid either resolving the problem or self-destruction - how?!
By maintaining cognitive dissonance they muddle through the
illogic and shield criticism of faith with emotional responses.
And now we see why this mentality creates a chronic festering
edginess and why the need for reactionary defenses. This is why
they must attack shock rockers or blasphemous artwork with
rallies and protests even though it merely advertises and
promotes loony, obscure artists. This is why shrieking PC
apostles are always angry over something, always searching for
an emotional target rather than anything backed by science,
fact, or objective evidence.
Any affront, real or perceived, to
erroneous belief systems cannot be allowed to
coexist and thus the religious live in a constant
state of intellectual siege; they can't accept
reality because it contradicts what they've been
told, what they believe above all else including
life itself. This confused lifestyle necessitates
a maniacal desire to warp reality to match their
belief in unreality which is why no one is allowed to
believe anything opposing what they do, and why
they must reach into every corner and control every soul.
They reject immersion in the world everyone else
inhabits with separate schools, separate
colleges and separate community events, because to
immerse, to participate, is to reinforce
contradictions and dissolve fantasies.
They can run but it's getting tougher than ever
to hide from the evidence.
In many ways Satanism is just a
mystical justification for the hedonistic
lifestyle. And hedonists are free to be but
their future is doomed to be brief and
unrecorded in the gene pool because they're
quickly replaced by ones with greater discipline
and motivation to perpetuate, survive and
extenuate. And the more hedonists in a society
the simpler superiority becomes. Selfishness
can't build the advanced superstructures that
provide the benefits of civilization.
So Much For
Christian Compassion
10.11.00 Torturing and
mutilating babies is both legal and vastly
prevalent in the U$A. Circumcising male infants
is probably one of the most repugnant
acts an otherwise concerned parent could intentionally do
to a child. The medical support is shaky, while the moral
support for circumcision has roots in the sterilizing and anti-sexual
emotions of the Victorian era, but also Christian and other religious sect's anti-sexual
predilections amidst the impetus of asceticism
and self-denial. Not to mention marking and
herding the flock of believers. The primary idea is
to exorcise a moral evil by removing a physical element of the human body.
Religion requires immense effort to make people
be inhuman, to force normal individuals into
warped modes of mind and body just to fit into
the sanctioned, 'proper' religious character
definition.
Denying feelings, denying impulses,
denying instinct, but even when asceticism 'works' it just
causes these natural forces to erupt from unpredictable and
unexpected directions. You get perversions like stigmata and the
obsession with hideously tortured bodies, like Christ crucified
and the executions of martyrs and prophets. In more primitive
sects the followers cut and maim themselves to appease the
(angry) gods, to include mutilation and self-torture. Like
pulling heavy objects with pins through skin and skewering body
parts. It's common throughout India, although often masquerading
more as a freak-show to attract an audience than anything else.
Even the most abstract symbolism when taken to extremes can
inflict very intense physical consequences. Mind and body can
interact within human culture in seemingly unlikely ways to
generate very tangible substance.
Holy Orthodox War!
02.02.00 The Russian media
has already claimed victory in Chechnya. Undoubtedly an overly optimistic statement, mostly
suited for boosting lagging public support. But
even if every Chechen gets shot or surrenders
tomorrow what does this really say? The entire
Russian military and already some 3,000 Russian
dead just to stomp on a tiny pseudo-republic of a
few dirt-farming peasants and rag-tag guerilla
soldiers!? Wow what an accomplishment and tomorrow the
world!
This entire conflict
is difficult for western observers to grasp, a
war as futile as it is senseless, but really its
not that complex. Chechnya is merely another battle in a
long running feud between Christian Russia and
the Muslims to the south. The Russian Orthodox Church at the
highest levels has both supported the war in Chechnya and also
praised the [Russian] war dead as heroes. This is no idle
statement from the church, the war is a religious conflict plain
and simple. The Russians have been in feuding with their southern foes for
centuries, attempting to keep Islam and deeper
Asia in general from overwhelming their Slavic
island-fortress.
Unfortunately for
the Russians the present conflict is merely
proving the level of weakness and decay within
the military and society. I dont think
Islam is expanding but the Christian/Slavs are
certainly contracting. So, now you see there is a
lot to lose in this otherwise stupid conflict of
fratricide and brutality. The Russians arent
the fools stumbling into one idiotic guerrilla
war after another, from Afghanistan to Transcaucasia. Chechnya is very significant
because its about maintaining a 1,000-year
empire. Certainly the USSR was a peak in Russian
history, at least geo-politically, becoming a global superpower.
But
ultimately Chechnya is a delaying action with the Russians merely buying time to pull out
with minimal catastrophe. I know it doesnt
seem that way right now but that is essentially
what it'll turn out to be. Another loss in a
string of failures as the Slavic empire declines.
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This photo indicates damage to
a Grozny cemetery from a fuel-air weapon or a thermobaric
explosive. |
The problem now is with the
Russian people themselves who need to stop creating
xenophobic excuses and deal with their internal foes -
the real danger to Slavic life. Eventually this will
happen but it will take a new generation to turn things
around. Soon foreign credit and the IMF will pull the plug on Russia, the cold and isolation will
close in, and the Abramovichs will find life increasingly
untenable with Russia a bloodless turnip.
Russia exists at a crucial
geopolitical juncture in world politics and the results
of her decline shouldn’t be glossed over. Who will fill
the power vacuum in southern Russia? A new Ottoman Empire? A new pan-Islam empire? Which would the
west prefer a resurgent Russian Bear of Christian colors
or a something less friendly and more Asiatic? The last
barrier between Asia and Europe is eroding away. Is the
west ready for the consequences?
Missionaries: Proselytization and Consequences
21.12.99 The missionary is arguably the most
deadly weapon any nation could fear being leveled against it. I
can think of no other force than religion that has started more
wars, motivated more bigotry, or stolen more lives. Opposing
theologies or inter-factional denominations it hardly matters
because theological views are oxygen to the internal flames of
hatred and envy.
The foot soldiers in God’s army
against national cohesion are the missionaries. Christian
missionaries are some of the most exuberant people one will ever
find. Likewise their enthusiasm far outshines any intelligence
they may possess. Blinded by belief, they rarely have a clue as
to the consequences of their actions beyond next week.
The missionary is like God’s
gravity bomb - fulfilled with an awareness of its design yet
completely ignorant of the target and after effect.
Can any country withstand the
onslaught of such a weapon so insidious it isn’t even recognized
as one? What defense is possible or practical? How effective is
counter-religious warfare? And finally do we really need to do
anything at all? We may find out that after all is said and done
we may actually owe the missionaries a debt of gratitude.
I
have past relatives
that, like many of their contemporaries, were steady churchgoers.
Even more so they were supporters of worldwide Christian proselytization.
So although I come from a long line of subversives, as you can
see, at least I can attest to a modicum of education on the
topic. In my case, way-back when, it was the Lutherans. One of their missions
was to China, as described in the book Korsets
Seger documenting the ‘Kinamission’ from 1890-1915. And this
was no hit and run operation, like we so often see today on the
latest oppressed hell-hole; this was a long term effort that
involved Lutherans living in China and establishing churches and
converts throughout the country, all the way back to at least
1807, according to Korsets Seger. Lutherans back in Europe
and America sent their tithes directly to the missionaries in
China, as well as ones throughout the globe.
I’m not trying to single out
Lutherans here because missionary work is something nearly all
Christian denominations have or are currently doing; the Mormons
can do it blindfolded. The Lutherans merely provide a
historical and archetypal example of the effort and consequences
of such work. Neither am I attempting to establish culpability
on the part of anyone here. Like everyone else they did what
they believed was right and did it to the best of their ability.
And isn’t that just the same message we get today?
China was a much more open to
outside religious influences a hundred years ago probably in the
belief that it would help them to modernize their society and
culture – Chinese history is peculiarly cyclical in that way.
The Lutherans lost no time taking advantage of that opportunity
and had plenty of funding to do so. Now the Chinese government
is just one of many countries paying the price. Christianity is
officially disliked and often repressed, but it’s all too late;
the destabilizing effects of Christianity cannot be
understated.
Fast-forward to today, Indonesia is
falling apart and the demarcation lines are religious. The
battles are largely between Muslim and Christian, as in the
Moluccas and in Aceh province; they don’t want to live together.
Remember the America’s have only been Christian for 500 years.
Soon feuds may spread to the Western Hemisphere as well. As
missionaries have sowed the gospel to every corner of the Earth
significant changes are inevitable within the newly-seeded
cultures.
Whether it's China, South Korea or
Panama the Church has a long and colorful history of influencing
public morality. Each country responds to the Christian
influence in slightly different ways but Christianity, like all
diseases, has only one purpose: the total domination of the
host. Many of the newly infected nations operate on the classic
repress and oppress methodology that plays into the hands of the
Church by creating martyrs and then new converts. We can see now
that the entire non-western world is merely in the beginning
phases of a long and torturous conflict that will play out over
the next hundred years. This battle is for the minds and moral
chains of the people. This war is one of nationalism,
self-determination and the reestablishment of a Church-State
political union. The nationalists are usually pro-traditional
religion and anti-western while the opposing side is
pro-religious freedom and friendly to western religious
authorities such as the Vatican, but not necessarily western
governments, Panama for example. Moral evolution is diverging into
two groups, the western secular camp, often deemed ‘decadent’ by
critics and proponents alike and the second group that's
conservative and regressive, culturally and morally.
A healthy and strong nation, just
like a healthy body, will easily repel the invaders even after
they have established residual colonies within the host. But
we're not talking about healthy nations. We are dealing with
starving, impoverished people and corrupt debt ridden
governments all ripe for religious awakenings. The hottest area
for missionary work today is Africa. With millions of starving,
ignorant heathens, modern Christian missionaries are finding
fertile grounds indeed. And make no mistake, Christianity is
popular and spreading like wildfire; in 25 years or less today’s
conflicts, as seen in Rwanda, will be nostalgically tame in
comparison.
If you think religion is dead -
think again, hard. Religious beliefs are what order the masses
throughout the developing world, in effect the bulk of the
global population. In comparison Americans, which are actually
pretty churchy (albeit religiously ignorant) people, are
considered God-less atheists by much of the planet. With
advances in communications technology and fewer travel
restrictions missionaries are rapidly approaching an unheard of
worldwide saturation level. A few corners of the especially
remote regions have not heard the gospel, but pretty much anyone
who cares to listen has had the opportunity. In case anyone
wonders, that fact is one elemental barrier to Armageddon –
everyone must have the opportunity to choose Jesus before the
Second Coming; but I digress.
Religion has evolved considerably
over the centuries from polytheistic animism to the present
omnipotent monotheistic deity. The evolution of religion is most
advanced in western culture, but the developing world is
quickly catching up. Unfortunately for the developing world the
conflicts so inevitably associated with divergent religious
philosophies are combined with high-tech weapons and aggressive
politics; this only spells one thing: serious trouble. The
groundwork for this new era of religious warfare has been laid
by the western missionaries of our past, expansionist and
colonialist period in the West as previously detailed. In the
near future those countries not irradiated beyond habitability
may have a new chance to start over with fewer hungry mouths and
hopefully a wiser population. That’s presupposing that factional
conflict will stay located within foreign boundaries.
Unfortunately they all know where we live, they have memories
longer than TV commercial breaks, and want nothing better than to
bring a few bombs our way. And who will have the audacity to say
the West didn’t earn it?
But technological progress is not
all bad. As our capabilities have improved so has our human
outlook of the universe changed along side it. From universal
human powerlessness and awe to a sense of individual freedom and
even to the point where every human soul has complete free will.
As religion evolves we’re seeing that belief systems are
increasingly becoming specialized and even customized, as well
as the powerful forces of decentralization at work. State
sponsored religion and established mainline churches are
increasingly changing to suit the needs of the churchgoers and
not the other way around. It’s almost like shopping for a new
car, which God will give me the most compassion and which pastor
seems the friendliest! This trend is likely related to the
pandemic drive for independence and ethnic homelands throughout
the world from Kurdistan to the Yucatan. A new religion for a
new people.
And in the developed world our
technology is fast replacing the fear of God that once reigned
supreme over ignorance and peasantry. Every element that our
civilization can control with ease means much less need for an
all-powerful deity to explain our powerlessness. But religion
isn’t obsolete yet. Realms of the unknown and unproven will
always remain, shadowy corners for God to live in and
worshippers to grovel for redemption.
The only thing dead about religion is universalism. The
desire to proselytize will always remain but I feel that
increasingly religious institutions will be turning inward and
focusing on the needs of their churchgoers. All churches are
really just business' - profit is as critical as bread and wine.
The new church is beholden to the customer more than to any
inviolate codified standard.
The Catholic Church has come a long
way on many previously sacrosanct issues – birth control,
homosexuality, women clergy etc. But this is just the beginning.
Western churches are also moving into the
political realm in the same vein as the specialization trend. As
the need to serve the customer gains significance so does
suiting their political tastes. A feedback relationship exists
because as much as the churchgoers want political concessions
the church wants its own and carefully cultivates the customers
passions to suit its own needs. Pat Robertson and Dr.
Dobson are two big names in this big new Christian game. As the
balkanization of the western polity continues new leaders must
move in to fill the power vacuum. These leaders will grow
dissent and the soldiers to fight for concessions from
the public trough. But then politics is nothing new to the
Church.
It’s difficult to say how far these
trends will progress for sure but the individualist nature of
modern religion is the most likely to reach maturity. I think
that eventually religion will become as personal as underwear;
perhaps it will be commercially prepared but everyone will be
more freely allowed to have their own opinion on the mysteries
of life and the universe. Given the horrific results of
state-sponsored religion it seems difficult to imagine that
privatized religion could do any worse.
No More Christians
13.01.99 I've noticed much news lately
concerning persecution of Christians and anything related to the
faith in general. China is in the spotlight right now because of
their notorious disdain for personal rights. But India, Islamic
states like Pakistan, and just about any non-western country
have been doing their own pogroms. I've talked before about the
evaporation of US moral authority but I've neglected to mention
that such respect is not limited to just a political
perspective. After all the US poses as a Christian country!
Right now Christ is about as popular as Uncle Sam, and that
certainly isn't good for foreign relations.
The effects of this are potentially
very extensive because the Christian faith has been the moral
tentacle exactly like the military is for the USA. It has
spanned the globe with an accompaniment in influence. But now
that the moral grip is slipping who or what will replace it? I
hardly doubt they will be as friendly to our interests as our
own Christian influence has been.
Life or Death
29.03.98 & 31.07.09 I
propose that the biological mother should have legal rights to
the life or death of their genetic offspring until a specific
young age, twelve perhaps. After all, if they create life and
are charged with the support and development of that life, then
shouldn't they have the equivalent right to destroy that life if
necessary? Why does any woman want an abortion? Because they
want to murder an infant or because they realize they lack the
means to support the baby and would rather spare the infant the
suffering and neglect it would otherwise receive?
Our legal reality doesn't
reflect biological reality and the abortion debate does nothing
positive to rectify the situation.
And in a related column,
why are Christians so fearful of death as in abortion and mercy
killing, I mean the babies aren't writhing in Hell! No,
according to their doctrine babies and anyone else incapable of
'sinning' gets a one way ticket to heaven. Wow what a bad break
for the baby eh?!! Yeah I'd rather stay here than go to heaven -
not! So, Christians want babies to live so they can have a
chance to grow up and burn in hell forever.
Christians are the world's
most perverted masochists, they want to suffer and they want
others to suffer with them. Their psychology is so warped it's
difficult to interpret the reasoning; but how can you debate the
topic when the other party simply ignores their own blatant
contradictions? The whole Bible is riddled with inconsistencies
and outright hypocrisy but that never seems to stop them.
More than anything else
abortion is the glue that holds together the tattered remnants
of modern Christian fundamentalism. The fanaticism is not
unusual given the context, it's a holy war and rational
discussion is impossible. It's fueled by tautological reasoning
- we're right because we're right.
One
Nightstand
(With thanks to Seligmann) |

2002 |
The Money Morality
21.10.96 Society and culture are reflections
of the collective morality, so what the group cares about most
becomes their God.
The Christian God and belief system
was based on an afterlife, including a utopian heaven attainable
only through the action of faith (Biblically-correct thinking).
Heaven is what the people wanted above all else (ultimately
anyhow). I would posit that the modern money morality can be
rational and 'earth based' because it promises heaven here and
now. After all what is heaven but the instant gratification of
all desires? The consumerist society is completely structured
toward the fulfillment of personal whims, it is the realization
of the old Christian heaven.
It isn't surprising to see the old
church in constant battle with 'worldly evil', 'money greed',
and the related litany of modern evils. The old church is dead
and in fact all its members are hypocrites because they practice
both faiths. The average Christian is a lot more afraid of
personal bankruptcy than being corrupted by the Devil. They are
made into heretics simply by living in a society dominated by
the religion of capitalism. The most fundamentally critical
issue to the institutionalized church is finance; after all what
happens to a church that can't pay its bills? It closes down
despite how noble the efforts of its priests and pastors may
have been.
The greatest rift between
capitalism and Christianity is that of rationalism versus
spiritualism. Capitalism is historically the first belief system
based on quantifiable substance (money) and purely rational in
its motives, science has conquered Christianity at last but its
new morality leaves mankind's spirit as vacant as an old
drive-in movie theater. Capitalism is really a religion of
expedience, or utility, because no new spiritualism had the
institutional authority to replace Christianity; nor does one
today.
The bizarre situation that America
faced in the 1950s could fill volumes, through a religious
perspective. The Church vs. Consumerism - America forgot about
the spirit because the body could get every pleasure desired.
Indeed spiritualism may be a facet of humanity present in
inverse relation to bodily health. A downtrodden and starving
body is likely a very spiritual one! (and vice versa) By this
reasoning the Christian new world would be the most
un-spiritual place possible - as was the Garden of Eden!
Even Nietzsche might need to think
twice about my thesis here because mankind isn't inherently
spiritual. The only human desire is not one of reaching
God-status, or a yearn for expression of the will, it's the
satisfaction of physical desires instantaneously. Truly humanity
hasn't changed any from the flatworms that seek light or avoid
it, or the sunflower that stretches toward the sun to gain every
lumen for growth. Instinctive automatons, just behaviorist's
rats in a box.
By this it can be seen that no
group is more spiritual than another biologically speaking,
merely they vary in their ability to become unspiritual or
physically satisfied through technological development. Anti-Nietzschian
philosophy?! Now it seems that the species' goal
is not the superman but a perpetual comfort zone where nothing
changes as long as the utopia heaven is functional. This is
exactly what occurs during drug addiction, it's the search for
the never-ending high! No one wants to leave the garden of Eden!
They would never actively work to improve anything if not for
their own desire of satisfaction. It's the definition of a
leaderless society. Maybe Nietzsche isn't completely wrong
because it can be seen here that an individual with vision is
necessary to guide the masses towards greater goals. Without a
leader we end up in the consumerist garden of Eden that is as
ephemeral as it is dysgenic.
But even the Nietzschian superman
is merely a slave to circumstance; why does our modern era have
so few great men? Because circumstance destroys social
revolutionaries. The only men allowed to succeed are the ones
working towards improving personal pleasure within the rigid
money morality; our technology has the power to stagnate as much
as it can revolutionize. As our technological world becomes
increasingly specialized the threshold for creation and
innovation becomes smaller, especially on the individual level.
Technological sophistication creates and anthill structure where
the individual is powerless but the group is not.
With the extinction of superman
leaders and the rationalist plague running amok, witness the
universal digitization of the individual into a systematic
machine society. The economic cost of sticking your neck out to
offer innovative solutions now far exceeds the benefits that
might accrue from success. The machine society of SOPs and
computerized bureaucracy extinguishes individual creativity in
favor of group or committee 'creativity'. Witness the decline of
yet another civilization.
Questions for God
It's so often referred to as the
Judeo-Christian belief system, yet if one believes in
Christianity then all Jews go to hell, and if one believes in
Judaism then all Christian's go to hell. Jews don't believe in
Christ, yet Christ said redemption is only through him. Cute
huh? What about all the people that lived and died before Christ
was crucified? They just went straight to hell. Well, unless
they were a tribe-member of the 'chosen few'. And what about all
the peoples of the world that lived between when Christ died and
before the Christian message became globally ubiquitous?
Straight to hell! They never had a chance. How can that be
rectified with God's preeminent justice and fairness?
-
Why did God create only a few
billion people a fraction of which worship any single god, and
yet create trillions of stars, none of which worship at all?
-
If life exists everywhere, like us
created in God's image, doesn't that contradict the uniqueness
of the Holy books, Jesus, and so on?
-
Why does it state in
Genesis (some versions) that "life came forth from the
sea"? Doesn't that sound like a Biblical support of evolution?
-
How can there be so many religions
that state only their beliefs are correct, yet the other
religions succeed just as well?
-
If every other religion is faulty
then how can the 'pagan' cling to their belief with such fervor,
even with opposing evidence? If it's a wrong religion they
should fail, right?
-
Why is it that the great pagan
societies have lasted millennia (Egypt, Greece, Persia, Mayans)
but Christian America can barely make 200 before becoming
poly-religious?
-
How can the Bible state that man is
created in God's image yet we all look different? What about
women, mutants, deformities? How many images does God have
anyway?
-
Why is it possible for us to
calculate the mass of the universe and the force of the Big Bang
yet still not be able to find out how or where God can exist?
-
If Satan exists in the center of
the Earth along with all the sinners as stated in the Bible,
doesn't that make it pretty crowded? How do they fit all the
dead sinners in there?
-
In a universe so cold and
indifferent to our individual well being where does the
supernatural come to play, where is the connection between us
individually and God anyway? Even assuming one has anything at
all to do with the other, what mechanism is used for
communication and emotional connections?
-
And where do the great religions
get their inspiration, God directly talking to prophets right?
How come he doesn't talk to prophets anymore, or when he does it
just turns out to be another cult or crackpot? Were the old
prophets just cranks too?
-
Isn't it convenient how theologians
of the Bible will say a passage is only symbolic when
scientifically impossible? Doesn't that just make the whole Bible one big metaphor?
-
How can there be anyone in heaven
when people act so evil? God would be lucky to get one in
a billion!
-
If God created the universe who
created God? Or if we were just virtual blips in a
meta-universal foam, who made the foam, or well, you get the
idea.
Answer: The animate God is merely
the universal order given to life and labeled as such. Just like
small children believe inanimate objects are living, so has
humankind given life qualities to the random powers of the
universe, otherwise known as quantum mechanics.
With everything that civilization
learns, God looks less and less like a supernatural entity and
more like the fundamentally ubiquitous, 'omniscient' and
immortal universal forces.
Even assuming divine creation and
scientific creationism, that God is out there participating in
our welfare, what scientific basis can possibly be postulated
for the mechanics of souls, transportation to heaven, hell, and
personal communication with God? You can't have it both ways. If
creation is scientific, as in the Big-Bang cosmic creation
moment being Biblical, then science also excludes those
fundamental mystical tenets of religion.
And why does someone go to hell if
they've never even been told it exists? Why do we all 'suffer
sin' simply because of one man's (or a woman's) error? Is this
not such a gross injustice and unfairness that then how can God
be considered just or fair?
If you were to invent a religion,
one that was meant to control the populace and unify the people
as well as last indefinitely, here are some attributes it must
have:
-
It would need to be conservative
to maintain status quo (the power of the rulers) and to keep
order and reduce the threat of revolution or chaos.
-
Promote popular obedience.
In other words the Bible justifies slavery since it was popular
at the time of its writing; the population should follow its
leaders and laws even if they are unjust.
-
Promote morality since
conservatism tends to maintain a stable society.
-
Make foundation FAITH. This
way no one can question dogma since they will be damned as
faithless. Give the believer an indefinite hope in an new world,
heaven return of Christ, etc. This will give the believer an
incentive to continue in the faith.
-
Make every other religion wrong.
This gives believers impetus to mission work thus guaranteeing
the faith will not die out. This also maintains the status quo
as no new 'pagan' or heterodox ideas are allowed in.
-
Make religion an ideal. This
gives the believer identity and elevates them above others,
especially the non-believers.
-
Explain the basic mysteries of
creation and the universe. Simplicity will hold up against
scrutiny!
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The
hexagram is considered the most potent symbol of the occult lexicon.
Seen it before? What does that tell us?
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