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 20^th century events, and continues to be a major force in the 21^st 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 click 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 15^th and 16^th 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 16^th 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 it’s 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 don’t 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 aren’t the fools stumbling into one idiotic guerrilla war after another, from Afghanistan to Transcaucasia. Chechnya is very significant because it’s 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 doesn’t 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.

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!

The hexagram is considered the most potent symbol of the occult lexicon. Seen it before? What does that tell us?