Yet another attack this past weekend by yet more alleged religious mental defects, murderers and criminals in London. Wishing all the best to those in London who have been killed, harmed, frightened or who have to repeatedly put up with the assholes who think their victim mentality, their need for relevancy through foolish banal religious mindsets, through the sick theistic belief system of fools, cretins and underachievers gives them any kind of license whatsoever to do harm to others.
First off, Islamic terrorists are cowards, pure and simple. Sort of, Not so much perhaps in many of their physical actions in combat or even suicidal actions, but most assuredly in their inability to be a part of human society and achieve change through means that do not harm or destroy others. Especially those innocents and members of their own religion.
However, suicide murder can also be considered a cowardly act in that once one disregard one's death in the event, there is clearly then no need, no strife, no efforts, no thoughts needed in achieving the difficult issues of evoking a movement through slower and more acceptable forms of political and social changes.
In that, they are pure cowards, lazy, stupid even and all those other things Republicans tend to label the poor and non Republican types with.
Is this going to be how the final global Religion War to end all religious wars begins? It may not start today, or next week, next year, or even ten years from now. But someone will one day have to ask, is today where it all started?
Will it end religions around the planet finally evolving us into the future? Finally? Actually one could call this the Reality Wars, except it's not a war against reality, it's a war against unreality. We have to start seeing the real world how it really is and not through a filter of unreality in religious thought and those who have taken that to their secular way of thinking. Yes, it's a hot mess.
Not these vastly silly Middle Eastern desert religions eschatological end of times crap. But the actual end to the childish religious beliefs that have infected this planet since we first pulled ourselves out of the muck and the slime, looked up at the sun in the sky and began to worship it's power and majesty out of fear. Because religion was indeed bread from fear of an ignorant and ancient people. One that I would submit, began before we could think clearly, through out ignorance and fear of things like darkness and being within the food chain, and not at the top of it for a very, very long time.
After all, how could religions not evolve in that environment?
Religious Wars that begin from what will start merely as a lash out at religiously spawned murderers? Then when all religious and religious, especially Islamic followers and leader do not stand up and take action in order to support their reasons to exist outside of realms of science, of facts, of objective reality, then finally the rest of the world in all it's rationalist and atheists, then in one religion against another, those who can finally simply no longer take it anymore, attack the fantasy cults of Islamic terrorists and other religions not their own, as we then all devolve into utter and murderous insanity?
Before that happens w all need Islam, as well as all religious believers and leaders in general to express an ever viral allergic reaction to their way of thinking in any of those cultures who might be leaning in the directions of fantasy beliefs systems and especially the death oriented religions such as the Middle Eastern Death cults of Judaism, Catholicism and Christianity and Islam.
Is this the beginning of the end of all religions worldwide? Do we really want to take these immature belief systems into the stars with us? Is this why no extraterrestrials want to visit this planet because religion in their minds is simply too childish, too dangerous a belief system to allow contact with or to allow to expand into the cosmos?
Getting back to the hard facts, do we allow religions to continue, to allow these sick cults like Islamic terrorism to continue to fester and grow like a mold on our minds around the world? Are we seeing the beginning of how religion on planet Earth, ends?
Humans have a basic sense of OCD, of Obsessive Compulsivity which when it gets out of control turns into a disorder. We see it time and against in systems and processes that break down in human culture and business. In believing things like religion, we give a nod and a smile to the potential for some very bad things to happen.
Humans will turn anything into a religion, merely by their OCD leanings of turning anything into a religion, into a ridiculous belief system that goes beyond rationality to the ethereal. Our desire to believe that if a little of something is good or great, then much much more is fantastic when in reality is is typically death, pure and simple.
Even one of our greatest forms of thought like Buddhism, which is not and should never have been a religion has, by those raised in many of those Buddhist cultures, striven to turn it too into a religion. We have done this with sex, with money and economies. With just about anything if you give us a chance.
Even calling it in the western sense, Buddhism, rather than Dharma, is in a sense trying to turn it into something it's not, merely out of our ignorance of what it was originally meant to be. And even some of that original thought on it from the first Buddha was out of some degree of ignorance which with time and knowledge we could have honed to a sharp basis of reality and betterment and yet, has been turned into a religion.
Question
What is Buddhism?
Answer
The name Buddhism comes from the word 'budhi' which means 'to wake up' and thus Buddhism is the philosophy of awakening. This philosophy has its origins in the experience of the man Siddhata Gotama, known as the Buddha, who was himself awakened at the age of 35. Buddhism is now 2,500 years old and has about 300 million followers world-wide. Until a hundred years ago, Buddhism was mainly an Asian philosophy but increasingly it is gaining adherents in Europe and America.
Question
So Buddhism is just a philosophy?
Answer
The word philosophy comes from two words 'philo' which means 'love' and 'sophia' which means 'wisdom'. So philosophy is the love of wisdom or love and wisdom, both meanings describing Buddhism perfectly. Buddhism teaches that we should try to develop our intellectual capacity to the fullest so that we can understand clearly. It also teaches us to develop love and kindness so that we can be like a true friend to all beings. Thus Buddhism is a philosophy but not just a philosophy. It is the supreme philosophy.
From Buddhanet
The argument about how great religions are, have been countered by how horrifying they have at times been. It's not just all about finding the disaffected, but in finding the veins of cancer in these communities, in their advocates and religions, in the religious and the criminal leaders overall, and in religions themselves.
How do you justify the criminals who run mega churches and do not do what their religions teach? How do you justify the slut shaming , gender shaming, and other types of shaming by religions and their religious against their own for merely having a human nature? One their are taught to hate, to hate the basics of being human.
Eliminating these religious terrorists is not just about eliminating these terrorists, but in eliminating the hold religions have in a growing force of unreality and in eliminating these religions themselves. We have to divest ourselves of religions before we can grow beyond this nonsense.
As we have seen the only way religions are any good is when they are diluted, when much of what their tenets teach are ignored, when humans, pick and choose what is best to believe in what their religion has taught since the beginning. The basis, the foundation, the history of which is so typically ridiculous.
When are we going to grow up and see clearly what the problem is here, and it is not just that of those who take the worst of their religion and run with it, leading to death and destruction. And as in Muslim terrorists, typically the death and destruction of there own?
Wake up and smell the religious mayhem, the theistic sadism, the fantasy idiocy.
We can do so much better. But we need a massive change and real understanding of our nature of that of our universe. But religion certainly is not IT.
Showing posts with label Catholicism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Catholicism. Show all posts
Monday, June 5, 2017
Wednesday, December 16, 2015
Special Edition: No one calls Mohammed an ahole. Why not, his Jihadists are?
No one calls Mohammed an Asshole, or any other ancient religious leader for that matter.
But why not? Fear of offending him? Fear of offending others? Why? Because they will try to kill us, possibly? There is no need to fear non believers. There is no need to fear the death of Faith. Faith is not dying. Religions are.
The reason we are seeing radical Islam is because religion doesn't work.
Frustration in politics and religion for many Muslims have brought simpletons like the members of groups like Al Qaeda and ISIL to fruition, to membership and action. Sad, disaffected people who join, or as in San Bernardino, who randomly strike out on their own, do so because they find their lives unsatisfactory. Their religion doesn't do enough or anything, for them.
They lash out at non Muslims and Muslims alike. But they also kill other Muslims in their complete and utter discare of killing their own because they know very well, although they are too stupid to recognize it, too blinded by their dysfunctional ideology, that Islam, that Allah, that their silly man made religion, is false and quite useless for their purposes as radical murderers and previously as inactive Muslims.
So they act.
Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Sikh, you name the religion, it boils down to a silly group of people congregating to worship and ideology of disaffected people. When they begin to realize what a load of crap it all is, they act. But rather than act against their beliefs, which acknowledges they have been duped, that they have been stupid, they lash out from that point into the world.
We all suffer for religion still existing.
Long after it has served any purpose it may have once had we all continue to suffer for it. It's high time religion finally just bury itself, pull he dirt over its own head, so that finally once and for all, Humanity can move on into a brave new world where we depend upon ourselves, to move off planet into the stars above, where religion has no reason to exist.
Whatever purpose religion once had there are now (actually always have been) other, better forms to take its place.
Regarding Islam, just where did it come from?
Christianity was an attempt by Emperor Constantine to control his flailing empire through the Nicene Council in creating the bible to get a handle on things that were out of control because of a splintered form of religion, Christianity. What about Islam?
Haven't you ever wondered why, thought it rather odd that the three major desert religions or the Middle East, all have similar holy places, so close upon one another? Coincidence? If so, what a very odd one. Try this on for size (video):
How the Vatican created Islam
Think that's all nonsense? I agree, it IS all nonsense.
Now can we move on? And if not, isn't it because of people stuck in their beliefs, infected by this insanity, as benign as it can at times be. Yet we'd be really so much better off without it.
Regardless, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of religions. And high time it is, indeed.
Here is a video of a debate between one of my favorite people, the late Christopher Hitchens vs Islam via Prof. Tariq Ramadan. Here is also to be fair, a video of Chris vs Christianity via William Lane Craig (another with Cardinal George Pell), and lastly a video of Chris vs Judaism via Rabbi David Wolpe.
Mr. Ramadan is very erudite but it's still a matter of fact that people have to pick and choose what they believe in, for what their religion states in it's religious books. Which itself, makes it dangerous and allows for things like the Christian Crusades, and Islamic Jihad.
Is it odd Hitchens doesn't really oppose Buddhism? I don't think so, although Buddhism does have foolish humans trying to turn it into a religion. Because that is what we do, by way of our defects in our make up.
Also another video with some of his comments on religion in general beginning with a joke about Buddhism. Finally a video with Chris Hitchens 2004: Genocide, Bamiyan, Buddha, Taliban, Al Queda, Rwanda
Chris takes a harder line on religion than I do. I'm not anti Islam, Christianity, or any religion in particular. I just think religion is overall a childish past time that has caused us a lot of grief and as we become more evolved, ever more problematic. Especially when there are other, better ways to live your life that are far more productive. Without religion, would we have landed on the moon in the year 1500?
I wish no harm against Muslims who are decent people. Or theists who are decent. But there seem to be so much religious scum floating on top of the social pool anymore that we have to act to stop it.
Just to make it painfully clear... I have nothing against Muhammad, Jesus, or any of those types of people. Just those types of people that slimy people worship. THOSE are the Muhammad's I find despicable. The Jesus who sucks. And so on.
We are actually experiencing the evolution of Faith as it evolves beyond the stupidity we've placed upon it for thousands of years. The banal foolishness of ancient old men, their housewives and scared children. That of religion, of useless rituals, of imagination counter to being fundamentally productive in any real or even if you prefer, spiritual way.
Some people certainly deserve for us to offend their religion, from how those people act. Islamic terrorists show us all, even other Muslims how their Allah, how Muhammad are mere people put into or manipulated to be in extraordinary circumstances, not deserving of the excessive respect they are afforded, little or none of the attention they get, or all the vain shoutings of "Allah be praised" by the foolish, the delusional and certainly the murderous.
Whenever you mention anything too much, you must know that it becomes diluted. That it begins to lose its meaning. All the shoutings we constantly hear of Allahu Akbar! Just how much meaning does that really have in it for those people beyond an affectation? Beyond mind washing?
You might say as Arthur C. Clarke did in Childhood's End:
"You deceived us." But no. I didn't and those few others who can also see clearly, haven't.
"You have deceived yourselves."
Look. I have nothing against any religion or religious people. Yes, ritual and religions are pretty silly and run through all young races. I have in fact, high respect for people who are monks, priests, nuns or similar types in any religion, including Islam.
If they are good leaders, and not recruiting murderers, not spewing pure crap to their followers, but are finding the truth, giving their people something in life to make their lives more than it is with what little they may have in their lives.
Mohammed couldn't read. Ignorant as he was, the so called unschooled Prophet, he surrounded himself at some point with people smarter than himself. Which I'll grant you, is not stupid, building a religion of hero worship upon something as silly as the Jewish religion and so even more so. At least Christianity was a call to more sanity at the time, but there too it went seriously wrong along the way beyond its initial inclusions of Buddhists elements.
Early Christians and Muslims didn't have enough education or historical insight to start their own religions. So they ripped off Judaism. But they were up against worse issues and what they did in creating a new religion probably made sense at the time.
There once again you have yet another man made God or Allah and religion. If these were such great religions how come their sacred tomes (Bible and Quran) have allowed for things such as the Crusades, and Jihads? If they are the literal Word of Allah, of God, well...we won't even go into the Christian Inquisitions, the Dark Ages, recent Jihads, and so on.
No one wants to speak out against religions because people get upset if you call into question what they believe, what they have believed since they were born, what their parents and ancestors have mistakenly believed...and unbelievably, even for thousands of years. At least Mormons, as silly a religion as that is, or Scientology, are young, and can be excused in some ways.
But no, no they cannot and they should know better.
And we shouldn't call into question their silliness? Really.
Let's talk about Abraham nearly killing his son because, "God told him to."
Uh, right.
We know now that it was a test, at least according to the old texts. God just wanted to see if Abraham was loyal and followed orders. But maybe later, God in a weak moment was just being kind. What IF what God wanted to hear from Abraham, a rational rebuke?
In using this situation as a metaphor for so many other religious situations through time, for Abraham to have just listened to what God requested of him (albeit as a voice in his head I might add, it doesn't sound crazy at all in reviewing it through more modern filters, right?), and then, sanely, for Abraham to have a pair of balls and simply to have said:
"God, judgement is yours. Therefore even if it is you requesting it of me, I cannot take it on myself to kill one of your creations, and my son."
Now that, would be a test! To deny God's orders to not do what he commanded? Utter Awesomeness. Now that sounds more like a God testing someone, doesn't it?
But no. Abraham pussied out. Just like Mohammed and his modern Jihadist followers.
The biggest pussies in the universe are Jihadists because they do not have the balls to refuse their own stupid mistaken beliefs. Or to realize they are stupid. Or that they are stupid, petty people.
They just like killing. Face it. After all, it's easy. It's satisfying and yet it's stupid. Just as Mohammed was an ancient anachronism having little or no meaning and less value today as does Christianity or Judaism.
Okay to be fair, Mohammed may have had good reason to say some of the physically based things he said way back when. Though the spiritual stuff certainly as it plays out over time, was just pretty silly and useless. Like flicking a Bic lighter a thousand years ago. You get ooos and awwws but really, what is it? Butane in a plastic container with a spark.
Not to mention, spending that much time devoted to a spiritual consideration, praying that many times a day when you could be doing something useful? It's a huge waste of time and energy for normal citizens and should be partitioned to special religious individuals.
Not to mention, having a callous on your forehead makes you look pretty damn silly. But then, it let's the rest of us know your somewhat scary orientation in life and the real world.
Spend that time actually DOING something, affecting change maybe, dildo.
Now I'm not saying that meditation isn't good, it is. Sure.
To mistake meditation for prayer is ignorant and an utter waste of time. Not to mention when you tie it to idiots like Daesh, or the fools and criminals in Boko Haram well, you've earned the biggest "Chump in the World" award. Or the Jihadist Favored Idiot of Mohammed Award. May your 72 virgins have syphilis when you get to your heaven and all be ancient old virgin crones only as you deserve. Grow up.
Look. #Daesh, #ISIS, #ISIL, #BokoHaram, you're all assholes. Deal with it. Get a real job. Work to affect change for your people through the systems that exist. Or make better systems, but don't tear down the world because you're unhappy.
I know. It's too had for your tiny minds to do that.
Killing is so much more fun, rewarding, satiating, empowering, and easy. Right? It's not hard after all to use an AK47 on a woman, a child, or an unarmed old man.
Try to start acting like adults and realize that no one wants or needs your silly fascist styled, ridiculous fundamentalist juvenile religious beliefs.
Humans have a reason for their inherent, built in pattern recognition skills and OCD style behaviors that make religion seems so satisfying. We need as adults to rise above those base, childish instincts.
Humans like masturbation, be it in stroking their genitals or in stroking their beliefs.
Religious ecstasy is very similar to sexual orgasm, just slower, less immediate most of the time. Face the facts. You're not good theists, you're religiously addicted Onanists.
Some people like to have such an intense orgasm they pass out (some even dying through auto-erotic asphyxiation). But you choose to blow yourselves up or die in religious fervor in "battle". Blowing up women and children in a city square or on a bus or a plane is not battle asshole, it's murdering innocents. You even murder your own Muslim people, moron and rationalize it is good. Like you're so important that you can be a judge.
How very romantic you are. What a child you are. The Bible says you must see through the eyes of a child. I bet the Quran says that too, cuz, you know... derivative.
Religion says you must ignore reality for your religion. Don't you get it? Don't you see what foolishness you have bought into? What has been perpetrated upon you for hundreds, thousands of years and your entire civilization has bought into it? Out of fear and feeling good?
No. Obviously. You cannot see how much of a fool you have been made by those you have followed. That is the bane of the theist. Allow me to help you.
Rule number one. Humans do not kill humans.
No, it's not worshiping God. That was just something some guy had told you God had told to him. Come on. Seriously? You really believe that?
Start "worshiping" your God, through taking care of his creations not destroying them. By the way worshiping a Prophet is after all idolatry, and in its crassest sense.
And again, stop being such an asshole.
Fear. Fundamentalists. Conservatives. We have them here.
The reason for conservatives being so out of control regarding their fears, just occurred to me.
If you hear a tiger in the grass and you react appropriately but find it's nothing, you're fine.
If you hear that noise and you think it's nothing, but it IS a hungry tiger, then you're dead.
Using that built in human dynamic inbred though hundreds of thousands of years, and not tempering it through appropriate personal experience, trial and error of your own, then you will come out just as how paranoid conservatives react to everything.
And so you see why we have the situation we have.
An entire stratum of society is paranoid because they haven't live appropriate lives.
We are all living in a very superficial and synthetic social construct.
Those who haven't challenged themselves in the right ways, or not at all, will find a terror behind every bush, building and door.
How can scary immigrants NOT be terrifying to these poor people?
They don't deserve our admonitions. They deserve our care and compassion.
And they as well deserve our not allowing them to be in control of the most powerful nation in the history of the entire human race and this planet.
Let me give you a parable.
Let's say there are three men. One prays, one meditates, both doing all the right stuff and yet (like you) are still lowlifes. They do all the right stuff and yet, they are still not good people. Religion doesn't necessarily stop any of that from happening, in fact research is showing it props bad behavior up. It's wishful thinking much of the time.
There are many loser religious types. Again, just look at Daesh, Boko Haram, Al Qaeda....
There is this third guy. Remember? I said three guys. He seemingly does all the wrong things. He doesn't believe in God, doesn't pray or meditate. Maybe he parties too much. Doesn't take good care of himself. He doesn't prey on the weak though either. Why? Because he thinks it's just wrong. In essence therefore he ends up doing all the right things, just because he doesn't want to hurt anyone.
He believes if you are just a good and ethical person people will recognize you are trustworthy. Because of that he acquires people around him who support him, who also are attracted to the Golden Rule, or Karma if you wish. Which roughly speaking is:
"Do onto others as you would have others do onto you."
The answer is here:
Be a good person.
It's not that hard. There is no reward in some fantasy "heaven". How capitalistic middle eastern desert religions are. Pay into this life for rewards in the next. Really.
Here on earth is your heaven, or your (our) hell. They are the heaven or hell you make of your life and others.
And you jihadists, you have made hell on earth all because of your silly make believe deities in the sky.
Grow up or die. Soon. Either way we, the people of the Earth do not need you or your ridiculous religious nonsense.
You are spawning right wing, fascist nationalism around the world and that is good for no one but some idiots who believe in a religion that they think teaches human beings to be death rather than life oriented.
Stop associating with those who hate human beings. Stop the self hatred. Stop worshiping a concept inn a god that also seems to hate us and disingenuously attempts to teach us that life is after death and not now when it actually exists.
What kind of person believes in mental tripe, in mind worm beliefs?
Surely no thinking rational person. Surely no "God" would ever think up such crap, only a human being could, or would. Only those who are lost or seeking to control their tribe. And then in as destructive a way as possible in attempting to control others' tribes too. And if they cannot, then they feel chartered to send their believers to kill them because they do not believe the same.
Can you really not hear how demented that is?
It's the old "you're different than me, I kill you!", mentality. How unevolved you are still. You make other Muslims look very bad.
Think, people! Try to think! Use your mind! What little mind you have left after religion has rotted most of it away.
I just saw an extremely moving Fareed Zakaria GPS show (12/13/2015) where they interviewed a woman who escaped from Iraq to Syria and then when the civil war started, to Turkey.
All her family had hoped for was to immigrate to the US. They thought they had it sussed at one point and then they were denied through a letter, snail mail. Yes, the US sucks sometimes. You can see how she feels this to her core and we were the ones who turned her down. Her and her family, after the horror she's been through, that ISIS and others have put her through. Over what? Religion? Allah, Muhammad, a piece of land?
The photographer and author who was responsible for her being on the show was also on the air and he nearly broke down in tears in explaining her story and that of others like her. He had interviewed twelve families previously who were accepted into America. A PhD and family, cream of the crop types. But this girl and her family, though they are people we'd be proud to have as citizens, were denied.
We worry (well some do), about our letting in a terrorist who will attack us. Are we really worried about letting in a killer. Or more so about being seen as fools, a seemingly far more pronounced idiocy in some people's minds?
We also have to consider the flip side of thinking that way. Let's shift my ranting at ourselves now, at my people.
What about those we turn down who DO become radicalized, who do end up hating us. BECAUSE in their hour (year, decade) of need, we DID turn them down. When they knew themselves that they were highly worthy of our acceptance and yet, we shat upon them and their family, their love of our ideals, upon their dreams and their needs?
Who then is responsible? More stupid humans.
I reject anyone's comeback in saying to me that they'd have become radicalized anyway since after all, that can be true. But just because it's possible doesn't mean it is how it is or always will be for everyone. It is just as true that we can be our own worst enemies. As we have been in many ways in spawning much of what is transpiring now in the world against us.
Some of those reasons Jihadists have used against us are real, accurate, even reasonable. Where we were at fault for the slights those people are feeling against us surely not all are true. And no we cannot in the twisted situation we've placed ourselves in, allow anyone to attack us either, regardless.
Therein part lay the conundrum. At some point someone has to stop the killing, the madness.
Surely it won't be Jihadists as that term defines madness. Stupidity supported by religion, false and fake gods.
We also have a responsibility not to do those things that reasonably give people reasons to attack us. Surely we should not sow those seeds, almost begging for people to attack us someday because of our own actions of greed and national desires and at all costs to others.
We must all stop the madness, on all sides. But your Islamic tribes have been doing this to one another for thousands of years. And yet there was a time long ago when you were at peace. But not the uncivilized among you. And that is what this is, you are who we are against. The uncivilized. The barbarians. Ask yourselves, how did you allow yourselves to devolve in such a way and who can stop it?
Only you. Only you....
These are the things I've seen in the news in recent years. Had another country done to us what we did to others, WE surely would have fought back. If we didn't have a military to use, we'd surely have done as we could with guerrilla warfare, with terrorist actions. One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist, right? To fight back in anyway available?
Bullshit. One's murderer is yet another's murderer.
So be careful in hating.
Because as some like to say,
"There but for the grace of Allah, go I."
Or in this case, we.
So. Think.
Act, responsibly.
Do, the right thing. Stop killing.
Or at least, try to.....try something.
But why not? Fear of offending him? Fear of offending others? Why? Because they will try to kill us, possibly? There is no need to fear non believers. There is no need to fear the death of Faith. Faith is not dying. Religions are.
The reason we are seeing radical Islam is because religion doesn't work.
Frustration in politics and religion for many Muslims have brought simpletons like the members of groups like Al Qaeda and ISIL to fruition, to membership and action. Sad, disaffected people who join, or as in San Bernardino, who randomly strike out on their own, do so because they find their lives unsatisfactory. Their religion doesn't do enough or anything, for them.
They lash out at non Muslims and Muslims alike. But they also kill other Muslims in their complete and utter discare of killing their own because they know very well, although they are too stupid to recognize it, too blinded by their dysfunctional ideology, that Islam, that Allah, that their silly man made religion, is false and quite useless for their purposes as radical murderers and previously as inactive Muslims.
So they act.
Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Sikh, you name the religion, it boils down to a silly group of people congregating to worship and ideology of disaffected people. When they begin to realize what a load of crap it all is, they act. But rather than act against their beliefs, which acknowledges they have been duped, that they have been stupid, they lash out from that point into the world.
We all suffer for religion still existing.
Long after it has served any purpose it may have once had we all continue to suffer for it. It's high time religion finally just bury itself, pull he dirt over its own head, so that finally once and for all, Humanity can move on into a brave new world where we depend upon ourselves, to move off planet into the stars above, where religion has no reason to exist.
Whatever purpose religion once had there are now (actually always have been) other, better forms to take its place.
Regarding Islam, just where did it come from?
Christianity was an attempt by Emperor Constantine to control his flailing empire through the Nicene Council in creating the bible to get a handle on things that were out of control because of a splintered form of religion, Christianity. What about Islam?
Haven't you ever wondered why, thought it rather odd that the three major desert religions or the Middle East, all have similar holy places, so close upon one another? Coincidence? If so, what a very odd one. Try this on for size (video):
How the Vatican created Islam
Think that's all nonsense? I agree, it IS all nonsense.
Now can we move on? And if not, isn't it because of people stuck in their beliefs, infected by this insanity, as benign as it can at times be. Yet we'd be really so much better off without it.
Regardless, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of religions. And high time it is, indeed.
Here is a video of a debate between one of my favorite people, the late Christopher Hitchens vs Islam via Prof. Tariq Ramadan. Here is also to be fair, a video of Chris vs Christianity via William Lane Craig (another with Cardinal George Pell), and lastly a video of Chris vs Judaism via Rabbi David Wolpe.
Mr. Ramadan is very erudite but it's still a matter of fact that people have to pick and choose what they believe in, for what their religion states in it's religious books. Which itself, makes it dangerous and allows for things like the Christian Crusades, and Islamic Jihad.
Is it odd Hitchens doesn't really oppose Buddhism? I don't think so, although Buddhism does have foolish humans trying to turn it into a religion. Because that is what we do, by way of our defects in our make up.
Also another video with some of his comments on religion in general beginning with a joke about Buddhism. Finally a video with Chris Hitchens 2004: Genocide, Bamiyan, Buddha, Taliban, Al Queda, Rwanda
Chris takes a harder line on religion than I do. I'm not anti Islam, Christianity, or any religion in particular. I just think religion is overall a childish past time that has caused us a lot of grief and as we become more evolved, ever more problematic. Especially when there are other, better ways to live your life that are far more productive. Without religion, would we have landed on the moon in the year 1500?
I wish no harm against Muslims who are decent people. Or theists who are decent. But there seem to be so much religious scum floating on top of the social pool anymore that we have to act to stop it.
Just to make it painfully clear... I have nothing against Muhammad, Jesus, or any of those types of people. Just those types of people that slimy people worship. THOSE are the Muhammad's I find despicable. The Jesus who sucks. And so on.
We are actually experiencing the evolution of Faith as it evolves beyond the stupidity we've placed upon it for thousands of years. The banal foolishness of ancient old men, their housewives and scared children. That of religion, of useless rituals, of imagination counter to being fundamentally productive in any real or even if you prefer, spiritual way.
Some people certainly deserve for us to offend their religion, from how those people act. Islamic terrorists show us all, even other Muslims how their Allah, how Muhammad are mere people put into or manipulated to be in extraordinary circumstances, not deserving of the excessive respect they are afforded, little or none of the attention they get, or all the vain shoutings of "Allah be praised" by the foolish, the delusional and certainly the murderous.
Whenever you mention anything too much, you must know that it becomes diluted. That it begins to lose its meaning. All the shoutings we constantly hear of Allahu Akbar! Just how much meaning does that really have in it for those people beyond an affectation? Beyond mind washing?
You might say as Arthur C. Clarke did in Childhood's End:
"You deceived us." But no. I didn't and those few others who can also see clearly, haven't.
"You have deceived yourselves."
Look. I have nothing against any religion or religious people. Yes, ritual and religions are pretty silly and run through all young races. I have in fact, high respect for people who are monks, priests, nuns or similar types in any religion, including Islam.
If they are good leaders, and not recruiting murderers, not spewing pure crap to their followers, but are finding the truth, giving their people something in life to make their lives more than it is with what little they may have in their lives.
Mohammed couldn't read. Ignorant as he was, the so called unschooled Prophet, he surrounded himself at some point with people smarter than himself. Which I'll grant you, is not stupid, building a religion of hero worship upon something as silly as the Jewish religion and so even more so. At least Christianity was a call to more sanity at the time, but there too it went seriously wrong along the way beyond its initial inclusions of Buddhists elements.
Early Christians and Muslims didn't have enough education or historical insight to start their own religions. So they ripped off Judaism. But they were up against worse issues and what they did in creating a new religion probably made sense at the time.
There once again you have yet another man made God or Allah and religion. If these were such great religions how come their sacred tomes (Bible and Quran) have allowed for things such as the Crusades, and Jihads? If they are the literal Word of Allah, of God, well...we won't even go into the Christian Inquisitions, the Dark Ages, recent Jihads, and so on.
No one wants to speak out against religions because people get upset if you call into question what they believe, what they have believed since they were born, what their parents and ancestors have mistakenly believed...and unbelievably, even for thousands of years. At least Mormons, as silly a religion as that is, or Scientology, are young, and can be excused in some ways.
But no, no they cannot and they should know better.
And we shouldn't call into question their silliness? Really.
Let's talk about Abraham nearly killing his son because, "God told him to."
Uh, right.
We know now that it was a test, at least according to the old texts. God just wanted to see if Abraham was loyal and followed orders. But maybe later, God in a weak moment was just being kind. What IF what God wanted to hear from Abraham, a rational rebuke?
In using this situation as a metaphor for so many other religious situations through time, for Abraham to have just listened to what God requested of him (albeit as a voice in his head I might add, it doesn't sound crazy at all in reviewing it through more modern filters, right?), and then, sanely, for Abraham to have a pair of balls and simply to have said:
"God, judgement is yours. Therefore even if it is you requesting it of me, I cannot take it on myself to kill one of your creations, and my son."
Now that, would be a test! To deny God's orders to not do what he commanded? Utter Awesomeness. Now that sounds more like a God testing someone, doesn't it?
But no. Abraham pussied out. Just like Mohammed and his modern Jihadist followers.
The biggest pussies in the universe are Jihadists because they do not have the balls to refuse their own stupid mistaken beliefs. Or to realize they are stupid. Or that they are stupid, petty people.
They just like killing. Face it. After all, it's easy. It's satisfying and yet it's stupid. Just as Mohammed was an ancient anachronism having little or no meaning and less value today as does Christianity or Judaism.
Okay to be fair, Mohammed may have had good reason to say some of the physically based things he said way back when. Though the spiritual stuff certainly as it plays out over time, was just pretty silly and useless. Like flicking a Bic lighter a thousand years ago. You get ooos and awwws but really, what is it? Butane in a plastic container with a spark.
Not to mention, spending that much time devoted to a spiritual consideration, praying that many times a day when you could be doing something useful? It's a huge waste of time and energy for normal citizens and should be partitioned to special religious individuals.
Not to mention, having a callous on your forehead makes you look pretty damn silly. But then, it let's the rest of us know your somewhat scary orientation in life and the real world.
Spend that time actually DOING something, affecting change maybe, dildo.
Now I'm not saying that meditation isn't good, it is. Sure.
To mistake meditation for prayer is ignorant and an utter waste of time. Not to mention when you tie it to idiots like Daesh, or the fools and criminals in Boko Haram well, you've earned the biggest "Chump in the World" award. Or the Jihadist Favored Idiot of Mohammed Award. May your 72 virgins have syphilis when you get to your heaven and all be ancient old virgin crones only as you deserve. Grow up.
Look. #Daesh, #ISIS, #ISIL, #BokoHaram, you're all assholes. Deal with it. Get a real job. Work to affect change for your people through the systems that exist. Or make better systems, but don't tear down the world because you're unhappy.
I know. It's too had for your tiny minds to do that.
Killing is so much more fun, rewarding, satiating, empowering, and easy. Right? It's not hard after all to use an AK47 on a woman, a child, or an unarmed old man.
Try to start acting like adults and realize that no one wants or needs your silly fascist styled, ridiculous fundamentalist juvenile religious beliefs.
Humans have a reason for their inherent, built in pattern recognition skills and OCD style behaviors that make religion seems so satisfying. We need as adults to rise above those base, childish instincts.
Humans like masturbation, be it in stroking their genitals or in stroking their beliefs.
Religious ecstasy is very similar to sexual orgasm, just slower, less immediate most of the time. Face the facts. You're not good theists, you're religiously addicted Onanists.
Some people like to have such an intense orgasm they pass out (some even dying through auto-erotic asphyxiation). But you choose to blow yourselves up or die in religious fervor in "battle". Blowing up women and children in a city square or on a bus or a plane is not battle asshole, it's murdering innocents. You even murder your own Muslim people, moron and rationalize it is good. Like you're so important that you can be a judge.
How very romantic you are. What a child you are. The Bible says you must see through the eyes of a child. I bet the Quran says that too, cuz, you know... derivative.
Religion says you must ignore reality for your religion. Don't you get it? Don't you see what foolishness you have bought into? What has been perpetrated upon you for hundreds, thousands of years and your entire civilization has bought into it? Out of fear and feeling good?
No. Obviously. You cannot see how much of a fool you have been made by those you have followed. That is the bane of the theist. Allow me to help you.
Rule number one. Humans do not kill humans.
No, it's not worshiping God. That was just something some guy had told you God had told to him. Come on. Seriously? You really believe that?
Start "worshiping" your God, through taking care of his creations not destroying them. By the way worshiping a Prophet is after all idolatry, and in its crassest sense.
And again, stop being such an asshole.
Fear. Fundamentalists. Conservatives. We have them here.
The reason for conservatives being so out of control regarding their fears, just occurred to me.
If you hear a tiger in the grass and you react appropriately but find it's nothing, you're fine.
If you hear that noise and you think it's nothing, but it IS a hungry tiger, then you're dead.
Using that built in human dynamic inbred though hundreds of thousands of years, and not tempering it through appropriate personal experience, trial and error of your own, then you will come out just as how paranoid conservatives react to everything.
And so you see why we have the situation we have.
An entire stratum of society is paranoid because they haven't live appropriate lives.
We are all living in a very superficial and synthetic social construct.
Those who haven't challenged themselves in the right ways, or not at all, will find a terror behind every bush, building and door.
How can scary immigrants NOT be terrifying to these poor people?
They don't deserve our admonitions. They deserve our care and compassion.
And they as well deserve our not allowing them to be in control of the most powerful nation in the history of the entire human race and this planet.
Let me give you a parable.
Let's say there are three men. One prays, one meditates, both doing all the right stuff and yet (like you) are still lowlifes. They do all the right stuff and yet, they are still not good people. Religion doesn't necessarily stop any of that from happening, in fact research is showing it props bad behavior up. It's wishful thinking much of the time.
 |
| Leaders of ISIS, Boko Haram, Al Qaeda |
There is this third guy. Remember? I said three guys. He seemingly does all the wrong things. He doesn't believe in God, doesn't pray or meditate. Maybe he parties too much. Doesn't take good care of himself. He doesn't prey on the weak though either. Why? Because he thinks it's just wrong. In essence therefore he ends up doing all the right things, just because he doesn't want to hurt anyone.
He believes if you are just a good and ethical person people will recognize you are trustworthy. Because of that he acquires people around him who support him, who also are attracted to the Golden Rule, or Karma if you wish. Which roughly speaking is:
"Do onto others as you would have others do onto you."
The answer is here:
Be a good person.
It's not that hard. There is no reward in some fantasy "heaven". How capitalistic middle eastern desert religions are. Pay into this life for rewards in the next. Really.
Here on earth is your heaven, or your (our) hell. They are the heaven or hell you make of your life and others.
And you jihadists, you have made hell on earth all because of your silly make believe deities in the sky.
Grow up or die. Soon. Either way we, the people of the Earth do not need you or your ridiculous religious nonsense.
You are spawning right wing, fascist nationalism around the world and that is good for no one but some idiots who believe in a religion that they think teaches human beings to be death rather than life oriented.
Stop associating with those who hate human beings. Stop the self hatred. Stop worshiping a concept inn a god that also seems to hate us and disingenuously attempts to teach us that life is after death and not now when it actually exists.
What kind of person believes in mental tripe, in mind worm beliefs?
Surely no thinking rational person. Surely no "God" would ever think up such crap, only a human being could, or would. Only those who are lost or seeking to control their tribe. And then in as destructive a way as possible in attempting to control others' tribes too. And if they cannot, then they feel chartered to send their believers to kill them because they do not believe the same.
Can you really not hear how demented that is?
It's the old "you're different than me, I kill you!", mentality. How unevolved you are still. You make other Muslims look very bad.
Think, people! Try to think! Use your mind! What little mind you have left after religion has rotted most of it away.
I just saw an extremely moving Fareed Zakaria GPS show (12/13/2015) where they interviewed a woman who escaped from Iraq to Syria and then when the civil war started, to Turkey.
All her family had hoped for was to immigrate to the US. They thought they had it sussed at one point and then they were denied through a letter, snail mail. Yes, the US sucks sometimes. You can see how she feels this to her core and we were the ones who turned her down. Her and her family, after the horror she's been through, that ISIS and others have put her through. Over what? Religion? Allah, Muhammad, a piece of land?
The photographer and author who was responsible for her being on the show was also on the air and he nearly broke down in tears in explaining her story and that of others like her. He had interviewed twelve families previously who were accepted into America. A PhD and family, cream of the crop types. But this girl and her family, though they are people we'd be proud to have as citizens, were denied.
We worry (well some do), about our letting in a terrorist who will attack us. Are we really worried about letting in a killer. Or more so about being seen as fools, a seemingly far more pronounced idiocy in some people's minds?
We also have to consider the flip side of thinking that way. Let's shift my ranting at ourselves now, at my people.
What about those we turn down who DO become radicalized, who do end up hating us. BECAUSE in their hour (year, decade) of need, we DID turn them down. When they knew themselves that they were highly worthy of our acceptance and yet, we shat upon them and their family, their love of our ideals, upon their dreams and their needs?
Who then is responsible? More stupid humans.
I reject anyone's comeback in saying to me that they'd have become radicalized anyway since after all, that can be true. But just because it's possible doesn't mean it is how it is or always will be for everyone. It is just as true that we can be our own worst enemies. As we have been in many ways in spawning much of what is transpiring now in the world against us.
Some of those reasons Jihadists have used against us are real, accurate, even reasonable. Where we were at fault for the slights those people are feeling against us surely not all are true. And no we cannot in the twisted situation we've placed ourselves in, allow anyone to attack us either, regardless.
Therein part lay the conundrum. At some point someone has to stop the killing, the madness.
Surely it won't be Jihadists as that term defines madness. Stupidity supported by religion, false and fake gods.
We also have a responsibility not to do those things that reasonably give people reasons to attack us. Surely we should not sow those seeds, almost begging for people to attack us someday because of our own actions of greed and national desires and at all costs to others.
We must all stop the madness, on all sides. But your Islamic tribes have been doing this to one another for thousands of years. And yet there was a time long ago when you were at peace. But not the uncivilized among you. And that is what this is, you are who we are against. The uncivilized. The barbarians. Ask yourselves, how did you allow yourselves to devolve in such a way and who can stop it?
Only you. Only you....
These are the things I've seen in the news in recent years. Had another country done to us what we did to others, WE surely would have fought back. If we didn't have a military to use, we'd surely have done as we could with guerrilla warfare, with terrorist actions. One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist, right? To fight back in anyway available?
Bullshit. One's murderer is yet another's murderer.
So be careful in hating.
Because as some like to say,
"There but for the grace of Allah, go I."
Or in this case, we.
So. Think.
Act, responsibly.
Do, the right thing. Stop killing.
Or at least, try to.....try something.
Monday, November 17, 2014
Faith and Forgiveness, The Fall of ISIS and Islam
Faith and Forgiveness.
Two of the most powerful forces in the universe. They can also be two of the most ridiculous and a couple of our biggest problem issues.
Faith
We need faith, but not when it goes too far.
If you believe in God, you have faith. Faith that what you believe in is not total lunacy. Why is that? Because that is so obvious to anyone but a young child, that to continue on in your belief from childhood into adulthood, takes a constructed and enduring contract with oneself to continue to suspend belief in order to have faith, to believe.
Faith means to build an enduring ignorance, irregardless of reality, of fact, of anything contrary to your beliefs. It's institutional ignorance.
When we step onto an elevator in a tall build, we suspend our belief in science (distance to ground concerns, one of our primal urges to protect ourselves) and replace it with our faith that the elevator won't drop us to a horrifying death.
In that sense, faith is good, it's a useful thing in daily life. It was a useful thing as monkey's climbing around trees having faith int heir grip that they won't fall to their death, even though, some always did. Either in a branch breaking, or falling while asleep. Faith, allowed what was necessary to survive. To stay off the ground when you could become food for a more powerful animal.
But when faith crosses the line to affect our judgement of others, to go even further to take our faith out of the realm of the suspension of belief into that of affecting others in their daily lives, then we have simply gone too far.
Forgiveness
In the Catholic religion, there is a thing called Last Rites. As you are dying, you are giving forgiveness for your life and then, you can go to heaven when you die. Uh huh, sure...like that works. The only way that could happen was if there was a contract with God, an agreement that this would be accepted and well, that doesn't make any sense at all. See the section on Faith, above.
Just as I cannot lift weights heavier than what I can normally do without first working out long and hard enough to be able to lift that heavy of a weight, so too forgiveness does us no good in being instantly forgiven. It is merely an initiator, a catalyst to start on the road to being able to lift those "heavy weights" in life. And if death is moments away, well, sorry Charley. Forgiveness merely gives us repose and a breath in order to adjust and begin on the path to getting somewhere. But when you die in a few minutes, you've had no time to adjust, to build the "muscle" in order to affect real change.
To think it is instant, is ludicrous.
Everything we have learned from nature shows us that to think you could be forgiven as in Catholic Confession, or even worse in Last Rights, and then suddenly you're purified, you can now gain entry to Heaven, simply does not in anyway reasonable way follow what we have seen in all of nature. Nature, if you buy into God, is a Nature that He created. Why would he choose one path for nature and another for humans? That too would make no sense.
But today, after hundreds of years of it being otherwise, Catholicism isn't our worst problem.
We need to have faith in order to get through the tough times. To allow us to move smoothly through life without having to be fearful of just about everything. As in a relationship with a spouse, so too with ourselves, or a deity, even.
Forgiveness is the same, sometimes, some people need to be forgiven as a right of passage to begin on a new path, to build upon our good intentions and continue that way of being in the end game, of arriving at a point where we can lift a "heavy weight" without thinking, because we have done the hard work leading up to that point, where it is at all possible and not, in spite of it.
To think otherwise, is childish. At the very least, it is naive. And as we have seen a lot in recent times, it can even be, destructive in applying religious faith to common human endeavors. The Middle East is our most gross example of that. It is Faith, lacking Forgiveness, and has shown what a destructive force that can be when you apply one in the extreme and completely turn your back on the other.
Religions Extremism
Regardless of what you believe in, especially, if you are one of the pathetic followers of ISIS\ISIL, or any religious extremist movement for that matter, you need to view life in the moderate if you want to survive; to apply both Faith AND Forgiveness, properly.
Humanity has a grand tradition of striking down what irritates it the most, be that a good irritant or a bad one, with the bad typically dying the most prominent of deaths.
To apply too either much (and you can apply even forgiveness with too much extremeness and it too can become dangerous), you are then on the road to destruction. If not yours right away, certainly those others who are innocent who you have and are, slaughtering.
In the end, we can all be assured of your own destruction. You, can be assured of your destruction. It just takes time. Perhaps not today, perhaps not right away even if you succeed in taking over regions. You cannot however hold on forever. Because in the end, all regimes of this type fail. It may very well be that yours will be spectacular.
Your failure, will be spectacular. You see, the world knows you for what you are.
I suspect you know it too. Greed always loses out in the end. Greed in religion, being the worst. The Catholic religion was once a force to reckon with and now is a dilute belief system that most people even if practicing, really don't pay that much attention to.
These capitalistic religions are a dying breed ("do good now, for reward later"; pay now, get something later; pay\receive: capitalism).
Islam, will eventually be the same.
Mohammed like Joseph Smith, is on the way out.
They just don't know it yet.
It's painfully obvious to many of the rest of us, however. Religions, are dying.
You see, that is the path Humanity is on. The path to rationality and science. At times like these, the death throws of a belief system, can be painful, for everyone. Religious ones, all the more painful because no one likes to realize that their entire lives, and generations of their families before them, have been fooled.
But it's okay. We were all fooled. Just, let it go.
What really exists, is where humanity is going, and not the ridiculous ancient religious myths and fictions of what used to be. Humanity used to be easily fooled. Many of us are starting to see that now.
With a belief system needing support necessitated to be based in faith with power over others through scripture and Imam or religious translators, and their abuses of power, we see these things on a daily basis now in the Middle East.
Not faith, and forgiveness. Faith, and killing.
Islam's time is rapidly coming to an end and with groups like ISIS\ISIL, countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran, they are only hastening yet another ancient Middle Eastern desert religion's demise. Jews mellowed out long ago being the oldest of the three. Catholics burned themselves out mostly in the Middle Ages and after. Now finally, it is Islam's time.
We do need to let Muslim's change their own however, for to try and change it from without, is to prop it up, to support its continuance through their resistance to outside forces. They do want to reform Islam. Most of them want to join the greater work and modernity. It will be reformed. There is no stopping that. There is only slowing it down, or speeding it up.
Faith and Forgiveness.
You can't have one, without the other. They need to be applied in a reasonable fashion. Face it, or face your own eventual destruction.
What's sad is not that they cannot see how ridiculous their beliefs in religion are, or in how upset they get when faced with their beliefs being discounted (drawing a picture of Mohammed is a killing offense, really? Grow up!). Or, the reality of them being proven to be as ridiculous as they are.
It is sad that they cannot clearly see the world all around them, other than in their own tiny view. With their own tiny wants and needs in a world that really doesn't care. The Middle East holds a culture that was once great and they have struggled of late to make it great again and have only succeeded in minimizing their import to the world and exemplified small minded efforts to become great.
Their violent efforts over past decades have made them become smaller and smaller in the world's view. When they really deserve veneration and respect for past accomplishments and an apology for how they have been treated for a very long time.
The world needs to face up to the fact that these are mostly our brothers and as well some of them, our sisters, and that they have reasonable needs too. They really have been abused for far too long.
Mostly, they want a normal, productive life, respect and decorum. But some of them have found the worst possible way to achieve that. One that will in the end, bring upon them their own damnation and destruction. It already is. With faith and without forgiveness.
NO one thinks that they are here for that much longer.
Not even they believe that, not even with their superhuman belief muscles.
And they do know it. At least, those in charge know it. For those who do not know it, it's really time to wake the Hell up and face the burning pyre that is their future, that of their religious agenda and the future of their religion.
If there even is one.
NOTE: this is an add on. In talking with another writer today some other things occurred to me. Here are those thoughts:
Times have past times where the days of sword against sword were the battlefield weapons. We now have these morons running around with weapons of mass destruction and I include in that, automatic weapons, even bolt action rifles. Compared to a sword, a spear or a bow and arrow which itself was a kind of WMD back then, which were more one on one weapons.
Once weapons left our hands to go out on their own to kill, the format of war changed forever.
With the payback of weapon's actions today, things are different and Islam no longer has the luxury of taking hundreds of more years to get their shit together. This crap people keep saying about Catholics went through this hundreds of years ago is valid, but inconsequential.
We need to put these religious murderers down, ASAP and with great prejudice. Then, during and before, we need to put down our religious acceptance of people who are delusional and violent.
We do NOT need to be going after pacifist theists, they need protection and respect under the circumstances, but we do need to stop giving people the freedom to allow this kind of thing to propagate in our...OUR, world, not their world, because their world Cannot be allowed to exist.
#ISIS #Islam #Iran #Iraq #Syria #Catholic
Two of the most powerful forces in the universe. They can also be two of the most ridiculous and a couple of our biggest problem issues.
Faith
We need faith, but not when it goes too far.
If you believe in God, you have faith. Faith that what you believe in is not total lunacy. Why is that? Because that is so obvious to anyone but a young child, that to continue on in your belief from childhood into adulthood, takes a constructed and enduring contract with oneself to continue to suspend belief in order to have faith, to believe.
Faith means to build an enduring ignorance, irregardless of reality, of fact, of anything contrary to your beliefs. It's institutional ignorance.
When we step onto an elevator in a tall build, we suspend our belief in science (distance to ground concerns, one of our primal urges to protect ourselves) and replace it with our faith that the elevator won't drop us to a horrifying death.
In that sense, faith is good, it's a useful thing in daily life. It was a useful thing as monkey's climbing around trees having faith int heir grip that they won't fall to their death, even though, some always did. Either in a branch breaking, or falling while asleep. Faith, allowed what was necessary to survive. To stay off the ground when you could become food for a more powerful animal.
But when faith crosses the line to affect our judgement of others, to go even further to take our faith out of the realm of the suspension of belief into that of affecting others in their daily lives, then we have simply gone too far.
Forgiveness
In the Catholic religion, there is a thing called Last Rites. As you are dying, you are giving forgiveness for your life and then, you can go to heaven when you die. Uh huh, sure...like that works. The only way that could happen was if there was a contract with God, an agreement that this would be accepted and well, that doesn't make any sense at all. See the section on Faith, above.
Just as I cannot lift weights heavier than what I can normally do without first working out long and hard enough to be able to lift that heavy of a weight, so too forgiveness does us no good in being instantly forgiven. It is merely an initiator, a catalyst to start on the road to being able to lift those "heavy weights" in life. And if death is moments away, well, sorry Charley. Forgiveness merely gives us repose and a breath in order to adjust and begin on the path to getting somewhere. But when you die in a few minutes, you've had no time to adjust, to build the "muscle" in order to affect real change.
To think it is instant, is ludicrous.
Everything we have learned from nature shows us that to think you could be forgiven as in Catholic Confession, or even worse in Last Rights, and then suddenly you're purified, you can now gain entry to Heaven, simply does not in anyway reasonable way follow what we have seen in all of nature. Nature, if you buy into God, is a Nature that He created. Why would he choose one path for nature and another for humans? That too would make no sense.
But today, after hundreds of years of it being otherwise, Catholicism isn't our worst problem.
We need to have faith in order to get through the tough times. To allow us to move smoothly through life without having to be fearful of just about everything. As in a relationship with a spouse, so too with ourselves, or a deity, even.
Forgiveness is the same, sometimes, some people need to be forgiven as a right of passage to begin on a new path, to build upon our good intentions and continue that way of being in the end game, of arriving at a point where we can lift a "heavy weight" without thinking, because we have done the hard work leading up to that point, where it is at all possible and not, in spite of it.
To think otherwise, is childish. At the very least, it is naive. And as we have seen a lot in recent times, it can even be, destructive in applying religious faith to common human endeavors. The Middle East is our most gross example of that. It is Faith, lacking Forgiveness, and has shown what a destructive force that can be when you apply one in the extreme and completely turn your back on the other.
Religions Extremism
Regardless of what you believe in, especially, if you are one of the pathetic followers of ISIS\ISIL, or any religious extremist movement for that matter, you need to view life in the moderate if you want to survive; to apply both Faith AND Forgiveness, properly.
Humanity has a grand tradition of striking down what irritates it the most, be that a good irritant or a bad one, with the bad typically dying the most prominent of deaths.
To apply too either much (and you can apply even forgiveness with too much extremeness and it too can become dangerous), you are then on the road to destruction. If not yours right away, certainly those others who are innocent who you have and are, slaughtering.
In the end, we can all be assured of your own destruction. You, can be assured of your destruction. It just takes time. Perhaps not today, perhaps not right away even if you succeed in taking over regions. You cannot however hold on forever. Because in the end, all regimes of this type fail. It may very well be that yours will be spectacular.
Your failure, will be spectacular. You see, the world knows you for what you are.
I suspect you know it too. Greed always loses out in the end. Greed in religion, being the worst. The Catholic religion was once a force to reckon with and now is a dilute belief system that most people even if practicing, really don't pay that much attention to.
These capitalistic religions are a dying breed ("do good now, for reward later"; pay now, get something later; pay\receive: capitalism).
Islam, will eventually be the same.
Mohammed like Joseph Smith, is on the way out.
They just don't know it yet.
It's painfully obvious to many of the rest of us, however. Religions, are dying.
You see, that is the path Humanity is on. The path to rationality and science. At times like these, the death throws of a belief system, can be painful, for everyone. Religious ones, all the more painful because no one likes to realize that their entire lives, and generations of their families before them, have been fooled.
But it's okay. We were all fooled. Just, let it go.
What really exists, is where humanity is going, and not the ridiculous ancient religious myths and fictions of what used to be. Humanity used to be easily fooled. Many of us are starting to see that now.
With a belief system needing support necessitated to be based in faith with power over others through scripture and Imam or religious translators, and their abuses of power, we see these things on a daily basis now in the Middle East.
Not faith, and forgiveness. Faith, and killing.
Islam's time is rapidly coming to an end and with groups like ISIS\ISIL, countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran, they are only hastening yet another ancient Middle Eastern desert religion's demise. Jews mellowed out long ago being the oldest of the three. Catholics burned themselves out mostly in the Middle Ages and after. Now finally, it is Islam's time.
We do need to let Muslim's change their own however, for to try and change it from without, is to prop it up, to support its continuance through their resistance to outside forces. They do want to reform Islam. Most of them want to join the greater work and modernity. It will be reformed. There is no stopping that. There is only slowing it down, or speeding it up.
Faith and Forgiveness.
You can't have one, without the other. They need to be applied in a reasonable fashion. Face it, or face your own eventual destruction.
What's sad is not that they cannot see how ridiculous their beliefs in religion are, or in how upset they get when faced with their beliefs being discounted (drawing a picture of Mohammed is a killing offense, really? Grow up!). Or, the reality of them being proven to be as ridiculous as they are.
It is sad that they cannot clearly see the world all around them, other than in their own tiny view. With their own tiny wants and needs in a world that really doesn't care. The Middle East holds a culture that was once great and they have struggled of late to make it great again and have only succeeded in minimizing their import to the world and exemplified small minded efforts to become great.
Their violent efforts over past decades have made them become smaller and smaller in the world's view. When they really deserve veneration and respect for past accomplishments and an apology for how they have been treated for a very long time.
The world needs to face up to the fact that these are mostly our brothers and as well some of them, our sisters, and that they have reasonable needs too. They really have been abused for far too long.
Mostly, they want a normal, productive life, respect and decorum. But some of them have found the worst possible way to achieve that. One that will in the end, bring upon them their own damnation and destruction. It already is. With faith and without forgiveness.
NO one thinks that they are here for that much longer.
Not even they believe that, not even with their superhuman belief muscles.
And they do know it. At least, those in charge know it. For those who do not know it, it's really time to wake the Hell up and face the burning pyre that is their future, that of their religious agenda and the future of their religion.
If there even is one.
NOTE: this is an add on. In talking with another writer today some other things occurred to me. Here are those thoughts:
Times have past times where the days of sword against sword were the battlefield weapons. We now have these morons running around with weapons of mass destruction and I include in that, automatic weapons, even bolt action rifles. Compared to a sword, a spear or a bow and arrow which itself was a kind of WMD back then, which were more one on one weapons.
Once weapons left our hands to go out on their own to kill, the format of war changed forever.
With the payback of weapon's actions today, things are different and Islam no longer has the luxury of taking hundreds of more years to get their shit together. This crap people keep saying about Catholics went through this hundreds of years ago is valid, but inconsequential.
We need to put these religious murderers down, ASAP and with great prejudice. Then, during and before, we need to put down our religious acceptance of people who are delusional and violent.
We do NOT need to be going after pacifist theists, they need protection and respect under the circumstances, but we do need to stop giving people the freedom to allow this kind of thing to propagate in our...OUR, world, not their world, because their world Cannot be allowed to exist.
#ISIS #Islam #Iran #Iraq #Syria #Catholic
Monday, October 28, 2013
58% of Americans say legalize Pot. So what new Drug shall we attack?
So, 58% of Americans now think we should legalize Cannabis. So let's stop wasting time and energy and legalize Pot! On the federal level. Let's now put that money into something useful. The War on Drugs has failed. So now what?
Consider that with the end of Prohibition against alcohol, Harry Jacob Anslinger (who held office as the assistant prohibition commissioner in the Bureau of Prohibition, before being appointed as the first commissioner of the U.S. Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics on August 12, 1930), replaced alcohol as the drug to war against, with pot. After all, he had to do something for those poor agents now pretty much out of work with families to support. Right?
So? Where does that leave us now? Don't we now have to replace warring on pot with something else? So what do you want to be the prime target now in our eternal war on whatever, I mean, drugs (and Americans) now?
Look, if you want to continue your wasteful "War on Drugs" then you've got to find a new drug to attack. A new group of people, new users, new addicts to attack, to ruin their lives like we have for so many pot smokers and their families (for no apparent reason or end purpose). And just what should be the new, nefarious, and most highly dangerous drug in History to attack and destroy? Well, I think I've got it. But it's not a drug, per se, though the symptoms are pretty much the same.
Extremism.
At least, extremism in ideological views. I'm all for extreme sports (within reason), as much as the next guy. Then again let's face it, extreme anything at some point, just becomes stupid. And we've seen a lot of that in recent times. The lesser of the evils, is still evil nonetheless in the form of trying to decide other's lifestyles, as in being antiGay, and needs in life, as in making abortion illegal and taking away women's rights, trying to force them into roles right out of the 1940s.
It would seem that conservatives in this country can't have a progressive thought without first leaning on their childhood fears of Hellfire and brimstone. But these are the least of our worries as there are far more ridiculous people out there. Not just people standing behind the counter-intuitive banners of ProLife, but those who out right murder people. Like abortion clinic Doctors. Or worse.
Yes, extremism has brought us suicide bombers, the destruction of the twin towers in NYC, mass murders, genocide, abuse, rape, child slavery, and on and on. It has recently even brought our government to a shut down (thanks GOP extremists), or to a slim down or whatever you want to call it. Whatever you label it, it was bad. Stupid, and bad.
Extremism is where you take something based in a truth, twist it with a half truth, then intelligently shove it down the throats of the less educated, the ignorant, the stupid, and those who are more rather than less, narcissistic. See you can't con an honest man. Conservatism and extremism, are like kissing cousins. As is Fundamentalism. It's all an attempt to decrease things to their simplest elements and let's face it, Life ain't simple. And whenever you try to make it so, people get lost in the shuffle. And a select minority find power.
Maajid Nawaz, is cofounder of the world's first counter extremism think tank, Quilliam, a campaign organization where they do "counter messaging", where they try to popularize counter narratives against extremism. They are looking for ways to "inoculate" extremists against extremist messages. Maajid was recently put on the Al Shabab hit list, so he must be doing something right. He is also author of the book, "Radical - My Journey out of Islamist Extremism", and he is one of those out there fighting the good fight, trying to squelch Islamic extremism.
Like the eleven year-old girl, Malala Yousafzai, who stood for education in her country against the Taliban, and who in 2009 was shot in the face by them for her efforts. She is now touring and continuing to speak out. Sam Harris called her, "The best thing to happen to Islam in 1,000 years."
One group engaged in this, in the arena of Women's Rights is AON. On this order of things, Valarie Plame (author of the new novel, "Blowback" and previously the non-fiction work, "Fair Game"), said recently that you can tell that "the trouble spots in the world, it is no coincidence, are places where women are treated as second class citizens."
Christopher Hitchens once said in a July 2011 Vanity Fair article, in speaking about Islam before the Talibanization of Afghanistan and Pakistan and on repression in the Islamic republic, "Let me try to summarize and update the situation like this: Here is a society where rape is not a crime. It is a punishment. Women can be sentenced to be raped, by tribal and religious kangaroo courts, if even a rumor of their immodesty brings shame on their menfolk. In such an obscenely distorted context, the counterpart term to shame—which is the noble word “honor”—becomes most commonly associated with the word “killing.” Moral courage consists of the willingness to butcher your own daughter."
Try to name some famous opposites of the Islamic extremist leaders who are on the other side of the table, as Democratic leaders in the Muslim world. Far harder to think of, isn't it? You remember Bin Laden, right? But who is his opposite number on the other side? Extremism is alive and well around the world, and here at home.
We can't keep trying to simply take out these extremists with raids and drone attacks and so on, as it works about as well as the drug war had. It's not stopping. We need to treat Islamic extremism like the ideological phenomenon that it is. As any extremism is. We can't simply remove the heads of these movements and organizations and expect them to simply go away. It just doesn't work.
They will just be replaced. Extremism needs to be nipped in the bud. It becomes as a drug to them, an addiction that they need to be extracted from, weaned off of. And because of it, they won't listen to reason. They are much like a drug addict of a real drug. Not pot for reason's sake, but we're talking your heroin or meth of the theistic type. The change needs to come in a fashion more insidious to them. They can't see it coming, because no matter how much sense the opposing argument can be, they will refuse to hear it. Spoken with an extreme American Conservative lately?
People are afraid of clarity in these things because it forces them to think, and have to avoid reason and they don't want that. They don't want it because it forces them to face that they aren't using reason, they are rationalizing what they want emotionally. And the world seems to be going that direction, more and more.
Whenever we are clear about a position, then people are forced to have to go up against it and either agree with it or more typically, disagree with it. But at that point they have to KNOW something. They have to know either that they don't know what they are talking about, or that they are avoiding dealing with it rationally. And that pisses people off. Not appropriately at themselves, but at others who are opposing them. No matter how correct those others are. Since mostly people don't know something, they then become fearful.
Richard Dawkins said that in the struggle of his Atheism against Theism, that this was exactly what he had come up against, time and time again. And it is very much how it is today in our own nation.
Since about 1980 Christians have taken over our national agendas. And that has got to stop. We need to have a secular government back to make secular decisions. Ones based in Humanity and not religious tomes. But we have been steeped in extremism ourselves in order to further these right wing religious agendas against secularism and sanity. We are in a death throw with theism around the world, and at home.
But at a more base point, it isn't just an issue with theism, Christianity, Islam, etc.
Again, it is the drug of Extremism.
Extremism, that easy drug to swallow, to become addicted to. It doesn't require much thought. But the thought it does require is easy and fun, emotionally satiating. Regardless who else out there gets hurt by it. Because it is a very narcissistic addition. It is for the "Me" generation. It is a kind of, "put your head down and ram it into the wall repeatedly" kind of thought format. It is both dangerous and holding the world back from advancing, from evolving. And it warps compassion for our race and justifies things, in the Islamic terror organization as example (and there are other religions doing this), such as killing of innocents and their own Islamic brothers and sisters.
Finally in Catholicism with Pope Francis, some sanity is coming into play. He is putting down all the avenues of extremism available to Catholics. Stop picking on Gays, stop being so focused on the concerns of birth control. Love one another, have compassion. Basically, he is turning the largest religion in the world, Buddhist, albeit with different rituals and texts. And, I am good with that.
So in the end we need a new drug. My vote as you have seen, is for a war on extremism. Or no war at all. Because the way we are really going to get a handle on things kinds of things, that keep popping up, is to treat all people of the world with compassion and not just corporate and national interests as primary concerns. But in the well being of all of Humanity, even those not of your country, or personal belief system.
Consider that with the end of Prohibition against alcohol, Harry Jacob Anslinger (who held office as the assistant prohibition commissioner in the Bureau of Prohibition, before being appointed as the first commissioner of the U.S. Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics on August 12, 1930), replaced alcohol as the drug to war against, with pot. After all, he had to do something for those poor agents now pretty much out of work with families to support. Right?
So? Where does that leave us now? Don't we now have to replace warring on pot with something else? So what do you want to be the prime target now in our eternal war on whatever, I mean, drugs (and Americans) now?
Look, if you want to continue your wasteful "War on Drugs" then you've got to find a new drug to attack. A new group of people, new users, new addicts to attack, to ruin their lives like we have for so many pot smokers and their families (for no apparent reason or end purpose). And just what should be the new, nefarious, and most highly dangerous drug in History to attack and destroy? Well, I think I've got it. But it's not a drug, per se, though the symptoms are pretty much the same.
Extremism.
At least, extremism in ideological views. I'm all for extreme sports (within reason), as much as the next guy. Then again let's face it, extreme anything at some point, just becomes stupid. And we've seen a lot of that in recent times. The lesser of the evils, is still evil nonetheless in the form of trying to decide other's lifestyles, as in being antiGay, and needs in life, as in making abortion illegal and taking away women's rights, trying to force them into roles right out of the 1940s.
It would seem that conservatives in this country can't have a progressive thought without first leaning on their childhood fears of Hellfire and brimstone. But these are the least of our worries as there are far more ridiculous people out there. Not just people standing behind the counter-intuitive banners of ProLife, but those who out right murder people. Like abortion clinic Doctors. Or worse.
Yes, extremism has brought us suicide bombers, the destruction of the twin towers in NYC, mass murders, genocide, abuse, rape, child slavery, and on and on. It has recently even brought our government to a shut down (thanks GOP extremists), or to a slim down or whatever you want to call it. Whatever you label it, it was bad. Stupid, and bad.
Extremism is where you take something based in a truth, twist it with a half truth, then intelligently shove it down the throats of the less educated, the ignorant, the stupid, and those who are more rather than less, narcissistic. See you can't con an honest man. Conservatism and extremism, are like kissing cousins. As is Fundamentalism. It's all an attempt to decrease things to their simplest elements and let's face it, Life ain't simple. And whenever you try to make it so, people get lost in the shuffle. And a select minority find power.
Maajid Nawaz, is cofounder of the world's first counter extremism think tank, Quilliam, a campaign organization where they do "counter messaging", where they try to popularize counter narratives against extremism. They are looking for ways to "inoculate" extremists against extremist messages. Maajid was recently put on the Al Shabab hit list, so he must be doing something right. He is also author of the book, "Radical - My Journey out of Islamist Extremism", and he is one of those out there fighting the good fight, trying to squelch Islamic extremism.
Like the eleven year-old girl, Malala Yousafzai, who stood for education in her country against the Taliban, and who in 2009 was shot in the face by them for her efforts. She is now touring and continuing to speak out. Sam Harris called her, "The best thing to happen to Islam in 1,000 years."
One group engaged in this, in the arena of Women's Rights is AON. On this order of things, Valarie Plame (author of the new novel, "Blowback" and previously the non-fiction work, "Fair Game"), said recently that you can tell that "the trouble spots in the world, it is no coincidence, are places where women are treated as second class citizens."
Christopher Hitchens once said in a July 2011 Vanity Fair article, in speaking about Islam before the Talibanization of Afghanistan and Pakistan and on repression in the Islamic republic, "Let me try to summarize and update the situation like this: Here is a society where rape is not a crime. It is a punishment. Women can be sentenced to be raped, by tribal and religious kangaroo courts, if even a rumor of their immodesty brings shame on their menfolk. In such an obscenely distorted context, the counterpart term to shame—which is the noble word “honor”—becomes most commonly associated with the word “killing.” Moral courage consists of the willingness to butcher your own daughter."
Try to name some famous opposites of the Islamic extremist leaders who are on the other side of the table, as Democratic leaders in the Muslim world. Far harder to think of, isn't it? You remember Bin Laden, right? But who is his opposite number on the other side? Extremism is alive and well around the world, and here at home.
We can't keep trying to simply take out these extremists with raids and drone attacks and so on, as it works about as well as the drug war had. It's not stopping. We need to treat Islamic extremism like the ideological phenomenon that it is. As any extremism is. We can't simply remove the heads of these movements and organizations and expect them to simply go away. It just doesn't work.
They will just be replaced. Extremism needs to be nipped in the bud. It becomes as a drug to them, an addiction that they need to be extracted from, weaned off of. And because of it, they won't listen to reason. They are much like a drug addict of a real drug. Not pot for reason's sake, but we're talking your heroin or meth of the theistic type. The change needs to come in a fashion more insidious to them. They can't see it coming, because no matter how much sense the opposing argument can be, they will refuse to hear it. Spoken with an extreme American Conservative lately?
People are afraid of clarity in these things because it forces them to think, and have to avoid reason and they don't want that. They don't want it because it forces them to face that they aren't using reason, they are rationalizing what they want emotionally. And the world seems to be going that direction, more and more.
Whenever we are clear about a position, then people are forced to have to go up against it and either agree with it or more typically, disagree with it. But at that point they have to KNOW something. They have to know either that they don't know what they are talking about, or that they are avoiding dealing with it rationally. And that pisses people off. Not appropriately at themselves, but at others who are opposing them. No matter how correct those others are. Since mostly people don't know something, they then become fearful.
Richard Dawkins said that in the struggle of his Atheism against Theism, that this was exactly what he had come up against, time and time again. And it is very much how it is today in our own nation.
Since about 1980 Christians have taken over our national agendas. And that has got to stop. We need to have a secular government back to make secular decisions. Ones based in Humanity and not religious tomes. But we have been steeped in extremism ourselves in order to further these right wing religious agendas against secularism and sanity. We are in a death throw with theism around the world, and at home.
But at a more base point, it isn't just an issue with theism, Christianity, Islam, etc.
Again, it is the drug of Extremism.
Extremism, that easy drug to swallow, to become addicted to. It doesn't require much thought. But the thought it does require is easy and fun, emotionally satiating. Regardless who else out there gets hurt by it. Because it is a very narcissistic addition. It is for the "Me" generation. It is a kind of, "put your head down and ram it into the wall repeatedly" kind of thought format. It is both dangerous and holding the world back from advancing, from evolving. And it warps compassion for our race and justifies things, in the Islamic terror organization as example (and there are other religions doing this), such as killing of innocents and their own Islamic brothers and sisters.
Finally in Catholicism with Pope Francis, some sanity is coming into play. He is putting down all the avenues of extremism available to Catholics. Stop picking on Gays, stop being so focused on the concerns of birth control. Love one another, have compassion. Basically, he is turning the largest religion in the world, Buddhist, albeit with different rituals and texts. And, I am good with that.
So in the end we need a new drug. My vote as you have seen, is for a war on extremism. Or no war at all. Because the way we are really going to get a handle on things kinds of things, that keep popping up, is to treat all people of the world with compassion and not just corporate and national interests as primary concerns. But in the well being of all of Humanity, even those not of your country, or personal belief system.
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