Religion: How to Enrage the Church of Scientology

The Scientologists can't follow one simple bit of Internet wisdom: Don't feed the trolls.

Housh and other channers knew that Scientology had a long history of using copyright law to silence Internet-based critics. But this time, maybe because the church was stifling not just unflattering content but potential comedy gold, the tactic seemed to inflame the chortling masses. That evening, Housh logged in to an IRC channel frequented by like-minded chuckleheads and started talking with five others about the Cruise video. There was a sense that something must be done, but what? One of them logged out and posted a call to action on 4chan and some similar sites. By the middle of the night, 30 people had joined the chat. Within a couple of days, a consensus emerged: They would take down the main Scientology Web site with a massive distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS.

Get the rest: The Assclown Offensive: How to Enrage the Church of Scientology



Brain scans of people who believe in God have found further evidence that religion involves neurological regions vital for social intelligence.

Click on the image above for the rest.

If we don't believe in God, who else are we going to believe in?

The atheist group behind the sign rightly pointed out the hypocrisy in the protestors, saying that they would like the community to show them the same tolerance they fought for during the civil rights era. “The women and blacks in this neighborhood, they’ve been discriminated before, in the recent past, as early as 30, 40 years ago,” a spokesman said “and yet, they have no problem discriminating against another group, whether it be gays or atheists.”

SHOOT: The answer to the question...well, you could try having faith in yourself, and trying to see reality for what it really is. I believe the bulk of the pain in our lives is based on following delusions that lead us to believe the world is better and worse than it really is. Life is difficult. But life is also what it is. You don't need to believe it. Just see it.

clipped from www.inquisitr.com An atheist billboard in Florida has resulted in community protests and a call for the sign to be banned, but wait until you see what’s on (or as is the case isn’t on) the sign. Unlike campaigns in Europe which included the slogan “there probably isn’t a god,” the Florida campaign says “Being a good person doesn’t require God. Don’t believe in God, you’re not alone.” According to the Christians in the area, saying that non-believers can be good people discriminates against Christians. Here’s where it gets even weirder: the residents object because (and I’m not making this up) African-Americans live in the area, and a shop owned by a born again Christian is nearby. “It says ‘Do not believe in God.’ How are we going to make it? Look at our schools, everyday. Everyday there’s something going on. Kids are out here killing each other, kids are here using drugs. Who else are they going to believe in?”

The Silver Shadow [COLUMN]

There is a circular window where I live, on the western elevation, that lets in a circle of moonlight on some evenings. The fingers of a massive Bluegum, were moving in the cold, restless air outside, making delicate confettied patterns over the dark, hollowy interior.

And while this dance of silvery light was playing off the wooden floor, the small black steel hearth downstairs glowed orange and sent invisible bulging bubbles of heat to the loft bedroom where I was reading.

I started off reading a newspaper article that described how one Jewish family had effectively declared war on another Jewish family. The American parents of a teenager paralysed in a car accident whilst on a trip to South Africa to attend a bar mitzvah were suing the head of Investec Bank, David Kuper, for $24 million.

I will tell you in a moment what I read next, but before I do, a disclaimer. I have tremendous respect and love for George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, I admire the beauty of Nicole Kidman and Natalie Portman, I think Ben Stiller and Larry King are excellent. All Jews. I'm going to share a thought I had. This doesn't mean I encourage you to 'believe' or 'buy-in' to the same thought. It also doesn't mean it reflects my beliefs. It is merely something that occurred to me that is possibly worth considering (and possibly not). It may be as wrong as waking up on a Thursday and saying, "Thank God it's Friday." But I am sharing this with you because you may find it illuminating. At worst, you might find it interesting. But I can guarantee you that what I am about to share is 'not nice'. It's disturbing. That said, please don't accuse me of being anti-Semitic or even attempting to be. That would be a shallow response to the many troubling issues that face all people right now.

The line of thought began constructing itself in bed, reading a book on 'How to read the Bible', and my girlfriend lying in bed beside me reading the Bible. Suddenly it occurred to me that these familiar characters, almost as familiar as movie stars, and carrying the fabled significance even beyond children's favorite bedtime stories (Pinocchio, The Three Little Pigs, Hansel and Gretel), David, Moses and Joseph are all Jewish characters. They're the ancestors of some of those funny dressed people who walk around on Fridays, whose men-folk have long gray beards, cowboy hats, and funny ropes swaying under their dark suits. Their real names wouldn't have been so different, David ben for David and so on. But let's be clear. My Afrikaans girlfriend and I am reading about a tribe of people who essentially have nothing to do with the etymology of our people. When the Jews were in Egypt, where were the Saxons? Why aren't we reading their stories?

The answer emerges if one takes this question quite seriously. In the very early era the Jews were enslaved by the Egyptians. Evidently the Egyptians found them - the Jews - too valuable to eradicate in the sort of xenophobic holocausts that are all too common throughout human history. So the Jews as a tribe managed a sort of sputtering existence, until they escaped from Egypt. They were then taken to the 'Promised Land' by Moses. Interestingly, this situation has inspired many struggling tribes ever since, including South Africa's blacks during Apartheid, and Martin Luther King spoke about the Promised Land (and not living to see it even though he believed others would) the day before his assassination.

The Jews went on to populate the land of Canaan and were somewhat successful in exterminating the local tribes. They were warned not to give themselves to idolatry, which is the worship of things as opposed to concepts. Some writers say that the gift God gave them, Jerusalem, became like an idol to the Jews. They could not tear their religion away from the thing that God had given them. And nor could others who claimed Jerusalem as their own. And then the Romans (the Saxons - our tribe) came along. By this time the Bible (Judaism - the Old testament) was well underway. It had been written for a people without their own country, without their own land. The word for a worldless group. And it is for this reason, because the Jews were never able to fully conquer their territory, that their religion has endured the way it has for as long as it has. Instead of land, sovereign territory, they needed to collectively belong to a book to be an identifiable, separate group, capable of withstanding the horror or horrors - assimilation with other, lesser mortals.

What followed was enslavement by the Romans, which wiped out any real prospect of a Jewish revolution or independent state (which their Bible prescribed/predicted/prophesied). Jesus came and died, and while some Jews claimed he was the long lost messiah, others, finding their prospects to a homeland diminishing by the hour, rejected the practical unreality of this claim. The Jews became scattered, forming disparate communities all over the world, but especially in Germany, Russia and the USA. It was only after World War II, that they were offered, by their allies, unfettered access back to Palestine/Israel. What is certain is that the entire Middle East region is dominated by Islam/Arab populations, and to this day surrounds the Jewish state on all sides.

On the one hand one can argue that the special treatment the Jews received shows the best of humanity. That even though a people are weak, they ought to be protected. If that's true, why were no special conditions or terms or land set aside for the Bushman of Botswana (now virtually extinct) and a host of endangered tribes all around the world. Well, the answer is probably that Jews in governments in these other powerful states engineered the rescue of their own people; the restoration of Israel as a sovereign state. Non-Jewish Christians obviously helped in this process too, seeing in the Jews some fielty as lost (perhaps misguided) sons and brothers, but sons and brothers nonetheless. Money, owned in abundance by Jewish interests, would have provided the military capability to defend their interests in a way never before possible.

And those same moneyed interests, overseen by the likes of Alan Greenspan, have allowed the Jewish tribe to perpetuate themselves. Money and religion.

My own experience of the Jews is of an intelligent, expressive people who are friendly towards outsiders but suspicious of non-Jews. On the one hand, their history may be the reason why they have maintained their sense of Apartheid, and their religion (we are God's chosen people, not you), or both. What's interesting is the Jewish history that so many Christians read about in the Bible is exactly that, Jewish history. A commandment such as 'Thy shalt not kill' actually meant 'Thy shalt not kill a Jew'. I found it somewhat amusing, somewhat ironic, that my girlfriend (and her clan have been accused of similar Apartheid slights against others) finding reassurance, and comfort, in stories about another 'Apartheid Bunch', the Jews.

Now there are all sorts of good reasons for people of a certain type to associate with one another. Language and culture for instance. Religion. It's simply easier to understand one another, and the chances of conflict and misunderstanding are less. The Koreans exemplify this, and the other extreme. They have the most homogeneous society in the world, and consequently, the most successful and busy online communities. These communities are quite insular in the sense that they don't need American software or search engines to run them. They run perfectly well on their own systems, and they don't have too much to tempt them away when it's in a different language and operated by a foreign (more individualistic) mindset.

But there are also the North Koreans, who exemplify the cautionary tale of insularity taken too far. Insularity that impoverishes an entire people.

I would argue that the high degree of insularity, the painful perfectionism that assures the health and financial success of the Jews may not be that useful in brokering good democracies. Jews have separate basins, sometimes separate refrigerators to wash their milk and meat. The Koreans also have specially adapted Kimchi refrigerators. Jewish families place scrolls (or facsimiles thereof) in their doorways. All of this sort of thing, in every detail, gets very expensive to actually implement, and is it absolutely necessary? Imagine if every household went to these lengths? And if there is one thing I have learnt since my girlfriend has moved in, is that perfectionism and a dogmatic approach to one's individual preferences is a recipe for disaster. It's a recipe for heated conflict. Practical versus personal wants and needs.

I want to go back again to my own experience of Jews. I had a wonderful kindergarten life at a Jewish nursery school, and many of my father's friends (then and now) are Jewish. They taught him how to work with money and he has done well for himself. I have found the Jews in my experience to populate the world of advertising, and finance and media and movies. It's possible that they may take care of you and listen to you if you're friends with them or there is some other vested interest. I don't know. What I do know is that they prefer to do business with their own kind. They prefer to form cliques and clubs with their own kind. And for the most part, the women certainly don't like to be seen fraternising with non-Jewish men. Jewish men on the other hand fraternise with both sides, but only marry Jewish women.

Here's where I begin to wonder... You have a group of people who were crushed by successive regimes. They remained separate and invented a religion to maintain both their sense of superiority over other human beings, and also to blame these other human beings for sabotaging their God-ordained success. Christians hijacked this faith, but went further. They imposed this faith not on single tribes, but on all tribes. Yes, you had to follow a few rituals, but they were able to grow it into the world's largest tradition - Christianity.
It occurred to me that the Jewish penchant for detail and slavish attention to rites is great for shackling a family to a tribe whose very existence was under threat (or construed to be) since time immemorial. But at the same time, this belief (exclusive rather than inclusive, superior rather than democratically equal) is guaranteed to isolate any group - for better or worse - from other communities. And worse, as I've said, by virtue of their arrogant boast (we're God's chosen people and you're not) the group makes itself a permanent target for persecution.

It occurs to me then that when we read about Jewish stories, we see them more as iconic tales about the human condition - the search for freedom from oppression, how small defeats big, how divine intervention is interpreted into our history, why we are special. I look at similar insular activities such as this:

Japan’s corporate insularity is a deep-seated trait—and one celebrated by its most successful firms. “I learned very early”, wrote Sony’s co-founder, Akio Morita, in his 1986 autobiography, “never to listen to ideas from outsiders.” Unfortunately, for all Japan’s strengths, such self-obsession stops it making the most of its considerable potential to create world-beating Sonys in a wider range of industries.

If the Jews and Japanese, Koreans and Afrikaners wished to maintain a degree of separation from other people, they achieved it. The Koreans have since shipped in English teachers in order for their schoolchildren to learn the language, to conduct commerce with the West. Korea has stepped forward and risen quickly to become the 13th largest economy in the world (behind India). Afrikaners - I see many of them talking English, and engaging with the world, either on their own terms or on terms that work. The Japanese have adapted their formulas to successful America models before - although it took a war and two atomic weapons to do it. The Jews are different in one crucial respect - if they're God's chosen people they certainly don't need to filthy themselves in the company of lesser heathens. They're content to do business with us, but no more.

I hope that communities will learn to embrace their common humanity going into the future. That does not necessarily mean that communities should merge, but that they should learn, at last, of their common heritage, their common humanity. The story of the Jews is a tragic one. Perhaps they were a people destined to lose, and they have been propped up in part by their faith (which has been a self-reinforcing reality - of faith causing self imposed asylum), in part by finance, in part by sheer stubbornness. It remains to be seen whether such traits can or ever will be rewarded in the grander scheme of things. What we know is that the most Jewish of traits (if one goes by the typification's we find in the average joke), greed, is behind the collapse of the world's financial systems. The perfectionistic counting of money and playing accounting games on and off balance sheets has, we're seeing now, wrecked the prospects for entire countries. It may have seemed incredibly clever to those who started playing these games on Wall Street. Hitler would say that the financial meltdown is the Jew's fault. It's not. Greed became a common cause. If you possess a credit card then you were one of an army of willing participants. Who decided to advertise these credit cards to us, and telling us it was a carefree, no hassle convenience is another question. I think our interest in Jewish interests and their self-obsession is overblown - the reason for this lies in their and (and us borrowing their) religion. Abandon the religion and you recover your common humanity.

Once we can let go of an arrogant belief, a sense of self-entitlement to prosperity and heaven, perhaps we can begin to learn to live like decent human beings, together. Although it is as simple as that, abandoning an arrogant belief about ourselves, the Jews have not done so for millenia, and I don't see the rest of mankind doing much better even in the face of terrible crisis. We may have been programmed to be stubborn, but the more chaotic an environment, the more stubborn inflexible programmes are programmed to fail.

And that night I dreamt I was walking in the rain through the streets of Seoul, South Korea. I entered a dark room and began to urinate. When I woke up, I found the bed wet. The silver circle on the floor was gone, and all I was left with was the unpleasant residue of a dream made manifest, by me. That is to say, our road takes us exactly to that real soggy-in-the-dark place where our dreams, our hearts, our beliefs, dwell. Be careful what you dream my friend, whoever you are. Be even more careful encouraging others to share in your dreams, because they may take you to a place which becomes a prison. A prison of your own desires and dreams, and that is a prison impossible to escape, unless of course you're able to wake yourself - and others - from it.

Quote from WORLD MADE BY HAND

In the wee hours of this morning I finished James Kunstler's post-oil book.
Here's a quote:

"...it was more possible that the human race possessed a spark of divinity that was worth cultivating that that a mysterious being was up there in the ether somewhere with anthropomorphic qualities of goodness and mercy running the whole show, and maybe it was the job of clergy to nurture that divine spark in us and make something of it."

I found it interesting that both Jim and I sold out...maybe that's too harsh a term...but in my austere novel THE HALF FULL MOON which is about the desert of the real, and the true nature of the original human being, about the threat of extinction to the human race (set in the Kalahari), I also flirted with divine inspiration and interference. Is it not (only) through the divine that we authorise radical change to ourselves and society? This is a peculiar subscription for us though, if you think about it, that we effectively endorse this view even in our fictions, while in our lives are chagrined by the washes of diffused 'religion'.

If you think about it, both Kunstler and myself have resisted the easy way out, which is escaping our worldly troubles through 'salvation and living forever' by simply declaring and committing to faith in a saviour. Yet in both our stories we certainly flirt with the idea of a divine presence, but one that is human in its divinity (and its source), not a sort of disparate alien power originating from elsewhere in the universe. I called my 'Jesus' Alcala, 'the desert dragon', and she was a supremely wise but feminine force, and appeared both fragile and able to circumvent some of the limits we take for granted. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure if I specified whether her origin was an Earth origin, or a product of the universe forming. I have an idea it is probably both, as divine consciousness is based on a omniscient consciousness and connection to everything. Interesting.

'Moses was high on hallucinogenic drug when he received Ten Commandments,' claims top academic

When Moses received the Ten Commandments from God, he was summoned right to the top of Mount Sinai.
But the man who led the Children of Israel to safety may have been even higher at the time, if an Israeli academic is to be believed.
Psychology professor Benny Shanon says it was likely Moses was hallucinating under the influence of a mind-altering drug at the time of his biblical achievements.

More.

What Color is God?

Setumo Stone's article "I refuse to pray to a 'white' God" got me thinking. I have a couple of very successful and intelligent Christian friends, and I'm not sure if we've brought this up before. When I lived in South Korea, some of the Jesus' looked Asian, and I remember then I did a bit of research, and found that many cultures 'modify' Jesus to look like, well, whatever the culture is that's worshipping him.

This says a HELLUVA lot. Jesus would be turning in his grave if he knew to what extent his ideas had been 'hijacked' by the gentiles, and he would propbably hunt down the Apostle Paul (formerly Saul), and throw him across the gulf separating heaven from hell. When Jesus said: Love your neighbor' that implicitly meant: 'Love your Jewish neighbour." Everything Jesus did he did for the Jews. Original Jewish law stated: "Thy shalt not kill." In those times it wasn't necessary to specify: "Thy shalt not kill other Jews." Obviously killing people from other tribes (heathen, infidels and gentiles) was nothing to cry about.

This same psychology continues today in fundamentalist religion. And it is easy for outsiders to point fingers and say: 'Well what happens if you throw a grenade (in the name of God of course) into a mob, killing people from your own Faith, aswell as the infidels, heathens, idolators and other filthy...er...human beings?' Well the Faithful have a clever counter-argument. If you kill someone from your own Faith (God forbid), you do him a favour because you speed him on his journey to heaven. The idea is that he will then 'thank you' when it is your turn to join him in heaven. As for those of other Faiths, you are doing everyone (including them) the seservice of cleaning up the world on God's behalf.

Great argument, but I just have one question. Since God is obviously the color of skin that yours is, and since everyone else (whose isn't) is expendable, and since you are clearly chosen...how about doing yourself a favour, and sending yourself to heaven? I mean inagine? You get to play on harpstrings like TODAY and feel no pain and sing songs all day. I mean, clearly, if you're so holier than thou you definitely don't belong here with the unclean. Get busy living on Earth. That's where we are now. But if you can't do that, if you really believe in the afterlife and that's what you're all about, what are you still doing right here with us?

Get real!

Errr...Houston (and Everyone Else) We Have A Problem

Why can't we all just...get along? Pictures from London emailed by W. Thanks, I think.

"God is too vague a concept to be meaningful"

'For if God’s greatness entails being invisible, intangible and inscrutable, then he can’t be disproved — but nor can he be proved.'

For the rest of this New York Times article, go here.

The God Con (LUXURY TRIP TO HEAVEN and all that)

In Bloem right now they are a building ginormous cathedral - it looks more like a Hypermarket - in Langenhovenpark, a stone's throw from another Monolithic superstore - er, church, the Baptist church.

It seems that in the same way that people want to worship celebrities for their wealth and good looks, or just because they're celebrities, we want to vote for people with big glossy cars, and when it comes to men of the cloth; it's no different.

It took me a while to realise:"Wow, when you give money to the church, although they may say it's for the poor and quote some awesome verses, it's really going to the preacher's salary." Given this convenient overlap, it makes sense that your preacher, who must be wanting to earn top dollar, will say wjhat is most MOST APPROPRIATE, most conducive to a collective opening of purse strings. Is he going to berate you for being stupid, for your own indulgences? No; he's going to congratulate you on your blessings.

I realised the facile nature of this whole thing - let's call it a CON - when I was in Korea. There they don't even go to the trouble or the pretence of building churches (you know, tall, atmiospheric buildings with steeple, stained glass windows and such). They just plonk a cross on a part of a square mausoleum, and churches do their thing beside massage parlours, schools, internet cafes, restaurants and all the rest. Some go even future and demand a 10% tithe - where workers give back that fraction of their salaries to their bosses. It's got something to do with the boss doing the work of God, so a tithe to the boss is just like a direct donation to God.

If that sounds ridiculous, it's really not a much longer walk than what you're doing in church. If churches didn't care about money - beyond subsistence - I wonder how many church men we would see. It's been rumored that the ginormous church in Bloem is used to bankrool a shopping mall. When I confront Christians there about this they are completely unsurprised. They bravely say: Even if they are using their money for that, I dopn't care. I'm giving it to God. Meanwhile some people are laughing, chuckling, giggling on their way to another sizable dank deposit.

Faithless: A Better Option? (RELIGION)

The series of New Atheist tracts that shot up the bestseller list lately have seemed like distress flares launched from the deck of a floundering ship at sea. Surely the enthusiastic reception bestowed on these books, led by Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, signals that something has gone wrong in an unprecedented way with our supposedly religious national culture.Or has it?

James's Faith
The pragmatist who understood the value of religion

By: David KlinghofferThe Weekly StandardSeptember 29, 2007

Original ArticleWilliam JamesIn the Maelstrom of American Modernismby Robert D. Richardson

A comforting observation to be drawn from Robert Richardson’s fine biography of the philosopher and psychologist William James is that America went through a similar crisis more than a century ago, pitting atheism against theism. That we emerged intact then may have been thanks partly to insights offered by James.Those insights remain fresh, both in their expression – he was a fantastic writer (as is Richardson) – and in their content, which has lost little of its relevance.

The only fault in Richardson’s William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism is that the biographer doesn’t draw out the contemporary relevance, the echoes of our times, in his compelling narration of the life of his subject.William James grew up, like his brother the novelist William James, in a household saturated with God-talk.

Their father, Henry James Sr., was permitted by family money to spend his time writing a succession of cryptic, mystical theological texts. Yet as a young man, William James was less interested in religious enthusiasm than in Darwinian evolution. His mentor at Harvard was the anti-Darwinian zoologist Louis Agassiz, whose views James ultimately rejected.

James was a born teacher, going on to teach psychology and philosophy to Harvard students for 35 years. He also had a knack for counseling, possessing as he did a tremendous – if erratic – sympathy for others.

James was devoted to his wife Alice, but Richardson describes him as a “philanderer,” if not an overtly sexual one. He indulged in “a mad crush on every other woman he met,” which he didn’t bother to hide from an increasingly wounded Alice.

Captivating Self Help

Despite bouts of hypochondriac worries and genuine ill health, he was massively productive. Frankly, James’s groundbreaking explanations of how the mind works – as in his Principles of Psychology (1890) -- seem less provocative now than they once did. On the other hand, his less academic contributions to what we may call the field of self-help still captivate.

Less Flaky

Some of his views sound like a less flaky version of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret. That phenomenally popular, Oprah-endorsed film-and-book combo purports to explain how by imagining what you want (wealth, health, anything), you can have it. James thought that there are indeed areas where believing in something can make it so.

Example

He gave as an example that, if you want to win a woman’s heart, it improves your chances to think and act as if she already loves you.He might have been recalling his own affection, at age 28, for a gravely ill young woman named Minnie Temple. It was her death in 1870 that initiated James’s engagement with religion.

Terrifying Vision

A month after, he was overtaken by a terrifying vision. While fully awake, he suddenly saw in his mind an epileptic patient from an asylum he had visited, “a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic,” who “sat there like a sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely inhuman.” Reeling at the thought that such a condition could befall himself, James took refuge in Biblical verses.The defense of religion became a salient theme in his work.

New Attraction

Why the continued attraction to it? Richardson smartly observes that much of William James’ best intellectual energy was poured into defying academic and elite assumptions: “James moved toward a major idea by starting out in opposition or resistance to received ideas.” One such idea was Darwinism.James the instinctive contrarian lived through Darwinian evolution’s earliest acceptance, which he often noted with approval even as he perceived its challenge to religion. It lead to a view, “widespread at the present,” he said in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), that religion was only a relic surviving from the primitive past. In opposing this “survival theory,” James saw that “the current of thought in academic circles runs against me.” He relished that fact.

Pragmatism

In his philosophic work Pragmatism (1907), James observed had Darwin had displaced “the argument from design” with the result that “theism has lost that foothold.” While rejecting conventional theism for himself, he also chastised the overly refined religious believer who worships a Deity that never impacts the physical world. Such a believer “surrenders…too easily to naturalism” so that “practical religion seems to me to evaporate.”

Why?

Why would a religious person concede so much ground? James pointed out that certain ideas are embraced by an uncritical public simply because of their “prestige.”He himself felt “like a man who must set his back against an open door quickly if he does not wish to see it closed and locked.” Shrewdly, he noted that in keeping a door open for faith he had more credibility because he was not orthodox – indeed he was irritated by orthodox Christianity -- but rather an outside observer.

We can imagine his response to our New Atheists. In dealing with secularists in his own day, he appealed to experience, reason and pragmatism. James argued that subjective experience has been undervalued as a source of enlightenment. In his essay “The Will to Believe,” he explained that personal experience which would confirm religion’s truth “might be forever withheld from us unless we met the [religious] hypothesis half-way.”

In other words, those who reject religion, for fear of being duped, have sealed themselves off from ever knowing whether they are wrong: “I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or willfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truths were really there, would be an irrational rule” (his emphasis).


Citing God’s instruction to the Israelite leader Joshua, “Be strong and of a good courage” (Joshua 1:6), James argued that it is more reasonable to act from the hope that religion is true, than it is to spurn faith out of the worry that it might be false. The religious act could even produce its own confirmation. Action creates reality. This is different from Pascal’s wager.

Faith generates reality

It’s more like a vote for faith, which can generate the reality it endorses. The idea wasn’t original with him. It had already been crystallized by the book of Exodus (24:7), which records the declaration of the Jews in receiving the Ten Commandments: “Everything that the Lord has said, we will do and [then] we will understand.” They would comply now with the commandments in the expectation that later, as a result of casting their vote for God, they would understand why He commands what He does. That illumination would confirm that God is a reality. To believe, and know that you’re right to believe, you must first act.That his religious psychology was anticipated in the Bible would not surprise William James. He appreciated Scripture as a “guide to life,” the practical effects of whose guidance can be gauged. According to his philosophy of pragmatism, this is the preferred way to evaluate any truth claim.

Pragmatism, he wrote, has “no materialistic bias as ordinary empiricism labors under” and judges theological ideas by the twofold criteria of whether they have “value for concrete life” and whether they mesh with “other truths that also have to be acknowledged.”Religion should make any individual believer better than he would be without it. It should not, rightly understood, violate science. It should provide a framework for diagnosing the ills of a culture, and for prescribing measures for the amelioration of social and political problems.

If a Biblical worldview does a better job of these than the secular alternative, that makes religion “true.”Yet James, that beguiling man, advocated a sense of humor about the fact that despite our faith, notwithstanding our arguments for belief, we might have it all wrong. Then again, perhaps it’s the New Atheists who have shut their ears to truth. Not that they would be likely to admit the possibility.

NVDL: What we believe, what we focus on, manifests as reality. Thus if a third of the Earth's population - 2 billion - profess to believe in Christianity, is it not possible they these multitudes of prayers, thoughts, attentions, actions - manifest some sort of intelligent field? I believe it is possible. But it is a reverse engineering of God which must, I think, logically break down at some point.

Having attended Nicky Gumbel's(the astute ex-barrister-become-preacher) evocative Alpha Course, I am less inclined to be so dismissive or even antagonistic towards Christinianity. It is possible for people to love - and have relationships - with one another, and maintain differing beliefs. I have experienced this. But I think one must be prepared to listen to the other, and be open and accepting of the other. And hopefully this is done in a mutual, genuine manner.

There are aspects of Christianity - its exclusivity, it's judgemental tone, its even acceptance of urgent scenarios like climate change (as the guise for 'Signs of the End Times'), the disconnect - in some ways - with the world (homosexuality, world crisis), that I find grave and unpleasant. But in other ways, when any person acknowledges, discusses or even ponders 'God', whatever their concept is of God, they, at the simplest level, ponder their place, their relationship vis-a-vis everyone and everything else. And that is always a valuable exercise, and can amount to a simultaneous connecting and cathecting of human beings with the world and it's creatures.

Juan Smith Praises God After Stint in Sin Bin

Juan Smith is a hard as nails oke. He once worked as a bouncer in Bloemfontein, but his bread and butter is still moering people.

He's a good player, and he's a Cheetah, but I don't know why - it irks me when these guys (Danie Rossouw did it to when he was awarded Man of the Match) get airtime and the first thing they do is 'praise the Lord'. Can't you guys do that on hands and knees before you go to bed, you know, like, in private.

Posturing in Public

I think the reason there's this public display, with a bit of spluttering, is because they are not used to or comfortable with praise and adulation, they're used to the arena. And thus to deflect criticism, and calm their own nerves, they call on God for moral support (and support in the sense of a moral backbone).

It may make sense to them, but I really think platforming and broadcasting your beliefs ought to be more private, and more humble. And in the context of rugby, it doesn't quite work does it? It's not a game based on love, but toughness, and the ability to tough it out. I thought that much was obvious.

Grandstanding

Today on the way back from lunch we walked by three or four peculiar gentlemen dressed in white and green tartan collared shirts, standing at the curbside in Rosebank, but looking really out of place. As we stepped past, one of them said: "Can we share with you about our glorious God? Will you accept him as your saviour?" "Er...Let me think about that: NO!"

Church Currie Cup

I have a suggestion though: A Church Rugby League. Soccer has it's PSL and MVELA, we've got the Currie Cup and Super 14, but why stop there? With so many Christian rugby players in our own rugby teams (Boks like Habana, Smith and Roussouw, the Blue Bulls etc) and even the international players (remember the Tongan and Fijian Faithful?), what we really MUST see is a battle of the denominations. That way everyone can wear their Jesus is King t-shirts, and may the best player...er...I mean PRAYER win. There can be a special service after the game - after all the moering - for the man of the match and the various captain's to humbly give thanks for the source of their strength and superior strategy. Fans can applaud them or lay hands on them at the same time. Ah men brother.

Pope Back From The Dead (PICTURES)

From Timesnow.tv:
A picture taken of a bonfire at a service marking the 2nd anniversary of Pope John Paul II's passing away, contains what the Vatican is convinced of a likeness of the pontiff himself in the flames, raising his right hand in blessing.

NVDL: Re-he-he-heaaaaallly? (Jim Carrey voiceover.)

The fiery figure on the left side of the image is being hailed as Pope John Paul II, making an appearance from beyond the grave on his 2nd death anniversary; as it bears an eery likeness to the real-life image of the Pope taken back in 2001, seen on the right side of the image.

NVDL: Eeerie? Don't you mean windy?

Believers are convinced [NVDL: well that's what they do - believe and convince themselves and others...] that it's a reappearance from beyond the grave and the likeness has created quite a flutter all around. Details appeared on the Vatican News Service, a TV station in Rome, which specialises in religious news broadcasts.

NVDL: [Elton John voiceover]And it seems to me, you lived your lives like candles in the wind, never stopping to think, when the rains came down...

Beware: The Voice In Your Head

"I would rather live my life as if there is a God, and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't, and die to find out there is."

NVDL: I've heard this sort of thing a lot. It's difficult to convey just how NUTS it is. It basically operates out of a mindset of: 'oh well, I give up. I'm not sure of my beliefs but I'll basically keep up the habit because it seems to be working.'

This is known as 'the psychology of previous investment'. It's why people stay in doomed relationships, it's why we spend a fortune on fixing a car (ultimately more than the car is worth), it's why we spend the whole weekend watching TV. We do it because we're too lazy to THINK. Real thinking is difficult and painful. It requires concentration and discipline. Think critically, and once you find your answers - through careful consideration - new choices, new actions are required. This involves more painstaking decision making. All other 'thinking' is mindless meaningless rumination.

So the next time someone speaks or emails the delusional sentence quoted above (or if you're a subscriber), bear this in mind: Don't guess. Don't assume. Find your answers. Knock on the door. Otherwise you're a fool living on delusions, and that makes you a danger to yourself and to society in general.

Is God for Real?

Making sense out of the nonsense

Over the last 6 six weeks, I’ve attended the Alpha Course. Basically it’s an excellent introduction to Christianity. In exchange for attendance, the prospective Christian gets to meet the local community and imbibe a three course dinner once a week. So, have I learnt anything? Yes! I’ve learn that it is vital that all people connect themselves to the local community, and by implication, give up their hyper individualism.

Aplha is a dated set of DVD’s presented by the charmingly articulate and intelligent Englishman Nicky Gumbel (an ex-barrister). Alpha is very affirming and positive and Gumbel’s analogies are always constructive, and often humorous. Even if you’re not a Christian, his ‘take’ is worth noting.

Christians will argue with this position, naturally. They will say there are many ways to go to heaven, to be saved, as long as it is through Jesus. The idea is that we are born into sin, so basically you’re indebted from the word go, and God, like a benign bank manager, will bail you out of your bankruptcy once you’ve made the appropriate declarations. Really?

This concept makes sense to some Christians; who believe that God is pulling all the strings (you can ask God to organize you parking, give you a nice day, and give your team victory over another). But it becomes difficult to reconcile this ‘reality’ when you start to imagine more than one person praying the same wallowing prayer: “Help me. Give Me. Save Me.” Bruce Almighty found himself in the selfsame predicament.

Flight 93 provides another succinct analogy for how ridiculous our thinking (or lack of thinking) can be: the airplane is in a terminal nosedive and the suicidal hijacker is praying, shouting desperately to Allah, while behind him all the passengers are praying, screaming to God. The airplane nevertheless slams into a Pennsylvania field, killing Christian and Muslim alike.

But the power of prayer, while we’re still making up our minds what to do, and who we intend to be, can’t be dismissed. Prayer is very effective in bringing about specific manifestations in reality. It’s important for people to meditate in a deep, quiet place, on those things of the universe that are important to Being. The act of prayer also does a great deal to reset our paradigms; we are placed once more into the clockwork of the universe, and we’re able to measure our respect for ourselves and others in the world. This is a vitally important practice.

Whereas Christians believe prayer to be a conversation with God, they also concede that it is the person praying who changes, not God. This is interesting, because it presupposes a scenario in which God does not need to do anything. The onus is on the ardent praying person to recognize what needs to change, and take action accordingly.

Those Christians who profess to ‘hear’ God speaking to them actually mean that they read particular verses (even a number of corresponding verses) and then develop a strong response to these messages. Others will describe God’s voice as a ‘feeling’, and often, especially in conversations Christians have with one another, God’s thoughts seem interchangeable with their own. But God’s voice is really man’s voice, and man – whether well or ill-intentioned – gets what he needs done through leveraging the persona of God.

An example: I was in a massive Baptist Church building earlier this year and listened to the pastor (who happened to be blind) saying: “God will provide the poor with food.” It all sounded wonderful, except that this statement required an addendum: “If God speaks to your heart, please respond with tins of food, whatever you’re led to bring.” George W. did the same thing to mobilize his army into Iraq. People understood the move as “God’s work’ and ‘God’s will’. God of course had nothing to do with it, except that when enough people consented to ‘God’s will’, it became God’s will. That’s what faith en mass does.

Thus God’s actions are our actions. This is the reality of the world; it is not the narrow definition of a Christian God, or a Jewish God, or any other God. That God exists there is no doubt. Even Richard Dawkins, one of the world’s foremost intellectuals, would probably agree that the idea of ‘God’ is interchangeable with ‘all that is’. And yes, even you, and even I, contribute to this Isness that is all around us, being created in the present moment.

But is this Isness a God with a personality, an identity, or is the Isness less personal? The answer depends entirely on you. It’s the same answer to this question: what is the meaning of life? No one can provide you with the answer, that’s your domain, for you will someday find yourself pondering the meaning (or lack of) in your own life, and then it is you, and you alone who needs to develop a Life Appropriate and Life Specific response.

The same is true of God. How did God come about? A great way to begin to answer all the most fundamental questions: birth, death, the afterlife, love and God, is to look at powerful firsthand experience. What, really, is your experience of God? Well, that’s what God is for you.

Is there life after death? It’s a question a lot like this one: when you’re sleeping are you awake? Ultimately of course, the question ought to answer itself. In the conventional wisdom of the world, sleep is sleep, and being awake – being conscious – is being awake. So to wonder, as we do, and as we must, about life after death, we are really coming to the core of what we believe.

If Christians really believed that paradise waited for them, why would they and their families endure the burdens of life and work? Why not go there immediately? It may seem like an absurd question, but it isn’t. Fundamentalist Christianity is really taking the bible at its word, and if we did, homosexuals would be jailed or worse, adulterers put to death, and infidels slaughtered on the battlefield.

But many Christians focus on the warm fuzzy stuff in the bible. They say to ‘love one another’ is what the bible is all about. If our idea of the world and God is Isness, then being nice towards one another certainly isn’t a bad idea. Do we need God to tell us what is self-evident: treat people nicely because the world has a way of paying you back for all your misdeeds. This is basic reality.

One argument that is almost never raised when non-Christians converse with Christians is this one: Why would an all-Powerful God have to resort to an elaborate drama that is the life and times of Jesus Christ? To put this into pure and simple terms: if you have a child that has misbehaved (because you said so), would it really be necessary to slaughter someone that is very close to you (as a substitute for yourself) as a way to say, “Okay, I forgive you, everything is fine.”

Is it so hard for human beings to imagine that things are as simple as they seem? Death is the thing that ought to make us think a few times before we do the things we do? We ought to drive more carefully, exercise, treat others well, because after this life, it’s over.

The idea of a second chance, rewards and paradise (effectively for doing nothing but having faith) is the delusion that will doom our civilization. The ‘something-for-nothing’ psychology is an unnatural and insidious deception that most people somehow accept as true. We wish to be celebrities based on our appearance, or win the lottery, or find the perfect partner; forgetting that chance governs a small subset of the universe. Work and deeds governs most of reality.

The idea that each of us (separately and as a collective) are responsible for creating the Isness, is how we save each other and ourselves. Reality is our choice, and each and every day we have a chance to make new choices. Do we accept or reject what is self evident? That’s the choice God has left to us, whatever we may believe.

Kunstler: Shocked!

From kunstler.com:

>Kunstler doesn't pull any punches in this instalment. Easy guy! Waitaminute, then again, let 'em fly Jim.<

Shocked, shocked! Alan Greenspan's memoirs are being flogged across the airwaves, bandwidths and printing presses, and the cohort of those who comment on public affairs in these media are shocked by the Maestro's confessions -- first, that a housing bubble emerged out of his leadership in the banking sector, and second that the Iraq war is about oil. As usual, they're getting it all wrong -- about as wrong as Al himself got it. But that is the way of things in this age of cultural dissipation and gross cognitive dissonance.

Greenspan claims he had no idea that his cutting of interest rates to near zero would produce any irregularities in the US economy. Apparently he hadn't noticed that the Big Fund Boyz called him "Easy Al" for a reason. Or that when you introduce nearly free "money" (as in "available for lending") into a system of financial trade, the recognition of moral hazard tends to evaporate. As the nation's chief bank regulator, Greenspan also apparently failed to notice the upsurge in dodgy lending practices previously only seen among mafia loan sharks, drug dealers, or twelve-year-olds playing Monopoly.

But the really funny part of all this is that the media columnists are acting as though the American public got hoodwinked by Al. Which raises the question: just what the fuck was the public thinking when they bought half-million dollar houses on salaries under 60-K, taking out no-money-down, interest-optional balloon mortgages and other tricked-up contracts? The answer is: they walked into these arrangements with their eyes open because they thought they could get something for nothing.

They thought the trend of steeply rising house prices would continue indefinitely and enable them to wiggle free of any hazard by flipping their houses to an endless supply of greater fools who would be there waiting to turn the very same trick. And the smoothies downstream in the mortgage and banking rackets were no less guided by avarice when they cooked up their formulas for bundling half-baked mortgages into tranches of tradeable securities. Easy Al may have failed to notice what was going on here, but then so did everybody else from The Wall Street Journal to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

This, of course, represents an insidious psychology. It could only happen in a culture that has come off the rails mentally, so to speak, as ours has in the sense that nobody has any sense of consequence, neither the leaders nor those who affect to follow the leaders. The leading religion in America is not evangelical Christianity, it is the worship of unearned riches, and its golden rule is the belief that is is possible to get something for nothing. Its holy shrines are Las Vegas and Wall Street. (And, by the way, has anybody heard the evangelical Christians complain about Las Vegas? They complain about a lot of things, but are themselves among the greatest believers in unearned riches -- given their preference for prayer over earnest effort in the service of solving life's problems.)

No, the American public, including the cheerleaders in the media, have only themselves to blame for the bitter harvest now underway in the asset and credit markets. And thus it would be salutary thing for Baby Jeezus, or the forces of nature, or whatever powers guide the universe, to now kick the shit out of them, so to speak, financially, because that is exactly what the American public is full of, from top to bottom, from George W. Bush at his lonely desk on Pennsylvania Avenue to the pitiful, bankrupt householders of Orange County and Boca Raton.

Now, as to the shock of Al's revelation that the Iraq war is about oil -- the media and the public has got this all wrong, too. The logic here seems to be that because the Iraq war is about oil it is therefore unnecessary, optional, a mistake, an indulgence, something we should not dirty our hands in.

In fact, the Iraq war is not about oil, per se, so much as it is about America's behavior here at home, about the choices we make for how we live on this continent. None of those who complain most loudly about our military presence in Iraq have advanced any proposals for reforming how we live here -- and hence for our enslavement to oil, much of the world's remaining supply of which happens to be in the neighborhood of Iraq.

When these complainers start complaining about the ubiquitous acceptance of suburban sprawl and abject car-dependency -- and this includes the environmental boy scouts out there who want to get merit badges for buying hybrid cars -- then they will deserve to be taken seriously. Until then, the American people have got exactly the grinding war that they deserve. Let them whine about it all the way to the Nascar tracks, and let them console themselves with giant plastic bottles of Pepsi Cola and buckets of chicken raised on corn grown with oil byproducts.

On CBS's "60-Minutes" show last night, Greenspan, in his new role as a private sector economic consultant made predictions for the coming months in the US economy. He declared that the financial sector would get over the current credit squeeze as if it were a mild case of indigestion brought on by one too many fried won-tons at the all-you-can-eat buffet, a mere burp, allowing the public to move on to the crab Rangoon and a helping of General Tsao's chicken. This gets back to the previous point about the Iraq war and oil in particular. Al doesn't get it. CBS's sycophant reporters don't get it. Nobody gets it.

We are entering the zone of the long emergency in which the primary resource needed to run the industrial economies will become scarce, expensive, and profoundly destabilizing to markets and to normal life, such as it is known in this country. And the current problem in the markets is a reflection of the resource bankruptcy we are facing. Our problems are not about credit, they are about permanent insolvency.

In his old age, Alan Greenspan's face -- once darkly handsome in his youthful years as a jazz musician -- has taken on the strange appearance of a circus clown. Something about the way his lips have settled into a kind of thick fatuous smile, even when he is apparently not amused by anything. Is it one of God's clever little tricks to leave him looking like a clown in his valedictory years, or has his face just resolved into the perfect embodiment of leadership for a clown nation?

The Politics of God

By MARK LILLA
Published: August 19, 2007
I. “The Will of God Will Prevail”

The twilight of the idols has been postponed. For more than two centuries, from the American and French Revolutions to the collapse of Soviet Communism, world politics revolved around eminently political problems. War and revolution, class and social justice, race and national identity — these were the questions that divided us.

Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.

An example: In May of last year, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran sent an open letter to President George W. Bush that was translated and published in newspapers around the world. Its theme was contemporary politics and its language that of divine revelation. After rehearsing a litany of grievances against American foreign policies, real and imagined, Ahmadinejad wrote,

“If Prophet Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ishmael, Joseph or Jesus Christ (peace be upon him) were with us today, how would they have judged such behavior?” This was not a rhetorical question. “I have been told that Your Excellency follows the teachings of Jesus (peace be upon him) and believes in the divine promise of the rule of the righteous on Earth,” Ahmadinejad continued, reminding his fellow believer that “according to divine verses, we have all been called upon to worship one God and follow the teachings of divine Prophets.”

There follows a kind of altar call, in which the American president is invited to bring his actions into line with these verses. And then comes a threatening prophecy:

“Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today, these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems. . . . Whether we like it or not, the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty and justice and the will of God will prevail over all things.”

This is the language of political theology, and for millennia it was the only tongue human beings had for expressing their thoughts about political life. It is primordial, but also contemporary: countless millions still pursue the age-old quest to bring the whole of human life under God’s authority, and they have their reasons. To understand them we need only interpret the language of political theology — yet that is what we find hardest to do. Reading a letter like Ahmadinejad’s, we fall mute, like explorers coming upon an ancient inscription written in hieroglyphics.

The problem is ours, not his. A little more than two centuries ago we began to believe that the West was on a one-way track toward modern secular democracy and that other societies, once placed on that track, would inevitably follow. Though this has not happened, we still maintain our implicit faith in a modernizing process and blame delays on extenuating circumstances like poverty or colonialism. This assumption shapes the way we see political theology, especially in its Islamic form — as an atavism requiring psychological or sociological analysis but not serious intellectual engagement. Islamists, even if they are learned professionals, appear to us primarily as frustrated, irrational representatives of frustrated, irrational societies, nothing more.

We live, so to speak, on the other shore. When we observe those on the opposite bank, we are puzzled, since we have only a distant memory of what it was like to think as they do. We all face the same questions of political existence, yet their way of answering them has become alien to us. On one shore, political institutions are conceived in terms of divine authority and spiritual redemption; on the other they are not. And that, as Robert Frost might have put it, makes all the difference.

For the complete article click on the title.

Mark Lilla is professor of the humanities at Columbia University. This essay is adapted from his book “The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West,” which will be published next month.

Thomas Struth

Can only God make life?

Artificial life likely in 3 to 10 years
By SETH BORENSTEIN,
AP Science Writer
Mon Aug 20, 1:49 AM ET

WASHINGTON - Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they're getting closer.

Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of "wet artificial life."

"It's going to be a big deal and everybody's going to know about it," said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. "We're talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways — in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict."

That first cell of synthetic life — made from the basic chemicals in DNA — may not seem like much to non-scientists. For one thing, you'll have to look in a microscope to see it.

"Creating protocells has the potential to shed new light on our place in the universe," Bedau said. "This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe and our role."

And several scientists believe man-made life forms will one day offer the potential for solving a variety of problems, from fighting diseases to locking up greenhouse gases to eating toxic waste.

Bedau figures there are three major hurdles to creating synthetic life:

• A container, or membrane, for the cell to keep bad molecules out, allow good ones, and the ability to multiply.

• A genetic system that controls the functions of the cell, enabling it to reproduce and mutate in response to environmental changes.

• A metabolism that extracts raw materials from the environment as food and then changes it into energy.

One of the leaders in the field, Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School, predicts that within the next six months, scientists will report evidence that the first step — creating a cell membrane — is "not a big problem." Scientists are using fatty acids in that effort.

Szostak is also optimistic about the next step — getting nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA, to form a working genetic system.

His idea is that once the container is made, if scientists add nucleotides in the right proportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over.

"We aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened," Szostak said.

In Gainesville, Fla., Steve Benner, a biological chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution is attacking that problem by going outside of natural genetics. Normal DNA consists of four bases — adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine (known as A,C,G,T) — molecules that spell out the genetic code in pairs. Benner is trying to add eight new bases to the genetic alphabet.

Bedau said there are legitimate worries about creating life that could "run amok," but there are ways of addressing it, and it will be a very long time before that is a problem.

"When these things are created, they're going to be so weak, it'll be a huge achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in the lab," he said. "But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen."

To rue in time

Can we really say that oil at $70 and more is a benign situation? We're also seeing a consistent situation where supply and capacity is being outstripped by demand (whatever the price?).




I defer to Jim Kunstler:

"Every structural element in our financial sector is a jackstraw groaning under a load of false expectation. The hedge funds are only the most elaborate pieces, with their intertwined webs of exponentially unreckoned risk. The equity markets are a three-ringed circus of 'greater fools.' "

Meanwhile in South Africa where I live the stock market has steamed up to just under 30 000, and there's rumors of 'sell in May and go away' happening in early July.
My thinking is simply this: if all economic is underpinned by energy (as breathing oxygen is the given for us walking around everyday), and that energy becomes more expensive, when do the marklets reflect that? My thinking is later, rather than sooner, and too late, rather than just in time.



And what if Israel is irrelevant to the Rest Of The World in the same way that say, Poland or Micronesia is. But based on our self-reinforcing beliefs we allow these conflicts to instead spread to the Rest Of The World.

Christ's Ventriloquist

From medipredict.com

The first-ever legal/forensic exegesis of Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and an associated legal/forensic analysis of the four canonical Gospels, finds that Christianity started in or around the year 49 CE in Antioch (present-day Antakya, Turkey) as a direct consequence of a personal conflict which had arisen, over 17 years, between Paul and the leader of this (at that time) Jewish sect, which Jesus had begun.

The sect’s leader was not Peter, as the Christian myth asserts, but was instead Jesus’s brother James. Peter was and remained a follower of James, and he died (as did the rest of the sect) as a member of this Jewish sect, not as a Christian — not as a member of the group which Paul started on this occasion. Jesus’s sect soon itself expired. What is today known as Christianity started with Paul, and was then developed by his followers, who wrote the canonical Gospels and the rest of the New Testament. The religion of the New Testament has nothing to do with the person of the historical Jesus: The NT was written and assembled to fulfill Paul’s Roman agenda, not Jesus’s Jewish one. This is shown to explain the entire myth.

Paul turned Jesus's corpse into his dummy, and thus became the voice of "Christ."

This ought to be a particularly distasteful, even disturbing image for a few reasons:

1) It shows caricatures basically holding up (and I use those words in the metaphorical sense as well) their buddy (in Minnie's case, someone closer) up to the light, for others to observe. It's a despicable thing that has been done, it is basically the celebration, the focussed observation of the victimising of one of your own in the name of some or other Pretext, and that Pretext is to serve the agenda of whoever is holding it up. But this is not something to be idolised or rendered as holy, but flocks of foolish sheep insist on doing so in every generation.

2). The use of (innocent) children's characters to depict death and suffering (whether by crucifixion or death-by-mousetrap) is extremely vulgar.

3). Worst of all is the image of Mickey who looks like he really wanted to be there, like it was part of someone's Divine Plan. Perhaps Post Hoc, with some clever editing and polishing.