June 9, 2012

Genesis - I Know What I Like. w/Peter Gabriel. Bliss.

June 6, 2012

Those elected officials in DC - they are not our government

Sure, they do a nice dog-and-pony show where they act like what they do matters, and act like they are making changes. But that's all illusion. A mere side-show for distraction. Our real government is not in DC, nor is it in any one city in the world. It lies in the boardrooms of corporations. Our real "masters" - the corporations. They own us. Even if you don't work for them, they still own you.

They can kill thousands and just say "oopsie" (think Union Carbide.) They can pollute the gulf, kill the fishing industry as well as all marine life, and just say "my bad - won't happen again! Promise!"

They own the media, the fictitious government, the police, the regulators, the courts - everything right down to the chair you're sitting in right now. Even if you aren't at the office.

They own YOU - most of us are in serious debt to them vis a vis school loans, auto loans, home loans, etc. Even if you are 100% debt free, chances are the city you live in, the school district you send your kids to, the fire department that guards your valuables - ALL OF THEM are in debt to the corporate world in a very real sense.

Just because things come with different brand names doesn't mean that the corporate isn't one huge monoliths, with the same people sitting on the boards of directors, the CEOs, etc.

You think you're free?

Think again.

Just like "Angkha" during the horrific days of the Khmer Rouge - where "angkha" was why you only got a pinch of rice a day, why your neighbor was clubbed to death, why your children were removed from you. It was all to serve Anghka.

We're in a similar situation. Sure, they don't beat your neighbor to death in front of you - but try and speak out - and you'll soon find yourself sharing a cell with Bradley Manning or "accidentally" killed with a tear gas canister being shot right into your face.

May 25, 2012

Are leaders inherently psychopathic?

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president. --Kurt Vonnegut Jr

I've been thinking about the difference between managers and leaders. Managers manage, that is, they tell worker x to do activity y, and so on. This is not leadership but the ability to manage efficiencies.

However, the "leader" in human societies is an altogether different beast.

Half a league, half a league,
  Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
  Rode the six hundred.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns' he said:
Into the valley of Death
  Rode the six hundred.
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The leader does not want to increase effiency, nor does a leader want to do the task at hand. The leader simply wants to lead, damned be the consequences.

This pops up all too often in society - and every self described "leader" I have met has been a complete psychopath.

"Leadership abilities" are constantly touted in Christian Circles, especially Evangelical ones. They want you, if you are to be a leader, to develop the ability to change minds with a command, force behavior with a thought and, in essence, be the top of a hive mind.

The Evangelical Leader is a good example. They are adept at the babble that makes up Evangelical Lexicon, and they use it to command the parishioners and scorn them when they disobey.

I have never met an Evangelical Leader who isn't in love with their own authority.

And I have never met an Evangelical Leader who wasn't themselves, a hypocritical mass of contradictions.

So I say "Eschew Leaders!" To me, this is the greatest accomplishment of the Occupy Protests. No leaders. Not even when celebrities came by to express their support, did the occupiers ask for them to lead.

May 1, 2012

Christians: If you don't do something about your psychopathic preachers, we will

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/01/north-carolina-pastor-sea_n_1468618.html#s830817&title=Stacey_Campfield_Virtually

From the beautiful mind of Reverend Samuel Harris:

"So your little son starts to act a little girlish when he is four years old and instead of squashing that like a cockroach and saying, 'Man up, son, get that dress off you and get outside and dig a ditch, because that is what boys do,' you get out the camera and you start taking pictures of Johnny acting like a female and then you upload it to YouTube and everybody laughs about it and the next thing you know, this dude, this kid is acting out childhood fantasies that should have been squashed.

Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch. Ok? You are not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male. And when your daughter starts acting too butch, you reign her in. And you say, 'Oh, no, sweetheart. You can play sports. Play them to the glory of God. But sometimes you are going to act like a girl and walk like a girl and talk like a girl and smell like a girl and that means you are going to be beautiful. You are going to be attractive. You are going to dress yourself up.'"

Seriously, if you wonder why Atheism is flourishing, and belief is dropping - even in the United States of Stupid - this is why.

Seriously, what he is doing is encouraging hate crimes.

Punch your son in the gut?

May 1, 2012

League of Militant Atheists - A Favorite Strawman of Many

In many arguments here, theists cite the League of Militant Atheists as proof that it the Soviet Union was a revolution FOR Atheism.

Let's do a little reading now:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Militant_Atheists

The League of Militant Atheists (also Union of Belligerent Atheists (Russian: Союз воинствующих безбожников ; Society of the Godless (Общество безбожников ; Union of the Godless (Союз безбожников ), was an antireligious organization of workers and others that developed in Soviet Russia under the influence of the ideological and cultural views and policies of the Communist Party in 1925–1947. It "consisted of Party members, members of the Komsomol youth movement, workers and army veterans".

The League embraced workers, peasants, students, and intelligentsia. It had its first affiliates at factories, plants, collective farms (kolkhoz), and educational institutions. By the beginning of 1941, it had about 3.5 million members of 100 nationalities. It had about 96,000 offices across the country. Guided by Bolshevik principles of antireligious propaganda and party's orders with regards to religion, the League aimed at exterminating religion in all its manifestations and forming an anti-religious scientific mindset among the workers. It propagated atheism and scientific achievements, conducted 'individual work' (a method of sending atheist tutors to meet with individual believers to convince them of atheism, which could be followed up with public harassment if they failed to comply) with religious people, prepared propagandists and atheistic campaigners, published anti-religious scientific literature and periodicals, organized museums and exhibitions, conducted scientific research in the field of atheism and critics of religion. The League's slogan was "Struggle against religion is a struggle for socialism", which was meant to tie in their atheist views with economy, politics, and culture. One of the slogans adopted at the 2nd congress was "Struggle against religion is a struggle for the five year plan!" The League had international connections; it was part of the International of Proletarian Freethinkers and later of the Worldwide Freethinkers Union.

Whew!

OK - so the group was not some paramilitary organization as some here have claimed.

As per 'persecution of Christians,' their persecution amounts to:

- Going to churches and obnoxiously debating with believers

- Working (albeit unsucessfully) to purge the USSR of all belief in God

- Trying to convert Theists to Atheists in the military, at the workplace, in schools, etc.


Now under Stalin there was real persecution of the religious, but under Stalin EVERYONE was persecuted, from high ranking party members, to ditch diggers, to people wearing glasses. If you did not like somebody on your block, you placed an anonymous tip to the NKVD and nobody every saw them again.

The one time they did try to remove religion from the USSR, Operation North - where they forcibly moved Jehovas Witnesses and practitioners of non-Orthodox religions to Siberia. Were they sent to labor camps? Were they stripped of their possessions? No and no.

The idea was to just get them out of their hair. Similar to the British Exile of the Anabaptists to the 13 colonies, except it was, well, fucking Siberia.
'
So all the lies Christians state about being killed for believing in God - all of it made up.

In Stalinist times you were killed for not being Stalin or Beria.

Let me follow up with what eventually became of the League of Militant Atheists:

The climate of the campaign against religion was changing in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The regime slowly became more moderate in its approach to religion. Yaroslavsky, in 1941 warned against condemning all religious believers, but said that there were many loyal Soviet citizens still possessing religious beliefs. He called for patient and tactful individual work without offending the believers, but "re-educating" them. He claimed that religion had disappeared in some parts of the country but in other parts (especially in the newly annexed territories) it was strong, and he warned against starting brutal offensives in those areas.

He alleged that there were very few attempts to re-open churches and that this was a sign of the decline in religion. He branded those who tried to re-open churches as "former kulaks" and "falsifiers of figures". This report was contradicted, however, by the LMG's own figures (based on the 1937 census) that found perhaps half the country still held religious beliefs, even if they had no structures to worship in any longer and they could no longer openly express their beliefs.[30]

An answer to this report was found when Nazi Germany invaded in 1941, and churches were re-opened under the German occupation, while believers flocked to them in the millions. In order to gain support for the war effort (both domestic and foreign; the allies would not support Stalin if he continued the campaign ) against the German forces that were effectively "liberating" religious believers from the persecution against them, Stalin ended the antireligious persecution and the LMG was disbanded. All LMG periodicals ceased to publish by September 1941. Its official disbandment date is unknown, but traced somewhere between 1941–1947.

Yaroslavsky turned his attention to other pursuits and in 1942, he published an article on Orthodox writer Dostoevsky, for his alleged hatred of the Germans.

So much for persecution of Christians, huh?

If only Atheists had it this good in the dark ages....you know, when the CHURCH ran things...

April 30, 2012

I have so much - yet I act as if it is nothing

I have so much to tell
To see
To celebrate

To be and to hold

All of it

Yet I push it away
As if I don't get it
Gone

To be and to lose

All of it

April 30, 2012

Bridge Over Troubled Water

April 27, 2012

Niccolo Machiavelli and Charles Darwin got a bad rap...

Both "Machiavellian" and "Social Darwinist" are terms for people who are far from that of Machiavelli and Darwin.

Let me tell you a story about a King who killed his messengers upon hearing bad news...

--------------------------------------


Niccolo Machiavelli was a gifted, ethical, moral, intelligent and benevolent man.

He was dedicated to Florentine Republicanism, and was a big figure after they ousted the Medici.

After they took power again, they tortured him, and when released he wrote "The Prince."

He wasn't advocating this, he was just telling the world what power is all about.

And it was ugly.

Classic case of killing the messenger.

Move to Charles Darwin.

The man was dedicated to science. He started off his journey on the HMS Beagle a theist, a scholar and an unbiased observer. He was dedicated to the ethics of the Church of England, love of family and a love of his brother man.

During his journey, he witnessed, first hand, how cruel "nature" can be. The weakest are killed by their brothers and sisters. Only the fittest survive. It horrified him.

He wrote "The Origin of Species" with this in mind.

Yet, there is a classification - ironically, very popular among some Christians - called "Social Darwinism."

Darwin never advocated "survival of the fittest" as a social structure, he was merely telling it as it was, with no checks, no balances, nothing to intervene.

God, if he ever existed or could exist - did nothing.

This is what is most damning about Evolution for Christians.

Darwin tells us how it is, and once again, the "kill the messenger" process happens again.

April 25, 2012

Does there need to be an Atheist/Theist dialogue?

Seriously - I would say that this issue affects both camps. There are a great deal of Christians who feel it is their duty to "save" or "rebuke" Atheists. And at the same time there are a great deal of Atheists intent of "converting" theists.

Neither of these does any good, and if anything creates animosity and resentment on both sides.

Christians, I feel, need to understand that many of us Atheists feel betrayed by religion and faith, and feel as if the nature of religion puts us in crosshairs.

At the same time, Atheists need to understand that most Theists are like them - they have families, homes, are suffering in this economy and what not.

Your thoughts?

April 13, 2012

Thank a Hippie!