Chaos Anarchy Terrorism in the Gender Changing Roles of an emerging New Global Culture? – Diarmaid MacColloch

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Polite Conversation - Noah's Ark - Funda/Mental/ism - Darwin - Evolution - Evolutionary Throw Backs

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Spreadsheetization of The Bible in the Global Culture to Support the Corporate Political Base

Spreadsheet Plus Bible Equals Numbers and or Creationism

Spreadsheeting the Bible Leads to Creationism and other political superstitious delusions.

People generally roll their eyes when I try to extrapolate how I see the whole new Global Culture thing as of and by the Corporate Spreadsheet.

They ignore me when I say that the Corporate Global Spreadsheet has reduced everything and everybody on this planet to commodity status and commodity value. 

That in many instances humanity has little or no cash value in the quest for obscene corporate profits and greed. 

That I assign a label as the Wharton Global Spreadsheet to the contamination and or destruction of our local culture(s) at the expense of this new corporate global money hegemony thing.

That as such, many people think they can ignore the present economics of humanity and still separately and equally apply old fashioned cultural or religious standards to things.

As such, I see on the right the usurpation of religion by politics to win elections and to take human rights and living wages away from humanity.

That the growth of ignorance in religion in my lifetime has I think grown exponentially and with no doubt help from the global corporate hegemony, directly or indirectly.  

That I truly believe that the current growth of fundamentalism and creationism and turning the black on white words of the bible into a commodity to be used for political and economic reasons rather than spiritual growth is due to the Spreadsheet-ization of the Bible into statistics and delusional facts to support the political base. 



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Fairytale Christianity vs. Fairytale Atheism

Fundamentalism is a mental disease at present trying to exterminate imagination and creativity out of the collective mind of the human race.

One thought, one truth, frozen, stagnating in time, is one book or many is all that can ever illuminate the world. My book, my knowledge is all that is needed to hold time and the universe back from any further investigation or thought.

Two old fools seem to represent the quagmire of the new Fairytale spectrum of belief systems on this third rock from the sun.

Fairytale Christian Fundamentalist Harold Camping with his billion dollar god business, after a lifetime of reading the funny book can’t even determine a train schedule from Heaven for his Roman pagan god Jesus. Are you stupid or something dude? Typical greedy carnie media preacher!

Jesus of Nazareth in Matthew, Mark and Luke is totally different from the Roman god Jesus in Revelation, a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy type text.  Was John of Patmos a wizard and or science fiction writer (snort, snort)?

Fairytale Atheist Cosmologist Stephen Hawking, after a lifetime of study of the infiniteness of the cosmos, is determined to state that there is nothing passed this life.

Both are fools. Both are fucktards. Both should be banned from decent company or social intercourse by the media.

Both are addicted to what is written in books by other people or those they have authored themselves.

Facts are only facts if they are written down by religious lunatics or by the new age wizards and or alchemists known as scientists. Both have absolutely no imagination. Both make idols out of one book or many books.

Both are morons IMHO.

So, if you are fundamentalist the world must end yesterday. God’s big six day experiment has to be erased. The experiment was a failure. Time to abort the experiment. Abortion is this one instance is a virtue instead of a vice?

So, if you are the smartest man in the world, the cosmos just happened by accident and the one ten billionth of a fraction of possible knowledge of the universe in books is all that science at this present time can fathom. But it is enough to say that there are no other possibilities or that time, space and or a creator have any other plans than those formulated by one Oxford Cambridge man.

Bullshit! Stephen Hawking you asshole!

The old high priests, the religionists are no different from the new wizards of the age, the scientists.

Jesus rides dinosaurs and Heaven has been foreclosed on (written off by a slide rule) .

Live with it!

The middle ages have officially returned.

Ignorance, on both sides of the human spectrum, rules the world!

Enjoy.

Word Worship, Kevin Shrum, Rob Bell

I just read an article against Rob Bell by a Pastor Kevin Shrum regarding Bell's upcoming book - Love Wins: Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. I have a few things to say and comment on.

Universalism: For Whom the Bell Tolls? – It Tolls for Thee

I think Shrum unfairly mislabels Pastor Bell as a Universalist and then tries to morph him into this supposed Universalist monster as the basis for his argument to shun him and his ideas. This, as well as to cut off all dialogue and understanding, to build a wall against his sharing with us all the message of Jesus and God's love towards creation.

Worship of a book can be idolatry. Indeed from a distance my perception of Islam is that it worships the words of the Koran. It is to me an idol. I have met few Muslims and have never gotten into a discussion with them about their religion. So in a way if I assume their worship of the words of Mohammed alledged to be the words of God/Allah is idolatry, that is a really big assumption on my part?

I read parts of the Koran and couldn't make heads or tails of it. After I gave the book away, I found out that it was supposed to be read out loud. I also have recently read that the King James Version of the bible was also written with the intent that it be read aloud. That modern translations of the bible block richness of language as well as meaning and connotations of verbal and oral history. If the literature that is the bible is now meant only to be read and not spoken, it is a great cultural loss to us all I fear.

Indeed the Reformation was formed out of the magic creativity of the human mind but more importantly out of machinery, the printing press. The signifigance of that invention and blood spilled in those days about over who understood the words of the bible better than your own translation or perception of such, the energy of anger, of that blood spilling and fire burning enthusiam still exists in the fundamamentalist quarters of Christiandom to this day IMHO.

In my youth and before the ultimate failure of Vatican II, my personal life was peppered with the left over resentment and hatred of that printing press revolution and the wars over words, that centuries old religion power struggle. Yes, words can kill and generations later the collateral damage of mere words, or the worship of such, can still be felt in some quarters.

In my search for spirituality and tainted by the Roman paganism of my youth and that name brand of Christianity, I have found many things and many words and many thoughts that suggest to me that the Jewish holy man Jesus is believable in some of his alledged teachings. I say alledged because scholars over at the Jesus Seminar have among other groups analysed the imperfections of the man made document called the NT – New Testament. Science, linguistics, historic research can shed new light on what I think some think is a perfect object worthy of worship – an idol so to speak - aka the bible.

Anyway, I ran into this article condemning a fellow Christian Rob Bell to some sort of shunned place though in fact I think some wish him a place in hell. My dear fellow Christians, hell is upon this earth and the fundamentalist business of saving souls by cracking men over their heads for not conforming to an imperfect book is like so medieval and archaic. The truth will make you free. Seek and you shall find etc.

I only just became aware of this Rob Bell fellow through the blogosphere and his unique approach to reaching out to humanity beyond his immediate circle at Mars Hill. I found Rob's You Tube on Resurrection and I loved the energy. For the first time in years I could connect with the concepts of the NT and that guy Jesus, and fully imagine that anything he said or did was, or could be, relevant in this modern age.

These rants in the fundamentalist blogosphere about Rob Bell are spilling over to people like me. I want to buy his book now. Free publicity like that some people have to pay for.

I did some research and came to the conclusion that Bell has a brilliant gift to take the rawness of Christianity and commmunicate it to others. His style is modern which is why I think some are jealous of him. He is no rock star but his style is definitely M-TV.

As far as I know Pastor Rob Bell is still a literalist fundamentalist Christian. While some of it works for me in some of his video ministry, it is still just at some level a hook to bring people into his mega-temple. Business is business. Consumers have to be made to want to consume. Etc. Competition is tough these days.

While most atheists are purported to be anti-God, they are in fact in my opinion just anti-religion and based on past and bad experiences of such. The Christian faith is fighting for market share in a dwindling or dying market. I think Pastor Bell is reaching out to some lost sheep. Pastor Shrum seems to be cutting off his own nose to try and smite Rob Bell's success. Pastor Shrum is, to paraphase the famous Ronald Reagan adage, breaking the eleventh commandment of Christian fundamentalism and speaking ill of a fellow fundamamentalist. Naughty. Naughty. He should know better.

Getting back to Pastor Bell:

Don’t you realize that the beach of universalism on which you’re stepping has been tried before and that, just as before, a tidal-wave of biblical truth and historical/theological consensus will sweep you away? You will become a footnote in the history of the church as just another well-intentioned ‘theologian’ who tried to spit into God’s powerful whirlwind of truth. Rob, I’ve never met you, but please, get off the beach before your stellar career is swept away.”

I have read of many so-called heretical beliefs in the past of Christianity. They have been killed off, murdered off literally, and swept into the dust of history. But seemingly they, the logic of these questioning beliefs, from reading the bible, they keep resurrecting themselves. Shrum starts his critique of Rob Bell accusing him of Universalism, which I don't honestly completely understand, as if that is enough to throw the first rock so to speak at a dissenter, a “heretic”, amidst their own fundamentalist ranks.

I have watched the hypocrisy of religion parasiting itself onto our government in my lifetime with its limited world views and cash grabs for “charity”. I have also seen the decline of morality in this nation and in particular the government at a rate to equal the march backward in time toward a Christian theocracy which I think is what fundamentalists want.

Looking at the fundamentalism of the Iranians and the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan, I fear a rule by people who worship words in books and claim to be the same as God almighty which is blasphemy in my point of view.

Did “family values” make honest men of Wall Street bankers? I don't think so. Quite the opposite I think. There is something wrong with any fundamentalism . It lacks heart and soul too. It is do as I say and not as I do little sheeple.

Well anyway the thing in this article against Rob Bell that inspired me to write this is below:

But, Rob, I have more questions. If universalism is true, I’m going for the best of what both worlds have to offer – eat, drink, and be merry in this life for tomorrow I will die, and when I do die I get heaven no matter what happened this side of eternity. And what’s my reward? I get away with it! Fantastic! Again, please don’t tell me that I should still follow Jesus in this life because it will make my life better. Are you kidding! I’m a ‘stinkin’ sinner’ who is already uninterested in and struggling with changing my ways, so if I don’t have to and I can still get heaven and if thumbing my self-important finger in God’s face has no eternal consequences, this is awesome and I for one am all about it...

I am reminded of Jesus' parable about the workers in the vineyard and the same wages paid to those who toil all day or for just one hour. When confronted by dissatisfaction from the day long workers, the owner of the vineyard invokes the golden rule of buisness – he who has the gold makes the rules.

Where do these self-hating, word worshipping fundamentalists get off telling people what God can dole out in terms of salvation? Who are they to say that they are the only 100% kosher Christians on the block?

“God rules the world!” Not you. God saves whomever he wants to. No matter what your so-called rule book says.

Bell in an interview denies being so-called Emergent. What I have learned from e-mails and internet articles about the Emergent church movement, is that it is in theory trying to get above the heavy gravity of the poorly translated inspired word of God. That if a congregation is to remain a vital part of any community in this secular godless global world, it needs to reach beyond those poorly man translated words to the heart of matter, to the heart of Jesus and his message of universal love of creator to its creation – all of his, her creation, not just a chosen few in the bible belt.

Let me be prophetic here too Kevin. Christianity must change or die. The global reality is indeed secular and godless and it is a drug that destroys humanity and men's souls. That if you cannot get to the heart of Jesus' message of love, understand and plant its seeds, then all is truly lost in this world and the next.

The Present Burnout of Christianity

The present burnout in Christianity is the result of many factors.

One, the fundamentalists, the literalists have been waiting in high gear for the end of the world for forty years now and two thousand years before that. I can remember before cable TV there was a Saturday night gospel show on a UHF channel called “The King is Coming”. Of course to a raised Catholic, somebody reading the book of revelation, it was an education of sorts. It must have made money because it has had a lot of imitators since.

The fundamentalists are a breed of people in the rural areas and on the sidelines of modern society in the big cities. With television you can transport their isolationist bubble into the minds of people in the cities. This whole hate of success and love of the end of the world scenario is something best left to psychologists. But after forty years, fatigue has set in because the last book of the bible is so vague. God and Jesus are just not cooperating in the end of the world obsession for the losers and the world haters of fundamentalism.

World hating and deferring on important life decisions like climate change are an institutionalized arm of fundamentalism not really found in any bible but don’t try and tell that to any fundamentalist.

So too fatigue for the RCs with their promises of change in Vatican II stalled for four decades over their command to have their morals as part of law of the land in the abortion issue. The abortion issue started when birth control, born of science and a need for it in a crowded polluted age, got stuck in neutral amidst gritty local politics.

While the RC faithful have been waiting for the lifting of celibacy and a golden age in faith, the fat corrupt bishops just keep selling off property one lawsuit at a time. The hierarchy of the RC church worships the golden idol of their own hierarchy and will do so until the last piece of property has been sold.

The mainstream Prots have cash and old buildings but if you look at the British or European version of entitled religious and official and semi-official government status, the Prots have not gone very far on their own since Martin Luther. The RCs may have come up with their own hundreds of pages of boilerplate belief in the Council of Trent, the Prots have their own version of boilerplate faith as well.

The main reason for so many years of study in any seminary is memorization and the PC way to talk about the bible and or God and or Jesus. God and Jesus are merely stage props in the talk the talk and the walk the walk of mainstream religion.

Sad to say, there would appear to be no unified Christian message to the world two thousand years after Jesus.

The smug science and industry successful west has atrophied over the ages. Islam, while not a superior belief system has the energy at the moment. The energy is born of hate and conflict of it bumping up against the godless capitalist west as exemplified in the metaphoric movie Avatar. Which leads to a brief reaction to that movie as a coded message of redemption for the whole human race in this decayed age of materialism and blind adherence to the centuries old boilerplate beliefs of both Christendom and Islam.

If you are half way religious you see a religious theme in Avatar. If you are from the second or third world you see a brutally unfair military that wants to destroy everything not American. Nature is the enemy because it is not certified as an acceptable PC religious experience. If you are a godless capitalist, greed is the important factor. Avatar plays on many levels.

Boilerplate religionists want to waste time on words. It has to quack like a duck and be labeled like a duck before it is a duck. No wonder the old religion is dying if you need a patent from the government before you can begin to have any heart felt communication with the divine through nature or even through yourself.

Which brings me to the future of any religious beliefs. We have come to a strange fork in the road. In the age of the Internet, individual reaction to the split second interface with knowledge, images, political and social concepts flash around the planet faster and more often than heartbeats.

Control of the Internet is coming in it being taxed, fees added, and censored. In the meanwhile new ideas as revolutionary as the 95 Theses or the science of a printing press as it was in it’s day five hundred years ago are occurring all around us in virtual time and presence – even if we are not aware of these milli-second, millimeter paradigm changes into our new global culture.

Global interface consensus is the future eyes, ears, and perception of a future human race. That race has piggybacked over many cultures and many belief systems to this point in time. It would all seem to be part of a creative force in the universe and in compliance with a concept of evolution as a positive force of the Creator.

How the world sees itself and functions for the next five hundred years, the outline of thoughts and protocols are being formed in these early years of the 21st century of a global common era.

Look forward. Be positive. Be creative. Act with love for one’s local and global neighbor. Think. Be wise. Be fruitful.

Let social justice rule and multiply.

Pax – Mundo - Humanitas ! (Peace – Global – Humanity)

Is Intelligent Design Bullshit ?

If you can define the parameters of any argument, you have the advantage to winning the argument.

I remember when the Jerry Falwell Public Relations oily communication thing was all cranked up under the emperor god Reagan. Cranking out the evil of “secular humanism”.

I at the time heard the phrase and was too busy living my life to try and understand this new modern phrase for satanism or the like. Few if any were challenging the new word factory being pumped out of Fundamentism Central or to admit my ignorance, I was not aware of anybody fighting this abuse of language in the name of the Jebus cash cow.

In retrospect, it is two words. It is secular, a neutral thing. And it is about humanism, a good thing. How can two fine words be put together and be so misused.

How about Intelligent Design as an example?

I recently heard the term Intelligent Design.

From Wiktionary – Intelligent Design :

A conjecture claiming that biological life on Earth, or more broadly, the universe as a whole, was created by an unspecified intelligent agent rather than being the result of undirected natural processes.

Intelligent Design grates on my ear. If Joe the Pope likes it, I know there must be something anti-free choice and pro-mind control about it.

Pope prepares to embrace theory of intelligent design

There have been growing signs the Pope is considering aligning his church more closely with the theory of "intelligent design" taught in some US states. Advocates of the theory argue that some features of the universe and nature are so complex that they must have been designed by a higher intelligence. Critics say it is a disguise for creationism…

The Pope also raised the issue in the inaugural sermon of his pontificate, saying: "We are not the accidental product, without meaning, of evolution."

Intelligent design seems like half-assed science to me. It is two parts “H” without the “O”. It is Hydrogen without Oxygen. It is not the answer. It is not water – the basis of all carbon life forms as we think we understand them. It is an assumption. If you assume, you are likely to makes an “ass” of “U” and “me”.

We may not be an accident in the Universe. But who is to say how much randomness was programmed into the original design? Who is to say that that “design” was not the result of whole eons of universes coming and going from big bang to ultimate implosion over and over again? Maybe randomness is the ultimate program – and not the desired dead end stop – of us – as we would like it or temporarily Re-design it to be?

Maybe this dead end result of how great we are as a species is stalled – an idol of we who cannot manage the natural resources of this planet bestowed on us by “Nature”.

We stand on this sick and or dying planet proclaiming ourselves to be the greatest designed species in the history of the universe.

We, as a limited species, are more than likely little more than a Ford model Edsel, 1958-1960. – Just waiting for another species to absorb or destroy us before we get the chance to destroy ourselves looking blindly into the mirror of life and only seeing “man” and or the man made design of the latest great version of a personal god. Me. Me. Me. Me. I!

It is a continuation of the concept of the personal gods designed in separate ages by Abraham, Moses and Mohammed. The energy that each comes up with to make an intellectual choice and say this is what it is all about may be fine and good. But what did Abraham, Moses and or Mohammed really believe?

If the bible and other writings are any indication of anything, over time the three gods of three prophets merge into one god. We somehow along with cultural conformity must conform to this ancient hodge podge of thought by once living intelligent beings each in their own historic setting. They and their resulting hodge podge of things are valid? And we are not?

I have to agree with the argument in Urban Dictionary that this shit should be taught in schools along with creationism and Darwinism. I look forward to apocryphal stories of Jebus accidently killing his pet dinosaur “Spike” and resuscitating it too etc.

In a way, all of us, individually and collectively and even the disorganized religion types needs a better and or new definition of God. All the old definitions of God, I think, are obsolete.

Though you might not think it, I am searching for that other new definition of God.

I would not think of imposing my definition on others, should I find it, for the sake of an alpha-male “I am RIGHT and you are wrong!” kind of thing.

I respect those people with the gumption to say “I don’t honestly know”.

This grasping for a cliché – sound bite - assumption called Intelligent Design sounds more like imitation science than true faith.

We must I think, agree with Voltaire’s character of Candide, and “cultivate our own gardens” because this is not “the best of all possible worlds”.

Good luck to us all, the human race, in Copenhagen.

OMG Are you a Wal-Mart Christian?

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OMG Are you a Christian? What kind of a Christian? How about a Wal-Mart Christian?

I mentioned earlier in one of my articles about how Christianity is assembling in a number of abandoned department store buildings in malls or in obsolete sports stadiums. Something about bigness in the American way of thinking that spells success. I don’t know how fundamentalism is spread around in other countries but I cannot but feel that the secular nature of American culture presently dictates some of its spiritual culture.

Looking at a TV evangelist in an auditorium of 15,000 souls, I am struck by the fact that Jesus in his entire lifetime probably did not preach to 15,000 souls. That Size and Success are the basic factors in the new Evangelism. Not enough to be a big church but we must build a medical center or a university in the name of our success. I mean in the name of Jesus and God. Whatever.

I listen to the telly and wait to hear the preacher’s words of wisdom since he has an audience the size of Jesus and his first century marketing capacity. I listen and all I hear is Pop Psychology. I don’t think psychology comes out of the spiritual side of any equation as much as it comes out of the secular side.

You are successful because you are successful and God would not dare to keep you from more success. Come again? Where are the thee-s and the thou-s and the Jesus part and the soul and the reward in heaven thingy?

Like I said, what passes for spirituality these days is a Sunday morning at Big-Mart, a cathedral of materialism and commerce. The old church buildings of the nineteenth century are being converting into condos and fitness spas and mini grocery marts. In the comfort of seclusion and the bubble of my home and armed with a channel changer as my only defense against evil, I listen and must turn off the preacher in wolf’s clothing.

Jesus’ message is simple and understandable and not something automatically discounted hour per hour. The secular nature of America is closer to the myth of Satan these days with it’s greed, envy, covet ness, and empty material non-spiritual success.

I sound a bit pompous but forgive me. I grew up in another age and have my own set feelings about God and spirituality. New is not better. Repackaged is not better. Big is definitely not necessarily a better thing.

Where ever two or more are gathered in my name, there I am also.
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