God Bless America But Not Ted Cruz

"Pastor" Rafael Cruz - 1986
"All I want are Tits and World Domination" Ted Cruz Video - 1986

God Bless America But Not Ted Cruz

I don’t know what “Evangelicals” means in Iowa. But they are believers in their imaginary friend in the sky. And if their children want to be Agnostic or Secular, their children will be ostracized and shunned. That sounds like Islam with secular laws in Muslim countries making it a crime or a death sentence to change religions or choose not to believe. That really sucks.

So in my point of view, the Muslims pray five times a day to their imaginary god thing. They sound quite stupid to me in my western civilization mindset. A lot like Iowa Evangelicals. They too sound stupid to me in my western civilized mindset. 

Getting back to Evangelicals in Iowa who are mindless fundamentalist Christians who believe every word in the very confusing contradictory passages of the Bible which is a combination of both the Hebrew and the Greek Testaments.

Ted Cruz, his political campaign has just declared "christian jihad" on the Trump Campaign in order to gain power and world domination, something Ted Cruz has been brainwashed all his life as something he wants as the goal of his miserable nasty pointless life.

And of course, Ted has been led by his grifter Gypsy father who claims to have started in Cuban as a person. But with a half century wall erected around Cuba, there is no way to check out the life story of the grifter “Pastor” father Rafael Cruz Senior etc. Ted’s real name is Rafael Cruz Junior btw.

The old man has been going around for years as pastor of a fictitious church in Carrollton Texas that is only a mail drop at some strip store mailing shop. Rafael Cruz is however a paid consultant of the right wing think tank Heritage Foundation who sees no conflict of mixing politics with religion just like those other barbarians and enemies of civilization, the Muslims.

If I was a full believer and merely Agnostic, I would call Pastor Cruz satanic and or of Satan in terms of the evil he preaches against races and immigrants and talks to religious groups all the time about using churches as data bases and delivery points of bodies to vote on and in elections, in clear violation of separation of church and state and non-profit tax laws.

Know your enemy without. Know your enemy within.

God bless America but not Ted Cruz. 

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Happy Cesar Chavez Birthday! - March 31, 2013

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

Happy Cesar Chavez Birthday!

I must say how refreshing it is for Google to display a birthday greeting on its opening web page site in the U.S.A.

Google and these displays of history and science on appointed days and with Google theme graphics is a breath of fresh air for America’s youth and others to regather and cherish a heritage of labor and its struggles that our school systems have try to purge out of our collective memory and national purpose.

And not the usual tired old religious Pagan thing with a faked empty tomb or a Bunny Rabbit representing the rebirth of the Earth in the wonderful God given season of Spring.

Hallelujah! (secular of course)

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Is Lack of Transparency Without Accountability a Moral Question Anymore?

Is Europe Too Corrupt to Save? Can Transparency cure the corruption endemic to the southern tier culture of Europe, a Catholic culture except for the Greeks?  Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Italy all good Catholic cultures with blind fascist obedience to a Leader or Dictator or a Pope being the historic cultural background.  This is not anti-Catholic where I am taking this but it is part of my background argument.

Can a lack of transparency be the reason why RC bishops protect pedophilia? The Pedo State (Penn State) child rape and child trafficking ring trial is under way in Pennsylvania just as the Monsignor Lynn Child Abuse trial has been sent to the jury, also in Pennsylvania.

I for one am not eager to hear any more adult male penis in child mouth or anus testimony in a secular case as opposed to a religious pedophile trial.  No doubt Bill Donohue at the “Catholic” League will regularly be reporting to us and mentioning to his drinking buddy Cardinal Dolan on the daily jury trial activities of secular Coach Sandusky at Penn State – actually no, Sandusky is a good Catholic adult male and has been recognized as such with awards from the likes of the Knights of Columbus etc. …. (Can’t go there? Librul eastern media? Right?) 

The nuns have shot back across the bough at the anti-female Vatican quest to sack the nuns' American real estate holdings through trumped up liberal, progressive humanist charges with a simple idea within their June one response to the boys in the Vatican:

“The board members raised concerns about both the content of the doctrinal assessment and the process by which it was prepared. Board members concluded that the assessment was based on unsubstantiated accusations and the result of a flawed process that lacked transparency.”

"Transparency".  That’s the word Carl Anderson as board member of the Vatican Bank IOR (Institute for Religious Works) kept tossing around the librul press when their token part time consultant Gotti Tedeschi, President of the Vatican Bank, got sacrificed as a scapegoat(?) in the recent scandal over there.  

No transparency – real transparency – and European banks don’t want to deal with the Vatican Bank without a trustworthy rating regarding money laundering and terrorism funding.

If Carl Anderson ran his Knights of Columbus Insurance business like the Vatican Bank….(Let’s not go there.)

And let’s not forget – Too Big to Fail in America?

I keep running into the “T” word – TRANPARENCY – all over the web.  And the TRANPARENCY word seems not to have a SYNONYM like MORALITY.

TRANSPARENCY  -  just a word without an energy or force - MORALITY and or ACCOUNTABILITY

The secular world has broken away from the traditional superstitious world of religion in the west.  The west invented Christianity or remodeled Jesus stuff under Constantine in the fourth century and church fathers remodeled or plagiarized Aristotle, Plato and other concepts of morality from the pagan world.

Now that Christianity is on life support in the west, the most, best you can get in the public forum is a bunch of women hating closeted homosexuals running the RC church trying to preach morality without transparency or accountability in the day to day operations of the church. That and fundamentalist creationist political hack party evangelicals.

Businesses preach profit without morality and most importantly of all without transparency and definitely without any accountability whatsoever.

Government preaches democracy and law and order, verbal code words for morality, without transparency and or accountability for no-bid Bush Cheney type government contracts etc?

The simple truth is that a lot of corruption in western society lies with the separation of actions, any actions not tied to any transparency and or accountability.

That is why trillions have disappeared on Wall Street and nobody except Madoff is in prison.

Corruption equals Transparency minus Accountability minus Morality – all in the same category or all divorced from each other these days?

The end of western civilization as we have known it for thousands of years?

I give some credit for part of the idea of this article to the below article in Al Jazeera English which as an outsider  news agency of sorts is witnessing the meltdown of the West in mentioning some “Emperor Has No Clothes” observations ignored here in the west regarding the present Eurozone monetary crisis.

          Just how corrupt is Europe?                      

The warning comes in a new report that says poor governance contributed to financial and political scandals in almost every European country during 2011. 

Greece, Italy and Spain are listed as among the most corrupt countries on the continent. 

Political parties, businesses and the public sector are said to be the worst institutions for corruption, while electoral commissions and state auditors performed the best. 

The report named Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain – the eurozone's most financially-troubled nations – as having deeply-rooted problems in their public administrations where officials are not accountable for their actions. 

Political lobbying is also seen as a major cause for concern. Out of 25 European countries 19 have no regulations on political lobbying. 

Party funding, with the influence of lobbyists on decision-makers remaining veiled in secrecy, is seen as ripe for abuse by big businesses. The report says Europe's political parties must do more to make funding transparent.

(Like regulations on lobbying could really provide any protection from corruption? – Look at Washington DC as an example.)

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Fork in the Road - Secular vs. Religious Morality

The Prez and the VP came out in favor the a civil rights issue on Marriage Equality in the past few days.

The Prez did so a day after the redneck bible thumpers in North Carolina had to reinforce their own "religious" POV which goes with the Old Testmament and for lack of more civil words, the male penis right to fuck his property, whether it be woman, slaves or other "chattels".

It is amazing what I have seen in my lifetime of the far right religious nuts taking on the absolute authoritarian Roman model of the guys in silk and lace at the Vatican.  Of taking over a political party and wearing a false mask of Jesus.

That model makes no apology and exploits any human being male or female, straight or homosexual, or "priest-like" sexual (question mark ?) persons who by birth or accident wander into the precincts of religious stone age authority.

It is a day when the fundies are pushing gay hate in Africa as a means to slide into the socio-economic scheme there as a moral factor in the growing future wealth of that continent.

The old are bankrolling the current propaganda war in the west, Europe, North America and parts of South America against the idea that someone might be born with a sexual orientation different than the majority tribe POV.  The young already cherish their freedom to choose life the way they see fit and as God intended.

It is a great day when an African-American President of the United States can interject a secular moral idea based on individual introspection based on a pro-Jesus POV onto the world stage.

While traditions in Africa will not likely to change.  From this day forward another global morality base idea is brought into sharp focus to the rest of humanity.  While the Muslim world is not likely to follow on the merits of same sex marriage, the idea, the seed of change, of a diverse global POV is planted.

It is remarkable when the old men in the Vatican in the sixties put all their prestige and money so to speak on the Craps Table and based the whole future of a dying church on trying to monopolize an individual's right to choose and or to deny their right to live out freely what God has imposed on them as an individual in terms of his or her animus, animal nature.

The spiritual power, the "higher angels of out nature", is the goal, the evolution of the species to achieve over the baser forms of our shared lesser nature.

It is to be remembered that the words of the arch-villian of humanity, archbishop Wojtyla's advice and prejudice to Paul VI on birth control, took a biased view of Protestantism and the rights of individuals by stating that the "holy spirit" was exclusively with the Roman Catholic POV.

Well maybe the "holy spirit" now speaks on matters of human sexuality directly to the individual, a very Protestant concept, and the old fashioned generally corrupted religious POV is growing obsolete in the new global arena of thought.

The Enlightment, though blockaded and detoured through the recent past, is on a clear path to the future.

Human morality and human sexuality are no longer properties owned by the state and or state religion in this new dawning global age.

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Opus Dei vs. Opus Meum – Rick “Fecal Matter” and GOP go off a Cliff

The Opus Dei candidate for President, Rick “Fecal Matter”, is doing remarkably well on a spike from a weekend endorsement from lunatic fundies on a Texas ranch.

Below is an attack ad probably paid for with freshly laundered Opus Dei funds.  While I agree that both political parties in America are going off the cliff, Rick Santorum is no messiah and or Jack Kennedy.

I don’t care if Rick privately tortures himself to get mythical grace for his many, many sins, most of which are based on basic human ignorance and an allergy to empathy and or compassion.

On the matter of a dying Christian church putting up Rick to push what is left of the human race off a cliff, perhaps the solutions all along to humanity’s problems lie with Humanity and Secularism – OPUS MEUM – Work of Humanity, me and mine.

Have a full rich wonderful secular day. 

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Religious Fright! - Fear of Religion

Rather than move the world forward in a positive manner, many aspects of religion no matter how “peaceful” your one true religion is, many aspects of religion are a redundancy decades or centurties after secular institutions began to function in the place of ancient religious insitutions such as courts, hospitals, universities and civil government.

Indeed, I think that religion here in the west is just hanging around after it has been become obsolete on the secular civil level. As such what good is it except to clutter those secular institutions with superstition and useless remembrances of the past.

The past is the past. The Modern World is now. A Post-Modern world is tomorrow. There seems to be a lot dead weight regarding religion trying to drag us away from modernity.

That dragging people into a mindless past with Sharia Laws, Islamic or Christian, is anarchy – trying to destroy the secular real, functioning, world around us.

In the news I see sad things in that seven people were mowed down in gun fire at a Coptic Christian Christmas Mass celebration in Egypt. Fully 10% of Egypt’s 80 old million souls are Coptic Christian which these days comes close to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in their beliefs.

There are also fire bombings at Christian churches in Malaysia, an Islamic Country, where a court ruling said that it was legal for Christians, a minority, to use the word Allah as the word for their G-d in Christendom. Semantics. Bloodshed. Misunderstanding.

I am looking briefly at the concept of post modern Christianity with various mainstream and evangelical fundamentalist branches of the Christ tree trying to rethink and retool not to a modern world – but a post modern world – whatever that means. The here and now is modern enough for me.

I will say that dialogue if it exists at the high CEO level of church entities doesn’t talk to the little people on the ground on how to rethink and retool- sounds like I am talking automobiles in Detroit – more so than churches – Religion is like General Motors – only the empty factories give evidence of a once great human enterprise. Empty churches – empties factories – Obsolete thinking! Gross mismanagement of purpose.

The RC church, the so-called power house of Christian entities that should be setting the pace on post modernism, if there is such a thing, is still wallowing in the 32 years of Vatican mismanagement. Still languishing in the disaster reign of Pius IX in the nineteenth century who started the war on modernism (like a similar war on terror – it will never end).

In fact, Vatican II and all its negative fallout to this day forty odd years later is partially a result of trying to undo 32 years of RC/Christian gross mismanagement of humanity and its spirituality. The Vatican likes electricity and flush toilets (very modern things) but everything else that is not medieval is Verboten.

Indeed, Benedict’s attack on Islam, a new holy war, his infamously incompetent and tactless reference to Islam in the 14th century in his Regensburg Lecture in September 2006 is something mainstream Christianity will have to deal with in terms of collateral damages for decades and perhaps centuries to come. Perhaps bloodshed in the news today in Egypt and Malaysia has its direct roots in that very same speech.

While one part of Christianity wants to address interfaith issues and improve the perception of Jesus’ message to the ages, bumbling hack Vatican bureaucrats are still debating the bloody Crusades!

There is a point in time long ago where the secular world took over most institutions in the West. Rather than give the devil his due, I would say that most of Christianity lives in the delusion of the past before street lights, electricity, running water, penicillin, birth control and all those other truly evil things of a modern world.

Religion, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism Etc. must look at reality first in the present and assess where they have been or where they are going. Otherwise, the coming rapture happens to them all - as they get whisked away into obscurity and history. Good riddance.

The Coptic Christian killings above is indicative of the dysfunctionalism of Islam in Egypt. Before Obama’s visit to Cairo earlier this year, the hack cronies of the Government decided that the pigs being raised by Christians in Cairo would cause a national swine flu epidemic even though there was little or no scientific data to support such a slap in the face of the Coptic minority population which eats pork.

The pigs were confiscated and destroyed. Compensation from the Government did not materialize. What would you expect – Justice?

The Moral of the story of Egyptian Muslims harassing Coptic Christians in Cairo - The pigs used to eat the garbage in the streets. The pigs are gone. Now all of Cairo smells of rotting garbage. If you want to be post-modern and or even modern world, start a secular garbage collection bureaucracy before you impose your stinking religious prejudices on the entire world. Think first – cause and effect.

The west and the Christians can learn from the lack of tolerance to others in the smug present world moving into a future world. That world will likely see the decline and disappearance of all religion because the guy in the back end of the Donkey costume does not know how to signal or cooperate with the other guy in front end of the suit. Or vice versa.

We are all interdependent in this world -“joined at the hip”- if it takes a hundred years to start up an interfaith dialogue, guess what, the secular will survive while your religious world crumbles and disappears.

Religions will come and go in the post-modern secular world. Whether there will be any religions left in that post-modern world? Well - one third of the passengers of the Titanic did after all make it all the way to New York.

In the meantime, garbage will continue to be picked up in a timely secular fashion.

Reality is real. Religion frightens me.

SHANAS – S.H.A.N.A.S. – Secular, Humanist, Atheist, Non-believer, Agnostic, Skeptic

The road to a true global future is indeed full of many skeptics and skeptical beliefs.

Perhaps it takes time for global reality to set in. Myself I would rather look at the tools available in global communication and set a focus point for others to gather at and to begin a lot of restoring of the human spirit and the human culture after thousands of years of religious bigotry and superstition.

My quest to assert my minimalist Christian beliefs as a Cultural Secular Christian is to have a place at the table of communication and not let some religious or PR hack determine what is best or acceptable for me to believe in.

We all believe and feel billions of different things. We are however bound together by blood and DNA on this fragile planet in space.

As such I termed the word SHANAS as a focal point – focus point as a label to follow, fill out in breath and come back in retort, an umbrella of beliefs and non-beliefs, in reaction to those thousands of years of abuse and superstition that the human race has endured thus far.

We all want to change the world. Perhaps I am too much in a rush to perfection for our human race. The past seems to cling to too many negatives and redundancies. The future or any so-called new world order should be determined by input by all mankind. Part of the future is trying to determine what to jettison from the past. It is no easy task on an individual or on a global scale. I value individual input rather than institutional input.

I took the words most common in these outside cultures and philosophies at present and forming from ideas that gravitate toward similar but not exact goals. Secular, Humanists, Atheists, Non-believers, Agnostics and Skeptics should focus perhaps under one label to ease the path to future communication and integration of a durable global matrix of local and global issues in the present and immerging Global Reality. The energies of these groupings do not seem to be set in stone so much as that energy can turn into quest for a new horizon and or enlightenment for all.

SHANAS – S.H.A.N.A.S. – Secular, Humanist, Atheist, Non-believer, Agnostic, Skeptic – as a label is a start.

Whatever forms in reality in terms of labels in the future will form by common consensus and not by any one SHANAS member of alternate belief systems. And as opposed to the obsolete superstitions and religions plaguing the present world. I want people to start thinking and acting globally and – in a Secular Humanist fashion of sorts.

Christopher Hitchens, a famous atheist, complains that we need a new Age of Enlightenment – well that age is here – it has arrived – it is time for individuals more so than any one or many institutions to bring forth the light within humanity to the forefront of all human existence.

This is the dawning of a new human age.

The Prize is the Journey

Caroline Kennedy recently said that an event like 911 made her want to get more involved and have a more active part in the whole fabric of American life. Good for her.

Myself, looking back, I see how 911 poked a hole in my political view of the world. I also had to stand back and decide what I believed in terms of religion. The other side was using, misusing religion as an arm of some political agenda.

This blog, with its readers, has been an education. In terms of my spiritual progress, I have figured out at where I might be at this present time on the road of life.

Perhaps I am more a nineteenth century Unitarian in my private belief systems on more things than anything else. I elect to change my opinions and beliefs as I go along if I so choose. Nothing, like beliefs, in this modern age should be set in stone.

Heaven and hell are here upon this earth. Some of us are lucky enough or blessed to have a choice to seek the former.

I am not a religionist. I do not addicted to religion. I do recognize that religion has been part of the social glue for thousands of years. Secular functions have replaced many previous sacred functions in society. Where religion stands in the rest of the world is entirely different than the way it is going along in the United States.

I am a secularist. I believe in the separation of church and state. I am saddened that so few in America have a rich appreciation or knowledge of true or good religion practice. While I know the average evangelical is probably a good intentioned Christian, I also know that the road to an imagined hell is often paved with good intentions.

That to burn books, symbolically, or in reality, of science is the worst kind of fascism. That this wanting to return to an early nineteenth century mentality whereby the only book in town is a bible is a path that leads to the disasters and misused emotions that turn to anger, hate and days like 911.

I recently got some feedback that said that religion is very, very dead in Europe or at least the organized Christian form is quite dead. We in America do not know or taste and feel our European brothers’ and sisters’ culture unless we travel and experience from those travels. I have to travel more.

That the only energy in religion in Europe these days may ironically be Islam and of the faith of so many immigrants to that social political economic state.

Where religion goes I do not know. I am an anti-religionist. I have my private beliefs but think that in out global mindset, which is the future, the secular side of the equation blots out any or all religious calculations.

Luckily. I have enriched myself and I hope you too the reader by what I have said in writing this year. It has been an interesting year.

The journey is the prize. The prize is the journey. For those of you lucky enough to enjoy thinking, march on.

The Sacred and the Secular

There is that standard term ”the sacred and the profane”. Sacred of course means the church. Everything else is the profane.

The term is no doubt centuries old and goes back to when the church was equal to or greater than the local civil authority or king. The aftermath of the collapse of the Roman Empire left many gaps and many niche opportunities for those willing to fill those gaps. Many of the basic civil institutions of western and European countries started first as church entities.

Profane as a word or description has picked up much too much negative connotation over these recent centuries.

For the sake of anything you might read here, I am using or will be using the word secular in place of the word profane, to mean the common man or woman’s world outside of any religious organizations.

Secular of course and of late has a nasty connotation especially in conjunction with the use of the word humanism. That is another article.

I live in a secular world. The USA is a market economy and goes non stop 24/7, twenty four hours a day and seven days a week in case you have never seen or totally understood that new cliché of communication.

So many things culturally are changing today. The fast pace of life has taken over the way we live in this secular world.

As a child, and half a century ago, my local neighborhood was immersed in the traditional nineteenth and early twentieth century predominate Christian culture. That meant that six days per week commerce was conducted. On Sunday, the Sabbath, stores did not open. The origin of the term “blue laws” in Pennsylvania applied to moral conduct codes and legislated by the state assembly.

Open a store on Sunday and get fined or arrested. In our neighborhood that was true but we played a little bit of a local variance of the law thing. Since orthodox Jews were closed on Saturday, their Sabbath, these grocers opened their stores from nine A.M. to one P.M. on Sunday and sold mostly milk and bread. My father would be buying milk on the way home from church from the Jewish Deli for my baby sister.

Over the years in larger urban centers, these local blue laws began to be ignored or legislated out of existence.

The stage was set for supermarkets and malls to do business seven days a week.

This commerce thing did not immediately weaken the religious thing. The tradition of not shopping on Sunday or keeping a quiet stay at home Sabbath lingered on depending on local regions.

Speaking to somebody recently who grew up in rural Georgia, the collapse of the no shopping on Sunday tradition budged a little when the local K-Mart opened from 12 to 4 on Sundays in the early eighties.

All this coincided with the expanding suburban mall culture, with the local indoor fountain area or food court in the local mall becoming the equivalent of the traditional American town square.

Many factors pulled the American culture away from the traditional sacred culture of the past.

Secularism did not happen as some evil satanic campaign to rob the sacredness from Sunday. It just happened.

So when I hear the strong political voice of American evangelicalism and their faint hope to go back to some sort of rural farm sacred Sunday kind of place, I have to concede that the dream sounds great. Shut down the Malls, our new 21st Century Cathedrals of Commerce on Sunday? I don’t think so.

It is a secular world and we are very much a part of it.