The Real Terror of Religion and its Ultimate Victims of Abuse

The Real Terror of Religion and its Ultimate Victims of Abuse

There is a scene on the telly of Muslims in Paris wanting to crowd into the local mosque for comfort and those outside talking to the cameras about “they are not like those who kill (the terrorists) and that Islam is a beautiful religion of peace.”

I dare say most people on the inside of the religion bubble see it as something good and part of the social glue of family and community.

But the truth is that for the three main monotheistic religions of the mean little desert god by various local names, these religions all began in violence under generals Moses, Constantine or Mohammed.

What do you mean Constantine created Christianity? Yes Christ the state sponsored myth and deity of a dying dysfunctional Roman Empire needed one last push of unity that the Emperor/God Constantine needed to stay insanely in power. It has little to do with a person named Jesus who may or may not have existed in historical myth. 

His, the Emperor/God Constantine's giving deeds to basilicas to bishops throughout his empire to collect taxes and recruit soldiers and dispense Sharia Law in those very same structures was the stuff labeled Christ-ianity to carry out his noble cause of gluing the mess of his dying empire back together again one last time. (...all the king's horses and all the king's men could not put ...)

I dare say that secret ceremonies in his special Christian Army units still practiced worship of secret Army deities while the secret ceremonies of the bishops carried on secret ceremonies of debauchery with the rank and file etc.

That Charlemagne killed all his conquered people with death by beheading for not submitting to the Christian faith and its church spies. That Islam was offered all throughout  the Middle East and Asia at the point of a sword at the head of conquering armies.

That Moses took what he wanted in terms of land and slaughtered people in the old fashioned way, the Egyptian way.

That people in times of personal or national crisis turn to the old gods for comfort. Today is no different than back then.

I especially feel sorry for those minorities that are not welcome in the Catholic Christian Sect, intelligent women or gay men and women or the discarded children of clergy rape, of power's pleasure. 

I feel sorry for people waiting around for stale crumbs from the old closeted gay master’s tables. Better a kick in the gut than a pat on the back from that human trash running that particular organization into the ground.

As Auntie Mame says in the movie at least. “Life is a feast and most poor sons of bitches are starving to death.”

Religion is poison. Toxic to the human race. 

Religion is for Terrorists. 

(or losers)

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Darwin's Box

I think that Darwin's box, which is a good metaphor, expanded the possibility of thoughts regarding science way out of the ball park in terms of 19th century western thought. If you stick you neck out, think outside the present box, and are proven right with your theories, then the box of reality expands for everyone. 

In fact, I think using the same metaphor, that the Creationists' box, ability to perceive or understand, is merely a pedestal that Charles Darwin is standing on in his new box IMO. 

I use the time, dating, calendar idea to expand perception, in reaction to the really dull loop arguments I read over and over again from creationists. A little bit like rants from Mao's little red book. The calendar I mention is the year 152 A.D.I. (After Darwin' Idea). The Gregorian calendar with its start date of Jesus, if he existed, being born around 4-6 B.C.E., is a built in unproven prejudice used in the arguments of the fundies, who with that calendar then do not expand thought, but collapse backwards into a six thousand year old fishbowl/universe. Duh!

The playing field, the arguments pro and con on creationism and intelligent design, the ground rules need to be expanded. Most people start and end in frustration with them because many  assume the present world is real, that Jesus is two thousand years old etc. Actually to get political here, if you try to ask for Jesus's birth certificate from them, they will hold up the book that they worship. 

In a way, in a modern scientific way, at least we know or have stronger evidence that Charles Darwin actually existed with papers, photos, portraits, biographies, written certifiable court room testimony type witnesses etc. A better starting point for a western calendar. The eastern world, philosophies, time etc. is another can of worms all together. 

Regarding the bible, during my long term search, research into faith, spirituality, I ran into a blog of a homeless man in Nashville who no doubt was running it on a computer interface at the local public library. He said, being a person who had to smile when getting handouts, food, survival, from the fundamentalists and in reaction to their preaching, evangelization, he said something to the effect that these people worship the physical book itself. Mumbling the words in it and not understanding them and repeating them over and over again is in a way not their faith but really their idol. 

And a final note on Darwin. A business psychologist in college whose insights I found interesting defined Great Men as men who made the world see itself differently. In the context of recent history, he defined people like Einstein, Gandhi and Darwin as great men because they changed the world with their POV. They in essence helped change the world's POV.

The problem I get with all fundies and the creationists in particular is that they have no respect for other people's POV. It is all a war mentality. Expand or collapse.

(What is the difference between General Moses, General Constantine and General Mohammed? None. They all founded religions of peace.) (sarcasm)






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Secret Solis Dei Cult – the Vatican

Nothing in Catholic church architecture to left to chance. Everything has a place and a reason for its placement in RC churches (and with a meaning, overt or otherwise). What is out in the open under the umbrella term of Sacred Tradition might surprise some.

Something occurs to me looking at both the floor plans of the old St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome with the Disneyesque RC mandated Baroque fun house – the new St. Peter’s Basilica. After the Reformation, Roman Catholicism got turned into smoke and mirrors. Got turned into PR rhetoric propaganda and not substance.

Few realize that St. Peter’s is not a Cathedral or chair or a bishop as in the bishop of Rome. The bishop of Rome’s seat is in the cathedral of St. John Lateran, a building, or its foundations, that is as old as Constantine’s religion itself.

And Constantine, was perhaps one of the first or earliest of many Universalists of history, following Akhenaten, Amranmosis (mosis – son of - Amran or just plain Moses), Saul of Tarsus and maybe even Jesus of Nazareth as well.

What caught my eye was the Chair of Peter thingy in both the old and the new St. Peter’s. Not much historical detail or paintings of the old St. Peter’s. But the new St. Peter’s has the smoke and mirror stained glass window of a dove surrounded by a sunburst above this mythical chair of Peter. Why all this emphasis on the power of Peter? He is not even buried there. He was buried in Jerusalem and never traveled outside of Palestine in his entire life?

The problem with a Universalist agenda then was that you had to tie all the strings together, just like string theory theology these days in the new secular religion of science.

Well back to placement of Significant Statues surrounding the main altar at the new St. Peter’s where there are two rather curious statues out of four.

One of course is of St. Helena, Constantine’s mom. It was mom’s lap pet religion of Christianity that caught his eye in terms of consolidating and merging all religions in the Roman Empire into one. It was mom who did the big Asian tour to Palestine and decided on which antiques from Rodeo Drive type antique shops she visited that became the official relics of her pet religion, now trading up under sonny’s growing patronage.

It was the bones, partial skeleton, which St. Helena signed off on, on Vatican Hill that became the present bones of “St. Peter” under the high altar at St. Peter's Baroque theme park/church.

But the one Statue, the first one at the right, facing forward towards the Chair of Peter Bronze sculpture below the sunburst stained glass window is St. Longinus. St. Longinus - all fifteen odd feet of him in height and gazing into the oculus.

St. Longinus is one of those verbal tradition things that you have to blindly believe in as a RC. Longinus is the so-called Roman soldier who pierced the side of Jesus on the cross.

No name mentioned of him in the NT but it is a tradition thingy.

If I were to analyze a myth, I would have to say that the statue of whomever (St. Longinus) carrying a long lance (and or of a ray of light) in his right hand gesturing in the direction of the chair of Peter below the Oculus stained glass window (the sun god), that statue is also guarding the stairway down into the grotto where ancient Romans like Constantine worshipped his sun god, Roman army cult god Mithra, born December 25.

More on this centuries old, sacred, secret global Solis Dei cult later on.

Whatever.

All religion is politics. All religion is local.

Judaism, Christianity, Islam are not religions so much as political parties. Their founders - Moses, Constantine and Mohammed were all generals.  Politics and war came first in the founding of these ideologies.


If an outer space alien could communicate with me in English, a language I am a master of, and ask the 64 trillion dollar question about what is all this religious strife on planet Earth about, well here goes.


Do Jews, Christians and Muslims worship the same abstract idol and or God? NO!


Definitely not!


A Muslim’s mother’s beef stew is not the same as a Christian’s mother’s beef stew.  


Only momma knew how to cook beef stew. 


For you to compare my mother’s beef stew to your mother’s beef stew is an insult to my mother and to me. 


And there you have modern religion; same as ancient religion.


All religion is local – just like politics.  All belief in God is local as well.


That’s the point with ancient paganism when it went up against the corrupted form of Judaism aka as Christianity.  They were going up against the abstract of One God in One Temple in Jerusalem.  There were no annex temples in the ancient holy land.  God had no vacation homes.


The Jews had one God and he along with his consort Asherah were worshipped in the great temple of Solomon until the Babylonian captivity. 


When the Jews did come back from Babylon, along with their Babylonian concubines, they rebuilt the mud hut, the great temple of Solomon.  They discarded Asherah.  The feminine side of their god disappeared.  God evolved, he then had a male side only.  Christianity is based on Judaism and Islam is framed on these two previous male only gods/politick/religions.  


Of course the Jewish god only talks Hebrew.  The Christian god only talks Aramaic, Greek and Latin.  And the Muslim god only understands Arabic.  One idea.  Three different gods.  E Pluribus Unum?  Hardly.


So when the Roman Nazis come along and could not impose Roman politics onto Jerusalem, they destroyed the Temple.  The genie was out of the bottle.  Because once you remove the geography of the abstract Jewish god, anybody including the Christians or the Muslims can add on their mom’s recipe for beef stew to the traveling ghost of a concept of one God in that god’s diaspora.


Yahweh was destroyed in 70 A.D./C.E..  All the kings horses and all the kings men could not put Yahweh back together again or at least serve the same beef stew ever again.


While the Jews, as the object of their inspirations and prayers, point back to a temple god of two thousand years ago, the Christians point back to general Constantine’s mom’s beef stew recipe, the Nicenian  heresy, and the Muslims look to the Kaaba.
 
Hinduism, which absorbed all local gods as it evolved as a political entity, let the local deities stand and evolve too along side the poltical “religion” etc..  Ironically, here is a quote from what appears to be a polytheistic culture about the weird unrealistic concept of a one god – a one size fits all deity.  


Why are there so many Gods in Hinduism?

God is one. There is only one Real and True God who does not have any form or a name. It can neither be described, thought of or conceived through human faculties. But since we are so many, each one of us conceives God according to our attitude, view points and state of life -- just as a woman can be looked upon differently by different people: mother, by her children; wife, by her husband; sister, by her sisters; daughter, by her parents; granddaughter, by her grandparents; sister-in-law, by her husband's brother, etc. The woman is one and the same, but she is viewed differently by each one of her relatives. Similarly, we look upon the same God in many ways.

I believe most Hindu’s are vegetarians.  I therefore probably cannot compare their politics/religion with my mom’s one true authentic recipe for beef stew.

 

Whatever. 

In most ancient cultures, the heart was the center of intellect and intuition.  In their hearts, Jews, Christians and Muslims perhaps understand and commune with the same God. But using a scientific metaphor – language, words, geography  – in other words, a form of gravity is introduced into the equation  – which confuses the perfection of the human heart with the questions and imperfections of the human brain with its tags and labels.

If man is both part beast and part angel, the question of - do Muslims and Christians worship the same God? – who is asking the question - why - and in what force of gravity present? 

Avatar vs. Limited Visions of Warlords

Warlords reshape people, territory, wealth, and loyalties according to their vision of a more perfect world – more perfect because the warlord thinks himself  to have more total control which is a dillusion.

I finally got to see the movie Avatar and was bored. All the hype and it was just a blue tinted rerun of hundreds of cowboy and Indian movies I have seen all my life.

All the fearful rhetoric from the church about “pantheism” and the worship of nature was overstated. While nature is worth restudying and in some ways reconnecting to in this plastic present world, it will never return us to the awe and importance it had in the hearts of our ancestors.

Putting the movie aside, I jotted a few notes while watching it.

Can you imagine a new world that nature created in the form of Pandora?

A new exotic uncorrupted world. North America with its virgin forests back. Cut down a forest. Plant a farm. New plants, new foods, new insights.

Goddess. It must be something fearful in that name. Mention of a goddess brings fear into hearts of the man-made religion of the Roman Army. Lack of a penis is potential for a heart.

Eywa. Network of energy. Thought provoking for a brain dead humanity numbed by hundreds of channels of cable TV, cell phones, Blackberries, Ipads etc. etc. etc.

Borrowed energy. You have to give it back. Perhaps the church knows that it has borrowed energy from all the faithful through the ages and are at present not using that energy wisely. The contract, or covenant made with God is on shaky ground. In the past the faith ran itself and a few princes got fat on the results of hard work by those of the faith. Now the princes are all fat and corrupt and there seems to be more princes than faithful.

The movie Avatar’s script is simple, contrite, predicable – cliché. Cameron knows how to bake a good puff pastry.

It is not so much mono-god – one god, so much as it is one Warlord or mono-warlord (corporation) and his demand that you believe in his personal god (and quarterly statement).

A hostile place can also be a place of beauty. A sacred tree scares the shit of the church. It thought that it had burned all the forests down centuries ago in terms of the Celtic belief in such things centered around nature and trees.

Civilizations rise and fall. So too for blue people on distant planets. Better to die in battle than live a thousand generations trapped in the dream of the Warlord’s personal vision.

Better to have a vision of your own…

I suppose in the overall scheme of things, and on a timeline, mono-warlordism has been a way to unite tribes under one title or one faith. As the world shrinks I can only see conflict as the unique visions of the warlords Moses, Constantine and Mohammed try to gel together.

Better to be a frog on a lily pad than want to help various Mono-Theistic faiths find fictional common ground.

In the spirit of Avatar, this Unitarian type believer sees the simple faith of the Native Americans, and their forgotten culture as a good and simple belief system. It is right to thank animals that we eat, for their sacrifice. It is right to stay in balance and not take more than we need. And in the end a happy Hunting Ground to go to when we die.

Not much of a faith, but it is my vision that counts and not that of any unholy warlords whose ghosts still haunt our global culture.

I am a Modern Christian

There’s an awful lot of bullshit about religion out there these days. There is an awful lot of people playing “GOD” in the name of jesus.

There are news sites that promote both the pro’s and con’s of abortion, distorting the whole birth control individual choice issue that can prevent pregnancy and therefore veto Abortion before there is a need for such.

There are a lot of tax free and tax reduced Hate non-profit groups that want to dictate what love, commitment or union is. There is an awful lot of fatigue out there over truth, debate, what passes for truth, what passes for debate. ETC.

A thousand, a million, a hundred million cookie cutter Christians, without heart, without the true spirit of Jesus in their heart, are not worth one true Good Samaritan pictured above.

Let me back up here. I started this blog to inform others of my mere “one” individual point of view about my interface with what I now consider “the insanity of monkeys (which is) - religion”.

I have evolved in this short period in a Darwinian sense (no, I do not believe Darwin to be “satan” whoever or what ever that is except the evil in the hearts of individuals, one or collectively in a group of people, as in an exponential growth of evil).

Darwin was only a man - he made a series of observations and calculated guesses about what was the mystery of it all. He did not write a bible. Thank the proverbial concept of God for that! He is the father of modern scientific methodology as this ignorant uneducated individual understands it.

He, Darwin, did tread on centuries of ignorance and superstition that we as local and or global cultures still cling to. Such is life.

With age comes a certain amount of experience and sometimes wisdom. As such I am a Christian.

I am a Christian who believes and or tries to follow the alleged teachings of Jesus, the alleged messiah and or alleged anointed one – “Christ”.

Of course this whole messiah/Christ thing is a Jewish thing. Somehow the Jewish thing got transplanted to another planet along the timeline to Rome – the mother of, and pig, civilization of the western ancient world.

Somewhere along the timeline, the teachings of my teacher Jesus got caught up in the Political Correctness of the Mother/Pig of nations, of Rome and the Roman Empire.

Somewhere along the timeline the teachings of Jesus got inserted into the anti-Semitic synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke and into the very Gay (I say it in a good sense of Gay Eye for the Straight Guy) Gospel of John.

I believe in a modern streamlined Jesus. I believe in the social, civil disobedient, pro-people philosophy agenda of an obscure Rabbi from Galilee.

While I believe Jesus’ message is divine, it is the internal Gnostic sense of divine within Jesus of Nazareth that evokes peace and harmony within my spirit and soul when looking out at my present social, political, economic, spiritual landscape.

I seek to define and refine that same divine spark within me that Jesus did within in his time – and dared to share insight with us in the shards of his words so powerful that they reach out to us today two thousand years later.

Jesus and his view of the world and its future and or its evolution to a new and distant place goes beyond the personal gods of Abraham, Moses and Mohammed.

I do not worship Jesus as a god. He was divinely human. He was perhaps first among equals in the ancient world. He is teacher and a path guider for all those modern generic “organized” and “fundamentalist” religious who still cling to fourth century superstitions in line with the political correctness of an ancient and dead Roman Empire.

The collective pathway to truth of religions from the past blends into the modern pathway and spiritual search of individuals to the divine - I am a modern Christian.

“He who has ears let him hear!”

Have a nice day.