Month: August 2015

I was walking my dog this morning, on a very pleasant day, and it hit me how evil Christianity is, or rather how evil the description of the Christian God is.

We are supposed to start our lives in shame, feeling guilty for something we did not do.  And it hit me that shame begets a need for justification, for aggressive action, for do-gooding, which is necessarily compulsive, and as prone to harm as help.

Without understanding fully all the creeds which adopt this name for themselves, it seems to me that Satanists, by and large, intend to reject this shame, this abhorrence of life and freedom.

And as parents would we ever contemplate throwing our children into the pits of hell if they failed to obey us exactly?  Would we threaten them with this?  Could we even contemplate this?  No: we assume goodness on their part, and do our best to love them, to cherish them, to teach them, and to help them if they fall off the path.  We never abandon them.

And who can accept a God who needs the ritual murder of animals, much less human beings?  Who can accept a God who requires a sacrifice of his son to satisfy his irrational rage at people who are by and large doing the best they can?

The key addition of Christianity is the concept of eternal damnation.  The Jews of course had the idea of Original Sin, but they had a system for managing the rages of their God, through sacrifice and piety.  They thought little about the next world.  They were like the Romans and Greeks in this.

Further, if God were as the Christians describe, would we only see his appointed representative once in the lifetime of humanity, in an insignificant part of the world, and would he only teach for something like 3 years?  If you were a parent, and you wanted to teach your children, would you not give them regular or even constant, direct, instruction?

Deconstructing Christianity is not that hard, but it is necessary for me, for my own healing.  I was raised as a Christian, taught John 3:16 and other similar verses, sang the hymns in church, was baptized, was taught to fear the Devil.

We need something like religion.  We need worship.  We need communion.  We need a place for the holy in our lives, for the sacred.  We need a concept of the Divine, of eternal life, of spiritual growth.  Foolish people see our choices as belief and disbelief.  I am no atheist, not even remotely.  I am, I think I can say honestly. a visionary.  I see visions.  I feel new realities.  I dream what has not been, but may yet be.

This is a hopeful post, one I intend to be filled with light.  What we leave behind is darkness when we accept something brighter.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/were-only-3-zip-codes-175956661.html;_ylt=AwrT6V0PzN1VZ1wA4_YPxQt.;_ylu=X3oDMTByb2lvbXVuBGNvbG8DZ3ExBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzcg

I don’t have any particularly incisive commentary.  I just thought this was interesting.  Do most of us not feel alone, even with those we are supposed to love?  Doesn’t the grass always seem greener on the other side, and does it not prove disappointing in the end?

Think about it: who are the women who want to cheat, or make love to cheaters?  Are they sensitive, genuinely caring, emotionally intelligent people who satisfy the real needs men have to feel understood, appreciated, and respected?  I very much doubt it.  They can play the part for a time, but they want something.

Fucking, in my not inconsiderable experience, is almost always disappointing.  There is unquestionably an ego boost–a hit–in seducing a woman–it makes you feel manly–but the very mindset required for it separates you. In terms of what sex can provide emotionally, I think women in this–as in most everything else–are most right.

I remain, in Gibbon, in the period of the reign of Julian–who interestingly, among other things, tried to rebuild the Temple of the Jews–and he related casually that it was not at all uncommon for him to sacrifice 100 oxen, which sounds astonishing until you compare it to what the Bible relates concerning Solomon: 

And Solomon offered for the sacrifice of peace-offerings, which he offered unto Jehovah, two and twenty thousand oxen, and a hundred and twenty thousand sheep. So the king and all the children of Israel dedicated the house of Jehovah. 1 Kings 8:63

Ponder that.  Ponder how, if it is even logistically possible–and it surely is, over some time horizon–what that carnage would look like. Ponder what a mere 100 oxen would look like.  And I don’t know how they were killed.  A relatively large weapon would seemingly be necessary.

There is a great mystery in all this.  My working hypothesis continues to be that it is a means of appeasing our own predator, animal instincts, which was necessary before the principles of inner growth were developed.

Plus Ca Change: The Christians tore down the ancient temples of the Romans.  And they built their own churches on top.  Who else do you know who does that?

If you look at the history–ONLY the history–Christianity is not so very different from Islam.  They venerated martyrs, demanded absolute submission to their creed, and fought aggressive wars in support of their faith.

I was reading the back story on Fritz Lang’s M, and found this curious: “Lang considered M to be his favorite of his own films because of the social criticism in the film. In 1937, he told a reporter that he made the film “to warn mothers about neglecting children”.”


Further: M has been said, by various critics and reviewers,^[17] to be based on serial killer Peter Kürten—the “Vampire of Düsseldorf“—whose crimes took place in the 1920s.^[18] Lang denied that he drew from this case in an interview in 1963 with film historian Gero Gandert; “At the time I decided to use the subject matter of M there were many serial killers terrorizing Germany—Haarmann, Grossmann, Kürten, Denke, […]”


As should be obvious, I cast my perceptual net far and wide.  Within my lifetime, we have evolved from a nation of “free range” children–which is to say largely care free parents and care free children–to one in which parents risk having their children taken from them if they let them walk a few blocks to the park before a certain age.


How important to emotional development is freedom in early childhood?  One can scarcely wonder if, on one pole of this equation, Muslim women find it very hard to develop emotionally and particularly to build a sense of self which alone would make them capable of raising emotionally intelligent children; and on the other hand, it seems the tribal lives of say, American Indians in the pre-imperial period, might be optimally conducive to growth.


If you are faced with large fear from an early age, what effect does this have?  Does not fear bring with it an increased need for security, and is that not precisely what government promises?


It is an extraordinarily tenuous hypothesis, but I wonder if the spate of very prolific, very public serial killers in the 1920’s in Germany helped the Nazi rise to power.  Conversely, I suppose one could wonder if the prevalence of such crimes indicated a national illness which eventually manifested in the Nazis.


I’m just spouting here.  It’s what I do.  This whole post may be utter nonsense, but I have often found nonsense leads to better ideas which actually have value.  Exploration is always potentially useful.

We Americans love to brag about our freedoms, but we have a shitload of petty regulations and bureaucratic procedures they don’t have in other countries.

Take the FDA.  They block all sorts of things that are quite legal in other countries. I was trying to get some kind of weight loss supplement that apparently actually works, and they sell it in Canada, but not here, because some jackasses abused it.  You can abuse COFFEE if you are determined.

For that matter, they DON’T block things like genetically modified foods that are at least labeled in other countries.  And for God’s sake, our government continues to subsidize the manufacture of high fructose corn syrup, which has NEGATIVE nutritional value.  Who helps put cheap cokes in the hands of the poor?  Uncle Sam, that’s who.

Take ordering contacts on-line.  If my prescription hasn’t changed in 25 years, who is hurt if I go three or four years without an exam?  The eye doctors.  They lose money.  They no doubt argued “safety” and in this country if you say fucking safety all the soccer moms circle their wagons, and the soccer dads say “are you sure it is safe now?”  You can smell the fear.

Fuck safety.  Life is either an adventure, or it is a niggling little prance in a small circle with boring people who do nothing, learn nothing, and are not overly missed when they leave this world because they didn’t really contribute anything.

Americans, particularly, are obsessed with safety.  I don’t know why. Perhaps it is our litigiousness.

Edit: tetanus shots.  That was another thing.  There are only about 30 cases of tetanus contracted a year in America, mostly in the pork industry.  The tetanus bacteria live in soil contaminated with fecal matter, which is to say virtually nothing in a city or the suburbs is even remotely likely to have it on it.

I tried to research how many people die from reactions related to vaccinations each year, but Google, Bing and Yahoo don’t want to tell me.

This is another thing: we think we have access through search engines to everything we need to know.  Google for sure, and likely the others, are quite capable of tweaking the searches any way they want, and whatever they want hidden, will not be found except by profound persistence.

Edit: thank god for Alex Jones.  Google plus Alex Jones got me this: http://www.infowars.com/jimmy-kimmels-ignorant-vaccine-doctors/

Point 1: there is no reliable reporting system for vaccinations, so no one can claim it is safe using sound empirical evidence.  Doctors are at their own discretion to report reactions, and they can expect to be sued if they are found culpable.  No one–NO ONE–can base their opinions on responsibly gathered statistics.

Point 2: the same professionals we are supposed to literally trust with our lives disappoint about a quarter of a million people EVERY YEAR.  People die due to fuck-ups.

If your sense of self depends on serving others, then your sense of self is connected to, and ultimately conflated with, others.  This in turn likely means that they are connected to you.  You lean on one another.

This is why you should watch children struggle with things for a long time, and why you should not feel bad when difficulties enter the lives of complacent people. Or your life, for that matter.

Trouble is wind for wings that are ready for it.  Let’s call that a bon mot.

I was laying in bed this morning, petting my dog, and it occurred to me that true worship consists in offering love and connection to the universe, or perhaps in receiving what was already there.  When you are participating in love and laughter and useful labor, when your consciousness is entirely filled with the focus needed to accomplish some worthy task, that is worship.

I was listening to Gibbon talk about the Emperor Julian, how he had many altars and that he made animal sacrifices on them every morning and evening.  Picture yourself doing that. Picture someone handing you a live chicken, you ritually offering it to that God–let us say Jupiter–then ritually slitting its throat, or cutting its head off.  Then you offer the dead animal again.  And you do this twice a day.

It seems to me it would pacify the violence and bloodlust which always exist as possibilities for all of us. It seems to me much of the violence on television, and in movies and in video games exists to feed this primitive, primal part of us, which never gets to break peoples jaws, or shoot anyone, scream at the top of its lungs, or even OFFEND anyone.  My god, can you imagine anything more productive of rage, of Donald Trump, than making everyone keep their mouth shut about nearly everything?  Those emotions, that need to assert self, and to be heard, do not disappear.

But this blood also becomes something you NEED, something you feed on.  The spirit is that of a vampire.

No, wherever Goodness is, that is true worship.  That is what I feel.

And I will repeat the point I made in my Grand Inquisitor piece, that Christ did not intend to be taken literally, to have ritual cannibalism enacted in his honor.  Wherever wine is, love is, and there he is.  Wherever bread is, where communion is, there he is.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/23/tom-harris-global-warming-deceptive-temperature-re/

We live in an era in which the stupid people vote for Obama, and even most of the smart people still believe in global warming.  To even approach reason and truth you have to be willing to be castigated as an ideological dissident.  How did we get to this place in a free society?  How did we allow it?  

It occurs to me that in raising emotionally intelligent children–which is to say, within my world view, the capacity for authentic Goodness–it is very important to allow them to name and express negative emotions.  You need to allow them to say things like “I am feeling very angry right now, and I don’t know why.  Maybe I’m hungry, but I think I also need some space.”

I think for most of history parents believed that if they created children who did what they told them to do, and acted as they were taught, that they had succeeded.  But history is a succession of violent scenes, scenes of grief, rapine, greed, vanity, and internecine violence (I would argue ALL violence is ultimately internecine), is it not?

Logically, if shame is the outcome of trauma, then a shame based society is a trauma based society.  You beat obedience into your kids, do you not?

It occurs to me to add as well that I experience “new emotions” regularly in my practice.  Part of it is asking for them, but much of it is simply avoiding labeling what comes up.

And if you think about it, if you do not like the feelings that occur daily for you, to change them you need new ones, more open ones, more empowering ones, and how could they not feel foreign at first?

There is metainformation in ANY new feeling, negative or positive: what it tells you is that something different is possible.  The sense of the possibility of change is necessary to ever consciously embrace change. And I think if it is not sought, some part of our unconscious snaps us back to the same spot regularly.  It brings us back to “who we are”.