With gnashing of teeth and rending of clothes, the religious have lost more of their cultural privilege this week and want us to realize how wrong we are in the most melodramatic way. They are truly convinced of this matter since recently overcoming the sin of pride with attendance to at least two bible workshops and a solid 6 weeks of Sunday morning service attendance .
Much like when interracial marriage was legalized in 1967 the religious warned us then too that changes to our culture are violations of the Law of God and Nature.
Unfortunately, religions free ride of expression and blind respect by the rest of civil society has been squandered by fundamentalist thinking that has energized a class of zealot who advocate slavery and ignorance as fundamental precepts for systems of government. It’s not hard to see and has become impossible to ignore.
Using religion as the basis for government is bad. Religion is here to help bad people become good but you don’t become good just because you have religion. Further I submit a government is not good because it has a belief in God. Quite the opposite, as divine authority has been used by every tyrant for the validation of their holy mission to tell others what to do, including what to die for.
Communism was a cult of personality worshiping the head of state just like Mao in China. The West tends to view these governments as atheist but they had strong belief systems of divine right. The leader was the representative of authority as chosen by God. It’s regressive feudalism to believe in kings and lords and that is what is programmed into religion, ALL religion.
This feudalism is disguised as heritage, tradition, or culture and becomes the excuse to propagate dissimulation into the larger more diverse culture. This is made politically volatile through the claim of persecution in order to dissuade public opinion and maintain control over social mobility.
Any religion that calls for discrimination based on dogma is irrational and should be left behind to the archaic dustpan of failed understandings like blood letting or a flat earth. Unfortunately passion overwhelms reason when intellectuals condescendingly agree this religious thinking is comparable to the understanding of reality through scientific method.
A basic precept to scientific understanding is that ‘not’ understanding is the first step to truth. Unfortunately popular culture has been hijacked by religious zealots that equate their beliefs into accepted points of debate, even to the level of commanding censorship to control the public image.
‘Religion of peace’ is not a harmless platitude
From http://blogs.spectator.co.uk
excerpt~~”The night after the Charlie Hebdo atrocities I was pre-recording a Radio 4 programme. My fellow discussant was a very nice Muslim man who works to ‘de-radicalise’ extremists. We agreed on nearly everything. But at some point he said that one reason Muslims shouldn’t react to such cartoons is that Mohammed never objected to critics.
There may be some positive things to be said about Mohammed, but I thought this was pushing things too far and mentioned just one occasion when Mohammed didn’t welcome a critic. Asma bint Marwan was a female poetess who mocked the ‘Prophet’ and who, as a result, Mohammed had killed. It is in the texts. It is not a problem for me. But I can understand why it is a problem for decent Muslims.
The moment I said this, my Muslim colleague went berserk. How dare I say this? I replied that it was in the Hadith and had a respectable chain of transmission (an important debate). He said it was a fabrication which he would not allow to stand. The upshot was that he refused to continue unless all mention of this was wiped from the recording. The BBC team agreed and I was left trying to find another way to express the same point. The broadcast had this ‘offensive’ fact left out.
I cannot imagine another religious discussion where this would happen, but it is perfectly normal when discussing Islam. On that occasion I chose one case, but I could have chosen many others, such as the hundreds of Jews Mohammed beheaded with his own hand.
Again, that’s in the mainstream Islamic sources. I haven’t made it up. It used to be a problem for Muslims to rationalise, but now there are people trying to imitate such behaviour in our societies it has become a problem for all of us, and I don’t see why people in the free world should have to lie about what we read in historical texts.”
Pope Francis says hypocrisy undermines Church’s credibility
Pope Francis on Sunday said clergy and Christians must not betray the word of God with their actions or they undermine the credibility of the Catholic Church.
Francis, elected a month ago, inherited a Church struggling to restore credibility after a series of scandals, including the sexual abuse of children by priests.
The pope spoke at the Papal Basilica of St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, where he celebrated Mass. He also greeted pilgrims and local Church members earlier in St. Peter’s square.
“Inconsistency on the part of pastors and the faithful between what they say and what they do, between word and manner of life, is undermining the Church’s credibility,” the pontiff said in his homily.
“Those who listen to us and observe us must be able to see in our actions what they hear from our lips, and so give glory to God!”
Pope Francis’ statement recognizes a problem but fails to address the cause of this hypocrisy as a failure of the belief system itself. The magnitude of this cultural distraction is compounded by the authority given to religion.
When such authority is used as valid substance for debate or public scrutiny you get talking points of ridiculous subjectivity as from below…
The Pope’s “Science Advisor” Is an Atheist Who Worships the Earth
From http://www.rushlimbaugh.com
“My friends, not one to let things go, I have dug deep, and I have found out practically everything there is to know about the science advisor to Pope Francis on this encyclical. And the main thing you need to know, the guy’s an atheist.
The word for it in the story that I found, one of the most credible stories, is a pantheist, which is a variation of atheist. A pantheist is somebody that believes the earth is a living organism that has the equivalent of a brain and reacts to horrible things done to it by humans.”
“Not by lions and not by tigers and not by chimpanzees or any other animal or plant, but only humans. And the earth compensates for all of the rotten, horrible things. The primary belief of a pantheist is that everything that happens in climate or weather is the earth intelligently reacting to egregious acts and behavior by man, and, of course in this view, the earth becomes the deity and there is no God.
The earth is an intelligent living and breathing organism with self-protection built in to compensate for the daily destructive tendencies of humanity. This is the guy who was the lead science advisor for Pope Francis on the global warming and climate change aspects of his encyclical.”
Who cares Rush how they understand the universe as long as what they can accomplish is beneficial for our human race! But that does make a difference to those with political stakes in keeping humanity subjugated.
Those who serve “Our Lord”.
The Grasshopper 