Snakes and Ladders

[pan]

“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”
Steven Weinberg

[pan]

1,000 rounded up in Gambian witch hunt

[Cal]

This is one highly superstitious continent Pan. I got myself quite a reputation around the town I lived in a couple of years ago when I picked up a slug-eater snake to show my gardener in an attempt to educate him not to kill the rather beautiful & harmless reptiles as they were performing the useful task by ridding the garden of snails. The man fled in total terror of both the snake and of me. The little slaughtering session next door I mentioned in another post was part of 'appeasing the ancestors'... the more noise made by the animals being killed the happier the ancestors are thought to be. Uncle Bob just north of here recently blamed the cholera epidemic in Zim on the UK & USA waging chemical warfare on his people ....hygiene & clean drinking water don't enter the picture. Our previous president didn't believe in the existence of the AIDS virus ... and our almost-certain-to-be-elected next president reached std 3 in school and thinks that taking a shower after sex provides protection against AIDS.... I suppose the upside of it all is that here we needn't worry too much about the collapse of western civilization .... it never really did fully take root here ... just icons of it were adopted like coca cola and mobile phones.

The hot news here today was about the Dalai Lama being refused a visa to attend a peace conference in 2010.

[BO]

Well, I'm not sure which is worse, third-world superstitions, or first world denial. I flipped on the TV this morning to witness the following bit of mainstream media pablum about 'Brightsiding'...

"Economy got you down? Go Brightsiding.' (watch the video to be thoroughly repulsed)

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/JobClub/story?id=7154760&page=1

Of course the media's job is to get people 'round here to look away while they're being robbed.

I think western civilization died with the greeks. ;-)

[Cal]

[BO]

This should be obvious, but what the hell, this thread could use some fresh meat.

Churchgoers more likely to back torture, survey finds

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new analysis.

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than 6 in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only 4 in 10 of them did.

The analysis is based on a Pew Research Center survey of 742 American adults conducted April 14-21. It did not include analysis of groups other than white evangelicals, white non-Hispanic Catholics, white mainline Protestants, and the religiously unaffiliated, because the sample size was too small.

http://cnnwire.blogs.cnn.com/2009/04/30/churchgoers-more-likely-to-...

[Kate]

Cal, the churches have it made - all the money collected on Friday, Saturday and Sunday - Night time too.
My overly active imagination - church is a karoake bar, a really bad one (if that is possible) - entry fee with their state of the Art Alters, new bibles, stages for the mean a stir preaching his own version of those dandy texts in de bible, silk gown for choir folks - the greatest sham ever- look how long it's lasted
Talk about Torture !!!!

I has better stop - I be pissing some folk off.


K.Vonnegut, I love this guy !

"But back to Karl Marx: How subservient to Jesus, or to a humane God Almighty, were the leaders of this country back in the 1840's, when Marx said such a supposedly evil thing about religion? They had made it perfectly legal to own human slaves, and weren't going to let women vote or hold public office, God forbid, for another eighty years."

[Cal]

High school teacher's anti-creationism comment violated law .... just as well I'm not a high school teacher.

[Mouse]

Talking gets scarier as the madness grows. So many people keeping their eyes closed.

No religion for me, it wouldn't be possible for me to be the way I need to be if I believed in looking at life from one perspective.
However if I were to tell you what I had seen it might be seen as adequate reason to prevent me caring for my grandchildren in the future, since they call you mad if you can see such things. The scale of devastation because of ignorance...
Church is too traumatic for me, it offers no solace. Where they see Christ on the cross I see the people he was talking about, dying in agony alone every minute of every day in their millions, slowly and fast.
Telling people they are sinners, priming them for evil thoughts and actions,
what astounding idiocy. Or the foulest plot.


My church is the back doorstep and my altar the sky.

In Cyprus as a child I lay on the warm stone looking at the sun through my eyelashes in the morning, listening to the heavy breath of the ocean. The sun is holding every molecule of me in halls of light and I am glad, and surrender.

[Cal]

Jury finds Dale Neumann guilty in prayer death case

[Cal]

This is an article I've been reading in CounterPunch - fairly heavy going, but I'm finding it interesting - "The Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism". I've had a 'troubled' on again-off again relationship these last 10 years with an otherwise remarkably nice man ... the otherwise bit being that he is a committed church goer who periodically has to purge himself of our liaison by going to confession. This article has helped me put some of our bizarre miscommunication into perspective.

Interestingly the author, Walter Davis equates christian fundamentalism with global capitalism ....
"It is hard to know which is colder, crueler: the logic of fundamentalism or the logic of capitalism? But then that question assumes they are different in some fundamental way. And let's face it we want to hang on to that difference because it offers reassurance, even a guarantee, that we can play the two off against each other. Those currently in charge of our country suffer from no such illusion. Maybe that's because they know the secret we need to fathom if we're to historicize the connection that Max Weber saw between Christianity and Capitalism and thereby learn that Christian fundamentalism and Global Capitalism correspond to one another because they derive from the same seedbed and feed on the same destructive violence. "

I love one of the quotes in the article attributed to Dubya (who I discover is George Bush) ...
"I don't do nuance".

[waldopaper]

Quite a tome here, Cal... and well worth reading.

Just as I suspected... about 1/2 the US population fits into the box of fear and hatred of uncertainty. Seems like it's much easier to reach into one's skivvies and grab one's Johnson and assign it all the metaphysical rather than be trapped in the kozmik duality of it all. So if uncertainty is the bug-bear, why the blind faith in "capitalism?"

Methinks at the moment it's because nobody really understands what abstraction the word "capitalism" represents... but in true fundamentalist fashion, the fundies have staked down a definition that fits what they want to believe and no mortal power or thought will ever pry it out of their dead fingers. It means "freedom" or "liberty," which are also abstractions.
the
But walking into Brawl-Mart and buying a shitload of plastic toys to fill your drywall box in the burbs is real enough... and that is a concrete substitute for "freedom" as long as they're not the ones who have to work off the clock at Sprawl-Fart to shovel the turds out of the changing rooms and pick plastic hangers out of piss-puddles.

They hate the "commies," but everything they think they own... from the skivvies around their Satanic nut-sack to the poison-packed gypsum-boards that make walls for their residential rat-trap is made in China. Dichotomy? Not at all! "Compartmentalization" is a word we have to grasp in our age to understand what we're up against.

Explaining "compartmentalization" to fundies would be like explaining "water" to goldfish.

[Cal]

The blind faith in capitalism comes from the 'dominion over nature' mindset that the bible advocates. We are supposed to use everything on the planet up with gay abandon before armageddon strikes ... it's all part of god's plan. It's our moral duty to trash this planet while we have the chance and then those of us who were true believers get whisked off to paradise for ever and ever while the rest go to hell. Mind boggling mindset ... but horrifyingly real out there. I am surrounded by it at work. Actually it seems like the only people I know that don't have that kind of mindset are here on RBC. It's christmas time and the cheer of it escapes me ... can you tell?