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VictimlessCriminal: ‘Magical Ritual Ties’
April 9, 2011 — xanthippaAgain – it is not about individual spirituality that is the problem: it is its dogmatization, called ‘religion’. It is a problem because it uses -maliciously or not – the blackmail of ‘eternal damnation’ to manipulate its believers into doing things they would not otherwise do.
Like, say, take out loans to give money to the church.
Or, blow themselves up in a crowded marketplace.
I had a Pentacostal preacher for a neighbour for a while. It was quite an eye-opener. For example, he and his wife did not use a car-seat for their infant, because that was ‘interfering with God’s will’. Apparently, God was sufficient protection from a car accident. Oh, the list goes on…
The church where he preached also encouraged people to donate their money – all their money – to the church. They had testimonials of parishoners who said that when they donated their last dollar to the church, even their grocery money, at the last moment they would get a ‘windfall’ and ‘God looked after them’!
That these kinds of organizations pray upon the credulous is shameful.
That they are given tax-free status is outrageous.
That they demand respect is intolerable!
Victimless Criminal: ‘Netherlands Votes on Banning Halal & Kosher’
April 9, 2011 — xanthippaYes!!!
We need this kind of a law in Canada!
Pat Condell: ‘The great Jesus swindle’ + long-winded commentary
April 2, 2011 — xanthippaThere are several things Pat Condell raises which are worthy of further discussion…where to start?
Perhaps before I do get into it, I should post this video which underlines just how the ‘personal relationship with Jesus’ appears to work:
Before you think I am picking on Christians, I’d like to point out that I included this video to support Pat Condell’s specific assertion that very different people who truly and honestly believe that they have a personal relationship with God through Jesus get very different information from this Jesus about what He thinks, says and commands. Yet, they all honestly believe it to be true…
…just like Muhammad truly and honestly believed that he had a personal relationship with God and that God was telling him what is right, what is wrong and what is forbidden. After all, Muhammad did convert to Christianity for a brief period of time in his youth!
So, I would like to bring the discussion back to some of the points Pat Condell had made.
How?
Perhaps by stating that, in my never-humble-opinion, whether god(s) exist is rather irrelevant.
People keep debating, discussing, self-examining and exerting effort and emotional investment towards answering the existence or non-existence of god(s). Frankly, framing the ‘religion debate’ by ‘this question’ is more than a bit of a red herring – it is a load of dingo’s kidneys!
This is not a proper – meaning constructive – debate to have because it rather completely misses the point that the problem does not lie in spirituality per se. Sure, just like cultures – not all spiritual beliefs are equal and some are downright destructive to the human psyche. Their veracity (or lack thereof) does not determine their venemosity, nor their cultural influence!
The archetype (or, perhaps I should call it ‘meme’) of ‘the original sin’ is one of the most toxic, humanity-destructive bits of spiritual belief around – for pretty much the very reasons Pat Condell has stated.
In a sad way, this very ‘spiritual meme’ (for the sake of convenience, I’ll shorthand it to ‘smeme’) is the greatest threat the Western Civilization faces.
Let’s not mince words: our Western Civilization may have arizen from a predominantly Christian area of the world, but it arose precisly by rejecting the dogmatization of spiritualiy as much as was possible. Yes, some wounds are too deep to heal – and the ‘original sin’ is one of these. During a comment-section-discussion with CodeSlinger and Derek, I explored some of these themes, but only tangentially…though at great length, if you are interested in this type of a discussion.
The short version of it is – one of the (several) points I was trying to make was – that ‘modern’, ‘enlightened’ Christians still obey/accept as ‘divine directive’ many of the things that they no longer believe to be ‘true’. Perhaps literally, perhaps even more deeply. The fact remains that once the ‘roots’ of where different bits of theology come from become divorced (to a greater or lesser degree) from the underlying dogma, the resulting ‘rules of proper conduct’, the very ‘morality’ dictated by that ‘religion’ becomes separated from its source.
Once this separation occurs (and the deeper it is – for, like most things, its degree is a continuum – the more this holds true), it becomes impossible to trace the ‘morality’, the ‘reason’ why something is ‘good’ or ‘evil’. The resultant belief that certain actions are ‘good’ or ‘evil’ remains: just the ability to understand the belief itself becomes lost through the unfamiliarity with (or de-coupling from) the fundamentalist dogma it came from.
In other words, it is no longer recognized as a ‘religious dictum’ and, instead, becomes thought of (erroneously) as a ‘universal value’.
This is true – to a lesser or greater degree – of just about all the ‘moderate faiths’.
What is also true is that parents raise their kids ‘to do what is right‘. This permits these ‘moral directives’ which results from specific ‘smemes’ to be passed down the generations without any reference to the original ‘smemes’! (All the guilt, none of the bliss!)
The more secularized and non-fundamentalist a society becomes over a number of generations, the deeper the disconnect between the ‘smeme’ and the ‘moral directives’ that result from it grows. The ‘Great Western Self-Guilting’ is just one of these: in just about all the populist ‘secular’ movements in The West, from environmentalism to radical feminism to just about everything else, we can trace the self-guilt and ‘self-loathing’ back to the ‘smeme’ of ‘Eve’s original sin’. Some try to fight it (inventing ‘salvation schemes’, like ‘municipal recycling’ and ‘carbon taxes’ and ‘reverse discrimination/quotas’), others submit to it (villifying everything ‘Western, Christinan, Jewish’ and attempting to befriend anything and anyone with a contempt for ‘Western Civilization), – but none of them recognize it for what it is: a ‘moral’ directive, left over from the time of Christianity and deeply rooted in the doctorine of ‘original sin’.
No longer having access to the root of this ‘moral directive’, because we have unshackled it from the fundamentalist dogma it is rooted in, we cannot identify (much less question, confront and defeat) this particular demon of ours…
…which is why it has so much power over us!
OK – I have barely scratched the surface here…but, enough ranting for now. Let me know what you think!
Why are so few Canadians voting these days?
April 1, 2011 — xanthippaStatistics are showing (or so we are being told) that fewer and fewer Canadians vote. Commentators are lamenting this, some are suggesting that people who do not vote should be fined and all kinds of other nonsense.
So, why?
The reasons why the percentage of Canadians actually voting isdecreasing are really very simple: our votes do not matter.
REALLY matter.
Oh, I understand – we get to vote in one band of politicians or another – and our votes matter in deciding which bunch gets in when. And, some politicians are worse than others.
But that is quickly becoming minutia, a cosmetic change rather than a substantive.
Why?
Because our very system is broken. And it is broken on multiple levels, which is why fixing it is not an easy proposition.
One level on which it is broken is the most easily visible one: our elected representatives are supposed to be answerable to us, the citizens….but, increasingly, they are only answerable to their own party leadership!
In other words, the party system we have in Parliament and in Provincial Legislatures has tipped the balances too far toward ‘party influence’ and away from ‘voter influence’. After all, if their nomination papers are not signed by the party leadership, a candidate must run as an independent: and just how many of those manage to get elected?!?!?
This gives the party leaders great power of control over their elected MPs! Too great an amount of power: to the point that the good/will of the party is the only thing our elected officials consider when ‘representing us’.
In a very real sense, we are no longer voting for our local representatives – when we cast our votes, we are voting for one or another party. Sure, it is still a choice to make – but it is not the choice our Parliamentary system was designed for. It is not the one for which the ‘checks and balances’ we have built into the system were designed. And it makes for very unresponsive government…because the policies of each party have to cover so many issues, we can only pick ‘bundle A’ vs ‘bundle B’ of good and bad things.
That is not the type of choice most people want: picking a lot of bad things, because among them are few good things you want. It means that no matter which party you are choosing, you are necessarily choosing some things you do not want, things you consider to be bad things. And, by voting, you are making those bad things happen.
People don’t like that. So, more and more don’t vote.
Because, when being forced to pick from several bad choices, most people prefer not to choose at all.
But that ‘level’ is only the most visible way in which our system is broken.
If the ‘party in power’ is the ‘what’ of the government policy, the civil service is the ‘how’.
I have personally seen and heard some high ranking civil servants explain exactly ‘how’ the elected politicians must be ‘handled’. Real life – not Sir Humphry Appelby. How what I thought to have been a uniquely ‘sound’ government policy which does not reflect the goals of the public service is contorted and the way it is implementation is sabotaged to the point where it not only fails, but fails in such a manner that it is obvious such an ill-conceived policy could never have worked and it failed because the politicians were too arrogant to listen to the experienced civil service experts!!!
Yes – to a degree much higher than most of us are aware of, we are being governed by a bunch of unknown, unseen, unaccountable high-level civil servants with a vision of their own: power through regulation.
Do you ever ask why is it that representatives of various government regulatory agencies have much, much greater powers than police do? Power to enter your property without a court order – and also without your knowledge, much less content. Power to take your stuff away from you ‘pending their investigation’? Do you even know the full extent of their powers?
It is a stealth-totalitarianism-through-red-tape!
In a state like that, the elected politicians are increasingly little more than window dressing. Why bother voting for them?
If I knew how to fix this, I would say so. I don’t. But, considering that most of these career bureaucrats have been in the public service for several decades before they have gained sufficient ‘influence’ and arrogance to sabotage policies they disagree with, I suspect we will need to bring in laws limiting the amount of time a person may serve in the public sector. Regulate the regulators, so to speak…
Sure, front line police officers and similar things – a different story. I don’t claim this is a well developed solution – to the contrary. It is more of a niggling suspicion that has been growing for a while .
These are just two of many failures in our governance structures – pretending there is no problem is only driving voters to apathy…
What do you think?
VictimlessCriminal: ‘Choudary Threatens Royal Wedding’
April 1, 2011 — xanthippaI could not have said it better: limiting free speech – ESPECIALLY the ‘lunatic fringe’ and ‘hate speech’ – only drives it underground, where it festers and infects other minds. Out, in the open, everyone can expose and debunk it.
The ‘Caledonia: No More Nightmares’ event
March 24, 2011 — xanthippaTuesday evening, the Free Thinking Film Society presented ‘Caledonia: No More Nightmares’.
It was a memorable evening.
I hesitate to say ‘good’, because even though the speakers were engaging and informative, all the people were pleasant (with only minor exceptions, hardly worth mentioning) and everything was well 0rganized – even the Ottawa Police were friendly and effective – the very fact that the events discussed during this evening happened is deeply troubling.
Here is a taste of what the evening was like:
There was a lot of food for thought there, that evening, and I am still not done thinking it all through – I am a slow thinker. I will write more about this.
The one thing that I learned coming from the evening was this: The ‘bad guys’ here were not ‘The Natives’ – a few residents there misbehaved at the beginning, true, but as soon as there was conflict which the OPP refused to police, militants from all over, of all races and colours, traveled to the 6 Nations land and robbed, raped and otherwise oppressed the Native residents. ‘The Natives’ were just as stuck as Caledonia residents. The OPP refused to help all of them.
The only ones whom the OPP protected were the militants. Yes, some of the militants were Natives. But most of the Natives from 6 Nations were not militants and most of the militants were not from the 6 Nations!
Had the OPP done their job at the beginning, the militants would not have sensed weakness and set up camp in Caledonia. None of this would have happened!
Marie Trainer, who was the Mayor for Haldimand county during these events, gave the most moving speech of the evening. It really brought home just how helpless and abandoned the people – both on the Caledonia/Haldimand county side and on the 6 Nations Reservation side.
One could see just how responsible she felt for her people, how heavily this weighed on her.
She told us an interesting story.
A number of illegal smoke shacks had sprung up in the area. These sell cigarets which have not passed any safety controls, and they sell cigarets to minors. Marie Trainer worked together with the 6 Nations Council to shut down the two smoke shacks on the County property and the two smoke shacks on the 6 Nations land. Now, only the 2 shacks on land owned by the Province of Ontario (controlled by the militants) remained. A representative from 6 Nations and Marie Trainer together went to the Province, asking for action to be taken to shut these illegal smoke shacks which sold tainted cigarettes to minors – to no avail. The Province of Ontario refused to take action to help them!
Shameful!
Reminder – Caledonia: No More Nightmares
March 21, 2011 — xanthippaA quick reminder that tomorrow night (22nd of March, 2011), the ‘Caledonia: No More Nightmares’ presentation is coming to the National Archives Library on Wellington Street. From ‘The Free Thinking Film Society’:
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BCF: silencing Jason Kenny – ‘Security Concerns’ are the next ‘Shut up, Slave!’ euphemism
March 14, 2011 — xanthippaBlazing Cat Fur has the story on how an MP – and a cabinet minister to boot – was effectively shut up by cries of ‘security concerns’. No matter that he was willing to provide his own security at his speech…
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 