risky political correctness

A dangerous trend has spread throughout these shakily-united States: the trend of political correctness. Damaging to honesty, truthfulness, and the very concept of Liberty itself, a person is being politically correct when, before speaking out loud, he stops to ponder whether or not what he is about to say might or might not offend someone within earshot. Rather than encouraging him to speak his mind freely in the knowledge that he has no – nada, null, zero, zilch – no control over the mental processes of other people nor the ability to control how others will react to whatever he chooses to say or do or sign or write, our society demands that he take everyone else's emotional and mental well-being into consideration and censor himself instead of just coming and saying whatever the deuce he intended to say in the first place.

Political correctness is un-American in that it forces us to be liars, to hide our prejudices and our stereotypes deep within the recesses of our souls, where hatred and malcontent tend to fester; it decreases the Safety of all Americans by allowing the bigot to mingle freely amongst open-minded people, his cruel heart filled with a resentment for people of color and a hatred for All Things Strange; it harms the Safety of all Americans by allowing bigotry and racism to build up in the mind of the sad and confused individual until he can no longer stand it, which makes him more likely to lash out physically against the object of his ire, a person with skin slightly darker than his. During more than one conversation between me, an American of European Descent, and Americans of African or Mixed African and European Descent (i.e. between a white person and brown people), I have heard these humans say that they would rather have their racist right out in public, where he can be tagged and avoided rather than for him to have to pretend to be color-blind when he really could care less if he saw a Negro being chained to a pickup truck and dragged.

Furthermore, political correctness emboldens the nitpickers and busybodies among us to wag their fingers at anyone even toeing the line of impropriety, and to say to them with self-righteous but artificial indignation: It's not nice to say this, and you shouldn't say that, because you might hurt this bunch's feelings, and cause that lot to be sad. There are many views espoused by religious extremists in this country – they who are trying to shut down Planned Parenthood and who want to amend our preciously secular Constitution to define marriage according to their and only their religious text – views I vehemently oppose and risk Life, Fortune, and sacred Honor to combat; yet while standing out in the snow counter-protesting nuns and stoking the ire of entire church parishes, I chose to speak my mind and to say hurtful and offensive things directly to them, right up in their faces, hardly flinching when they called the cops to complain about the public display of the word vagina, which is the medical term for one part of a woman's sex. I shall stop harping on the past and start encouraging the few lovers of Liberty left on these shores to end self-censorship, to encourage clear and open debate, and to fill their hearts with emptiness; together, we can conquer the scourge of political correctness, preferring honesty to deceit, choosing the Truth over lies. So stand up and speak freely – do it now, or forever scold your niece.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

Liberty, at stake

Liberty, at stake

This picture was created on 25 March 2011, well before the Republic Party in America released the Defense Of Marriage provision in its Romney/Ryan presidential platform, which is a brazen assault on the rights of gay, lesbian, transgender, and bisexual Americans to get married. Fight theocratic rule! Fight injustice! Maintain the separation of church and state! Mahalo. X

on public worship

Why do people go to churches in order to pray to their god? Why has congregating with one another in groups become the baseline method, the normal state of affairs for Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Catholics, Mormons, animists, and wiccans? I am merely a lay person, and an ignorant, worthless whorphan at that; therefore, I can only present here my own poorly-conceived thoughts, offering them up freely upon this, the altar of public opinion.

I believe that churches are a stubborn hold-over from earlier times during which the great majority of people could not read. During, say, the European Middle Ages, the individual had to physically enter a church in order to hear such words as he thought were his god's teachings, words which his under-educated and stunted mind accepted, without question, as Fact. Since our governments have forced their citizens to become educated to a certain standard, and since the literacy rate in most western industrialized nations (WINs) sits at nearly 100%, we should no longer need these bastions of foul old organized religion, as we can now all read our Bibles and our Korans and our Bhagavad-Gitas by ourselves, and in the privacy of our own homes.

Among the primary factors contributing to the survival of churches and other places of worship is the fact that these communities act as meeting-places at which different people can share resources with one another without going through the hassle of trawling for useful acquaintances among the general population; it is assumed that anyone who manages to stay within the church without pissing off too many people and who is witnessed to perform the community's shared rites and rituals is a trustworthy and generally good chap upon whom one can rely to accompany the kids alive on the biannual canoing trip. Another reason is that these communities are self-perpetuating, with new parents retreating to the bosom of Mother Church as soon as they hear their child's first screams, just as their parents did when they were born; having suddenly tiny people around – the sanctity of whose souls are, for some reason, in doubt – seems to drive both man and woman back into the clutches of organized religion, where they and their children become ensnared, so that when the children become adults and have kids of their own, they return to tug on the apron-strings of corpulent, silken-shirted charlatans who profess to know more about freely-accessible books than other people do.

I find it curious that people feel the need to worship in public, where they will be spoken to by the holy man and quietly shunned by their fellow parishioners if they do not perform their group's rites and rituals according to its rigid standards. It seems to me to be a very petty thing indeed, putting on expensive clothes in order to perambulate in the midst of other well-dressed people, everyone bowing and scraping and singing and tapping themselves on the head and torso in rigid adherence to a highly-ritualized ceremony meant to bring people, in some mysterious fashion, closer to the god that they think created them. If there were a god such as YHWH, the Christians' foul deity, an omnipotent, omniscient being that felt spited if it were not prayed to enough times or in the correct fashion, I think that that god would be able to discern whether its supplicants were performing correct rites in the correct way without them having to all get together and sing and wail and moan at each other in fancy, multi-million-dollar places of worship. In my opinion, it is by far preferable to pray in the privacy of one's own home, so that any mistakes one makes will not be seen as failures-to- adhere-to-policy, but, rather, as the steps that any fallible and self-aware creature must take on the path towards its own betterment and enlightenment.

In America, churches are built and refurbished and re-roofed regularly, financed by supposedly good people whose cash donations should instead be used to improve the lives of chronically poverty-stricken, perpetually hungry persons livingin the Third World; then again, however, I am little more than a spoiled, worthless whorphan – what the deuce do I know?

場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit

on my loss of faith

  My parents were both Lutherans. My father was a pastor, my mother a devout follower of the same religion. From birth until my fourteenth birthday (at which point I rebelled more openly) I was for most of my life either in a church, on my way to a church, or otherwise engaged in some sort of churchly activity. Among my earliest memories outside of wild animal encounters as a toddler take place in churches. I sang my first public solo, at the age of ten years, on Christmas Eve, to a packed house, at a church in Shamokin, Pennsylvania.

  All around me were devout and loyal Lutherans who all sang the same songs in the same fashion at the same times of year, their practices unchanging from one decade to the next. While I, in general, have no problem with people engaging in religious practice, I realized recently (after deep and introspective thought) that I had abandoned my own faith at a very young age. My belief in an invisible god, as well as any respect I might have had for the doctrine of the Lutheran church, these things faltered as early as the age of six or seven; by my teens, they were long gone. It is well that I was a shy and quiet child – if I had told anyone about my doubting, they would likely have forced me into re-education classes, so as to keep me enslaved to The Church. (I have never believed that thinking “bad” thoughts, doubtful thoughts, would get me in trouble with a godhead whose main message is love, forgiveness and compassion; thankfully, I recognized at a comparatively young age my fellow Lutherans' fear of eternal damnation for what it truly is: a thinly-veiled effort by the church hierarchy to keep the people in the pews hating themselves for sinning, and begging the pastor to do something about it.)

  I was a young boy standing in a front-row pew watching my father perform the service. I can remember looking at all the people around me, their heads bowed, their lips moving in unison, and I thought they were all going to look up at some point to spring the joke and laugh. I can recall looking at those docile individuals standing in that wood-paneled church, looking at them and bouncing the backs of my legs against the dark wood of the church's benches while laughing to myself quietly. I have since that time not stopped laughing at and mocking any organized religion that happens to cross my path. The complexity and self-contradictory nature of the thousands of different teachings found in the Christian bible had become overwhelmingly foreign to me at that young age, so foreign and confusing that I knew, in my deepest of knowing-places, that they could not all be true. At that young age, for some reason, I was able to see through the smoke-screen of canon and verse, and pluck from the brambles of dogma the few tender fruits of pure and honest meaning. In time, I have been able to utilize these fruits outside of the framework of the artificial, and inherently corrupted, structure of organized religion. (I wish sometimes that I had not lost faith, that I could somehow become faithful again, and believing, that I could abandon perpetual doubt, that I could once again with impotent fury shake a fist at the sky and curse the god who made me, but I do not believe in an external god, only in the Majesty of the Human Spirit – I hold myself responsible for my place in the world; I fix my problems instead of bitching about them.)

  Of course, standing in that church and doubting quietly, I feared Yahweh, that terrible and jealous god whom I had been taught from birth to fear with abject and abiding terror. Once I had in my own mind mocked him and laughed at him and shown him my young and tender behind, however, I realized that the might of His Wrath (an emphasis on paternalism pervades the Christian bible to the point that I am shocked that any woman would practice that faith willingly) existed only in myth, or in the tales of old. I knew at the age of seven years that religious indoctrination was very much a form of mental slavery, and I was abhorred by the fear-mongery and intimidation used by most organized religions to perpetuate their existence.

  Now, many years later, I am so very happy with my young self for his brave and clandestine decision to rebel quietly against the culture within which he had been so enmeshed. That seemingly simple act of doubt, along with Lao Tzu's Tao Teh Ching, has helped me to find the path to inner peace, to primal simplicity, to a life without need for self-aggrandizement or self-justification; now, the action is the goal. I let the chips fall where they may, no longer constrained by the stultifying and stagnant framework of a desperate and failing religious organization. Now, my mind is free and elastic, while my heart is empty and still.

  Three cheers for doubt, and for quiet and patient rebellion.

Spes Mea In Ratio Est - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp