No religious text
Is more true than its fellows
Read them all - with love
[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]
Showing posts with label religious. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religious. Show all posts
16 May 2018
28 July 2017
regarding LGBTQC warriors
Dear members of America’s armed forces:
Please consider supporting your fellow lesbian, gay, bisexal, transgender, queer, or curious (LGBTQC) soldiers by performing the following acts: declare that your entire platoon, your full company, and your whole battalion are openly LGBTQC.
Not only will this make the unconstitutional, un-American, and hateful targeting and ostracization of individual service-members more difficult, it will enrage terrorist extremists at home and abroad. The foreign terrorist extremists known as Daesh (formerly IS, or the Islamic State) will lose their minds once they realize they’re fighting against and being killed by transgender people or homosexuals; and the homegrown religious extremists spouting hatred and spreading fear within the United States will be driven to frenzy just imagining that transgender people or homosexuals are putting their lives on the line to defend American values. Please remember that it doesn’t matter if any or all of you are actually LGBTQC - declaring it openly sends a powerful message of acceptance, hope, and pride.
Unit cohesion is fundamental to mission success. By standing united against small-minded bigotry, you’ll help show the world that true Americans are virtuous, inclusive, level-headed, and not to be fucked with.
americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan
Please consider supporting your fellow lesbian, gay, bisexal, transgender, queer, or curious (LGBTQC) soldiers by performing the following acts: declare that your entire platoon, your full company, and your whole battalion are openly LGBTQC.
Not only will this make the unconstitutional, un-American, and hateful targeting and ostracization of individual service-members more difficult, it will enrage terrorist extremists at home and abroad. The foreign terrorist extremists known as Daesh (formerly IS, or the Islamic State) will lose their minds once they realize they’re fighting against and being killed by transgender people or homosexuals; and the homegrown religious extremists spouting hatred and spreading fear within the United States will be driven to frenzy just imagining that transgender people or homosexuals are putting their lives on the line to defend American values. Please remember that it doesn’t matter if any or all of you are actually LGBTQC - declaring it openly sends a powerful message of acceptance, hope, and pride.
Unit cohesion is fundamental to mission success. By standing united against small-minded bigotry, you’ll help show the world that true Americans are virtuous, inclusive, level-headed, and not to be fucked with.
americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan
14 September 2014
prayer and guns
No matter their flavor or doctrine or creed, religious extremists clearly feel the need to tell other people how to lead their lives, how to raise their children, how to dress their wives. This happens not only in the Fertile Crescent but also among American Protestants who claim that their nation is a Christian one then try to enforce it with prayer and guns. To us who've kept thinking it is hard to see the forces of ISIS, of Christianity, parading and boasting and spreading by might the teachings and habits that they see as Right. To live life in freedom by my chosen rules to me is worth more than a mountain of jewels; to live life in constant, perpetual fear that there maybe could be an extremist near just takes the wind out of my billowing sails and makes me weep buckets and flagons and pails. So stand up and fight for your right to choose to wear pretty dresses or to drink some booze, to worship in this house or nowhere at all, to stay down or get up right after a fall. This here call to action may not be too loud, it may not much rile up the masses and crowds, it is though a call for more pure anarchy and for less of religious insanity.
© americanifesto / 場黑麥
© americanifesto / 場黑麥
13 March 2013
on modernizing marriage
As happens often in this land of shifting mores, America is stretching long-held notions of marriage to the breaking point. Rougly half of all marriages in this country end in divorce, and homosexual couples from coast to coast are demanding the same rights as their heterosexual fellow countrymen. Among the many reasons we are in this mess is because marriage was long ago contaminated by religion. Now, instead of functioning as a secular affair designed to protect offspring and safeguard common assets, it is all too often clothed in the coarse, restrictive mantle of one organized belief system or another.
In general, Americans have little patience for old and outdated things; in the last sixty years ours has become more a nation of shoppers than one of fixers, or menders. If a car stops working the way it should, the average Ynki gets a new one. If her computer isn't fast enough, she trades it in. And if her husband turns out to be someone other than the person she thought she was marrying, she divorces him. Armed with a better understanding of what she is and is not looking for, her chances at finding a new spouse more to her liking on the open market are greater than they were before she wed.
Marriage should be a beneficial affair, one rife with Happiness, trust, and love mutually enjoyed. Often, though, people remain in broken or abusive marriages out of fear that willfully terminating them will cause their souls to be cast down for all eternity into mythical pits of mythical hellfire. If we could but free divorce from it negative moral and religious associations and celebrate it for the positive effect it can have, suffering Susan might yet escape the clutches of combative, callous Cal; through education and an different attitude, her soul could soar once more. When marriage is freed from the shackles of religious conviction, all involved win (except, of course, pastors and religious zealots who scream regularly for this author's blood). Please help end state-sanctioned inequality by signing this petition, today. Huzzah.
mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥
In general, Americans have little patience for old and outdated things; in the last sixty years ours has become more a nation of shoppers than one of fixers, or menders. If a car stops working the way it should, the average Ynki gets a new one. If her computer isn't fast enough, she trades it in. And if her husband turns out to be someone other than the person she thought she was marrying, she divorces him. Armed with a better understanding of what she is and is not looking for, her chances at finding a new spouse more to her liking on the open market are greater than they were before she wed.
Marriage should be a beneficial affair, one rife with Happiness, trust, and love mutually enjoyed. Often, though, people remain in broken or abusive marriages out of fear that willfully terminating them will cause their souls to be cast down for all eternity into mythical pits of mythical hellfire. If we could but free divorce from it negative moral and religious associations and celebrate it for the positive effect it can have, suffering Susan might yet escape the clutches of combative, callous Cal; through education and an different attitude, her soul could soar once more. When marriage is freed from the shackles of religious conviction, all involved win (except, of course, pastors and religious zealots who scream regularly for this author's blood). Please help end state-sanctioned inequality by signing this petition, today. Huzzah.
mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥
19 September 2012
dangerous self-seclusion
During the period when America's news outlets still reported on this country's ongoing occupation of the sovereign Republic of Afghanistan, they often spoke about the dangerous seclusion of much of the Afghani population. Living in rugged valleys so inaccessible that neighboring villages are sometimes wholly ignorant of one another, even though they live but a few miles apart, the television's talking-heads spoke long ago of the risks to Liberty, justice, and the rights of women that arise when people live in such seclusion, arguing that it granted their religious and societal leaders absolute power over their minds and bodies.
As things stand in America today, however, religious extremism similar to that practiced by close-minded, militant, and misogynistic Islamic leaders in al-Qaida and Hezbollah has infected the minds of even highly-placed officials in the Republican party, rotting the souls of America's Christian extremists, persons who call themselves dominionists. Just as the threat of religious terrorism that we once thought came from without now comes from within, the American people are secluding ourselves into walled-off little worlds whose borders are defined by the edges of our flat-screen television sets, the rims of our hand-held tablet computers, and the invisibly-reaching tendrils of our Wi-Fi transceivers. This home-grown technological self-seclusion is as great a threat to democracy and freedom as the threat posed by Afghani mullahs instilling hatred-of-all-things-unknown in the minds of children living in distant and dusty valleys. Whereas in Afghanistan many villagers only hear and see and are exposed to a limited and selective view of the world – one they receive from often poorly-educated and ill-informed religious leaders – we in America who choose to spend our lives riveted to self-illuminated talking boxes expose ourselves to a limited and selective view of the world, one we receive from often ill-informed religious and societal leaders who exploit fear-of-the-unknown and the power of oft-repeated lies (as per Goebbels) to corrupt the minds of erstwhile free-thinking and self-respecting citizens.
Many other authors and I have rung the warning-bell previously, altering others to the brainwashing and heart-hardening upon which America's mass-media preys, which it perpetuates at all cost, and which it does with such pervasive effectiveness that its methods were copied by the Nazis themselves – all no no avail; it seems that a majority of us Americans do not care that we have become docile sheep, that our minds are owned by vulture-capitalist billionaires, that our hearts are weighted down by pettiness and greed, or that we allow our views to be shaped by small-minded idiots who squawk at cameras with make-up-caked faces. It is not hard, however, to free our minds from enslavement to television or to allow our opinions to grow out of hubris and humility; the healing begins when we turn off our TVs, toss aside our tablets, switch off our radios, and leave our houses to have a nice walk, driving Fear from our minds with gradual surety and loving effort. President Franklin D. Roosevelt got it right when, in 1933, he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Fear festers in the minds of people who shut their ears to differing opinions, who close their hearts to the shades of truth found in dissenting voices, who allow themselves to be caught up in religious fervor and nationalistic self-righteousness. Please, friend, remember to doubt everything that you hear, to question all that you are told, and to fight the urge to live in the manner of a secluded villager who believes everything his mullah tells him. Mahalo.
場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit
As things stand in America today, however, religious extremism similar to that practiced by close-minded, militant, and misogynistic Islamic leaders in al-Qaida and Hezbollah has infected the minds of even highly-placed officials in the Republican party, rotting the souls of America's Christian extremists, persons who call themselves dominionists. Just as the threat of religious terrorism that we once thought came from without now comes from within, the American people are secluding ourselves into walled-off little worlds whose borders are defined by the edges of our flat-screen television sets, the rims of our hand-held tablet computers, and the invisibly-reaching tendrils of our Wi-Fi transceivers. This home-grown technological self-seclusion is as great a threat to democracy and freedom as the threat posed by Afghani mullahs instilling hatred-of-all-things-unknown in the minds of children living in distant and dusty valleys. Whereas in Afghanistan many villagers only hear and see and are exposed to a limited and selective view of the world – one they receive from often poorly-educated and ill-informed religious leaders – we in America who choose to spend our lives riveted to self-illuminated talking boxes expose ourselves to a limited and selective view of the world, one we receive from often ill-informed religious and societal leaders who exploit fear-of-the-unknown and the power of oft-repeated lies (as per Goebbels) to corrupt the minds of erstwhile free-thinking and self-respecting citizens.
Many other authors and I have rung the warning-bell previously, altering others to the brainwashing and heart-hardening upon which America's mass-media preys, which it perpetuates at all cost, and which it does with such pervasive effectiveness that its methods were copied by the Nazis themselves – all no no avail; it seems that a majority of us Americans do not care that we have become docile sheep, that our minds are owned by vulture-capitalist billionaires, that our hearts are weighted down by pettiness and greed, or that we allow our views to be shaped by small-minded idiots who squawk at cameras with make-up-caked faces. It is not hard, however, to free our minds from enslavement to television or to allow our opinions to grow out of hubris and humility; the healing begins when we turn off our TVs, toss aside our tablets, switch off our radios, and leave our houses to have a nice walk, driving Fear from our minds with gradual surety and loving effort. President Franklin D. Roosevelt got it right when, in 1933, he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Fear festers in the minds of people who shut their ears to differing opinions, who close their hearts to the shades of truth found in dissenting voices, who allow themselves to be caught up in religious fervor and nationalistic self-righteousness. Please, friend, remember to doubt everything that you hear, to question all that you are told, and to fight the urge to live in the manner of a secluded villager who believes everything his mullah tells him. Mahalo.
場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit
18 August 2011
on paying the price
During a recent conversation with a middle-aged woman of the conservative mind-set, she said, “The Europeans are paying the price for tolerating Islam.” When I pressed the issue, my counterpart explained that Europeans have been exposed to bombings (see here), murders (Theo van Gogh murder, see here), and extremist rhetoric (see here) emanating from the Muslim communities that have been allowed to flourish in their midst. I tried to explain to her that it was foolish to vilify an entire religion based on the actions of a few of its radical members, but she stood fast, her mind soon locked up in obvious Fear of an impending Worldwide Caliphate.
She was reluctant to offer any kind of solution to this supposed problem, beyond the solutions I deduced by reading between the lines of her general outlook, those being either the forced emigration of any and all Muslims to places outside of Europe, or the sequestering thereof into controlled and separated communities (otherwise known as concentration camps).
In response, I stated that America has suffered also from the decision to tolerate any and all religions, foremost among them Christianity, a religion that has spawned its fair share of murderous and extremists individuals. When pressed, I gave the examples of the 2009 abortion clinic murders perpetrated by a Christian extremist (Dr. Tiller murder, see here), the Oklahoma city bombings (see here), and the marked increase in religiously conservative and extremist rhetoric, including the widespread disillusionment that has lead many Americans (see here) to believe that this country was founded as a Christian nation (it was not – read my blog series No American Theocracy).
I am not saying that Christianity is solely responsible for our country's woes, or that those who believe in it are necessarily bad or dangerous people, although it is true that much of the fear-based and xenophobic rhetoric heard today (see here) and a considerable number of attacks against innocent civilians (see here) emanate from the greater envelope of the Christian religion. What I am saying is that religion requires of the individual a relinquishment of his ties to clear thinking and to reason, and, with its frequent reliance on the belief that it alone is the road to the salvation of the soul and that all others are false roads that lead to eternal death and endless suffering, one can easily get carried away and do something foolish in the belief that one's actions are somehow providing pleasure or satisfaction for That Force Which Cannot Be Named.
She was reluctant to offer any kind of solution to this supposed problem, beyond the solutions I deduced by reading between the lines of her general outlook, those being either the forced emigration of any and all Muslims to places outside of Europe, or the sequestering thereof into controlled and separated communities (otherwise known as concentration camps).
In response, I stated that America has suffered also from the decision to tolerate any and all religions, foremost among them Christianity, a religion that has spawned its fair share of murderous and extremists individuals. When pressed, I gave the examples of the 2009 abortion clinic murders perpetrated by a Christian extremist (Dr. Tiller murder, see here), the Oklahoma city bombings (see here), and the marked increase in religiously conservative and extremist rhetoric, including the widespread disillusionment that has lead many Americans (see here) to believe that this country was founded as a Christian nation (it was not – read my blog series No American Theocracy).
I am not saying that Christianity is solely responsible for our country's woes, or that those who believe in it are necessarily bad or dangerous people, although it is true that much of the fear-based and xenophobic rhetoric heard today (see here) and a considerable number of attacks against innocent civilians (see here) emanate from the greater envelope of the Christian religion. What I am saying is that religion requires of the individual a relinquishment of his ties to clear thinking and to reason, and, with its frequent reliance on the belief that it alone is the road to the salvation of the soul and that all others are false roads that lead to eternal death and endless suffering, one can easily get carried away and do something foolish in the belief that one's actions are somehow providing pleasure or satisfaction for That Force Which Cannot Be Named.
In these times of increasingly frequent political and economic crises, we have seen the rise of supposedly Christian politicos who loudly express their often extremist political views. When we read or hear the rantings of Islamic extremists, we are alarmed; the rational and clear-thinking American should be just as alarmed hearing some of the more radical Islamic rhetoric as he would be hearing the fundamentalist Christian views being expressed by prominent individuals such as Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin (see here). Any extremist religious opinion is a danger to society as a whole: weak-minded individuals are easily swayed by those they think are speaking to them the words of some unseen god, and the gullible will gladly participate in violence against innocents so long as they believe it might secure their place, after they die, in some fictitious realm of edible joy and eternal conga lines.
If Europeans are paying the price for their tolerance of Islam, Americans are paying the price for our tolerance of Christianity. But to outlaw one religious practice or the other would be to destroy the fabric of our democracy and to trammel the most sacred rights granted by the Constitution, among them being freedom of religion and, more importantly, liberty of thought and deed.
Pay the price we must, for violent acts by religious extremists will not end until religion itself has ended. To tolerate one religion is to tolerate them all; we are stuck with our extremists, Christian or Muslim, Jewish or Mormon. So if you are worried about Muslim extremists wreaking havoc over in Europe, remember that there are Christian extremists here in America who are wreaking havoc too.
The next time some religious zealot starts screaming at you on the street corner, tell her to take a nap, and to practice her crazy beliefs at home, by herself.
Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp
If Europeans are paying the price for their tolerance of Islam, Americans are paying the price for our tolerance of Christianity. But to outlaw one religious practice or the other would be to destroy the fabric of our democracy and to trammel the most sacred rights granted by the Constitution, among them being freedom of religion and, more importantly, liberty of thought and deed.
Pay the price we must, for violent acts by religious extremists will not end until religion itself has ended. To tolerate one religion is to tolerate them all; we are stuck with our extremists, Christian or Muslim, Jewish or Mormon. So if you are worried about Muslim extremists wreaking havoc over in Europe, remember that there are Christian extremists here in America who are wreaking havoc too.
The next time some religious zealot starts screaming at you on the street corner, tell her to take a nap, and to practice her crazy beliefs at home, by herself.
Ultima Ratio Regum - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp
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