Priests refer to their parishioners as "my flock."
Rightly so. They are sheep -- to be herded, to be fed mysticism, to be intellectually and morally slaughtered.
The flock must bend to religion's make-believe metaphysics, to religion's insistence on epistemological retreat (faith), to religion's demands of immorality, to religion's self-sacrificing politics.
Religion is the ideal training camp for fascism, socialism, communism, liberalism, conservatism, progressivism, despotism -- any political "ism" that demands self-sacrifice and obedience. The sheep believe they rebel, but even when the sheep enjoy their tea parties, they demand sacrifice from fellow sheep via taxation, regulation, subsidies, welfare. Sure, these sheep say they want less authority and less obedience, but they simply ask for smaller knives at the throats of their fellow citizens. They can't help it. They are sheep.
The non-religious are sheep, too, though they like to think they are rebels and hippies and anti-establishment and trend-setters and intellectual. They are better sheep than the religious sheep. They lambast "greed" and wealth on par with Jesus, unlike their conservative brethren, who ignore the hypocrisy.
The god of the non-religious is Immanuel Kant, who proclaimed that duty is what rightly drives human beings and that we are born with "categorical imperatives" in our mind that guide duty and "good will." In other words, we ain't in control; we should obey some intrinsic things in our minds, and we should sacrifice ourselves and happiness to others and duties to others. (Kant was the King of circular reasoning)
There have been many Kant disciples through the last two centuries, but it is ultimately Kant that the atheistic sheep worship -- ironically, because Kant himself was a theist, whose main purpose was to give alleged vindication of a god's presence and authority over morality: god is necessary for the "ideal of the supreme good."
And so we have the superstitious left and right in this country, who've abandoned their minds to their gods of the heavens and universities. The sheep have surrendered their rationality for obedience and irrational doctrines and concomitant self-sacrifice. They have disdain for themselves and, therefore, for all individuals. Their self-loathing projects itself up the rest of us, insisting that we be punished physically for their intellectual misery.
They cannot believe that individuals have efficacy, the ability to understand reality and the ability to be independently happy. They cannot believe that individuals must be left alone. Individuals must be commanded, and individuals must obey. They must serve. They must, ironically, try to make others happy but not themselves.
And, so, they cannot understand individual rights. They cannot understand rights. They do not want rights and they insist that others do not have them either. We are all sheep, after all -- unworthy of rights, waiting for our next commands, waiting to be rightfully slaughtered. Bound sheep do not like unbound sheep.
As long as the vast majority of humanity allows superstition to grip it by the throat and cut off oxygen to the brain, we will not have individual rights. We cannot even discuss it seriously until great gobs of individuals take ideas and themselves and reality seriously. We will continue to live in the Dark Ages as our "modern" brethren and sisters flock to their particular brand of mysticism.
I sometimes wish I could live 300 years hence, when Objectivism has won and young children's mouths gape open as they hear of a time in the 21st century when people, even adults, actually BELIEVED IN GODS!
At least the very thought of such a time and such children makes me smile. And I've seen that gaping mouth on the face of my own lovely daughter. And, oh, how I smile!
Showing posts with label faith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label faith. Show all posts
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Saturday, February 20, 2010
The voodoo lady next door -- and our "modern" world
The elderly English (actually Irish) lady next door is in her dark basement room sticking pins in one of her dolls that looks like me and chanting somesuch incantations directed eastward at my abode. I can't prove it, but every once in a while I get an "ouchy" in some part of my body that I can't explain.
She and I and her husband used to be friends over glasses of a high-dollar Bahamas liqueur; that's when she told me she did it (the voodoo-doll thing) to everyone who pissed her off in her life -- and now she's pissed off at me (long story involving my daughter evidently petting her cat too hard or something and me telling the old witch that she was, um, an old witch after she banned my daughter from her yard forever or until the British get their colonies back).
And on an unschooler list I'm on, a lady said yesterday that she believes in reincarnation and that her children *knew* they were being born before they were born but that the lady wasn't ready for a while and the children knew they would have to wait until she was ready. (I'm not making this up. Hell, I COULDN'T!)
And last week, as I blogged before, some old high-school friend wanted me to join a 600,000-strong Facebook group that beats their children and is proud of it because it evidently keeps kids from going rotten.
And Tiger Woods yesterday said he needed a relapse into Buddhism to "control" his desires.
And Pat Robertson ... NO, NO, NO, forget it. He makes the voodoo lady look like Aristotle.
And more and more sports nutties are pointing heavenward after they make a good play. Where the hell is The Vigilante God of Reason's serrated thunderbolt to lop off the faith-fingers when they are pointing skyward?!
And ObaMa and his coteries of media talking heads smugly smile as they talk of robbing me and millions of other innocents of our money. "Thank you. Can I have another!"
And the Vietnam Vet across the street from me regales me on the "nobility" of the working man, as compared to the business man, and demands that the business MAN be made a spectacle of and his cash stripped from his business to feed 50,000 people around the world starving. "I don't give a shit about those 50,000 people, and the 'noble' working man votes to have my money stolen from me," I tell the Vet. "What?!" he says with lunatic-fringe eyes and a lurch forward to within inches of my face. Soon, he's stomping home in exasperation.
And the Republicans pretend they are true Tea Partiers and try to steal the show and then put their vunder-chick Sarah on the podium and she melts the GOP believers with talk of God and the sanctity of life and all the usual faith-drivel we've come to loathe and fear as rational citizens seeking distance from the faith-based Zombies.
And then you turn around more often in America and see women cloaked in black from head to toe with beady eyes leering out, and rednecks standing defiantly next to their Ten Commandments at the courthouse, and the usually sensible Sean Hannity going on a God rant, and some pencil-necked half-brain dropping to his knees five times a day and aiming his head roughly at Mecca and his ass at the rest of us.
What the HELL is a rational man to do? How the HELL are we ever to have a free country, from basement to podium, from livingroom to shopping mall, when the lunatics are on the grass making daisy chains while America burns?
There's been an insanity loose in the world from the dawn of mankind -- a separation from reality, a tendency toward the subjective world of the wishful, an inclination to laud emotions devoid of sensibility, a powerful drive to control the outside world via an inner world of sanctimonious delusion, a devout pursuit of the shrouding void, a determination to avoid this world at all costs to pretend that something might be better or that there is allegedly more (Who would WANT more than this wondrous, complex, intoxicating world?!)
If we modern humans make it past this Time of Insanity (as we can only with the work of Ayn Rand), our rational ancestors will have no trouble lumping us in with the Dark Ages torture chambers, the voodoo dolls of 18th century Africa and the Caribbean (and my neighbor's basement), the pagan incense of the Roman era and the sun and animal worship of early man.
Most of our minds are little different, incapable of pellucid thought, incredulous at requests for rationality, befuddled by demands of decency and justice, meandering in a self-inflicted daze, worshipping idols and gods spontaneously and seeking death or exclusion for those standing proudly, firmly and happily on terra firma, looking adoringly at the star-flaked skies and the wonders we have created.
The chasm between the rational man and the irrational man is no different than that between the sane man and the insane man. In fact, they are one in the same.
She and I and her husband used to be friends over glasses of a high-dollar Bahamas liqueur; that's when she told me she did it (the voodoo-doll thing) to everyone who pissed her off in her life -- and now she's pissed off at me (long story involving my daughter evidently petting her cat too hard or something and me telling the old witch that she was, um, an old witch after she banned my daughter from her yard forever or until the British get their colonies back).
And on an unschooler list I'm on, a lady said yesterday that she believes in reincarnation and that her children *knew* they were being born before they were born but that the lady wasn't ready for a while and the children knew they would have to wait until she was ready. (I'm not making this up. Hell, I COULDN'T!)
And last week, as I blogged before, some old high-school friend wanted me to join a 600,000-strong Facebook group that beats their children and is proud of it because it evidently keeps kids from going rotten.
And Tiger Woods yesterday said he needed a relapse into Buddhism to "control" his desires.
And Pat Robertson ... NO, NO, NO, forget it. He makes the voodoo lady look like Aristotle.
And more and more sports nutties are pointing heavenward after they make a good play. Where the hell is The Vigilante God of Reason's serrated thunderbolt to lop off the faith-fingers when they are pointing skyward?!
And ObaMa and his coteries of media talking heads smugly smile as they talk of robbing me and millions of other innocents of our money. "Thank you. Can I have another!"
And the Vietnam Vet across the street from me regales me on the "nobility" of the working man, as compared to the business man, and demands that the business MAN be made a spectacle of and his cash stripped from his business to feed 50,000 people around the world starving. "I don't give a shit about those 50,000 people, and the 'noble' working man votes to have my money stolen from me," I tell the Vet. "What?!" he says with lunatic-fringe eyes and a lurch forward to within inches of my face. Soon, he's stomping home in exasperation.
And the Republicans pretend they are true Tea Partiers and try to steal the show and then put their vunder-chick Sarah on the podium and she melts the GOP believers with talk of God and the sanctity of life and all the usual faith-drivel we've come to loathe and fear as rational citizens seeking distance from the faith-based Zombies.
And then you turn around more often in America and see women cloaked in black from head to toe with beady eyes leering out, and rednecks standing defiantly next to their Ten Commandments at the courthouse, and the usually sensible Sean Hannity going on a God rant, and some pencil-necked half-brain dropping to his knees five times a day and aiming his head roughly at Mecca and his ass at the rest of us.
What the HELL is a rational man to do? How the HELL are we ever to have a free country, from basement to podium, from livingroom to shopping mall, when the lunatics are on the grass making daisy chains while America burns?
There's been an insanity loose in the world from the dawn of mankind -- a separation from reality, a tendency toward the subjective world of the wishful, an inclination to laud emotions devoid of sensibility, a powerful drive to control the outside world via an inner world of sanctimonious delusion, a devout pursuit of the shrouding void, a determination to avoid this world at all costs to pretend that something might be better or that there is allegedly more (Who would WANT more than this wondrous, complex, intoxicating world?!)
If we modern humans make it past this Time of Insanity (as we can only with the work of Ayn Rand), our rational ancestors will have no trouble lumping us in with the Dark Ages torture chambers, the voodoo dolls of 18th century Africa and the Caribbean (and my neighbor's basement), the pagan incense of the Roman era and the sun and animal worship of early man.
Most of our minds are little different, incapable of pellucid thought, incredulous at requests for rationality, befuddled by demands of decency and justice, meandering in a self-inflicted daze, worshipping idols and gods spontaneously and seeking death or exclusion for those standing proudly, firmly and happily on terra firma, looking adoringly at the star-flaked skies and the wonders we have created.
The chasm between the rational man and the irrational man is no different than that between the sane man and the insane man. In fact, they are one in the same.
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