Sunday, October 4, 2015

Yeah. Here's the thing...

Yeah.  Here's the thing:  There was this group of people in the Middle East, about 2-3000 years ago, who had their own god, whose true name is unpronounceable, (but the letters of his name you are actually allowed to pronounce if you're not into summoning demons in your spare-time sounds like "Yahweh"), and this god laid on them a bunch of taboos, alla which seemed to be pretty much the opposite of what other groups of people in the area were doing, because their god wanted them to be "peculiar."  Rahrah or whatever you call him forbade his people from consorting with those other folks because he is "jealous."  These people found that a lot of those taboos didn't make sense and did them anyway because everyone else was doing them and BTW, the gods and oh, yeah, what's this thing called a "goddess," that these other folks had, well, they seemed much cooler. The guys whose job it was to enforce these taboos spun invasions by other countries, like the Philistines and the Persians, as ways their god was punishing them for breaking those taboos, like eating shellfish and wearing clothes of different fabrics, getting tattoos, eating pork, etc. which really didn't do much to change the mind of these people since those other folks who had goddesses had great shrimp restaurants where you could also get a tattoo while you wait for a table.

And the Persians were conquering everybody, so the idea that this peculiar and jealous god was punishing them didn't stir the kool-aid.  And it was obvious that the whole "suppress women" thing was clearly to keep folks from recognizing those goddesses, maybe because Wrongway couldn't get himself a girlfriend.

Once this group of people were released from being held captive by those empires that conquered them and were able to return back home, the guys who enforced the taboos culled a bunch of myths and legends that seemed to pretty much plagiarize the myths and legends of other nearby cultures so that this group of people could have some sort of foundation to their culture, given that their history had been pretty much as a group of nomadic shepherds.  Which is why, for example, the Big Book of Semitic Myths and Legends has two separate creation stories and multiple names for Runway or whatever his name is, one of the names actually translating to a plural noun...  One thing that was especially interesting was how the time they pitched their tents in Egypt was completely turned around from them having their own city there and assimilating into their culture (proven by archaeology) into them being slaves of the Egyptians who had to escape their captivity, with the help of this gun-nut named Charlton Heston.  The point of all that trying to get them to, again, obey Curdsnwhey and his wacky taboos, since he was jealous of Horus or something.  Anyway, priests gotta eat, too and yes, that's right...I said give me 10% of your wealth.

About 2000 years ago, one of these guys whose job it was to enforce the taboos realized this system of taboos wasn't working and figured out that it's not really important what taboo you did or didn't break, it was what was in your heart that was important and if you treat others the way you want to be treated, the rest of the big questions as to which restaurant has better shrimp will just work themselves out.  So he quit his job collecting the 10% and became homeless and found a dozen guys who were interested in what he was saying and he began trying to explain this new way of looking at the world to anyone who would listen while trying to resist the advances of that Magdalene chick who wanted him to settle down so she could figure out how to love him.

Well, because the other dudes whose careers depended on enforcing the taboos saw this as a threat to their industry, they paid one of this guy's 12 male friends that he hung around with for 3 and a half years (but they were all just good friends), to hand him over to the authorities on trumped up charges.  They were pretty sure he had stole cigarillos from a convenience store, well, at least he matched the description of the guy.  Look, if he had simply complied with the orders given by the authorities he wouldn't have been shot in the back while running away.  That guy was just a punk and a thug who wore a hoodie and deserved to die for probably stealing something that is the value of a combo meal.  A fairly small group of people realized that this guy who said "forget the taboos, just love each other" had a point and made him into a martyr to this cause that we should just Love One Another and let politics and organized religion and what you eat or wear alone because that stuff just gets in the way of being, gosh, just NICE to each other.

The Roman Empire didn't like that whole hippie love-in stuff much so they hired this guy who had never met the martyr, (had him change his name to Paul since he was put into the Jehovah Witness Protection Program), to write up a bunch of doctrine and dogma and oversee a mythology about this martyr so that the 11 remaining guys who had actually been trained by the martyr to spread his message would be ignored and therefore create an organized religion so that this whole Love One Another message could get established as an organized religion with its own secret handshakes and stuff since it seemed to really create a placated, contented attitude in people since they were willing to "render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar, etc."  So these people were organized into a cult which kinda freaked out average Romans since they were worshiping this guy who had been executed by the Romans, claiming he rose from the dead and could walk on water and such and they wrote up 4 separate stories several decades after the martyr's death that really ramped up the whole "he's actually this messiah that all these stories and anecdotes from the Big Book of Myths and Legends told about and look he could also do magic" thing, which didn't make a lot of sense to a lot of the people who were still into the following taboo thing because that messiah as described in that Big Book was clearly a military, political leader who was described as The Lion of Judah who would "crush the snake that was biting his heel" and etc. etc. etc.  The whole "let's all bring our wealth into a big pile and then redistribute it so that no one goes without" smelled like some Commie, Socialist plot, too.

Then when Nero began using followers of this martyr as tiki torches in his garden after he blamed them for the big fire in Rome, many Roman citizens felt a lot of sympathy for these folks and sure, their religion was weird, but no more weirder than Mithraism, which this new cult had a lot of similarities to, anyway.  And they were so gosh darn NICE and all.  So this religion really took off, meanwhile the 11 other guys are holding their hands on their head trying to tell these people that no, no, you're doing it wrong...it's not about creating a religion at all.  Oh, just go ahead and crucify me upside-down, I can't take it anymore.  You want to flay me alive, yeah, go ahead.

So this whole new cult served the dual purpose of creating a growing population of people in that area of the Middle-East that didn't care if the Romans ruled them or not, while at the same time creating a negative view of the taboo-followers who were seeking independence from Roman rule because, gosh, those Love One Another folks are so dang NICE.  Eventually the religion of the taboo followers was rendered null and void in 70 AD when the Romans finally put down their rebellion and destroyed the temple the taboo-followers needed to actually follow the instructions of their god, Larry, or whatever his name sounded like, and the taboo-followers sort of dispersed wherever they could and basically created a new religion that involves these things called dreidels and funny hats and making motion pictures and Broadway shows, although they did keep the "don't eat pork" thing...while being persecuted as the ones responsible for having the martyr shot for wearing a hoodie after dark in a garden he wasn't supposed to be in, while the New Roman Empire just continues to chuckle to itself while it counts its tithes.

Meanwhile, the whole "act like sheep" thing was working so well in the Middle East and with the growth of the cult in Rome itself that the Roman Empire pretended that it fell, and instituted this "Love One Another but with dogma and doctrine and oh by the way the martyr is actually a god" thing over the Roman citizens as well and began to rule people both politically and religiously and brought back, irony of ironies, most of the whole taboo thing. Then they began to conquer the rest of the European continent's "hearts and minds," convincing rulers to join the cult, which instantly made all the ruler's subjects members of the cult...although they decided to ignore the rubbish about don't eat shellfish or wear different types of fabrics or plant different types of crops and all the other taboos that just seemed weird.  Subjugation of women was, and still is, in.  So this new version of the Roman Empire basically made it so that when you were born, you were a member of this cult and each generation of people in this cult are basically forced through systemic indoctrination to both claim they Love One Another, while also following the remaining list of "Official Taboos" as a member of this cult.  So do as we who run the cult say, or we'll condemn your eternal soul and burn you at the stake, and don't forget, Ebay (or whatever his unpronounceable name is) loves you.

So soon the Love One Another thing began to apply only to those who belonged to the cult and the people in charge of governing the cult weren't so gosh darn nice at all, oh no, and people who didn't want to join the cult, or wanted to leave the cult, were tortured, burned at the stake, their countries invaded and claimed for the New Roman Empire.  The people in Europe who were expected to belong to this cult especially were taught that although there was an established religion and gods and cultural traditions with their own taboos there already for long centuries, if not millennia, that all that was just a deceit by this evil entity (although the Big Book clearly had him in one story as one of those angel-things who basically had a wager with the god named Woohoo or something that this guy Job was not as taboo-following as he seemed) that they were told existed even though their old religions really didn't have that sort of entity since a lot of their gods were dualistic in nature and so demonstrated that good and evil were often a matter of perspective and that you can't have life without something dying and vice versa.  You know, the whole circle of life thing.

So their ancestral gods were relegated to myths, and their ancestors described as dirty, ignorant barbarians who needed "ancient aliens" to build their Stonehenges for them, while the myths of those Middle-Eastern people were taught as being actual things that actually happened...which is like trying to convince someone that a tropical beach is actually a snow-covered mountain.  But when you threaten to burn them at the stake if they disagree, people will tell you almost anything you want to hear.  We don't burn people at the stake anymore, but try getting that promotion at work if you insist on showing them all that motherfucking sand.

So before long, Europeans didn't know anything other than this cult which held power over them politically and spiritually so that questioning the cult was not only heresy but also treason.  So, basically in this situation, one's political views and religious views become blurred into this inflexible, conservative, fixed mindset in which you are told what to think by the taboo-enforcers and you find yourself as sheep that can only bleat when you are confronted by facts that oppose the New Roman Empire's dogma.  Because changing your mind about politics is also condemning your eternal soul, so yeah, they continued to vote Republican. These Europeans built for themselves a worldly empire, with a divine mandate as an excuse, and so subjugated other countries around the world, taking the land from the inhabitants, forcing them to join the cult, until they themselves began to forget their own heritage and culture. And now because you had a bunch of Europeans who had their own heritage and religious culture removed, having been replaced by Middle Eastern gods they have ZERO connection to, material power and wealth began to be more important than mental and spiritual contentment.

Because when you lack spiritual and mental contentment, you invariably will turn to physical pleasures, and while these give you a fleeting feeling of euphoria or contentment, that's just a sensual, temporary experience and if you aren't a balanced, "all things in moderation" person, dependence on these sensual delights to get you through your day can turn into addiction, whether it's food, binge-watching bad teevee shows, sex, alcohol, the accumulation of wealth and temporal power, or just the rush you get when you're being an insensitive asshole to someone who is so gosh-darned NICE.  So, quite a population of these cultists give lip-service to living a good life and Loving One Another and more and more have become obsessed with a very short list of taboos until there's only really a handful left that these cultists still cling to, most of the others have been disproved as being taboos, or at least no longer needed...like the taboos against eating shellfish or eating food 3 days after it was prepared are no longer applicable, thanks to the deep fryers at Long John Silvers and refrigerators.  In many cases the taboo of "thou shalt not kill" only applies in certain cases...which is why the same people who want to outlaw abortions line up to buy the movie American Sniper.

Which is really the case for any culture's taboos, they are mostly arbitrary, besides the ones about murder, stealing, lying, etc. that any culture needs to prevent chaos, and when even taboos like "thou shalt not commit murder" are applied completely arbitrarily, that does still lead to chaos. So today you have billions of people on this planet who really have no idea how to connect to the divine principle at all since their ancestral gods have been turned into characters appearing in superhero movies or in children's books about the Myths of Greece or summat and they have no actual connection with those "peculiar" Middle-Eastern gods they are told to worship, whether they live in North American, Japan, Russia, South America, etc. so they have turned to materialism, social status, political power and substance abuse in order to fill that god-shaped hole in their life.  You can actually hear the water slosh around in their heads if they try to think independently about, pretty much anything.  And they're usually not very nice, because they're grumpy.

It has created conversely as well a growing population of people who think now that the only reality is physical matter and that things are only things, but who still find some reason to get out of the bed each morning and give a damn about anything since they believe they are only a thing controlled by electrical impulses that is a byproduct of a thing in their bodies, which is a thing. In short, fundamental, orthodox religion, when it is shown to be null and void, that religion having already successfully relegated the old religions to only myths, this creates a population of people who throw the baby martyr out with the bathwater.  Basically, most of the world is spiritually incompetent.  Whether you recognize there is no divine nature to reality or not, science has in fact shown us that physical reality is composed only of energy in varying degrees of coalescence, which leaves us with the only true reality to the universe as being consciousness..."luminous beings we are, not this crude matter"...

But back to the cultists: they hire each other for important jobs other than promote the people best qualified for the jobs, they strive to look and act and talk the same, they all support each other's ignorant, misinformed, bigoted, racist, erroneous views on a wide variety of topics because questioning each other about anything besides what sports team they like or other really unimportant topics is...taboo.  They are afraid of others who are different from them and persecute those who have different views, while at the same time crying and protesting if their own views are ever questioned.

So this lack of the ability to think of anything other than what you've been told to think because you've been told you're bound for the lake o' fire if you do is why, when the country that they live in, for example, has an obsession with guns which results in people shooting each other to solve a (perceived) problem, whether it's a loner in a movie theater or a church or a school or a racist white cop who sees our president's "uppity" face when they see a black man in a wheelchair who might just have maybe a gun in his lap or who should be strangled to death because he was selling cigarettes out of season or that the black kid (looks like a thug) who punched him should be shot in the back while he was running away because, yeah, he matched the description of the kid who might have stolen some cigarillos that cost, maybe $5...when these tragedies occur, those people whose minds belong to this cult are unable to deal with them in a rational matter but instead obfuscate, lie, spit out toxic, mean-spirited Facebook posts, etc. because they have been brainwashed into thinking that religion has ANYthing to do with politics so that their worldview is joined-at-the-hip to the fate of their immortal soul and are basically scared to death of the notion that everything they have been told about everything is wrong, which is pretty much exactly their situation.

This is why they can't change their mind about one thing without changing it about the other and their political views have been designed for them to make them fear others who are different because the last thing the corporations, mostly run by members of this cult, want is for people to start agreeing and cooperating with each other on things that our ancestors had already figured out millennia ago, and if people become more mentally and spiritually content, why, they might even stop buying all their shit. They want to divide people into members of The Club and those who want don't want to belong into any club, and by the way, not joining The Club makes the Peculiar He-Man-Women-Hating Semitic God of Animal Husbandry, NoWay, angry, cause he's jealous and stuff, eh? And all this is why therefore it seems that they are incapable of having independent, objective thought or being able to employ even the most basic common-sense, even in the face of crisis of their own making...

While meanwhile, the martyr who just wanted us to love each other and enjoy BBQ and shrimp and polyester blends, wherever he is, has a face that looks like tartar steak because of all the times he's had to face-palm himself in the past 2000 years.

Selah