Tag Archives: Bible

Were Qurans the only books burned? Where’s the outrage from US churches?

If the Qurans recently burned at NATO bases in Afghanistan were disposed of accidentally in the incineration pits, aren’t American Fundamentalist Talibans concerned about where the excess bibles go? By now we all know the M.O. at US camps in our occupied territories is to incinerate any and all unused inventory. They’re even ordered to burn leftover bottled water. Can there be any doubt if the US forces found themselves with too many Qurans to go around, that they had fewer takers for Christian bibles? When you raise the subject in these parts, even yokels profess their indignation at the prospect of burning a bible, so wouldn’t they want to scrutinize what’s being burned at our military bases? Or is it the same with American flags? When hippies do it, it’s a national sacrilege, when the Army does it, it’s ordained cremation.

The Colorado Springs Occupy Movement needs to burn some Bibles out at Fort Carson perhaps?

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‘The U.S. government and the American commander of NATO-led forces in Afghanistan apologized after Afghan laborers found charred copies of the Koran while collecting rubbish at the sprawling Bagram Airbase, about an hour’s drive north of Kabul.’ See Reuters Six killed, many wounded in Afghan Koran protests.

A fake D.C. ‘apology’ is not enough though. The US soldiers deliberately disrespected Occupied Afghanistan and deliberately insulted the Afghan people who are overwhelmingly Muslim, and the US soldiers just don’t care much how they trample on these poor peoples of the world they are hired guns to oppress. So what if Occupy Colorado Springs were to burn some Bibles so that these soldiers headed out to Afghanistan don’t just forget and repeat with some new atrocity or another against the Afghan population?

What if also the American Antiwar Movement threatened to burn some Bibles out at all the US military installations around the US? Wouldn’t that get the message through to the US troops that some of us American people are just as outraged at ‘our’ US occupying army contempt for other peoples of the world as the Afghan people are themselves? Yes, I think it would get that point across rather sharply!

It would also bring into light the entire issue of just how wrong it is for the US to be militarily occupying Afghanistan. It simply really is a criminal act our country as a whole is engaged in as a whole, and we should be utterly ashamed of what ‘our’ troops are doing, and not proud about them at all. Shame on the US for being ‘holy book’ burners! The US troops knew just exactly what they were doing and chose to disrespect the people who hold another religion than their own.

Consider the Lilies

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My friends are no doubt a scrappy bunch. It’s no big surprise that guys like Jon and Adam and–holy shit–Skip, are pissed off and ready to burn a few barns down, so to speak. I don’t think I need to look up a bunch of fancy references to convince anyone that things are dire, dire, dire. The college students I went hiking with yesterday afternoon will have to live what, like 20,0000 years to pay off the stupid shell-game debt they supposedly owe. Some guy on Adam’s page was trying to convince me the whole business is thus because we never pay our bills. Bullshit. It’s like this because a buncha paranoid Fascist clowns have set up a little magick trick to try and convince us they have some legitimate claim to all the cheese. THEY DO NOT!!!

So there’s a fight working alright, and I’ve been in it since I was a potential in my Granddad’s genetic line. But I recently noticed–this is so weird–we’re all fighting the wrong guy, and he is us. If we collapse our little bubble here in our little gob of the quantum foam, we’re all screwed; not just us little guys. And we really do have enough guys to kick their Fascist asses on the way down. But guess what, we’ve all got it wrong!

Like it or not we’re all in this together. We’re each and every one of us as fucked up as the Devil!!! Shit he may have been the only sane one all along–but now I’m just picking at scales. Sorry. Didn’t meant to. Ahem. Point is some of us are fucked up differently than others. It doesn’t matter. That crackhead? Fuck-ed. The cop beating him down? Fuck-ed. Dominique Kahn-Strauss? Fuck-ed. Who else? The Pope? Me? You? Yeah, you’re starting to anticipate if not grok me.

I’m a tool. Sometimes I’m also a dick and an asshole. That’s another matter–I’m happy about being a tool.

A while ago I came back to Colorado from a trip back to Cleveland for the great John Covert’s 95th birthday party. The moment I returned to my adopted home town, every television set in the danged known Universe began to trumpet the imminent falling of the sky, talking heads of every political stripe and linguistic camp bewailing the unavoidable collapse of the American dollar and the entire foundation of all civilization along with it. I found myself with time on my hands, so I started tinkering with this blog as nothing more than an outlet for some frustrations, and a place to sling a bit of my ordinary schtick, mainly just at myself, assuming I’d be the only one reading. I played around on Facebook a little meaning nothing more than to hunt down a few friends from the distant past. That’s what FB is for, right? A series of rapidly developing events took place and I soon found myself in the position I mean to describe right now, as best as I am able.

I guess I can’t recall the first moment I was told I could write. It hasn’t really mattered til recently–everyone knows writing is one of those career choices pursued by quixotic artsy-fartsy types that were willing to sacrifice creature comforts on the off chance someone might give a shit, and that the big bucks might roll in, easy-pleasy. Like hitting the lottery or breaking into the billboard charts with your high-school garage band, right? Besides, writers as a breed must, by necessity, possess a form of self-deluded arrogance that they have things to say of such verity and import that people will be compelled to actually pay money to subject themselves to the grief of listening to the blather produced in the effort to be a big deal. It was never like that. I just wanted something to fill the time that wouldn’t dissolve my brains like the all to comfortable slide into awareness of regularly scheduled TV programming was beginning to do.

Somewhere in the midst of Facebooking about how we need a new econo-political paradigm it became apparent that bitching about this need had long been a habit of mine, as well as of many of my friends. I’ve always been a pretty good bitcher, too, in fact, when I entered the foundationless world of a self-employed remodeler it was a sense of the futility of bellyaching about how paint companies were managed. My brother and I had enough faith in our pooled abilities to believe we could do things better than the people running outfits for which we had worked to strike under our own banner. The key words in this were and remain “faith” and “believe”.

So it occurred to me that if I really believe my own drivel, I ought to live it out.

Well that was an eye-opener. Very little pursuit of that idea led me to examine just what I actually believe, which turns out to be quite a bit, and quite at odds with the established order of things. I started, as is my wont, to contemplate God, and the deeper nature of things. I thought about how this transposes to something manageable in this “real” world. We have to work at a job, right? We have to round up bacon we can trade for goods, services, support for our children, and so on. But wait a minute–20 years of self-employment, and I was broke, money-wise, and most of my relationships were broke in some sense as well, though in most instances I couldn’t tell how, or how to fix it. Seemed the thing I was best at doing was bitching. Where’s the fun in that?

But I do believe in God, right, even though I’ve managed to get myself thrown out of both Christian churches and sorta like devil-worshiping occult groups because my notions of God are…unconventional. Enough so I’m usually inclined to put quotation marks around “God” when I type the word, and to feel compelled to issue tedious disclaimers about how I differ from the general milieu of thinkers on the matter.

An experiment in ontological ideoplasticity.

This whole thing is about stuff I believe. I’m kinda stuck at that level, since there’s not much I know. Some of what I believe has to do with what other folks believe, so I’ll be pretty much doing what a lot of other folks do, in a lot of ways. In some

Whoa!!! Blah Blah F-ing Blah.

Mt 6

25 Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

26 Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

27 Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?

28 And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

29 And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

30 Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?

My apologies to any devil-worshiping freaks I may have just offended. You’re wrong, anyhow–that’s for another moment. Point is–and I’m no ordinary Christian–this is stuff we all learned from the cradle. I’ll be using Christian doctrinal talking points throughout this whole conversation because that’s where I learned this shit. It’s also where I learned it was all crap.

I’ve had a real hard time with this one, cause by now I can usually say, “The point is….” Right now I still can’t do that. The whole collection of thoughts in my head begins to ooze its way into the point when I come at it this way. Bear with a little, OK?

Christians say they believe the book that stuff up the page a little came from is the sacrosanct Word of God, equated with the Logos–God on paper, if you will. With apologies to those real Christian human beings in the world, Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit!!!!! If you shitheels really believed one word of the shit in that book, this conversation would be intrinsically inconceivable. See that at the end of that last sentence? PERIOD.

On the other hand, I believe the Bible to be a beautiful collection of fine literature, some of which may be divinely inspired. We have all these cultural heroes, like Gandhi whom I linked to on FB earlier, Jesus, John Lennon ferchristsake. We pay a bunch of lip service out to them then grab a beer and flick on some stupid nonsense on TV, or punch a child, or throw rocks at a cop, or bust a protester. Fuck that, I decided I believe it. Whatever it is.

You may have noticed me carrying on about a new paradigm, money’s a bad metaphor, we’re all in this together, &c., &c. All that is real, real important to what this is about, but OMG kids! This was a bitch to get off. I’ll be hanging flesh on it all as I go, but be patient. what ended up here just now was way different than what I’d meant to do. A writer has to possess a pretty ridiculous quantity of arrogance in the first place, just to have the motivation to sit here pouring all of it out. I mean, I think this tripe I’m typing is valuable enough, and that you all will want to see it–need to see it–to occupy me at 3:30 in the fucking morning. Even worse, here and round about, (get wit’ me on Facebook, if you came from somewhere else), I’ll be arguing with Hegel, Gandhi, Paul the fuckin’ Apostle. Can you believe it? Whatever, I believe the finer points from all those guys. I’ll explain everything.

This hasn’t been the clarification I’d promised to put up, but it defines some of the questions, I guess. You can have it.

Now don’t forget. A little review: It’s All Bullshit!!!

(Reprinted from Hipgnosis)

Stage Magick

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For Bruce McCluggage

Had some words with my friend Bruce yesterday–OK, lots of words. In fact, the Spirit moved me, so I was blasting words all over the place like that guy from the X Men, only with a gag instead of a visor. All the way toward the end of much conversatin’–and yes, Bruce held his end respectably in the face of my torrent–we came to a summation.

The idea is already on the pages here, so it’s important, and needing some flesh, but it’s also very simple. We all know we can’t prove a negative. Any third grade philosopher know this as an unshakable verity, right? So who will step up to prove that? No one, that’s who–we can’t do it, and mind you, I don’t hearsee that term coming from myself often. I’ll beat my kids senseless if I hear them using it. (Hi kids! Molto amore!). Hell the notion is generational. My totally outstanding 95 year old Granddad banned the word from his brood’s vocabulary, and he started his family during the Great Depression. But we can’t, and we know we can’t.

We can’t even prove that we can’t prove that we can’t prove a negative. We can add layers to our investigation to Eternity, and never can we prove a negative. And yet we know that we know that we know (&c.) that we can’t do it. What the Heellll!!? This is why: Reason breaks down at a point between proving and knowing right here for us to examine like a fascinating diamond, cut in some diabolically ingenious fashion to as to hide its facets from us like a tesseract or something. There’s math that explains this pretty succinctly. Look up Kurt Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, (here’s a good start http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel/). Godel, whose name I’ll be disrespecting til I figure out how to add an umlaut on this thing, wrote a bunch of High Math, way beyond my capacity, that shows us in terms even I can grok, that any closed system can never possibly contain all the tools necessary to fully describe itself. With me so far?

This shows us another Eternal Verity: Truth transcends Proof; and further–our ability to know does the same. Now, Bruce is a philosopher, and kind of a Christian, so this sort of shit doesn’t bother him like it may the Scientific Determinists that may read this. What we are gazing upon, through the lens of our little diamond, is an example of our ability to “jump out of the system”, and view it from outside, in some manner as indescribable as how we can know there’s no proving a negative. (Apologies to Doug Hofstadter for abusing an idea I came across in Godel, Escher, Bach. I’m about to depart from his comfort zone, I think. He did, give him mucho credit, respectably describe the idea within the closed system of those pages). This is an ability we share with God. This, I think, is why some tidbit of western scripture says, “Ye are gods,” (Psalm 82, for you skeptics; read it all and get some context before attempting to argue, please).

This whole line of thought is closely associated with the Ontological Argument as proof of God, if not fully dependent upon it, (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/). For the uninitiated, this is a supremely brilliant bit of philosophical tomfoolery that attemtps to prove the existence of God by reason alone, in an orderly procession of thought utterly divorced from empirical evidence. If anyone would care to take it on, I’d love–no LOVE–to see a genuine debunking. It’s very slippery indeed, and feels for all the world like a stage magician pulling infinite decks of cards from his sleeves. But it’s irrefutable, in my stupid little mind. It jumps the system.

I’ll readdress the crap we’ve mulled over here, but this is good. Put simply–arithmetically, one might say–We can’t prove a negative>We know this>Truth is superior to proof>We are therefore superior to the closed system of All-There-Is>Only god is thus>We are gods. (Yes, I took a leap there at step 6. I only have so much attention span. Roll wit’ it for now, OK? It’s in the Ontological Argument if you feel like getting ahead of me). This is arithmetical, yes, and handily sums up my points from yesterday, Bruce and friends. But, as you’ve seen by now I guess, that doesn’t mean one can’t do a bit of Algebra, Trig, or (Meta)Physics with it.
***
Jeez, I hope you all enjoyed that. Please don’t burn me at the stake yet. There’s more. It’ll take a while to work around the mess of toroidal thinking here. See Bruce–I didn’t forget that part. I’m only human, even if we are all gods. Bear in mind all, that Nothing here is any more valuable than the opinion of one idiot house painter. And any of you who have read the stuff before this will know already: It’s all a bunch of bullshit.

(Reprinted from Hipgnosis)

IDF’s Anarchist Bible, Old Testament: sulfur as a weapon, mind you it stinks

Judge not lest ye also be judged…

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Which is a distillation of the basic part of Jewish law. When one brings an accusation against another in before the priests (judges) both parties are supposed to be judged. Equally. Leviticus goes on and on about using the same measurements to sell as you use to buy. Standardized weights in every facet of life especially, in cases before the priests.
Israel says Hamas has Anti-Aircraft missiles.
Sure, if I had hostile people in multi-billion dollar attack aircraft flying low over my family and friends and occasionally SHOOTING at us I’d perhaps want some way to shoot back and maybe keep the Rich Murderers from killing me or my family or friends or for that matter ANYBODY.
It’s a huge leap of arrogance for Ehud Barak to go all crybaby and say Waaaahhh those people we’ve been steadily killing in their own country which doesn’t waaaahh actually belong to waaaaah Israel and Israel has no legal authority to waaaaahhh use high-tech terrorism against their people, mostly civilians, have gotten a waaaahh waaahhhh wahhhh way to keep from doing it sometimes.
No Fair!! Waaaahhhh Waaahhh we’re the only ones allowed to kill waaahh waaaaaaaaaaahhhh!”

By the same measure with which ye judge shall judgment be measured out to ye. People who want to argue the point can talk to Moses about it. Or God.
You’re not going to have it both ways, an unlimited Magic Ticket to killing anybody anywhere in the world as Mossad claims the right, and nobody else having the right to stop you from doing it. If you say God gave you that authority then you’re simply LYING and using God’s Name in vain. There’s two of the Commandments right there.
Since the commandments given to Moses extend far beyond the ones Charlton Heston dragged down the mountain, the “Ten”, and the first part of it is that you’re sworn to keep the whole law, and you have to have kept the whole law in order to judge any to death… (which is impossible by the way) you either have to actually live by the Law or quit saying that you do.

It’s not all that difficult to understand. 613 mitzvoh (plural of mitzvah, laws you’re sworn to obey on Bar Mitzvah for young Jewish men and Bat Mitzvah for the ladies) isn’t all that much. Lots of traps in there if you want to just arbitrarily declare yourself to be a judge but that’s the way they’re set up.

There lies the arrogance of doing it.
Aside from all else, eagerly seeking any excuse or “commandment” that allows you to KILL people marks you off as very strongly wanting to kill people and looking for a loophole to the “thou shalt not kill” from God’s Top Ten Hits

There are a lot of Christians and Jews and people who don’t even give a fat flying ferret about what God had to say, but want to KILL.. and Kill PEOPLE, and “get away with it” as far as any laws in predominately Jewish or Christian societies which wisely prohibit killing PEOPLE. and they’ll say that somehow, even though exactly NONE of the people propounding the idea actually speaks fluent Aramaic or Classic Hebrew, that it simply MUST be a clerical error, that the original Hebrew, which conveniently they don’t speak,
AND EVEN MORE CONVENIENTLY THE PEOPLE THEY’RE TRYING TO CONVINCE OF THIS LIE DON’T ACTUALLY SPEAK classical Hebrew, that it really said in the Original, which is conveniently not present, “Thou Shalt Not Commit Murder”.

The fallacy of that is inherent and apparent just in their smarmy-ass Fake Elite elitist presentation of the case.

It’s obvious just from them making such statements as “God said it, we’re the only ones authorized to interpret it and thus you had better believe us or we’ll make sure you burn in Hell” that they

a) fully intend to kill PEOPLE and
b) they’re not sure if they’ll be prevented beforehand or punished afterward and
c) don’t want to take the risk of being punished for their wrongdoing and
d) are going to convince as many people as possible to take their side, and
e) knowing the nature of their own cowardice probably talk other people into doing it for them and assuming all the risks….

Like the risk of somebody returning fire when you’re in your multi-billion dollar Jet Fighter Aircraft murdering them and their neighbors.

Not My Tribe

the myth of middle ground