1. My Historical/Economic Rant

2. Why I Can't Be A Christian

3. My Satanism

4. Prayers And Conjurations

5. The Life Of Christ, A 2000 Year Retrospective

6. My Brief Career As A Psychic

7. Mother Theresa

8. Atheist

9. Thoughts On Native American Spirituality

10. Putting Spiritual Power Into Your Everyday Life!

11. Questions For White Supremecists

12. Better A Soul That's Empty And Cold Than A Hot Head Full Of Shit

13. Laura Slessinger

14. Education

15.In Defense Of Christians

My Historical/Economic Rant

I’ve never really noticed the apparent negativity of my writings before. Someone recently brought it to my attention. I felt that I generally had a positive outlook but now I can see how it may have been buried.
Comments about my essays being academically useless haven’t been ignored either, but this is not an issue because I never intended for my essays to be acedemically used.
You will notice a style, I refer to it as “rant format”, which involves a lack of specifics, references and bibliographies. Rant format also involves the use of tangents, repetition, and occasionally irrelevent information if it fits into the theme. Rant appears to be in direct opposition to academic writing, but is only effective if the writer has good grasp on his subject matter. A good grasp on the subject matter means having read and understood the academic writing on the subject. I respect the more academic authors, read and understand their works, but I am not an academic writer. I write in a rant format because I am not trying to convey facts, I am trying to convey emotion. My facts can be checked elsewhere, and I believe they are accurate. If I am unaccurate or misinformed, I don’t mind having that pointed out to me. I am prinicipally writing for people who already know the facts, and my work is one of philosophically interpreting the facts. If my facts are wrong my philisophical arguments become invalid and I need to know if this is the case. Don’t quote my facts or take them to be fact, because even if I’m right it’s still not the point. My point is philisophical, not academic. Academics is important in philosophical thinking, but the facts I state are simply background to the opinion.
The majority of my essays were written off the cuff in response to various arguments by e-mail, and the computer I use which has internet access is at the office where I work as an archivist, so I don’t have access to my library when I’m responding to e-mail. I use to feel that this was a good thing, as having my library close by acts both as a crutch and a hindrance.
I used to have a tendency to quote alot in my essays, because so many writers can say the same thing I want to say with so much more style. When it comes to opinions, originality isn’t an issue. All opinions are the sum of their influences. My creative works don’t get posted on the internet. When I’m finished honing them, re-editing them for the hundredth time and scrapping what doesn’t work, I’ll probably try to get them published.
The positive outlook I’ve tried to convey is that life is wonderful so please stop fucking it up. Unfortunately the fact that life is wonderful seems like such a given to me that I concentrate on what’s fucking it up. I believe that we are living in the best period of time humanity has ever known. I’m angry about the fact that it may go downhill instead of up, and my children may not get to live in a world as wonderful as I do.
I’m sad because I see so many people who are convinced that everything is rotten.
They point to what has been portrayed as an increase in natural disasters, violent crimes, and the movement towards de-nationalization. I see that the facts show no real increase in natural disasters and violent crimes, but an increase in both their effect in terms of human life and the speed at which we find out about them. They effect more people because there are more people. We hear about more of them because we have instantaneous international communication systems through which to find out about them. I see the movement towards de-nationalization as a great idea being applied in a wrong manner by the wrong people.
Nationalism, the idea that people are intended to be divided by nations, is an artificial construct. I hear excuses being used against interfering with the actions of Islamic dominated countries towards women. The excuse of “That’s their culture, they have a right!” doesn’t work, because I really can’t see a girl being genitally mutilated, beaten to death by their family, forced to where hot black clothing in the desert, not permitted to see a doctor, etc. being particularily proud of their culture.
Many people in such cultures have a contrary view, based on their observations within their own culture, but don’t dare to speak it and feel they are alone. International mass communication allows them to speak it, call international attention to the atrocities, and hear similar viewpoints from others in similar situations. Slowly, those countries changed and became more civilized. Yes, I believe that there is an exact measure of civilization, or at the very least an exact measure of barbarity. Cultural relativity is valid in some respects, but barbaric is barbaric when it comes to the treatment of women, children, homosexuals, atheists, etc. The western world is barbaric in it’s own way, but “everybody’s doing it” doesn’t make it right.
I’ve found myself forced to become acultural as a result of not seeing, anywhere in the history of this planet, a single culture that I would like to live in. They are all rooted in religion, and thus fundamentally flawed. All of their accomplishments pale by comparison with what they could have done had they not been shackled to the taboos and prejudices of religion, and deprived of better critical thinking skills as a result of the expectation to believe the unproven.
Most of them are fairly benign at this point, because most of them have no power. The pleasant feel of most religions fades away when it gains power. Christians now say that the witch-hunts weren’t Christian, and point to the few parts of their bible that would denounce it. If they achieve power again, which they are in the Southern U.S. and many dictatorships, you will see them using different quotes all of a sudden.
Christianity is lucky in that it’s main literature is so vague and inconsistent as to be interpreted in any way it needs to be, readily available to excuse or promote almost any action.
This still sounds negative though, doesn’t it. Hold on, I’ll get to the point in a bit.
Unfortunately for the Middle East, the hard-won liberality was destroyed. It may not have been, but for western intervention. Western countries secretly assisted the Taliban in Afghanistan, refused to help feminist movements in Iran, and have pressured governments in those regions to avoid socialist medicare systems. They could never make the kind of petroleum profits they now make if the workforces in oil producing countries were treated fairly.
That’s the problem with globalization as it is being brought in. It is being brought in by the wrong people, those who benefit from hardship. I’m at heart a capitalist, and economically right wing in many respects. But that is because I believe that, if properly applied, capitalism could produce a better society. In fact, I'd like to point out that the international mass-communication devices utilized by many of those opposing capitalism would not exist without the capitalist system.
I am also an elitist, in that I believe certain people are meant to fill certain roles. Elitism has been badly misinterpreted, however. To me, people who demonstrate a great ability should do what they are able. People who are intelligent, ambitious and demonstrate qualities respectable in a leader should lead, and should have some of the advantages which come along with it. The pack needs the Alpha, but does the Alpha deserve a bigger share of the kill even when his contribution to the hunt is limited? The Alpha is only needed as much as the Omega, and it is not right, nor in their best interests, for the Alpha to starve the rest of the pack.
Also, the hereditary nature of power is a problem. Contrary to the popular interpretations of genetics, many things are as much a product of nurture as of nature. A born leader who rises up from poverty and obscurity fights against all odds to bring down the tyrannical rule of an inept emperor/dictator, etc. He then leads the people to glory and comfort, eliminating many of the mistakes made in the past. His son takes the crown upon his death and...his son may not necessarily be the best choice. But tradition dictates, and a few generations pass before the great leader’s descendent is overthrown in much the same way. But really, was the leader really the one who did it anyway? Or was he just the voice that communicated the demands of the masses, who would have done it anyway, with some other leader? Look through history and find a dynasty that lasted more than a few generations. You’ll find maybe one or two, and in many cases these rulers had bureaucracies which did most of the work for them, and were in relatively easy times.
Capitalism threatens to fall into the same trap as, naturally, those who have struggled for glory wish to pass on the rewards of their work to their children. Their children often don’t face the same struggles, and so after a few generations they take power and wealth for granted. Often they come up with the delusion that they are where they are because they are better than those who aren’t, and a form of cruel snobbery takes over the hereditary elite...who really aren’t the elite at all, and would be better off leaving the control to someone else.
People have come to be persuaded that there is equal opportunity now. There really isn’t. Raised in a ghetto, taught in an underfunded school and raised by parents who lost all hope long ago, a child simply does not have the same chance as the middle class child. Worse yet, third world countries where the school systems are run by religious organizations. They learn to read and write, but critical thinking is avoided because it’s an inescapable fact that critical thinkers will eventually think critically about their religion. One who knows the facts they need to get along in their culture,who works well in a factory, bank, bureau or doctor’s office, has a great income and lots of respect, but can be persuaded to fall for just about any scam presented to them because the basis of their education was a dead Jew on a stick. Plus, there is a system in place which has been set up to keep them down even if they can think their way around their miseducation.
That’s a major problem. Thus, educational opportunities of the same quality, and economic advancement opportunities of the same level depending on education, should be extended to everyone, because that’s the only way we can say for sure that the people elevated to a higher status got there because they were smart enough and worked hard enough to get there on a level playing field. Compared to the amount of rescources we waste on silly things like trends, religions and con artists, funding such a venture on an international scale isn’t nearly as big as you would think.
Another problem is in priorites. What’s the point of discussing education when the current bent of capitalism seems to reward the stupid people who can throw balls, tell jokes or twirl around on stage singing songs written by machines and professionals? That’s a major problem in it’s own right. As a musician and writer involved in the film industry, and coming from a family of artists, I’m kind of cutting my own throat when I say that it’s wrong, really, truly and unquestionably wrong, for our society to spend so much of it’s time, energy and rescources on something trivial like entertainment. Entertainment is important, but when the combined budgets of Hollywood films made in one year are higher than the amount of money spent on public education it’s not hard to see that there’s a big fuck up in priorities going on.
One of the charactars in White Plague, a novel by Frank Herbert (Dune, The Jesus Incident, etc.), lamented the lack of scientists in positions of political power. It is the scientists, be they chemists and biologists, sociologists and anthropologists, or even psychologists and philosophers, when it comes right down to it, that have accomplished everything of importance. Our sociological evolution has been chiefly the result of a progressively better standard of living provided by science. The problems of science are the problems resulting from completely non-scientific individuals running the governments of the world. The people who have come to control the scientists of the world are chiefly interested in either profitable or military applications of new technologies.
I can’t verify this next example, nor can I remember the exact numbers, but I was once told that the estimated cost of cleaning up all of the world’s fresh water was about the same as the amount of money spent on ice cream in Europe alone. Priorities are also in question when the newsmedia has convinced the U.S. population that their president getting a blow job is a bigger issue than his attempting to bring in universal medicare.
Most Americans don’t even know what universal medicare really is, thanks to the mass misinformation campaign led by the insurance agencies, who are the biggest beneficiaries of the current backward system. So, for the sake of the Americans, let’s sum it up: You’re the only industrialized nation without it. It would mean no more people would go bankrupt due to heart attacks. It means that the concern of your doctors is keeping you healthy, not keeping you there as long as possible and ordering unneccessary tests to get the bill up, or conversely, withholding neccessary tests and treatments because your insurance doesn’t cover it and you can’t afford it. If it means more taxes, it also means less insurance premiums. It balances out much better in the end. But trying to persuade the common person of what it is can be difficult when their only source of information is a media dominated by the few people who benefit from their suffering.
Besides, who cares about medicare when there’s more important political issues to think about, like the president getting a blow job.
The "news as entertainment" phenomena, which has caused media outlets to concentrate on entertaining their audience instead of informing them, has led to the growth of many movements which defy all reason and logic. Could Uri Geller, Peter Popoff, etc. have achieved the fame they did if they hadn't of made a good "scoop"? So called "documentaries" like "Search For Noah's Ark" can be constructed in such a way as to make their arguments very convincing, very scientific sounding, enough so to convince many people that they are real. The debunkers are never given similar air-time, as "Noah's Ark is a hoax" is a non-story. Thus, they lend credibility to the Bible in order to secure ratings, damaging the public's sense of critical thinking.
I repeat, it’s not hard to see that there’s a big fuck up in priorities going on.
Capitalism also started to go the wrong way when it lost it’s individuality. It once was that a business could grow very large under the leadership of a few people. But the banking system made that impossible, and now corporations have no real leadership. Individuals have ethics, but within a mob environment the individual rationalizes his ethics away because of a lack of control. It’s going to happen anyway, so the individual spokespersons, board members, managers, consultants, etc. would rather benefit from a bad thing than oppose it when they “know” that opposition is hopeless. They would rather not think about what they’re doing, and are concerned more with the well being of their families. Who is the leader? The individual stock holders appear as a mass on paper, and the corporations are trying to please them. But the individuals don’t really know what is being done with their money. In some cases the individual stock holders may know what the corporation is doing, but their stock does well because of it and, after all, your little RRSP isn’t going to help anything against the billions of others. The leaders are under pressure to get profits up, because everyone with a bank account, RRSP, bonds, company pension plan, etc. has a vested interest in getting those profits up even if they have no actual knowledge of what their money is being invested in. If you get interest, it’s being loaned. Many people don’t totally understand the implications of this, and don’t realize that they are part of the anonymous group of “investors” that the evil capitalist is serving.
CEO's and board members of major corporations absolutely have to not only profit, but profit more each year than they did the year before, or their stock will fall and they will lose their jobs. You cannot appeal to any CEO on environmental or moral grounds because of this fact, even if you could "touch their hearts" like they do in movies, they can't alter a profitable course because, even if they did, they would be replaced and the next guy would change it back.
The holder of a union pension plan gets his layoff notice, and has no idea that the layoff is intended to serve him, as an investor through his pension, by laying him off. An ironic and not unlikely scenario within the present system.
Individually everyone knows that it has to be stopped, but they don’t know how. Neither do I. I can’t put myself in a student loan debt getting a PhD in economics so I can figure the whole thing out, because if I did I would have to get a job with that degree in order to pay it off, and any job would probably be accompanied by a few thousand gag orders preventing me from doing anything about it.
But I’m optimistic.
I guess the fact that I’m still happy is very irrational. I just “know” that the world will change for the better, as it always has. Neo-pagan, back to the land crap isn’t going to work. You’re not going to regrow your fur, forget how to walk upright, or forget what a wheel is, so there’s no point in thinking we can erase the memory of our achievments, and no reason why we should. We have progressed. There is no evidence supporting the idea that the traditional pagans were really environmentalists. They just didn’t have the tools to control their environment and so they had to understand how their environment was controlling them and how to benefit best from the control. They were, in fact, barbaric. They were xenophobic, genocidal, ignorant, sexist, racist, and violent. Their rituals often involved human and animal sacrifices, women in some instances may have played a partial leadership role but usually only in their old age, as women in most of those societies outlived men, but they did so after a lifetime of male dominance and so their position was simply loaning moral credibility to the status quo by acting as a role-model for women in order to help keep them in line.
The ancient Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Babalonians, etc. were much more evolved culturally, but were still rather barbaric.
I credit Christianity for it’s civilizing effect. Yes it was and still is barbaric, but much less so than what it was replacing. It dominated because it was a great option compared to other religions at the time. It helped to unify the world because it was, unlike the rest, a religion of conversion. Other religions didn’t seek converts in the same way because they didn’t see universality as a goal. They civilized Northern Europe back when Hitler’s precious “Germanic master race” was still playing Conan in the forests and the “inferior” races had long built their great empires in South America, Asia, The Middle East and Africa.
Christianity brought unification in a way that the Romans never could.
But, much like the primitive religions of cave dwellers gave way to village religion which gave way to tribalism which gave way to to city religions which gave way to national and later empirical religions... Christianity has served it’s purpose. All of those were advances. Maybe if some of these neo-pagan types read more by actual archeologists and less by other neo-pagans they would see the situation for what it was, and realize that the ancient religions are not something they really want to emulate. Christianity may seem barbaric as compared to the contemporary western attitude, and this attitude has been woven into the fabricated versions of pagan religions, but why not just see the attitude for what it is and realize that we no longer need any religion. We have outgrown it.
The cultural advances made by the ancient Greeks and Romans were chained to a fatal flaw. The flaw was that their's was a society still steeped in primitive barbarity, and surrounded by primitive barbarians. Philip of Macedonia, and his son Alexander the Great, were of a barbarian culture but, due to Philip's period of captivity by the Greeks he was educated and grew to respect Greek culture. Eventually, Macedonia conquered Greece, unifying it in a way it had never been able to unify itself before, allowing it's influence on the ancient world to grow in leaps and bounds.
But both the Greeks and the Romans were bound up in an economy built on slavery, war and the distraction of the impoverished "free" masses, the middle class of the time between the rich and the slaves, with various entertainments that increased in their violent and sexual natures as the middle class became bigger and bigger. This middle class was actually quite impoverished in many respects, and often worse off than the slaves. One of the groups who were used in the entertainments first long while eventually took over the empire, through it's women, who found Christianity much more appealing than the patriarchal, male chauvenist paganism of the era. It was still chauvenistic, but it put women above slaves and that was an improvement. They didn't wage war to convert the unbelievers, but they started to use force the moment they had the authority, and the military, of the Roman government behind them.
Christianity had been suppressed much because of it's association with Judaism. The Hebrews, you see, were a culture opposed to all religions but theirs, a culture whose holy works called great the kings who tore down the altars of foriegn gods and killed their followers. It just so happens that this group had chosen as their homeland a piece of territory that not only lay between the Romans and the Sumerians, but also between the Sumerians and the Egyptians, and between the Romans and the Egyptians. A race of uncooperative and zealotous people who planted themselves firmly on the most important trade route between four great empires, if you count Greece, was not a welcome thing. Christianity, being seen by the Roman leaders as a Judaic deriviative, wasn't exactly something to cheer about when the Roman leaders saw it gaining popularity on all sides of their empire, even within it's own army but especially among it's women, who, as I mentioned earlier, saw it as a movement of female liberation. Strange times, indeed.
Christianity could have been snuffed out early on, if it had not been for one strange event. A Christian leader, who was simply making a prediction based on his political knowledge and military observations but has since been hailed as a prophet in Christian mythology, predicted rather vaguely that enemies would surround Israel, but the hand of God would hold them back and get the faithful out before the enemy made another attack and whiped out the unfaithful who remained. It happened. The Jews staged a revolution of sorts, the Roman legions surrounded the city but their commander ordered a withdrawal because of bad weather and insufficient supplies for what was expected to be a long siege. The Jewish leaders applauded themselves for scaring off the enemy, but the Christians fled the city. A few years later the Romans returned and took the city, wiping out much of it's population and shipping the rest to varied distant corners of the empire in chains. The Christians had escaped this fate because of the political knowledge of one of it's members, and this had a profound impact on them.
Christianity was already growing, but this incident saved the lives of many and gave a large, well witnessed and easily understood "miracle" which made convincing evidence for the power of Christian prophecy. It cemented the faith of many converts who knew they would be dead if not for their recent conversions. It appeared, as it is mythically documented in the New Testament of today, that Jesus had spared the lives of the Christians in Jerusalem while God punished the evil nation of Israel for straying from it's path and condemning his son.
It's interesting to note that this same, already fulfilled, is still being bandied about as a yet-unfulfilled prophecy by some armageddon scholars. It is the basis of the evangelical theory of the rapture, to be precise. It was also around this time that various blends of Judeo-Christian-Pagan fringe groups existed accross the empire. Most of their works were destroyed in time, but a strange thing happened in Israel. Thousands of scrolls, detailing the rules of order, beliefs and observations of several fringe groups were hidden in a cave, probably to prevent their imminent destruction by the Romans. These weren't found for almost 2000 years but today, as the Dead Sea Scrolls, they give us a better picture of the societal chaos of the era. In some cases, though I'm not going into detail, they give us a picture of what kind of society we could be living in now if a Jewish or Roman fringe group other than Christianity had managed to gain the popular appeal Christianity had. Historically, it appears that many rolls of the dice led us in this direction. While things could have been better if the dice had fallen differently, an analysis of the other fringe groups which had the same potential as Christianity tells us that it would more likely have been far worse.
The fascinating thing about the Dead Sea Scrolls is the fact that they are being analyzed now. Being the ancient equivelent of the pamphlets we see in our time, every fringe group jockeying for control and publishing their material, you see how much better it is in our time...the internet has provided us with a form of equalization the likes of which we have never had before.
The major corporations, no matter how big their websites are, are only as likely to get visited than some guy with free geocities webpage, free e-mail account, and able to pay a $35 a year registration fee for a domain name. You can't deny that you have, indeed, a historically unprecedented degree of freedom in the information you are allowed to access, and in what you are allowed to write and publish for others to read. Your only barrier is money, but with free internet terminals springing up in libraries, market deprecitation resulting in a wicked price drop on both hardware and software, in addition to free homepages and very cheap fees for registering domain names, that barrier is pretty much being trampled. Face it, if you look at the platforms of politicians, this is what you are voting for. People may be ignorant about the platforms, but if they took the time to read the information clearly available to them about all of the candidates, they could make an informed choice. The fact that they don't is no fault of the media. When the media does take a turn in direction, going slightly left or slightly right, being a little too open to new ideas, they get attacked for it, and boycotts are common. These aren't corporations doing these things. Maybe corporations spend advertising dollars to bribe media outlets into covering up potential scandals, but in perspective, it's the outcries of minority groups such as the religious right that make the media censor itself on the really important issues.
They may not be a majority, but they are very loud and they are good consumers. They get what they ask for. Maybe those of us who really want to make some positive social change get a little louder about our exact wants, avoiding getting caught up in semantics and scrapping this senseless antagonism the so-called left wing seems to have with capitalism.
We have to start working within that framework, because like it or not it actually seems pretty solid and well established. It's taken a few hundred years to reach this point, and that has some advantages.
If you believe I'm wrong about all of this, I can respect that. But only if you will admit that, whatever your solution might be, capitalism has provided much in the way of your ability to spread those ideas and find others of like mind. You must also admit, especially if you are from a lower or lower middle class background, that the time you have to spare for thinking about such things, as opposed to constant labour during the day and no lights at night, no education, etc., and that this extra time you have can be attributed to the benefits of capitalism. In other words, you wouldn't have time to -eyed mystics, fundamentalists and puritans, which is what they would get from a review of our best selling books. It has to be made clear to our descendants that, even though the majority of the population worshipped a dead Jew on a stick, some of us were relatively solid in our thinking.
This period of time was close to the end, and millions of dice rolls were cast every secound, anyone could have grabbed the reigns at any time, but no one at the time was able to tell who could eventually hold thee of it. If you're reading this, and understand it enough to disagree with it, then you are not dying from poverty. Even if you're on a free library terminal and you live in a dumpster, at least you're wealthy enough to be literate.
It's important to keep modern times in perspective with ancient, because our view of the so-called "time of Christ", which was an important era for different reasons, is similar to what the view is going to be of our culture a thousand to two thousand years from now. It's important that when people find an interesting or unique idea on the internet, that they print it so that there are solid copies, and the ideas won't be annihilated if something bizarre should happen in terms of civilization and technology. Solid, real, long lasting copies must be made, or the wave we are currently riding, where the power of mass communication is available at everyones fingertips, will be useless. We have to make sure that future generations know that were weren't all a bunch of dull-eyed mystics, fundamentalists and puritans, which is what they would get from a review of our best selling books. It has to be made clear to our descendants that, even though the majority of the population worshipped a dead Jew on a stick, some of us were relatively solid in our thinking.
This period of time was close to the end, and millions of dice rolls were cast every secound, anyone could have grabbed the reigns at any time, but no one at the time was able to tell who could eventually hold them the longest.
The miracle at Jerusalem was one of these rolls, and whether it was sixes or snake eyes depends on your perspective.
Many Christians did get captured and enslaved, however, and those slaves spread the religion throughout the the slave ranks of the entire empire. Christianity was much more appealing to the slaves and the poor than the pagan religions which were now offering a better afterlife at a price. Only later did Christianity enter the same stage. It took a long time for it to catch on with the rich, however. But the peaceful nature of the religion had weakened the empire enough that barbarians from the north could raid and plunder with ease. The empire fell apart completely in the west, remaining only in the east. During the period shortly before the collapse, just after Rome had converted to Christianity, the island now called Britain had been conquered. During and shortly after the fall, certain missionaries from Britain brought Christianity to Ireland. The Irish were more or less easily and peacefully converted, and several monastaries were built there, monks carefully hand copying Greek and Roman works, including but not exclusively the Christian scriptures. Britain was taken over by the Saxons and repaganized, but Ireland remained Christian.
The eastern part of the empire maintained intself for a long period of time, while the rest of Europe, slipping quickly into feudalism, slowly put itself together, with the Vikings and Goths converting to Christianity under the loose rule of a much less glorious Rome. Coming out of barbarity and militarily defeating an advanced civilization didn't stop the barbarians from being at least a bit awed by the Roman accomplishments, and so it's no wonder that their chieftans and war heroes immediately clung to the status symbols they saw around them. These symbols included manors and castles, titles like King which were accompanied by command of an army and the power of life and death, ruled by Kingly whim alone, over the people lucky or unlucky enough to dwell on the land they claimed. This was the same sort of culture that Philip and Alexander of Macedon saw, and the barbarians were more than happy to spread it in much the same way. But the intellectualism and cultural refinery of the empires, as much or as little as they had been, were left forgotten and the great works destroyed during the time of the collapse itself. The adaptation of Christianity, in a new form, may have been a matter of convenience to these former chieftans and warriors. The name, some of the basic symbols and holidays, the morals they would follow anyway, all just part of trying to make their claims to rulership legitimate. Chieftans and warriors didn't get those sorts of status symbols or those sorts of powers, and so the claim to Christianity was part of the new image that came with the titles and benefits of the new culture but without most of it's key principles.
In the Eastern part of the empire, a man name Mohamed had a vision. His vision was the cornerstone of a strange Christian/Jewish/Pagan hybrid called Islam. Islam was a culturally refined and tolerant religion, one which followed the Roman example of allowing self-government to the conquered people in exchange for high taxes. They didn't suppress the followers of other religions, they simply taxed the shit out them. Moslems were exempt from taxation for the most part.
Under this rule, the Arabic peoples achieved many technological and scientific advances. For example, it was Moslem scientists who perfected the navigational device long known as the astrolabe. They also brought algebra into the realm of science, and it was a moslem who invented zero, a very important number when you think about it.
They spread accross the middle east, the eastern Roman empire, the northern part of Africa and up into Spain, into a politically loose-knit but culturally bound empire.
But a strange thing started to happen and the Islamics of the eastern half of the Moslem empire slid into barbarity. Part of this was manifested in the takeover by the Ottomon's, who eventually took Constatinople. They burned the library of Alexandria, declaring that no book other than the Koran was necessary, and changed the name to Istanbul.
Not long after this, Rome had regrouped and expanded it's empire, now under the dirty and ignorant banner of Christendom, and looked with envy it's mythical holy lands, the part of the empire once looked on with contempt but now had importance as the place where all of the events they based their religion on were supposed to have happened. In that area, Christians had lived a long time in a state of almost harmony with the Moslems. Taxed and disrespected, but basically left alone.
The first crusade changed that, though things were changing slowly on their own anyway. The eastern half of the empire became less tolerant, it's masses and leaders less educated and more militant. It's leaders tried to become more controlling of the empire. The Spanish Moslems were still rather liberal and autonomous, but they faced a different threat: forced conversion or expulsion from Spain as a result of a Christiandom heading the same direction as their Moslem counterparts.
It was in the middle of all of this that Ireland was rediscovered, along with the literary Canon of the Graeco-Roman cultures in addition to the Holy Scriptures that had been carefully stored, hand copied and examined by Irish monks the whole time. This provided a great boost to the new Roman Empire, now called Holy by it's leaders.
Feudalism faded slowly as small dominions merged into larger ones, forming nations eventually leading to new empires. The Ottoman Empire in the east dominated Islam, the Pope in Rome had a loose grip on Europe. The crusades aside, interaction between the two was minimal.
Sailors took to the seas over time and rediscovered China and Africa, which slowly led into colonialism. In the meantime, corruption within the Catholic, meaning "universal", church led to the development of splinter groups. Martin Luther wasn't the first protestant, but his was the only one that managed to survive long enough to hold it's place and grow. North America was discovered, England waffled for a short while between Catholicism and Lutheranism before Elizibeth the first formed a national church that combined the best and worst elements of both. She also halped encourage the growth of trade and, thanks to her newly formed and underfunded spy service, her navy kicked Spain's ass and pissed off the pope real good.
Lutheranism had led to Calvinism which led to puritanism to which we owe the current rendition of democracy. The puritans had the support of the middle class, the businessmen who had turned their envy of aristocratic indulgence into a form of sour grapes moral outrage. While leaving the poor out of it altogether, they led a revolution and voted themselves in as leaders of the new parliament. They banned dancing, card playing, the theatres and just about everything else there was to do. They didn’t last long, and that was for the best. But we owe them a great debt for the system of parliamentary democracy, a system which, for all of it’s flaws, is still the best one we’ve ever had. The Puritans, removed from power, emigrated en-masse to the new world. It’s a common historical error to say that they founded the U.S.. Actually, they pretty much remained in isolation until their way of life faded out. They opposed slavery not because it was harmful to the slave, but because it made life too easy for the masters. The masters, on the other hand, as well as the impoverished whites of the Southern U.S., picked up something from the puritans. The puritans moved accross the American mid-west, later followed by other immigrants, and kept much of their lifestyle in tact. They lived in a strange, isolated nation made up of small rural municipalities with an economy dependant on agriculture. It lasted like that, and in many ways hasn't changed, for almost 200 years. It's no wonder the people of the southern U.S. seem to be shocked at the rest of the world and frightfully cling to past paradigms and superstitions. They are being forcibly wakened, very quickly, from an essentially feudalistic time period to a present that it took centuries of slow, painful changes for the rest of the world to get to.
It's another one of the reasons capitalism started to go wrong in the U.S.. While the tools of industrialism were invented, and are chiefly improved by, a nation of people that are essentially rational and liberal, the majority of the country was made up of a people in isolation that placed little or no value on creative expression or rational, scientific procedures. Then they started to take control, seeing the cultural evolution that had created a perfect environment for the industriousness and inventiveness that made the U.S. great as a decline in moral values. They saw this slow, painful and incomplete evolution as a decline in moral values because they hadn't been part of the subtle changes, generation after generation of constant challenges to the status quo being knocked down and returning later in a more acceptable form, debates and testing of political theories, many which failed, etc. They were in an ideological sleep for a couple hundred years, and mass communication technology jolted them awake to the outside world.

Strangely enough, they attempt to write the history in such a way as to make it appear that the "good old fashioned" values they are promoting were responsible for the inventive spirit that made them great. When one sees that the great inventors and scientists were usually heretical and controversial in some way or another for their time, one gets the same chuckle out of such history as one gets from seeing an emaciated teenager with dirty clothes, a pathetic vocabulary and no education shouting about the superiority of his race. Maybe the Germans accomplished great things, Mr. neo-nazi trash bucket, but, German or not, you haven't. Same to the trailor park conservative, the preachers of good old fashioned values and the career politicians. Americans may have done great things, but you haven't. In fact, by lobbying for creationism and prayers in public schools, laws against sex-education and birth control, censorship of art, literature and music, etc. they are steadily working toward a society that is blantantly contrary to the rational and creative endevours that made their country great.
In many ways, successive governments in the U.S. over the last 90 or so years have acted in complete betrayal of the principles upon which the country was founded. The supporters of those governments have done it all draped in the proud flag and history of the nation they are trying to subvert, and have accused those of subversion that have tried to stand up for the logical evolution of a country founded on such great principles.
For example, the civil war wasn't a betrayal, even though it bent the constitution and demanded more federal powers, because the logical evolution of the country called for an end to the anacronism of the South, an agriculturally based feudal economy built on slave labour. It was only later when the precedent was abused and federal law began to invade more frequently into the affairs of the independant but united states and even into people's day to day lives.
Remember, especially the ladies reading this, that during all of this time the history I have described was principally controlled by males. Maybe a queen here or there had some effect, usually on the word of male advisors, but all in all the control of human destiny was an all boys club.
It was around this time that some of what were considered to be liberal ministers, though with an essentially puritan bent, saw the educated yet stifled women of the middle class in the western world and saw their potential. Women were, after all, treated with far more severity when it came to morality and etiquette. Thus, if the vehicle by which they strove for power could by laden down with the agendas of the neo-puritans, the obvious evolution toward women's liberation could be manipulated to assist the return of the slowly fading churches. Women who wanted to gain some sort of socio-political independance and power found that, indeed, the temperance movement was the only option. It was church run, therefore suitable for ladies and exempt from husbandly protest. As it later evolved into the suffragette movement it still kept much of it's puritanical ethic, which is why the official recognition of a woman's right to vote coincided with the criminalization of prostitution, gambling, alcahol, marijuana, etc.
Like the development of parliamentary democracy, a major step forward was, by necessity, carried by a major step backwards. As the entire industrialized world was converted in much the same fashion, the generally annoyance with puritanism eventually would have eliminated it's destructive manifestiations, like in England. However, the newly empowered U.S. federal government, along with the European governments who were also starting to enjoy the fruits of their nationalist chokehold, realized the value of laws that will be inevitably broken. Laws that the lawmaker knows will be inevitably broken by a large, generally good, segmant of the population serve a function of surreptitious devision. It makes each generally patriotic and law abiding person that happens to indulge in an activity they can't see anything wrong with suspicious and paranoid. It makes them more likely to work double time at being a good citizen in order to cover up. It has a drawback, however, in the segmant of the population that simply lacks self control. This segmant is the same segmant that produces the most zelous religious fanatics. They are a minority, but can be a loud one if persuaded. In short, they need something external to control their lives.
One sees a similar phenomena in the Middle East, where a single generation of young adults had a brief glimpse at the modern world but were dragged back to the dark ages by the Ayatollah, Taliban and the rest.
One of the things which may have led to the continued spread of both Christianity and Islam, as well as the long time loyalty of their adherance, was that neither of them decided upon it's leaders by right of heredity. After the death of Mohamed, a loyal follower who had no relation to Mohamed took his place. The Christians decided their popes by hierarchical vote. Delusions are delusions, and even the most intelligent and rational human being only has the evidence he has to work by. They have, like China, had great leaders in the sense that their leaders could maintain and expand the power of their religion steadily over many centuries. Had they written laws of hereditary power into their religion, they would have faltered in a major way every few generations or broke apart early on into smaller sects that would eventually form new religions. The kingdoms and nations within the Religious boundaries fought with each other, but in any feudal or national war both enemies prayed to the same god and their priests came from the same seminaries. This was a result of a generally strong leadership in the Church, which didn't have the same hereditary laws that the aristocracies did.
People realize, almost instinctively, right and wrong. If, that is, they haven't had that knowledge destroyed by a system of illogical morality. It's a fairly logical conclusion that, if you are allowed to hurt other people, other people will be allowed to hurt you. Illogical morality is when right and wrong are blurred by laws that have nothing to do with harming one another, but are based on prejudice and fear of the unknown.
But, if a person hasn't been indoctrinated into an illogical morality, they can develop their ethics from reason and thought alone.
They don’t have to believe that a deity is necessary for it to exist. But many Christians, Moslems, etc., who are otherwise quite liberal, continue to identify themselves as Christians, Moslems, etc. This lends credibility by followership to the leaders that are preaching barbaric versions of Christianity and Islam.
An example of this could be seen in Pope John Paul II uniting with Islamic fundamentalists to oppose the spread of birth control information to the third world. Most Catholics in North America wouldn’t agree with the Pope if directly asked, but the Pope doesn’t ask. He can say “I have this many followers, you can’t ignore me!” because many people are counted among his followers, simply because their parents baptized them. Their parents, who don’t even go to church, baptized them because they didn’t want to upset their own parents. Because of people’s sense of tradition, they add their children to the membership lists of a following they don’t believe. They don’t realize that belief doesn’t matter any more. As long as he’s got the numbers behind him, the Pope has power. If all of the non-practicing Catholics, the ones that are on the lists but don’t attend regular services or obey Papal edicts about birth control, etc., were to officially disown the church, having their names removed from the Popes list, the Pope would be left with a rather small church. But they don’t, and it drives me crazy trying to figure out why they don’t.
Why do women and homosexuals want to be priests of a religion that has always mistreated them? A religion whose holy books specifically attack them? Why do they think it’s right to re-write the religion to oppose itself just because they can’t stand the thought of calling themselves by a different name? I credit John Paul II with one of the most telling arguments I've ever heard against such revisionism: "Relgion is not a democracy.". Why re-invent Christianity and Islam when you could drop them altogether?
That’s not as bad, however, as attempting to re-write the even more barbaric paganism into modern ethics. Modern times are good. It’s been a slow progression to here, with many set backs. We may see another dark ages and another thousand years of barbarism, but we’ll pick right up again where we left off just like we did after the last one. Maybe it really was the last one, and maybe it is going to progress altogether.
That’s my point. I have a very positive outlook. The jumble of negativity aside, I hope I’ve conveyed my sense of pride in being part of a species that has developed in such a way has humans have. I hope I’ve conveyed my sense of pride in being a part of this age, where everything is up in the air and every day sees rapid change. I hope I’ve conveyed my sense of hope in the future. I believe that it’s a damn long road ahead but not as long as what we’ve already walked.
We’ve progressed from discovering the edge of the jungle to the edge of the universe. We’ve done this by walking in circles, tripping, breaking bones and struggling against each other almost as much as our environment.
The vast majority of generations of human beings were primitives. Our advance into agriculture, trade, etc. is very recent. We’ve come a long way, and it’s time to think about where we’re going from here. If we did all of this almost unconsciously, bit by bit by luck and no real plan, imagine what we can achieve if we were to actually make a plan as a species. But we have to acknowledge our species, it’s achievments and it’s failures first. We must acknowledge that, for the time being, we are alone. There appears to be no God who cares, and no evidence of an afterlife. We don’t need to believe in them either if we can acknowledge that this life, here and now, is as good or bad as it gets depending on how we deal with it, and acknowledge that it is, in fact, up to us to deal with it.
I could go into much more detail about any aspect of what I’ve discussed, and, as long and rambling as it was, I hope it achieved what I intended it to...whatever that was, I forget.

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Why I Can't Be A Christian
Well, once I was a Christian and then I read the Holy Bible and decided that I hated God. Prior to that I had just read the parts that I was told to, you know, the inspirational quotes, the psalms, the parts that were being used as evidence to support the views of whatever church was telling me why they were more Christian than anyone else. I saw that there was, truly, no such thing as a Christian or a Jew in the modern world, and, if there was, they would be the most insane person you ever met.
The way I was taught about Moses in Sunday School, for example. The Pharoh was the evil one, he was oppressing the Jews. But in the bible, God said that he was purposefully "hardening his heart" to make him oppress the Jews. The Pharoh would have let the Jews go easily, but God essentially posessed the pharoh to make him more cruel, so that God could perform a bunch of miracles which would make the Jews love him, make them feel that he had done alot to save them. This I found sickening. But there was more.
There was the one about killing homosexuals, girls who weren't virgins before they were married (based on the supposed universality of the hymen which was later proven false:not all girls have one and God should have known that) and a bunch of other things which, strange enough, can be found in almost every primitive, barbaric culture.
Many Christians say that God changed his mind on all this with the coming of Christ. He'll do the punishing later. Now on to revelations.
So...a dictator will be coming to power. He has a strict set of laws and will have the technology to enforce them, even to punish those who think about disobeying his laws. He gives no logical explanation for these laws, and insists that he is doing this out of love. Before he comes to power, many people are trying to get everyone to support this dictator, based on the assumption that everyone who supports this dictator and obeys him will live, and everyone else will die. The dictator has already said that the majority of people won't be good enough to live.
Doesn't this make every Christian, Jew and Muslim a traitor to humanity?
The average Christians relationship with God goes something like this:
1.He says he owns you.
2.He says he made you what you are.
3.He says he loves you.
3.You must love him.
4.You must obey him.
5.Even if you love and obey him, he will still hurt you just to test your love and obedience.
6.He has the right to kill you because he owns you and he made you what you are.
7.He will make you seperate yourself from your family, friends, business, etc. if they don't obey him. In order to prove you love him, you must only associate with others who love him too.
8.He says he knows exactly what your thinking, and tells you what you're allowed to think.
9.You are not allowed to complain, because, after all, he's always right. Now matter how bad he hurts you, you have to love and obey him because he owns you.
10.He says you will never be good enough for him. You must always try to make yourself perfect but still, no matter how hard you try, you will never be good enough for him, and should simply be thankful if he lets you live.
11.You must thank him on a regular basis for everything you have, even what you earned yourself, because, after all, he allowed you to earn it yourself and he has the right to take it away.
12.Even if you love and obey him, and thank him everyday for everything you have, all gifts are temporary and he has the right to take them away from you without reason any time he wants to.
This, by all standards, is an abusive relationship. If your husband or father acted this way toward you, would you tolerate it? Once women did, now they don't. But why do so many people still tolerate it from something that they can't even prove exists?
So many Christians have defended their belief in God based on the complicated balance of the universe. It must have been created, they say.
But what does this prove?
I'm not sure what to believe in this regard, and have a tendency to believe in God in the creator sense, despite my personal disgust with myself for doing so. Someday science will prove that it isn't true, but until then it's hard not to believe in a creator.
If there is a creator, then I thank him. He is not God in the Christian sense, but a god. I have a great respect for the god who created this wonderful world.
I have a great respect for the god who gave us the instincts, emotions and desires which are necessary to guide us through the pleasures of this world.
I have too much respect for this god to believe that he would then tell us that we have to resist these instincts, emotions and desires, that they are wrong and we have to do whatever we can to stop ourselves from following them.
I have too much respect for this god to believe that he would give his list of rules to an isolated tribe of barbaric desert nomads and punish everyone else for not knowing them.
I have too much respect for God to be a Christian.
So, I sought all the pleasures of the world. Soon, I discovered the work of Anton Szandor LaVey, who seemed to have the same idea as mine, and had had it many years before me. I read his book, The Satanic Bible, and realized that I had been a Satanist all that time, but had never realized what it meant or that I was one.
As for my daughter, well, that's been worked out between my wife and I. My wife had no religious upbringing, and lived and thought that way her whole life, but had never heard of LaVey.
Yes, I plan to teach my daughter about the world and about her right enjoy it. Yes, I plan to teach my daughter to think for herself and never take the advice or orders of anyone for granted. Yes, I plan to teach my daughter to be as great as she can be at whatever she wants to do.
But I don't plan to drill her on any "Satanic Catechism" or even tell her anything about Anton LaVey or Satanism at all, but I won't have any problem if she finds his works for herself, or the works of Nietzsche, Wilhelm Reich and others who influenced his work.
Rituals are psychological exercises which give a person a certain amount of confidence. Want something but can't see a way of getting it? Do a ritual and, chances are, it won't actually make it happen, but once it's done and your mind has been focused on the goal, you'll be subconsciously watching for any opportunity to make it happen, opportunities which you may othewise miss.

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My Satanism
Satanism is not a religion as normally defined. Satan is a philosophy of opposition to herd mentality in any form. All religions have an "enemy" of sorts. Norse pagans had Loki, American Indians had Coyote and others, etc. The "enemy" of these religions is usually represented as an individualist, as the majority of the world's religions are based on an ideal of sacrificing the individual's well being for the service of the leaders. It is a sin in most religions to question that religion's rules, the more logical the question, the greater the illogic and hostility with which it is answered. An example: What's wrong with adultery? "God says it's wrong" Why would God say it's wrong "It's not our place to ask, he just says so" Why should we listen to God when he doesn't give reasons? "Because God is all wise and all knowing, he knows what's right, and he doesn't have to give reasons" How do we know that God is all wise and all knowing when he doesn't give us reasons for his laws and actions "Heretic!!!!!" and the questioner is burned at the stake, beaten, or simply ostracized from friends and family until they see the "wisdom" of God. Because we live in a Judeo-Christian dominated area of the world, where references to the Christian God are in our constitutions and government papers, we use the title of Christianity's opposition for our philosophy. Satan is a metaphor representing we who do not obey the "common wisdom". If it's televized mass consumerism which dominates, causing rampant environmental destruction and the decay of intelligent values, we will examine Marxist/leftist/radical environmental solutions in addition to others. If it's socialist oppression by mass consent, forcing the motivated and ambitious to cut short their efforts in order to create a false "equality", or lowering standards of education and talent in order to elevate the apathetic and lazy to a level they don't deserve, we will examine right wing solutions. We will make full account of all options, no matter how taboo the source, and filter from each philosophy/religion/political platform, even the ones we oppose, the few ideas which, in combination with other ideas from other sources, can better humanity. Be it Naziism or Zionism, capitalism or communism, African American civil rights activists or Ku Klux Klan grand wizards, if, among all the idiotic rhetoric they spout, a gem of original wisdom can be found, we will find no shame in mining that gem, and giving credit for these ideas where credit is due. We are not out to destroy the social fabric, but to seperate it from the social handcuffs that prevent humanity from moving forward in evolution. We want to replace the values of blind faith and obedience with values of intelligence, logical observation and useful inventiveness. We admit that the religions of the past served a purpose in helping to get us where we are today, but they are no longer of use to us, and have overstepped their boundries in attempting to block our progress. Much like the tails we once had, evolution calls for us to drop our useless devotions and paradigms.

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Prayers And Conjurations
Rituals are psychological exercises which give a person a certain amount of confidence. Want something but can't see a way of getting it? Do a ritual and, chances are, it won't actually make it happen, but once it's done and your mind has been focused on the goal, you'll be subconsciously watching for any opportunity to make it happen, opportunities which you may otherwise have missed.
God's answered your prayers before? Odin, Zeuss, Allah, Wesakechuk, Baal, and a whole whack of other gods have answered other people's prayers before, too. Do you pay much attention to them? No. Let me guess, all of those are demons in disguise and your god is the only one, right? How do you know? Of the thousands of religions, as well as the thousands of interpretations of your religion alone, how do you know. "Sure the bibler is harsh, but the world is harsh!"...a typically Christian sentiment, and actually, a sentiment shared by most religions. Yes, the world is harsh. It would be a lot better if their weren't so many millions of people who worked double time to make it harsher for themselves and others. It would be an easier world for the women of the Middle East, Asia and Africa if they weren't treated as secound class citizens in their own countries. But their religion insists on it.
Come to think of it, so does yours. But not anymore, right? Your religion has lost it's power in North America, so women, homosexuals and decent human beings can live in a relatively free society. So, your religion puts on the guise of universal love, tolerance, etc. to regroup itself until it has the power to start stoning people to death again. Or burning them at the stake. Oh, yeah, Jesus said you don't have to do that anymore, right?
No...he's going to do it later. And he's going to do it worse, and eternally. And he's not just going to do it to those who actually break the laws, he's going to do it to those who questioned the laws at all.
Let's figure out something here. Do you have any respect for your God? Obviously not. Because if you did, you would suppose that he would want intelligent people following him. Not the sort of people who, during a period of mental instability such as you yourself described, were willing to believe anything to make it seem worthwhile. Not the sort of people who believe that believing is the key to all things, and that the demand for proof is nothing more than an evil trick to keep them from the "truth". Not the sort of people who would believe that their god would hand all of his laws to a group of barbarians in the desert and expect the rest of the world to believe it.
No, you have no respect for your god. And neither do I. I bet you were a drug addict or an alcaholic at one time, right? Maybe a gambling addict? At any rate, you suffered from some kind of addiction which dominated your life. Then Jesus saved you. You found a way out of your addiction...or did you? No, just another addiction. In Germany in the 1930's it would have been Hitler who rescued you (unless you were Jewish), different circumstances could have made it David Koresh or possibly Jim Jones, making you very lucky in a way. It could have been anything that "saved" you. Just any addiction to save you from the one that was killing you. Because you are an addict. Nothing more. Never will be. If you had discovered Satanism instead, you would have been one of those obnoxious one's who think they're like me because they wear the same symbol, but they are not. They cling to the guilt just like anyone, and end up vandalizing people's property, killing animals, and loading themselves up with drugs just to prove how faithful they are to Satan. Later, they turn Christian and say that they "survived" Satanism. Some of us wonder how Satanism survives them.
The idea that something else will rescue you...no. You rescue yourself and answer your own prayers.
I perform a ritual, knowing that the demons I "pray" to do not exist. I enter a state of mind which allows me to temporarily believe in them. Then, subconsciously, I await a reply. Subsconsciously, I'm on the look out for any opportunity to get what I wanted, opportunities I would never have seen otherwise. It is simply a game of creating self-confidence.
You do the same thing, but when your prayers are answered, you still believe in the illusion. You allow it to dominate your life, tell you what you can and can't do, and it makes you feel guilty for everything you get.
I get my prayers answered too. I've seen all kinds of things happen which seem just too coincidental to be coincidental, they must have been supernatural...but they happen in every religion, and often, they happen at random.
I could pretend that I'm praying to your God just as easily. When I was into neo-paganism I called the illusion-god Odin, and pictured him as in Norse mythology.
Now I call him Satan, because it most closely resembles my outlook on life, which is this:
Every religion has it's so called "evil" side. Usually it's the being which calls the rest of the myths into question. It acts as the example of free-thought, intended to scare the people into obedience, to sacrifice themselves for the good of a community that never sees any good because nobody is actually happy because everybody is sacrificing themselves for the good of the community...a circle of stupid meant to keep the leader in power because, by way of the myth, he has the people believing that they are working for the community when they are in fact working for him.
Wilhelm Reich knew that when you can control someone's sexuality from an early enough age and make them defy their most natural instincts, you can control them completely. This is the root of every fascist society, and is why every religion has a harsh set of sexual morals.
This is why the media, the new god, took hold of the sexual revolution. It could take control of the followers Christianity lost by swinging the other way. Promiscuity is as bad as monogomy when it becomes a cumpulsion, and by making a large number of people who otherwise would have, by their naturally addictive personalities, been devout Christians, into devout consumers.
That's why sex sells. It proved that Wilhelm Reich was right, and that by controlling people's sexuality and making them defy their natural instincts, you could control their lives, and that, since naturally we are not really very promiscuous, but also not asexual or monogomous, you could do it either way. Make them into sex addicts and sell them products, or make them fear sex and make them work harder.
You see, God is everywhere.

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The Life Of Christ, A 2000 Year Retrospective
"We're all on the same boat,
"But the captain fell asleep,
"Half the crew has gone mad,
"And want to sink us in the deep
, "As their hatchets smash the deck,
"They sing and make a racket,
"And as a reward for sinking the ship,
"They think the captain will give them a life jacket."
-From "The Night They Scuttled Gaia"
by Daniel Johnson
It was a period of time similar to our own. The Roman Empire, like today's USA/UN, caused a blending of miscellaneous cultures in the spirit of trade. A Roman posted in Egypt or Britain may learn much of the culture there and bring elements of it home. A philosophy that remained solid in one region for thousands of years is carried into another region far away, but would be considered an abomination by that philosophy's original followers. People of mixed ancestry find no home or church to call their own, and soon begin developing their own religion. Such was the world in the time of yet another schizophrenic prophet who claimed to be God or at least a close relative. You know the type. They're all over the place today, just as they were then. What if David Koresh had been around then, and, years after his death, his followers continued to spread his word, though mistranslated in many parts, and it had the same luck as Christianity. You would then be asking me if I researched Koresh' divinity and why am I an FBI-ist. No difference. The only reason Christianity spread was because a Roman emperor converted, and Christianity had the rescources of the Empire to spread their word. Europe became dominant in the world because North America and Asia were generally more pleasant and peaceful, and had little in the way of domesticable animals. European's were forced to develop different technology, and their pathetic religious wars required bigger and better weapons. In short, Christianity advanced because it didn't work. It didn't better the lives of it's followers, and the hardships that it caused made it stronger, as it is simply a justification of hardship without purpose. Christianity justifies hardship by saying that the world is an awful place, which is the basic foundation of most religions. They make the world sound like an awful place, and offer a way of supposedly escaping the world. Then, they enforce a series of brutal laws which do, in fact, make the world an awful place, proving premise A correct, and therefore lending premise B a certain amount of credit. They went to Asia and North America, killed many of the inhabitants, robbed them of their cultures, forced them into a position where they couldn't feed themselves...and then they fed them. The only way they could survive was to go to the churches. They weren't totally aware that the nice old preacher man that gave them their food was a good friend of the man who made it illegal for them to find their own, or in the case of South America, the man who whipped them in the mines. Christ himself, you are correct, had nothing to do with this. Except that, by his philosophy of "turning the other cheek", and by his support of the sexual restrictions in Judaism, he made it possible for people to follow even the most self-destructive orders, live in the most abject poverty while obeying rich and powerful over lords, and made them feel noble in their suffering. This philosophy enabled Hitler to take power, even though he despised it. The people of Germany, under Christian domination, were trained into submission for centuries. Like a well trained horse, the only difference is in who takes the reigns. Thus, those who preach "peace" don't follow it. But those who hear them preach do. Peace, they are taught, neccessitates obedience, especially in a time of war, war being neccessary to spread the word of peace. Those who are converted as a result of the war become peaceful, that is to say, obedient, and are willing to kill whoever doubts their new found faith in peace. The Bible leaves such a great deal to interpretation. Jehovah preaches war and says "Wipe out all in the land, the women, the children, the sheep, the whole damn bunch". Jesus preaches peace and says "Obey your master". The leaders follow Jehovah, the followers follow Jesus, and the followers don't question the obvious hypocrisy of the situation, after all, Jehovah is Jesus's father and it will all make sense to them someday, somehow... The Bible not only leaves much to interpretation, but what isn't in the bible is very telling as well. The Bible was not an assembled piece of writing in the time of Christ, it was actually put together at an early church council meeting a few hundred years later. They decided then what would and wouldn't be in the book, deciding on four gospels instead of 12 (there was originally one for every apostle), disregarding large parts of the old testement, and leaving out a large part of Jesus' alleged teachings. Something else that's important to consider. In modern times, faith healers abound with tricks of all sorts, and they come in various different religous sects. Think about Uri Geller, the great faith healer. He had tons of media support, government funded scientific experiments were made to sound as if they supported his claims, thousands of people believed in him. All of his tricks were exposed by stage magician James "The Amazing" Randi, but large parts of the media chose to ignore the evidence to hold on to a good story. Uri Gerller's career faded, but 20 years later he's released a "psychic power" kit, which actually states that he made his fortune by something like picking stocks or oil drilling sites. In our times, we have scientists who can point out a fraud, though in this case even they failed as a result of one simple thing: their will to believe! The will to believe without evidence is applauded as "wisdom" in most religions, and so it was even in the Roman Empire, where fake cures and miracles abounded. Who, then, is stupid enough to believe that the 12 apostles' account of Jesus' miracles are credible? That those of ancient superstitious times were any better at skeptical enquiry than the average believer of our time? Today, we return to that time. Philosophies of unbelief are all over the world, in addition to a few hundred thousand philosophies of belief. For this brief time that we are in, anything is possible. The fanatics of various religions believe that their time is at hand, and soon everyone will bow to their God or die. Others, more hopeful, believe that our time is at hand, and soon we will be able to abandon the mystical shackles of the past. Who knows what's going to end up happening? Did you know that for the first few hundred years of the Dark Ages, the Catholic church had most people in Europe persuaded that Christ's reign was already in effect, and that the church was God's communication device? Revelations predicted that the anti-christ would do this, and it was done, but God never came... ...and he won't come anytime soon. Return To Top

My Brief Career As A Psychic
"Grey Horse Horroscopes, Numerology and Tarot Readings. Send your full name, birth date and time, $10.00 and a piece of your hair to P.O. Box #...". So read the poster I put up on bulletin boards at the local libraries, new age bookstores, and on telephone poles around the city when I was 15.
I was a fraud in the sense that I didn't really believe in what I was doing, but the methods I used garaunteed that the customer was still getting exactly what they paid for. I entered the information into a computer astrology/numerology program, the computer spat out charts with generic interpretations, and then I opened up a tarot card program, printed out the computer generated random spread, the card placement and card interpretations, shoved it in an envelope and mailed it away.
If I had actually sat there and done the charts by hand I would have come up with the exact same thing anyway, and, damn it, I was 15 years old and had better things to do...like spend my money.
I also did tarot readings for friends using a "real" deck, having discovered that nobody was going to take my advice, but they would follow me to the ends of the earth if I declared that the cards told them to do so. I actually started to get jealous of those 74 pieces of thin laminated cardboard, so I began trying my hand at "cold reading" people I met on the street.
I got a janitorial job when I was 16, cleaning bingo halls from midnight to 6 in the morning. I would wake up at 10 p.m., get ready for work, go to work, come home, eat breakfast, go to school, come home and go to sleep at four in the afternoon, wake up at 10 p.m...I didn't have time to be Grey Horse anymore, and I also didn't have any need, as I made much more money picking cigarette butts out of people's piss in the urinals, scraping dried vomit off the floors, scrubbing nicotine stains off of the glass (Before then I had always wondered how the bingo hall could afford such large tinted windows), and otherwise preparing a pleasant environment in which hairless apes could joyfully spend their welfare checks. I was still making my money in the service of the same people, but I had alot more self respect.
I continued the readings for friends, however, but over time a strange thing happened. I got so good at cold reading, and my card inspired advice worked out so well, that people I barely knew started coming to me to sort out their problems. It was a major ego-boost, and I was considered by many to be some sort of expert on all things occult.
One day I had a thought. Maybe I was actually psychic, and only believed that I was faking it. Maybe my inner psychic ability was coming through in such a way to make me think it was my own intelligence, estimation of personality, and problem solving skills that did it. Maybe I had a gift, and I could become even better at it if I allowed my inner psychic voice to speak directly.
Bat that soon ended. For a few months, all of my readings were off, and my advice sucked. As soon as I started "faking" it again, my "power" was restored.
When I was 18 I came accross a book called "The Magic Of Uri Geller" in which James "The Amazing" Randi reveals the tricks used by Uri Geller, the "psychic wonder boy" of the 1970's, who had managed to fool scientists, get the media on his side, and develop a large following.
I was inspired. I decided to undo all that I had done. I went to a party where I cold read several people that my friends knew but I didn't, I bent spoons with my mind, I guided someone through an out of body projection (a form of hypnosis, really) and I read symbols placed in sealed envelopes.
Then I announced that I was a fake, and one by one revealed all of my tricks. I thought that by doing this I could enlighten them, make them examine the fallacies that they lived by, give them a wonderful sense of skepticism and free them from the chains of gullibility.
I was wrong. As far as they were concerned, I had betrayed them, lied to them, given them advice using false pretenses. Even though my advice had always worked out for them, it was just luck and I had been irresponsible. Some of them weren't so angry, and came up with an option they figured I must never have considered. I only thought I was a fake, but my inner psychic ability revealed itself in such a way as to make me think it's my own intelligence...
A few of them understood what I was trying to do, but they hadn't believed in my "abilities" to begin with. It was a revealing experience, but beyond that it accomplished nothing but the loss of some old friends.
I now had a new perspective on life as well.
Here's some thoughts.
Cold reading works for several reasons. One is that those who believe in it are idiots, and idiots have simple problems that they can't figure out. If you're intelligent enough to pull off a good cold reading, you're probably also smart enough to figure out the simple problems that idiots have. But, a psychic can have many other good uses, even to a non idiot:
Jim Rose, of the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, revealed many psychic parlor tricks during his "Secrets Of The Strange" tour, in between Mr. Lifto's lifting of heavy weights with different body parts, Rubberman's squeezing through a tennis racket, etc. He blasted faith healers, revealed dozens of scandals, and generally gave a wonderful lecture on the psychology of gullibility. But close to the end of the evening, he mentioned that, although he doesn't believe that your future can be read in the lines of your hand, he still gets his palms read on a regular basis because "a good palm reader can give you some good advice".
Sometimes we need an outside opinion, but many people are too stuck up to take advice from another human being. After all, religions have, for thousands of years, worked hard to make people think that humans are all stupid and only spiritual beings know what's going on. Anton LaVey did a wonderful chapter on using astrology, etc, the "props", for the same reason, in "The Compleat Witch".
My first introduction to cold reading techniques came from a book, written in the late 1800's, called "Gypsy Magic And Fortune Telling". It gives a list of things to say that will persuade just about anyone that you're psychic. It works on an interesting principle. You see, people don't talk much about certain aspects of themselves, because they believe that these aspects make them different from just about everybody else. They don't really want to reveal some of their beliefs, because they think people will call them wierd. But many of these aspects are almost universal. People are trained to believe that they are alone in the world and should obey the status quo, which happens to be completely unnatural and barely anybody really believes it, though they all pretend to to fit in.

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Mother Theresa
Mother Theresa was born Aug. 27 1910 in Albania. Her real name
was Agnes Gonxha Bejaxhiu. At the age of 18 she decided to enter
into a convent, and joined The Sisters Of OUr Lady Of Loretto,
which sent her to Calcutta as a teacher. In 1950 she founded the
missionaries of charity, with 12 other nuns, and since then it has
grown to 3000 siters. They have 517 missions in 100 countries,
and Mother Theresa even won the Nobel prize in 1979.
So with all of these achievements, should she be granted sainthood by the Catholic Church? Well, there's some other considerations. The Catholic Church insists that their saints work miracles. This is an interesting flaw in their requirements, as when they were written they never considered the possibility of a scientifically enlightened age when miracles could be explained as luck or outright fraud, and so perhaps she should be let off on that one. To be fair, the Catholic Church did do everything in their power to stop that from happening, from the persecution of Galileo to the repression of Mendel's findings in genetics, but the scientific age couldn't be stopped. If they stick with it, there won't be anymore saints for a long time.
Did she really do anything good? Well, not really.
The number one cause of poverty in nations like India results from overpopulation. There are just too many people, and not enough jobs or rescources. By preaching against birth control and abortion, and by advancing the Pope's stance on "A woman's Christian duty"(A nun in the coven or a bun in the oven) she did far more harm than good.
To get donations for her work, she often had her picture taken with the most brutal dictators of South America, which, in the eyes of the Catholic majority in those countries, legitimized their regime and helped stifle protest against the daily torture and murder they perpetrated. The educational systems her organization set up merely covered up for the governments of those countries who felt it more important to buy guns than textbooks, and was merely a pretense to draw children from their homes to be indoctrinated into Catholicism without their parents being present.
Essentially, what Mother Theresa did was the equivelent of firing an automatic weapon into a crowd, only to heal the resulting wounded to demonstrate her prowess as a doctor.
In her actions, corrupt and hypocritical, destructive and self-demeaning, dishonest and misrepresented, she epitomized Catholicism and therefore should be granted sainthood, to be worshipped by future idiots that follow in her footsteps.

Atheist
This is in response to some believers who recently e-mailed me. It is, of course, far from original. Pretty generic atheism, actually, which is okay because it's still effective. It's still effective because religion is still stupid. We don't need new arguments because, no matter how they phrase them to make them sound new, they're still using the same arguments they've used for too many years.
Arguments: 1.Standard cosmological argument stating that order=design=creation. This rests on the assumption, which theists mistake for fact, that order cannot result from chaos. Just as one can occasionally find rather orderly shapes in clouds, which look just like faces and objects, random chance events often resemble order. Is this universe too complicated to have come about by chance? Being that it took trillions of years to get this way, I'd say there was alot of opportunity.
Now that the scientists have managed to examine matter at the sub atomic level, we see that chemical reactions of various sorts could create any number of outcomes, depending on such variants as temperature and pressure. Why isn't the world different from the way it is? Because, by chance of which we are a part, it came to be this way.
2.Standard wishful thinking argument stating that life without a god would have no purpose and that if the universe came about by chance then nothing in it is of any value. This is an easy one to counter, which is why theists only discuss it in passing before resorting to the standard cosmological argument. Simply put, jump off of a building and, as it is desirable that a parachute appear on your back before you land, the argument goes, it will appear. Nonsense? Glad you agree. Hoping there's a god does not make it so.
But, however, the existence of a god is not, in fact, desirable. Life actually would have no purpose if everything we are, everything we've accomplished, was all organized to train a race of slaves for the creator, which seems to be the bent of Christianity. The freedom and purpose offered by the Judeo-Christian slant seem to be the freedom to serve our purpose, which is to serve God. Life has more value when you acknowledge chaos, knowing that it could turn out any way, and that it's up to you, that is, up to humanity to create it's own destiny.
The belief in a domineering creator has been one of the stumbling blocks of human progress, because the majority of people don't think that it's worth the while to do anything other than please a non-existant god because he's going to tell us what to do.
Thus, the belief in God provides no purpose but to nullify any purpose.
3. God is supposed to be, according to most theists, omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient. In other words, he's everywhere, all powerful, and knows everything. But omnipotence makes omniscience impossible, as it means he doesn't know the feeling of weakness or failure in other than abstract form. He would know what it is because he "invented" it, but he would be immune from the experience itself. Also, another feeling this god would never know, is simply the experience of not knowing. He would never expereince curiosity.
Thus, a being that is both omnipotent and omniscient is a contradiction, and a theory whose essential foundations contradict each other is automatically scientifically invalid.
4. The miracle argument, stating that miracles prove the existence of spirtitual beings, depends on your gullibility. Many of the miracles are pretty lame to begin with such as the virgin Mary appearing on the window of an office building, some have been proven outright fraud, like Peter Popoff and Uri Geller.
Some are historic, thus can't be proven "wrong", which is to say, they aren't that likely and historical innaccuracy is rather common. If modern people can fall for Peter Popoff and Uri Geller, what makes you think the ancient ones were any brighter.
The majority of the so-called miraculous occurences in history could be explained by modern scientific investigation, and those that can't will most likely be in the future. But, because of the smug "if you can't prove it wrong we can assume it's right" attitude taken by spiritualist idiots but not applied to other religions, I have to take this one further.
Quite simply, when the causitive factors are unknown, one must look objectively at all of the possibilities and the one that is closest to our factually known reality is probably the correct one. For example, our factually known reality is that there may be sentient life on other planets, but that it would most likely have no resemblance to or interest in human beings. Also, they wouldn't be able to get here because long distance space travel between galazies is, as far as we know, impossible.
But, the idea that aliens who resembled human beings came here, imitated gods and performed miracles, etc. is still a more likely scenario than any explanation by divinity. In other words, belief in God is more ludicrous than belief in an intergalactic imperial conspiracy to trick humanity, which is pretty damn ludicrous if you ask me!
5.The moral argument falls into the wishful thinking category, but is distinct because of it's relevence. Many decent, atheist parents still send their kids to sunday school because they think that they will be more ethical with some religious upbringing.
But here's the problem.
Religious morality is immoral.
Quite simply, if your sense of right and wrong are based on mystical rewards and the threat of mystical punishment, you really don't have a sense of right and wrong but a sense of blind obedience. If they can be persuaded that the mystical being who made the laws wants them to do something, then anything can be considered right, including what most of us consider heinous crimes.
6.Evolution, the big bang theory, etc. are far more likely than gods. A popular argument is that God may have put it together and set it in motion, after all, it had to have come from somewhere. But, then, where did God come from? It's an equally unanswerable question. To use a really bad paraphrase of something said by Stephen Hawking, if there is a god, he had no choice in how he created the universe, and therefore his presence was probably not required.

Daniel Johnson

Thoughts on Native American Sprituality
I was having an argument with an uncle of mine not long ago, a highly educated man for whom I carry a great deal of respect. I was greatly enjoying the exchange, as an intelligent shouting match is always more valuable than a quiet discussion with an idiot. At one point I mentioned Satanism, and he asked me what type of Satanism I was talking about. I said “LaVeyan” and he said “Oh, you mean Anton LaVey...he’s full of shit.”.
Now, this is coming from a man who, from what I knew of him, followed a branch of Aboriginal spirituality.
The conversation drifted too quickly for me to give a full reply, so this would be my rebuttal to his remark.
Coming partially from a Cree background, I am fully aware of many customs and beliefs held by Aboriginal people. I still participate in the occasional sweat lodge, as I feel they have some value outside the spiritual realm they are intended for. I use sage in my rituals, which I gather for the purpose according to their custom out of acknowledgement. But that’s about as far as it goes.
The North American Indian civilization was essentially still in the stone age. All civilizations in the world share that history, but as a result of not developing an agricultural economy many groups remained in that time-frame.
Starving yourself prior to several bouts of rapid dehydration may cause some vivid hallucinations, but a connection to the spirit world will not be reached by malnourishment.
I can understand to some degree why such practices may yield results on a small scale. An intelligent and logical person who has been raised in such a culture, believing that great decisions are made by spiritual revelation, may not be able to examine a situation critically. His mind is capable of finding answers by logic, but he has been incapacitated by the mythology and cannot accept his own ability.
So, by self-traumatization, malnutrition, dehydration and the occasional psychedelic substance he brings forth visions, which are vivid hallucinations showing him what he won’t acknowledge he has already figured out.
Much the same with the meditative practices of the Tibetans, etc.
But the overall effect is damaging. The critical thinking skills are relenquished to the “spirit world” only, and solutions are polluted with the innuendo and metaphor through which the hallucination speaks.
The hallucinations are often accompanied by "objective evidence" in the minds of the followers. I was once at a conference where the keynote speaker, a tribal elder visiting from the U.S., made a big deal about an eagle flying overhead, saying that it was a sign of approval. I stifled my chuckle despite myself, knowing that great insult would be taken by my noting that the attachment of great spiritual value to such mundane events is also common in new age circles and at meetings conducted by Christian faith healers.
There was another incident, at a sweat lodge, where some bells which hung from the top of the lodge began to tinkle partway through the ceremony.
The sweat lodge, as tradition dictates, is completely dark save for the glowing coals, which don't provide any usable light, so nobody could see who rang the bells or even a shadow of anyone standing up to do so. Of course, nobody would admit to such a thing, and the elder conducting the sweat lodge made quite a big deal about it's implications. It was taken by most of the group as a sign that the Great Spirit was present during the ceremony. As is likely to happen, observations were made afterwards by some of the wide eyed disciples about how it would have been impossible for anyone to have done it without someone else knowing. The lodge was pretty full, I must admit, more than it is usually would be. But not so much so that, as most of the group claimed, nobody could move without the two people beside them feeling it.
It would have been hard, however. But the one person who could have definitely moved during the ceremony, the one person who always had at least a foot of space between them and the people beside them, was the elder. Nobody is going to accuse an elder of attempting to use fraudulant means to promote his faith. Especially not little old white me on a strange reserve several kilometers out of the city amongst a group of seemingly dedicated believers.
Given that the elder in question was a highly educated individual, originally a Psychologist, and not given to many of the superstitious and traditional elements of the ceremony, I found it rather suprising. But I realized that some of those in attendance were recovering alcaholics and drug addicts who sorely needed such miracles to keep them on the right track, and at least believing in this hogwash was a step up from there and a step up from believing the even more destructive hogwash of Christianity, to which many recovering addicts retreat instead.
Unlike the faith healers, there's no question of the elder bilking followers for money. The elder makes no money from his work, and at the very least I can say for sure that he is doing what he does for what he feels is the well being of the sweat lodge attendants.
I personally believe that the elder in question was probably an atheist himself, and, even if he isn't, I have heard him speak on various subjects enough times to respect him as a generally rational and respectable person.
But I've seen other elders who are not so. Some of them are very far from rational, and these are always, without fail, the most rigidly traditional.
The elder I was discussing differed from most elders in his high level of education and in his having travelled to many places around the world. Most elders are firmly rooted in the old ways, with outside influence restricted to Christianity, and so they truly reflect the most likely state of mind ruling the Native people before European contact.
Like many primitive cultures, they were ruled by group prejudice and superstition. The free spirit image of the “noble savage” is a crock, and in many regards they were under a greater thought restrictions than even the most oppressive Christian countries.
They were far from liberal, and though the occasional first nation may have elevated the status of women further than most, it was rare and usually only the older women. They were sexist in ways most women in general would never tolerate today.
The egalitarian nature of their society was one of necessity, though many in modern times attempt to paint a more romantic image. Egalitarianism doesn's work for the simple reason that it opposes the progressive personality. The progressive personality wants personal recognition, creativity is in many ways a result of what Nietzsche called The Will To Power, or what the Bhuddists and other spiritualist dunderheads seek to annihilate in their becoming one with the universe.
If one is taught their whole life that they must always be part of the herd, that egotism is a sin, etc. they will subjugate their personal interest and thereby subjugate their creative urge. Thus, primitive remains primitive.
It should be recognized that Aboriginal healers were, by mellenia of trial and error, successful in keeping a large portion of their people relatively healthy, moreso than the Europeans. Perhaps this results directly from the stature which was held by the healers in the eyes of the tribe. The healer was encouraged in his creative and intellectual progress because he was revered. The flaw was that they didn't recieve this reverance until their old age, when they were fully indoctrinated into self-denial, and thus the ego-boost wasn't enough to bring forth greater progress in general. Physics dictates that a body at rest will stay at rest until it is disrupted. Primitive begets primitive until some incident propels them to further heights.
They were not primitive as a result of lower intelligence, but as a result of their environment which, except in the more southern climes, demanded that they travel great distances on a regular basis. They also had a severe lack of the domesticable animals which had led to the huge progresses of the Middle East, North Africa and eventually Europe.
They didn’t have the opportunity, except again in the more southern climes, to develop an agrarian economy in any major sense. In order for them to have grown a crop, it would have meant planting in the spring and staying until fall. As if they would take that risk when this period of time would mean not hunting and therefore starving come winter should the crop fail. Not having the opportunity to develop an agrarian economy meant that there was no opportunity to develop a stable civilization, which is necessary for technological advances.
A lack of technological advances and a society that depended on total group cooperation meant that they would most likely have remained primitive for a very long time if Europeans hadn’t come. But eventually the empires of South and Central America would have done the same thing as the Europeans. It would have been much better for them, as those empires were in many ways more advanced both technologically and sociologically than the Europeans. Also, they would not have taken as much of a supremecist attitude, as their cultures were in many ways very similar and had the same roots, so the assimilation process would have been swifter and more complete.
It is important to note that the Germanic nations were not that far off from the stone age themselves, and nor were many small tribes, such as those found on the British Isles, which advanced swiftly after being conquered by a more well developed neighbor. If Aboriginals are upset about being treated like dirt by Europeans for so long, perhaps the Europeans should acknowledge that they too faced similar problems in their history. They were just as humiliated by their conquerers, resisted assimilation in much the same way, but eventually adjusted and are better for it.
Recognizing the accomplishments of a culture, both real and potential, does not necessitate any acknowledgement for that culture’s spiritual beliefs. Just as Christianity hampered the development of European civilization more than it helped, the North American Indian could have gone alot further without their religious hangups.
So, dear Uncle, at least Anton LaVey’s philosophy is compatible with contemporary reality, which is more than I can say for a spirituality that asks it’s followers to cling to stone age values.
However, full acculturation of the North American Indian into European values would not be a positive development for either party. The Roman Empire advanced not because it annihilated the cultures it assimilated, it advanced by being partially assimilated into those cultures itself. It spread and advanced by utilizing the ideas of the cultures it assimilated, and assimilation didn't entail the full conversion into it's values demanded by the later Europeans in their North American invasion.
A culture must grow from itself. Conversion to Christianity prevents this growth, which is why it would have been better had the South and Central American empires advanced north first, as mentioned earlier. The Roman Empire advanced into regions whose people were similar to their own, and from their advanced into regions whose people were similar to the people they had previously conquered. The conquered people, for the most part, weren't jarred in such an extreme way as the Native Americans were.
Aboriginal peoples have to pick and choose, filter if you will, the positive elements of their culture that are conducive to modern life, and blend them with the positive elements of the dominant culture that are conducive to their own culture. This has been done by some with successful results, thanks to the unique middle ground provided by Satanism. Anton LaVey combined elements of primitive paganism with both the structural hierarchy of Christianity and the atheist/humanist mindset of modern times.
Christianity among Native Americans is a degrading factor, as it is part of the European faction that attempted to annihilate the culture completely. Satanism acts against this in the same way as it does for European rooted individuals who, seeing Christianity as a hindrance, metaphorically reject it by taking the title of it's mythological opposition. Mere disbelief can be countered by a traumatic experience followed by a well placed bit of propaganda, as seen in many born again cases. Intelligent rejection of the religion, based on detailed study of it's major tenets and critical analysis of it's ideals, becomes a larger part of your consciousness and thereby can't be thwarted in the same way as mere disbelief can be. Thus, rejection of Christianity by Natives necessitates an examination of both it and their traditional religions and an understanding of their shared negative and positive charactaristics. The Satan equivelent in North American Indian mythology is similar, being an ingenious independant spirit thus refuting the accepted ideals of self-denial and herd conformity which are the negative values shared by most religions including Native spirituality and Christianity.
This is a part of each individual, and an analysis of the modern age shows that this Satan equivelent in all cultures has reached it's time, as we have evolved to a point where individualism is more possible than it has ever been before. Self-denial is no longer necessary for survival, and herd conformity is now doing more harm than good.
Anton LaVey's philosophy can act as a gateway between the cultures, as I said earlier. Evidence of this can be seen in the works of Satanic Apache artist Stephen Johnson Leyba, among others, who represent the advance of the Native culture into the modern age. It's positive elements and their companion metaphors, the symbols of the culture, carried forth out of the stone age of intellectual suppression into the modern age of rational individualism.

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Putting Spiritual Power In Your Everyday Life!
Here are some observances I’ve made of mundane events which, observed by the mystically inclined, are seen as evidence of spiritual forces at work. For a very long time I’ve associated with the new age and occultnik element, keeping on hand some of the connections made during my time in the movement. One of the things which I believe binds these people to their beliefs is the fact that, to them, the spirit world reveals itself on an almost daily basis. In attempting to demonstrate to these people that they live in a fantasy world, I come accross a wall created by mounds of “evidence”, not all of which can be torn apart because they have re-written the experiences in their own minds and the evidence I’m presented with is already tainted with that bias, also the day to day nature of the events makes it impossible to go through all of them. So, here’s a collection from different walks that ought to at least domonstrate the universality of these occasions in all religous fields.

I’ll start with some extracts from one of my other essays, Thoughts On Native Spirituality:
"I was once at a conference where the keynote speaker, a tribal elder visiting from the U.S., made a big deal about an eagle flying overhead, saying that it was a sign of approval. I stifled my chuckle despite myself, knowing that great insult would be taken by my noting that the attachment of great spiritual value to such mundane events is also common in new age circles and at meetings conducted by Christian faith healers."
"There was another incident, at a sweat lodge, where some bells which hung from the top of the lodge began to tinkle partway through the ceremony.
The sweat lodge, as tradition dictates, is completely dark save for the glowing coals, which don't provide any usable light, so nobody could see who rang the bells or even a shadow of anyone standing up to do so. Of course, nobody would admit to such a thing, and the elder conducting the sweat lodge made quite a big deal about it's implications. It was taken by most of the group as a sign that the Great Spirit was present during the ceremony. As is likely to happen, observations were made afterwards by some of the wide eyed disciples about how it would have been impossible for anyone to have done it without someone else knowing. The lodge was pretty full, I must admit, more than it is usually would be. But not so much so that, as most of the group claimed, nobody could move without the two people beside them feeling it.
It would have been hard, however. But the one person who could have definitely moved during the ceremony, the one person who always had at least a foot of space between them and the people beside them, was the elder. Nobody is going to accuse an elder of attempting to use fraudulant means to promote his faith. Especially not little old white me on a strange reserve several kilometers out of the city amongst a group of seemingly dedicated believers."

Now, onto the occultniks. An acquaintence of mind was walking through the food court of a local mall with a group of friends. These friends were new to the new age, and my acquaintence had been “teaching” them all about it recently. Accross the food court they spotted someone that the group didn’t like, who was carrying a tray of food to her table. One of them pointed her out, and a few secounds later she happened to trip and lose her tray.
My acquaintence immediately claimed to have “zapped” her, causing her to fall, and I observed during conversations how the incident was re-written over the next few days. On the day it happened, about an hour later, they were telling me about it. They pointed her out, she fell. She didn’t see them or know they were there. The “leader” claimed to have caused it.
It was only a day later when some of them were claiming to have seen the leader “zap” her, lifting his hand in her direction and muttering something under his breath, upon the conclusion of which the fall occurred.
Given a week, most of the group had actually “felt” a rush of power come from the “leader” as he concluded his “chant”, a half secound before she fell.
In fact, I’d say that the poor girl tripped and fell all by herself, and my acquaintence took advantage of the situation to boost his reputation as a sorcerer.

I myself have done similar things.
During an outdoor summer solstice ritual, the wind was blowing at a medium pace while we were setting up. The wind stopped suddenly right when the ritual began. I realized that this meant the wind would probably be very sporadic, and that if I played it right and paid attention to the wind, I could conduct the ritual in such a way as to make it appear that the wind was acting in cooperation with me.
The wind slowly built, and I slowly raised my voice and changed my tone as it did so. When I felt the wind slow down, I slowed down with it. When the wind stopped altogether again, I quickly ended the ritual and the wind began again, calmly, after the final words were spoken.
I didn’t even get to finish pointing out the “power” I had exhibited over the wind, because the rest of the participants began talking about it as soon as I started mentioning it. Their descriptions were more elaborate than mine, and, being at the time a little jealous of some of my acquaintences who had gained influence over people by such miracles, I did more than play along.
I am ashamed of myself for doing so, because this was well after my conversion to the Skeptical movement, and I had maintained that the rituals were all strictly metaphorical. The mild hint that some actual power existed was only a way of keeping people concentrated on the ritual, so that it could have it’s full psychological effect. I worry even now, as I never got to tell some of the others in attendance the truth, that I may have inadvertantly given their “believer instinct” a boost which, for all I know, may have led them further toward a spiritual belief.

James Randi’s expose, “The Magic Of Uri Geller” , is peppered with similar incidents. The fraudulent psychic Geller added to repution he had established doing parlor tricks by claiming responsibility for various day to day coincidences, some of them very mundane. For example, in one incident the film projector on an airplane breaks down while Geller is on board. He claims to have accidently done it in a power surge of sorts, and even went as far as to claim the stewardess said it was very rare. Working as a media archivist, I’ve had to use a film projector several times a day for weeks on end. I know for a fact from experience that they mess up quite a bit, which is why most films have so much leader at the beginnings and ends so there’s lots to cut off when, time after time, it gets jammed while being loaded.

In closing, if you are one given to belief in spirituality and have many day to day occurences that appear spiritual, ask yourself if they would appear as spiritual if you didn’t already believe in spirituality.

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Questions For The White Superemecists
In my long struggle to rid myself of myths, I was at one point forced to examine my opposition to racism. Certain white supremecist writings had grabbed my interest because they seemed too logical and too well thought out to pass off.
It made me ask some serious questions about racial equality. After all, doesn't it seem, despite the few exceptions, that the majority of black people, native people, etc. are uncreative, slow learning followers? Doesn't it seem that, even though a few of them had done great things and had achieved great creative and scholarly heights, that the majority of them don't really measure up?
Doesn't it seem that these people were uncivilized and had little in the way of technological advancement before European contact?
Yes, it does seem that way. It seems most likely true.
The question is, isn't it the same with white people?
Why is the bulk of the membership in any given white supremecist group made up of trailor trash?
Why are there so few white people in history who have accomplished great things compared to the number who simply worked and obeyed?
Why?
Because they're all the same.
If white people are, as they say, supreme, why is the majority of white supremecist literature made up of discussions on the Jewish itnernational conspiracy? If white supremecists believe that it's the Jews who really run the world, doesn't that make them Jewish supremecists?
I was once told that the constant struggles and wars in Africa and the Middle East were a sign that they were of an inferior culture. Note that nothing is mentioned about Europe, whose constant wars only tapered off halfway through this century. Less than 50 years of relative peace after centuries of constant battle, but the Chinese have managed to keep a relatively stable empire for centuries longer than any European or Middle Eastern people.
I've had it pointed out to me that in some cities where there's alot of immigration, the majority of the street people are immigrants. They don't have jobs and don't appear to be looking for them, why are they so lazy?
Here's an answer: The culture shock of a foriegn city causes them to band together in certain neighborhoods for protection, thus the employed and unemployed alike end up in the same neighborhood.
The stereotypes against them make it hard for many of them to find jobs, and until they get citizenship, many jobs are closed to them altogether. Educational opportunities are based on them learning a high level of english. How fast can you learn Chinese? The level of english they usually develop is quite phenomenal considering the differences between the languages. European languages are all from common backgrounds, thereby it's easier to learn one when you already know another. The immigrants in question are often full grown adults, and the learning curve by age is against them. So there are many explanations for the poverty of immigrants that are far more reasonable than "Because they're inferior". Besides, if they weren't unemployed, you'd turn around the other way and scream "Those damn immigrants are taking all the jobs!".
Why was the majority of Europe made up of isolated barbaric tribes until they were civilized by the Roman empire, who were in turn civilized a great deal by their contact with the Middle Eastern and North African empires?
If the white supremecists are correct in their assumptions that black people aren't as capable of learning academic subjects, why did their ancestors in the southern U.S. make it illegal for black people to learn academic subjects? Because they knew they were full of shit about black people not being capable?
What bothers me the most about this, what makes me retread over something I figured most people grasped long ago, is that the white supremecist movement, losing it's traditional Christian support, is now infiltrating Satanism.
If Satanists are supposed to examine carefully all of their views, dispose of destructive myths, make rational and logical conclusions based on evidence, then Satanists should be immune to the racist plague.
But the semi-logical sounding arguments of Micheal Levine and the like seem to be just too hard for some of these idiots to get their heads around. All it takes is careful examination of the facts to answer the questions posed by white supremecists and refute the answers they've given.
The non-existent connection between Satanism and Nazi-ism was once one of the stupid myths of the 80's, along the line of cat-killing and baby fat burning. A band like Slayer, who happens to use some Satanic symbolism and happens to write some songs having Nazis as their subject, are labelled as being white supremecist even though their front man is a visible minority. Give me a fucking break!
But this connection is being utilized by the neo-nazis, playing upon a misguided definition of elitism, to convince some of the less intelligent wannabe Satanists that racism can be justified.
ALL WHITE SUPREMICISTS IN NORTH AMERICA: THIS ISN'T GERMANY, GO BACK TO YOUR OWN COUNTRY!!!!

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Better A Soul That's Empty And Cold Than A Hot Head Full Of Shit
A relatively standard argument I've been getting lately is that without a God, I must have an empty spot inside. I must have some sort of internal yearning of some sort, a part of me that "knows" that there is a higher power. This, apparently, is a part of everyone, and many a former atheist will tell you all about it.
Here's the problem with that assumption.
The feeling of pointlessness is common in people who think that they're "living life to it's fullest" by taking in alot of chemicals, having a dangerously promiscuous lifestyle, or any number of other things. This emptiness is a result of the fact that their life is pointless. Yes, religion does give their life a point, but not as good as they would have had if they adopted self-improvment as a goal. Also, living a society surrounded by religion, where it's in our constitutions, infiltrates our schools, flashes itself at us on t.v. and in movies.
It's hard to escape it's message, relayed in both overt and subtle methods, and so, of course, it's going to be there so that when the feeling of being overwhelmed by emptiness finally gets to you, it will be those messages, buried in your mind from years of near-subliminal indoctrination, that ring out as a provider of purpose.
This gives the born again the notion that the conversion, the great revaltion of Christ's love, came from within. They will insist they weren't indoctrinated because, as far as they could tell, they weren't.
Atheist parents will sometimes put their children into sunday schools because they think it will help them be more ethical, and thinking that they won't be real believers when they get older. This is a severe problem, because childhood religious indoctrination is the most insidious form of brainwashing in existence. It has a crippling effect, because if the child doesn't consciously remember the experience, they can't question what they learned at a young age when they're old enough to do so.
So, there's that voice nagging in their heads. They don't notice it, but it's there. Later in life, when stress pulls them down for what would be a short while, the voice gets louder. Everyone's had a day when they've said "what's the point", but this subtle brainwashing means that there's always a chance that a "voice inside" will answer the question, and if it's the "right" moment, the answer might sound like the voice of God.
I've managed to kill that voice altogether. It took me a long time, and I drifted through varying degrees of spiritualism and mysticism, thinking that I "had to believe in something", but eventually I examined it all, in detail. I put that voice front and center, meditated for several hours a day until I could remember in detail the incidents that made me believe in spiritual beings.
I had been in a Christian run children's home for part of my childhood, but for the year before that, and a few months after that, I had lived with my father who was a complete atheist. So, because at that age I had asked him about many things and he had answered me as best he could, I was able to remember the questions that most children in the same position put aside and forget.
After my father died, I lived with my mother and step father. My step father was a schizophrenic who read alot of biblical paranoia literature. Hal Lindsay, Mike Warnke and the rest of them, filtered through his mind, blended to form a religion that can only be described as right fucked.
The trauma of watching my father die at 8 years old, in addition to the fast changes that came with it, made me very open to any influence. My step dad was there to take advantage of that, and he used the opportunity. I'm still in the position of having to examine every belief I have just to make sure that it doesn't result from the thinking patterns instilled in me by him.
He distrusted organized religion, so I was lucky there. But we did, for awhile, attend a rather liberal church before his paranoia got the best of him. I spent awhile in sunday school as well, and some of what was said there did have an effect on me.
In addition to that was the various t.v. shows, movies, magazine article, etc. that may have had nothing to do with religion, but casually mentioned it as part of the background. This had a recognizable effect as well, once I examined it closely.
But the jarring that occurred every so often, my father's arguments against religion, the memory of the abuse in the children's home and the humiliation of discovering too late that my step dad was not a reliable source for information, all stopped the subtle messages from settling in.
I pity the individual with a stable background, with dilligent parents, that never hears any outside opinion about these subjects until adolescence. With religion is schools, etc., television closely monitored, etc., their parents' views become very pervasive and there is no chance to question it until it's too late.
I killed that little voice. I brought it out, tracked down it's roots and interrogated it. It went away. God, for me, is dead.
This, according to some, would make my soul cold and empty. But it hasn't. Because I don't have one.

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Education
When I was a teenager, I read the Autobiography Of Malcom X as part of my research into the Black Panthers, a division of the civil rights movement. I found myself intrigued by one very important part, which occured while he was in prison.
He spent alot of time in the prison library, where he got much of his education, and he relates how he improved his handwriting by copying out a dictionary page by page. While he was doing so, he noted that a dictionary is like a miniature encyclopedia, and copying it out helped him remember much of it, thereby giving a huge boost to his education.
Having suffered an accident in my early childhood that damaged the tendons in my left hand, as I was left handed, my handwriting was awful. I can type and play guitar very well, because it involves the use of different muscles than handwriting or drawing, which I suck at.
I was fascinated with this idea, and I took up the task of doing it myself. My handwriting was a little more clear when I was done, but the other benefit was far greater. When asked later on in life of his alma matter, Malcom X claimed, he would simply respond “books”. He went on to discuss in that same chapter the problems with the educational system, and why a personal desire to learn can be thwarted by the system. A personal desire to learn and access to rescources from which to learn can provide for a greater education than that offered by the best of universities.
The trouble is, many people’s desire to learn is discouraged in the public school system, which was not actually intended for education. The public school system originally came into being during the industrial revolution with a double purpose. The first purpose was to act as a baby sitting service for the working class, so they could spend more time at the factory. The second purpose was to condition working class children for factory life so they would be better laborers. Another purpose was to ensure that any values which were taught in the home that contradicted the values taught by the leadership could be corrected. Another reason was to quell the rise in street gangs that were sprouting up in the new urban environment created by industrialization. The educational aspect itself was at the bottom of the priority list.
So the failures of the public school system to educate children are no mystery at all, and shouldn’t be when one considers the severe disadvantages represented by such a sytem to begin with.
I started to teach my daughter how to play chess shortly before she turned 3. At first, it was getting her to remember the names of the pieces. Then it was how the pieces moved. As she progessed into killing my pieces instead of just moving them around the board, she also started to move her pieces out of the way before I killed them. Having learned that the game is over as soon as I kill her king, she began devising tactics to stop me from killing her king. She’s starting to grasp the idea of checkmate, but she still doesn’t consider the game to be over until her king is actually dead.
As I’m writing this, she’s now 4 and I’m quite impressed by how far she’s advanced in the game. Teaching her has been very frustrating. I can usually only handle 10 minutes at a time before I start to get mad. I end the game as quickly as possible in order to make sure I don’t inadvertantly discourage her from playing. I get frustrated because I insist she play by rules, move the pieces as they are meant to be moved, etc. I don’t let her win, as this would have no benefit to her. Someday she will win on her own skill and that is far more valuable. Some consider this to be mean, but I have reasons to do it. I do this because I don’t consider chess to be a game. It is an exercise in strategy and critical thinking, and when she’s older she will benefit from the thought patterns such an exercise develops.
I don’t make her play it, either. She wants to play it, and she begs me to play every day. It gets less frustrating and more suprising every time, the 10 minute limit has become 20 and I actually have a fair amount of difficulty in finishing the game when the frustration gets to me. One of the main rules that I stick to, and one she makes me stick to, is that the game isn’t over until the king is killed.
Now, consider the relative ease of playing chess versus the difficulty of reading, writing, mathematics and science. My wife and I are also teaching her these things, and for longer periods.
We’ve regularily do experiments that teach basic scientific rules. To her, it’s fun just to see what happens. Often, she will want to do the same one every day for weeks because she enjoys it so much. 3 small bottles of food coloring, red blue and yellow, diluted in three glasses of water and mixed at whim, bit by bit, into several cups to see what new colors can be made. This is very inexpensive and she’s learned that the same mix will yield the same results every time, which is an important lesson on the scientific process, and for her it’s tons of fun. She’s started blending different colors of playdough together because she’s found it follows the same rules and food coloring and water.
Could a school with 15 kids to one teacher come even close to matching that? Especially when the curriculum is so long and drawn out that important interrelated concepts are often taught 4 or 5 years apart? Could they do this in an environment where kids are all brought down to the level of the statistical average?
Could they do this in an environment where even the most motivated student, with the most involved parents, is dragged down by forced association with the most unmotivated, neglected kids in the class? Could they do this when the science experiments are usually saved for older grades and only done once?
I really don’t think so.
They can’t do it when graduating to the next level is dependant on learning only 50% or so of the information, and when a kid who already knows more than that on one subject still has to redo that subject because they failed at others. When important concepts are missed, they don’t go back and deal with them as long as most of the subject is learned. What is learned? Learned is only when they can remember it for a test, which means they might not actually understand it.
If an important concept is missed, it may not become apparent until a related concept is being taught at a grade level a few years later. Enough of those, and an A student in grades 1-8 who missed about 5% of the concepts can end up flunking grade 10 because of related concepts that can’t be grasped until the missed ones are figured out.
I’ve been told that, statistically, children with alot of early education don’t do better in school than kids without it. This is pretty sad because the reason is so obvious. I figure if a parent wants their kid to benefit from early childhood education, they’d better home school as well to make sure that progress is continual. To put a child with the equivelent of a grade 1 education into kindergarten is to make early childhood education useless.
As a parent, I know during every second of “class” time wether or not my daughter is interested in what we are doing. She wants to do it, and unless something persuades her that it’s a chore, she will always want to do it. She volunteers to help dry the dishes because she thinks drying the dishes is fun. If we continue to treat it that way, she will benefit from the work ethic later on. In many ways, she’s too young to help dry dishes. It’s more of a hindrance than a help, when it comes right down to it. But she will get better, and therefore it’s worth the trouble because when she is old enough to do it properly, she won’t think it’s a chore because she’s been doing it , and enjoying it, for as long as she can remember. Same with the flashcards, the work books, the science experiments, the puzzles and the daily games of chess.
By a certain age, we won’t have to teach very much anymore. We’ll be there when she has a question, but her main instructor will be our home library, the world around her, and her personal desire to learn.

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In Defense Of Christians
Some have interpreted my attacks on Christianity as a sign of hatred for Christians. It isn't. I have associated with many Christians, and feel I've had good reasons for doing so.
During the 1997 federal election, I was a member of a small political party, who I won't name for fear of my association with them being detrimental to their public image. The local branch of this party, with a handful of members, met every week to discuss various things related to the upcoming election campaign. I learned very quickly that I was one two non Christians in the room
The party had no religious affiliations or leanings, and was generally centrist on most issues.
The candidate in my constinuency was a devout Catholic, but I liked him even though I knew he would hate me if he knew that I was a Satanist. We disagreed with each other on every social issue discussed. But, as the party's platform was more or less structural and economic rather than social or legal, neither of our positions conflicted with any element relevent to the party.
The party called for a series of referendums on moral and legal issues. This both me and the candidate agreed on fully. But we both had different reasons for doing so, and far different hopes for the outcome. We came close to shouting matches over abortion, but both agreed that a referendum was a good idea, and both believed that the outcome would be against the other.
But I still pounded the pavement with pamphlets, put up lawnsigns and tried to convince everyone I knew that the candidate was a great guy. Because he was. I felt that he was best suited, out of all the federal candidates in my constituency, to represent the people in parliament, and that the party he ran with had the best options for the country.
When I was reading Martin Luther King Jr's 1964 civil rights classic "Why We Can't Wait", he discussed in one chapter the contract which volunteers were obligated to sign before being allowed to participate in actions. With some of them being "Pray to Jesus Christ daily..." and the like, I asked myself a question. If I was a young black person living the southern U.S. at the time, and believed what I believe now, would I sign such a contract and indirectly promote Christianity even if I didn't follow it?
I came to a conclusion. If I was a young black person in the southern U.S. at the time I wouldn't believe what I believe now because I wouldn't have the educational opportunities, the vast freedom of information and communication abilities I have. Also, I could never relate to the experience of being a young black person in the southern U.S. no matter how hard I tried, because I have had a relatively free and open life, am white and therefore part of the dominant race, and therefore any attempt to judge what needed to be done by such people in such a time and place would be a crime of trivialization pretensiousness on my part.
Given the choice of civil rights organizations at the time, it was Martin Luther King Jr or the Nation Of Islam. Martin Luther King was a minister who came from a long line of ministers. His movement was built within the churches, black ministers added the politics to their sermons and the churches served as strategic bases for direct action. The movement preached peace and discussion, helping to calm and angry black nation who otherwise would have exploded.
Elijah Mohammed's Nation Of Islam preached fear, hate and paranoia. It slowly started to change under Louis Farrakhan, but in a bad way. Both were anti-semetic, but Farrakhan learned to deal with white people while Mohammed claimed white people were devils. Farrakhan deals especially well with the extremist element among whites, as a mutual respect and some closed door discussion have developed with white supremecist leaders. The Nation Of Islam often quotes from Aryan Nations literature on the subject of the Jewish conspiracy, the number one philisophical element they share between them, the runners up being identical nationalist agendas, paranoid militancy, mirrored nonsensical mythology and the quintessentially red-neck morality they both preach.
Knowing this, aren't you glad that they didn't gain the support of most American blacks? Even with it's flaws, the movement of non-violent direct action was an excellent option. It had to be done, a religious element was needed to act as a catalyst, and the pacifistic re-interpretation of Christianity was much more rational and logical than the alternatives.
Thanks to the naivete of some music groups such as Ice-T, Public Enemy and Rage Against The Machine, some young blacks and many whites are displaying sympathies for the Nation Of Islam, having no knowledge of the neo-nazi element Farrakhan is courting or the oppressive sexist and homophobic religious fundamentalism he spouts They don't realize that when he talks about an independant black state within the U.S., his vision is closer to that of the Taliban in Afghanistan than those supporters would like.
But this support only goes as far as a t-shirt and a rap lyric, maybe attendance at a rally or possibly the Million Man March, whereas the activists wihin the mainstream civil rights movement in the U.S., which has the most support and the most tangible accomplishments, are much more invovled. Though they reject much of the extreme views, the mainstream still rightfully recognizes the Nation Of Islam for it's work and participates in many of it's actions.
I would like to ask much of the mainstream civil rights movement why it continues to embrace Christianity, the religion which was forced upon them during the time of their enslavement and used to keep them under control. Why, as a race having experienced firsthand in their immediate history the degrading and destructive nature of slavery, would they worship a man that implored slaves to stay with their masters and people to obey their unelected leaders without protest?
But it is understandable, and it's been hard enough for them to accomplish what they have toward their physical liberation without having to worry about their psychological and intellectual liberation as well. Though it's a good time for them to start thinking about it now, up to this time it would have been destructive and divisive rather than productive. As it was the black Christian clergy who built the civil rights movement, the issue of respect dictates that this should be handled slowly.
My point is about the value of the Christian belief system as a binding force in our cultural evolution, and the civil rights movement is only being used as an example because of it's recent and continued prominence. I don't pretend to understand their minds or their movement and apoligize if any offense is taken by those who are a part of it and who therefore truly understand it.
But it could have been any religion, if you think about it. Christianity per se wasn't the binding force, it just happened to be the one that was there. The Christian religion has survived because of, rather than in spite of, the contradictions in it's scripture. When Christian churches have controlled governments, they have taken to the dictatorial and warmongering elements of Revelations and the Old Testament. When they've lost their control, they have retreated to the apparently pacifistic and liberal stance of Jesus. Thus it has the ability to to appear sincere both when begging for tolerance and violently refusing to offer that tolerance to others, thus they cling to survivial when besieged and proliferate through force when empowered and that they have lasted this long is principly a manifestation of their own hyp[ocrisy.
The hypocrisy is not as blatant to the Christians themselves as it is to the rest of us, as they honestly see whichever ineterpretation they choose as being legitimate.
The blending of these opposing forces in a single work is one of the many things which make the Christin Bible such an important work of literature. It is a blend of poems, songs, short stories, epic tales, textbooks, geneological histories, philosophical tracts, high magick grimoires and hallucinegenic rambling. To read it as such, rather than as an actual guidebook to life or revelation of cosmic truths, is an exhillerating experience. It is the cornerstone of an ancient canon that includes the Islamic Koran, the Jewish holy works, the Mesopotamian and Egyptian legends, the Greek theatrical works, the Homeric epics and the philosophical texts of Plato.
It is the cornerstone of this canon because within it are elements of all of these, the time in which it was slowly written encapsulated the times of the other writings, and because it is the most widely distributed "sample pack" of the ancient western canon, opening up a gateway to understanding the context of the others. It has a bewildering array of styles and perspectives bound within it's pages.
But it contains, of course, many innaccuracies besides the obvious one about the existence of God.
I read it in the same way I read Homer's Oddesey, Alex Haley's Roots or Adolf Hitler's Mien Kampf, as similarities abound between all of them. Like the others, it professes to be a historical work but is written from the bias and within the context of a certain culture, it's history skewed in favor of the culture that wrote it. All tell the stories of heroes and villains tossed around by deities and a law far beyond themselves, and all but Roots rest the fate of the entire world on the incidents of their relatively isolated nation.
I've enjoyed all four of them for different reasons, have agreed with all of them on some of their philisophical and moral ideas, though I remain in opposition to the largest portion of the ideals they espouse and know that they are ridiculously innaccurate in their history. They are all valuable works of literature in their own ways, and have served as reflections to the paradigms and collective hopes of the cultures they represented, fascinating albeit erroneous in their outlook.
The Bible is the work that initially turned me against Christianity, yet paradoxically it's literary brilliance alone kept me from complete condemnation of the faith, which led to my ability to justify working with Christians toward mutual goals when the need arises, and recognizing the contributions Christianity has made to our society.
The contributions have continued today, though they have declined in both frequency and extent. The Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, by their quaint interpretation of an obscure bit of scripture, opposed the use of blood transfusions. Now that the AIDS epidemic is upon much of the world, and the proliferation of a clean blood supply is posing a major challenge to the field of medicine, the value of advances in blood-free medical procedures is becoming apparent. It has been the Jehovah's Witnesses who have led and financed many of the developments, and now that the medical community at large is recognizing the need, they are also recognizing the key role played by the Jehovah's Witnesses in making many solutions possible now that they have these problems.
It is important to note that initial reasons for the Witnesses refusal of blood transfusions were rather superstitious and ignorant, it's the manifestations of these superstitious beliefs that ended up having an unexpectedly positive outcome.
The Jehovah's Witnesses have done many other great things as a movement. Their various publications, including magazines like the Watchtower and Awake, discuss some very relevant issues in an often very scientific and unbiased manner. The fact that every article makes a feeble attempt to bring the subject into a religious context is kind of annoying, but once you get passed that minor barrier you can find some very informitive articles.
Only by fully acknowledging the accomplishments of an idea do we put ourselves in a position to note it's flaws.
In the case of Christianity, it's historic accomplishments have actually outweighed it's flaws. It's a matter of it's current accomplishments, which do not outweigh it's flaws. In other essays I have compared it to the tails we once had. Once we needed them, but now we've evolved and we should be hurrying up about dropping them as they've become an unnecessary burden. Religions united small bands of people into great civilizations, but now that we're there we should give it a nod and move on.

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Send mail to: Daniel Johnson, amduscias666@hotmail.com