XTIAN FUNDIES CONTROLLING AMERICA

Last year, the fundamentalist Christian Talliban in American forced Federated Department Stores to remove a British brand name from its shelves: French Connection, United Kingdon (acronym FCUK). Today, they forced Microsoft to discontinue support for an anti-discrimination bill to protect gay employment and housing in the State of Washington. They are currently trying to force very radical judges on us by altering the rules of the Senate which have been in effect for 200 years. They've forced movies and books to delete negative references to their particular form of dictatorial religion in the last year.

If the fundamentalist Talliban in Christianity can force major commercial enterprises to back down, imagine what they can do (and do do in small southern towns) to the freedoms of those of us few free individuals who recognize no gods and no masters? Can it be long before some of us are fined for being witches or burned at the stake for being atheists? Look, don't laugh. These fundamentalists are undemocratic in their psychologies and disrespecting of basic human and governmental freedoms. They are misled into thinking that their truth is the only truth and, therefore, can justify any behavior to force their aims onto the rest of us. We have all of history to remind us of past Christian cruelty and terror.

Will the internet allow us to continue to keep freedom alive after religious McCarthyism comes to dominate American culture? Who knows? 'Cause right now bills are waddling on their little duck feet to control and censor the internet, and few of our current congresspeople are brave enough to stand up to fundamentalist power.

I recently came across a Christian minister who 25 years ago said that "Fascism in America will come wearing the face of Christianity." Right on, brother.

PS: For those of you too young to recall—this suppression of American institutions and beliefs by the rabid barking of a strong minority of "true believers" is "McCarthyism". You are in the middle of it. You are experiencing it right now if you will but look around and recogize it. You will be able to understand what your parents are talking about when they refer to McCarthyism.


A REAL ETERNITY IN REAL TIME

I’m absolutely certain in this modern age of ours that few of us can really believe any more in a hidden life of spiritual beings, of arisen gods and places in space where our immaterial selves live on, doing goodness knows what for eternity. That’s why fundamentalism is so desperate, so angry and violent. They know a truth which they cannot accept. It plagues them and they kick and scream like children being dragged to Saturday night bath.

Yet, look! On this other hand, on the material hand, perhaps man is about to achieve an eternal life of the material body. This life will not be so peaceful as a heaven where the sounds of harps go on all day long and one’s sandals scrape along golden streets. Eternity without god! Now that’s a volkswagen of another color! That’s what men and women of the future face. Think of all the changes which must happen within the human psyche before it will be able to accept such an ambivalent eternity as this? Yet, here we are, face to face with it, and the face in the mirror we see will be transcendent beyond anything we could have imagined in order to accept this bloody gift.


ETERNITY IN FLESH?

And yet we troubled humans exist in painful flesh! Now here’s a real quandary. Can we cast off this too too troubled coil and keep it too?

From HOUSE OF CARDS (P. 29): "For example, studies find that the incidence of alcoholism is related to the alcoholism of the biological parents of children who have been adopted and is unrelated to the alcoholism of the children’s adoptive parents. That does not mean that a child with an alcoholic biological parent, or even two, is more likely than not to become an alcoholic. Far from it—most children of alcoholic biological parents do not become alcoholics themselves. The study’s conclusions mean simply that there’s a trend, involving genetic constitution." —ROBYN DAWES


SPEAKING OF THE FLESH—DON'T SEX ME UP OR I'LL GO TO HELL!

Over the years, I keep rediscovering this idea in a thousand forms, from essays to short stories to novels. I'm sure it's deeply in the works of Tennessee Williams, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, to name just a few. So, passed on to me, I worked it into my psyche and even think it infects my own sex life with my past wives and even my current wife. Now, of course, the dastardly Robyn Dawes debunks the Catholic idea in his book, HOUSE OF CARDS. Any young person reading this—beware the ideas of your time because when you grow old you may find that all things you learned are balderdash. In fact, after you read this book, you'll question everything you believe. Should I even believe this book? Will a pendulum swing back the other way and knock Dawes off the desk too. Then what shall any of us believe. Indeed!

"The Catholic Church retained the hierarchical structure of the soul, so that the highest level consisted of the “pure” love of Christ and God, and the lowest level consisted of impure lust for the sensual and material things of the earth—to the point that celibacy (or “virginity”) and asceticism were common among devout Christians at a very early date." (House of Cards, Dawes, p. 207).

And, if any are looking, you'll see modern day Christians trying again, for the thousandth time in history, to put the genie back in the bottle again, and only shamed human beings can come out of making sex "wrong" again.


THE NAME OF GOD IS PROPAGANDA

Yet, given all the nice ideas expressed above, we are mired in this now of lies and deceit, and the fearful ones who can't look ahead hold us back with injections of their fear. Why are they so fearful if they, indeed, believe their mythology?

When I think of the Bush tactic of lying until others believe and when I think of he Christian lie repeated over and over and over, I see the propaganda is alive and well on the Christian right. No wonder Bush believes the lie of god and so easily lies to others. It's all part of the self-fulfilling myths. Even Joe Campbell was misguided enough to believe that we all needed "myths" to live by.

Why not live by the story of truth that science tells? Though some like to call science just another myth, at least that myth is based in fact and mathematics rather than stale old stories and the hierarchical tales that monkeys tell in their grimaces and leaping and squawking.

"(Goebbels maintained that the effects of propaganda depend less on a belief in the legitimacy of the source than on the repetition and intensity of the propaganda itself. Subsequent psychological experiments have borne out this contention; experimenters have condistantly found that people tend to judge that whatever has been repeated is true—even when the repetition is only of the words in the assertion. Are we, for example, immune to the effects of repetitive news that we know to be “managed” simply because we know that what we are being shown and told is what those managing it want us to see and hear? (I know I was not during the recent Gulf War.)" (HOUSE OF CARDS, p. 202)

Will we be able to overcome the Christian/Moslem/Jewish lies and ring in the new mythology of life eternal?
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“She got her good looks from her father—he’s a plastic surgeon.” —Groucho Marx