@ John:
they don't care about religion or race or any
of that stuff; they care about money and power
I believe this is true of any politically motivated (power and money
hungry) group of people hanging their hat on religion or quasi religious
ideologies; a quest for power will feed off any belief to fuel/ sustain
itself.
And as one (perhaps not so wise in all aspects but believable in this) man
once famously stated: "Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes".
And with that, I shall go back to my lurking.
On Sun, Jan 12, 2020 at 6:30 AM <j...@wetmachine.com> wrote:
>
> My experience this year was similar to Krishna's (see post below).
>
> With the following corollaries:
>
> A) I changed my mind about the Republican Party in the USA; in
> particular about Republicans in Congress. I'm 67 years old and I first
> voted when I became eligible to vote at age 18 (George McGovern Vs
> Richard Nixon). Since then I've voted in dozens of elections: local,
> state, national. In all that time I've only voted for a Republican 3
> times (the same person in 3 successive elections): the District Attorney
> for southeastern Massachusetts, who had a good reputation as a
> corruption-fighter & fair-minded prosecutor. I hold & have always held
> extremely negative views of virtually all nationally prominent
> Republicans of my adult lifetime, including Nixon, Reagan, both
> Presidents Bush, Dick Cheney, John McCain & many others. So I've never
> had particularly positive feelings about the Republican Party, either
> its policies/philosophy/legislative agenda, or its prominent
> representatives.
>
> BUT!!
>
> But until this year I did feel that at least some Republicans shared
> with me a common conception of the meaning of the United States of
> America — who we are, what our values are, what we stand for — and I
> believed that our understandings of the meaning of "patriotism" had at
> least some overlap. I no longer believe these things to be true.
>
> I now believe that the Republican Party is a white-supremacist
> patriarchal, nihilistic, kleptocratic death cult strongly influenced by
> evangelical Christian eschatology/grifting & organized along the lines
> of a Sicilian-American mafia crime family but largely controlled by a
> clique of trans-national/non-national/post-national oligarchs. I believe
> that white-supremacist revanchism is the core organizing motive of
> rank-and-file Republicans. (The Republican oligarchs in charge care
> little about such things; they don't care about religion or race or any
> of that stuff; they care about money and power. But they know how to
> harness the strong resentments of the common volk & are applying the
> latest & greatest AI-based tools to that task.)
>
> This nihilistic/(Christian) death-cult foundation explains the
> Republican antipathy to science, in particular to climate science, but
> also to things like the "anti-vax" movement and the categorical refusal
> to apply U.S. tax dollars to study the epidemic of mass murder in the
> USA using the proven tools of social science. The role of the NRA as a
> launderer of foreign money, pretty much exclusively from Russia, in
> exchange for promoting this anti-science, pro white-supremacy movement
> has been largely under-studied and under-reported.
>
> Summary: to assume that any Republican Senator or Representative in
> Congress has any fealty to their oath of office, or to the United States
> of America itself, is naive at best & arguably derelict or complicit.
> Mitch McConnell, for example, is -- himself, a single person -- a
> greater threat to the continued existence of the United States of
> America than was The Confederate States of America, with all her armies.
>
> I apologize for sounding like I'm pitching an over-the-top screenplay
> for another James Bond movie, but this is my actual feeling about the
> political situation in the United States, and it has changed
> considerably since last year.
>
> B) I've changed my mind about religion in general. I now think it's all
> mostly bullshit, and more harmful than helpful. I think its time has
> finally passed and that humans need to leave religion behind.
>
> I grew up Catholic; baptized & confirmed. I a was an altar boy for about
> 4 years during those years when the Catholic Mass was still said in
> Latin. As a graduate of a very highly-regarded Jesuit high school, I got
> a full dose of deep Catholic theology, including, for example, reading
> the works of St. Augustine & other early "church fathers" & theologians
> in the original Latin.
>
> I'm still kind of obsessed with that stuff. It still pervades my novels.
> I'm intrigued by the deep ideas that motivated men to leave the
> "material world" & go live in remote monasteries high atop thousand-foot
> high rocky outcroppings & spend their lives in hard (celebrate) work &
> prayer. (See, for example, my novella "The Pains").
>
> But I think it's all bullshit. Although I myself pretty much abandoned
> all belief in the Catholic worldview in which I was raised starting
> about age 18, I still maintained some affection for the Church & the
> Christian fable that the Church preserved. & I had similar divided but
> generally positive attitudes about Judaism & Islam, based on my own
> personal experience & study.
>
> Obviously religion is a reality in the world today. It means a lot to
> billions of people. People fight & die over it. It's not going away any
> time soon.
>
> But, in 2019, I changed my mind about it. Before I was a-religious, but
> I believed it was OK if religion stuck around; it was not concern of
> mine so long as it didn't step on my toes.
>
> Now, 2019, after 40 years as a somewhat disinterested student of
> religion as a curious sociological phenomenon, I'm pretty much
> anti-religion. I think it's all pretty much superstition, tribalism &
> bullshit. And I'm especially against religions premised on a believe in
> an "afterlife". I believe that after-life-based theologies are the
> source of unspeakable, immeasurable suffering. Because (pardon me if I
> state the obvious), if you believe that, for example, your horrible
> cruelty in "this life" will be "forgiven" & that you'll be granted a
> pass to infinite paradise in "the next life," what's to stop you from
> being a monster according to the rules of your particular fairy-tale
> religion? Conversely, what's to motivate you to prevent, for example,
> the murder of beautiful, distinct, actual, real children — each an
> actual human person; each from a family that will never recover from
> their murder — in their classrooms, if you really believe that their
> being murdered sends them to heaven to hang out all day ("Angels too
> soon!")(doing what, exactly?) with a very benevolent "caucasian" (i.e.
> European, long-haired, bearded, generally unmuscular) Jesus.
>
> OK this post is far too long and may generate (or not?) a lot of flack.
>
> Also, it's been a few years, I think, since I posted here, although I'm
> a regular lurker.
>
> To those of you who've joined this list since my most recent post (2 or
> 3 years ago?): Hello! Nice to meet you.
>
> Comments welcome.
>
> (Unless and until & I feel the need to go hide in a cave to avoid
> replies.)
>
> Happy New Year to all,
>
> Please forgive any obvious typos or lost thoughts, and, as our friend &
> guide Udhay has had occasion to remind me, "assume goodwill."
>
> jrs
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 2020-01-09 05:29, Krishna Udayasankar wrote:
> > So this may seem obvious to many, but it was a fairly big deal for me
> > - to realise (actually, accept) that there are individuals who cannot
> > be moved by reason and logic - be it on political odayissues or
> > personal
> > issues. I suppose I'd always viewed their imperviousness as having
> > some limit, some breaking point, but I was forced to accept that I
> > might be chasing the infinite here (Was it Einstein who said...?)
> >
> > It's one thing to state this as I do, it has been completely another
> > to reconcile to it as a fact and to learn to change my expectations
> > and operations accordingly. You might say that this was (and still is
> > in some ways) a shift in world-view that led to a existential crisis
> > (pardon me for sounding like an angsty teenager). If reason is not
> > supreme, then what is? How does one continue to interact with people
> > if reason is not what connects us, and how does one operate knowing
> > that reason cannot work, will not triumph (PS. Autocorrect just filled
> > that as "trump" which, while not incorrect, is a step on the road to
> > the place where irony goes to die.
> >
> > -End of rant-
> > ----------------------------------------
> > Krishna Udayasankar, PhD.
> >
> >
>
>
