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It is always nice to find a well put together video, and this one titled ‘The Beginning of Everything’ does a wonderful job of laying down the fundamentals of how our universe began.
Well, the short answer is that Jesus was a complete dick. Discern4 has a slightly longer and more detailed answer.
Happy Bunny Day, btw. :)
A good talk on some of the problems facing people who wish to debate sensitive topics in society.
“No idea is above scrutiny and no people are beneath dignity. And what I mean by that is that no idea in Islam, like any other religion and any other philosophy and political thought and creed, is an idea. An idea is by definition adopted voluntary and therefore should be subject to scrutiny. And so I don’t subscribe to any form of blasphemy or censorship when it comes to an intellectual and rigorous debate around any idea. On the other hand, no people are beneath dignity.
So no idea is above scrutiny, no people are beneath dignity. And what I mean by that is, it’s very easy when understanding it in this way to recognize, and you can recognize it in your gut, the difference between somebody who is saying I don’t like the religion of Islam. Let me scrutinize it, you know. I think this whole thing about the literal word of God doesn’t sit comfortable with me. That’s very different to someone saying all Muslims are terrorists and they are a disease in America we must expel them. Your gut can recognize the difference between those two. I think Muslims as a people deserve every dignity like any other human being. But every single idea – Charlie Hebdo is a case in point. People have the right, the absolute right to scrutinize and satirize.”
“Sarah Moore Grimké (1792 – 1873) was born in South Carolina, to a slave holding family. As an adult she came to Pennsylvania to live. Later, describing the agonies of conscience she suffered on the account of slavery, Sarah Grimké referred to the South as a “wilderness” in which they saw nothing “but desolation and suffering”.
[…]
Sarah Grimké”s Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women were originally designed to present her views on feminism but she used them as a means to answer the churchmen [her detractors] as well. The central theme is woman’s equal moral responsibility with man to act for the good of humanity. The author employs wit and acerbity as formidable weapons: all she asks of her brothers, says Grimké is that they “take their feet from off our necks”; when women rely on men for protection, she notes sarcastically, they are apt to find “that what they have leaned upon has proved a broken reed at best, and oft a spear.” She did not hesitate to declare that the word “husband” was “synonymous with tyrant.” She herself never married. “
The excerpt from her letters illustrates the lockstep that religion and patriarchy enforced upon women and her objects to said oppression.
“Haverhill, 7th Mo.17, 1837
“The New Testament has been referred to, and I am willing to abide by its decisions, but must enter my protest against the false translations of some passages by the MEN that did that work, and against the perverted interpretation by the MEN who undertook to write commentaries thereon. I am inclined to think, when we are admitted to the honor of studying Greek and Hebrew, we shall produce some various readings of the Bible a little different from those we know have.
The Lord Jesus defines the duties of his followers in his Sermon on the Mount. He lays down grand principles by which they should be governed, without any reference to sex or condition:- ‘Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. […]
I follow Him through all his precepts, and find him giving the same directions to women as to men, never even referring to the distinction now so strenuously insisted upon between masculine and feminine virtues: this is one of the anti-christian ‘traditions of men’ which are taught instead of the ‘commandments of God.’ Men and women were CREATED EQUAL; they are both moral and accountable beings, and whatever is right for he man to do, is right for a woman.
[…]
How monstrous, how anti-christian, is the doctrine that woman is to be dependant on man! Where, in all the sacred Scriptures, is this taught? Alas! she has too well learned the lesson which MAN has laboured to teach her. She has surrendered her dearest RIGHTS, and been satisfied with the privileges which man has assumed to grant her; she has been amused with the show of power, whilst man has absorbed all the reality into himself. He has adorned the creature whom God gave him as a companion, with baubles and gewgaws, turned her attention to personal attractions, offered incense to her vanity, and made her the instrument of his selfish gratification, a plaything to please his eye and amuse his hours of leisure. ‘Rule by obedience and by submission sway’, or in other words, study to by a hypocrite, pretend to submit, but gain your point, has been the code of the household morality that women have been taught. The poet has sung, in sickly strains, the loveliness of woman’s dependence upon man, and now we find it reechoed by those who profess to teach the religion of the Bible.
[…]
This doctrine of dependence upon man is utterly at variance with the doctrine of the Bible. In that book I find nothing like the softness of a woman, nor the sternness of a man: both are equally commanded to bring forth the fruits of the Spirit, love, meekness, gentleness, etc. “
Easy to win or be the winner when you design the system , no? Grimké addresses this point and of course, much more, in her analysis.
–Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings. Miriam Schneir ed. p. 40-41
TL;DR – Religion even the olden tymes was all plum fracked up but was markedly worse if you happened to be female.
I’m consistently amazed by the audacity of organized religion and the amount of steamy-ripe-bullshit that it forces down our society’s throat. The fetid promotion and glorification of ignorance coupled with the consistent denial of science and fact is a burgeoning cataclysm for the human race. Organized stupidity, if left unchecked, will be the end of us.
There are bright spots though, in Canada organized religion is hollowing out as people move away from being scared of lights and ancient shadows (worshipping capitalism instead – woo-haa…). Baby steps and what not. Our progress though seems fruitless though as we live in the shadow of the towering mass of religious stupid that is the United States. In the US it seems as if the powers of fear and magic are still on the rise despite the fact that the rest of the world is gradually becoming more rational and more secular.
That is worrisome to say the least, as our blessed bible believers have access to enough nuclear weaponry to sterilize the earth several times over. Earth wiping out capacity isn’t something you give to people who believe in ghosts, magic, and assorted Ooga-Booga. It is unsettling to watch what is going down the GOP side of the run up to the presidential elections. There is no ‘safe’ candidate in this field of republicans, as all are afflicted, to one degree or another, with the virus of organized religious belief. Further comment on the republicans and their suicidal commitment to unreality is the topic of another post because the amount of stupid involved with their political strategy would break my blog if discussed all at once. Perhaps a more simple start to the religious problems in the US is answer?
I’m thinking that a good start in the US would be to remove the tax-exempt status of the Churches. If this info-graphic is even half true, it would be a step in the right direction for the people of the US.
I might (well not really) become a believer if the various testaments to human gullibility decided to dismantle their superstructure and actually help the poor.
Welcome gentle readers. Today I ask of thee but a kernel of patience whilst I set up the topic at hand.
Teh Role of teh Female in the Religious Stuff.
Religion and Patriarchy actively conspire against the female half of humanity. We have to look no further than Christian Patriarchy over here and Islamic Fundamentalism over there to see the corrosive effects of religion on females (and everyone else). We’ve missed talking about a segment of the world religious community that, despite a different set of ooga-booga beliefs, shockingly manages to codify and practice misogyny with great aplomb.
Orthodox Judaism. And behold yet another goldmine of misogyny in which to revel in! (?) Let’s take a peek at a small sample of what we are talking about:
“During the 1970s feminist critics began to expose the absence of women’s voices within the male-dominated structures promoted by Judaism’s exclusively male-authored texts. Feminists also strove to reconstruct the lost voices of women, trying to recover evidence of women’s history and self-understanding that would allow a more diversified picture of the multiple Judaisms that have flourished throughout the Jewish past. While Judaism traditionally defines itself as a divinely revealed religion, its beliefs and practices have been interpreted and regulated almost exclusively by male authorities until the modern period. Feminist analysis has pointed out that men have created the legal systems articulated in the Mishnah, Talmud, and codes of Jewish law, and acted as supreme arbiters of its interpretation by reserving the rabbinate for men. Courts of Jewish law were historically run by male rabbis, and women were excluded as witnesses in most court cases. In rabbinic law, men may contract a marriage or divorce a wife, but women can neither acquire a husband nor divorce him. Women enter into rabbinic discourse as objects of discussion, when their ritual purity, sexual control, or marital status impinges upon men’s lives.
Many Jewish feminists have suggested that the insistence on overwhelmingly male imagery for God was a deliberate effort to strengthen the male-dominated institutional arrangements of Jewish life and undergird male authority over women in the religious and societal realms. As a result, feminist analysis views Jewish texts with suspicion for their collusion with societal patriarchy in silencing women’s voices, or, even worse, as creating patriarchal oppression and endowing it with the aura of divine sanction. At the same time, some feminists have culled biblical and rabbinic texts to find counter-patriarchal traditions that support principles of justice and equality, or voices of trickster women seeking to correct halakhic inequities (Pardes; Adler). Even as D. Setel argued that the prophet Hosea’s metaphor of Israel as God’s adulterous wife was pornographic, R. Adler noted that God’s reunion with the adulterous Israel, which violates Deuteronomic law (20:4) mandating a husband’s divorce of an adulterous wife, might be understood as a “constructive violation” of Jewish law – “the metaphor that preserves the covenant breaks the law” (Adler, 163–64).”
I gave up with the highlighting and bolding after the whole “objects of discussion” malarkey (lobe blown). Anyhow, now with a little background established we can talk about the Hunger Games.
What?
It has come to the attention of credible journalists and serious Christian scholars, that Starbucks – owned by a JEW!!! – hates Baby Jesus, Christians, and Christmas, and has been trying to subvert and destroy Christian America(TM)’s sacred Christmas traditions, by gradually removing Christian imagery from its Holiday CHRISTmas red cups! Clearly the End Times are upon us, as persecution of Christians everywhere ramps up to levels unheard of in modern times!
I have undertaken to document Starbucks’ dastardly deed over the last 11 years, so that evidence of their perfidious treachery will be preserved – the Internet is forever!!! Below the cut: my trenchant analysis of the anti-Christian trend of Starbucks’ Holiday CHRISTmas cup imagery! Read the rest of this entry »
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