GOD

http://www.thedailybeast.com/videos/2011/12/03/2012-election-for-atheists.html

That's a curious sentiment from somebody who's gone out of his way to make fun of religion.

I do believe that a belief in god is crazy, but that doesn't mean that the people who believe in it are crazy. Those are two different things. Ideas can be stupid and crazy and the people who hold those ideas are not necessarily stupid and crazy.

You've said that you're beyond atheism. What does that mean?

I have trouble believing that other people believe. (Laughs.) ..

You think they're lying?

I'm sure they're not lying. Their belief may be genuine. But it's like arguing that fairies are coming out of my toaster in the middle of the night. You can't prove to me that there aren't fairies in my toaster, but that doesn't mean you should take me seriously. What I have a problem with is not so much religion or god, but faith. When you say you believe something in your heart and therefore you can act on it, you have completely justified the 9/11 bombers. You have justified Charlie Manson. If it's true for you, why isn't it true for them? Why are you different? If you say "I believe there's an all-powerful force of love in the universe that connects us all, and I have no evidence of that but I believe it in my heart," then it's perfectly okay to believe in your heart that Sharon Tate deserves to die. It's perfectly okay to believe in your heart that you need to fly planes into buildings for ALLAH.

I watched the link provided by Daily Beast two or three times. I was quite taken by it.

Penn said terrible things about Obama in 2008 and I just wrote him off.

But he is a libertarian (which means he is a repub who wants lower taxes no matter how much the country suffers) but like Ron & Rand Paul, he wants our war machine dismantled and he wants a declaration that the war on drugs is crap.

The reason I was taken by his rant on the video provided was that I question my own emotional and religious 'self' all the time.

I recall in the 70's just yelling and screaming at the TV while the Vikings lost to Dallas. And it struck me...why the hell do I care whether the Vikings, who have nothing to do with me or my family, win or lose?

I am sure that half the time I go through my rants following some series of lies on the internet or cable I am only reacting by some inner soul that has nothing to do with reality.

I watched Buffet today on Smokin Joe and I swear I hate that guy. He cannot help but tell us now how many hundreds of thousands of acres of land he owns in Texas; he cannot help but tell us how important he is to this nation; and he is incapable of noting when he is wrong.

The main subject at hand had to do with this trans-inter continental pipe line providing international oil companies with easy access to oil (fracked and otherwise) from the Canadian Tundra.

Well, I really think we need this pipeline.

Just to write this sentence gives me heartburn.

But we can create tens of thousands of jobs for people who really need jobs and the show referenced the boom in ND and I have real probs with environmentalists who wish to save birds.

Fracking bothers me as far as using available water; as far as filling the ground with poisons that ostensibly harms thousands of people; and as far as posing a danger to wildlife and humans due to inevitable breaches in the proposed pipeline.

But damn, all measures proposed in Congress are subject to a balancing test and the fracking related to Canadians is a Canadian problem.

How is that for rationalization.

There is a time and a place for real debate of issues related to this country's survival.

And there are Fifth Amendment issues involved in these discussions that are resolved by way of a foregone conclusion by our repub Supreme Court.

Anyway...

There is a religious odor to all political discussion and there always has been.

Penn is saying what I have been writing about for years.

There is a new word that is being used all the time in recent decades and that word is 'Christian'.

That one word has really gutted the New Era Democrats.

Progressives who flew the repub party for the dems over the last 40 years could at least sit back with some ease knowing that the Baptists hated the Roman Catholics and the Mormons were looked at as Cultists by all 'Christian' sects and everyone hated the Jews.

But Fallwell and Robertson and Swaggert and others took a look at this situation and decided that we are a Christian nation that loves the Jews because of the last Book in the Bible!

We, that is the Progressives lost something in the morphing.

We lost power. This was the type of power that our Deist Forefathers held when this nation was created.

A few years ago, by the way, I would have ceded the abortion issue to a great extent and simply backed some legislation that curbed Roe v. Wade and somehow allowed all abortions to be declared illegal following the first two or three months of pregnancy.

But I am not willing to do that now.

And the reason that I am not willing to make such a concession is that every goddamn time any piece of legislation is presented in Congress, there is some provision relating to Federal Funding of abortion or some provision calling for the death penalty for any physician who ever was involved with an abortion or forbidding abortion of a fetus who found itself inside the womb of some rape victim or punishing a woman whose only choice was life or an abortion.

And now, all these bastards are against birth control. These sects whose main purpose in life was to destroy the Roman Catholic Church are now adopting this anti-birth control stance.

And groups that back Santorum wish to put Sodomists in prison.

So fuck them!

I aint a woman and as far as I am concerned almost all these issues should be decided by women since I shall never be involved in a birth arising in my own body.

Enough of that!

The real issue that arises from Penn's rants and my previous writings has to do with religion—whether or not sports or politics or preference for old movies involves the same processes as religion—and this issue really gets to me because I feel it is at the core of humanness.

Penn ends his rant with a query.

These evangelists must be speaking in some code I do not understand. BUT I CANNOT FIGURE OUT WHAT THAT CODE IS!

He reaches this conclusion rationally by noting that our current President, and all of our Presidents before him, will speak about how they sought direct knowledge from the God on High in order to make decisions that directly affected our soldiers or our poor or our ailing.

Penn's position is that George W and Barack are not idiots. I have no time to dispute this statement in this rant of mine.

I mean if you are taking your marching orders from satans like Feith and Yoo and Cheney and the rest of the neocons, how in the hell would you conclude that anything you do has anything to do with God?

But Greenwald will spend half of his posts concluding that Barry is worse than w.

Penn's argument, however chaotic it may seem, really relates to the Santorums and the Bachmanns in our universe.

Santorum just came out again denying Evilution on the basis of Genesis!

Penn's argument is this.

People did not live to be 900 years old. Not then and not now.

The universe is 13 billion years old, not six thousand.

There are millions of species on this planet and there is no way in hell or on earth that two of every species (except oceanic beings of course—although mixing fresh water with salt water could affect...oh forget it. See you get too involved in fairy tales and you find yourself arguing with yourself!) could be placed in one boat. Especially when one takes into consideration the contradictory boat designs located in Genesis.

Taking the myths of our Bible and not treating them as metaphors is stupidity.

And yet, Bachmann and Santorum know how to bathe properly; how to provide for their families; how to respond to pundits on the airwaves without blushing; how to drive automobiles; how to eat properly in the presence of others; how to properly feed and tend to their children; in fact how to walk and chew gum at the same time.

So Penn decides that Santorum could not possibly be that jack shit crazy (as Penn puts it) as his reference to Genesis would lead a sane person to believe.

Without getting too far into the philosophy of Julian Jaynes at this point, I think the code has to do with our definition of 'metaphor'.

I was intrigued by a movement in the UK that deals with a fear of loss among the main population that English, Welch and Scottish culture is being over-run and threatened by foreigners.

So I did some research and you know what I found?

In England and Wales 94% + of their population consists of white English and Welch.

I would have thought that being a world power for centuries; after conquering a subcontinent with 700 million people; after setting up basically city states along the harbors of a hundred countries that the UK would have been inundated by Gandhis and Africans.

By the early 21st century, the British Indian community had grown to number over one million. According to the 2001 UK Census, 1,053,411 Britons had full Indian ethnicity (representing 1.8% of the UK's population). An overwhelming majority of 99.3% resided in England (in 2008 the figure is thought to be around 97.0%). In the nine year period between 2001 and 2010, the number of Indian-born people in the UK has increased in size by 43% from 467,634 to around 669,000 (an increase of over 200,000). Wiki.

No. It never happened.

Strange dress that might include Berkas and head towels apply to less than one percent of the English population.

Blacks account for less than two percent of their population.

Muslims are counted as less than half a percentage point.

I think that in this country, as in others, people like Santorum and Bachmann and Buchanan perceive that there is a national will and a national soul and a national mind and a national heart.

Santorum does not believe that Noah built an ark that contained all species of landed animals---I never figured out what the birds would have done 40 days on the seas (or half a year depending upon which contradictory story you believe that are rendered in the same story) but it is believable I suppose.

Santorum believes in the metaphor.

He believes in the metaphor just as a progressive might believe in the metaphor of Gaia!

Bachmann believes that our Forefathers (I have never heard her discuss Foremothers!) could not possibly have believed in slavery as a right and just institution.

Michele, my belle, simply believes in a metaphor as far as the origin of this nation and her own belief in herself.

So that an abortion ruling by a liberal court, or an attack on the myths recited in the Bible, or an opinion that our economic system is unfair, or a number of liberal attacks become attacks on the mind, heart and soul of this nation as perceived by the individual brain.

Politics is a religious exercise.

That is why real debate over issues involving three hundred million people is presented in tweets.

This all becomes a Jungian or Zen Yoga exercise in thought and rhetoric.

I personally believe (although I can only prove by some post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning) that Newt believes in nothing except his own monetary well-being. The same type of belief system would extend to my feelings concerning rummy or cheney or a host of others.

The first Roosevelt has recently been highlighted by our President in a speech given this week.

But Teddy lost that election of 1912 and we were awarded with a racist, nationalist, elitist prick as President of these United States.

The real line with regard to our National Religion was drawn in the sand by the second Roosevelt and his wife.

And so, for 80 years or so, Americans have basically taken sides in the war against Franklin.

Bachmann and others have had to look and see who their heroes are and they end up with Silent Cal and ….well I am not sure who else. They are stuck ignoring Nixon, and the Bushes as anathema to their entire ethos.

Franz_Boas along with his student mistresses like Ruth_Benedict and Margaret_Mead were fascinated by the concept of the Moiety.

Anthropology . one of two units into which a tribe or community is divided on the basis of unilineal descent. (dictionary)

This lexiconic definition does not do justice to the concept of the Moiety.

The Moiety had much more to do with the fabric of the culture in question than just the rules for kinship.

The individual found himself (Women really never counted. There was never a matriarchal society but I can argue with those who hold this myth in their hearts and minds) on one side of the line drawn in the sand.

I recall that Evans-Pritchard or one of his students 'proved' that cross-cousin marriage rules ended up with the same result as parallel-cousin rules, but who cares?

Unlike Penn I am really an agnostic because I would never pretend that I had the cranial capacity to understand God.

But I am anti-theistic in the sense that I despise people who claim to know God! Well despise is a tough word. I despise their ethos, I suppose.

My conclusion to this chaotic display is that human beings in any society are stuck in a construct of 'us' vs. 'them.'

There will always be a yin to your yang.

There will always be a repub vs. a dem.

There will always be a 'law & order' side to a 'libertarian' side.

There will always be a 'nationalist' side juxtaposed to an 'isolationist' side.

There will always be some line drawn in the sand between conservatives and liberals.

Pudge Luntz will work with this ethos derived propaganda tool.

Our national political campaigns will never have anything to do with 'facts' or 'truth' or 'justice' or freedom' or 'liberty' or any other such terms. All these terms are meaningless except as metaphors for something else.

Our national political process will only deal with metaphors.

Which ever side of the moiety wins in a national election may really have an effect upon how many sick people die, how many citizens go hungry, how many homeless citizens become even more homeless, how many citizens remain unemployed and how many castes are created as a result.

It took me 14 years to begin to extricate myself from the chains of the Roman Catholic cultural binds and it took me another two decades to experience any type of individual freedom.

No one will ever convince Bachmann or Santorum that their beliefs are crap.

The best we can ever do is to keep providing, per 'free speech” (remember folks nothing is free), to individuals who are not quite sure of their proper moieties, pointing out that other metaphors might better suit their purpose.

THE END.