You did go to school, Blair?
 
Il y avait en 1789 une revolution en France.  Of course you know that.  Making out there’s something bizarre about criticizing religion, it’s an issue because of the whining of fuck-faced nutters, making out it’s something people shouldn’t do, deliberately falsifying political and intellectual history,  parroting the evil lies of your masters in Rome.  Pretending the Catholic Church is of significance in England.  
 
How about Johnson and Cameron?  Didn’t Eton teach you there was a civil war in England?  It’s known as the English Civil War so it’s not hard to miss.  There was a king called Charles who had a Catholic wife and cosied up to Rome, the consequence of which was his head was separated from his body and rolled slowly away from him down Whitehall, the final consequence of which was the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the Catholic Church was kicked out of England.
 
All of them, Rome, Riyadh, Tehran, they think we’re all peasants and savages.  Ignorance, irrationality, their bloody life-blood.  They think we’re going to fall down in awe.Lo, it is a {{{REVELATION FROM A MIGHTY GOD}}}.  Some guy’s take on life the universe and everything.  Other people have different takes. This is  a {{{MAN OF GOD}}}.  Actually it’s a sexually diseased and psychopathic fucktard with total cunt-for-brains.  It  is the will of {{{ALMIGHTY GOD}}}.  You don’t have a fucking clue what God’s will is.  You don’t even have a fucking clue whether God exists. 
 
The West has been through all this once.  A convulsion of about 40 years from the Boston Tea Party  in 1773 to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 established the foundations of the modern world.  No-one knows that better than the evil old men of Rome.
 
Why are we being pushed into going through it all again?
 
A sick animal, a complete nutter, a ludicrous little loony, pitches up here and opines the entire country is now subject to his ravings, we may not be permitted to criticize his sick fuck death cult of obedience and no-one laughs in its mad stupid sick animal face.  No-one takes it quietly aside and educates  the creature in the nature of the society he has  deigned to honour with his presence, We were supposed to take this loony-tune seriously. 
 
In a couple of lines:
Other Muslims laughed quietly, murmured, oh dear, and proceeded to explain to The Great Dictator that he really couldn’t behave like that: no ‘Islamophobia’.
No Muslims explained he really couldn’t behave like that.  In silence lies consent: ‘Islamophobia’.
 
After watching an entire series of the Dave Allen Show perhaps the freaks might rethink this question of taking the piss out of religion.
 
Liberty is a function of love.  Control is a function of self-will.  Of course the bloody little animal could change.  It could stop being self-obsessed, psychopathic, believing others his property.  He could start to see others as equal in rights, individuals running on separate tracks, distinct from him, getting on with being the people they are and choose to be not what a sick freak dictates.
 
He could love his neighbour as himself, which is the foundation of equal rights, as there is modern terminology for those who totally withdraw love from others: psychopaths.
 
I don’t think I have anything more against Mohammed than I do against say Gaius Julius Caesar. He was a man of his time.  He was a general.  He had lots of people killed.  But venerate him, say he can’t be mocked or criticized, a man who subjected others to his rule and took human life.  You cannot be fucking serious. 
 
A plus: Indirectly responsible for Islamic art, Islamic letters, Islamic beauty with which we most noticeably fail to be bombarded.
 
Entertainingly, Caesar was the first Roman to be deified.  They were more flexible about these things then.
 
Ratzupthearse is said to have got terribly incensed at finding more Frenchmen were training to be Buddhist monks than to be Benedictines.  I expect they find Buddhism more bloody Christian.
 
Wednesday, September 20, 2006 Pope Benedict and the Buddhism/Masturbation Controversy Pope Benedict’s recent scuffle with Islam, including his non-apology--characterized by Middle East observer Abu Aardvark as “that time-honored classic ‘I'm sorry that you got angry when I called you fat’” dodge--- has highlighted his confrontational stance toward other faiths.

A column by Madeleine Bunting in The Guardian makes a case for his hostility toward Judaism and Buddhism as well.

In the process, Bunting retails the notorious statement made by Benedict while he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, purportedly equating Buddhism with masturbation.

Buddhist Channel reported that the full quote, delivered in an interview with L’Expresse in 1997, went like this:

"If Buddhism is attractive, it's only because it suggests that by belonging to it you can touch the infinite, and you can have joy without concrete religious obligations,'' Ratzinger said. ``It's spiritually self-indulgent eroticism.''

Other outlets cut Cardinal Ratzinger some slack, opining that “auto-erotisme”, the term used in the original article, could more accurately translated at “self-love” or “narcissism”.

Actually, auto-eroticism is an English-language term coined by the sexologist Havelock Ellis to describe mental or physical sexual activity not directed toward a sexual partner. It was later picked up by Freud.

Cardinal Ratzinger knows his Freud. He considers Freud an originator of the secular spirit he detests, and entitled one of his major pronouncements on the decadence of Europe “Europe and its Discontents”—a play on Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents.

In this case, I assume Cardinal Ratzinger employed auto-eroticism as a term of art, using a modern term for the sinful, non-reproductive sexuality abhorred by the church to condemn a kind of shallow spiritual gratification that he considers futile, degenerate, and dangerous to the soul.

So, although the Pope was not referring to Buddhists as masturbators, they can find little consolation in the awareness that what he really meant is that he was dismissing their spiritual exercises as pathetic and contemptible.

In any event, Benedict’s hostility toward non-Catholic faiths is a matter of public record.

Religions that have felt the lash of his disapproval include Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Anglicanism.

In 2000, the National Catholic Reporter published a list of Cardinal Ratzinger’s greatest hits, including a money quote from the same L’Expresse interview:

"In the 1950s someone said that the undoing of the Catholic church in the 20th century wouldn't come from Marxism but from Buddhism. They were right."

Reportedly, at the time Cardinal Ratzinger was incensed that there were allegedly more Frenchmen studying to be Buddhist monks than Benedictine monks.

As the Catholic Church’s top doctrine cop—running the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a.k.a. the Inquisition--he also ordered a German Benedictine monk, Willigis Jager, a.k.a Zen master Ko-un Roshi, to cease and desist from all public statements and activities promoting dialogue between Catholics and Buddhists.

Beyond strict demands for doctrinal conformity and acknowledgement of the Catholic Church’s unique role as interlocutor between humanity and the one true God, Pope Benedict’s worldview is apparently militantly Euro-centric. Europe, in the Pope’s view, is a creation of Catholicism and the implication is that Catholicism without Europe cannot survive.

There was speculation that Cardinal Ratzinger chose his papal title not to commemorate Pope Benedict XV, but to honor St. Benedict, who founded the Benedictine order and is credited with saving Catholicism from extinction in the European Dark Ages.

The Pope considers Europe to be Catholicism’s home turf, under assault from alien faiths and lazy tendencies toward syncretism (literally “Cretan towns forming an alliance” according to my Webster’s, but figuratively speaking a meaningless mishmash).

Islam at the gates of Europe is Pope Benedict’s particular bugbear.

The Pope’s perspective—in which Catholicism is inextricably bound to its European matrix—has a creepy clash-of-civilization vibe and his recent statements criticizing Islam were undoubtedly a conscious “stay outta my yard” challenge to the demographic, social, and political encroachment of Islam into Europe.

In the lament on decadent, faithless Europe that he coauthored--Without Roots—Cardinal Ratzinger wrote:

At the hour of its greatest success, Europe seems hollow, as if it were internally paralyzed by a failure of its circulatory system that is endangering its life, subjecting it to transplants that erase its identity. At the same time as its sustaining spiritual forces have collapsed, a growing decline in its ethnicity is also taking place.

Hmmm…”a growing decline in its ethnicity”. I don’t think he’s referring to a shortage of good Vietnamese restaurants in Rome.

Pared to the bone, the Pope’s attitudes look a lot like racism cloaked in theology.

Reuters reported on an interview Cardinal Ratzinger gave to Le Figaro in 2004:

Joseph Ratzinger... has said Muslim but secular Turkey should seek its future in an association of Islamic nations rather than the EU, which has Christian roots.

In an interview last year for France's Le Figaro Magazine, Ratzinger, then doctrinal head of the Roman Catholic Church, said Turkey had always been "in permanent contrast to Europe" and that linking it to Europe would be a mistake.

If Pope Benedict is going to be busy re-fighting the crusades in Europe and the Middle East and reliving the glories of the Inquisition, he’s not going to have a lot of interest and energy in dealing with Buddhism except as a competitor for the hearts, minds, and souls of the parfit knights of his Caucasian Round Table.

Indeed, since he is wrapped up in his theory that European civilization is uniquely Catholic, he seems ready to write off the rest of the world—at least those parts with “great cultural protagonists”, as he termed them, such as East Asia and South Asia--as spheres that are innately Buddhist , Muslim, or Hindu.

It will be interesting to see how the Roman Catholic Church fares in China under Benedict’s reign.
Permalink posted by China Hand @ 10:31 PM >
  Comments:
Some commenters on Peking Duck made the point that it’s understandable that the Pope should have the right to speak his mind. And if he believes that Buddhists are (doctrinal) jerk-offs, well, free speech doesn’t stop at the Inquisitor’s door.

A few thoughts.

The Pope believes his is the one true faith, qualitatively different from all others.

That’s his right, even his duty. It’s the cornerstone of his faith.

He can also trash other religions, not only as inferior in doctrine and rigor but also false paths to salvation.

No problem.

But he’s also the head of a religion that claims not only to profess the true Word of God, but also to serve as God’s instrument on earth, and provide the means of human salvation that is not only unique but universal (“Catholic).

It’s a test of his leadership—and God-given duties as Pope—to put points on the board for the Catholic Church worldwide, and not just in the European homeland.

Pope John Paul II, who shared many of Cardinal Ratzinger’s views including, presumably, revulsion at Buddhism, understood that his job was to condone inter-faith dialogue so that the Catholic Church could claim to encompass the good points of other religions and at the same time assert its superiority in the critical matters of revealed truth and salvation.

Benedict XVI, on the other hand, appears to have made the dubious decision that other religions have to be discredited en toto so that Catholicism is the last faith standing.

It’s an understandable position for an Inquisitor to take.

It’s the necessary stand for the leader of an embattled sect, which is how Pope Benedict sometimes appears to regard himself.

But it is not a viable position for the leader of a global church that considers itself not only unique in truth but infinite in its understanding and universal in its scope.

Tearing every other religion (and for good measure, secular humanism) to their foundations so that the deluded turn to the true faith would be a tough job even if the Savior appeared in person to do the job. For fallible men and a fragile church to attempt it by themselves is simply beyond their capacity.

So instead of engaging in a multi-millennial argument with Islam, Buddhism, and every other religion that won’t be decided until the true God shows up to settle accounts, I think the interests of the Catholic Church and the world would be better served if Pope Benedict decided his faith could be most effectively protected and propagated by looking for good in the hearts of Buddhists, Muslims -- instead of making remarks easily construed as deriding them and their religions.
Permalink posted by China Hand : 11:27 AM
 
I tried to masturbate to Buddhism, but to no avail...I guess I will have to try this Catholicism thing…again.

What the Great Papa needs to do is offer a better product than hatred, hypocrisy, fear, etc., and the people may come to him. But until that time, he may find that they are a lot smarter than that.

The other amazing thing to me about ALL religious types is why the need to “SAVE” everybody? …and against their will too. Why the need to hate people who just do not see it your way and are going to hell because of it? Should not THEY be coming to YOU?

If I knew the way out of a dangerous place to nirvana, would not people be following me because they know better? Of course if they knew I was just wasting their time, going to steal their money and just make me worship them in the HOPES of going to nirvana, I might be hesitant to follow me and they would then resort to some form of kidnapping.

Basically like most commerce, the Pope just needs a better product and the people will come. But selling snake oil does not work in this day of enlightenment and that just pisses these type of folks off. That is why they hate science and are trying to destroy the public school system. Ignorance is bliss to them.
Permalink posted by G Warcriminal Shrub : 5:43 AM
 
As a former Catholic, and present Buddhist, I agree that Benedict's approach to spreading "the Faith" is counter-productive -- not just to members of other religions, atheists, agnostics, secular humanists -- but to many Catholics themselves. These Catholics and others wished for a return to Vatican II,to Pope John XXIII with his outreach and embrace of people of other faiths and and to those with no faith.

Many persons were hoping Benedict XVI would be as Pope -- a different person than he often was seen in his previous role as Head of the Propagation of the Faith.

These hopes appear to have been dashed to the ground.
Permalink posted by zingiber : 7:49 AM
 
This morning I read that the Creation Museum in Kentucky has had 100,000 visitors when they were hoping for 25,000 the first year. This museum purports that the earth is merely 6,000 years old, Adam and Eve were there at the beginning in our present form, and that dinosaurs walked alongside them while Noah was busily building his ark and gathering together male and female species of every animal in existence in order to save them for procreation.

Then in the Middle East, in the name of religion we have family members killing their sisters because she "dishonored" them by leaving a husband she was forced to marry as a child.

Then Benedict comes out with his remark that the Catholic Church is the "one true" religion. In a world of billions of people, each having a mind of their own, he spews the same old same old I was fed for 12 years of Catholic schooling.

Religion? I don't think so.
Permalink posted by Permafrost : 2:30 PM
  O Well
so this ------------

Sweet John ___________

Religion
is
most prudent
discerning
all
human error*

Alas
roasted
poor sweet
Joan
to
a
perfect
medium rare *

Blessings mebob *****************hufm
 
We’re not talking about the conduct of Islamic nations or the conduct of Christian ones.  We’re talking about whether Mohammed and Jesus were morally equivalent.  Any suggestion of moral superiority of Jesus’ teachings of course evokes slavering screams of racism, but like so much of the garbage since Jesus was a Jew and Gautama what would today be Nepalese claptrap it surely is.
 
There is of course another time that ‘Peter denied his Lord’, one that hadn’t happened yet when Kipling wrote.  Where was Jesus in WWII?  Where the hell d’you think he was, he was in Auschwitz.  He was a Jew.  Even if you have somewhat creative notions as to who his father was, you are not arguing over his mum and Jewishness is of course matrilineal.
 
There is of course something sickly absurd about Catholic Jew-haters saying their Hail Marys. 
 
Kabbalah is still a living tradition, and it does not take its authority from one school, one body of literature or one person.  There is the main Jewish line of Kabbalah that continues to preserve and hold the religiously acceptable format, but there are many others, both inside and outside the Judaic field, for Kabbalah has passed into Western civilization at several points. The first was through one of the greatest Kabbalists, Joshua ben Miriam, better known as Jesus, son of Mary, whose teaching is permeated with its terms and precepts.  His Lord’s Prayer, when set on the Sefirotic Tree is a prime example, and it may be read from either end of the Tree’s Lightning Flash with considerable illumination.
Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi: The Way of Kabbalah
 
How may one put this?  There are some things they don’t like learning more than others.
 
There are certain basics in the Christian world
 
Thou didst not come down from the Cross when they shouted to Thee, mocking and reviling Thee, "Come down from the cross and we will believe that Thou art He." Thou didst not come down, for again Thou wouldst not enslave man by a miracle, and didst crave faith given freely, not based on miracle. Thou didst crave for free love and not the base raptures of the slave before the might that has overawed him for ever...I too prized the freedom with which Thou hast blessed men, and I too was striving to stand among Thy elect, among the strong and powerful, thirsting "to make up the number." But I awakened and would not serve madness. I turned back and joined the ranks of those who have corrected Thy work. I left the proud and went back to the humble, for the happiness of the humble. What I say to Thee will come to pass, and our dominion will be built up. I repeat, to-morrow Thou shalt see that obedient flock who at a sign from me will hasten to heap up the hot cinders about the pile on which I shall burn Thee for coming to hinder us. For if anyone has ever deserved our fires, it is Thou. To-morrow I shall burn Thee. Dixi.'"
Dostoevsky: The Grand Inquisitor
 
Truth nailed upon the cross compels nobody, oppresses no one; it must be accepted and confessed freely; its appeal is addressed to free spirits...A divine Truth panoplied in power, triumphant over the world and conquering souls, would not be consonant with the freedom of man's spirit, and in the mystery of Golgotha is the mystery of liberty….Every time in history that man has tried to turn crucified Truth into coercive truth he has betrayed the fundamental principle of Christ.
Nicholas Berdyaev
 
By the way to Christian clergy who point out they’re supposed to welcome the stranger, I would point out that there is a difference between welcoming someone into your home and rebuilding it to suit his taste. 
 
 
PANTHER -> Site news -> The Mind of God?
by Ysabel Howard - Friday, 27 January 2012, 10:26 PM
 

 
If you go on a trip through the universe, and there are many brilliant ones on the Web, you get a glimpse of what might be the Mind of God
Of course mystics knew that yonks ago, 'no human mind can conceive the entity called God', can't remember the exact quotation.
Meanwhile...'Hi, I'm God. No, I don't know much about the universe I created, I must admit. Thought the earth was its centre. I do get terribly upset about much skin human females show and whether they've had sexual relations with men who don't own them, and even more upset if anyone doesn't like the book I wrote. Sloppily researched, they say, no evidence, made it up as he went along. Thought he was supposed to be omniscient. And omnipresent. How can he not know? OK, OK, who am I trying to kid? I'm just a guy, trying to figure things out best I can. I got a lot of things wrong. Lots of politicians fulminate against guys who don't like the book I wrote. The trouble is, a lot of people are pretty thick and readily manipulated and there are a lot of people ready to manipulate them. I really didn't see it like that, you know. I mean, what I wrote is genuinely how things seemed to me to be.'
Really, who are they trying to kid? What is wrong with saying how things looked to guys a long time ago is not necessarily how they are?

PANTHER -> Site news -> Love has no bounds. This I know. Love does not distinguish between life and death. It is we who do that, we who must do that.
by Ysabel Howard - Saturday, 9 July 2011, 10:16 PM
 

 
If one wants to really enrage the Catholic Nazi ape, it is insufficient to merely point out that Jesus was a Jew; it is necessary also to say that he was a Jewish mystic. Then, if one truly wishes to be the target of every subnormal animal in sight, one should point out that loving one's neighbour as oneself does not require belief in anyone's god. Multiverse theory is good too.
To sum up evolution perhaps a little breath-takingly, 'what makes it is what works' - so in the end/story so far of course it all meshes together. It couldn't be here if it didn't. I was watching a wildlife programme recently about the Arctic or it might have been the Antarctic, somewhere very icy and very, very cold, with lots of blizzards. The idea that a creator created the polar bear to be able to go months without food is really rather mad, and possibly defines this 'creator' as deeply sadistic. I mean, OK, an ice-desert appealed to its sense of aesthetics, but why should some poor bastard of a penguin have to live there? Life is mean, life is hard, for human and non-human animals alike, by no means necessarily 'we plough the fields and scatter'. In temperate climates it does all fit together very nicely. Other places, life hangs on by the skin of its teeth despite a hostile environment.
Since the whole thing is speculation and unfalsifiable, there would not appear to be any reason not to speculate that on the other side of a singularity in a separate universe exists the entity generally known as 'God', though in a form inconceivable to those who claim knowledge of him. There are three places that immediately spring to mind to go from there. One is that 'God' is directing the whole gig. One is what on earth this entity has to do with any life-form in this universe, does it even know this universe exists? One is (of course) Multiverse defined by sexual equipment of the human male.
Why should the multiverse not itself be 'God'?
We do not know. No, make that
WE DO NOT KNOW
My book revolves around two propositions. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. e = mc². We have minds not holy books to understand the universe so far as we are able, but that really isn't very far.
Somewhere over there are raving nutters who have major problems with both propositions. They profile themselves so perfectly that too is very funny.
“Tributaries feed. Distributaries branch out on their own. Start reading up on meteorites.”
“What!”
“Standard form is that the GD is a rift valley, about which no big deal. I think it’s a crater. I think that whatever it was that came from wherever it came from somehow causes disturbance in the ether. I think this was millions of years ago. I note the effect of the field is startling but hardly negative or evil. I think when people appeared and – became aware of the situation they buried whatever under what is now Azt. I have absolutely no idea why! I mean, whether they thought they were removing it from circulation or whether they thought of it as some kind of guardian. I think whatever leaches into the water. I have been told whatever may be harnessed by the Cult for evil. I have been – somewhat melodramatically – been presented with a – parallel, a teaching-story. I think at some point it was discovered by the Cult and used for evil, hence the five-headed monster. I think all this is broadly science, though not necessarily our science. It has been - mused that the Matter of Kadun is the intrusion into our dull humdrum lives of a different set of physical laws. I think it - possible that whatever follows the same rules but the effect is – distorted by its being in terms of both time and space a long, long way from home.”
“Astroshit!” said Kyse.
“I knew you’d love it,” said Sarat.
“You think the areas of blankness are going to map out against waterways?”
“Give you a definite maybe – there may be reasons to do with the nature of the rock and soil why the effect is stronger in some places than others.”
I think the Anile throne contains whatever, explaining or at any rate excusing her more interesting qualities. Intelligent metal? Intelligent life that looks like metal to us? What does she want to do? She wants to go home. She dissolves into space-time. The rest is us. Maybe. Truly I am not responsible for the welfare of the universe! Whatever cosmic cataclysm wrenched whatever from its home, I can never know. But I just might be able to resolve this Matter of Kadun.
Flying across the GD, he leered at it through the window. Memory stirred. I believe in possibilities. Are metaphysics immutable? Then ‘will’ survives, I said. It’s lousy metaphysics! All these dead people keep talking to us, he complained to himself. What then is my problem with Hass? My problem is he appears to take the Jumesit at face value. He doesn’t talk about it. He wouldn’t, would he, not if he has periodic chats with Maya. Sarat grinned to himself. Anyway, they’re in it over their heads now! It’s good to talk. Take at face value. Enter the dream. Oh, what did happen at Casin-ruhn?
Scene: Her Imperial Majesty sits sipping tea, not a hair out of place, while two elegant young men gaze at her in rapt adoration. If they weren’t gay, I might be jealous! He’s not bloody gay! Somewhere there is a person in a female body. I got there first! Suppose everything is a metaphor. Did something just fall into place?
“Move over!” he said to Asyrion, as time lurched. Or something. Oh pooch! he nearly said. Pooch, pooch, pooch! He pulled Dill close. “Grrrr! The warmth of our bodies,” he said.
Dill snuggled closer.
“Darling, is this quite the place!”
“On the chair. She responds – why does she – why can she not – stories about the Jumesit abound! But that’s because of the five-headed monster! Bring her here – she was ‘responsible’ for Casin-ruhn. But it’s all still there, so someone replaced her – “ His mind was working very fast now. He wasn’t sure that was a good thing.
“Is it something they put in the water?” wondered Venga.
“How are we?” asked Hass.
“Cold,” said Sarat. “It’s cold in Casin-ruhn.”
“Zur,” said Dill, “can be uncomfortably warm in summer.”
“Suppose what screws it is magnetism,” said Sarat.
“Is this a private conversation?”
“How much have you told them?”asked Sarat.
“Would I dream of doing anything without you!”
He told them everything as he had always known that he would. Finally, he took a deep breath, held Dill so tightly that she muttered, “Oof, you’re squashing me!” and asked steadily, “Have you seen Maya recently?”
“No,” said Hass.
Another theory bites the dust.
“I didn’t – when I was here after. I wondered if I was – preventing myself.”
“Our social circle,” said Venga, “remains limited.”
“Perhaps,” said Sarat, “people who knew something.”
“Perhaps,” said Venga, “people who were something.”
“Who found out something, who – changed themselves. Wouldn’t they say so!”
“Something in the water?” suggested Venga. “Perhaps they didn’t know.”
“You talk as though these guys are real,” said Dill.
“It’s difficult, isn’t it,” said Sarat.
But Venga said, “You talk to Jaizal. You decide if he’s real.”
“I suppose we’d better live here,” sighed Sarat.
Hass smiled.
“There Has Been No Announcement.”
“That was yesterday,” said Sarat.
Later Hass caught him alone.
“What will you say?”
Sarat grinned.
“Sort of the truth.”
Sarat Comes Clean! We’re An Item Says Sarat. Sarat Names The Day.
The last time I stood here, I said things I now confirm. With all my heart, with all my mind, with all my being, I love Dill. Also I love Maya. Maya is dead. If we continue, we are in some place immeasurably distant. If we do not, there is an ending. We cannot, we should not live our lives in a place, a time of our imagining, in a world bounded by death. Our place is here and now, our meaning to be alive and to live to the fullest extent of our being. We should live our lives in reality.
Some will say, that is the opposite of what I said. I say…..He laughed. Tough. I do not have today to be solemn. I do not feel the need to be formal. I do not have to explain my innermost feelings to the world.
I am here because I love Dill. Dill is my grace and my truth. Dill is my resolution and my culmination. To Dill I say, nothing can destroy our love. This I know.
Dill entered the House of Silence and walked down the aisle towards him in the little black dress. He wrapped his arms around her then kissed her cheek and left her to it.
Some people, they know who they are, will try to pour scorn on Sarat’s feelings. They will say, either he truly loved Maya or he truly loves me. I say, they are idiots, who understand nothing of the human heart.
Zulagan bit his lip so hard it nearly bled and stole a glance at Mitch. Mitch was sitting forward, his head in hands, thinking why do I feel the eyes of the world are upon me! My lady, thought Challin, why not call them morons and be done. Cho looked at Kile, poker-faced, save for her dancing eyes.
Of course he loves Maya. Of course he loves me, as much and as deeply as he loved Maya when she lived. If you cannot see the difference, then truly you are a lost cause. And I love Sarat, with all my heart, with all my mind, with all my being. I am here because I love Sarat. Sarat is my grace and my truth. Sarat is my resolution and my culmination. To Sarat I say, nothing can destroy our love. This I know.
He did not, observed Seani, get where he is today without a certain amount of raw nerve.
Nor by the sound of it did she!
Dill hadn’t finished, not by a long chalk.
Love has no bounds. This I know. Love does not distinguish between life and death. It is we who do that, we who must do that. I do not live my life as though my sister were still with me, though she never leaves me. My father, my grandmother, do not live as though Heela were still present. Would it not be nonsense to say I am not Mistress of Var-segan because my grandfather is dead. Life is a process of change. Have we not said it? They cannot destroy our laughter, our joy, our delight in life, in each other. This we know.
They are bound in understanding, thought Cho, and that also is the message – and if you don’t get it, you’re a moron. I shall enjoy my grand-daughter-in-law.
You have to look at the father, sir.
Oh no, said small, tubby and balding, mother-panther in defence of her cubs. You have to look at the mother!
Sarat: Sarat, Dill and the Matter of Kadun (3)

 
 
Of starting-points, there is no proof, other than a few quarks milling about the place. Of this starting-point it may be said that since it predicates individuality and diversity it does no harm, other than since it predicates freedom and thus responsibility, the capacity to choose, it will be offensive to those who do not believe in such things.  Of this starting-point it may also be said that it posits only energy.
 
There are single, absolute realities. A grain of sand has the properties of sand. It is not a malign entity seeking to infiltrate your sandwiches at a beach-party. Everything is itself, not what it ‘must be’ or you imagine it is, has its essence independent of how coded perception sees it. The unique identity of an individual may be less obvious, not least to the individual himself or herself. People play roles and seek to cast others in them.
 
Inner freedom, whether in Zen, the Tao or the mystic traditions of the monotheisms, is recognized as liberation from illusion, imagined mind-constructs of reality. This is thought remote from real life but the racist, the sexist, the homophobe exists entirely in his or her mind-constructs, refusing to perceive the reality, the individuality, of other human beings. Individuality is a reality deeply invisible to those who take one look at your exterior and derive what you are, how you feel, what you think, thereby. Confident assertion of the limitations of women kept us out of the universities until alarmingly recently.  Equally confident generalizations were applied to ‘the poor’, the male poor nonetheless gaining suffrage ahead of the female poor.
 
Either you decide in advance what the world is and what the individual humans in it are and when they fail to be it coerce them into being it or kill them if they are recalcitrant or your frame of reference dictates their category of human has no right to life or you look at the world and the individual humans in it and what they do and have done and say and have said and form conclusions therefrom. Either you categorize humans according to their external appearance (form) and declare women or Jews or Arabs or gays are fundamentally a different kind of human to you or you start with the proposition that all are fundamentally human (essence).
 
Those who believe in One Book, One Truth are in the former camp.  Everyone else is in the latter.
 
Those who believe in One Book, One Truth, whether that book is the Bible, the Qur’an, the Torah, Das Kapital or Mein Kampf  prejudge and of course deny all evidence to the contrary, whether scientific or social.  The authors of these works have created the world as they think it must be or if you prefer have created fictional worlds.  The rest in a nutshell is their lamentable struggle to fit the real world into the box they have created for it.  Such fictions are the so-called grids on reality, excluding some bits, inventing others and generally perpetuating lamentable balderdash - children of God, oh yeah, blah, right - and the daughters of God beaten, raped, stabbed, murdered, burned, misbegotten, don't reach the necessary specs, inferior product - and they dare claim no-one should offend them? They believe in people being on their knees and indeed an after-life?  They should be on their knees to all the women whose talents they have crushed and continue to crush, whose sexuality they have punished and continue to punish, whose being they have suppressed and continue to suppress, whose lives they have destroyed and continue to destroy - and they dare claim no-one should offend them?  At least  Nazis and Communists don’t do that.  Short shrift would await them if they did.  This post is in part an exploration of the hypnotic effect the phrase “It’s my religion” has on politicians.
 
What you think or have been told ‘must be’ the truth of a person or a situation is not what is.  
 
There is light, energy, power. As manifested in this dimension, that light is energy, is the universe. All universes. This energy manifests itself in life as the prime directive: survive! Without it, there would be no life. Nothing would eat, reproduce, breathe. Outside life, there would be no planetary motion, movement of the waves, erosion of stone to sand. There would be no change. That is the Real. As Reality, it is Truth. The universe is part of the Whole. That whole some term God. The ‘creator’ is synonymous with the created, the observer with the observed.
 
Mutations, permutations, all the little genes and atoms, all the DNA and what have you, eventually evolved a particular kind of intelligence, which we call human, making judgements about the world about it, scratching its head – who did that? I did! There is an ‘I’. That which thinks or acts, that which copulates or feeds, that which is confined within my body is separate from him over there. But this ‘I’ has no real existence, is – a figment of the imagination, an invention of a brain whose judgements are related to the survival of the organism and the survival of the self.
 
The source is absolute. At the risk of sounding obvious, the point about an absolute is that it isn’t relative. ‘Good’ is given meaning by ‘bad’ and vice versa. You can’t have a one-sided piece of paper. The source is not good. The term has no meaning. It is. Subjectivizing that ‘is’ leads to ‘bad’ and ‘good’ and ‘totally harmless’. It’s a nice day. I think I’ll go for a walk. Evil isn’t Man being what he is but being what he isn’t, the triumph of the ego, the illusory self, which feels threatened, needs to oppress, control, destroy. All crime is self-centredness. I want to murder, rape, mug you. I do not find your views relevant. Beyond that ego is the true self, the reality of each and every one of us, capable of perceiving the reality of others and which is itself as naturally as is a grain of sand.
 
The universe (therefore) consists in the Real. Real sand, the realities of people. That reality alone has significance. The universe is neither benign nor malign, but is. The is is truth. Its antithesis is lies. Lies, refusal to perceive the Real, are born of fear. The desire for truth, for the Real, fuels empathy, compassion, drives out fear. Love. You may hear it said that Love is Truth. If you love truth more than yourself, you see what is there. Your  internal reality becomes synonymous with external reality.
 
‘Repetons-le Messssieurs
Quand on le laisse seul
Le monde mental
Ment
Monumentalement.’
(Jacques Prevert, Paroles, ‘Il ne faut pas…’)
Let us repeat, gentlemen, left isolated, the mental world lies.  Monumentally.
 
You may have heard it said that perfect love casts out fear.  (‘There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.’ 1 John 4:18)
 
Fearing ‘God’ went out with if not quite with the Ark then at least with the Gospel according to St John, but the orthodox continue to rabbit on about ‘God-fearing’ as a virtue, perhaps because of this:
 
<blockquote>If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? 1 John 4:20 </blockquote>
 
It is possible aliens came and built the pyramids.  It is possible we are all brains in vats. It is possible God is an old man with a long white beard sitting on a cloud.  It is possible some obscure sect I have just made up (at least I think I have – one never quite knows with obscure sects) that believes in the one holy and eternal lightbulb has the truth and everyone else is wrong. 
 
What breaks the ‘isolation’ of the mental world is of course the external world.  The censor charges himself or herself with the duty of ensuring the external world does not trouble the mental world. 
 
 
I think the exact offence is using the office of Prime Minister to give aid and comfort to the enemies of the Queen.
 
Some more light reading for he corrupt inexcusable and evil vermin now in charge of this country.
 
PANTHER -> Site news -> Thomas Paine: The Age of Reason 1794
by Ysabel Howard - Saturday, 17 December 2011, 11:52 PM

 
Thomas Paine (1794)
The Age of Reason
Source: From Constitution Society, where the full text is available.
HTML Mark-up: Andy Blunden.


TO MY FELLOW-CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
I PUT the following work under your protection. It contains my opinions upon Religion. You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.
Your affectionate friend and fellow-citizen,
THOMAS PAINE
Luxembourg, 8th Pluviose,
Second Year of the French Republic, one and indivisible.
January 27, O. S. 1794.

PART FIRST IT has been my intention, for several years past, to publish my thoughts upon religion. I am well aware of the difficulties that attend the subject, and from that consideration, had reserved it to a more advanced period of life. I intended it to be the last offering I should make to my fellow-citizens of all nations, and that at a time when the purity of the motive that induced me to it, could not admit of a question, even by those who might disapprove the work.
The circumstance that has now taken place in France of the total abolition of the whole national order of priesthood, and of everything appertaining to compulsive systems of religion, and compulsive articles of faith, has not only precipitated my intention, but rendered a work of this kind exceedingly necessary, lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true.
As several of my colleagues and others of my fellow-citizens of France have given me the example of making their voluntary and individual profession of faith, I also will make mine; and I do this with all that sincerity and frankness with which the mind of man communicates with itself.
I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.
I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.
But, lest it should be supposed that I believe in many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.
It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. He takes up the trade of a priest for the sake of gain, and in order to qualify himself for that trade, he begins with a perjury. Can we conceive any thing more destructive to morality than this?
Soon after I had published the pamphlet Common Sense, in America, I saw the exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system of religion. The adulterous connection of church and state, wherever it had taken place, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, had so effectually prohibited by pains and penalties, every discussion upon established creeds, and upon first principles of religion, that until the system of government should be changed, those subjects could not be brought fairly and openly before the world; but that whenever this should be done, a revolution in the system of religion would follow. Human inventions and priestcraft would be detected; and man would return to the pure, unmixed and unadulterated belief of one God, and no more.
Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet, as if the way to God was not open to every man alike.
Each of those churches show certain books, which they call revelation, or the word of God. The Jews say, that their word of God was given by God to Moses, face to face; the Christians say, that their word of God came by divine inspiration: and the Turks say, that their word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from Heaven. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.
As it is necessary to affix right ideas to words, I will, before I proceed further into the subject, offer some other observations on the word revelation. Revelation, when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man.
No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.
It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication – after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.
When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hands of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so. The commandments carry no internal evidence of divinity with them; they contain some good moral precepts, such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver, or a legislator, could produce himself, without having recourse to supernatural intervention.*
[* It is, however, necessary to except the declaration which says that God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children; it is contrary to every principle of moral justice.]
When I am told that the Koran was written in Heaven and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes too near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second-hand authority as the former. I did not see the angel myself, and, therefore, I have a right not to believe it.
When also I am told that a woman called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not; such a circumstance required a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it; but we have not even this – for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves; it is only reported by others that they said so – it is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not choose to rest my belief upon such evidence.
It is, however, not difficult to account for the credit that was given to the story of Jesus Christ being the son of God. He was born when the heathen mythology had still some fashion and repute in the world, and that mythology had prepared the people for the belief of such a story. Almost all the extraordinary men that lived under the heathen mythology were reputed to be the sons of some of their gods. It was not a new thing, at that time, to believe a man to have been celestially begotten; the intercourse of gods with women was then a matter of familiar opinion. Their Jupiter, according to their accounts, had cohabited with hundreds: the story, therefore, had nothing in it either new, wonderful, or obscene; it was conformable to the opinions that then prevailed among the people called Gentiles, or Mythologists, and it was those people only that believed it. The Jews who had kept strictly to the belief of one God, and no more, and who had always rejected the heathen mythology, never credited the story.
It is curious to observe how the theory of what is called the Christian church sprung out of the tail of the heathen mythology. A direct incorporation took place in the first instance, by making the reputed founder to be celestially begotten. The trinity of gods that then followed was no other than a reduction of the former plurality, which was about twenty or thirty thousand: the statue of Mary succeeded the statue of Diana of Ephesus; the deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints; the Mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian Mythologists had saints for everything; the church became as crowded with one, as the Pantheon had been with the other, and Rome was the place of both. The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud.
Nothing that is here said can apply, even with the most distant disrespect, to the real character of Jesus Christ. He was a virtuous and an amiable man. The morality that he preached and practised was of the most benevolent kind; and though similar systems of morality had been preached by Confucius, and by some of the Greek philosophers, many years before; by the Quakers since; and by many good men in all ages, it has not been exceeded by any.
Jesus Christ wrote no account of himself, of his birth, parentage, or any thing else; not a line of what is called the New Testament is of his own writing. The history of him is altogether the work of other people; and as to the account given of his resurrection and ascension, it was the necessary counterpart to the story of his birth. His historians having brought him into the world in a supernatural manner, were obliged to take him out again in the same manner, or the first part of the story must have fallen to the ground.
The wretched contrivance with which this latter part is told exceeds every thing that went before it. The first part, that of the miraculous conception, was not a thing that admitted of publicity; and therefore the tellers of this part of the story had this advantage, that though they might not be credited, they could not be detected. They could not be expected to prove it, because it was not one of those things that admitted of proof, and it was impossible that the person of whom it was told could prove it himself.
But the resurrection of a dead person from the grave, and his ascension through the air, is a thing very different as to the evidence it admits of, to the invisible conception of a child in the womb. The resurrection and ascension, supposing them to have taken place, admitted of public and ocular demonstration, like that of the ascension of a balloon, or the sun at noon-day, to all Jerusalem at least. A thing which everybody is required to believe, requires that the proof and evidence of it should be equal to all, and universal; and as the public visibility of this last related act was the only evidence that could give sanction to the former part, the whole of it falls to the ground, because that evidence never was given. Instead of this, a small number of persons, not more than eight or nine, are introduced as proxies for the whole world, to say they saw it, and all the rest of the world are called upon to believe it. But it appears that Thomas did not believe the resurrection, and, as they say, would not believe without having ocular and manual demonstration himself. So neither will I, and the reason is equally as good for me, and for every other person, as for Thomas.
It is in vain to attempt to palliate or disguise this matter. The story, so far as relates to the supernatural part, has every mark of fraud and imposition stamped upon the face of it. Who were the authors of it is as impossible for us now to know, as it is for us to be assured that the books in which the account is related were written by the persons whose names they bear; the best surviving evidence we now have respecting that affair is the Jews. They are regularly descended from the people who lived in the times this resurrection and ascension is said to have happened, and they say, it is not true. It has long appeared to me a strange inconsistency to cite the Jews as a proof of the truth of the story. It is just the same as if a man were to say, I will prove the truth of what I have told you by producing the people who say it is false.
That such a person as Jesus Christ existed, and that he was crucified, which was the mode of execution at that day, are historical relations strictly within the limits of probability. He preached most excellent morality and the equality of man; but he preached also against the corruptions and avarice of the Jewish priests, and this brought upon him the hatred and vengeance of the whole order of priesthood. The accusation which those priests brought against him was that of sedition and conspiracy against the Roman government, to which the Jews were then subject and tributary; and it is not improbable that the Roman government might have some secret apprehensions of the effects of his doctrine, as well as the Jewish priests; neither is it improbable that Jesus Christ had in contemplation the delivery of the Jewish nation from the bondage of the Romans. Between the two, however, this virtuous reformer and revolutionist lost his life.
It is upon this plain narrative of facts, together with another case I am going to mention, that the Christian Mythologists, calling themselves the Christian Church, have erected their fable, which, for absurdity and extravagance, is not exceeded by anything that is to be found in the mythology of the ancients.
The ancient Mythologists tell us that the race of Giants made war against Jupiter, and that one of them threw a hundred rocks against him at one throw; that Jupiter defeated him with thunder, and confined him afterward under Mount Etna, and that every time the Giant turns himself Mount Etna belches fire.
It is here easy to see that the circumstance of the mountain, that of its being a volcano, suggested the idea of the fable; and that the fable is made to fit and wind itself up with that circumstance.
The Christian Mythologists tell us that their Satan made war against the Almighty, who defeated him, and confined him afterward, not under a mountain, but in a pit. It is here easy to see that the first fable suggested the idea of the second; for the fable of Jupiter and the Giants was told many hundred years before that of Satan.
Thus far the ancient and the Christian Mythologists differ very little from each other. But the latter have contrived to carry the matter much farther. They have contrived to connect the fabulous part of the story of Jesus Christ with the fable originating from Mount Etna; and in order to make all the parts of the story tie together, they have taken to their aid the traditions of the Jews; for the Christian mythology is made up partly from the ancient mythology and partly from the Jewish traditions.
The Christian Mythologists, after having confined Satan in a pit, were obliged to let him out again to bring on the sequel of the fable. He is then introduced into the Garden of Eden, in the shape of a snake or a serpent, and in that shape he enters into familiar conversation with Eve, who is no way surprised to hear a snake talk; and the issue of this tete-a-tete is that he persuades her to eat an apple, and the eating of that apple damns all mankind.
After giving Satan this triumph over the whole creation, one would have supposed that the Church Mythologists would have been kind enough to send him back again to the pit; or, if they had not done this, that they would have put a mountain upon him (for they say that their faith can remove a mountain), or have put him under a mountain, as the former mythologists had done, to prevent his getting again among the women and doing more mischief. But instead of this they leave him at large, without even obliging him to give his parole – the secret of which is, that they could not do without him; and after being at the trouble of making him, they bribed him to stay. They promised him ALL the Jews, ALL the Turks by anticipation, nine-tenths of the world beside, and Mahomet into the bargain. After this, who can doubt the bountifulness of the Christian Mythology?
Having thus made an insurrection and a battle in Heaven, in which none of the combatants could be either killed or wounded – put Satan into the pit – let him out again – giving him a triumph over the whole creation – damned all mankind by the eating of an apple, these Christian Mythologists bring the two ends of their fable together. They represent this virtuous and amiable man, Jesus Christ, to be at once both God and Man, and also the Son of God, celestially begotten, on purpose to be sacrificed, because they say that Eve in her longing had eaten an apple.
Putting aside everything that might excite laughter by its absurdity, or detestation by its profaneness, and confining ourselves merely to an examination of the parts, it is impossible to conceive a story more derogatory to the Almighty, more inconsistent with his wisdom, more contradictory to his power, than this story is.
In order to make for it a foundation to rise upon, the inventors were under the necessity of giving to the being whom they call Satan, a power equally as great, if not greater than they attribute to the Almighty. They have not only given him the power of liberating himself from the pit, after what they call his fall, but they have made that power increase afterward to infinity. Before this fall they represent him only as an angel of limited existence, as they represent the rest. After his fall, he becomes, by their account, omnipresent. He exists everywhere, and at the same time. He occupies the whole immensity of space.
Not content with this deification of Satan, they represent him as defeating, by stratagem, in the shape of an animal of the creation, all the power and wisdom of the Almighty. They represent him as having compelled the Almighty to the direct necessity either of surrendering the whole of the creation to the government and sovereignty of this Satan, or of capitulating for its redemption by coming down upon earth, and exhibiting himself upon a cross in the shape of a man.
Had the inventors of this story told it the contrary way, that is, had they represented the Almighty as compelling Satan to exhibit himself on a cross, in the shape of a snake, as a punishment for his new transgression, the story would have been less absurd – less contradictory. But instead of this, they make the transgressor triumph, and the Almighty fall.
That many good men have believed this strange fable, and lived very good lives under that belief (for credulity is not a crime), is what I have no doubt of. In the first place, they were educated to believe it, and they would have believed anything else in the same manner. There are also many who have been so enthusiastically enraptured by what they conceived to be the infinite love of God to man, in making a sacrifice of himself, that the vehemence of the idea has forbidden and deterred them from examining into the absurdity and profaneness of the story. The more unnatural anything is, the more it is capable of becoming the object of dismal admiration.
But if objects for gratitude and admiration are our desire, do they not present themselves every hour to our eyes? Do we not see a fair creation prepared to receive us the instant we are born – a world furnished to our hands, that cost us nothing? Is it we that light up the sun, that pour down the rain, and fill the earth with abundance? Whether we sleep or wake, the vast machinery of the universe still goes on. Are these things, and the blessings they indicate in future, nothing to us? Can our gross feelings be excited by no other subjects than tragedy and suicide? Or is the gloomy pride of man become so intolerable, that nothing can flatter it but a sacrifice of the Creator?
I know that this bold investigation will alarm many, but it would be paying too great a compliment to their credulity to forbear it on their account; the times and the subject demand it to be done. The suspicion that the theory of what is called the Christian Church is fabulous is becoming very extensive in all countries; and it will be a consolation to men staggering under that suspicion, and doubting what to believe and what to disbelieve, to see the object freely investigated. I therefore pass on to an examination of the books called the Old and New Testament.
These books, beginning with Genesis and ending with Revelation (which, by the by, is a book of riddles that requires a revelation to explain it), are, we are told, the word of God. It is, therefore, proper for us to know who told us so, that we may know what credit to give to the report. The answer to this question is, that nobody can tell, except that we tell one another so. The case, however, historically appears to be as follows:
When the Church Mythologists established their system, they collected all the writings they could find, and managed them as they pleased. It is a matter altogether of uncertainty to us whether such of the writings as now appear under the name of the Old and New Testament are in the same state in which those collectors say they found them, or whether they added, altered, abridged, or dressed them up.
Be this as it may, they decided by vote which of the books Gut of the collection they had made should be the WORD OF GOD, and which should not. They rejected several; they voted others to be doubtful, such as the books called the Apocrypha; and those books which had a majority of votes, were voted to be the word of God. Had they voted otherwise, all the people, since calling themselves Christians, had believed otherwise – for the belief of the one comes from the vote of the other. Who the people were that did all this, we know nothing of; they called themselves by the general name of the Church, and this is all we know of the matter.
As we have no other external evidence or authority for believing these books to be the word of God than what I have mentioned, which is no evidence or authority at all, I come, in the next place, to examine the internal evidence contained in the books themselves.
In the former part of this Essay, I have spoken of revelation; I now proceed further with that subject, for the purpose of applying it to the books in question.
Revelation is a communication of something which the person to whom that thing is revealed did not know before. For if I have done a thing, or seen it done, it needs no revelation to tell me I have done it, or seen it, nor to enable me to tell it, or to write it.
Revelation, therefore, cannot be applied to anything done upon earth, of which man himself is the actor or the witness; and consequently all the historical and anecdotal parts of the Bible, which is almost the whole of it, is not within the meaning and compass of the word revelation, and, therefore, is not the word of God.
When Samson ran off with the gate-posts of Gaza, if he ever did so (and whether he did or not is nothing to us), or when he visited his Delilah, or caught his foxes, or did any thing else, what has revelation to do with these things? If they were facts, he could tell them himself, or his secretary, if he kept one, could write them, if they were worth either telling or writing; and if they were fictions, revelation could not make them true; and whether true or not, we are neither the better nor the wiser for knowing them. When we contemplate the immensity of that Being who directs and governs the incomprehensible WHOLE, of which the utmost ken of human sight can discover but a part, we ought to feel shame at calling such paltry stories the word of God.
As to the account of the Creation, with which the Book of Genesis opens, it has all the appearance of being a tradition which the Israelites had among them before they came into Egypt; and after their departure from that country they put it at the head of their history, without telling (as it is most probable) that they did not know how they came by it. The manner in which the account opens shows it to be traditionary. It begins abruptly; it is nobody that speaks; it is nobody that hears; it is addressed to nobody; it has neither first, second, nor third person; it has every criterion of being a tradition; it has no voucher. Moses does not take it upon himself by introducing it with the formality that he uses on other occasions, such as that of saying, “The Lord spake unto Moses, saying.”
Why it has been called the Mosaic account of the Creation, I am at a loss to conceive. Moses, I believe, was too good a judge of such subjects to put his name to that account. He had been educated among The Egyptians, who were a people as well skilled in science, and particularly in astronomy, as any people of their day; and the silence and caution that Moses observes in not authenticating the account, is a good negative evidence that he neither told it nor believed it The case is, that every nation of people has been world-makers, and the Israelites had as much right to set up the trade of world-making as any of the rest; and as Moses was not an Israelite, he might not choose to contradict the tradition. The account, however, is harmless; and this is more than can be said of many other parts of the Bible.
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.
We scarcely meet with anything, a few phrases excepted, but what deserves either our abhorrence or our contempt, till we come to the miscellaneous parts of the Bible. In the anonymous publications, the Psalms, and the Book of Job, more particularly in the latter, we find a great deal of elevated sentiment reverentially expressed of the power and benignity of the Almighty; but they stand on no higher rank than many other compositions on similar subjects, as well before that time as since.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/paine/works/age-reason/ch01.htm

 
 
PANTHER -> Site news -> CN.I. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky: The ABC of Communism Chapter 11: Communism and Religion
by Ysabel Howard - Saturday, 17 December 2011, 11:57 PM

 
CN.I. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky: The ABC of Communism Chapter 11: Communism and Religion
§ 89. Why religion and communism are incompatible
'Religion is` the opium of the people,' said Karl Marx. It is the task of the Communist Party to make this truth comprehensible to the widest possible circles of the labouring masses. It is the task of the party to impress firmly upon the minds of the workers, even upon the most backward, that religion has been in the past and still is today one of the most powerful means at the disposal of the oppressors for the maintenance of inequality, exploitation, and slavish obedience on the part of the toilers.
Many weak-kneed communists reason as follows: 'Religion does not prevent my being a communist. I believe both in God and in communism. My faith in God does not hinder me from fighting for the cause of the proletarian revolution.'
This train of thought is radically false. Religion and communism are incompatible, both theoretically and practically.
Every communist must regard social phenomena (the relationships between human beings, revolutions, wars, etc.) as processes which occur in accordance with definite laws. The laws of social development have been fully established by scientific communism on the basis of the theory of historical materialism which we owe to our great teachers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This theory explains that social development is not brought about by any kind of supernatural forces. Nay more. The same theory has demonstrated that the very idea of God and of supernatural powers arises at a definite stage in human history, and at another definite stage begins to disappear as a childish notion which finds no confirmation in practical life and in the struggle between man and nature. But it is profitable to the predatory class to maintain the ignorance of the people and to maintain the people's childish belief in miracles (the key to the riddle really lies in the exploiters' pockets), and this is why religious prejudices are so tenacious, and why they confuse the minds even of persons who are in other respects able.
The general happenings throughout nature are, moreover, in no wise dependent upon supernatural causes. Man has been extremely successful in the struggle with nature. He influences nature in his own interests, and controls natural forces, achieving these conquests, not thanks to his faith in God and in divine assistance, but in spite of this faith. He achieves his conquests thanks to the fact that in practical life and in all serious matters he invariably conducts himself as an atheist. Scientific communism, in its judgements concerning natural phenomena, is guided by the data of the natural sciences, which are in irreconcilable conflict with all religious imaginings.
In practice, no less than in theory, communism is incompatible with religious faith. The tactic of the Communist Party prescribes for the members of the party definite lines of conduct. The moral code of every religion in like manner prescribes for the faithful some definite line of conduct. For example, the Christian code runs: 'Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.' In most cases there is an irreconcilable conflict between the principles of communist tactics and the commandments of religion. A communist who rejects the commandments of religion and acts in accordance with the directions of the party, ceases to be one of the faithful. On the other hand, one who, while calling himself a communist, continues to cling to his religious faith, one who in the name of religious commandments infringes the prescriptions of the party, ceases thereby to be a communist.
The struggle with religion has two sides, and every communist must distinguish clearly between them. On the one hand we have the struggle with the church, as a special organization existing for religious propaganda, materially interested in the maintenance of popular ignorance and religious enslavement. On the other hand we have the struggle with the widely diffused and deeply ingrained prejudices of the majority of the working population.
§ 90. Separation of the church from the state
The Christian catechism teaches that the church is a society of the faithful who are united by a common creed, by the sacraments, etc. For the communist, the church is a society of persons who are united by definite sources of income at the cost of the faithful, at the cost of their ignorance and lack of true culture. It is a society united with the society of other exploiters such as the landlords and the capitalists, united with their State, assisting that State in the oppression of the workers, and reciprocally receiving from the State help in the business of oppression. The union between church and State is of great antiquity. The association between the church and the feudalist State of the landowners was exceedingly intimate. This becomes clear when we remember that the autocratic-aristocratic State was sustained by the landed interest. The church was itself a landlord on the grand scale, owning millions upon millions of acres. These two powers were inevitably compelled to join forces against the labouring masses, and their alliance served to strengthen their dominion over the workers. During the period in which the urban bourgeoisie was in conflict with the feudal nobility, the bourgeoisie fiercely attacked the church, because the church owned territories which the bourgeoisie wanted for itself. The church, as landowner, was in receipt of revenues extracted from the workers - revenues which the bourgeoisie coveted. In some countries (France for instance), the struggle was extremely embittered; in other countries (England, Germany, and Russia), it was less fierce. But this conflict explains why the demand for the separation of church and State was made by the liberal bourgeoisie and the bourgeois democracy. The real basis of the demand was a desire for the transfer to the bourgeoisie of the revenues allotted by the State to the church. But the demand for the separation of the church from the State was nowhere fully realized by the bourgeoisie. The reason is that everywhere the struggle carried on by the working class against the capitalists was growing more intense, and it seemed inexpedient to the bourgeoisie to break up the alliance between State and church. The capitalists thought it would be more advantageous to come to terms with the church, to buy its prayers on behalf of the struggle with socialism, to utilize its influence over the uncultured masses in order to keep alive in their minds the sentiment of slavish submissiveness to the exploiting State. ('All power comes from God.')
The work which the bourgeoisie in its struggle with the church had left unfinished was carried to an end by the proletarian State. One of the first decrees of the Soviet Power in Russia was the decree concerning the separation of the church from the State. All its landed estates were taken away from the church and handed over to the working population. All the capital of the church became the property of the workers. The endowments which had been assigned to the church under the tsarist régime were confiscated, although these endowments had been cheerfully continued under the administration of the 'socialist' Kerensky. Religion has become the private affair of every citizen. The Soviet Power rejects all thoughts of using the church in any way whatever as a means for strengthening the proletarian State.
§ 91. Separation of the school from the church
The association of religious propaganda with scholastic instruction is the second powerful weapon employed by the clergy for the strengthening of the ecclesiastical régime and for increasing the influence of the church over the masses. The future of the human race, its youth, is entrusted to the priests. Under the tsars, the maintenance of religious fanaticism, the maintenance of stupidity and ignorance, was regarded as a matter of great importance to the State. Religion was the leading subject of instruction in the schools. In the schools, moreover, the autocracy supported the church, and the church supported the autocracy. In addition to compulsory religious teaching in the schools and compulsory attendance at religious services, the church had other weapons. It began to take charge of the whole of popular education, and for this purpose Russia was covered with a network of church schools.
Thanks to the union of school and church, our young people were from their earliest years thralls to religious superstition, this making it practically impossible to convey to their minds any integral outlook upon the universe. To one and the same question (for instance concerning the origin of the world) religion and science give conflicting answers, so that the impressionable mind of the pupil becomes a battle ground between exact knowledge and the gross errors of obscurantists.
In many countries, young people are trained, not only in a spirit of submissiveness towards the dominant régime, but also in a spirit of submissiveness towards the overthrown autocratic, ecclesiastico-feudal order. This happens in France. Even from the outlook of the bourgeois State, propaganda of such a kind is reactionary.
The programme of bourgeois liberalism used to contain a demand for the separation of the school from the church. The liberals fought for the replacement of religious instruction in the schools by instruction in bourgeois morality; and they demanded the closing of schools organized by religious associations and by monasteries. Nowhere, however, was this struggle carried through to an end. In France, for instance, where for two decades all the bourgeois ministries had solemnly pledged themselves to dissolve the religious orders, to confiscate their property, and to forbid their educational activities, there has been one compromise after another with the Catholic clergy. An excellent example of such a compromise between State and church was the recent action of Clemenceau. This minister in his day had been fiercely opposed to the church. In the end, however, he forgot his hostility, and personally distributed orders of distinction among the Catholic clergy as a reward for their patriotic services. In the struggle for the exploitation of other lands (the war with Germany), and in the domestic struggle with the working class, the bourgeois State and the church have entered into an alliance, and give one another mutual support.
This reconciliation of the bourgeoisie with the church finds expression, not merely in the abandonment by the bourgeoisie of its old anti-religious watchwords and of its campaign against religion, but in something more significant. To an increasing extent, the bourgeoisie is now becoming a 'believing class'. The forerunners of the contemporary European bourgeoisie were atheists, were freethinkers, were fiercely antagonistic to priests and priestdom. Their successors have taken a step back- wards. A generation ago, the bourgeois, though they were them- selves still atheistically inclined, though they did not believe in religious fairy tales, and though they laughed covertly at religion, nevertheless considered that the fables must be treated with respect in public, since religion was a useful restraint for the common people. Today, the scions of the bourgeoisie are not content with looking upon religion as providing useful fetters for the people, but they have themselves begun to wear the chains. Under our very eyes, after the November revolution, the liberal bourgeois and the members of the professional classes crowded into the churches and prayed fervently to that which in happier days they had regarded with contempt. Such is the fate of all dying classes, whose last resource it is to seek 'consolation' in religion.
Among the bourgeoisies of Central and Western Europe, which still hold the reins of power, a similar movement in favour of religion is observable. But if the bourgeois class begins to believe in God and the heavenly life, this merely means it has realized that its life here below is drawing to a close!
The separation of the school from the church aroused and continues to arouse protest from the backward elements among the workers and peasants. Many of the older generation persist in demanding that religion should still be taught in the schools as an optional subject. The Communist Party fights resolutely against all such attempts to turn back. The teaching of ecclesias- tical obscurantism in the schools, even though the instruction should be merely optional, would imply the giving of State aid to the maintenance of religious prejudices. In that case the church would be provided with a ready-made audience of children - of children who are assembled in school for purposes which are the very opposite of those contemplated by religion. The church would have at its disposal schoolrooms belonging to the State, and would thereby be enabled to diffuse religious poison among our young people almost as freely as it could before the separation of the school from the church.
The decree whereby the school is separated from the church must be rigidly enforced, and the proletarian State must not make the slightest concession to medievalism. What has already been done to throw off the yoke of religion is all too little, for it still remains within the power of ignorant parents to cripple the minds of their children by teaching them religious fables. Under the Soviet Power there is freedom of conscience for adults. But this freedom of conscience for parents is tantamount to a freedom for them to poison the minds of their children with the opium which when they were young was poured into their own minds by the church. The parents force upon the children their own dullness, their own ignorance; they proclaim as truth all sorts of nonsense; and they thus greatly increase the difficulties which the unified labour school has to encounter. One of the most important tasks of the proletarian State is to liberate children from the reactionary influence exercised by their parents. The really radical way of doing this is the social education of the children, carried to its logical conclusion. As far as the immediate future is concerned, we must not rest content with the expulsion of religious propaganda from the school. We must see to it that the school assumes the offensive against religious propaganda in the home, so that from the very outset the children's minds shall be rendered immune to all those religious fairy tales which many grown-ups continue to regard as truth.
§ 92. Struggle with the religious prejudice of the masses
It has been comparatively easy for the proletarian authority to effect the separation of the church from the State and of the school from the church, and these changes have been almost painlessly achieved. It is enormously more difficult to fight the religious prejudices which are already deeply rooted in the consciousness of the masses, and which cling so stubbornly to life. The struggle will be a long one, demanding much steadfastness and great patience. Upon this matter we read in our programme: 'The Russian Communist Party is guided by the conviction that nothing but the realization of purposiveness and full awareness in all the social and economic activities of the masses can lead to the complete disappearance of religious prejudices.' What do these words signify?
Religious propaganda, belief in God and in all kinds of supernatural powers, find their most grateful soil where the institutions of social life are such as to incline the consciousness of the masses towards supernatural explanations of the phenomena of nature and society. The environment created by capitalist methods of production has a strong tendency in this direction. In capitalist society, production, and the exchange of products, are not effected with full consciousness and in accordance with a preconceived plan; they proceed as if they were the outcome of elemental forces. The market controls the producer. No one knows whether commodities are being produced in excess or in deficiency. The producer does not fully understand how the great and complicated mechanism of capitalist production works; why crises occur and unemployment suddenly becomes rife; why prices rise at one time and fall at another; and so on. The ordinary worker, knowing nothing of the real causes of the social happenings amid which his life takes place, readily inclines to accept the 'will of God' as a universal explanation.
In organized communist society, on the other hand, the realms of production and distribution will no longer contain any mysteries for the worker. Every worker will not merely perform his allotted portion of social work. He will in addition participate in the elaboration of the general plan of production, and will at least have clear ideas upon the matter. Throughout the entire mechanism of social production there will no longer be anything mysterious, incomprehensible, or unexpected, and there will therefore be no further place for mystical explanations or for superstition. Just as the joiner who has made a table knows perfectly well how the table came to exist and that he need not lift his eyes towards heaven in order to find its creator, so in communist society all the workers will clearly understand what they have produced with their collective energies and how they have produced it.
For this reason, the mere fact of the organization and strengthening of the socialist system, will deal religion an irrecoverable blow. THE TRANSITION FROM SOCIALISM TO COMMUNISM, THE TRANSITION FROM THE SOCIETY WHICH MAKES AN END OF CAPITALISM TO THE SOCIETY WHICH IS COMPLETELY FREED FROM ALL TRACES OF CLASS DIVISION AND CLASS STRUGGLE, WILL BRING ABOUT THE NATURAL DEATH OF ALL RELIGION AND ALL SUPERSTITION.
But this must by no means be taken to imply that we can sit down at our ease, satisfied with having prophesied the decay of religion at some future date.
It is essential at the present time to wage with the utmost vigour the war against religious prejudices, for the church has now definitely become a counter-revolutionary organization, and endeavours to use its religious influence over the masses in order to marshal them for the political struggle against the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Orthodox faith which is defended by the priests aims at an alliance with the monarchy. This is why the Soviet Power finds it necessary to engage at this juncture in widespread anti-religious propaganda. Our aims can be secured by the delivery of special lectures, by the holding of debates, and by the publication of suitable literature; also by the general diffusion of scientific knowledge, which slowly but surely undermines the authority of religion. An excellent weapon in the fight with the church was used recently in many parts of the republic when the shrines were opened to show the 'incorruptible' relics. This served to prove to the wide masses of the people, and precisely to those in whom religious faith was strongest, the base trickery upon which religion in general, and the creed of the Russian Orthodox church in particular, are grounded.
But the campaign against the backwardness of the masses in this matter of religion, must be conducted with patience and considerateness, as well as with energy and perseverance. The credulous crowd is extremely sensitive to anything which hurts its feelings. To thrust atheism upon the masses, and in conjunction therewith to interfere forcibly with religious practices and to make mock of the objects of popular reverence, would not assist but would hinder the campaign against religion. If the church were to be persecuted, it would win sympathy among the masses, for persecution would remind them of the almost forgotten days when there was an association between religion and the defence of national freedom; it would strengthen the antisemitic movement; and in general it would mobilize all the vestiges of an ideology which is already beginning to die out.
We propose to append a few figures, showing how the tsarist régime paid over the people's money to the church; how the church was directly supported by the common people, who drained their slender purses to this end; and how wealth accumulated in the hands of the servants of Christ.
Through the synods and in other ways the tsarist government annually supplied the church with the average amount of 50,000,000 roubles (at a time when the rouble was worth one hundred times as much as today). The synods had 70,000,000 roubles to their credit in the banks. The churches and the monasteries owned vast areas of land. In the year 7905 the churches owned 1,872,000 desyatinas, and the monasteries owned 740,000 desyatinas. Six of the largest monasteries owned 782,000 desyatinas. The Solovyetsky monastery owned 66,000 desyatinas; the Sarovskaya, 26,000; the Alexandro-Nevskaya, 25,000; and so on. In 7903, the churches and monasteries of Petrograd owned 266 rent-producing properties in the form of houses, shops, building sites, etc. In Moscow, they owned 1,054 rent-paying houses, not to mention 32 hotels. In Kiev, the churches owned 114 houses. Here are the stipends of the metropolitans and the archbishops. The metropolitan of Petrograd received 300,000 roubles per annum; the metropolitans of Moscow and of Kiev were paid 100,000 roubles per annum each; the stipend of the archbishop of Novgorod was 370,000 roubles.
There were about 30,000 church schools, and these were attended by 1,000,000 pupils. More than 20,000 teachers of religion were 'at work' in the elementary schools of the Ministry for Education.
Everyone knows that the autocracy supported the Orthodox church as the dominant and only true church. Many millions of roubles were raised by taxing Musulmans (Tartars and Bashkirs), Catholics (Poles), and Jews. This money was used by the Orthodox clergy to demonstrate that all other faiths were false. Under the tsarist régime, religious persecution attained unprecedented proportions. In the population of Russia, for every hundred inhabitants there were (besides the 70 Orthodox), 9 Catholics, 11 Mohammedans, 9 Protestants, 4 Jews, and 7 of various creeds. As for the number of the Orthodox clergy, the following were the figures for the year 1909:
The 52,869 churches of Russia were served by Archpriests 2,912 Priests 46,730 Deacons 14,670 Readers 43,518 In the 455 monasteries were Monks 9,987 Lay-brethren 9,582 In the 418 nunneries were Nuns 14,008 Lay-sisters 46,811
Total 188,21
The figures relate exclusively to the Orthodox church. A similar parasitic caste is found in every nation, though of course, professing some other religion. These masses of people, instead of extracting vast sums of money from the population in order to promote popular ignorance, would have been able, had they been engaged in manual work, to produce immense quantities of values. The socialist State, when its economic apparatus has been perfected, will introduce labour service for the clergy as for all unproductive classes, so that they will have to become workers or peasants. Of the State revenues paid to the church under the tsarist régime, more than 12,000,000 roubles went every year to the urban and rural clergy. It is plain enough why the reverend fathers were opposed to the separation of the church from the State, since this implied the separation of a dozen million roubles from their pockets. This sum, however, was but a fraction of the clerical incomes, which for the most part were derived from professional fees, land rents, and interest upon the capital of the church. No one has been able to ascertain the precise amount of the revenues of the Russian church. Approximately the sum may be considered to have been 150,000,000 roubles - at a time (we repeat) when the rouble was worth one hundred of our present roubles. A considerable proportion of this income is still paid by the people to the clergy.

 
A SHORT HISTORY LESSON
 
Magna Carta: 1215

The Pope denounced Magna Carta as the work of the  devil, you know. Others think it a cornerstone of Anglo-American  democracy. Britannia  ecclesiam romanam non amat neque amabat.

Welcome,  therefore to England, land of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Charles I,  Cromwell,  William of Orange, the Glorious Revolution, Paine, Darwin, Marx. Of course in  turdville they know no  history. Faith schools not all they're cracked up to be then?

1534: Act  of Supremacy established the Church of England, of which the monarch is the head.

Once upon a time there was  a king called Charles. He had a Catholic wife,  upheld the rejected concept of  the divine right of kings and cosied up  to Rome. His head ended up separated  from his body, rolling gently away  from him down Whitehall.

English Civil War 1642-1651

30 January 1649 Execution of Charles I

Shortly  after, there was another king called James and his reign ended with the Glorious Revolution and the installation of the resolutely Protestant  William of Orange  and the law-makers rather thought they'd settled  things once and for all.

1688 Glorious Revolution and establishment of Protestant  succession
 
It can be argued that James's  overthrow began modern English parliamentary democracy: never since has  the monarch held  absolute power, and the Bill of Rights has become one  of the most important documents in the political history of Britain. The deposition of the Roman  Catholic James II ended any chance of  Catholicism becoming re-established in  England, and led to limited  toleration for nonconformist Protestants — it would be some time before  they had full political rights. For Catholics, however, it  was  disastrous both socially and politically. Catholics were denied the  right  to vote and sit in the Westminster Parliament for over 100 years  afterwards. They were also denied commissions in the army and the  monarch was forbidden to  be Catholic or marry a Catholic, thus ensuring a Protestant  succession. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_Revolution

 And I do declare that no foreign  prince, person, prelate, state or potentate hath or ought to have any  jurisdiction,
power, superiority, pre-eminence or authority,  ecclesiastical or spiritual,  within this realm. 

And whereas it hath been found by  experience  that it is inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this  Protestant kingdom  to be governed by a popish prince, or by any king or  queen marrying a papist, the said Lords Spiritual and Temporal and  Commons do further pray that it may  be enacted, that all and every  person and persons that is, are or shall be  reconciled to or shall hold  communion with the see or Church of Rome, or shall profess the popish  religion, or shall marry a papist, shall be excluded and be  for ever  incapable to inherit, possess or enjoy the crown and government of  this  realm and Ireland and the dominions thereunto belonging or any part of   the same, or to have, use or exercise any regal power, authority or   jurisdiction within the same; 
English Bill of Rights, 1689

The office of Prime Minister had yet to be created.  Academic lawyers could argue for years about whether it was within the  spirit of the law  that it is inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this Protestant kingdom  to have the Prime Minister married to a  Catholic. 

Indeed they were bloody lawyers.  They knew what they were messing with. 

And then roughly 100 years later there was a little  upset in France and another king found his head rolling gently away from his body and  lots of blood coming from his neck and there was the  Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Civil Constitution of the  Clergy and they just don't seem to  learn, cos they got Troof.

French Revolution  1789-1799

12 July 1790 Civil Constitution of the Clergy making all Roman Catholic priests subordinate to the French government
21 January 1793  Execution of Louis XVI
17 November 1793 celebration of the goddess 'Reason' in Notre-Dame de Paris

 4 July 1776 Declaration of Independence of these United States of America
 
The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America was adopted in December 1791. 

Congress shall make no law respecting  an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;  or
abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a  redress of  grievances.
 
Probably the Vatican didn't even notice, being somewhat more locally engaged. Others, however, did and do.
 
They didn't surrender to the voice of sweet reason. They were forced to surrender and indeed fought a valiant rearguard action.

Wherefore, civil society must acknowledge God as its Founder and Parent, and must obey and reverence His power and authority. justice  therefore forbids, and reason itself forbids, the State to be godless; or to adopt a line of action which would end in godlessness--namely, to treat the  various religions (as they call them) alike, and to bestow upon them
promiscuously equal rights and privileges. Since, then, the profession of one  religion is necessary in the State, that religion must be professed which alone  is true, and which can be recognized without difficulty, especially in Catholic
States, because the marks of truth are, as it were, engraven upon it. This  religion, therefore, the rulers of the State must preserve and protect, if they  would provide--as they should do--with prudence and usefulness for the good of
the community. For public authority exists for the welfare of those whom it governs; and, although its proximate end is to lead men to the prosperity found  in this life, yet, in so doing, it ought not to diminish, but rather to increase, man's capability of attaining to the supreme good in which his  everlasting happiness consists: which never can be attained if religion be  disregarded.

22. All this, however, We have explained more fully elsewhere. We now only wish to add the remark that liberty of so false a nature is greatly hurtful to the true liberty of both rulers and their subjects. Religion, of its essence, is wonderfully helpful to the State. For, since it derives the prime origin of all  power directly from God Himself, with grave authority it charges rulers to be  mindful of their duty, to govern without injustice or severity, to rule their
people kindly and with almost paternal charity; it admonishes subjects to be  obedient to lawful authority, as to the ministers of God; and it binds them to  their rulers, not merely by obedience, but by reverence and affection,
forbidding all seditions and venturesome enterprises calculated to disturb  public order and tranquillity, and cause greater restrictions to be put upon the  liberty of the people. We need not mention how greatly religion conduces to pure  morals, and pure morals to liberty. Reason shows, and history confirms the fact, that the higher the morality of States, the greater are the liberty and wealth  and power which they enjoy.

 23. We must now consider briefly liberty of speech, and liberty of the press. It is hardly necessary to say that there can be no such right as this, if it be  not used in moderation, and if it pass beyond the bounds and end of all true  liberty. For right is a moral power which--as We have before said and must again  and again repeat--it is absurd to suppose that nature has accorded indifferently  to truth and falsehood, to justice and injustice. Men have a right freely and prudently to propagate throughout the State what things soever are true and honorable, so that as many as possible may possess them; but Iying opinions,  than which no mental plague is greater, and vices which corrupt the heart and  moral life should be diligently repressed by public authority, lest they insidiously work the ruin of the State. The excesses of an unbridled intellect,  which unfailingly end in the oppression of the untutored multitude, are no less
rightly controlled by the authority of the law than are the injuries inflicted by violence upon the weak. And this all the more surely, because by far the  greater part of the community is either absolutely unable, or able only with  great difficulty, to escape from illusions and deceitful subtleties, especially  such as flatter the passions. If unbridled license of speech and of writing be  granted to all, nothing will remain sacred and inviolate; even the highest and  truest mandates of natures, justly held to be the common and noblest heritage of  the human race, will not be spared. Thus, truth being gradually obscured by  darkness, pernicious and manifold error, as too often happens, will easily prevail. Thus, too, license will gain what liberty loses; for liberty will ever be more free and secure in proportion as license is kept in fuller restraint. In  regard, however, to all matter of opinion which God leaves to man's free  discussion, full liberty of thought and of speech is naturally within the right  of everyone; for such liberty never leads men to suppress the truth, but often  to discover it and make it known.

 Libertas, Leo XIII, 1888

For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd  principle of "naturalism," as they call it, dare to teach that "the best  constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that  human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any  more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made  between the true religion and false ones." And, against the doctrine of  Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to
assert that "that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is  recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties,  offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require." From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to  foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an "insanity,"2 viz., that "liberty of conscience and worship is each man's  personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every  rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an  absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether  ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to  manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by  the press, or in any other way." But, while they rashly affirm this, they do not  think and consider that they are preaching "liberty of perdition;"3 and that "if  human arguments are always allowed free room for discussion, there will never be  wanting men who will dare to resist truth, and to trust in the flowing speech of  human wisdom; whereas we know, from the very teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ,  how carefully Christian faith and wisdom should avoid this most injurious babbling."4

Quanta Cura, Pius IX 1864

It is doubtful whether England would accept governance by the heavenly host but by an organization as utterly tainted as the  Vatican - you  cannot be serious. But of course there is always ignorance and ignorance is  enthusiastically cultivated by clerical and secular  anti-educators alike

The Reformation was a number of things. One of them  was people failing to make a connection between Jesus's teachings and  what is known  of his life and a mega-buck empire based in Rome. Since  neither the New  Testament nor the mega-buck empire has vanished, people  continue to fail to  make the connection, regardless of how many saintly  priests do good works in abject poverty.

How simple is it possible to make this? Jesus did not  like religious farts. A large number of people inside the Churches and  outside them,  follow Jesus because he did not like religious farts.  Attempting to foist religious farts on people on the grounds they  represent Jesus isn't going to  wash.

And how it's done, the conversion of a democracy to a   theocracy, is of course by seizing the citadels of bourgeois power,  politicans  as puppets.

It goes on and on, the filth, the attempted indoctrination that faith is intrinsically superior, when it is entirely evident that it isn't

 And in the very dead of night, long after even the  most  determined revellers are tucked up in their little beds, long after the foxes  have finished crashing around in the bins, when it's  absolutely quiet, if you put your ear to the ground you can hear a  rustling noise like dry paper. That's  money talking.
Nothing is more hated than intelligence, except intelligence in a female body.  And fact.  The simplest facts of history are to be suppressed.
TRIVIALIZING THE REFORMATION
 
P-R-O-T - yikes, they can't even read. The clergy do not have the same role as in the Catholic world and now they are less important than ever.
____________________________________________________________________________________
This is the Protestant world and has been for some time. That it does not occur to us we want or need Rome to interpret the Bible for us goes deeper than 'modernity', 'liberalism', Marx or the Enlightenment, itself the child of Luther, of people reading the Bible for themselves and deciding the Vatican talked nonsense and pernicious nonsense at that. : everything that has happened to religion and spirituality in the Protestant world is, no matter how utterly opposed to and divorced from his beliefs, the child of Luther not of Rome, just as the entire thrust of Neu Arbeit, hanging on the words of members of spiritual hierarchies and indifferent to what ordinary people think, and particularly the despised adherents of "pick 'n' mix" religion, is anti-Protestant.
This is overlooked, the 'schism' portrayed as trying to agree on the nature of the Host so they can all be one church again.
This site has gone on at inordinate length about the Enlightenment and Marxism but that has missed the point. The thrust of Blair's clerical fascism was actually pre-Reformation. The Vatican was supposed to matter to all of us, not just the members of a minority sect called British Catholics.
Protestants believe that through Christ they have been given direct access to God, just like a priest; thus the doctrine is called the priesthood of all believers. God is equally accessible to all the faithful, and every Christian has equal potential to minister for God. This doctrine stands in opposition to the concept of a spiritual aristocracy or hierarchy within Christianity. Priesthood of all believers
"The Magisterium of the Church
85 "The task of giving an authentic interpretation of the Word of God, whether in its written form or in the form of Tradition, has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church alone. Its authority in this matter is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ."47 This means that the task of interpretation has been entrusted to the bishops in communion with the successor of Peter, the Bishop of Rome.
86 "Yet this Magisterium is not superior to the Word of God, but is its servant. It teaches only what has been handed on to it. At the divine command and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it listens to this devotedly, guards it with dedication and expounds it faithfully. All that it proposes for belief as being divinely revealed is drawn from this single deposit of faith."48
87 Mindful of Christ's words to his apostles: "He who hears you, hears me",49 the faithful receive with docility the teachings and directives that their pastors give them in different forms.

 
The true root of the free world, Protestants thinking for themselves.  Someone tell that dirty chimp, those evil diseased smelly animals in Rome, who of course think exactly like fucking Muslims, who fundamentally see no wrong in Islam, other than theologically, who equally assume women are to be defined by men, decided for, that they are meddling in the formerly Protestant world, where they have no authority, where they are not wanted, and where no-one gives a fuck about them, and keep fucking out. 
 
If you tell me that there is a single person in the whole of the island of Ireland who does not know that England is Protestant, I piss with laughter.
 
All this has of course been said countless times before.  The point is there is no point: the point is I am surrounded by the insolently evil.
 
About that 3D printer
There’s something it’s quite important you filthy animals all understand.  You won’t of course, but shall I try one more time.  You change nothing.  You do not make yourself more intelligent, more informed, more literate, more rational by ample demonstration you are not intelligent, informed, literate or rational.  You could make yourself more informed literate and rational by study, by application.  You could indeed make yourself more intelligent, to the extent that intelligence is bound up with literacy and the capacity to understand words and rationality and the capacity to grasp reason.  Behaving like a wordless mindless butcher does not stop you being a wordless mindless butcher. 
When all the people who note you are a wordless mindless butcher are prone and bloodied at your feet, you alone left standing, you are still a wordless mindless butcher, stupid, ignorant, irrational, illiterate.
You do not change a single thing about me.  You do not stop me being the daughter of Barrington Stockwell Howard and all the rest of it.  You do not change my having graduated from the University of London and qualified for membership of British Mensa.  You do not erase from my mind all knowledge and experience.  You do not eliminate communities of pagans, secularists, atheists, naturists, Buddhists, humanists here in Brighton as throughout England.
You do not change the millions of books on goddesses and alternative belief-systems as on quantum physics and mathematics, on geology, on natural history indeed available to the entire world on Amazon.
Shall we talk for a minute about Kindle Unlimited.  Kindle Unlimited is Kindle’s lending library.  You have heard of Kindle, I take it, Blair.  It’s the ebook part of Amazon and indeed many ebooks are cheaper than their dead tree copies.  For £7.99 a month you can subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, which means you can borrow up to ten  books at a time, return them, borrow ten more.  You will see that a fast reader can get through 20 books a month for 7.99 or call it 40p each, which is pretty good, and these books are on many subjects, some fact, some fiction, so whatever piques your interest can be freely explored.  (Am I explaining the world the mostly normal live in to the political classes?  Probably.)  
So you can read books on a variety of subjects for very little, which of course you can equally do if you have the time and the legs to haunt charity shops, of which there are a huge number. 
Similarly, there is something called YouTube.  In common with the rest of the Internet there is a huge lot of crap on it, but there is equally a huge amount of non-crap.  There you will find music of all kinds from all over the world.  You will also find physics, maths, cosmology, chemistry, natural history, enthusiasts of all kinds sharing their knowledge.
Millions of people view these vids.  That is of course millions of people worldwide.
You do not eliminate the thousands, millions of explanations of the world from the most to the least scientific that are not your own.
You remain a ludicrous futile, ridiculous, absurd, sick, vicious, snarling and pathetic animal.  The longer you continue this, the more you prove you are a ludicrous futile ridiculous, absurd sick vicious snarling and  pathetic animal: a joke.
And so it is evident that across the political spectrum to be a ludicrous futile ridiculous absurd sick and pathetic animal is to the way to go, what is prized, whatever layers of puke they attempt to conceal it with.  The futile vicious animal is to remain unperturbed, no demands to be made of it.  The futile vicious animal is to rule.  Their chief weapon of course is absolute psychosis and ignorance, the animal is to assume it is complete and perfect.  On no account is it to become possessed of curiosity and want to learn about the diverse and buzzing world around it. 
However, automation means the futile vicious and ridiculous animal is about to become surplus to requirements.  Presumably those who demand unlimited immigration think everyone in the world should have the opportunity to lie around naked on Brighton’s naturist beach because there won’t be anything else for them to do. 
DIY your Will, DIY your tax-returns.  Print a new sofa.  All the time worn phrases of parents encouraging their offspring into safe professions no longer hold.  Always work for doctors, always work for lawyers, always work for accountants, nope.  All over the Internet people are addressing the same brick wall. 
Labour of course still lives in the world of Lowry, the legions of noble workers trudging up to the factory-gate.  As do the master sheep-shearers, all the jolly fresh-faced little underlings dead from the neck up shall toil away doing their will. 
Shall we talk about Kindle and YouTube.  That's apart from the millions of specialist sites on everything from British butterflies to Niels Bohr and Max Born, Byron and Buddha.  OK, you type 'quantum physics' into YouTube search.  You get a huge number of results.  It doesn't stop there.  You type 'quantum physics in Arabic' or 'quantum physics in German' and you get a huge number of expositions in Arabic or German.  Or you can type 'quantenphysik' or whatever the Arabic is for quantum physics.  YouTube is not monolingual.   Or you can just type 'string theory' into Kindle search and get 932 books to read.   Provided people 1) can read, 2) have internet access and 3) are not hampered by their fucktard governments limiting their internet access, the whole world has access to limitless information on anything anyone wishes to instruct himself or herself about, a great deal of it for free.  Project Gutenberg offers 57000 free ebooks: 'You will find the world's great literature here, with focus on older works for which copyright has expired. '
Then there are the free courses offered by serious institutions.  At Coursera you can do Data Science from John Hopkins or if you prefer the University of Edinburgh will introduce you to philosophy or the Shanghai Jiao Tong University will teach you Mandarin, Duke will teach you neuroscience and that's not all in English either: .Генетика (Genetics).  Harvard offers its own range of free online courses.

“The idea is simple: to publish all of our course materials online and make them widely available to everyone.”
Dick K.P. Yue, Professor, MIT School of Engineering   Unlocking Knowledge MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity. View a list of our most visited courses   
People with no more chance of attending MIT in person than they have of flying to the moon are effectively studying there.

All over the world people are learning things that 30 years ago money or geography meant they hadn't a hope in hell of reaching.

And Her Majesty's Government thinks people shouldn't think in case they upset nutters who live in some sort of time-space bubble cut off from the world.  What sort of message do you think you send to kids in Pakistan or Dubai who would actually quite like to wave the religion of the mad bye-bye?   But then of course it is remarkably unclear to me in what bubble HMG resides; it certainly doesn't reside in modern England.'I look for truth and find that I get damned.'  I could say that, yes, except it's insane.  What is this fucking crap?  This is not C1st Gallilee, a Jewish colony of the Roman Empire.  It is England in the C21st.  Of course I look for truth, it's a very commonplace preoccupation of sentient life.  People do not normally rise from the dead.  Perhaps you have noticed this simple fact?  Of course I think the Creation is crap.  It's only 158 years since On the Origin of Species, and barely less since the birth of genetics, Mendel ironically an Augustinian monk.  On the Origin of Species proved unexpectedly popular, with the entire stock of 1,250 copies oversubscribed when it went on sale to booksellers on 22 November 1859.
The link with human origins was not initially explicit but rapidly became so, and no, May, Javid, Hammond and all the rest of you freaks, Darwin was not surrounded by mobs with firebrands, Huxley was not prosecuted for disparaging religious doctrine.  Bishops were once capable of communicating with educated life in terms more elevated than 'you don't believe what we say so you're evil'.
McDonnell, I think was at one point caught on camera calling for violent revolution.  Woo-hoo, the noble workers shall seize the means of production.  And smash the evil machine.  The word is Luddite.  If he wants to keep the country in the C19th, well, that will be interesting, just don’t blame Brexit for Britain falling behind the rest of the world.  But co-ops indeed are a possibility, the people put out of work who have contributed to the success of the enterprise ‘retiring’ with shares in it.
 
Thus having done its best to turn us all into illiterate ignorant grunting violent animals who respond to words with violence and pride ourselves on our ignorance, having turned as one on anyone who said anything should be demanded of the masses, any adherence to any intellectual or moral standards, for did we not understand they were victims (mostly of Labour’s love of animals, I mean, we’ve all gotta be equal, ain’t we), Labour now has an urgent need to cultivate interest in the arts, love of gardening, enthusiasm for exercise, the joys of cooking or wild flowers, fascination with local history, the pleasures of family life, pets, DIY, argument, intelligent conversation, who am I, what am I, why are you reading my bloody slogan? 
 
Unless of course it wants mobs of drunken and/or stoned animals in the streets, which it may well want, but which is unlikely to find mass approbation. 
 
Ostrich Land: the future is 20 years away.
 
Time to get the crucifixion of medicine in first, before the country has other things on its mind
 
Maybe won’t affect me much at all, let alone such place as I continue to play in the labour market, but technology moves fast.  For the moment the lovely guys and girls from Ocado will continue to check my eggs and ask me how many bags I’m returning, the lovely guys or girls from Amazon will worry if the package they’re handing me is too heavy for me.
 
Ocado has shown off a prototype driverless van designed to deliver goods at short distances.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40421100
Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, is testing unmanned drones to deliver goods to customers, chief executive Jeff Bezos has said.
The drones, called Octocopters, could deliver packages weighing up to 2.3kg to customers within 30 minutes of them placing the order, he said.
However, he added that it could take up to five years for the service to start.
The US Federal Aviation Administration is yet to approve the use of unmanned drones for civilian purposes.
"I know this looks like science fiction, but it's not," Mr Bezos told CBS television's 60 Minutes programme.
"We can do half-hour delivery... and we can carry objects, we think, up to five pounds (2.3kg), which covers 86% of the items that we deliver."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25180906
The UK, I read, employs a mere 8% of the population in manufacturing.   But that’s all right, because there are always jobs in the service industries. 
 
Medical records have bar-codes and paperless is the world of the fantasist.  If ever there was a job a robot could do it’s gathering medical folders for clinics, sending simple emails to whomever the system deems to have the notes.  ‘You have these notes?’  ‘No.’  For that matter of course scanning sets of medical records could be done by a robot.  Open the folder, start at page one. 
 
Tianran Wang seems a sensible guy
Tianran Wang, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and an expert on industrial automation, spoke about China’s manufacturing industry at the Beijing event. He said that it lagged behind those of other nations and would need a major technological overhaul. He also emphasized that part of the challenge will be figuring out which tasks can be automated most effectively, and how machines and humans can share the workload. “Not all labor-intensive industry can be automated,” Tianran said. “We need hybrid automation.”
 
“But the traditional economic path from increasing productivity of agriculture to light manufacturing and then to full-scale industrialisation may not be possible for all developing countries,” Mr. Kim said in response to a question at the Brookings Institute during a discussion on extreme poverty on Tuesday.
“In large parts of Africa, it is likely that technology could fundamentally disrupt this pattern. Research based on World Bank data has predicted that the proportion of jobs threatened in India by automation is 69 per cent, in China it is 77 per cent and in Ethiopia, the percentage of jobs threatened by automation is 85 per cent,” he said.
“Now, if this is true, and if these countries are going to lose these many jobs, we then have to understand what paths to economic growth will be available for these countries and then adapt our approach to infrastructure accordingly,” Mr. Kim said.
 http://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/Automation-threatens-69-jobs-in-India-World-Bank/article15427005.ece
 
And what is it in the UK?
Almost half of all jobs could be automated by computers within two decades and "no government is prepared" for the tsunami of social change that will follow, according to the Economist.
The magazine's 2014 analysis of the impact of technology paints a pretty bleak picture of the future.
It says that while innovation (aka "the elixir of progress") has always resulted in job losses, usually economies have eventually been able to develop new roles for those workers to compensate, such as in the industrial revolution of the 19th century, or the food production revolution of the 20th century.
But the pace of change this time around appears to be unprecedented, its leader column claims. And the result is a huge amount of uncertainty for both developed and under-developed economies about where the next 'lost generation' is going to find work.
It quotes a 2013 Oxford Martin School study that estimates 47% of all jobs could be automated in the next 20 years:
"Our findings thus imply that as technology races ahead, low-skill workers will reallocate to tasks that are non-susceptible to computerisation – i.e., tasks requiring creative and social intelligence. For workers to win the race, however, they will have to acquire creative and social skills," that study says.
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The Economist also points out that current unemployment levels are startlingly high, but that "this wave of technological disruption to the job market has only just started".
Specifically the Economist points to new tech like driverless cars, improved household gadgets, faster and more efficient online communications and 'big data' analysis to areas that humans are quickly being superceded. And while new start-ups are raising billions, they employ few people - Instagram, sold to Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion, employed just 30 people at the time.
Those conclusions are echoed elsewhere. Another study ('Are You Ready For #GenMobile?'), to be released in full on 21 January by Aruba Networks, points out just how fast traditional working models are changing.
It says that 72% of British people now believe they work more efficiently at home, and that 63% need a WiFi network to complete their tasks - not bad for a technology that was barely standardised 10 years ago.
Meanwhile in 'The Second Machine Age', out this week, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue workers are under unprecedented pressure by the automation of skilled and unskilled jobs.
In a recent Salon interview Brynjolfsson said: "technology has always been destroying jobs, and it’s always been creating jobs, and it’s been roughly a wash for the last 200 years. But starting in the 1990s the employment to population ration really started plummeting and it’s now fallen off a cliff and not getting back up. We think that it should be the focus of policymakers right now to figure out how to address that."
The BBC also produced a report earlier this month which claimed, in stark tones, that "the robots are coming to steal our jobs".
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/01/17/rise-of-the-machines-economist_n_4616931.html
 
Haldane said the Bank had used methodology pioneered in the US to model the impact of smarter machines on the UK labour market and its more than 30 million employees.
It classified jobs into three categories – those with a high (greater than 66%), medium (33-66%) and low (less than 33%) probability of automation, and made an adjustment for the proportion of employment those jobs represented.
“For the UK, roughly a third of jobs by employment fall into each category, with those occupations most at risk including administrative, clerical and production tasks.
“Taking the probabilities of automation, and multiplying them by the numbers employed, gives a broad brush estimate of the number of jobs potentially automatable. For the UK, that would suggest up to 15m jobs could be at risk of automation.”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/nov/12/robots-threaten-low-paid-jobs-says-bank-of-england-chief-economist
At some point the doors of nations are going to slam shut, and it won’t be because of race or religion, and it won’t be the ‘First World’ versus the ‘Third World’ because although people may be falling over themselves to get the hell out there probably won’t be anywhere  to go if you’re not techy, not  possessed of some other specific skill or talent.  Don’t know about North Korea.  Maybe North Korea will solve the problem for us, abolish the future.
 
The world could divide very simply into Luddite or automated.  In some circs at least it will be incremental, and a matter of choice.  The golden opportunity lies before me of asking Alexa to ask Ocado to add carrots to my order, but I find I don’t want to do that.  If we stop short of the point where machines interact with personalities, then no robot can do things specific to me, or any individual.  Undoubtedly a robot would have been invaluable in all the hauling and heaving of the nightmare of clearing the house, but without access to my memories of 5, 15, 35 it could not have chosen what to keep and what to throw.  Yes, that book is falling apart but it revolutionized my thinking when I was 17.  Since at the moment I do very little in terms of interacting with the outside world, indeed at the moment since I don’t see many people anyway it seems prudent to see none while the flu epidemic lasts, it is a little hard to see how robotics will impact on my life, but certainly my long-term transport needs would seem to be assured, mooching around in a little pod.  Like probably a lot of people, if for a different reason, it’s a long time since I’ve trailed round shops looking for the perfect skirt or sweater.  Indeed I am the retail-trade’s worst nightmare incarnate, since I barely go to shops at all, maybe pop round to the Co-op if I run out of something.  What is the point of staggering around Marks or Ryman’s when I can order on-line. 
 
It may by the by be said that, at the expense of many hours on the Internet and off it measuring and thinking, I have had no failed on-line purchases, nothing which I have unpacked only to think shit, that’s not at all what I wanted/needed/expected.
 
Even in this externally unexciting life, there are possibilities.  I can’t really quite reach the top shelves in my kitchen cupboards, get things to the front and push them a bit.  I can’t quite reach the hooks on backs of doors to hang my coat or jacket.  So what else are the backs of chairs for.  A robotic arm would have its uses around the place.
 
So much for the Labour Party spearheading the great forward march of the toiling masses to socialism.  Certainly it will be necessary, but only if it’s not living in the C19th.
 
It doesn’t take much of a glance at the papers to conclude that both the people who run the country and those who comment on them are not living in the real world. 
 
Living in a loony bin on all levels.  Did you know you can buy a 3D printer on Amazon for less than the cost of a state-of-the-art laptop?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Flashforge-upgraded-exclusive-technologyoutlet-Distributor/dp/B00LC6NVXO/ref=sr_1_17?s=industrial&ie=UTF8&qid=1505830261&sr=1-17&keywords=3d+printers
https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/manufacturing-design/coloring-complex-3d-printed-objects
Isn’t that just so cool?
https://youtu.be/FSu19nz7NlE
Comments are pretty good too.
What happens to all of it, insignia of wealth, status, diamond tiara, manor house, castle, palace, if people can just print the parts?  I should imagine part of all this is a frantic attempt to maintain status and pecking order, hierarchy, must one not have respect?  That Marxists are in full accord is just jam.  What happens to ‘reverse insignia’, cheap thin clothes with shoddy stitching?  After all, chemically, it’s all the same stuff.
What happens to everything when if you want a new sofa you pop to the community printer in the town centre?
That government by the futile for the futile shall not perish from this earth.
It is really remarkable how hard it is to identify any politician who lives in the real world.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/03/jeremy-hunt-office-government-working-from-home
 
It really isn’t surprising the howls of raucous laughter that greet the proposition we should save Pret are doubled when it comes from a man who has never worked in an office.
 
Pret, Costa et al have been ripping off the poor bloody workers for years, though from their point of view that’s probably not fair since they have exorbitant city centre rents to pay. A packet of decent ground coffee is roughly the price of a large latte.  I thought they were all capitalists. A gap in the market was identified and profitably filled. There is no longer a market for the goods on offer.  The company folds.  End of story.  Like saying we should keep manufacturers and sellers of manual typewriters going.  As for sweetums Mullins, someone should explain to him that work has output, even if it is virtual, even if it’s not fixing the leak under someone’s kitchen-sink, even indeed if it pointless.  The pointlessness of the tasks is not the problem or fault of the worker diligently performing them.  Spreadsheets are created.  Emails are sent and replied to. Phone calls are made and received.  Paperclips are counted.  Letters are typed.  Zoom calls with clients are performed.
 
But one thing to potentially  genuinely make employers twitch.  If they’re of any size, they’re probably getting all stationery at cut-rates.  Their much dispersed employees are probably buying anything they need at the local stationer’s and charging the company for it.