- including you; do I detect a bit of sophistry (if not a variant of plain old solipsism) in such a harsh judgment? or just massive testiness today.

This Kill a Building-load of People for God shit - has left us all a bit testy, nor am I immune; as the guy said, nothing that is common to man is alien to me. Your screed reminds me how we got in this worldwide mess, I guess. Fuck - I'm not even gonna try for brevity. Just ignore it if it's too long.

I mean.. yeah it IS kind of annoying when the possessors of the One True Faith pretend they've got it All worked out; even more so when some go around knocking on doors - volunteering to straighten out strangers! And this all before they have *any idea* what their target is about, maybe.. how many evangelists s/he might have eaten for breakfast, say? Hear another POV? Suuure. Glassy-eyed stare maybe.

I don't notice Brett goin around tryin to straighten out folks' psyches, nor imagining this would be fertile territory (in case he ever does go around like that). Maybe I missed something? He seems to have a good heart, just doesn't realize how annoying it is when you come too close to that sanctimony which implies: you poor SOB, if you were as enlightened as I, you'd see the One True Faith too.

Look - they bring up little children this way, and children have no concept about what others' experience of life is like, especially if it's different. Their parents fersure don't try to inculcate that genuine tolerance, acknowledgment of one's own ignorance, as a civilizing and necessary habit - how many fucking wise parents have You ever met ?? They really *don't* understand, empathize with how others perceive their self-proclaimed Righteousness, nor its implications, intolerance.

We might as well get used to the fact that, most of the inhabitants around the planet seem to have a need for a certain amount of me-too confirmation that the things that go bump in the night are.. not gonna eat ya. It may be a genetic predisposition, for all I can guess - like the lab tests of some substances (Sci forum): some folk pronounce it bitter; others can't taste anything! Maybe also a herd thing - everyone (well most everyone) has this clan thing, family thing at least: make babies; ensure your 'immortality'. And fucking logic has just about *zero* to do with this group-religion tendency, as with the taste tests.

Personally I tend to find the most loathsome homo-sap quality - and by far the most Dangerous to all others - to be, possession of Certainty. The Taliban exemplify perfectly the symptoms of this extreme sociopathy: they perform all their bestial actions Because God Wants them to! The suffering they impose, the deaths they order - demonstrate that they give not a fuck for 'people'; only for their perverted fantasy of a God, inside their terminally diseased minds. And they are smugly Certain / Righteous! - just watch the interview with that robed hyena, by the Brit. lass.

Hey, think you have a monopoly on being pissed off at massive ignorance in action, oh irascible One? Many Nazis demonstrated more humanity than these scum. Annihilation as a terminal virus works for me - because they *are* infectious to the highly suggestible empty mind. Lots of those now: the more we warehouse people, keep them dirt-poor with running sores - the more converts to apochryphal BS. What Have they got to lose? West thinks it can keep all the goodies and ignore the suppurating billions. Hah.. PHBinaction.

Everybody wants to get in the judging business and also have the Best / the One True Religion! Few read their own holybooks with any comprehension - about judging or about, "keeping it in the pants", not wearing their beliefs on their sleeves. The books SAY that! Do they get it? Of course not: they're homo-saps! not Godlets. {sigh} Whaddaya expect from an average homo-sap: wisdom !?

Anyway - if you're quite certain that ~"nothing's there, if you can't demonstrate it on an analytical balance or measure its spin, momentum, strangeness" (?) then please consider how your Certainty (about nothingness?) makes any more sense than Theirs.
(Unless of course you're Sure You Know - how the whole fucking Cosmos operates, from aleph null on out) But then..

Let's face it: the whole juvenile species is now more and more often a gnat's ass from incinerating itself, like right now - over abstractions and fantasies around ~ WTF Would God Do with this 10 Megaton Smart Bomb?. This before.. it ever managed to grow up, to become fully functioning homo sapiens Sapiens. It bloody well might be a Righteous Murican finger on that Activate key, too. Next year? Talk about nascent Shakespearean tragedy..

Then too, we see there are some prime-grade Super-creeps out there, worshipping Thanatos! all salivatin about Who gets to start the count-down! while They (!!) get fucking 'raptured outta here' [they actually Say that] and escape to Cloud Cuckooland, and watch the incineration .. ever so sanctimoniously. I've heard em on the Tee Vee! - it's a nightly ritual, beatific knowing smiles and all. These Troglodytes are gettin ready for The Show. (Gives compassionate-fascism a Bad name.)

But I dunno if Brett's one of the ones preparin to gloat or not. Til he does reveal he's got the rest of us bar-coded for entertainment in the arena, has got his box-seat Ticket stapled to the pineal gland with the wishbones of a hundred Angels of Thanatos(?)- can we forgive him for having 'normal' parents? And being an unwise bastard like the rest of us.



{sheesh}

Ashton

His vulgar rants side closer to Satan than God's message.

First off, vulgar means merely 'common'. Common-speech, not necessarily scatological, impertinent or sexually colorful. As far as I'm concerned CRC understands quite well what that part of speech called an ejaculation was invented for. Those who are more offended by fuck than by atom bomb: well I'm with him on that crusade; we have become a nation of fucking euphemists where nobody fucking DIES anymore - they er.. sorta umm pass.. away...

Second off, you're doing it again: For *you* this fantasy digital yes/no good/evil Righteous/Wrong personification of 'Evil' you like to call Satan is about *your* way of dividing up the mysteries of the world. Ditto: it's *your* God which you again postulate as if..

Everyone in the fucking world has / ought to have / is lesser *for not having* this particular allegory! [among countless ones available to vivid imaginations everywhere]. Again: shades of that insufferable smugness about being uniquely Right, about all those Mysteries of there being life and consciousness and Everything. That blend of patronizing smugness the world calls sanctimony.

Can you finally wrap your mentation around this difficult concept?
There are [many] Other models of the universe than.. YOURS.

Then as to,

He is obviously disturbed and unlikely to change due to anything we may say. I hope he hasn't offended either of you to deeply. I for one, appreciate your wisdom and insights.

Either I've said it too nicely (so no need to pay attention) or too poorly (uh I don't get it) - but I don't see you *noticing* the patronizing Certainty in your words. Yet!

Now you have donned the pop-shrink mask, deemed CRC 'disturbed' (in Murica just a few years ago - that phrase uttered by a nincompoop about another: was the equivalent of another religion's I divorce you. I divorce you. I divorce you. = no appeal, either). WTF are you to diagnose anyone's 'mental condition' as diseased = merely because the expressed POV happens to contradict the POV you have adopted, adapted: and deem Revealed Truth ?

Maybe by 'disturbed' you meant 'upset'? which in Murica often means: merely making full use of the Emotional Center in concert with Intellect to make a Point [*]. But I infer from context: this was a 'diagnosis'. Please correct if it was the other.

Lastly (I hope) re If you see me trying to force others to turn to religion, please let me know. I am for tolerance, both for religious people and Atheists.

Y'know.. we've had interminable threads re what 'atheism' might connote - let alone Atheism. That VS agnostic VS ____ nuances about which these EZ lazy generalizations are too fucking crude to mean Anything. Spirituality is another concept, supposed by many to be somehow 'within the selection of a er Popular religious corporate Name'.

It isn't. Spirituality, that is. Most folk read the parts they like from a massive tome of contradictory, retranslated , interpreted phrases uttered by other men (no women) - and call the regurgitation of selected passages.. their faith? beliefs? Beliefs! Reading lots of stuff with no common [referents] in language, is fucking rote memorization.

One may eschew All of that morass, develop from experience and careful contemplation - insights and occasionally wisdom. Whether modified by the 'spiritual' vague connotation or no: it ain't about which God Name you happen to fancy ergo it's the Right One QED. (Anyone who can 'force' a religion on someone - is either Torquemada (look him up) or.. the victim is possessed of the empty mind of a jellyfish. (Maybe not so uncommon, that?)

Sorry Brett. I'm not noticing you to possess much comprehension of what genuine tolerance for other Views would be like, and mouthing the platitude is as revealing as (as CRC observed) hate the sin "love" the sinner.

Communication has failed on this issue of sanctimony, so deeply ingrained as to be invisible to the bearer. CRC's take then remains the gold-er standard: for blessed brevity.

Maybe 'wise' is an endangered-word too - disappearing into the TLA, the catchphrase. Maybe it oughtn't to be used except when it is recognized actually. But wait: that would require a certain discrimination, subtlety and the life experience of others' POV, needed to apply those. Never mind.

(But not to worry: you have Lots of company, many in robes. We'll be hearing from more and more of them, in months to come - many having no slightest intention of learning something called ~tolerance.) You are at least paying the idea lip service, even though you can't actually feel it. That is always a start - it signifies what one hopes to.. someday achieve. Keep at it.. obviates the need for a shrink, at very least. In my limited experience: 'The Wise' are an infinitesimal mminority among homo sapiens Sapiens. Miniscule, that is. For the record: I don't generally qualify (either).





{sigh}

Ashton