1. For Muslim Extremists, Religion Matters

Comment #54319 by eye of horus on July 6, 2007 at 11:05 am

The almighty lords of dualism: Ahura Mazda, Yahweh, God, and Allah are ethical equivalents of comic book super-villains. Jokers all.

And this pulp fiction enjoys fanatical cult followings.

Yet we shouldn't mistake political ideology for religious belief.

Wherever ideology reduces to theology, as in the Southern U.S., secular politics disappears. Secularism corrupts. Tolerance capitulates to evil. Only puritanism prevails.

The holy text is merely pretext. Ideology masquerading as religion bamboozles the masses, the media.

Undermining the Constitution, trashing biological science, and perverting education to suit a disgusting Xian ideology of social control and cultural domination by right-wing military-politico-religionists are the real terrorist threats.

Home-grown Xo-fascists frighten me much more than all Islamo-fascists combined.

eye-of-horus
copyright asserted 2007

2. At a Theater Near You ...

Comment #53934 by eye of horus on July 4, 2007 at 9:14 am

** Look upon U.S. you mighty, and despair **

In the U.S. we don't need terrorists, foreign or domestic, to undermine our secular state and institute religious law. We have Bush/Cheney/5 Supremes well on their way to ending what little remains of the Republic.

Those wretched ephemeral babblers lusting for the purple in '08 notwithstanding, a slide into the abyss can only be slowed, not reversed. No political force exists which can not be enslaved or aborted by MIXR -- the military industrial Xian right.

De facto dictator Cheney, a postmodern Sejanus, does more to catalyze the rot of Empire than any external threat or internal disaster.

This is not necessarily a bad thing.

Since . . . Carthago delenda est.

eye-of-horus
copyright asserted 2007

3. I believe that there is no God.

Comment #53245 by eye of horus on June 30, 2007 at 9:57 am

As a secular humanist, I always marvel that Western religions, which are large-scale late arrivals whose foundations are very much this-worldly, continue to charm otherwise intelligent people.

Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Xianity, and Islam, each presents a silly moralistic cosmic dualism (good/evil, God/Devil, religious/secular, permanent/transitory) combined with a somewhat dilute monotheism.

Ahura Mazda, Yahweh, God, and Allah are spiritual equivalents of comic book super-villains.

Opposition to Western faiths certainly does not make one an atheist. Calling someone an 'atheist' in the U.S. is a slur -- remember "godless atheism" of the old Red Scare days. But faith, of course, is never the issue.

Ideology is. Ideology masquerading as religion bamboozles the masses, the media.

Undermining the Constitution, trashing biological science, and perverting education to suit ideologies of social control and cultural domination by right-wing politico-religionists is what we have too much of in America.

Home grown Xian Taliban frighten me much more than Osama and all Islamic mullahs combined.

eye-of-horus
copyright asserted 2007

4. Those fanatical atheists

Comment #40708 by eye of horus on May 14, 2007 at 6:33 pm

Xianity has taught dualism borrowed from Plato and Zarathustra along with a perspective that "reality" must be built from the "inside" out. Part of Nietzsche's metaphor - God is dead - implies that the two-world doctrine and a solipsistic theory of knowledge are bogus.

Accepting presuppositions which should be overturned vitiates discussions on Western religion and theology. Metaphysical dualism / moral dualism / mind-body dualism along with a supposed self-evident reality of self-verifying mental states — no wonder so many attempts to understand Nietzsche fail.

"Beyond Good and Evil" and "Twilight of the Idols" deserve to be approached as radical attacks upon dualism and mentalism. (Not as tracts for atheism, immorality, and physicalism!)

The so-called great monotheisms exhibit a syndrome caused by dualistic delusions and epistemological hubris. The mistaken respect accorded the Big 3 must be swept aside to get at underlying rot. This is the 'revaluation of all values' [trans. Kaufmann] sought by Nietzsche in "The Antichrist."

eye-of-horus

copyright asserted 2007

5. Mormonism: A Racket Becomes a Religion

Comment #36157 by eye of horus on April 30, 2007 at 10:35 am

Do forgive the idle picking of a minor nit. Dante placed Aristotle in the First Circle of Hell, Limbo, lit by the flame of human reason. A place of eternal sadness, not of eternal suffering. Here were all virtuous pagans like Virgil, and faithful Jews of the Old Testament like Adam, and unbaptized infants.

As a virtuous pagan, I'd hoped a post-Vatican II Pope might be more welcoming to well-intentioned mere mortals who simply could not believe in metaphysical entities. Alas, these are times of the icy conservative demonic. Dante's vision of Limbo has been ruled unbelievable by Ratzinger (Benny XVI).

His Highliness chose to slap Dante down almost on the doorstep of the 700th anniversary of The Divine Comedy! This is the sort of thing which fills Ratzinger's mind, after all he was official watchdog of the faith under JPII.

There ought to be some protests. Who are we to believe, an inspired poet or a party hack? Besides, there's some tortuous real estate in Circle Six reserved just for Popes.

6. Postmodernism Disrobed

Comment #31392 by eye of horus on April 12, 2007 at 9:42 am

The great-grandfather of postmodern jibberish is Kant. Its grandfather, Heidegger. Its father Foucault.

Philosophical clarifiers (lest all philosophizing be damned): Hume, Nietzsche (esp. Beyond and Evil, Twilight of the Idols, Book V. of Die Froeliche Wissenschaft) and the late Walter Kaufmann.


The demarcation to be made is not science v. non-science, but sense v. nonsense and honesty v. dishonesty.

7. Prophets of the new atheism

Comment #30689 by eye of horus on April 9, 2007 at 11:03 am

In about 180 CE, Celsus posed a question to early Xians in his "On the True Doctrine" which would never occur to America's unlettered, myopic faithful -- ". . . who are we to believe a rabble of mistaken prophets, or the philosophers?"

If an ID claims that atheism presupposes either "naturalism" or "materialism", it's easy to refute him. I'd claim to be a Plotinian.

Plotinus (d. 270 CE) the last great Greco-Roman philosopher was both a mystic and an idealist -- his views however were entirely anti-Xian. But, he could be used to defend science -- for the sake of amusement and against Xo-fascists.

God is dead. But philosophy is alive and well. Does science rest on metaphysical presuppositions? I think not.

And Xians fear philosophy (reason). See 1Cor1.

8. A 'Sad First' in the History of the Congress

Comment #25812 by eye of horus on March 15, 2007 at 9:21 am

Xians!

History reverses perspective.
Today you are the Romans.
You are the persecutors.

Your priests and preachers advocate murder.
Your lies throw filth upon empirical truth.
You presume to establish an American theocracy.
Your end-time delusion fosters nuclear war.

Xianity is a public mental health crisis.