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  hardie karges 11:56 am on May 18, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: GOD ( 24 ), religion ( 171 )   

  RELIGION MADE TO ORDER WITH A MESSIAH ON THE SIDE 

  God may be dead and long gone, but religion is a horse of another color. Religion is more about godliness than God himself. If necessary to create Him, then do so. Draw the hair long and the beard wild, or put him in a business suit with clipboard and calculator. The Chinese portray Buddha (and always have) as a sitting laughing bald guy with a belly bigger than his considerable buttocks. The Thais portray Buddha (and always have) as a tall slender stroller with eyes half-closed and an empty palm extended gracefully. On the other hand, the legendary Avalokitesvara, exporter of Buddhism beyond India’s borders and Bodhisattva par excellence somehow invariably morphed from a man into the woman Kuan Yin/Kannon/Kuan Im everywhere he/she entered the pantheon of worship. Go figure. If Jesus has ever been portrayed as anything other than a well-tanned surfer dude breaking bread with the buds or gazing above invariably back-lit halo-like, I’ve never seen it, but that all started with renaissance ‘hippie’ painters with agendas, or so a high-school teacher assured me. Likenesses of Muhammad are proscribed, of course. Religions tend to give the region of their acceptance the message they need, like it or not. Violent Europeans get the love-priest. Sexually obsessed Arabs get the head wrap for women. Possessive face-obsessed Asians get the religion of renouncement and passive withdrawal.

   

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  hardie karges 12:22 pm on May 16, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ISLAM ( 67 ), religion ( 171 )   

  ISLAM 101 

  Muhammad is the only prophet to turn a profit these days. Moses is bankrupt; Jesus is in Chapter 11, trying to write off II Corinthians as a total loss; Buddha just laughs it off, belly fat now after ‘going Chinese’. He doesn’t care about Nirvana any more than Jesus cares about Madonna. Islam is the only plan with a man. It’s a good investment, no interest allowed, but a piece of the rock implied, a place in Heaven guaranteed, and a piece of cake to boot. Applications are being accepted, no fee required. Islam is the religion for the rest of us, no thought necessary, just submission to Allah. Allah knows best, in his own inimitable way. Pray what you will; take what you need. Your body is a temple, point it five times daily toward Jerusalem; I mean Mecca. Put no pork in it, nor any other food that’s not kosher; I mean halal. Punish infidels, but spare the Fidels and the Rauls and the Saddams and Gomorrahs, as long as they’re enemies of our enemies. Annihilate pagans, Israelis, and Americans. Got it? There, that’s not so hard, is it? Religion 101, point and shoot.
   
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  hardie karges 5:55 pm on May 15, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: OIL ( 6 )   

  BLACK OILY MEAT 

  Mushrooms are the forbidden fruit; oil is the forbidden meat. The Russians claim that oil is a renewable resource, constantly replenishing itself from below. If you go deep enough anywhere, you’ll eventually find it. That may be wishful thinking. Nevertheless, time is the crucial factor. Anything is renewable if you wait long enough, just as anything is depletable if you use it fast enough. The genie is out of the bottle and won’t go back in without some major coaxing. There’s no wishing for an earlier time without oil when everything was peaceful and simple and pristine. The air and water may have been cleaner, true, but human hearts were certainly no more gracious. The past is a pool of blood, ready to trap the unwary in its web of deceit. The present is a pool of oil, purchasing peace and happiness on the installment plan, buying time with the accumulated wealth of centuries. If there’s nothing there to substitute for oil when it gets scarce, will people kill themselves? Is there something like a methadone maintenance plan for oil junkies? Will a downward spiral into Dark Ages ensue? It’s probably a good time for a new Messiah; nothing heals like religion.

   
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  hardie karges 7:51 am on May 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: FUNDAMENTALISM ( 2 ), PROSTITUTION ( 4 ), religion ( 171 ), TV ( 3 )   

  JINNS AND GENIES AND JEANNIES 

  Before there were the Ayatollah and Osama, there were Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Oral Roberts, live in Technicolor, threatening to send us all to Hell if we didn’t get religion. There’s not that much difference between fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam. Despite the bad rap as the Great Satan, the US is really rather socially conservative, especially compared to modern Europe, out forever from under the yoke of the Pope, and anxious to show it. Amsterdam is not even the half of it, just being honest about what everybody else is already doing. Northern Europe never got rid of the old-fashioned brothels, so there’s nothing to bother with legalizing now. At the North Brussels train station, you can see the girls before you even get off the train, standing in the windows like underwear models, but instead of selling the underwear, they’re selling what’s under there. Ironically, this is on the edge of what’s probably the largest Muslim neighborhood north of Tangier. Turks, Pakistanis, Persians, Arabs, they’re all there doing what they’ve always done, selling carpets, selling cloth, selling hookahs, kebabs, and all things Islamic. The girls in the windows are all white. All we need is the Janissary Corps and you’d have a movie set for 19^th century Istanbul. Oh, wait, here comes a policeman now. The girls don’t care. They scratch their butts and suck the life out of their cigarettes as if to advertise the prowess of their jawbones. When they finally exhale, the smoke forms little jinns and genies hovering overhead, apparently waiting to see if the girl will twitch her nose and maybe we’ll get another new Darren to make my childhood even more traumatic than it already was. At least James Bond morphed after an absence of a few years, so that a new generation maybe didn’t even know the difference, but Darren just became a different face with a different personality like some nagual shape shifting in front of our eyes. Oh! Now I get it; he was the male counterpoint to Jeannie’s genius, a genie in his own right!

   
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  hardie karges 11:36 am on May 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 471 ), CHRISTIANITY ( 163 ), GOD ( 24 ), ISLAM ( 67 ), religion ( 171 )   

  GOD’S MANY FACES 

  Jesus Christ is now starring on the God channel, speaking from the grave in tongues and English, parables shining through the fog with colored lights and music. He broadcasts his message with satellites and stars to lands where Muhammad still speaks with sword and scimitar. Buddha can’t compete head-to-head with his non-message of middling accommodation between extremes of aggressive violence and aggressive entertainment. He communicates heart-to-heart with a message of non-aggression and reconciliation at all costs. The costs can be steep, payable in dignity and self-esteem, poverty and need. Some things just can’t be bought and some things just can’t be sold. Buddha picks a middle path through a maze of lotuses on one side and chrysanthemums on the other. Jesus can’t make up his mind between the conformists and the protesters. Muhammad tolerates no pussy footing. The Muslim Channel blares from loudspeakers five times a day in thirty some-odd (some VERY odd) countries. The middle path for Islam lies somewhere between a rocket launcher and a razor blade. The true middle path chooses no sides. If it doesn’t lead to eternal bliss, at least it leads to another tomorrow and an infinite, if indefinite, future. All paths lead to God.

  Joram Arentved is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Joram Arentved 5:02 pm on July 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    Helt i orden, Andreas V., hvis du VIL have det at vide, er det netop Buddhismen, du jo ér vel- kommen til at tage op med mig, så jeg lettere kan forklare & sætte dig & f.x. mig selv etc. ind i, hvad min status som ‘sund-fornuft-tilhænger’ egentligt er ensbetydende med & mærkeligt nok p.g.a. en ufortjent arbejdssag, jeg stadigvæk ikke rigtigt tror på, ikke rigtigt ved, om jeg kan
    se mig selv som ‘nu-igen-skyld’ i.
    Ven- & ærlig hilsen fra Din, fortroligst,
    Joram Arentved, Santiago, Chile.

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  hardie karges 8:19 am on May 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: JESUS ( 21 ), WAR ( 11 )   

  JESUS THE FEMALE PRINCIPLE 

  Jesus came to remind us of something long forgotten, that we are essentially good if not holy. The wickedness learned has to be unlearned. Man’s original goodness, reverence for Nature, and the worship of the female principle, had long been hijacked by warriors and their war gods by the time Jesus came along. Emperors were steadily performing Caesarian sections on what remained of a previously female-based society, throwing out babies with bath water, only a few being able to escape by hiding in the reeds and saving up their rushes, floating out to safety down river. Coincidentally, this all gained steam with the ascendancy of cities and their increased stratification of life, including professional soldiers and slaves. Along with militancy and the rise of cities, came the rise of plagues and epidemics, hitherto unknown for lack of a population base to feed upon. When the nomads of the steppes created a warrior’s life for themselves, they took the hit as being barbarians, but really they were just claiming what was theirs in a lawless world. Nevertheless, Jesus knew what was real and what was not, and told it much like it was in words that could go down easily. The performance of miracles didn’t hurt the road show, either. Miracles were commonplace in a miraculous world. Their absence in a world of science is the price we pay.

   
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  hardie karges 10:30 am on May 10, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ISLAM ( 67 ), SUICIDE ( 5 ), TERRORISM ( 3 )   

  SUICIDE BUMMERS 

  Islam has suicidal tendencies. The Bali bombers strike again, suicide bombers doing it all for the love of God. October must be the suicide season, fresh fertilizer for fallow fields. Flowers grow where tourists fell, the death knell for picnics and frolics and Muslims on the beach. This is unholy war. This is suicide. This is apocalypse. Muslims grab the torch of negativity from the communists and run with it. If neutral countries convert to Islam, then they’re on to something. The world could use a new Messiah, but I don’t think Osama’s it. He might be wearing robes, but I don’t think the Messiah will be demonstrating proper use of a machine gun. I think he’ll be speaking seven or eight languages fluently, preferably Chinese, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Swahili, French, Spanish, and, uh, oh yeah, English. That’s nine, a lucky number in China. I think the Bible or somebody predicted there’d by ten divisions of the world by about this time in history, so let’s add Malay/Indonesian, representing three countries and a quarter bil people directly, the entire Polynesian world by extension. Muslims should be happy to have four on the list, maybe five counting Swahili, so Africa’s got two with Arabic. Asia’s got a few, Europe’s got four, so everybody’s represented linguistically except American Indians. Maybe we should add Quechua, the language of some ten million dirt-poor Native Americans in the Andes Mountains of South America.

   
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  hardie karges 9:32 am on May 9, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: BALI, INDONESIA, ISLAM ( 67 )   

  NO MO’ INDONEASY ISLAM 

  It used to be you’d eat in a Chinese restaurant during Ramadan in Indonesia since the locals were closed (not that the locals have that many restaurants anyway, outside the tourist areas). That’s getting harder. Bali used to get some special consideration for its tourist clout and the fact that it’s not Muslim anyway, Hindu-Buddhist since the early days, written and spoken language deriving much from the same wave of Hindu-Buddhism that converted Burma, Cambodia, and Thailand. Not anymore. The Bali bombers changed all that. They said they were only ‘Sari’ that their victims weren’t American. Sounds like somebody needs a geography lesson. Ever seen students in these madrasahs bobbing their heads and chanting? You’d think you were in a back room in Brooklyn if you didn’t know better. Now if they start strapping little books around their heads… what would a visitor from another planet think? Indonesia would be a basket case if all the Chinese were forced out of the country, but it’s happening, little by little. First they go to Bali, and then they leave altogether. Indo-Aryans have been propping up Islam commercially and intellectually for centuries, but they can only go so far, especially when Iran itself and now Pakistan are both hotbeds of radicalism. Thailand’s better off than Indonesia, but the problem spills over in the three southern provinces where Muslims are the majority, as they have been for centuries. It’s all so much bullshit politics and posturing. Malays will raid Thai whorehouses to make sure there are no Malay girls there, while Surabaya in Indonesia plays host to the biggest red-light district in the hemisphere. As it continues to make gains in the ‘Arabization’ of sub-Saharan Africa, Islam increasingly is the religion of the poor and people of color. David slew Goliath with a slingshot, and they can bring down Consumer Culture with fear. A word to the wise probably won’t be sufficient.

   
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  hardie karges 12:26 pm on May 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: communism ( 21 ), ISLAM ( 67 ), religion ( 171 )   

  NEGATIVE SPACE, NEGATIVE RELIGION 

  Indonesia’s being ruined by the jihad. Fundamentalists hate Islam lite almost as much as they hate Western hedonist consumerism. Actually I’m not that crazy about that blind materialistic part of Western culture myself, but religion is everyone’s personal choice, isn’t it? Not in Islamic countries, it’s not. You don’t get to change your mind. In that they’re similar to the previous Communist regimes, lack of freedom and the lack of fun. But Islamic countries stress non-materialistic goals while many of them are rich beyond imagination, yet the communist regimes were totally materialist with barely a pot to piss in. If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think that the downfall of Communism and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism were timed by some cosmic clock. It’s funny how most, if not all, the Communist countries and client states joined the rush to capitalism with hardly a second thought while very few have joined the jihad. That’s too bad for Indonesia, which traditionally shares affinities as much with the South Pacific and Southeast Asia as it does with Islam. They became Muslim to facilitate trade centuries ago, and the rest is history. Philippines made the switch from Islam to Christianity under Western imperialism, except for Mindanao, but Indonesia didn’t. It’s no problem until fundamentalists decide to impose their negativity on the rest of the populace. I was asked to leave a Muslim mosque in Malaysia once, simply because I’m white. I’m a student of religion, a BA in philosophy, but unmistakably white. So are Bosnians, but that’s another story; they ‘surrendered’. I was sitting there minding my own business, soaking in the atmosphere, meditating just like everyone else, but to no avail. I was asked to leave. I decided right then and there that Islam is probably not the religion for me.

   
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  hardie karges 4:04 pm on May 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ISLAM ( 67 ), religion ( 171 ), sex ( 39 )   

  MUSLIM OUTCALL 24/7 

  Muslims just don’t get it. Life can be fun and religious, too. The two are not mutually exclusive. Or are they? Certainly Christian fundamentalism is almost as conservative as the Islamic variety, but at least it allows for some good clean fun. It doesn’t lock women in the house or behind the veil. I doubt Judaic fundamentalism is much of a rocking time, either. I think that a negative attitude toward life emanates from the Middle East, for what reason I don’t know. It could just be a guilt complex at finding pleasure in sensation rather than God, or just good old-fashioned female control methods to assure male dominance, but I suspect it’s low cultural self-esteem at seeing their once vast domain now vastly reduced. Fortunately it’s not all like that. Moroccans are certainly some of the nicest people in the world, at least once you get past les faux guides working the tourists in Interzone. Indonesia is the same. Without the local Taliban policing people’s panties, you’d have something like a low-key Thailand. I guess that’s what they don’t want. That’s why the jihadis blew the Balinese joints up. Laos maybe? Communism is more fun than Islam any day. The problem is that all restrictions are restricted to women. Men can do whatever they want, and do. Bar boys twitch their butts and giggle and make chitchat at bars in Bali. Beach boys (no, not THOSE Beach Boys) escort young Japanese girls and older Western women openly and freely (pay in kind). Gay guys roam Kuta Beach at night preying on tourists and praying for tips to the point that I’d rather watch TV than suffer the annoyance. Girls used to walk that beach until the Mafia or the Taliban moved in to protect its turf. I had sex in a lifeguard stand there once. Hey, we were in love! What’s wrong with those Muslims anyway? The last time I was in Indonesia, a week before the 10-12 Bali bombers, a guy stalked me all over the streets of Malang, speaking perfect English and talking about the CIA. Life’s weird.