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  hardie karges 7:08 am on June 9, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

  BOMBER BUMMERS 

  Suicide bombers are at least as suicidal as they are religious. They can’t fool me. I know that look in the eyes. Airplane windshields can’t hide that. Surely they don’t believe all that ‘heaven of a thousand virgins’ crap. Is virginity that precious? I suppose that the obsession with virginity dates from a time when the male of the species felt compelled to ensure that any offspring from his mate was his, and his only, some law of genetics or something. This was before blood and DNA testing. This was before makeup and powder. I’d kill myself, too, if my only potential mates looked like some of those women. No wonder they want their women covered head to toe. Down South they just use a paper sack and think about Holly Woodstar. I suppose the latest in Islamic fashion might be a Velcro quick-zip headscarf with anti-bacterial agent imbued. Some Thais are caught on the wrong side of the line, the wrong side of the veil, the wrong side of the book. I can see them grinning on the other side of that veil. The girl in the Marrakesh market was going to remove her veil for me, for reasons I don’t know. She must have seen that look in my eye that says that I’m looking, anywhere and everywhere, high and low, for anything and everything that has meaning, but especially love.

   

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  hardie karges 2:22 pm on June 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: EXTINCTION ( 2 ), SPECIES ( 7 ), SUICIDE ( 5 )   

  MORT A CREDIT 

  We are the only species to contemplate suicide, Celine solutions in quick easy installments. Please pay account balance within thirty days of invoice. We may be the first species to go extinct by suicide. We may be the first species to go extinct because we just didn’t really feel like reproducing. We’re just going through the motions. So far as we know, no other animal has ever committed suicide, though interviews with whales continue. It’s against the laws of nature. We flatter ourselves as the scientific animals, discovering the secrets embedded in nature and inventing ever new ways to get even deeper in bed with her. We flatter ourselves as the rational animals, courting favors and suing for marriage, then back-filling logic retroactively to compensate for our lack of foresight. We flatter ourselves as religious, the divinity animals, the infinity animals, in the process of ascent to our rightful place at God’s right hand. We flatter ourselves. We’re all that and more. We’re the ego animals, competing for glory and the love of the flag. We’re the murdering animals, killing for its own sake, and loving every minute of it. We’re the suicide animals, an experiment gone wrong, a bill overdue. The clock is ticking and the fuse is lit. We don’t need to be concerned about Apocalypse; we need to be concerned about species extinction.
   
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  hardie karges 12:40 pm on June 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: SUICIDE ( 5 )   

  DEATH AND LIFE 

  Suicide is the logical conclusion to all questions about the ultimate meaning of life. Fortunately there is more to life than logic. I try to discourage all casual talk of suicide and lend a hand to anyone in danger of careless suicide, not just for their own benefit, but also to protect the reputations of us serious suicide afficionados. We don’t appreciate casual dabbling on our turf. Suicide is a lifelong commitment, a philosophical avocation. It has nothing to do with desperation; not much anyway. It becomes the cornerstone around which all issues revolve. Life becomes a constant effort to avoid this cornerstone, even though in the end it will be embraced like a long lost friend coming home to roost. The final chapter will be like that Big Trip that I kept putting off until another day, which has finally arrived.

   
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  hardie karges 11:49 am on June 6, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: America ( 59 ), language ( 173 )   

  HAVE PEN WILL TRAVEL 

  I’m a language junkie, a lingo jockey. I need language the way others need dollars or drugs, but mostly I need meaning, my life sentence w/o parole nor punctuation, just the same letters over and over forming the same words over and over, but with ever-changing meaning. The gift of words came upon me like a thunderbolt from heaven, and got stuck in my throat, lost in self-reflection. Pen in hand, I’m ready to slay demons and fellow travelers, heal the sick, change the world, and other assorted odd jobs. Heroes are hard to find in a world gone to heroin, short cuts and cheap thrills. No one wants to take a risk, tempt fate, stick it out just to get it whacked off. America is the last bastion of the belated hero, simultaneously reviled and celebrated. America creates the world for those too busy to do it for them selves. Space is money; Europe is just too expensive for its own good. They can’t afford to waste time in idle speculation. We can do your dreaming for you, design that prototype, and then contract out the final production.

   
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  hardie karges 1:29 pm on June 5, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: drugs ( 7 ), ego ( 33 )   

  INTERNAL BORDERS 

  We all walk the edge of a fragile border dividing dimensions, but many of us also walk a fragile edge of inner consciousness. For the poet this can be an asset if controllable but still accessibIe. I know I can keep a poetic edge on my tongue’s knife when the drugs start running out, I just don’t know if I can keep an edge when the money rolls in. I probably don’t have to worry about that, though, do I? Drugs expand the mind and the ego beyond recognition. Some ego is good, even necessary, but too much removes you from the normal circles of creative flow, and you start looking for somewhere and someone on whom to lay the blame. Alcohol is safer and more sociable, if less, uh, ‘quantum’. Alcohol greases the wheels of creative derangement a step at the time, drug of choice, $1 a pop, straight to the vein to the heart. Nervous systems are there for warning of impending danger, not juking for maximum thrill. Drugs can short the system out, rather than smoothing it out or lifting it up. Often I’d say good-bye to everyone present before toking up, just in case I forgot in the heat of inspiration.

   
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  hardie karges 2:22 pm on June 4, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: drugs ( 7 ), religion ( 168 ), sex ( 39 )   

  SEX, DRUGS, RELIGION 

  One of my previous lovers left me for a woman. That made me stop and think. She swings both ways now, I think, if and when she swings at all. I guess that’s natural when your life consists primarily of sensation. She’s an artist. She’s also an atheist, or so she says. They’re the saddest people in the world, or so it seems. They also seem to be more inclined to drug use, though I couldn’t place causality. They go way beyond recreation, inspiration, and good ol’ fashioned “getting fucked up”. They’re into Club Med, something to kill the pain, that special kind of sympathetic pain that accrues mostly to druggies; they need it special. But don’t forget the ‘opium of the masses’. It kills pain, too, the pain of being. I think the main problem with religion is the picture in our minds of the traditional battle gods with their long beards, war wigs, and bad teeth, threatening us with eternal damnation if we slip and fail. Thor is there with a fist full of thunderbolts, and so’s his boss Woden and Frida the Wonder Woman, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday hanging over us like a sentence of death and a book of lies. It’s so negative, promising Hell for bad behavior, as if we couldn’t behave ourselves otherwise. Islam takes the opposite tack, promising a Heaven full of virgins if we do the right things here and now. Score one for Islam. You already know what Hell is like. Buddhism doesn’t do any of that. It doesn’t lead you into battle, nor does it promise Heaven nor Hell. It just doesn’t do much of anything at all, actually. This world is all illusion. No shit. These are not religion’s bright spots. People have done things in the name of religion that I wouldn’t do to my worst enemy. It doesn’t have to be so hard.

   
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  hardie karges 7:41 am on June 3, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Asia ( 17 ), LEARNING, religion ( 168 )   

  RACE FOR RELIGION 

  Pidgin English replaces Pidgin Sanskrit and the history of Southeast Asia moves forward into the new millennium. The Indian influence seems as though it were always benign and probably one of the best justifications of India’s reputation as a guru-culture, i.e. a culture of teachers and teachings. It appears that that is exactly what they did in Southeast Asia about two thousand years ago, both as traditional Brahmanists and as the reformers, Buddhists, bringing not only religion, but alphabet and much new vocabulary. But as is always the case, ‘teacher, teach thyself.’ Hinduism in its original form is forever stained by its embrace of the caste system, a polite form of racism. There is always the danger of this in any culture with more than one race, of course, and the religious acceptance of it seems no more than an afterthought to justify what was already the case. While Buddhism never addressed the issue specifically, its lack of a caste system must have made it more attractive, all else being equal. Islam certainly capitalized on the inherent tension in the caste system and complemented it with its simple, but strict, teaching accessible to all, and an army promising plenty of spoils for the victors. To the present day Buddhist temples are centers of learning, if basic, in Southeast Asia and were for a long time almost the only centers. Islamic schools serve much the same function in its sphere of influence. It’s an open question as to why the history of the area is entirely dependent on Chinese annals for chronology and corroboration, given the advanced state of Indian learning and literacy.

   
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  hardie karges 7:50 am on June 2, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: DOGMA ( 5 ), religion ( 168 )   

  LIMITS OF DOGMA 

  You don’t have to throw out religion because of the dogma. That’s like throwing out the dishes with the dishwater. Religion is initiated in experience and culminates in a belief system. One man’s dogma is another man’s belief system is another man’s mind control. Those who denigrate belief systems, including religion, seem to need higher than normal levels of drugs and alcohol to attain that enlightened mental state. Admittedly belief systems can get out of control and into politics. It’s an endless temptation and maybe even the ideal system if it’s capable of self-correction. Dogma is usually not. They’re all guilty of it, of course, Buddhism in the Tibetan theocracy, Christianity in the old Holy Roman Empire, Islam in modern Iran among countless others. Communism was guilty of the same thing. It’s called ‘totalitarianism’, the idea that the state can control everything, including thought, or conversely, that religion can run the government. These things require finesse, tolerance, and time. Some concepts are simply irreconcilable, better just to agree to disagree. Taliban women under veils are as repulsive to modern Western sensibilities as Amsterdam whorehouses are to the mullahs. There’s no easy reconciliation, best just to stay on your side of the line.

   
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  hardie karges 11:35 am on June 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Apocalypse ( 12 ), religion ( 168 )   

  APOCALYPSO 

  Tsunamis and typhoons and hurricanes are taking revenge on those who take Nature lightly, changing money in the temple and erecting pleasure parlors right on the edges of her frayed slip. After the tsunami, some Thais asked me if this was it, the Big A, Armegeddon, Apocalypse, as if because I’m a Farang, therefore of Judeo-Christian heritage, I’d know what it’s supposed to look like. Thai Christians take that shit seriously. You don’t just casually go switching religions. If you leave the graven images and the golden Buddhas behind, you at least want a good old-fashioned apocalypse in return, or maybe a Messiah or two. The problem is, if Jesus came back, no Christians would believe it, so the new believers, prostitutes and drug addicts and mixed loose nuts, would have to start all over again. Religion is like that. Desperation makes it very attractive. The more money you have, the more you have to lose, the camel and the eye of a needle and all that.

   
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  hardie karges 7:56 am on May 31, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: love ( 49 ), religion ( 168 )   

  The more we learn, the less we know 

  That’s the hard thing for religion to admit. It is about certainties, after all. It’s hard to admit I really don’t know jack shit about what’s out there; I only know what’s in here, that I feel this incredible love radiating outward and seeping inward that connects me to every living thing that breathes on this one-in-a-trillion planet. It has nothing to do with someone stroking my ego or pulling my leg. It has everything to do with a friendly word from a stranger, a helping hand when you’ve fallen down, or a baby’s smile. Just thinking about it in the fifth dimension of memory can send a shiver up my spine, and a tear to my eye. This is the great gift of Christianity, the transformative power of love. In a dog-eat-dog world, nobody had ever said anything as simple as “love your neighbor as yourself”. Imagine what would happen if everybody actually did that. The problem is that too often those who don’t, take advantage of those who do.

  more or less... and Brian are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Brian 8:45 am on May 31, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    Couldn’t agree more. There is a story that the Rabbi Hillel, a contemporary of Jesus, was challenged by a non-Jew. The challenge was that if Hillel could recite the Torah while standing on one leg, the challenger would convert to Judaism. Hillel stood on one leg, said “do unto others as you have them do unto you. That is the Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study it.”

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    more or less... 9:45 am on January 26, 2009 Permalink | Reply

    Why connect the ‘golden rule’ to a religion. It was ‘borrowed’ by middle east monotheism from far east ancient wisdom.
    Monotheism has found and exploited the flaw in this meme. The suicide bomber believes he is killing for the good of God, he would hope you would do the same to him. Same story for the abortion clinic bomber… This ‘great gift of Christianity(Monotheism), the transformative power of love’, we can do without! Take ‘Christianity’ out of the equation however then you have something worthy of aspiration and equation to ‘loves power’. Don’t be fooled, religion is a fraud. Fall for the fraud if you must, but know it for what it is. I only relay this simple truth because we are you.