Religion Meets Politics; Body Meets Soul: Capitalism is the Past; Buddhism is the Future…
Huh? What? Is this guy illiterate? Why is he comparing apples and oranges while alluding to bananas under the influence of ananas (pineapples), knowing all the while that the only fruit that can cure his disease are cherries and sometimes cranberries? (Orange you glad I didn’t venture into tropical fruits whose names are only known through vague inference and oblique reference and bad translations like jack-fruits and custard apples and the alligator pears of a previous era?)
Surely this is the greatest travesty of language competence since half-decent actress Zooey Deschanel and that other guy with a letter for a first name decided to call their musical duo ‘She and Him’, knowing all the while that one pronoun was nominative and the other accusative, without even considering the political implications of a feminine subject getting all on-top transitive and doing it to a masculine object, sure payback’s a b*tch, a batch of contradictions, but really his guitar-playing’s not half-bad and her only musical background is the title role in a season of ‘Death Cab for Cutie’ and the best line she ever had in a movie was “Penis!” in that flick with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. But I digress.
I mean, you can’t just inter-mix religion and politics for Sunday entertainment, now, can you, despite or because of the fact that it’s prohibited? Can you? “Never talk religion and politics” is an adage as old as America itself and the mixing of the two is an affront to the separation of Church and State that lies at the heart of our dysfunctional system of government, isn’t it? Why, yes; dysfunctional, that is…
Everything’s different now. Everything is a caricature of itself, and nothing is sacred anymore. Our Western and American values are up for grabs and subject to reinterpretation. Our freedoms have degenerated into licentiousness, and our liberties have lost their licenses. Our paradigms have shifted and our grounds have been re-sifted. Religion has nothing to do with church anymore and politics has nothing to do with government. Work is not all about money anymore and life is all about quality and not quantity. The merger of politics and religion does not signal theocracy. It signals maturity.
Capitalism must die, pool sharks notwithstanding. Its continuation threatens the planet and society. It doesn’t have to end overnight, but the sooner the better: no more booms and crashes, no more zooms and clashes. I’m not talking about free enterprise, mind you. That’s different. That’s sacred. Capitalism is a perversion of it, most likely originated in the extension of credit, and the various packaging and re-packing that comes and goes with that.
If that makes me a Communist, then so be it. I prefer ‘Buddhist’; yes, that’s no typo. It’s no accident that some of the most successful Communist countries had a prior history of Buddhism. Even today the line is blurred—in China, Vietnam, Laos, Burma and elsewhere. But I’m not talking about totalitarian dictatorships. I’m talking about shared spaces and shared societies, not shares of common stock. The only common stock I care about is DNA handed down in re-stacked decks, hands shuffled and re-shuffled for hybrid vigor and species survival.
If religions must go through the phases of Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism (in no certain order) as lives must go through the phases of youth, middle age and ‘seniority’ = discipline, love and wisdom, then so, too, must societies go through the political phases of dictatorship, democracy and socialism both in their political and economic applications (‘apps’ for short). But the order is not ordered and the ‘roll-out’ is confusing. Silly phases must be gone through (passive voice intentional) and ch-ch-changes must occur in fields and screens of red, blue and green. Stay tuned…
Atheists are lucky. They get all the benefits of religion with none of the sacrifice: no long dark nights of the soul, no wrestling with questions of good and evil, or right and wrong, no giving to unnamed charities and the nameless homeless simply because ‘there, but for the grace of God, go I.’ No God = no grace; or not much, anyway. True, some secular humanists have adapted the same play-list without the figure-head, but still: more later on that…. 
Kc are discussing. 
We all know what it’s like to be in love: that crush—of feelings and desires and… and… suffering, yes, suffering (we’re talking about passion, remember, as in the Passion of Christ OR the passion of hot steamy nights). There’s nothing like it in the world, absolutely nothing. It will make you do the craziest things or go to the craziest lengths, all for love, or the act thereof…
People are desperate; people are starving; people line boulevards scrounging for crumbs and morsels; the homeless drift through the streets of nameless cities like zombies on life support, more and more keep coming and coming, without end middle or beginning, living in the moment like animals in search of pleasure and pasture; office workers adjust their ties and tie up their arms in expectation of junk, mail arriving from the four corners of the earth in bits and bytes, accounts payable and receivable in silver and slivers of pie-charts and Boolean logic… 
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streaming consciousness... 
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