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  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 12:22 pm on May 16, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , religion   

    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.

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 7:51 am on May 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply
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    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 19th 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!

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 11:36 am on May 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply
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    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's avatar

      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.

  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 12:26 pm on May 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply
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    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.

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 4:04 pm on May 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply
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    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.

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 10:55 am on May 3, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: religion,   

    CONSIDERATA 

    Good things can happen for all the wrong reasons. If I had been more successful in business, then I wouldn’t be writing this tractatus right now. If jihad weren’t threatening the foundations of the western world, then capitalism might very well kill us all before it knows its limits. All revolutions go too far by definition, three hundred sixty degrees and you’re back where you started. Except that the entire plane where you started is also in revolution, so you actually come back to a different place in the larger plane, for better or worse, like the difference between tropical and sidereal years. An individual mind, ‘brain’ if you’re an absolute materialist, makes revolutions per minute on a good day, depending on the horsepower of your engine. There’s a world of free will on the inside, pure and innocent. Your wish is its command. The real world is not so naïve. It has a mind of its own. It can give and it can take away without explanation and no apparent causality. It’s larger than any of us individually.

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 1:17 pm on May 2, 2008 Permalink | Reply
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    PIDGIN RELIDGIN 

    It’s time for a new religion, preferably one of love, as universally aimed as it is themed, based on science as a guide without being tied to transient precepts and hopeless missions in rundown slums in nameless cities, one that unites politics and economics under its storm-proof umbrella. Democracy and Christianity have been the apologetic lapdogs of capitalism far too long, walking hand in hand down Byzantine cul-de-sacs and Roman highways, just like Islam and jihad, Buddhism and prostitution, Judaism and finance, Communism and alcohol, covering for each other and hiding from the truth. Feed your people physically and spiritually or make way for those who can. Shit or get off the pot; share the wealth or lose it. Create the wealth or think of something better. Democracy has always been borne on the backs of slaves, lofty goals held up by whipped backs and hungry mouths, Greece and Rome and the deep deep South. Two out of three are good enough for me. Colonialism had a prettier face, but the end result was still the same and it had little to do with race. Scar tissue is ugly whatever the circumstance; a little white powder can’t hurt. So slaves became Slavs, Mongols became Moguls, blacks became blokes, and the rest became history.

     
  • Unknown's avatar

    hardie karges 3:38 am on February 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , religion   

    Milagros 

    Twice I was in Mexico City on the most polluted day in the history of the world.  Yes, it got worse.  One day somebody found a yard-long mutated rat.  Yeow!  I hope that’s not the future path of evolution.  Nobody wants to brag about that, of course.  It seems like every time I go to Mexico somebody’s just seen an image of the Virgen de Guadalupe shedding her tears in some new location.  They take that catholic shit seriously, miracles and all.  A common greeting in Mexico is, “Que milagro!”  That’s what I want to know, “What miracle?”

     
    • ecopreservationsociety's avatar

      ecopreservationsociety 4:58 am on February 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Mexico City has some wonderful attributes, but the pollution there is nothing short of disgusting.

      Not sure you measured the “most polluted day in the history of the world”

    • ecointeractive's avatar

      ecointeractive 5:01 am on February 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Sorry, not for me. Mexico is possibly the least desirable place in all of Latin America

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