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

  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   

  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   

  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.

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  hardie karges 8:29 am on May 30, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: GOD ( 25 ), religion   

  Messiah complex, God simple. 

  If you believe in anything, then you believe in God. But beware of false prophets and easy solutions. It’s time for a new religion, gather up all those shitty little revelations and write them down in a new Bible, if that’ll make you feel any better. Ancestor worship runs in the family, but stops short of a true metaphysics. Oriental religion offers a way out, but no way in. Western religion could use a pill to chill and enjoy the show without everybody demanding the starring role and a share of the box-office. But no drugs, please. It’s time for East and West to meet somewhere besides WWIII-era cheesy GI bars lining the beaches in Pattaya and Frankfurt. It’s time to reconcile science and religion without all the rank and rancor. Science is about probabilities; religion is about certainties. There’s really no need to battle over turf. Islam is way ahead in one area- they have a God with no face, pure and inescapable, while Christians need frequent inspiration from the guy with the tan, and Buddhists prostrate themselves to a thousand graven images while professing non-attachment. Christianity wins the battle over behavior hands-down with the doctrine of unrelenting love, and Buddhism will always be closer to theoretical physics with its flexible approach to reality. But talk’s cheap. As always, do as they say, not as they do. Buddha, Christ, and Muhammad take their places in the head, heart, and muscle of the world and man like the sage, lover, and soldier in all of us: old, middle-aged, and young. Islamic discipline, Christian love, and Buddhist other-worldliness are the tripod legs of one true religion, the trilogy, the triple Gem, the five pillars, the Ten Commandments, and the eight-fold path all showing different sides of One Truth- God exists. Live your life accordingly.

   
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  hardie karges 1:10 pm on May 29, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: GOD ( 25 ), religion   

  ARGUMENTS FOR GOD 

  Maybe there is a God, and maybe he gives a shit. Maybe there is a reason to live. Maybe I need it. Maybe I need the sandy coastline, the muddy rivers, and the purple sunsets. Maybe I need people in general, though maybe no one in particular. My heart is a palimpsest, a lonely beach washed over and rewritten many times by warriors determined to topple my castles in the air. If you can explain it, then it isn’t God. God speaks in silence, in your innermost thoughts. God is that voice inside, your partner in dialogue, your constant companion.

   
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  hardie karges 11:35 am on May 26, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: history ( 42 ), religion   

  AND THE MEEK WILL INHERIT THE EARTH 

  Will the meek inherit the Earth? Forced to take sides in a war they don’t want, they’re left to their own devices when it comes time to take up arms. Most would rather busy their hands working the fields of Abraham, but the powers that be reject simple solutions. Individual egotism becomes group solidarity becomes national pride becomes racial superiority, religion holding the hand that feeds as it follows. Conspiracy rules, a conspiracy of ignorance. Half the world consumes what the other half produces, as if nothing could be more natural, peasants plowing fields becoming poorer and poorer while hunters become herders become warriors become corporate raiders with habits as large as their bellies to feed from the fields of peasants. Everybody gets in on the deal, women holding down the fort while men do the hunting, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

   
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  hardie karges 5:45 am on May 25, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: jihad ( 8 ), religion   

  IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER 

  This is the Bible; this is a new millennium; this is WWIII. Populations are in movement all over the globe to avoid the axe, to avoid the sword, to avoid the inevitable. This is the war to end all wars. This is slow-motion Apocalypse, the first to be televised. This is the year of the virus, DNA carefully packaged in Trojan horses. This is the race to end all races. Jihad rears its ugly head like a ghost from the past, Saladin riding a gilded stallion, forcing the infidels into submission, showing mercy to the repentant. The One God is a jealous God. His three grandsons fight for favor in his eye, Ariel, George, and Osama taking up where Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad left off, jockeying for position in a world growing smaller by the day. Abraham’s house long divided between Jesus’s many children and Muhammad’s brotherhood of the sword, Moses wants nothing more in his old age than his childhood room with a view after years of travel and homelessness. Sibling rivalry for the Father’s favors begins at home.

   
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  hardie karges 11:56 am on May 18, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: GOD ( 25 ), religion   

  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 ( 68 ), 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.

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