Author: Allegra

Born when atmospheric carbon was 316 PPM. Settled on MST country since 1997. Parent, grandparent.

From control-z.com

Stated bluntly, faith or belief in an after-life is the single-most cause of suffering and foolishness inflicted upon the human race, by the human race, and for several reasons:

  • It negates the immediacy and value of human life right here and right now.
  • It corrupts the collective unconscious of the species in such a way as to affect behavior. Believing in an life-after-death, making the assumption people don’t really die, subconsciously legitimizes capital punishment and the death penalty, abortion, territorial wars, religious wars, turf wars, gang wars, terrorist attacks, ethnic cleansing, murder, suicide cults, political assassination, et al, since people aren’t really dying after all–they’re just continuing on in another stage of existence.
  • It allows people to postpone action in this life (whether humane or humanitarian) in favor of the life yet to come, allowing for political and religious boundaries, derision and division, separatism and succession. Hence there remains global hunger, border skirmishes, illiteracy, disease, poverty and pestilence, all because the problems of this world are deemed ultimately not as important when measured against the life yet to come. With the idea of an after-life always simmering in the back of people’s mind, they don’t try as hard to really instigate change in this world, strive for peace, alleviate suffering, fight for global changes. After all, eternal life starts at death so why should folks get all worked up over sixty or seventy years?
  • It offers people hope for a solution to their problems at some future time and enables them to not make a conscious effort to begin making the necessary changes or do the necessary work now. It allows them to postpone taking responsibility for their own lives or education (since god will enlighten them and fix everything once they get to heaven) and permits them to sit on their hands in ignorance and inertia while life passes them by. Why make a serious search for truth if truth will be revealed on the other side?
  • It legitimizes the use of persecution and torture in the name of saving souls for the after-life.
  • It allows religious leaders to control their people by offering hope in the next life, promising rewards, threatening punishment, even sentencing eternal damnation (through papal bulls, excommunication) all by invoking interpreted church doctrine.
  • It assumes a mind-body (or soul-body) dichotomy, a disembodied spirit that is mystically and temporarily ‘housed’ in human flesh while blissfully ignoring the inescapable synthesis of each person’s material surroundings, environment, cultural prejudices, parental influences and biases, birth order, sex, physical appearance, shape, size, color, health, biochemistry, electrochemical reactions, stored memory, bones, flesh, blood, eyes, ears, mouth, and steady oxygen supply to shape personality. Everything we think we are we owe solely to the state of our flesh and empirical surroundings, a process impossible to remove from the intrinsic network of matter. With all the above in absence, what would remain exactly to “stand” in judgment before the throne of god, and what mechanisms (or lack thereof) would drive interaction with the divine inquisitor?
  • It rewards laziness, complacency, ignorance, superstition, irrationality, religious fervor, and blind faith with promises of an other-wordly victory and assurances of everlasting retribution.

Food

Tom and Peggy kindly invited me to dinner.  Lady Miss Banjola was there – after putting almost 600 k on her scooter, Jake, in a single day of riding.  Tom howled and cursed about the entree in a most entertaining fashion, but it was edible despite his best efforts.  Despite it being a Sunday I had good bus luck getting home.

I watched Broken Trail again yesterday, and happy I was to do it, there being a number of things I missed the first time I watched it.

My spell of vacation is coming to an end, and I’m almost happy about going back to work.  If it’s the usual vacation, I’ll come back and everything will be different and my desk will be in the basement and my red stapler will be missing….. kidding.

glad news, sad news

My philosophical buddy Avinash called and reminded me to be rational – it was a lovely conversation.  I met him while I was running the Simplicity Meetup group last year.

Katie has a job!!!! She picked it out, applied, interviewed her new boss as hard as he interviewed her, and I am very proud of her.

Lady Miss Banjola is a pharmacist! Dred her blisterpakking skillz!

I have come to the conscious decision to let go of some stuff and it hurts, but it’s kind of a good hurt, if you know what I mean.  I’m talking material stuff.

Sad news…. Cali, Tom and Peggy’s kitty, aetat 24, is v. poorly and not going to make it.

I-I-I-I phone

Godawmighty, the techsphere’s buzzing like a rhythmically whacked wasp’s nest about the Iphone.  Boingboing.net went so gaga they might as well be writing advertising copy for Apple, and someguy over there said ‘THIS IS THE UI WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR’.  They are aware, of course, how breathless and ecstatic they sound so they posted under the title “Jesus is Risen”.  o RLY.  Indeed, as RobofNine would say.
Just so, as mOm would say.

I just found the remote that came with my computer. Who knew, back in 1992, that computers could have remotes?
Saw Keith, read TWO (okay, most of two) Aubrey/Maturin books yesterday AND went to Shrek III.  Yes, Shrek III isn’t ‘as good’ as the first two.  But it’s still way funnier than just about everything else out there.  Would have been nicer if it had taken me less than an hour to get home, but oh well. That’s life with no car.  While he was here I unlimbered my credit card and bought (or so I believe, but I never got a frikking confirmation email) two books about … gee… can you guess???? Aubrey Maturin!!!!  One of them is a book by book atlas and the other is detailed illustrations of all those heaps of frikkin nautical terms.  I’ll probably break into them before I give them to Keith, but he’s jiggy with that.  Anyway, with any luck they’ll get here before his birthday, and if they don’t nae borra.  He’ll be 21.  Can you believe I pushed him out of my body 21 years ago??? it’s bizarre.  He’s so adult and calm and inspiring, and so easily pleased.

Day 1 of no beer.  At Katie’s grad I said I didn’t think I could live a month without beer.  Then I realized that this was the single saddest, and possibly stupidest, thing I had ever heard myself say.  After taking thought, I figured if I can pass most of the month of July without beer, I’ll be in good shape.  Dunno how I’m going to get through Tuesday though – I always drink a beer before I perform (One beer Only), as I find it prevents worry.  More than one beer, though, impedes performance.  Didn’t Shakespeare do a bit on that? It’s also bizarre to think that in my personal take on Ol’ Abe Maslow’s Cone of Consciousness, Beer outranks Sex. What am I, Homer Simpson??? Sad mismanagement in that, dear friends.
Off to the weight room now, I have an appointment with one of the infernal machines.

Bad week for a vacation

The weather has not been great this week.

I light a candle for the people in my circle of acquaintance who are feeling suicidal right now.  Hang in there!

At a friend’s urging, I watched What the Bleep do we Know.  It was in spots really entertaining, but I preferred Mindwalk, which covered a lot of the same ground.  Also, when one of the people being interviewed turned out to be a medium channelling a star-being, Ramtha, and another one of them was a sex scandal star, I was getting steady pings from the baloney detector.  This whole create your own reality thing is great, but I have a couple of comments.

Clipper ships did not exist during the time of Columbus.  The story about the First Nations of the Caribbean “not being able to see the ships” – nice story, but bogus.  That was actually the point where I got lost.  I will watch Marlee Matlin in practically anything, and I enjoyed her performance, and the special effects were fun.  But, and this is a big but, quantum physics as we (and I mean we in the sense of a small number of human beings) currently understand it does not change anything about the world.  It doesn’t.  It may make certain kinds of technology or cosmology possible, but it will do dick all about the mess the world is in or feed anything actionable into the hopper of possible solutions.
You can say – as they frequently did, in the film – that we’re all deeply intertwingled “We are One”, and intention is everything.  Then they wisely pull out the rug, and take it all away by saying our minds keep us separate because of addictions, and if your intention isn’t perfect you can’t manifest a better reality or the reality will be flawed by your lapses in intention.   We are one hundred percent responsible for our own reality.  Ka ching.  I don’t mind the notion of personal responsibility, but a) you have to be in a position to think about that responsibility and b) you are issued at birth a number of possibilities, none of which have anything to do with responsibility or intention, and which directly impact your ability to be able to even form these ideas.  Whenever I see people twittering on about intention, I feel like showing wards full of AIDS babies and starving children in camps overtop of their words so we can see how incredibly egocentric and lacking in compassion the whole “You can create your own reality” shtick is.  And talking about addictions??  Christ, there are times when I think that we aren’t “meaning” machines as much as we are “stimulus response” machines.
Now, I don’t know a damned thing about philosophy – I leave the heavy lifting to the experts – so I stick pretty close to Allegra’s Law; everything about human beings points back to breeding rights and the acquisition of entitlements which allow you to extend, control, contribute to or benefit from your kinship network.  Evolution is conservative, imperfect and slow, and there’s chunks of the human genome which no longer appear to point to breeding and extension of kinship networks.  But when I look hard enough I can see the connection, thanks to books like the Third Chimpanzee and Sex, Time and Power.
I dream of being a perfect and enlightened being.  Then I wake up and worry about my kids.  So be it.