Happy Halloween

Hello Dear reader

Since Halloween is supposed to be scary I thought I might just scare the Hell out of you.

We live in a world that lifts mediocrity to the level of iconographic, attempts to squelch originality for the sake of consumerism, has all but succeeded in medicating originality totally out of existence [and I’m actually waiting for it to be a criminal act] and votes people in charge that cater to the religious right wing conservatives who wish to re manifest a world that if it existed at all was based in ignorance, prejudice, deceit and maintaining some status quo that didn’t actually exist. They will not rest until we live in some weird culture that is half way between “little house on the Prairie” and the surface story of “Father knows best.” I’ve recently been listening to the news…I listened while Bush’s personal lawyer was denied even a hearing concerning consideration for the Supreme Court…because nobody knew how she’d vote on issue’s like Roe vs. Wade…i.e. reversing the legalization of a woman’s right to choose whether or not she can handle being a parent. Now I don’t have a problem with denying Bush putting his friends in office, Hell after the debacle in Iraq, his complete hands off approach to the Enron scandal, his standing by while his cronies leaked the identity of a CIA operative over to the Press because her husband wasn’t a TEAM player, and the fact that economy is in such a state that I’m working more hours now but actually making less money in spending potential then 2 years ago with no hope of a raise in pay cause my boss can’t afford it: I want to know why he hasn’t been brought up on charges of Treason, Crony-ism and profiteering at the cost of us Taxpayers. But his supporter’s thank GOD we have a god fearing, right to life, missionary/Empire building mentality (Our Christian/profit by exploitation beliefs or total annihilation of your culture) and they refuse to see the truth. For starters we are borrowing the money to put fourth this Fool’s agenda by borrowing money from Communist China who doesn't believe in any God, whose slowly stealing the manufacturing capability from this country and lending us the money to continue down that road. These fools are losing their jobs and supporting the idiot that’s getting indebted to the thief.

If that doesn’t scare the Hell out of you then nothing will.

Lets start (yet again) with a woman’s right to choose to be a parent. We have had Abortion in this culture since the very beginning of it. Women that were the vehicle of birth control have been burned, tortured, imprisoned and treated like criminals. What is it about this one concept that keeps hanging people up? Because God said we were to be thankful for every child that was sent to us...That might have been true when 7 out of 9 children would die before they were 10 years of age. Not that every child isn't a miracle...but a child should be wanted and loved. And we aren't dealing with a CHILD here. An abortion deals with the "potential Child" i.e. the fetus. if I had a lump of uncooked dough lying on a table I could make bread, pizza, pretzels, or for that matter art out of it...it has the potential to be many things...but one doesn't eat the dough...it must be baked first...and in the process many things can happen...many many things. Of course there's the concept of the Parent to be...

There are member’s of everyone’s personal Circle that has a couple of kids that you find yourself thinking “…there ought to be a law against people like that having the right to have kids.” Well there isn’t. And the need to reproduce is in our reptilian part of our brain so I doubt that there is going to be. However the hormones to wish to pursue the activity that leads to reproduction start early in a human are strongest when our ability to reason is not fully matured probably because if you really knew what the out come would be the chances of us having any kids at all just wouldn’t happen. Trying to get teenagers to not think about Sex is almost as pointless of trying to hold back the ocean’s tides with a sandcastle. It is how they are programmed, that’s why teenagers and 20 year olds look the way they do and why old men like me find ourselves remembering that we were once young. SO instead of teaching people how to deal with these feelings and how to prevent becoming a Parent before we’re actually mature enough to deal with making another person (YES we have that technology!) we feel teaching it is immoral. Immoral is having sex with animals…teaching a teenager about birth control is educating the kid about how it all fits together (for lack of a better example.) However, these Christian right wingers are the same people that don’t want birth control taught in the schools, so they don’t want to teach it themselves and don’t want it taught in schools. They want to teach abstinence. Well ok. I have a good idea...why don't you fast for a week and try not to think of food. One is a hunger just like the other.

They want their trust in God’s plan to be their complete and absolute answer to all things. A group of them were holding up anti abortion signs along Church Street a few weeks back. I actually considered pulling over and engaging one of these people in a debate on the subject. But I realized that attempting to educate people that have decided not to think for themselves is a fool’s errand. This isn’t the issue however. As I have stated in the past for the Record, I am not a big fan of abortion. But then I will never need one. I will never be a single woman who in a moment of passion made a mistake and will now be responsible to raise a child. If it were my sister who wanted or needed one then I’d figure that is her decision and as an American Citizen she should have the best medical care that is available to her to accomplish this, the moral issue is one she will hafto deal with-I don't need to decide this for her. The bottom line is this…by making it illegal you will not stop it, you will just make it unavailable to someone who can’t afford to pay a doctor to do it for them under the table. Thus possibly destroying 2 lives.
I have a friend who’s almost 60 and admitted to me once that he and his brother were lucky…his mother had aborted the 4 siblings that came before them. And I’m sure that it was illegal in the 40’s. Just remember that God himself said that it was up to him to judge and not us. This is what is meant between a separation between Church and State.

And here's another one of those moral issues that leave me shaking my head. I can recall as a child my parents wanting me to avoid any communication or contact with an individual in the next neighborhood over. He was reviled as some sort of deviant of massive proportion, a danger to me and those around me, I’m amazed that he wasn’t stoned regularly and that his house wasn’t burned to the ground knowing how the local society felt about him. Even to mention his name was an invitation for glares at best and being harassed about it at worst. This man’s unforgivable crime was that he was a homosexual. Or so I was told, as I never saw him with another man…I never saw him outside his own yard, my m other assured me it was true and as I got older I found many faults with my mothers ability to apply guilt. These same folks would like to have a man like this to be totally expunged from society. It is immoral behavior. Do lower forms of animals have morals because it happens in them all the time? There is a mountain of evidence that shows homosexual behavior in all forms of life available to this world…it’s probably a genetic hold out from when we were bisexual like worms and slugs. They point at the bible and declare it to be against the will of god, however if they were to read further in that chapter the same feeling is held for people that handle and eat pork…and for some reason that part’s up for interpretation. What this guy did with another consenting male was between the two of them...it shouldn't be part of the public forum.

People are so unwilling to think for themselves that even these “Christian’s” don’t want to actually approach reading the bible with an open mind, they want somebody else to read it and interpret it for them. I used to work with a Baptist a few years ago and occasionally we’d lock horns on this issue. We’d debate evolution…I’d win the debate. We’d debate the actual feasibility of the things mentioned in the bible… I’d win the debate, we’d debate racism (yeah for some that’s part of the bible too…The Klan is supposedly Christian organization) I’d win again. It finally came down to him admitting that he was taught to believe these things despite the fact that he knew that they were wrong. I recalled Mark Twain’s comment that “Faith is believing in something you know ain’t so.”

Christianity is a swell faith when the whole thing is considered-where it falls apart is when people pick it apart and apply parts to fulfill their personal agenda. However we must remember that at the time all this was written down we were just mastering the production of Bronze, working out the details of Iron, living at the whims of Nature and not traveling more then a few miles where we were born and would die. We lived with our animals and we planned on having a whole lot of children hoping that a few might live to be adults. And we needed help on the farm. Disease was caused by demons. The earth was the center of the universe and all the other planets including the sun revolved around it. And oh yeah the world was flat. IF anything bad happened it was either God’s will or the work of the Devil. And as soon as we figured out who was the one responsible for being in league with the devil that somebody would be stoned for it! If you had a disease you would consult with your local holy man…a doctor was a wizard and in league with Satan, a woman's menstrual cycle was considered uncleanliness and they were expected to go and deal with it outside society on the other side of the city walls...I would love it if some poor Southern Baptist man attempted to throw his wife out of her house and told her to pitch a tent on the outskirts of town until this nonsense of her 28 day cycle was at an end. I get this feeling that's another one of those things that's up for interpretation. There was this movie on last night that I watched most of after my bladder woke me up at 3 am. The plot was that a tomb was discovered in modern Jerusalem that supposedly held the actual body of Jeshua bar joseph, or as we know him from the Greeks…Jesus Christ. And of course the Church was in an uproar. They had to prove that this was not so…it threatened the faith. The Israeli’s were trying to be helpful to the Christians and this relationship made the Moslem Palestinian’s nervous. The Jews were under the impression that if this was a Jewish burial then it was not to be touched and everybody just wished the whole thing would go away except the archeologist who discovered it who really couldn't see what all the uproar was about. It was Science i.e. Truth and all this other stuff was conjecture. The one thing that kept going through my mind was that Jesus was sent with a message. The miracles that are attributed to him were to assure us that the message was divinely inspired and should be seriously considered. The message was one of Love and Tolerance. That all were equal in the sight of God, which each choice a man made was between himself and God, that Man was no more nor less a part of the whole system and that should he be respectful of that place. That we were a family and that this sorta bickering amongst us and this “I’ll tell daddy what you said/did” accomplished nothing. Did Jesus performing miracles make this message any more or less true? When will people realize that the people that set themselves up as knowing what God wants from them have some other agenda in mind? We are all individuals, we are all unique to quote the life of Brian.
Its up to the individual to choose if he will stand on his own two feet and let God’s gift of free will allow him to run his own life or if he will hide behind a doctrine that had a lot to do with what we were 4,000 years ago and should be used as a guide to what we should be.

Happy Halloween.