RELIGION SCREWS UP MORALITY

Ever since early Catholic education, I’ve rejected the concept of original sin. Now, in my ‘60s, I’m irate about it. Please Father, gimme a break; I had nothing to do with Adam and Eve. I can’t even figure out why God had to appease himself by sacrificing his only begotten son. What the heck is God pissed off at me for?

The concept of sin and guilt has ruined a lot of lives. To religious people, sacrifice is good and pleasure is bad—particularly sexual pleasure. Why else would all forms of non-reproductive sex be considered evil and criminal? There’s even a Biblical story to illustrate God’s this point: Genesis 19:24 tells the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. God informs Abraham that he plans to destroy the city of Sodom because of its wickedness. “Non-vaginal sex,” sayeth the Lord, “that’s not what it’s all about. I told you people to be fruitful and multiply and that’s not the way to do it. So you better get that nephew of yours out of there, because it’s going to hale some pretty nasty brimstone any day now.”

Until this day the derivative “Sodomy” refers to non-reproductive sex. No babies plop out of this union and this is unpleasing to God. If pleasure weren’t anathema to God, instead of destroying Sodom, He would have gone to Jerusalem and sayeth with Jewish accent, “Try it, you’ll like it.” But noooooo. He sayeth, “Woe be to you who fuck around. It’s my way or the highway …to hell.”

God wants fat asses sitting in pews— that makes homosexuals an abomination because they don’t reproduce. The word of God gets transmitted much faster and accurately in tight-knit, large extended families. Think of all the suffering throughout the generations this fact has caused. The state of Georgia, until a few years ago, actually outlawed oral sex between consenting adults—even if they were heterosexual and married.

To bring the point home—that religion loves sacrifice and not pleasure—I offer this excerpt from Mirror Reversal.

Looking at herself in the mirror with a serene smile of success, Cynthia reminisced about the great times she had the last few weekends at the rave clubs. She loved to dress up sexy and beautiful, get there early, and pick up the first good-looking hunk that turned her on. Then she’d spend the rest of the night disco dancing, having intriguing conversation, perhaps smoking a little grass – body stuff that makes the skin very sensitive to touch, nothing heavy – finally going up to the dark balcony and having doggie-style safe sex with her arms resting on the railing. While screwing she could overlook the festive dancers below, enjoy the Beats & Breaks music, and watch pixie light rays of color reflecting off the whirling glitter ball and the glitzy costumes. That was her idea of a good time, good clean All-American fun, and she tried to understand why this should be considered immoral by anyone who was into humanity and the human condition—especially in a world with so many people doing serious damage to one another and catastrophic damage to the environment.

And so I ask, with people killing one another every day, people blowing themselves up, and people ravaging and desecrating the great Amazon rainforest daily, I inquire, “Why is Cynthia’s idea of a good time considered immoral? “ The very pillars of society—the judgment of right and wrong—are corrupted by people who want everybody to observe the one true religion.

I’d love to hear any comments on whether Cynthia is a good girl who just wants to have fun, or an incorrigible sinner who should be stoned.

If you’d like me to continue this eccentric ministry, please pick up a copy of Mirror Reversal on Amazon or B&N. I just received word that God is coming to take me unless I sell a hundred books by the end of the month. Nah… forget that. I think somebody’s tried it already. Sorry Rev. Roberts.

SOYLENT GREEN WAS THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER

Soylent Green is more important to us than the King James Bible. Instead of warning us of an imaginary hell, it alerts us of the real possibility of the horror of overpopulation.

The movie was way ahead of its time and a stern forewarning of what will happen if we continue reproducing like rodents.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edQNjJZFdLU&feature=PlayList&p=E5277029F3FB1EF2&index=15

Imagine the sense of loss as Edward G. Robinson watched the glory that once was Earth. We can't let it happen. There's still time. An age of solitude, an earth as desolate as the moon, after the incredible biodiversity and ineffable beauty that Gaia once knew, for me is unbearable to comtemplate.

Ironically, the actor died right after this scene. It was his last message.

HUMAN EXTINCTION

Chris Hedges' "We are breeding ourselves to extinction"

http://informationclearinghouse.info:80/article22181.htm

is one of the most insightful, on-the-money, spot-on essays I've ever read. I'm posting it here because I predicted the same events over five years ago when I started writing Mirror Reversal. It's heartbreaking that I could be so right, and yet alone, so helpless.

Professor Cynthia Whipple tells her boyfriend,

“Once you’ve reached a certain level of education, the Bible’s quaint stories don’t answer the questions anymore. The hope for heaven and the fear of hell are just that, mammalian emotions. But the reasoned belief that a futureworld will exist is all but certain. And what will the futureworld be like? – that should be our main concern. Instead of worrying about an imaginary heaven as an individual, let’s devote ourselves to entering a real futureworld as Homo sapiens, the wise. At this very moment there might be future souls praying to us to preserve the Earth and its ineffable beauty. Sometimes, when I’m listening to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, I can hear the sighs and yearnings of the world’s future citizens, ‘Please preserve the Earth,’ they weep, like the mystical chants of Odysseus’s sirens carried by the winds of time, ‘it belongs to us also. Don’t destroy it any further; it can’t be replaced. Your awareness of the condition of the world is the only thing that can save it. Just get us there and we’ll know what to do.’

“I see everything in terms of the Prime Directive and selfish gene theory. Picture a cruise ship sailing down a wide river of time: that’s really what the Earth is, a cruise ship sailing through space at 70,000 miles per hour with a precious cargo of life that required eons to form. Now picture one dominant species taking over the ship – some kind of mammal… a mouse, say. The reality is that the ship is heading straight toward a disastrous waterfall, bigger than Niagara. The entire population of the ship will certainly crash. The mice can feel something is wrong, but all they keep doing is carving out little niches in the ship so they can reproduce. They work and fight and bark at one another. All they care about is their little territory and a place to raise a family. They aren’t evolved enough to think about what’s in store for them right around the bend in the river.”

She seemed in a half trance, as if spilling out pent-up feelings to her psychiatrist uncle. “But the scenario is even worse, from an existential point of view. It’s not a waterfall that’s waiting around the bend, ‘cause the mice had nothing to do with the creation of the waterfall. The mice are heading for an ugly, poisoned and polluted lake that they created themselves with greed, stupidity, and arrogance. There’s no life in the lake at all: it’s filled with insecticides, mercury, and atomic waste - plastic milk cartons, electronic junk, and disposable razor blades. It’s contaminated with run-off from science fiction, mechanized chicken slaughter factories; run-off from robot phosphorus strip mines – miles long – where money is the only thing that matters. The inhabitants of the ship unwittingly created their own deathbed.

THE MEANING OF LIFE WITHOUT GOD

If humanity is going to continue to evolve, the traditional orthodox religions must be dismissed as indefensible mythology. Religion has kept us in the Dark Ages long enough. The time has finally come because nature has been strained to her limits. She is at carrying capacity right now. Religions continue to encourage runaway population growth at exponential rates such that millions die of starvation and preventable diseases every year. War is no longer a feasible answer to population control.

Even worse, religion indoctrinates subjects to believe that the world is coming to an end, so it doesn’t matter what we do to Gaia, she’s a lost cause anyway. The endmeme (see my video on the “endmeme” on Youtube) is the most dangerous and treacherous idea to ever escape from Pandora’s Box. How can we hope to survive when the vast majority of the Earth citizens believe God’s wrath hangs over us like the Sword of Damocles?

All human beings are on the same boat, a cruise ship sailing through space. We’re passengers on “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” as Carl Sagan describes it.We all face the same dismal fate bar none: nothingness.

But our sad existential fate doesn’t have to ruin our lives. We can ward off pessimism by a positive attitude. Instead of focusing on the vastness of the cosmos and our evident insignificance, we can concentrate on the sunbeam. We can appreciate the sheer luck of living at the intersection of the unimaginable fifteen-billion-year-old timeline of the cosmos and our own meager lifespan. An average lifespan seems like a long time but geologically it’s a millionth of a second. We’re ephemerons like mayflies. Every second of our life is precious.

That being so, it looks to me like the hippies of Woodstock Nation had it right. The purpose of life is to have fun—SEX, DRUGS, and ROCK ‘N’ ROLL. For me, it’s Sex, Pot and Art (Verdi and Puccini, Wagner and Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich; Rembrandt and Vermeer, Monet and Renoir, Picasso and Rouault), not that I have anything against rock ‘n’ roll. Classical music and the paintings of the great masters bring me to a sublime consciousness, so beautiful it makes all the suffering of life worthwhile.

I believe that if everyone in the world shared this worldview—that life is fleeting and meaningless— there wouldn’t be so much violence. Picture an army recruiter telling his hippie customer, “Your life has just begun but we need to kill our enemies. You’ll be respected and honored by friends and family. But everything’s a trade-off. There’s a chance you won’t come back and if that happens we’ll wrap your coffin in colorful flag, shoot rifles in the air, make sad sounds with a bugle and say prayers to a non-existent God. Wha-dya say?”

Anybody who gave this proposition some thought would recognize a no-brainer. “Sorry, Doc. Your offer would be cool if I had nine lives like a cat. Or if there’s an afterlife where I could enjoy eternal bliss. But I don’t think so.”

If the rulers of the world shared this view of life I don’t believe humanity would be suffering in war and pestilence. With all their money and power, they’d be too busy living life to the fullest: getting high, experiencing the ecstasy of playful sex and loving companionship, enjoying the geniuses of music, painting and literature. It would only a matter of time before the alphas figured out a way for everybody to live in harmony with each other and nature. The love of life would be so great that presidents couldn’t even bear the thought of aggression against other countries or of committing atrocities.

If humanity is to survive, the average joe has to tell the president, the cleric, the corporate bully, “Look, you do your thing and I’ll do mine. Just have fun and enjoy your life, don’t hurt anybody, and don’t pollute our beautiful planet. Paradise could be right here and now, if the human intellect emerges from the soul of mankind and dominates the world.”

As in the fairytale, when Beauty kissed the Beast—the beast being our evolutionary baggage, our phylogeny—the beast was transmogrified into a handsome prince.

[More on this subject at Mirrorreversal.com. or mirrorreversal.blogspot.com]