OUT, DAMNED SPOT!!!

How it must be to live life without conscience.  To think say and do what one pleases without regard for the effect on others.

It must be lovely to vent one’s hatred on one’s fellow man without fear.  It must be wonderful to commit any manner of hideous crime upon one’s fellows and know that one is never going to be held accountable.  Most of all it must be wonderful to know that one is completely right and never have any doubt.

This is the situation with those who are “saved”.

If one believes that Jesus died in order that your sins will not be taken into account, one has a free pass to Heaven.

As long as one believes, there is nothing one can do that one will have to pay the price for.

You can stand on street corners and shout out your hatred of your fellow man and condemn all to Hell.  One can kill unbelievers and feel righteous.  One can beat children into submission, and feel righteous.  A man may subjugate his woman, and feel righteous.  A man may subjugate another, and feel righteous.  One can spit on the poor and on the sick, and feel righteous.

One can homeschool one’s children and teach them that science is evil and leave them unprepared for the world that we live in, and feel righteous.

One can abandon one’s children for not living up to your standards, and feel righteous.

One can say that Matthew Shepard deserved his death, and feel righteous.

One can say that New Orleans was destroyed by God for its wickedness, and feel righteous.

One can say that an agonising death from AIDS is deserved, and feel righteous.

To believe that all one’s sins are paid for by another is provably dangerous and provably false.

If all a person sins were paid for, they would not experience the consequences of their own behaviour.  The mere fact that they do proves that their premise is bunkum. For every cause there is effect.  No beliefs will alter that.

To write, as I witnessed yesterday one of these deluded people do, that without a belief in God there can be no morals is probably one of the most evil beliefs there can be.  It denies personal responsibility and perpetuates the lie that man is evil left to his own devices.  (Never mind that all of the sacred books were written by men and thus so were their moral codes!)

We rely who on our conscience think deeply and carefully about what we believe and how we treat ourselves and others for we know that our beliefs and our actions have consequences and that we and others will be affected by those consequences.  We do not believe in a fairy tale, in magic, that allows us to escape the consequences of our thoughts and our actions.

Evil springs from this very misconception, that we are not responsible for our beliefs and our actions.

Those of us who know this ought not sit down and be quiet in the face of this tidal wave of evil.  We must stand and be counted.  Evil in all of its forms can never be and should never be tolerated.

(It is also important to understand that just because one rejects the idea of a saviour God does not make one an atheist.)

NO CAUSE WITHOUT EFFECT

It is clear to me that human beings are mostly ignorant of the fact that all we believe has an effect. What we do also does but it starts with what we believe. It also seems that many of us really believe that what we believe and do is of no consequence either to ourselves or others.

This may seem, on the surface, to be a fatuous example – until one examines it.

I am speaking of the advertisements aimed at women for hair or make up products with the by line ’because you’re worth it’. These adverts are based on lies, and the participants know this. The actresses who are part of this con KNOW that they do not look like that in real life! They KNOW that any woman who buys the product will not look like they do at all. They have no chance to because only computers make a person look like these actresses do.

They make money out of lying to the public. They make money out of helping to make women feel badly about themselves. They make money out of presenting a false image as real.

Clearly they do not see the immorality of what they are doing nor do they see the harm they are doing. They do not see that they are contributing to the atmosphere that encourages women to hate themselves. Self hate leads to terrible pain for the self hater and for others they affect.

Truly nothing we do or believe is without effect.

If we are think of people who are different from us as being wroth less from us, it has an effect and this effect is for ill, not for good. The Holocaust is a glaring example of the effects belief can have. The reason we hate Hitler is because we cannot accept that people like you and I actually did the evil work. Hitler just spoke. Ordinary people did the killing.

If you are one who considers yourself not racist but still would prefer your neighbourhood to be all white, you are responsible when a person of colour is beaten up or killed but because YOUR belief helped to create the atmosphere that allows such evil.

It is not a moral defence to hide behind ‘religious belief’ to justify the condemnation of gay people. Thos who hold such a belief are as responsible for the death of gay people as if they did the act themselves. By holding such beliefs YOU create the atmosphere that allowed Matthew Shepherd to be murdered. YOU created the atmosphere that allowed an effete 10 year old boy to be bullied to the point he hanged himself. Hiding behind Christ does NOT absolve you. Lying to yourself does not make it so. And there is no escaping the consequences of YOUR belief and action.

Life is, to a very large extent, the result of what WE believe. We act according to what we believe. Much of what we believe we are not even aware of!

The exhortation to KNOW THYSELF is of the utmost importance. Without self knowledge we cause untold suffering to ourselves and to others.

Juts think of the power within YOU! The world can change and will change if only you believe it so. I am NOT talking about Magical Thinking here, the ludicrous belief that we can alter the world by wishing or imagining! No I am talking about the fundamental beliefs we hold inside us that hold us back and cause harm to ourselves and to others.

No amount of belief will prevent people getting sick and dying. It will not prevent tsumanis, earthquakes, flood, famine or plague. Belief WILL alter how we experience LIFE. It will mean  the difference between an enjoyable experience and a terrible one.

The only reason my life went from darkness to light was because I  changed my belief system. It wasn't easy. It was extremely painful and I nearly lost my life and mind in the process but I DID come out the other side in to light.

My major work was undoing the damage done to me by religion and it’s crippling belief system. This combined with abuse gave me a belief system that could only result in evil. There was no chance it could result in anything else. Undoing the damage of religion is probably the most painful and difficult and frightening thing to embark upon for at the very root of such thinking is that to question your religious teaching is evil in and of itself! Oh what a clever, manipulative and evil thing to do. This is WHY religionists cling to the right to indoctrinate children because they KNOW that most of us will never take the journey I did to break their evil hold upon my spirit and mind and body.

Are YOU prepared to be responsible for you beliefs?

AVOIDABLE GRIEF

Britain has a bad reputation for the way it mistreats it’s children.

In the early hours of yesterday morning, a coach with five teachers and 40 pupils came off the road. Many were injured and a 17 yr old girl was killed.

This happened during a BLIZZARD. The weather had been forecast for almost a week before hand. The blizzard was well under way before this coach even left.

It beggars belief doesn’t it that this coach was even on the road?

What were the parents of these children thinking?

What were the teachers thinking?

What was the coach driver thinking?

What was the head of the school thinking?

What was the coach company thinking?

What none of them were thinking was that the children come FIRST!!!!

If any of them had thought about the children, their welfare and safety, first, this awful, awful tragedy would not have happened.

Few seem to understand the concept of personal responsibility. Few seem to understand what it means to put children first and foremost always.

Most accidents are nothing of the sort. This wasn’t. It had a cause-neglect of duty.

In this country, about 3 children a week are killed by their parents/carers through abuse. In every case it has been allowed to happen by other adults because they neglect their duty. They put the needs of adults first.

Our world would be much closer to the world we long for if we only would love and respect our children. Love is an action, not a feeling. If we truly love, then we ACT like we do! We don’t love what we fear(we can’t- fear cancels love out-hence you cannot love and fear God.) and we don’t love what we abuse.

All of those involved in this will suffer greatly. Will they understand why? Will they learn?

Pain of itself does not teach. Only if we accept personal responsibility for our pain. If we blame others, we don’t learn. Often others do cause us pain, but it is still OUR pain and our responsibility to deal with it.

If a person comes along and kicks you hard enough to break your leg, you can lay their screaming in pain and rightly blaming your attacker. However, if you expect your attacker to fix it, you will remain in pain and become crippled. YOU have to fix it and in the process you will learn.

Those who read this blog, will know that I was caused a great deal of anguish and pain by others. You will also know that I, ME, fixed it. I didn’t expect my abusers to, although the inner hope that one day they would apologise and love me could be interpreted as such an expectation. However, it was always I who searched for healing and I knew I had to heal myself.

Yes, those people who hurt me were to blame. There is nothing wrong in blaming. In fact it is a necessary part of healing to put the blame where it belongs. Unlike what is often taught in 12 step groups. It is very damaging and is just another way of avoiding truth to insist that blaming is wrong or unhealthy. Healing will never truly happen, for either party, if blame isn’t apportioned. Not blaming keeps the victim in their place and keeps the abuser off the hook.

GLAD TIDINGS (FOR NOW)

Lilian Ladele, the woman registrar who refused to officiate at the Civil Partnerships (marriage of gay people) due to her being a Xtian (using religion as an excuse for her bigotry), and who was subsequently fired by the authority for whom she worked, has lost her appeal for discrimination in the Court of Appeal. She is now going to appeal to the Supreme Court (yes we are becoming more and more American, we never had one of those until recently). Hopefully they will uphold the Court of Appeal who upheld the fact of her own bigotry and using religion to justify it is not on.

Perhaps it ought not to, but the fact that she is a woman and black, makes me feel more exasperated toward her. I just cannot understand how she cannot see the correlation between the discrimination she faces day to day with the discrimination she gives out day to day!

The Bible is used to justify racism and misogyny. It still is. And you will find passages in the Bible that will justify a racist or misogynistic stance. As for misogyny, the Bible makes it very clear that women are less than men and indeed are subjects of men and are to do their bidding and keep a low profile.They are to obey. It also speaks of the legitimacy of slave keeping, obeying the masters, and the need to keep the races apart.

Funny how most, if not all of that, is ignored. As is the wearing of polyester cotton and other mixed fibre cloth and the eating shell fish and anything cloven hoofed or strangled.

And yet people still use the Bible to justify the abuse of children and the abuse of homosexuals.

Clearly this has nothing to do with the Bible and religious belief but with the inner feelings and ideas of those who espouse the hatred.

Believe whatever you want to believe. You have that right. You do not have any right to ask that others respect your belief. I certainly don't. I find much of what stands for religious belief cretinous at best and evil at worst.

Here in the UK we have Sunday trading laws which control opening hours of shops because of the Church. How dare they? If they want to keep the Sabbath (which is Saturday anyway, duh!), let them. They have no right to force everyone else to.

We have anti cruelty regulations here which dictate how animals are slaughtered for food. Non Jews and non Muslims are not allowed by law to kill the way Kosher and Halal dictates because it is deemed cruel. And yet Kosher and Halal butchers are allowed to! How stupid is that? The law should apply to ALL or it really is an ass.

Any non Jew who circumcised a boy the way some Jewish ceremonies do, would be jailed for child abuse. Because it is a 'religious ceremony', they are immune from this charge. The circumcision of females is roundly condemned yet the same mutilation of a boy child is both ignored and encouraged. The major effect of circumcision for both sexes is the reduction of sexual pleasure and the main reason it is done.

Going back to the woman I first spoke of. I DO understand where she is coming from and others like her. She believes in a God of conditional love and has been taught that homosexuality is evil. She has also been taught that to question is likewise evil. She as been taught that if she does not believe as she believes, she will suffer eternal torment in the fires of hell, or at the very best eternity without Light. In effect, if she doesn't believe, she is evil herself and will be rejected both by her peers (those in her congregation) and God.

I know just how that feels. I know the terror one feels for doubting. I know how rejection feels when one finally finds the courage to start thinking for oneself, for daring to think that what one has been taught is wrong. I know what it costs. However, ultimately the cost of not following my own conscience was very much higher. I came to realise that a God of conditional love was an oxymoron. That the Pope and nuns and priests had no authority and later, that the Elders and preachers also had none. I came to see that the great Orators who could whip a congregation into a frenzy of speaking in tongues, whip up a passion so strong that people literally fell to their knees, were using the exact same techniques that Adolf Hitler did, to the same effect, and look where that led. One only has to watch and listen to see that these Orators will lead their people into the same evil. Georgetown?

NONE of these people know THE TRUTH. Not one person on this planet does. We cannot know Absolute Truth and no matter what garb the people wear, no matter what lofty position they hold, they are LYING when they say they do.

All the pomp and ceremonial majesty employed is thusly employed to FOOL us and it works! Not just the Roman Catholic Church, Not just the Pat Robertson's, Ian Paisly's, Billy Grahams. The Hindus, the Buddhists, the Muslims, they all have their ways of controlling and fooling you.

The Emperor really has no clothes and you will not perish for daring to say so or think so. Your suffering will come though not daring to think and for not freeing yourself from bondage.

Mark my words, if these people win, evil and tyranny will win. Back will come the burnings, the beheading, the tortures. We will be plunged back into the Dark Ages and it will be our fault. No one will be safe.

Think this is over top? They still behead adulterers in the ME. They still murder gays by law in the ME. In South Africa people were regularly burned alive for their so called wrong doing. By not recognizing the evil inherent in these fundamentalist ideas, by not seeing where it could lead, one plays into their hands.

One only has to see and hear the Westborough Baptist Church to know the evil they would heap on us all given the chance. You only have to hear televangelists to know where it will lead.

The only way to beat them is to be certain that YOU treat others the way you want to be treated yourself. Give the same love, compassion and acceptance to others that you want for you and yours. It really is that simple. Changing our world only requires that we change ourselves. It is the only thing we really can change.

WAKE UP! You are not weak. It isn't beyond you. You can do something that matters. You can change. You have nothing to fear.

Hate ideas but do not hate people.

JUST AN IDEA

POL POT, STALIN, HITLER, OSAMA BIN LADEN and many others are on our 'evil' list.

Yet these people did not do what they did on their own. In fact it would seem they didn't do it at all. Others did it for them.

People like you and me. People like our neighbours. People like out parents, grandparents, children, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, friends, teachers, doctors.

None of the crimes these men are known for could have happened without the compliance of ordinary people.

The millions of disabled, homosexual and Jewish people killed during the Holocaust were killed by ordinary people. People like you and like me.

We find that idea far too scary to face so we pour all our fear and hatred onto one person and thereby excuse the rest of us.

It also enables us to carry on hating. To carry on discriminating. It enables us to be racist and homophobic. We tell ourselves we are not evil like Hitler, we wouldn't send people to death camps so it is okay for us to hate those who are different.

It was people, ordinary people, who decided that homosexual survivors of the Holocaust were not entitled to any form of help or compensation because they 'deserved' it. It seems the killing of six million people didn't teach anyone anything.

Look at the world today. You'd think the Holocaust never happened for all that was learned from it. The hatred still abounds on all sides, both victim and oppressor giving out hatred, in fact it has become difficult to tell them apart. We expect peace but not at the cost of giving up our hatred.

We discriminate against our our kind. Some of us are not black enough, gay enough, Jewish enough, man enough, woman enough.

We think in terms of separation and we call it good. We label each other in order to be separate. We cordon off bits of the planet and call it ours and prevent others from entering. We call them different. We even say they are not human like us.

We hold religious ideas that separate us. We say those who don't believe as we do are wicked and destined for hell or non existence. We think it our right to force our ways on to others.

All that separates all of us is our beliefs. Our beliefs are only ideas that we have. They are not TRUTH. No one knows what that is. Objective Truth is not attainable and no one, but no one, knows what that is, no matter how vociferous they may be. All we have is ideas. Those ideas may approximate Truth but that is all they can do. How do we know if they do? I'd have thought that the first rule would be 'how much harm' does this idea cause? Most of our ideas would have to be ditched if we thought about that seriously.

No matter how strongly you believe something, it is still just an idea, not TRUTH.

Yes, we can know some mathematical and scientific truths but we don't know them all.

No one knows the whys and wherefores of our existence. Instead we have stories about how we got here and why we are here and where we are going. Whether our idea is science based or spiritually based, it is still just an idea because none of us knows.

We mostly, not completely, believe what we believe because of how we FEEL. Fear is usually at the root of what we decide to believe or not to believe. Certainly most religious teaching is based upon fear no matter what anyone says to the contrary. They will argue that their God is a God of Love but the He will destroy disbelievers! They don't see the inconsistency in that. Nor the wickedness. Nor the sheer and utter pain of and sadness of it.

We too often believe what others believe because we want to belong. We don't want to be ostracised, left out, or rejected. Thinking like this ultimately leads to self destruction and misery. Misery for others too who suffer the results of your fear.

WE CANNOT LIVE AND NOT AFFECT OTHERS.

I have no trust for anyone whose God would destroy them if they did not believe because I cannot trust their motives. Are they acting from true compassion and love or from fear? It must be from fear, it cannot be from anything else. If they believe their God will smite them for not believing, then their actions are fear based. Look at the world. This was well illustrated to me when a missionary was asked why she worked in such dire conditions, for people is such great need. Her reply was that she did for 'her god'. In other words she was was acting purely out of fear for her own safety and not for the love of those she was supposed to be helping. I think, that even if not obvious, this counterfeit 'love' will show itself in the results of her 'help'.

I was truly shocked to hear her words. I really, naively, expected her to say she did it because she couldn't bear to see these people suffering and she felt compelled to relieve where she could. I was stunned by her selfish, rather than selfless, response.

In the end we all experience the consequences of our beliefs and the actions they engender. We cannot escape these consequences. The good ones nor the bad ones.

To suggest that someone else already 'paid' for our mistakes is a source of much wickedness and pain. It clearly isn't true for one thing. If it were then the believers would all be happy and well and never ever suffer anything negative. The fact they do shows this to be a lie. It also enables people to act in harmful ways towards others in the belief that they are right and if they are not, well they won't suffer the consequences because they have been 'saved'.

Our beliefs can destroy people. even if we did not pick up the knife, the gun, the rope, by believing that others were 'less than us' we were a part of their destruction as surely as if we did it ourselves.

The widespread belief that human beings are bad at core results in the world we live in. Nothing has been learned from history. Nothing. We still, on the whole, try to force out ideas upon others.

We live with the consequences.

ANON'S ATTITUDE KILLS

CARL WALKER HOOVER

Click on the link above. This is about an 11 year old boy who hung himself when he could not endure the bullying any more.

He was not considered 'normal' and no one at his school thought anti gay bullying should be addressed.

You may not realise it Anonymous but you and all who think like you allowed this to happen, allowed the bullying to happen, allowed this boy to be hounded to his death at the age of 11.

Every time a gay person, who one perceived to be, is bullied or killed, every time a person of colour is abused or killed, every time a woman is abused or killed , or a child is abused or killed, ALL those people, regardless of their actions or non action, who think that gay people, people of colour, women and children are LESS than, are responsible. Why? Because you give fertiliser to the growth of hatred.

Personal Responsibility has much wider ramifications than we like to think.