The Problem With Magical Thinking

Everyone knows how stupid I think cults are. Of course by "cult" I mean any supernatural belief. But let me also make it clear that I also include in this number any of the various "new age" pseudo-beliefs in things like numerology, astrology, gluten-free diets, feng shui, "chemical sensitivities and/or fibromyalgia", satanism, vaccine-phobia, etc.

All of these belief systems--and the innumerable others that humans allow to pollute their minds--are desperate attempts to control an uncontrollable world. Here's the thing, my friends: the world is as it appears to be, if you have any doubt just look around. Everything that appears to be alive is slowly decaying--changing through an inexorable--entropy--into something new and unrecognizable.

There is no order, there is only chaos (and its correlate in earthly nature: brutality). Soon everything will be much different than it is now, and you have absolutely no control over any aspect of the process. Just know that your teeny tiny piece of existence is rapidly fading, and no amount of wishing can ever change this immutable fact.

As Rimbaud said (Paul Schmidt translation):

And what of the world?

What will it become when you leave it?

Nothing, nothing at all like its present appearance.

Here's an interesting deconstruction of numerology:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125668948820711987.html

Xenu Can Suck My Big Fat Crooked Cock

Interesting stuff in the MSM this week about Scientology. Poor Scientologists seem to be having a difficult time explaining their bizarre faith to others--a necessary component of luring others into their absurd excuse for a religion, but tough to do when your sacred scriptures just make people laugh.

Let's be frank: Scientology's religious beliefs (for instance, that a goddess name Xenu trapped millions of souls from another planet in volcanoes on earth gazillions of year ago and then blew them up with atom bombs so that these disembodied spirits now cling parasite-like to human beans) are really no more non-sensical than any other bizarre faith story told by other celebrity-endorsed religions like Christianity (homeless Palestinian who walked on water). It's just that Scientology's faith story is so much more recent and also that it was so patently concocted by a very bad science-fiction writer.

It's funny to me to watch religious people of whatever persuasion squirm when confronted to someone who knows them to be full of baloney. See some examples below:

http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2009/10/26/scientology_haggis/

Collateral Damage

Week before last I was awakened in the middle of the night by a loud domestic disturbance next door. I heard yelling and a women screaming and glass breaking. I heard female voices sobbing. I looked out the window and two women were huddled in the yard next door. They were holding a small child and the three of them were crying.

I called the cops. The women had been locked out of their home and thrown into the yard by the drunken husband of one of them (the other woman was the younger sister of the woman whose husband had thrown them into the yard). Turns out the drunken abusive husband was a serviceman on leave from a tour with the army in Iraq.

More collateral damage. What a splendid little war this has turned out to be. Fought for no good reason but to drive the ego of a bunch of sexually impotent old mean white men (who, when they had the chance to serve in war themselves--in Vietnam--chickened out and laid around stateside drinking beer while working class men were sent to fight and die).

What a great idea the whole thing was. And what wonderful forethought: take a generation of our working class men and teach them to kill. School them in the intricacies of urban warfare and then bring them home and turn them loose on our streets, in our cities and towns. Addict them to the stress of violence and then return them to their families.

Too bad there is no heaven or hell (aside from the hell we create for ourselves here one earth). If there were--and if there were any semblance of divine justice whatsoever--then the flaccid Pooh-Bahs who thought up this debacle of a war would occupy the most painful, suffering-infused corner of hell. Of course right next to them would be all the super patriots who supported them--the great mewling herd of Fox News watchers who couldn't wait to send a bunch of someone else's sons to fight and wound and die in the name of the American empire.

A pox on all their houses!

Why We're All Going to Hell

In good times we cut taxes for the rich. In bad times we cut services to the poor.

Nothing New Under the Sun

One of the best teachers I ever had was Roy Applewhite. He taught English at Lincoln Junior High. He taught me my love of literature, and of good writing (woe is my fate to be so poor at it). He told me one time "there's nothing new under the sun." He meant that one of the more offensive traits of the young is their utter lack of humility, their confidence that they are experiencing something new, something never dreamed of before, something perhaps even heroic.

This rodeo was going on long before I got here, and it will continue long after I have left.