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Edited on Sun Oct-19-03 05:33 PM by 9215
Atheist 9215 presiding:
Title: Religion and MADNESS!!!
Please bear witness to the madding of religious crowds. Zombies led like lemmings over the cliff. A case study.
We have just witnessed the spectacle of Dr David Kelly, the scientist at the heart of the Hutton Inquiry, being described as a convert to the Baha'i faith.
Few of us have heard of this particular religion. Like others, I expect, I had to refer to an encyclopedia. This is what the British Hutchinson Encyclopeda has to say:
Baha'i Faith
Religion founded in the 19th century from a Muslim splinter group, Babism, by the Persian Baha'u'llah. His message in essence was that all great religious leaders are manifestations of the unknowable God and all scriptures are sacred. There is no priesthood: all Baha'is are expected to teach, and to work towards world unification. There are about 6 million Baha'is worldwide.
Great stress is laid on equality regardless of religion, race, or gender. Drugs and alcohol are forbidden. Marriage is strongly encouraged; there is no arranged marriage, but parental approval must be given. Baha'is are expected to pray daily, but there is no set prayer. During 2/20 March, adults under 70 fast from sunrise to sunset. Administration is carried out by an elected body, the Universal House of Justice.
The Baha'i Faith claims that it incorporates what is best in all religions. Twenty thousand martyrs have given their lives rather than deny it. It has three central figures. The forerunner was Mirza Ali Muhammad, born in Shiraz in 1819, who adopted the title the Bab, meaning 'the gate', when he declared in 1844 that he was the 'Mihdi' or 'Qa'im' promised in the Koran to save the nations. Orthodox Muslims and the Persian State conspired to overthrow him, so that he spent most of his teaching life in prison, his followers zealously carrying on his work of proselytizing in the face of fierce persecution. He was finally shot in public at Tabriz in 1850. The body was recovered by his followers and hidden for 50 years in various places, eventually being enshrined on Mount Carmel, the chief centre of Baha'i pilgrimage.
In 1863 Husayn 'Ali, a Persian nobleman who took the name Baha'u'llah, meaning 'The glory of God', announced himself to be the One foretold not only by the Bab, but in the holy books of all religions, who will inaugurate an era of peace and spiritual wellbeing for mankind. As a Babi, he had already been deprived of his considerable possessions and banished to Baghdad; banishment to Constantinople, Adrianople, and the prison city of Acre followed. His writings include Kitab-i-Aqdas, Kitab-i-Iquan, and many letters, including proclamation of his claim to the chief sovereigns of the world, among them Queen Victoria. On his death in 1892, leadership passed to his eldest son, 'Abdu'l-Baha, the exemplar of the Baha'i Faith, who had shared his father's imprisonment since childhood. He was freed by the Turkish revolution of 1908, and made an extended tour of Europe and America 1911-13. He was knighted in 1920 for the part he played in averting famine in Haifa during the war, and died in 1921.
His will appointed his grandson Shoghi Effendi, then studying at Balliol College, Oxford, as guardian of the cause. Under his guidance, the administrative order of the Baha'i Faith developed. The Baha'i Faith is based on a belief in successive progressive revelations of God, none of which is final. Thus Muhammad was a great prophet and his doctrines were revealed, but neither his revelation nor that of Baha'u'llah precludes God from revealing himself further in future ages.
The morality of the Baha'i Faith is high. The individual soul continues to exist after separation from the body and may draw even nearer to God throughout eternity. The Baha'i Faith claims to restore to mankind the power to achieve unity through love. The troubles of the present age are but a prelude to the necessary and inevitable unification of the human race. All prejudice, particularly of race, colour, class, or creed, is condemned; compulsory education, abolition of extremes of poverty and wealth, and equal status for men and women are among its social teachings. It prohibits slavery, asceticism, mendicancy, and monasticism; prescribes monogamy; and discourages, but does not prohibit, divorce. A universal auxiliary language is advocated and collective security urged as a step towards a world commonwealth.
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Religion cannot supply the above in the last paragraph. Only a secular democratic government with a strong people oriented Constitution and the free exchange of ideas has a chance of doing this. If you want to see a successful theocracy, one that maintained itself, go to Khomeini's Iran, If you want to see a failed one put on a Kevlar vest and go to Beirut
What forces people to wallow in such BULLSHIT foisted upon them in their houses of worship?
We've got thousands of religions with their clamoring bells, smoking pots and stogy pedophile profits (spelling?) consumed in dumbass rituals and the people who are members aren't any better, and many of them are worse, than their secular counterparts. The religous goobers differ only in how dumb and un or ill informed they are. When they aren't pumping each other with biblical babble they are flying into those of another faith, preferably of another race or ethnicity, under some nationalistic slogan geared toward patriotism of one sort or another.
I'd rather befriend someone who isn't a person of God and and acts like one is suppose to act than be anywhere near some slobering Fundie squirrel brain who masters the rituals but none of the substance.
95% of the US population believes that a snow bearded old fart created the earth in 7 days and nights, pulled wo-to-men women from the jawbone of an ass, er, uh, oh that was Samson slaying the Philistines, er whatever and all of us have to pay for Adam having non-marital, groping sex in Eden, er was that snakes and apples and forbidden whatever. Adams original sin then set the world in motion from that point and we are all just actors in a Divine puppet show without intermissions and without the option of getting another job.
Now tell me how this satisfies the wishes of those seeking to oppress people??? You don't have to tell me; it is designed to emasculate, denigrate, deindividuate and destroy the soul with toxic guilt. Why were people given brains if not to use them? Oh, sorry, don't mean to question the will of God.
This shit is pumped into peoples brains like the official story, still standing, that Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin from the rear when the Zapruder film shows him unmistakably being slammed back and to the left, back and to the left, back and to the left. How does public opinion manage to be bent to accept such obvious falsehoods?? How do societies learn to believe the official line though it is obviously, grossly and seriously flawed? How do people go mad?
One Goddamn word:
R-E-L-I-G-I-O-N
It is the greatest story ever sold. (I coined that phrase FYI)
You wanna hear fire and brimstone? Standby
It defiles all that is right and good and wholesome about the human specie by claiming to be the only right and good and wholesome way. When I watched that movie "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" when people point their fingers at those who have not been snatched and make that bizarre alarm with their voice I think of religion. Fundamentally these two things are the same only the body snatching is less insidious than religion; it makes no pretenses about what its goals are. Even the Borg assimilation is better than the slow roasting of the brain incurred from "Divine" Intervention.
I watched a documentary on Martin Luther and the Reformation and realized that what he was really fighting for was democracy. He never understood that form follows function, that the way the institution is structured (non-democratic) is what the problem is and reforming it will not do any good in the long run because the function or goal: enforce obedience to idiotic ideas about what this specie is and where it came from and how to get close to the bearded old fart is THE PROBLEM! You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Teaching people that "back and to the left" means the shot was fired from the rear and repeating this mantra endlessly is to condition people to stop thinking altogether out of fear of not being "with us". That is the function of religion.
The form or structure: prohibition of participation when the preacher speaks from the pulpit or any other rostrum is similar to a TV audience. It isn't, in my opinion, a coincidence that the two are similar. Day after Day, week after week, year after year, century after century people have been indoctrinated to keep their mouths shut and their wallets open. Repeat after me: Mouths shut and wallets open, mouths shut and wallets open.....you are becoming sleepy, you are becoming one with God......zzzzzzzzzz. Their non-participation in the corporate world is similar in regards to participation. Then once every few years they go to vote like it was some jubilee; not, as it should be, an active, predominant part of life. Voting like shopping, is just another thing to do.
Its like feeding somebody to near explosion as in the movie "Full Dinner Jacket" then telling them to go out and run a footrace.
People are apathetic because they have been conditioned to be passive and they have been conditioned to be passive by a monstrous CIA run Octopus that controls almost all stimulation where it can, which is almost everywhere unless you are savvy to whats going on.
That the Mafia, Nazis, corporate predators (Sunday go to meetin' like no other) and other villiany move as readily in a Church as they do in their business orgs is a testament to how morally bankrupt religion is. The Mafia, no doubt, contribute a goodly, if not a Godly, sum of money to the Catholic Church, the holy of holies. Who these greaseballs are and what they represent are is ignored for the sake of economics. Churches should more rightly be labeled dens of inequity with a :) .
Another precept of religion: To be a member you can do anything you want as long as you profess a belief in God.
Forever an atheist
9215
Next week stay tuned for mixing secularism and politics and our drive to amend the Constitution: "Freedom from Religion"
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