Signs of a New Age?

Found this on the BBC...

Keeping the faith

A POINT OF VIEW By Tim Egan

The US may be one of the most religious countries in the West but is it undergoing a period of doubt.

A few days ago, I attended a memorial service for a friend who died far too young, of throat cancer. The service was held at a history museum, and it was packed - standing room only.

What was curious, initially, was the lack of any reference to religion. My friend had left a final set of instructions: he wanted to be remembered first as a husband to his wife of more than 20 years, and second as a citizen of his city, and third as a lover of history.

During the tributes, there were many references to how the past can inform our decisions in the present. There were nods to reason and friendship and love.

The closest anyone came to mentioning God or spirituality was when someone told the widow, as an aside, that you often visit the deceased through dreams - when they can appear at no particular prompting.

America seems to be experiencing an atheist moment

Even if the formal religion was absent, the habit of expressing a hope for spiritual optimism remains. The secular funeral is still somewhat of a novelty, at least to me.

But it may be something that we see more and more of in the future - particularly on the West Coast, the most unchurched part of the United States.

It may be daring to say it but America seems to be experiencing an atheist moment. Although "In God We Trust" was declared the national motto by an act of Congress more than 50 years ago and has been stamped on the currency for longer than that, some considerable doubt has developed of late.

If you look at the bestseller list over the last year, you'll find a number of books on atheism - to the surprise of the publishing industry.

God has always moved in not-so-mysterious ways when it comes to the literary world. He can sell books, especially ones that foretell an apocalyptic ending just around the corner.

The so-called Left Behind books, a series of novels envisioning the Rapture, when the good are separated from the evil in a fiery judgment day, sell in the millions. They are not for the faint of faith.

Another genre, self-help books that invoke God for the sake of making money, losing weight or finding a date, have a permanent home on the bestseller list. God is kept very busy with this segment of the market.

But until this year, there was thought to be little support - or audience - for tomes by the anti-religious. Several books changed that.

Full-bore polemics

On the academic side, we have God: The Failed Hypothesis by Victor Stenger and Nothing: Something to Believe In by Nica Lalli.

The three most popular books are God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by the newly-Americanized Christopher Hitchens, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris.

These bestsellers are not cursory academic surveys; they are full-bore polemics against religion, challenging the very idea of God.

Hitchens, with his quick wit and his quiver of quotes from long-dead British luminaries which he carries over from his schoolboy days in England, seems to be having the most fun and the most effect.

You could call him the Pied Piper of non-believers. He makes it a point to debate with a cleric in every city he visits, and is a frequent guest on conservative and religious radio stations.

The premise of his book is that while religion may have served people well in the age of ignorance, now that science can explain the world there is no reason to attribute the sun, the moon and forces like gravity to higher beings.

As he says, the nine-year-old knows more about the natural world now than the leading scholars of a thousand years ago. What has rankled his critics most is his suggestion that religion is usually a force for bad.

More than anything, people without faith hate the description of them as empty or soulless

Believers point out that people of faith have been at the forefront of significant improvements in human rights and in caring for fellow humans over centuries - everything from abolition of slavery to the civil rights movement in this country, to church-led efforts to reduce starvation and disease in less-developed countries.

I ran into Hitchens not long ago at a book festival where he was jousting away and getting rich in the process. He looked just as the New York Times Book Review had described him: "A village atheist standing in the square trying to pick arguments with the good citizens on their way to church."

I asked Hitchens why he thought his book had such a sudden rise to the top of the bestseller charts when polls show that - at most - barely one-half-of-one-percent of Americans call themselves atheists.

He said that the polls were misleading. There is a large and fast-growing segment of the population that is lapsed or well onto its way to atheism but is afraid to admit it.

"If you're a lapsed Catholic," Hitchens told me. "You're part of a very large and fast-growing group."

Many of those people, of course, might be agnostic rather than atheist?

Revulsion at zealots

More than anything, people without faith hate the description of them as empty or soulless. They have long been singled out for a special kind of hell.

The constitution of the state of Texas, for example, allows discrimination against atheists in employment or jury duty - provisions that have been nullified by federal laws.

And even my mother used to lower her voice in the kind of whisper reserved for people with terminal brain cancer when she described a neighbour as.... an atheist.

Non-believers say they have also been aided by the revulsion of fair-minded Americans to the religious zealotry behind the September 11 attacks and the subsequent violence on behalf of radical Islam.

The latest round of atheism books point to countless wars, slaughters and massacres done in the name of My God is Better than Your God. The 9/11 attacks got people thinking about what sort of God could be summoned for such awfulness.

Social critics, dating to at least de Tocqueville and Dickens, have always marvelled at the pure number of passionately religious people in this country. Indeed, no Western democracy has so many devout churchgoers, by percentage, as the US.

On the face of it, the numbers do seem to indicate that the United States is a Christian nation, as politicians often say.

The latest surveys by the Pew Centre show that 76% of the population - upwards of 230 million people - call themselves Christians. Jews make up 1.3% and Muslims are under one per cent - though fast-growing.

Atheists are near the bottom. There are seven times as many atheists in Europe as the United States, by percentage. But the second largest group, categorized by belief, are those who call themselves secular or non-religious. They make up 13 percent of the population.

It is this group that has perhaps been afraid to call themselves atheists, for fear of shunning or other censure. They could be largely undecided or they could be searching or they could believe, as some friends say with a wink, in the Church of the Outdoors, or the Church of Baseball. They are also the people buying these books.

But while atheism may have made its way into the public discourse, it remains strictly verboten in our politics. Even though a majority of people say in surveys that a person can still be a good American without Christian values, to be an atheist and run for high office is to wear the scarlet A.

Among the presidential aspirants, half the Republican candidates do not believe in evolution, a view bounded in their religious faith and the imperatives of running in a primary heavily dominated by evangelicals.

Democrats 'more open'

One contender, Senator John McCain of Arizona, made headlines this month when he said the American founders meant to establish the United States as a Christian nation.

In truth, the constitution expressly prohibits establishment of a state religion. The founders were trying to avoid the entanglements of church with state. And perhaps the best known founder, Thomas Jefferson himself, may have been an atheist, in the view of many scholars.

No matter. The Democrats, scorned by a huge sector of the electorate for their perceived secularism, have become more open about faith this time around. Both Hillary Clinton, and Senator Barack Obama frequently mention God on the campaign trail.

But they also put some distance between themselves and the religious. Senator Clinton said last week that if she were president she would shield science and research into such things as stem cells from religion and politics.

The United States may never be as secular as Europe. If you sample even a small share of the reaction, on blogs or Christian talk radio, to these new atheist books, you sense how strongly people feel about their faith. It's not passive or abstract.

But, perhaps we have arrived at a moment where doubt is having its day - and for a time, atheists are coming out of hiding.

David Hume and the Causal Thread

Everything that happens or exists has a cause right? A+B+C correct? Apparently not. Coincidences and strange synchronicities appear to defy this logic. They seem to represent order arising by chance. For example, When Louis XVI of France was a child, an astrologer warned him to be on his guard on the 21st of each month. Terrified by this, he never undertook any business on this day for the rest of his life. In spite of this, several very important things happened to him when the 21st came around. It was on June 21, 1791 that he was arrested fleeing the French Revolution, on September 21st, 1792 France abolished royalty forcing him to abdicate, and on January 21st 1793, he was executed. How can these seemingly random events all fall upon the same series of days? Was there a cause? The problem with coincidences is that they seem to violate most accepted notions of cause and effect.

Modern Quantum Physics is beginning to provide clues, as well as Unified Field and Chaos Theory, but this is only a start. Many of the important concepts of these black sciences were proposed many years earlier by a fellow named David Hume. He was a Scottish philosopher of the 18th century, whose Treatise of Human Nature has never been fully re-buffed by science, and much of what he espoused remains justified. Since the 5th century, it has been assumed that for everything that happens in this world, there is a cause (normally from the actions of something else). Mr. Hume rejected this. He maintained it is not certain that every object must owe its existence to a cause. Hume professed this is no more valid than believing every husband must have a wife, so therefore every man is married. Hume maintained that the traditional notions of cause and effect are incapable of proof. All we can truly claim is that what seems to be a cause always precedes what seems to be an effect, and there appears to be a connection in our mind. Beyond this, nothing more can be claimed. His view was that a connection between the two was simply nothing more than a habit of the mind. Other than our direct observation, which may or may not be what they appear, the rest is simply a mental assumption.

Hume's theories are remarkably similar the conclusions of the modern Schrodinger's Cat experiment of Quantum Mechanics. This theory basically states that observable phenomenon are simply that; Observations. Any connections beyond this are incapaple of proof and may or may not actually be what we are seeing, if they exist at all. It is all a matter of perspective, which the human species is limited in capacity.

In other words, there may be more there than what we see.

More Ramblings About Raven...

There are many different legends of Raven. This is simply one re-telling, and may not be totally historically accurate to any specific culture. My native heritage is decidedly lacking in Raven stories, as there are no Ravens in the Choctaw homelands. The closest equivalent was the crow, and it is simply seen as a malevolent, evil bird deserting mankind after the great flood. Raven is different. Raven is not a crow. Raven is found in similar (almost identical) stories worldwide. Here is the gist of the main Pacific Northwest American Raven legend.

Legend of Raven

Back in the days before there were men and the world, The spirits lived in a dark world of their own under the Great Chief. Raven was one of these spirits. There was no sun, moon, or stars in this world, and everyone bumped around in the dark. Raven had heard the Great Chief's daughter had some things called the Sun, Moon, and Stars locked away in cedar boxes. But was very jealous and guarded them very well. Raven decided to transform himself into a small hemlock needle and allowed himself to fall into her drinking cup. She drank him down and he became a baby inside her. He eventually was born as the Great Chief's grandchild.

The Great Chief loved Raven very much, thinking Raven was a normal child. Raven screamed and squawked so that he would be allowed to play with the contents of the cedar boxes. Eventually the Great Chief gave in, as all Grandfathers do, and allowed the child to play with the contents of the biggest box. Raven transformed himself back into his normal form and caught the ball of light it contained in his beak. He flew up the smoke-hole of the Chief's lodge, burning and blackening his feathers in the process.

Raven was so distracted by the light he was carrying, and the way the world looked at first sight, that he did not see the Great Chief transform into an eagle and fly after him. This caused him to drop the light and part of it shattered, bouncing back up into the heavens to become the sun, moon, and stars. The sudden light in the world frightened man, causing him to flee to the far corners of the earth, but in the end brought him great knowledge. This allowed man to come into his own and become great, developing the great societies and cultures we now have.

Raven is shown to be the prototypical "Trickster" deity, similar to Loki, Lugh, Prometheus, and even Jesus Christ. He is the also hero-saviour to man born of virgin birth. Joseph Campbell called his sort the "Hero of 1000 Faces" and he can be found in virtually all human cultures, though he is not always represented as a Raven figure. He is the bringer of knowledge (often forbidden) to man, and a saviour who often sacrifices himself or a part of himself in the process.

It is also startling co-incidental (or is it really?) that the Pacific Coast and Alaska peoples celebrate his birthday at Christmas .

This leads me to a a few quotes I think are worth mentioning:

In the later stages of many mythologies, the key images hide like needles in great haystacks of secondary anecdote and rationalization; for when a civilization has passed from a mythological to a secular point of view, the older images are no longer felt . . .

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. . . . temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. (Joseph Campbell)

Dark Deities of the New Age

What rules our world? Are they God's or Demons? The new divine entities are unrecognizable to most average citizens. Those poor souls caught in the consumer nightmare currently eating up the Earth for cash. The modern divine are a new type never seen before in human history, and their grasp is proving inescapable for your average human. These new deities are none other than Wal-Mart, Exxon, Texaco, and other insidious multi-national money-making organizations. How can this be? A company is not a God. Just because it is not listed in the Bible or Koran does not mean it does not fit the definition of one. Lets take a look at this...

What are these companies in truth? They are a self generating self supporting (living) entity. Their sole purpose is to grow bigger and stronger. This is done by their employees and the customers they bring under their control. The employees operate under a common mindset, creating a corporate mentality that operates as a single entity. It is devoted to one thing. Getting money. These companies generate profits that are more than the Gross National Product of most small countries, and in some cases more than that of the US government. In essence, these organizations are beyond all controls of human society, save that of public image, which can be manipulated and does not really count. The humans that make up these organizations become in effect, the body/nerve cells of the corporate entities body structure. If this does not qualify as a "god" I don't know what does. Human society and governments are shaped by them. Wars are fought for them. People are dying for them as I write this article. All of human society and thinking is being manipulated by them to create a civilization of subservients working at a minimum wage slave job with the sole life goal of spending more money on their products. The new purpose of life is now to consume. Period. Sure, lots of people will tell you otherwise, but they are simply parroting the voices of these hidden entities from years of conditioning. The biblical gods are dead. Long live the hidden corporate deities! Or are they demons?

These demons want us to hold on to outmoded ways of thought and to remain fighting amongst ourselves. Divide and conquer at it's finest. The current war in the Middle East is the result of two of these entities clashing (the oil/industrial complex of the US, and the Muslim fundamentalist complex). These are the real gods of this world, and human society as a whole cannot see it. If you don't think so, try talking about this subject and see how taboo it really is. The Sci-Fi movie The Matrix was dead on, just change a few names and a few of the sets.

I really get bothered when I see people using the government as a scapegoat for perceptions of things like global UN domination, one world government, etc. The fact of the matter is these corporate entities are the real enemy. They have surpassed the UN, and are in fact in almost total control right now. We will never see a global one world government, as capitalism (what they are based off of) always has to have a structure of haves and have not's to work correctly. There will always be some enemy to fight so that profits can be made. The world's governments and the United Nations are simply irrelevant and are pawns in the game. Even the mighty US Government is simply a pawn to these larger entities. All the strife from the conspiracy theories, UN Hating, One World Government, Christian/Muslim/Jewish warfare are simply distractions to keep our attention aimed at a different subject and off of our corporate overlords. As a matter of fact, MOST politics, especially at the national level, are simply distractions to keep our mind from seeing the real issues. Isn't it funny how the same issues seem to be carried on for years and years. The US is still divided over crap that was an issue 30 years ago when Reagan was in office. A nation that can put a man on the moon can solve issues like these if they really want to. Something is keeping them going without resolution for a reason.

The saddest thing about this mess is that we created it. The only way to stop them is to take away their power. We can do this by refusing to buy their products, their throw-away consumer lifestyle, and to quit shitting in our food bowl by letting them destroy the planet for money. The strongest vote is with our cash! Make yourself heard! Capitalism only understands capitalism. Not participating in their consumer bullshit is the only way to do it.

More Fun with the Skunks!

Caught another one last night! This one was really big and PISSED OFF! The little bugger tried to bite me through the cage. I loaded it in the back of the truck and drove to work, planning on leaving him on the side of the road several miles from home. I am not sure what was in the air that day (other than skunk smell), but it seemed everything odd that could happen, happened. Including finding a twenty with a rolled up Crack rock in it where I happened to sit the trap down to release the captive skunk. I picked up the twenty thinking "Cool! Money!", and then thought, "Why is it rolled up?". I unrolled it and found the surprise. Ouch! I threw that hunk of crap so far away it was not funny. Then I Lysol-ed and de-crittered the money.

That was worse than finding a skunk in the trap for the third night in a row. To top it all off, my computer crashed while all of this was going on, and I came home to find a seriously FU' ed hard drive. Oh, and two distant relatives decided to pass away as well. At work, my employees were trying to strip some scuff marks off the floor, but ended up stripping the wax and everything all the way down. A five minute job turned into a 5 hour job.

Something was definitely amiss that day. My wife thought it was just Karma catching up with me until she realized it was happening to others as well.

Oh, it was also the 23rd, and Midsummer, of all things! Such is a day in my life.

Adventures in Chicken Ranching

I live in the country, and live a fairly organic lifestyle. We raise a lot of our own food to avoid purchasing anything from China Mart. As such, we have a small flock of chickens. We have lately been having some issues with a small family of foxes who decided to move in next door. Shortly after this I lost my entire flock of Black Frizzle Bantams, my "Voodoo" chickens, to the fox. I was rather ticked and decided to do something about it. After getting permission from the Game Warden, I set a live trap in the yard, in hopes of catching these sly little gray chicken thieves. The first night, they stole the bait. Every night after this, I have caught nothing but skunks. I had no idea our yard was travelled by so many different skunks. It is apparently a Skunkapollooza in my yard after dark. Have you ever tried to set a pissed off skunk free from a live trap? It is not very easy. Needless to say, the house has smelled like skunk now for days. It is becoming quite obnoxious.

I suppose I could try other means, but it has become a game between me and the foxes.

Art and Magick

I saw this on one of the forums I peruse on occasion. I like the thought behind it. Where do you stand?

"Magic is Art. If your magic isn't art... then you are boring. I'm not interested in boring.

Art is Magic. Always was. We painted on cave walls for a purpose. Art and culture are flows of affect that move across subjectivities. It isn't objective but it isn't "merely subjective" either.

Life is Art. Your life is a creation that you are engaged in creating right now. I hope you are creating beautiful and interesting things with it.

Life is Magic. Trying to live the best life you can where art, magic and fun are the same thing? beautiful. If not, why not?"

Originally posted by Fenris23