Steagus

The Bible is not moral.

Many Christians and even people who are mildly religious often say the bible is a guidebook for morality, for a way to live on this Earth in peace with your neighbors.

Well after reading the Old Testament I’m not sure how that can be said? Here is a brief sampling of guidebook material for the reader:

• Ladies – if you are horny and there is no other man around but your father, you may sleep with him as long as you get him drunk first.
• Offering your daughters for a gang rape to an angry mob is perfectly alright as long as it prevents said mob from sodomizing your male house guests.
• If the actions of your followers cause you to drop the tablets you had just received on a mountain top from God himself, the appropriate thing to do is kill them all. Well most of them anyway. You need some followers. God will send a plague to wipe out some more just to drive the point home.
• When invading a city make sure to burn and kill everything inside the city – men, women, children, live stock, plants, buildings, everything. Oh except the gold and silver. God loves gold and silver and you should place it in his temple. But completely raze everything else.
• Don’t beat your slaves so badly that they die on the spot. If they die a day later that’s alright.

You know, I think they are right. That does sound like a great guidebook for living in peace and harmony with your neighbors. After a while the only people left will be people who believe, live and think just like you. As blueprints go it’s a very simple solution and easily followed by even the most simple minded among us.

Oh but wait. We don’t follow that Bible. That Bible is not meant to be used as a guidebook.

What!?

Isn’t the Bible the word of God Almighty? Didn’t God direct his prophets (profits) to lay down his thoughts and intentions in writing so the people could know his Word? Didn’t the Old Testament serve as a guidebook (and a very good and Just one) for hundreds upon hundreds (if not thousands) of years as THE WORD OF GOD? Why the sudden denouncement against its teachings – symbolic or otherwise?

Could it be people decided that the ways before weren’t correct? That people decided that perhaps all this killing and bloodshed wasn’t really in the best interests of living in peace? Could it be that people decided that differences among the races really weren’t a big deal anyway and they didn’t feel like warring with them anymore? Could it be that times changed and the powers that be (governments and religious types) saw the writing on the wall and needed to adjust their marketing?

Well probably not as a collective group, but subtly opinions did change and morality shifted away from absolutism and a germ of decency toward your fellow man/woman began to take root. Oh don’t get me wrong, this didn’t happen over night and as one of the people who commented to the first post stated in their talk about their deacon father not even to this day.)

I make no bones about it that Jesus was a man who lived during the Roman Empire. I think Jesus did exist but his status as Divine was merely a persona created around his myth after his death to foster a new age of religious controls. If you don’t follow me you will go to Hell. I am the Son of God  (and God himself in some cases) and I will sacrifice myself for all your sins – you owe me.

It’s interesting to note that the Bible as we know it today was created by committee from a scattering of texts going back centuries. (Incidentally it should also be noted that Paul did not renounce slavery as wrong. So the New Bible didn’t correct everything.)

The Bible people read now, mostly the King James version, was started in 1604 and finished in 1611 by 54 men.(Men not women. Their place was still well established- kitchen and bedroom.) These men decided what would go into the “official” version of the Bible. There was even this huge debate about whether Jesus Christ was divine or not based on different interruptions of saviour/deliverer and other vague references - “Before Abraham was, I am.” After a narrow vote his Divinity was established. Very advanced democratic thinking for the time. Except now suddenly Jesus - a man - is a God or The God but surely not just a man wandering the earth saying nice things about people and telling people to stop stoning prostitutes.

After this time the New Testament bible was further revised by different people with different opinions of what should and shouldn’t be included. Factions split, loyalties were created and surprisingly God stayed out of the diluting of his Holy Text. God said nothing. No more burning bushes, no more divine dreams to create arks, boxes, nothing. Hmmm… I suppose he figured we’d work it out amongst ourselves. Besides he died for …. well his Son who was him, and his spirit and his Son at the same time.. or is that only just his Son and the whole trinity stuff is nonsense - misguided attempts at appeasement of the varying beliefs and people in power at the time? Regardless he died for our sins and one may assume that rewriting the Bible into many different versions of the ONLY TRUTH is covered under that atonement. (Does impregnating a woman without her consent to birth your holy child get covered under this as well? Because when you get right down to it, according to the story, God raped Mary.)

So the New Testament fixes all the morally repellent thinking of the Old Testament and dresses it up for the “modern” era.  But we’ll still leave all the Old Testament stuff in there as a warning of what not to do just in case there are any doubts. That worked out very well now didn’t it?

Consider the Crusades, destruction and colonization of South American, African lands, and the North American conquest. Seems the “turn the other cheek” philosophy wasn’t useful for taking gold and silver from the heathens and some good old fashion wrath needed to be used to fire up the people.

But we don’t do that stuff today do we? We don’t go in and wipe out people because they think differently than us? (Germany WW2, Israel, Northern Ireland, Iraq (2003-??), Sino-Indian War, China)

But not in America, the most Christian nation on the planet or so we would like to believe. We would like to believe many things wouldn’t we?
No we, as a God fearing nation, just vote in politicians who retard our school systems with creationism stories. We elect presidents who suspend life saving research to cure disease because a zygote might have a soul. (Whatever that is?) And when alternative approaches are found to carry on the same research that doesn’t use aborted fetuses – placenta linings for example – we object to that as well under the grounds that we shouldn’t be playing God. So what happened to the first argument about protecting life? Was that just an emotional straw man to fire up the already converted? No one wants to harm children. But killing abortion doctors is ok?

Or we follow mega-church leaders who rack in millions upon millions of tax free dollars in the name of God and who own entire television stations, fly around on private jets and own multi-million dollar houses and have hundreds of millions of followers world wide.

Leaders whose hypocrisy is laid out in tabloid articles about gay lovers, adulterous affairs, drug addictions, and precious gems of free speech - like saying that New Orleans was flooded because God hates homosexuals. I suppose New Orleans would have been spared if everyone openly offered their daughters to any man who was thinking about sodomizing another man.

Doesn’t anyone else see a problem with this book?

And you can’t say it’s just a few bad apples tainting the opinions of the others. This behavior and group thinking has been perpetrated by people for thousands of years. How many witches were burned at the stake because the women accused didn’t submit to searches for “devil marks” in private by the priests doing the searching? How many children have been victimized by holy men in this century alone? Consider life in the Dark Ages where the use of torture was raised to near perfect forms of human suffereing. Are all these just isolated examples of a few bad apples? If you think so then you are delusional. You are ignoring facts laid out in front of you for hundreds upon hundreds of cases. These things are done by people using a system. (It’s ok to change your mind and thinking. It’s not flip-flopping, it’s openness to reality and the evidence before you. It’s listening to that little voice inside that says, this really doesn’t make any sense - why do I believe/follow this again?)

The Bible limits our morality. It restricts our free thinking as rational, conscientious beings, it limits our thrust for knowledge and understanding of the world around us and replaces it with a simple unthinking solution – God did it.

The Bible is not the word of God and the society we’ve created was created by Men using primal tools and groupthink reasoning to gain power, influence and dominance over the populace. This isn’t just for Christians but Muslims, and Judaism as well. Of course they were born out of the same soil so there’s no surprise there.

All religions, all over, are social control mechanisms used by people of power for power.

How wonderful it would be if people did things because they wanted to do them and to help their fellow man and not because it will gain them brownie points to get into “heaven”.

How wonderful it would be if people lived free of fear for imagined sins against the creator. That sex was a private matter between consenting adults and not subject to the suppressive (and yet vicarious impulses) of learned men who follow a book written over two thousand years ago.

How wonderful it would be if people pursued knowledge, thoughts and ideas without the muzzle of censorship imposed by dogma.

How much further along as a species we would be toward harmony on our planet if not for the violent hate filled views of governments and peoples formed purely by their religious beliefs and systems. (People will always hate to some degree, it hasn’t been bred out of our genes yet as needed for selfish survival instincts, but religion amplifies this hatred and gives people reasons - and worse justifications - for evil actions.)

——–
Religion is an insult
to human dignity.

With or without it
you would have
good people doing
good things and
evil people doing
evil things.

But
for good people
to do evil things,
that takes religion.

– Professor Steven Weinberg, 1999
———

For most of my younger life I lived in fear. I was afraid what God thought of what I was doing and of living a life of sin which would only lead to death and eventual oblivion.

I tried many different religions during my youth and unfortunately fell upon the Jehovah Witnesses because … well that’s what my mom had gotten into and like many young people I was curious and wanted to please my parents. (Dad never bought into it all. I should have picked up on that.)

All religions are bad but I have to admit the JWs really put a spin on my young mind that has to this day affected me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m completely free of their way of thinking but my mom isn’t.

I had thought the year and a half long trip my parents took after all the kids had left the “nest” and toured the country in an RV would open her eyes to the wonderful world we live in. How people are just people good and bad all over without the conscriptions of spiritual guidance. And it was so for a time.

Then, I think I may have unintentionally pushed her back in. I made a mistake in my life that affected another and my mom – in order to make sense of it and deal perhaps, I don’t know – went back to God. For comfort, for atonement, for something, I’m not sure, but it started just around the time that “bad” thing I did occurred.

I can not undo what happened but the grip I saw take hold of her is very disturbing. She started talking all “end of the earth” again and how righteous Jesus was and wicked Harry Potter was for encouraging witchcraft. She even started throwing out all her books again. Last time she did this was when I was a teenager. (A little side story here and one of the main reasons I snapped out of my delusions about religion as a young’in. I had a very close writer friend who was a poet. A beautiful poet and helped me with writing and working on my crafts and hobbies. She was an older lady who lived down the street and I spent four years landscaping her entire yard. She was a good friend. But she was also an Astrologer. She ran charts and the whole bit to make extra money to supplement her teacher’s retirement. She had a book of her poetry published and gave me a copy. It was good and I liked it. But since she was an Astrologer we couldn’t have anything “evil” in the house otherwise it would influence us and turn us from God. So – in hindsight the manipulation I went through to do this was basically child abuse – I dug a pit in the ground in the backyard and burned her book. I burned a book.)

So now we are at it again but I’m not a child or teenager. But as all children with parents there is a respect you give your folks. There is a deference you must show them. It’s just part of yourself. Well it’s part of me anyway. My brothers and I (and dad) just let her be and “live and let live” is the guiding rule around the subject of religion.

That would be fine if religion stayed in its place – in the person. But it doesn’t. It’s a plague that has a need and that need is to flourish and spread - to infect others and bring them in line with the correct way to think and behave. The way it thinks and behaves. The dogmatic irrational “truth is truth because it says so in the book” way of thinking. It doesn’t matter that there are hundreds of other plagues out there with the exact same goal as itself. (And the foundations for those beliefs were written by men mostly seeking power and influence and control over populations.) The hosts of religion don’t seem to be bothered by this – generally speaking – and only spread when given an opportunity. There are clearer examples of this not being the case for fundamentalism and radical religious hosts who kill others in the name of their God or blow themselves up for salvation in the after life but I digress slightly.

Anyway - I came across this amazing speech by Sam Harris on NPR (http://wordforword.publicradio.org/programs/2007/09/14/) a couple months back that spoke on religion and morality. It was an articulate speech that covered how morality doesn’t – or more specifically, shouldn’t – come from scripture. I burned a copy of this and gave it to my mom. Her first reaction after listening to it was. I’m gonna paraphrase this because I don’t recall the exact words but it went like this: “You can’t take this guy seriously, because he doesn’t believe in the bible.” End of argument. That was it. If you don’t believe in the bible the discussion is over. Everything in the bible is true and those who don’t believe are wrong. How is that an argument?You can’t even begin to discuss the errors in the bible unless you already accept the bible as truth. So basically any errors in the bible are somehow your fault for not understanding them.

If that isn’t cultish brainwashing than what is?

So we talked for a bit but dad wanted to watch a movie which he specifically purchased at Best Buy and wanted me to see it. “The Illusionists”. It was a good movie but it meant I couldn’t talk about what I really wanted to talk about. Why the bible isn’t a book by the Almighty. (She mentioned that the Old Testament isn’t needed anymore because the New Testament corrects all the moral directives given and besides Jesus died for us and that means anything that happened in the Old Testament is all good now; wiped clean by the blood of Jesus’ sacrifice. Little comfort to the slaughtered I should say. And no comfort to the millions of Jews persecuted as Christ killers for the last couple centuries.)

There was a few minutes afterward where we were able to “get into it” again but dad said he was ready to go. So they headed out. I asked for an email about the issues she had with the speech and why it was in error but haven’t gotten a response from them. Usually after they come over I get a call the next day (or even that night) saying they made it safely back but nothing this time. Interestingly I heard dad say to mom as they were pulling away “Let it go.” Apparently she did. Completely.

Well I’m done being silent on this issue. Religion is not only wrong it is dangerous. This tacit approval of religion by silently enduring irrational non-critical thinking of people has to stop. To say the bible – or any holy book – is true because it says it’s true is self-delusion unthinking escapism. I will no longer smile politely in pleasant company while Jesus is invoked as the savior of mankind or bigotries are justified in the name of spiritual righteousness.

You know who the savior of mankind is – mankind.

And spiritual righteousness is just another way of saying “I have God’s approval to hate this group of people and any actions I take against them is on them for being against God.”

Look how wonderfully fruitful that way of thinking has been these last couple centuries and tell me there isn’t a better way.

Slavery is approved by the Bible and yet most civilized societies don’t follow that edict anymore. Why is that? If you can pick and choose your passages why have the book in the first place? Why not just be?

I have created some Zazzle shirts (http://www.zazzle.com/steagus ) to allow others who are tired of this divisive dangerous occupation with false hopes and beliefs by the delusional know how you feel – and most importantly think.

I think George Carlin said it pretty well when he said “When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion. No contest. No contest. Religion. Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time! But He loves you.”

What do you think?

Well I finally did it. I broke the code of the PayPal payment system. After months upon months upon months of frustration and blurry reading I finally got a response back from PayPal for a payment.

Seriously folks I must have read dozens upon dozens of documents and help faqs and forum posts looking for the simple straight forward clues that would lead to success. There is no simple and straight forward document that explains how to do the create this process.

You’ll be reading along and find a single morsel of information and then the plate gets snatched away as they begin to talk in circles. You click on a link on that page hoping it’ll lead to another nugget of goodness only to get redirected to a forum page with dozens of similarly confused people. Then a forum Admin will post a link and say this page as your solution. So you click it and the page is no longer available or is vaguely related to what you’re looking for but not quite there. And when people write back and say “Um.. the page is down.” or “That’s not really helpful, can you just post in the thread the answer.” they are answered by silence or worse yet another link.

There are script generator pages that are completely broken. And don’t get me started on the scripts. Man zero nesting of the code and typos and syntax errors as well.  It was as if someone was in a hurry and needed to push out the sample code before lunch/launch and did it from memory without verifying anything.

Since I’m not one to complain without offering a solution I’m documenting the process in simple step by step directions. It should be noted that my experience was for implementing the IPN/PDT functionality of PayPal in PHP. I did not use the APIs or other cart tools that are supposedly plug in and run. I have my doubts about those claims now.

So without further ado here is PART ONE of a multiple part series : 

Ok. I know that seems rather straight forward but I must have gone back and forth with this for a while. Perhaps I’m simple but no where that I could find was this process spelled out for the end user.

In the next post I’ll go through the steps used to set up your business account for its Preferences and other payment details then writing the scripts used by IPN/PDT, which is where it gets really opaque.

Until then … later.

I mowed my back yard today.

I had planned on doing it anyway but figured it was about time to mow it when I realized that deer had been bedding down in the tall grass in my driveway. There were deer sized impressions in the grass and although my first thought was crop circle, I quickly realized that no it was the deer I’ve been seeing hanging around the property.

So 7:30 am I went outside and started mowing. First the idea that I was up at 7:30 am is amazing but I’ve been having to get up this early for two weeks now because that’s when school is starting. (It was Saturday so I didn’t get up at my usual time of 6:30 am.)

I mowed in the damp dewy grass lands of the back yard and got a pretty good part of it done. But there were places I just couldn’t go with my 6hp Troy Built string trimmer and that’s when I had to resort to the Dupont Corporation for some assistance. Agent Orange is illegal in the states but there’s another product that’s just as effective if not as quick - Round Up Professional Grade. (”Boy, this’ll kill everything in 5 square arces.” said the country store clerk between spitting, chewing, russling a calf behind the counter and ringing up my purchase.)

So with sprayer in hand I walked the perimeter of the house, down the 70 feet of felled pine trees that were taken down last winter and piled up in the far corner of my property but never burned, and down my side of the long road that leads to my driveway. In two weeks it’ll be as clear as water from a Florida spring. (I think I’m delirious because I’m writing very flowery prose at the moment and it’s really not needed. I should eat some food and take a nap before the rest of the day starts. Much work on the site to do, gotta fix the seal around the comfort station in the bathroom and meeting some friends for ribs and the Path Finder movie.)

Whoever invented gnats needs to be kicked square in the nads! Seriously.

Why do they exist?

I was out walking today and couldn’t go twenty feet without a couple dozen gnats trying to fly into my ears - both sides - at the same time. It wasn’t just wind.

These little fockers had a mission to get into my ears and nothing was going to stop them. I think they even followed me or told their friends or something, because a mile down the road I was still under assault. I had swatted and flicked my ears to near bleeding and nothing stopped them.

Eventually I had enough and turned around and went home with the constant stream of bugs deciding my orafices were the only place on the planet they could find peace and quiet and build a home with their natty friends and family.

I’m telling ya, “Square in the nads!”

PS(And the same goes for mosquitos. More than annoying, deadly disease carrying creatures. Why haven’t we chemmed them into extinction yet? I’m just saying. We could if we wanted to.)

Ok. I’m thoroughly convinced now.

I’ve been thinking on this for a while and now understand that many (if not all) conflicts and problems in movies, books, tv shows, and even in real life are the result of people not talking with each other.

There I said it. If you don’t say what’s on your mind then that’s where problems spring and where assumptions start.

If not for the lack of communication written into sitcoms there would be no drama, no ‘action’ to watch. Is that good? What is that saying about us, really?

I saw this last night on a tv show called ‘The Unit’ on CBS. A married couple are having some serious personal (but separate) conflicts in their lives. She is dealing with X problem, and he is dealing with Y problem. (No pun intended I’m sure.) She attempts to talk with him and he shuts down. Because he’s tough and strong and is REALLY dealing with stuff. (Also there is national security stuff involved.) He shot a kid in the back to save his squad, and then later had to shoot a woman (the guide) in the head because she got trapped and she couldn’t be captured.

But instead of responding and listening to her or using her as a support mechanicism for his angiush (sp?) (he didn’t have to go into details) he goes off without a word.

Later he comes home (having finally told his story to his Commander and feeling much better for it - he bought flowers) and she is gone - “working late”. He hits the bars and ends up having sex with another women in a drunken haze. His wife isn’t having sex but is enjoying a quiet wine filled evening with her new boss. (Yeah, totally cliche.)

But if they had taken the five minutes it would have needed to talk to each other 30 minutes of show wouldn’t have been possible. No angst. No remorse. No uncertainy of trying to figure out what the other person is thinking or feeling. Dude, you told your commander you can’t talk to your own wife!

I just finished reading a book were the boy and girl have been best friends since first grade. He is totally in love with her but maintains the friendship. She’s great and only when all is destroyed at the end of the story she reveals she knows how he feels about her and has wished they would have been together since ninth grade. But now… well now it’s too late. (because he kept a secret from her not related to his love) Like that makes any kinda sense at all! “The Gospel According to Larry” meh book. shrug.

Even my most beloved show Firefly is not immune to this “I’ve got no mind to sess out the situation for you Doctor, now go fetch your sister.” or the episode where the old army guy has himself mailed to them in a coffin because he’s dead (not really but it’s his only way of escaping his troubles). Later in the show Mal hatches a plan and the guy asks what’s going on. Mal doesn’t tell him the whole plan just “do it”. The army guy turns on them and ends being shot by Mal. Great action and drama but completely unnecessary. If Mal had taken one minute - no 30 seconds - to say “I’m not going to turn you in. Honest. I have a plan that’ll get us out of this. You’re on my crew and that’s that. Now we don’t have a lot of time. Let’s go. Zoe. Follow me.” Conflict resolved and no assumptions. Of course the last fifteen minutes of the show are removed because they don’t have to go into that whole - trust, don’t trust, I have bullet for you - moment at the end. It was a single tear episode for sure but come on. It was staged.

Well this has turned into a boring rant on nothing.

I suppse the idea is that if people would be open and honest (even painfully honest at times) a lot of angst and misery could be avoided. In the end we own our feelings and thoughts. They come from us regardless of how they are created. They’d be a lot lighter I imagine if we opened them up a little more.

Or maybe not. What do I know?

I saw this article about the emphasis on having a college degree just to get a job these days and have a theory. http://www.alternet.org/story/51316

If I could place my foot in the conspiratorial waters (or mouth) regarding the importance placed on a college education these days I’d say it’s by design. Perhaps the reason this emphasis on “you will fail in life unless you go to college!” is to ensure a steady supply of indebted adults for banks and other financial institutions? If the lowest to upper-middle class of workers spend most of their lives paying off a college loan a perpetual revenue stream is all but guaranteed.