ch.annel2-i.s-n.ow-a.ngry

Gleeful news from the UK:

Organizers say that replacing the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951 with new consumer protection rules will remove key legal protection for “genuine” mediums.

They think skeptics might bring malicious prosecutions to force spiritualists to prove in court that they can heal people, see into the future or talk to the dead.

Why should you be able to charge for it if you can’t prove you’re really doing something? I’m not allowed to charge people to do stuff I can’t prove I’m doing, why should someone who can hit the table with their knee at opportune times to fool people into believing the dead are speaking be able to charge for such theatrics unless they tell people it is just theatrics. I mean, true believers will know the law is forcing them to speak ‘lies’ before they get on to the ‘truth’ of their  communing with spirits or whatever.

Psychics also fear they will have to give disclaimers describing their services as entertainment or as scientific experiments with unpredictable results. 

They say the new rules will shift the responsibility of proving they are not frauds from prosecutors and onto them.

“By repealing the Act, the onus will go round the other way and we will have to prove we are genuine,” McEntee-Taylor told Reuters. “No other religion has to do that.”

Religions also don’t get paid by the hour to ‘heal’ people or ’speak to the dead’ or other such flim-flammery.  When you go to church, you choose to toss coin of the realm into the bucket, you don’t swipe your credit card at the door.

More than 16 percent of American adults say they are not part of any organized faith, which makes the unaffiliated the country’s fourth largest “religious group.”

I myself like the Buddha’s teachings of the middle path (i.e. moderation). However, I like the original intent of the Buddha’s message, wherein he does not claim to be a god and says that he should not be worshiped, that following him should not be made into a religion. Of course, no one listens to that, they just want a new ‘god’ to worship and rituals to follow. But I am not part of any organized faith. I have never and will never ‘go to church.’  I applaud those who have woken up to the many ills that organized religion have forced upon us throughout the ages. When I was younger, I felt alone, now I can say that one in seven people actually admit to thinking like I do about this.

Hehe: But that masks a precipitous decline in native-born Catholics. The proportion has been bolstered by the large influx of Catholic immigrants, mostly from Latin America, the survey found.

I bet that will drive conservative nuts nuts and they will deny it as the liberal bias of the NYT. I wonder what the anti-immigration conservative movement would say when they find out that the only reason we still have the same amount of Catholics in this country is due to (illegal?) immigration from Mexico and other parts south. “They bring us drugs, disease, poverty, and more Catholics than we can raise ourselves! How dare they!”

We can fight as extremists, or get along as moderates. I’ll respect your religion as long as you respect my lack thereof. What you call God I call Nature. What you call miracles I call hallucinations written about unverifiably by long-dead men who loved to write in allegory. I tend to believe in concrete things I can touch and derive from my own experiences.

The Hindu beliefs of Brahma and atman, samsara and moksha, those all sound like metaphors for the world that quantum mechanics and nanotechnology are introducing us to. For instance: the technical scientific limitation to the possible orbits of the outermost electron of an individual atom are defined as infinite. The fact that we exchange electrons, which make up the physical properties of the world we see around us, is evidence of the interconnectedness of being that Hindu and Buddhist faiths propose. However, they make the mistake of saying the world is an illusion that is not important. That I take issue with, I believe the outer world is just as important as the inner, precisely because of the interconnectedness of being. When you trash Nature, you trash yourself. When you trash yourself, you trash your spirit. Science has told us that we are made out of the remnants of long-dead stars. If that’s not interconnectedness, knowing that we were born out of processes born out of the very beginning of our observable universe, I don’t know what is.

Religion can have some useful metaphors and morals. But you must remember that it is metaphor, anything to do with spirituality must be metaphor and thusly have different but similar meanings to anyone that experiences it. Take the good, leave the bad, and progress forward with life, yo.

In an article on CNet addressing the group Anonymous’ efforts to get the Church of Scientology’s mishaps covered in news media in a sane way, by posting videos on youtube, the article has the following keywords and tags:

Topics: Criminal Hackers, Security

Tags: security, denial of service, defacement, Church of Scientology, YouTube

Absolutely no mention of ANYTHING involving criminality, hacking, security, denial of service or defacement was mentioned ANYWHERE in the article. The only thins mentioned was the CoS and YouTube. If posting home-made videos to YouTube is criminil hacking, defacement and denial of service, well….

“Are you about worn out of all the television commercials you’ve been seeing, mostly about politics? I don’t blame you. At this time of year, sometimes it’s nice to pull aside from all that and just remember that what really matters is the celebration of the birth of Christ, and being with our family and our friends,” Huckabee said in the ad.

The spot has drawn attention from some because in the background as the camera pans across, the edges of what look to be a bookshelf in the background form a Christian cross.

Found this laughable bit of news in an article about how Hillary “feels the momentum building” (i.e. isn’t ahead in the polls). So, this ad is in question because the bookshelf may or may not be symbolic of the Christian cross. Not because he said “what really matters is the celebration of the birth of Christ.” That apparently isn’t Christian at all. However a bookshelf sporting 4 right angles, as many bookshelves do, especially the wall-to-wall kinds of fancy politicos, is a horribly subtle symbol that Mike Huckabee is indeed *gasp* Christian. After this Bush administration, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that people aren’t paying attention to what anyone says.

Muhammad. Muhammad. Muhammad. Muhammad. Muhammad. Muhammad. Muhammad. Muhammad. Muhammad.

It’s a fucking collection of syllables, get over it. I’ve never heard so many fucking people cry as when the word Muhammad is involved. Islam must be too new or something, because they’re still willing to kill over some guy they never met (Muhammad).

The guy had some good ideas, the guy had some great ones. One of those was non-violence. So stop, please stop, hurting and killing in his name or because of his name. A school in Africa was closed for a month because a teacher let her kids use a common name, Muhammad, for their class teddy bear. The school now fears reprisals and the safety of faculty and students, because some people are willing to blow the shit out of anyone that looks at the name Muhammad crosswise. If they name is so damned holy, how come every man that even looks vaguely middle eastern is named Muhammad, no matter how criminal or not they may be, no one fucks with them.

I was considering not posting this, as it is insulting to a certain segment of the Islamic population. But then I read that people were protesting to try to have the teacher put to death for her student actions because she ‘insulted Islam.’

You know what, anyone who agrees with that? Fuck you.

And just to ensure that Jihad is declared upon me and death threats are sent, I’m going to post not only my drawing of Muhammad, but one of Allah as well, and show their reactions to what is going on ‘in their name.’ Here we go:

Muhammad: @:(#+-<

Allah: @:(#+-<

p.s. I think Islam is pretty good as religion goes, but as always, fuck the nutters. Fuck the Christian nutters, fuck the Catholic nutters, fuck the Islamic nutters, fuck the Scientology nutters, fuck the Buddhist and Hindu nutters. And the more you try to silence dissent, criticism and ‘insults’ the more I will say: FUCK YOU!

Wanting someones death because they allowed children to name a teddy bear Muhammad is terrorism. Wanting to flog her was bad enough. 15 days imprisonment and deportation was merely insulting.

No one will bring about the death of organized religion as fast as organized religion itself, whether through getting so crazy everyone rejects it, or getting their wish and wiping all life off the face of this earth so we can go ‘be with god,’ i.e. turned into carbon deposits that will be recycled for the next dominant life-forms attempt.

Iraq’s national security adviser said on Friday he strongly opposed any military attack on Iran and, in contrast to the Bush administration’s policy, said the option should not even be considered.

Well, good.  I think we ought to listen to those who know first hand the workings of U.S. military might, when it supposedly intervenes for good.  Three weeks to depose a dictator,  four and a half years and they still don’t have electricity 24/7 in the capital city? In fact, they have less electricity there than elsewhere in the country. How do you keep a refrigerator with maybe 4 to 8 hours of power a day? How could you even run a generator when all petrol is rationed?

And in Iran, we have a democratically elected government. Maybe not the best, but would we take kindly to people fucking with our democracy, as fucked up as it is? No, because it’s ours and we’ll fix it ourselves, damnit.

Reading about poor polar bears this morning. We’re still hunting the things, Americans and foreigners alike. Americans are doing it dishonestly, importing their trophies through Canada to avoid breaking US law. But what really shocked and awed me was this:

 The Arctic crisis has become so compelling that leaders of the world’s main religions gathered this weekend on the iceberg-studded sea off this small town, deep in the Arctic Circle on the west Greenland coast, to pray for the planet. Bartholomew I, the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox church – who convened the group – told them: “the danger of an avoidable catastrophe is now more acute than ever.” On Friday senior representatives of the Roman Catholic and protestant churches, Sunni and Shia Islam,and the Hebrew, Hindu, Shinto and Buddhist Zen religions joined the Patriarch in silent prayer on the prow of a liner under a lowering sky in the shadow of giant icebergs.

When its bad enough that you’ve got every religion praying against it, that’s something, because they’re usually busy praying against one another.