It doesn't take long to need a break from family over the holidays, survey says
Abigail Rosenthal, USA TODAY NETWORK
If you find yourself hiding in the pantry to get away from family this holiday season, know you're probably not alone in the search for some peace on Earth.
A survey commissioned by Motel 6 found that it only takes less than 4 hours before people need a break from socializing with family.
You can help send gifts to those in need through USPS Operation Santa
According to the survey, Americans are planning on spending an average of three and a half days with extended family this holiday. And people admit to finding ways to escape the holiday bustle — 25% said they have hidden in a relative's home for some time alone, and 37% have made an excuse to leave the house altogether.
Some of the biggest stressors, according to the 2,000 Americans surveyed, include facing a lack of privacy (22%), family members annoying each other (20%) and drama between the family (20%). Plus, if you're not the one hosting, there's the stress of feeling like an imposition (19%) and having the house be too busy or loud (18%).
But even though it can be stressful or exhausting, 95% feel it’s important to spend the holidays with family. So when your nerves start to fray, remember: It's only a few days, and the pantry is a prime hiding spot.


Obama: Trump Is ‘Unfit’ for Presidency
Article, Videos
President Barack Obama lashed out at Donald Trump on Tuesday, saying that he is “unfit” to be president.
BREAKING: Obama says "I think the Republican nominee is unfit to serve as president" & is "woefully unprepared" pic.twitter.com/xL2pUGUenE
— CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) August 2, 2016
“If you are repeatedly having to say in very strong terms that what he has said is unacceptable, why are you still endorsing him?” Obama said during a press conference at the White House with Singapore’s prime minister.
“There has to come a point at which you say, ‘enough.'”
Obama lashed out at Trump in the wake of the candidate’s criticism of Muslim parents of a U.S. Army officer who was killed in the Iraq War.
Top Republicans — including Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) — have all denounced Trump’s comments but none have reversed their endorsement of the nominee.
“What does this say about your party that this is your standard bearer?” Obama asked.
“This isn’t a situation where you have an episodic gaffe,” he added. “This is daily and weekly where they are distancing themselves from statements he’s making.”
Obama’s comments were striking in that they did not come at a political convention or a rally with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, but at a joint White House press conference with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore.
It is rare for a president at such a formal setting to rip into a potential successor’s ability to serve. Yet Trump’s unprecedented campaign, and division within the GOP over it, have given Obama an opening.
Rep. Richard Hanna, a retiring congressman from New York, on Tuesday became the first GOP lawmaker to say he would vote for Clinton.
Obama said his opponents in 2008 and 2012 — McCain and Mitt Romney — were “wrong on certain policy issues, but I never thought that they couldn’t do the job.”
“But that’s not the situation here, and that’s not just my opinion,” he continued. “That is the opinion of many prominent Republicans.”
Trump released a statement an hour after Obama spoke ripping the president and Clinton for their handling of the economy and foreign policy.
“Obama-Clinton have single-handedly destabilized the Middle East, handed Iraq, Libya and Syria to ISIS, and allowed our personnel to be slaughtered at Benghazi,” Trump said.
He said the Iran nuclear deal had put that country on the path to having nuclear weapons, and that Clinton and Obama had let dozens of veterans die while waiting for medical care.
“They have produced the worst recovery since the Great Depression,” he said.
Trump also criticized Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of State, saying it put national security at risk.
Trump has been at the center of a political firestorm over the past week after feuding with Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of the soldier.
One day after Obama spoke at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, Khizr Khan delivered a blistering rebuke of Trump’s proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the U.S.
Standing beside his wife, Khan questioned whether Trump has ever read the U.S. Constitution while waving a a pocket copy of the founding document. He also said Trump has not sacrificed for his country.
Trump said in an interview with ABC News that he had sacrificed by building his business. And he also suggested the bereaved mother’s initial silence was because of her religion.
Trump again responded to Khan’s comments during a Monday night interview on Fox News.
“His son died 12 years ago, and [if] I were president, his son wouldn’t have died because I wouldn’t have been in the war, if I was president back then,” he told host Sean Hannity.
While no GOP leaders have dropped their endorsement of Trump, Hanna cited Trump’s comments on Khan in explaining his decision to vote for Clinton.
“I think Trump is a national embarrassment,” Hanna told The Syracuse Post Standard. “Is he really the guy you want to have the nuclear codes?”
Photo credit: CNBC / Screenshot.
Republican: If a Woman Has Right to an Abortion, a Man Should Have Right to Force Himself on a Woman
Trump: Protester Should Be Arrested for 'Filthy, Dirty Mouth'
Poll: Trump Begins Presidency with 36 Percent Approval Rating


Posts Tagged ‘Religion’
Why Christianism Fosters Demons
The Christo-Islamist god does not do with just Satan, but a whole army of demons, fallen angels, or “djinns”. This is not an accident, but its core strategy.
An excellent essay in Scientia Salon: an official guide for demon hunters with a helpful advice from philosophers and witch hunters illustrates this. History is how philosophy ought to be done. No history, no philosophy.
Why? Because philosophy is about the deepest reasons. The deepest reasons have to be hunted down in history always. (Yes, even in science, see note.)
I will explain why the extreme cruelty and terror found in several famous religions are not accidental by-products, but essential to the core of these superstitious systems.
Notre Dame Gargoyles Watch Over Paris To Make Sure Of Extirpating Whatever Needs Extirpation
Some have the religion of religions. They worship the idea. The idea of religion. Of course, they have an agenda; it could be Tibetan Buddhism (with its demons), or the Christo-Islamist god, who absolutely needs a fig leaf. And the name of that fig leaf was Satan (or Shatan, namely Hades, Pluto, or Ba’al, refurbished, with a fresh Dark Side coat).
There is a funny passage in the Qur’an where Allah (Arabic word for the Christo-Islamist Jewish god) warns about asking him questions about his business with Shatan and Djinns. He hints darkly that those who ask too many question will end in the fire (where they will be burned until their skin falls off; then their skin will grow back, and they will be thrown in the fire again; apparently the Qur’an anticipated stem cell treatments yet to come!)
There are religions, and religions. Generally, when talking to some primitive about religion, she or he assumes, naturally, that one talks about her, or his religion. But maybe 10,000 religions are known. 99.99% of them grossly violate human rights, and are criminal systems of thoughts and mood. Once again, that’s no accident: religion is all about plutocracy, and plutocracy all about the demonic side of man.
When religious people talk about “religion”, and request respect, they don’t mean that we should respect the Aztecs’ religion: they never heard of it. Or, if they did, they don’t realize what it means.
Religion’s idea comes from the Latin “religio”, itself contained in re-ligare: to bind together again. We The People, bound again together. To what? To whom? To us again?
Religions basically come under two variants: those which bind to rationality, and those which bind to irrationality, that is, to madness.
By “madness” here, I mean any altered state of consciousness. I am a mountaineer and a mountain runner. I have run very long, say in Iran, at 10,000 feet, in a one way solitary run I had to complete to save myself. The heat was great, blood was seeping through my running shoes. I felt nothing. This sort of altered state of consciousness, evolution given stoicism, is routine for tough mountain climbers, who are familiar with slipping out of cracks from blood seeping out of their bodies, while keeping a happy smirk on their faces.
Why would one bind to rationality? Because, without rationality, there is no survival. Homo has been mostly selected for increasing rational performance over the last 5 million years.
Civilization blossomed this in the idea of democracy. The republic is the fundamental religion, as it effectively was for the Romans, for centuries (in co-existence with superstitious cults, such as the original Roman one).
Why would one bind to irrationality? Because, once We The People has become irrational, in other words, dumb, it can easily be manipulated into subservience.
Hence superstition. “Superstitio” was used derisively by the Christians against Pagans as early as the Fourth Century. However, the concept is “what stands above”… the world. In other words, what cannot be objective.
Superstitious religions are there to terrify people, and force them into abject subjugation, so they all have demons, as the Punic religion did, or the Aztecs.
The Aztecs, thanks to tearing the hearts of their live prisoners out, had kept the nations around them in a state of fear of these “flower wars”.
Just as Islam is about peace, Christianity about love, the Aztecs’ gods were about… flowers. (Once, to inaugurate the greatest temple so far, they tore 80,000 hearts out, in five days, a remarkable pre-industrial feat.)
The Aztecs were horrified by the torture of the Christians. As far as they were concerned, Christianity was a torture religion, perfectly symbolized by the torture instrument the Christians brandished, the cross. Christians will be surprised to learn this. Of course. Gods, imagination, and machinations go very well together.
Christian minds have been well engineered together into the herd instinct.
Terrified people obey their masters well. And if that is not enough, the Christians, later imitated by the Muslims, would exert what (“Saint”) Augustine referred approvingly as “great violence”. By the time Augustine recommended “great violence”, the executions of those-who-had-chosen (= “heretics”) were routine.
This is how the Christians took an empire which was mostly Pagan and Neo-Platonic by storm: by killing millions. And this is also why, ever since, they speak of the persecutions they suffered before that: because the later were relatively puny: only 6 Christians were executed under Marcus Aurelius. Some emperors may have been closet Christians, well before Galerius executed 3,000 Christians, in the worst persecution, around 306 CE (which he rescinded later)..
Christianity and its parrot, Islam, have killed tens of millions, in their names.
Now they don’t want their names to be their names, a bit like homosexuals don’t want to not be called gays, otherwise they would be rather sad.
That’s why their sacred texts enshrine the power of ultimate violence, when they do not call to exert it, outright. That’s why they are, under the guise of fearing them, a cult of demons.
The Cathars said nothing else. So the Christians exterminated them, millions of them, down to the last one. And also all those who lived in the same cities, just to make sure:
“Dieu reconnaitra les siens!”: kill them all, God will recognize his own, the commander of the Crusade is alleged to have ordered. This most ferocious of all Crusades happened on French soil. Don’t expect the masters to remember that. Although not respected as much as Islamism, Christianism is still up there in the pantheon of values in the West (go ask people what they think of Saint Louis or Luther: they will express reverence for these master thinkers of Hitler.)
Superstitions such as Christianism and Islamism, who include divinely mighty demons are demoniac, it’s a fact. And that’s why Allah does not want to talk about it, lest we ponder his bloody hand, and the company he keeps.
We have seen demons. They helped the Caliphs kill those who did not believe. They helped emperors love the church demoniacally.
You don’t want demons? Bring back reason.
But not any reason. Before he decided to invade Ukraine, Putin’s approval rating was 65%. Now it’s 86%: Russia has become mad with war frenzy. One of the reasons why religions full of demons are popular, is that demonic behavior itself is popular: people with nothing better to do, will get on the warpath. Not just for the spoils (material riches, eternal life) but also because that’s the way people are.
All the way to viewing irrationality as a right. Right as a vacation from the human condition.
Note about history and philosophy: Many problems more or less scientifically solved recently have their roots in Ancient Philosophy, which first brandished them. An example is the incompleteness theorems in logic (they grew from the Cretan Liar paradox, as I have explained in the past). Zeno’s paradox is another. Or even Archimedes’ infinitesimal method.
I could make here a digression in physics. Physics, ultimately, is about history. The lab tests what has been determined, historically, as important. Roughly all of the physics system of thought, articulated around equations, superficially observed, is actually historical: even the axioms of Quantum physics have their ultimate justification in history, not experimentation as all too many naïve physicists… believe. Yes, believe, as a Jihadist believes: closing one’s mind is not the exclusive province of superstitious fanatics.
Tribes is where the power lays, and not just in the Middle East. Those who are viewed as brandishing the right ideas climb up the hierarchy of power.
Tags:Augustine, Christianity, demons, irrationality, Islam, Religion, superstition, Systems of Moods, Systems of Thought, Terror
Posted in Education, religion, superstition, superstition, Systems Of Moods, Systems Of Thought | 5 Comments »
Unbelievable Comfort: NO BRAIN, NO PAIN
Madness Of The Crowds: Comfortable, Cuddly, Yet Also Experimentally Useful.
In brief: Why do people “believe”? Superstitious religions are tools of oppression. They impose the unbelievable, making the masses stupid and gullible. If so why do they still seduce people? The charitable explanation, is that they offer hope: be nice to Moloch, and Moloch shall give you everything.
But is that all? No. The main reason (for higher-ups) to believe the unbelievable, is that it introduces a simplification of the mental system. It forces a hierarchy of causality that denies whatever contradicts the religion. That means, of course, that it denies most of the world. So the world goes poof. Is not that great?
Baal Temple, Syria: Yesterday’s God, Today’s Lord Of The Flies
[Ba‘al dhubaab: in Arabic, “Lord of the Flies”, that is, Lord of Dung, a rich idea coming from the Jews, two millennia earlier! Someday soon the Abrahamic religion will also be seen as a pile of dung to join Beelzebub.]
Superstitious systems of thought occupy a double-faced position in the jungle of ideas. On one end of the spectrum, they are a simplification, a laziness, a creature’s comfort, a herd phenomenon.
On the other end, being a simplification, precisely, they allow to experiment more cleanly with new systems of thought. For example, Christianism imposed murderous altruism: an interesting experiment.
WE ARE GOD, And TO PROVE IT, WE KILL YOU:
A young mother, who does not even look Sudanese, was raised an Orthodox Christian (her Muslim father was in absentia). Later she married a Christian Sudanese. Some Muslim then accused her of adultery (if a Muslim woman has sex with a non-Muslim, she is committing adultery, says that religion).
While she was waiting for another child, Sudanese authorities decided that she had renounced Islam.
Renouncing Islam is a capital crime in Sharia, a set of “laws” (of the jungle) invented by Muslims a few generations after the Qur’an, the book of eternal peace, 5 feet under.
Sharia is the law in Sudan. So the 27 year old mother was condemned by a so called “judge”, to be whipped 100 times, before being hanged to death. No doubt the “judge” had some prurient interest. (Sudan’s president there is under an international arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court. I propose to arrest the “judge” too.)
Chris Snuggs a rather fierce participant to this site wrote: “Islam in many countries is a hideous barbarity, the ultimate manifestation of unhinged minds. Perverted “religions” of this kind are the most staggering example of mass-hysteria the world has ever seen, and peculiar to Homo Sapiens. No “ordinary” animals suffer from this kind of mass simultaneous mental illness. Three billion people need psychiatric help. Astonishing. Why are we prone to mass-hysteria and irrationality on this scale? The French people regularly voting socialist is another example, and of course reminds us of the definition of a lunatic: someone who does the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.”
Renounce Islam, Die: Does Sharia Hate Islam?
[This is the wedding picture of the woman who got condemned to death for marrying the Christian on the left. Is Islamophobia truly Homophilia?]
By “belief, and believers” one commonly means “deciding to believe in the unbelievable, because it’s so convenient”. “Belief” is commonly believed to be an acquired taste at best, an imposed violence at worst.
Nietzsche pointed out about Christianism, Voltaire, about Islam, or Marx, in general, that religion is the opium of the people, or something to make the people into a herd.
More generally, theocracy has been used as a weapon of terror, for the oppression of all sorts of peoples. The Aztecs captured their enemies alive, and then sacrificed them, opening them up, and tearing out their beating hearts. Before cutting them up, and throwing the proteins down the steep pyramids.
This robust religion kept peoples subjected. However, when Cortez showed up with 2,000 super warriors, those the Aztecs terrorized were enthusiastic to levee huge armies to help the Spaniards with the Hummingbird God.
Christianism and Islam do not basically differ from the Aztec gig. The Aztecs brought death through cannibalism. But it was a rather quick death. The Aztecs were horrified by the tortures of the Spaniards. Those knew no bounds. If Spanish tortures were so advanced that was, no doubt, to keep up with the Muslims, and beat them on their own torturous ground.
In Islam, slavery is kosher. All men are viewed as slaves of dog (typo, sorry!) god. A standard punishment for Muslim slaves who had tried to escape was impalement. As the patient could take several days to jerk about, all transpierced, that procedure had an educative effect on the otherwise ignorant masses.
Violence is intrinsic to the Abrahamic religion. It all started with the Bible, a compendium of holocausts, praising an holocaust driven god. Getting advice and example from the Bible allowed Europeans, clutching their bibles, to massacre the Americas, and much of Eurasia and Oceania.
Now religious fanaticism is less of a problem than a distraction, as the secular, republican spirit mostly rules, except in a few places: Israel, some places in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, where old fashion Islam is gaining ground.
Does that mean we are getting rid of the COMFORTABLY UNBELIEVABLE?
INSANITY BRINGS THE COMFORT OF THE HERD, THE ECONOMY OF STUPIDITY:
Because having unbelievable beliefs brings mental economy, and ties that bind. What could go wrong?
Let me explain a bit more: intelligence is highly profitable, but it’s also costly. To become intelligent, one has to create lots of neurons and synapses. And the environment does it: studies on rats have proven this. Long ago.
All these neurons and synapses require a lot of energy to build. That’s exhausting: one has to go hunt and gather a lot. Also, once built, all this awareness brings pain: many a religion and philosophy have moaned about extinction (“nirvana”) of consciousness as the solution to the problem of pain (how that differs from Hitler’s solution beats me).
From there springs the opium of the people effect: opium creates an absence of mind by putting many neurons to sleep, but it’s the same result, even more efficiently, by making sure none of these neurons is ever born.
Finally, last, but not least, as the religion simplifies the system of thought, it creates a simple system of thought, and a simple brain. A simple type of a specific brain. Those are easy to match to each other. All those who believe some guy is the son of dog, chose to be crucified for man, and taught us love, are, clearly, made for each other. They have an insanity to share.
There is nothing more reassuring than the herd. And a crazy herd, charging all along, is the ultimate symbol of force, thus, safety.
MUSLIMS CREATED THE WORLD, ROMANS ATTACKED LATER, AND OTHER INSANITIES:
My spouse had a friend for a few years, and even travelled overseas with her. She was, superficially well educated. As all would-be shock philosopher, I tend to stay apart. Yet, in the end, we met. It was rather brief.
She was from Morocco. I know Morocco, first time I was there I was two years old. I mentioned in passing that this beautiful country was graced with Roman monuments. She mumbled something to the effect that Europeans could never resist invading Muslim countries. I pointed out that the Romans were in Morocco nine centuries before the Muslims ever invaded the place. Her face went white. She told us Morocco had always been Muslim. We were basically insulting her country.
I said: not so. I told the truth. Her world, her simple world full of simplifying lies that bind, was shattered. I was not just demolishing her world view, but her social fabric, made of victimized conservative Muslims invaded by greedy Romans.
She did not contact us ever again.
I am never the one to interrupt relationships, because I view even the worst relationships as interesting experiments in my philosophical laboratory… That has led me to harrowing situations, because insuring the integrity of their mental systems brings up the greatest ferocity in human beings.
Such is the human condition.
PASSIONS CREATE THOUGHTS, THOUGHTS KILL EACH OTHER, & GIVE BIRTH TO MAN:
That ferocity in things mental may look baffling. But it is of the essence. Homo is the intellectual animal. Human ideas compete, and they compete to death. Inferior ideas get killed. Superior ideas thrive, munching the bones of past guesses.
Lovers of the free market gloat that it can produce superior product. Bu there is no product higher than an idea. And the ideas do not just constitute a market. They constitute a jungle, where pain, greed, anger, rage, ecstasy and lust are just ways to achieve a healthy jungle.
FOLLY EXPANDS, OCCUPY ALL SPACE, REASON FOLLOWS:
Although I focused mainly on the Abrahamic religion above, the situation is general. Stupidity binds.
An example is indeed presently provided by socialism, the old fashioned way, complete with a plethora of useless civil servants and assisted ones (as Chris fulminates).
An other excellent mania of the crowds is found in physics, where completely insane theories have progressed in recent years ( for example the Multiverse madness).
By this, I mean more than physics became more insane than any of the preceding. Yet, precisely because it presents the neurological advantages of insanity, the insanity in physics has been progressing. A delicate moment.
That’s progress, how progress works.
When physicists have gone completely insane, hopefully someone will point out reason, and be believed (it took more than a millennium, between Ptolemy and Buridan, though!)
Folly expands, occupies all space, reason follows, and sweeps behind. That’s how intelligence progresses: even the mania of crowds can be put to work.
Whether it’s painful or not, is irrelevant. The fundamental constructive naturally occurring software, the fundamental principle, of man is not pain, but intelligence.
Tags:Abraham, Brain, Mania, Moods, Pain, Religion, superstition, Systems of Thought
Posted in Biology, Neuroeconomy, Neurology, Psychology | 34 Comments »
When Religion Makes People Crazy
One of my readers, Mark, suggests that: "Maybe you should focus on whether religion makes people go bad, or whether already bad people use religion in a bad way?"
Religion is often causative of bad behavior, as Critias said, 24 centuries ago, and for the reason he said (see the preceding essay). But there is more. Sharp distinctions exist among religions: some are innocuous, and indispensable, some are black mambas, and ought to be disposed of, as such. Or admired from a distance, as such.
I define religion as an inescapable background to the human discourse. Religion is the context that allows the logical, and emotional discourse. So the basic idea of religion, is neither good or bad. Not anymore than the brain is good or bad. Having a brain implies having a religion: this is already true of the most basic logical systems (starting with first order logic).
Clearly, though, if the context, the religion, is full of viciousness, anger, resentment, it will make people bad. Contexts can clearly make people bad; see traditions of vendetta and blood feuds (which constitute a sort of meta religion, as horrendous blood feuds traditions in Albania, in "Islam", were nearly identical to those in Greece, in "Orthodox Christianity", or in Catholic Italy, next door).
Then I distinguish superstitious religions from the rest. Pretty much the rest means secularism (most forms of Buddhism having also superstitious elements). In secularism, only real facts from the real world, as determined by the science of the age ("Secula"), are admitted to build the metaphysical universe. (No, no contradiction; for example, physics and mathematics cannot function without their meta-elements.)
In a religion dominated by superstition, overarching metaphysical elements are introduced which "above-stand" (= super-stare). "Superstition" has come to have a pejorative meaning, an invention of the Christian-In-Chief, the self described "13th Apostle", emperor Constantine Himself. Constantine defined those following other religions than the one he had chosen personally, as "superstitiosus". That was meant to be an insult.
According to emperor Constantine, the other religions had elements which stood above the real world, thus they were unreal. But of course the same can be said about Christianity, with its woman who stuck to her story (Mary), its Holy Spirit which is also the Logos, the son, and the Father, while being one, and that God who claims to suffer for you, and you better believe it, or Jesus will throw you in the fire forever, being all about love and jealousy as He is, with His sword, His threats, and his countless "miracles". The Abrahamic religion, with its ethical admiration for a God who orders the death of the young male child is a particularly incoherent superstition (killing the young male child, most love, was an old fancy of the superstitions of the area).
Superstition is intrinsically friendly to madness, and gives a justification to irrationality, because it venerates so called "miracles", which are known not to be of this world; they stand above it (the Pope just determined that so called "miracles" happened with six new people, so he called them "saints").
An aggravating factor is that those miracles, those inventions known to be false, are supposed to be the most important "facts" of the universe. Thus the Big Lie is venerated (in Hitler’s approach to the universe, the Big Lie is a master concept, and rightly so for those who venerate holocausts).
Moreover people who are used to be officially mad about something innocuous, may well turned just as mad about something much less innocuous (such as Jesus’ obsession with setting people aflame).
There is no doubt that the shrieks of Jesus to burn people forever and ever were, and are, bad. Not only civilization nearly collapsed, but they caused the deaths of dozens of millions. There is no doubt Jesus’ cold rage led to the burning of philosophers and common citizens, as soon as the Fourth Century. There is no doubt that Jesus’ pyromaniacal ranting enabled the Dark Ages, as the fascist Roman emperors found in Jesus’ teachings the moral excuse to burn alive their enemies, and the knowledge that had made them possible.
And there is no doubt that the pyromaniacal violence, and obsession of the Qur’an with burning alive the enemies of God originated with the incendiary homicidal bleating from the "Agnus Dei".
Ali, originator of Shiah, wanted to burn his enemies alive, and did so (before being assassinated). If the teachings of Jesus had been as non violent as those of Buddha, I doubt Ali would have had such ideas, or, having them, would have been taken seriously, that he could put them in force.
So bad, violent superstitions create bad people, or make bad people worse. Another example of hyper violent superstition is Nazism, a racial superstition, which created millions of bad people, who, surely, had Hitler been Gandhi, would not have been as bad.
Hitler was conscious of this, and deplored that Christianity was not as war-like as Islam. Although Islam and European Middle Age Christianity both derived from the pyromaniac Jesus, their genesis and evolutions were very different.
Christianity, or more exactly ‘Orthodox Catholicism" was imposed by fascist power, from the top. Islam was an insurrection led by an analphabetic, but very smart reject. Soon Islam was captured by top generals, who wrote the Qur’an, accentuating Jesus’ pyromania, turning Islam into the world’s greatest war machine, which annihilated Persia, and devoured a few years more than half of the Roman empire. In Occident, it was the opposite; the Franks took control of the Roman empire, and that meant taking control of the bishops who controlled the Imperium Romanum, Pars Occidentalis.
Middle Age Christianity, a milder form, was created when the Franks defanged the old Roman Catholicism, which had caused the Dark Ages, and converted it to a civilization helping form. This was done, after several false starts, when the Franks took control of the "Occidental Roman empire", and domesticated it, starting around 480 CE, a process Saladin did ephemerally to Islam in the 13C (but now greatly forgotten).
Still another example of the viciousness of some superstitions: the Aztec religion, which promoted anthropophagia, to an extend so great that it revolted its neighbors (who were themselves prone to serve human flesh for dinner). This is how Cortez was able to rise an 80,000 men army to boost his own 2,000 Castillans. The Aztec superstition, clearly, had made a group of men prone to eat men to an extend insufferable to other men eating men.
Definitively religion can make men bad, and then, even worse. Nazism was a religion. There were plans to turn Nazism into a full blown religion. It was already clearly a cult.
Nazism was a hybrid of Catholicism (Hitler’s initial religion, and strong support), its strong anti-Judaism, and Germanic tribalism a la Herder, and a mish-mash of selection of the fittest, racial pride, lower class resentment, with militarism and plutocracy pulling the conceptual strings. The result was definitively a powerful , albeit insane, religion, which was on a collision course with French secularism. Nazism was rudely interrupted by France, and her empire, Britain, the Commonwealth, and their subsequent involuntary allies (USSR, USA).
Suicidal charges by engineers is how the Nazis broke the French lines at Sedan in May 1940. Those fanatics believed they were the superior race, and that metaphysics made their sacrifice easy to bear. On the positive side, after that, those peculiar fanatics were dead, never to be seen again, and were soon joined by another 50,000 prime elite dedicated Nazis who died in May-June of 1940 during the Battle of France. They were sorely missed by Hitler, in the following years, as Nazism, a racist superstition, having run out of the fanatics who made its early victories possible, bit the dust.
As they campaigned (in appearance) successfully in Russia, the intensity of Nazi losses came to be nearly as great as in France, 18 months earlier. Finally, Nazism ran out of Nazis, just as the Syrian and Arab Baghdad-based Caliphate collapsed after its armies got annihilated in France during three successive invasions (721 CE-741 CE). Some religions are best at war, but not necessarily best at surviving.
Being better for the age of war does not mean better, for the age of mind. Having a better mind does a superior civilization make. Survival of the fittest does not apply to species of animals, but also to civilizations, and the religions they rest on.
Tags:Religion, Vicious Mass Delusions
Posted in philosophy, superstition | 3 Comments »
DOMINION OF RELIGION, FORCE OF CIVILIZATION.
RELIGION HAS TO BE REMOVED FROM THE POLITICAL EQUATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST. AND THAT PROBABLY MEANS BY FORCE. THE MEDITERRANEAN UNION AS A BETTER FINAL SOLUTION.
Abstract: When Christianism (grandiosely self described at the time as “Orthodox Catholicism”, namely Common Opinion Universalism) became officially the one and only religion of the fascist Roman empire, Judaism, the tribal source of Christianism, was programmed for extinction. This is the basic source of the Arab-Israeli conflict. To fix it, religions (and not just Hamas, as Israel’s foreign minister Tzipi Livni has it) have to be removed from the “equation”. And that will mean mental, legal, economic and if need be, physical force: if Gaza can be blockaded, so can others (including Israel).
Fortunately, after enough secularization, a solution exists to the entire mess: the establishment of a powerful Mediterranean Union.
Roger Cohen wrote an excellent essay on the Arab-Israeli conflict, in light of Israel’s assault on Gaza and Hamas [“Dominion of the Dead”, NYT and IHT, January 7, 2008]. In it Cohen argues, among other things, that the weight of dead history rules the conflict: “History is relentless. Sometimes its destructive gyre gets overcome: France and Germany freed themselves after 1945 from war’s cycle. So did Poland and Germany. China and Japan scarcely love each other but do business. Only in the Middle East do the dead rule.”
It may be rather the dominion of religions that is generating the hatred. From way back. (In P/S 6 below, we suggest the only viable long term solution, but religion will have to be defanged first.)
It is highly politically incorrect to attack religion, because a superficial reading of the republican constitution in Western secular states calls for tolerance. But TOLERANCE, IMPLICITLY, REQUIRES GOOD BEHAVIOR: the secular republic, a religion of its own, rules and just tolerates religious superstitions; it just tolerates them, no more, they have to behave.
Nevertheless, out of control religion obviously dominates the rest in the Middle East. It’s faiths over reason, and faiths rule. As faiths hate each other, and try to exterminate each other, it’s war for ever, as long as the final solution has not imposed itself.
Comparisons with past strife in Europe, and the present unification of Europe, have to be used very carefully, when talking about Israel and the Arabs. But they are revealing. Roger Cohen does not get into what made the European conflicts different from the Arab-Israeli conflict. We will do this presently, and it suggests how to get out of it.
One has first to look at the religious problem straight in the eye: Christianism and Islam are heresies of Judaism. Judaism is tribal. The God of Judaism is not nice (Jehovah obviously inspired the semi demented and certainly atrociously lethal, civilization shattering emperor Constantine). Christianism and Islam are universal (so Judaism is their natural enemy, except that they clearly originate from it, hence a self contradiction.)
Heresies hate each other all the more since the Bible, New and Old Testament, and Christian governmental practice, under the Roman empire, made clear that heretics should be executed (if possible by fire). Islam came after centuries of imperial Roman Catholic terror (which involved a “war against the philosophers”, book burning, mass murders and other civilization devolving atrocities; intellectuals and books had to flee to Persia!). Islam was fully inspired by them all.
(Meanwhile, in the West, the Franks had defanged Catholicism by 496 CE; the entire “Oriental Part” of the Roman empire, including Palestine and Arab lands missed that secular turn, and this is the root of the different fates of the “Pars Occidentalis” and the “Pars Orientalis”: the West became dominated by secular law and common sense, whereas the Orient slowly sunk under superstition and religious law, in spite of all those good books saved from Catholic burning.)
The Arab-Israeli conflict was built in the version of the Qur’an given to us by Caliph Uthman. In the Qur’an Jews are insulted, threatened, and apparently, threatened with death (whatever apologists of Islam who do not seem to have read the Qur’an in depth say). Interestingly, the Muslims inherited the hatred of Jews from the Christians (some are not going to like the word “hatred”; again, they should go back to the Qur’an, and read it, to learn that many pigs and monkeys are actually… Jews, put into this dismal state by God Himself). Threatened with death (once again!), the Jews/Israelis are in no mood to let their guard down.
So we cannot get out of the Arab-Israeli conflict as long as the religions are left to speak. Hamas, or Hezbollah, and most Arab states, and to a significant extent Israel, are all religious. To make matters worse, Hamas and Israel’s government have been democratically elected (that does not mean they are full democracies; they are not, because democracy requires full democratic institutions, and obedience to Universal Human Rights).
Let’s compare with Europe. Although sometimes there were extensive religious conflicts in Europe, they were not baked into the fundamental European conflict mix. Religions were incidental, incidental to, an excuse for, the fundamental power plays in Europe. On the grandest historical scheme, France, Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain belonged, sometimes for centuries, to the same country.
France, Germany and Poland were part of the same polity. Here are pell-mell samples of past facts: a lot of Germania was Roman, and all of Germany belonged to the Merovingian, and then Carolingian empires (which extended all the way to Poland); a British slave became empress of the Franks, a king of France married an Ukrainian princess, another a Danish princess, still another was elected king of Poland; France and Britain are actually the same country, more or less divided in two to this day (same with Germany), France was all involved in the Thirty Year war in Germany, Napoleon not only united Germany, but its Grand Army was greatly made of Germans, etc… So the fighting in Europe was inside a single civilizational system. Europeans all shared the same laws, religions and even language for centuries, or even millennia. They may have different languages now (again unified by Anglo-Normand, (aka “English”)), but they have the same cultural roots, they are all variants of the same civilization. The Greco-Romano-Frankish civilization.
In the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, the wars between France and Germany had clear rights and wrongs. For example the German universal health care system was clearly the best in the world, an inspiration for France. Germany had also the highest literacy rate in the world (about 100%).
But then, France was a democracy and a republic, with universal human rights, whereas Germany was not a republic, not a democracy, but a mild fascist system, a “Reich”. The “Reich”, then, not restrained by democratic checks and balances, became ever more fascist, and attacked all of Europe (August 1914). That did not work too well, so, propped by rogue American plutocrats, persisting in its erroneous ways, Germany became ever more fascist, racist and demented, until France and Britain declared war to it on September 3, 1939, to save democracy. By then many Germans had a feeling of doom, as they perceived they were not on the right side of right. Fascism in Germany was terminated in 1945, and many of the Nazis had come to realize, even before this, that they could not go on like that. There was a clash of civilization, and the good civilization won.
It’s politically correct to proclaim that there is no clash of civilization between Islam and the rest. But Islam was initially constructed as a war machine against Christianity and Judaism, just like Christianity was constructed as a war machine against all other religions (and exterminated them all, except Judaism, although it came close in the fifth century). Right now, there is at least a clash of religions.
Some of the wrongs between Israel and Islam are from way back: Christianity was built by oppressing the Jews (allusion to what Constantine and his successors did). Christians ejected Jews from Israel, and built a church on the great Jewish temple. Islam inherited this, but cranked it up to the next level, by making the oppression of the Jews not just official, but legal. They also built several Muslim mosques and “shrines”on the Jewish Temple Mount, perhaps to show they were several times as bad as the Christians. (By then the Franks were applying full Roman law again and had given the Jews their full rights back, in equality with Catholics.)
Islam is antidemocratic (it’s not just a religion but a system of government that loudly proclaim what Hitler called the “Fuehrerprinzip”, i.e., the Chief is always endowed by God with absolute right). Israel is also fundamentally anti democratic: to say that people from a particular religion (Judaism) have particular rights on a piece of land is an offensive tribal imposition.
And so on. Both sides are very wrong. If they keep on persisting in their erroneous ways, Weapons of Mass Destruction will set them right, or whatever dust is left. If one wants to help them out, one has to tell them their thousands truths mighty soon, in no uncertain terms, and apply enough carrots and sticks to change their behavior. Being just nice will not do it. They cannot be treated as adults. It is extremely clear in the case of Hamas, but, unfortunately, this applies to Israel too. Democracy can go wrong when its institutional roots are not deep enough: consider the Weimar republic.
To come back to the democracy-turned-fascist that misgoverned Germany with the anxious approval of the German people: democracy was imposed by force there in 1945, after killing more than 11% of the German population, and destroying the country (unfortunately). If France and Great Britain had attacked earlier, the outcome would have been better (but Great Britain, as the USA, had no army, and no inclination to treat Germany, or the Nazis, severely). In other words, force can work as a last resort. To break the rule of Islam and Judaism in the Middle East as political system is a necessity, and will happen, either by polite force, or massive destruction.
Patriceayme.com
P/S 1: To the European historical entanglement corresponded psychological entanglements. The Roman aggression, or, let’s say, civilizational push, made the rather pacific Germans ever more aggressive and militarized in return (we know this from archeological studies). In turn Rome became ever more fascist (as generals such as Marius became larger than previously authorized life). Thus, historically and ironically, in the great and long confrontation between Roma and Germania, Rome was advanced, but fascist, and Germania was primitive, but democratic and anti-sexist. After a millennium of this, the Germans (in the person of the elected king of the Franks Clovis) learned to become fascist (Clovis became Consul and exerted Roman imperator powers demonstrated in the summary execution of a follower during the “Vase de Soisson” incident, when Clovis imposed his Roman imperator power for all Franks to see). Meanwhile, transmogrified by German influence, the Romans became less sexist (they had at least one fully ruling and civilization forging empress, an “Augusta”).
P/S 2: Thus conflict creates mental entanglement, and right now, that means entanglement with hatred. And hatred plenty there will be, because Israel has already killed hundreds of apparently innocent small children in Gaza in the present offensive. Differently from the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazis, and in spite of Israeli efforts to hide it all, this is in full sight of the entire planet.
Now the entire planet, differently from the populace of Nazi Germany (from which the Nazi crimes against civilians were rather hidden, thanks to an undeniable Will to Ignorance of the German population, and heavy censorship), is confronted with having to decide to protest this, or not, and do something about it, or not. When children are dying, the weight is heavy. The whole planer is watching, and it is not deep in a jungle in Congo somewhere, out of sight, out of mind. There is only so much that the entire planet’s moral sense can take. At some point, only force will bring relief. But that means enforcing no more attacks, from any side. Neither from bulldozers, rockets, nor hate inspired documents, such as the literal, Uthman inspired Qur’an, or literal interpretations of tribal Judaism.
Listening to Israeli civilians watching a city being bombed, approving loudly, and insisting they would love to see it razed, and they don’t mind, because they feel “fascist” [sic! from a woman with reddish hair], shows, clearly that the human impulses that led to the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto are not restricted to Nazism. Israel is entering there an extreme danger zone, because it exists strictly at the goodwill of the EU and USA. It is hubris to feel otherwise.
P/S 3: Massively lethal force was used to remove religion from the political equation in Europe, all over Europe, killing millions [part of the process included the horrible religious wars of the 16-17 C].
By the time the US Constitution rolled out, the removal by force of religion from the equation was a given (so the USA does not have as much memory of the struggle to eliminate religion from politics). The first two US presidents put it thus in a joint document:”… As the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion…”[1796-97]. (The recent re-imposition of religion in the USA, is very recent, indeed, dating from 1956, and is, of course, an ominous decline, in part at the root of the present socioeconomic crisis, and Warren is its prophet. Amen.)
P/S 4: The British government accepted that France was not part of its dominion only in 1815 CE. So the “100 year war” (officially 1337-1453 or 1337-1558, when Calais fell back in official French hands) lasted nearly 500 years. It was originally a French civil war between the Plantagenet and the Valois (with right being on the British side). In 1940, the Prime Minister, Churchill proposed the (re-)unification of France and Britain as one country, but the idiotic French PM declined. Nowadays, British and French are European Union citizens, and are getting quickly more unified than ever.
P/S 5: The European Middle Ages has bad reputation as a period of strife, and it’s entirely unjustified. It is the rise of religious hatred in Europe that caused the strife, and that was at the end of the Middle Ages (and it was inaugurated by the Crusade against the Toulouse County). The religious wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth century had a base in political power struggles, but the mobs got really driven mad by various variants of the Judeo-Christian faith. This went on for two centuries, and killing children or infants was standard. Although religion got clamped down in the end, some of the losses were so high that hatred kept on going. A tradition of hating France appeared in Germany in no small reason because of the massive French intervention in the “Thirty Year War” of the seventeenth century, which was a religious war, probably the worst of them all. This is clear from the writings of the German philosopher Herder [the anti-Goethe], that had a great nationalistic, homicidal influence [all the way to Hitler]. Thus the huge wars that happened later (mostly propelled by Napoleonic and Prussian fascisms) were, at least partially, consequences of, and echoes from, the period of religious wars earlier on.
P/S 6: THE MEDITERRANEAN UNION AS SOLUTION:
Is a long term peaceful solution possible to the question of Israel? Sure. But one has to get the religions back in their cages underground first, and throw away the key.
Second, the solution will have to be imposed by force, say by the future imperial might of the (inchoating) Euro-Mediterranean Union. The idea would be to recreate basically the Roman empire (minus the crazy homicidal Christian rule of the late empire), with Israel as a precious asset, a larger version of the United Arab Emirates, a rich province profitable to its neighbors. By force, we mean legal force (preferably), a more muscular version of the force used in the EU construction.
The EU construction is made to make local antagonisms irrelevant, and local democracy, with full democratic institutions, a necessity. Turkey has been trying, for half a century to satisfy the EU requirements; several of the Latin and Mediterranean dictatorships (Greece, Spain, Portugal) became democracies to gain EU access. A full Mediterranean Union could duplicate the process, making the Israeli-Arab conflict irrelevant and obsolete. Fundamentally the Jews are just a tribe that was pushed out of Arabia, so, please grow up, and forget about your personal direct access to God, each of you.
It has been in the interest of the USA to support the European Union construction (because the EU extends to all of Europe the Franco-British democratic core, genitor to the USA, and, if nothing else, the USA will not have to come to the military rescue of France and Britain once again). For similar reasons, it is in the interest of the USA to push for the Mediterranean Union (a Sarkozy idea that has been mollified at this point). Ultimately, and naturally, the Mediterranean Union would get incorporated within the EU.
Cynics will wonder how many divisions the future Mediterranean Union has. Well, just wait. As it is, about half of the NATO force in Afghanistan is not American (there are even some Arab forces). NATO may be better used, negotiating and retreating in Afghanistan while redeploying around Israel to enforce the secular law (there is already an important UN force in Lebanon doing just that; first headed by the French, then the Italians, it has more than 12,000 soldiers, plus an important naval arm). enough of the utopia of two states peacefully side by side: the time of a greater force has come.
Tags:Europe, Gaza, Israel, Mediterranean Union, Religion
Posted in civilization., War | Leave a Comment »


Home Airplane Travel Hacks How Do Airlines Allocate Seats To Passengers?
You are getting married in just two months but that’s not all. Your best friend is getting married just two weeks after your wedding date. So what do you do? You gather your girlfriends, book a ticket to Ibiza and have the best (hen) party of your life.
You book 15 tickets with Ryanair from Birmingham to Ibiza and as the excitement keeps pumping you up, you enter your information for check-in. As soon as it’s done, the excitement turns into anger, rage, and disappointment.
Every single one of your friends from a group of 15 got the middle seat in a different row!
Even though this seems like almost impossible odds, it’s what happened to Steph Vickers and Faye Cutler, two best friends who were celebrating their joint hen-do.
The return flight cost them £220 per person and “I just thought it was really disgusting how much they expect you to pay, on top of what you’ve already paid, just to sit next to somebody. It’s unacceptable, really,” said Steph Vickers, the soon-to-be bride. She felt that the airline was trying to squeeze every single cent out of her pocket. It’s like if you choose not to pay for the seat, you would be at the mercy of the airline.
Most of us have had similarly bad experiences with airline seat allocations. And the first step in solving this problem is understanding how airlines categorize seat selections.
Airline seat selection category
The first thing to understand is that different airlines have different policies when it comes to seat allocation. The old economy, business, and first class tickets which signalized the comfort level of the flight are now exchanged for a range of different tickets which offer different perks and price tags. You knew what economy, business, and first class meant, but when you read “Family Plus package”, “Flexi Plus” or “LowFare+ticket,” you have no idea what they mean.
It becomes like a minefield of terms nobody understands.
But it can all be boiled down to these four categories:
Open seating — these are open seats which can be booked in advance and there is no charge for them. Passengers simply choose a seat for free. American airlines has this kind of service for standard seats.
Open paid seating — these are open seats which can be booked in advance for a premium (pay extra). This can sometimes be offered for free for frequent flyer elite members. Many airlines have cards which show you just how many miles you have flown with them and what your status with them is (silver, gold, platinum, etc.).
Seats which require certain parameters — There are multiple seats and rows which require certain parameters to be met. Exit rows, seats for passengers in wheelchairs, front (bulkhead) rows, seats for unaccompanied minors, and even rows specially designed for mothers with infants. The last example of a mother with infant concerns a cradle which can only be put in certain rows.
Seats that are held by the airline for airport check-in — These seats are usually somewhere between 10-20 percent of the total seats on the plane. Airlines keep these seats for the airport staff to allocate according to the special needs for that specific flight. Sometimes the seats need to be moved around, like with the example of people who need to sit together (elderly person and his caretaker) or families with kids.
Now that we understand the selection categories, let’s see how do airlines allocate seats to passengers.
Children, groups, and individuals
The procedure when it comes to children is that they need to be seated next to at least one adult. Even though this is the practice for most airlines and they do this seat allocation free of charge, there are others (Ryanair) where a parent needs to reserve (pay) a specific seat to have his child seated next to him.
Read more: Is it safe to travel via Turkish Airlines?
British Airways, Thomas Cook, TUI, and Virgin Atlantic all guarantee that children under the age of 12 will be seated next to one parent.
Air France and KLM do this for the entire families while American Airlines guarantees that children under 15 will be seated next to one parent.
Other airlines such as Flybe, Norwegian, and Jet2 say their systems seat children next to one parent “in 99% of cases” even though they can’t guarantee that it will happen.
Groups have different ways of sitting down together for free and the first advice is to make your check-in as soon as possible. If you do this as soon as check-ins open up for airlines, there is a big chance that your group will be seated together free of charge.
Most airlines open up their check-ins 24-48 hours before flights departure so be ready to online check-in your group as soon as you can.
There was a study done by the civil aviation authority (CAA) in December 2017 on the chances of being separated if not paying extra to guarantee seats by the airline. The chances of being separated from the group if you didn’t pay extra were between 12 and 18 percent for most airline companies (British Airways, EasyJet, Flybe, Jet2.com, Monarch Airlines, Thomas Cook, TUI Airways, Virgin Atlantic). The only two airlines that had a bigger percentage of separating groups which didn’t pay extra are Emirates with 22 percent and Ryanair with staggering 35 percent.
So if you are flying as a group and you haven’t reserved a seat for the group, most airlines won’t separate you in over 80 percent of flights. But if you are flying with Emirates or Ryanair, you might want to pay extra for those joint seat numbers.
Read more: 5 Rules to Getting the Best Seat on a Plane
The CAA’s research indicated that the passengers are not happy when they don’t sit together with their group. Almost half (46 percent) of respondents felt negatively toward the airline when they found out that they needed to pay more if they wanted a seat next to their group.
While we are at the CAA’s research, let’s take a look at what else they found out and what kind of regulations will they force on the airlines.
CAA’s review of allocation policies
Civil aviation authority (CAA) found in their research that most regulations regarding the allocation of seats are on the airlines themselves and that they vary considerably. Different regulations mean that people who are traveling with young children or the ones that have disabilities or reduced mobility should be seated next to the people who are accompanying them whenever possible.
But these rules don’t apply to everyone even though they should. For some people sitting together isn’t optional, it’s mandatory for them to even take a flight. The research showed that just over half of respondents reported that their airline informed them before they booked their flight that they would need to pay to make sure that their group sits together.
Ten percent said that they were informed about this after booking, while another ten percent said that they were never informed about having to pay extra to sit together.
There are a lot more problems in the lack of regulation when it comes to seat allocation and the CAA is bringing transparency into it. The key issues that require further investigation regard transparency of paying extra when there is a low chance of people actually being split up, passengers with reduced mobility, and the impact on families who are traveling with children— especially those younger than 12 years.
But all of this seat allocation which requires extra pay fills the accounts of airlines.
How much are airline seats worth? Around $5 billion a year
Airline ancillary revenue was around $82 billion worldwide in 2017. About 20 percent of all ancillary revenue comes from onboarding services which means that the airlines cash in around $16 billion worldwide from it.
CAA found out that the UK consumers collectively paid between £160-390m per year for allocated seats. Two-thirds were for seats that cost between £5 and £30 and further 8 percent paid more than £30.
Read more: Can You Take a Pen on a Plane?
It’s up to the civil aviation authority to figure out if these charges are fair and transparent and act accordingly.
We can just hope that their actions will be in our favor.
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Getting the Most From Your Ryanair Experience


Dr. James Dobson's September 2015 Newsletter
Those of you who received and read my monthly letter from July may remember that I said the Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage had vast implications beyond the issue itself. It was, in fact, about everything else. The focal point was actually about winning the culture war with one fell swoop. It also constituted a devastating broadside against the Christian faith.
Let me explain what I meant. I have said for more than 30 years that members of the gay and lesbian movement didn’t really want to marry in the traditional sense. Why would they choose to burden themselves with financial constraints and troublesome legalities, such as alimony and divorce courts? That was never the objective. What motivated many within the homosexual community was a plan to gain a foothold within the institution of the family in order to destroy it. Then, all of the benefits of traditional marriage would be granted without the entanglements that have accompanied it historically. That is what I have believed from the earliest days of the movement.
Well, on August 14th, 2015, a commentary written by Matt Barber appeared at barbwire.com that laid out the unvarnished truth. Read very carefully and you will understand the real meaning of this battle, which we have now tragically lost. You’ll see quotes from gay activists at the end of the commentary that leave nothing to speculation. You’ll also see a statement about me and the perspective I have long espoused. Barber writes:
It’s never fun to be proven right when warning of some impending wrong. Many in the pro-family movement have long stressed that the cultural Marxist left’s belligerent push for the judicial fiction that is “gay marriage” was never about gaining “equal access” to this biologically exclusive male-female institution, as they profess, but, rather, is, and has always been, about control.
While there are many layers to unfold, the almost instant explosion in government-sanctioned, anti-Christian extremism on display post Obergefell v. Hodges, confirms the poisonous three-fold agenda that underlies the “social justice” mob’s flowery “marriage equality” propaganda. That is: 1) the ultimate destruction of marriage, 2) forced affirmation of sexual deviancy under penalty of law, and 3) the eventual criminalization of Christianity.
Here’s the bottom line: Homosexual activists don’t want the white picket fence; they want to burn down the white picket fence. The endgame is not to achieve so-called “marriage equality,” but, rather, to render marriage relatively meaningless.
Masha Gessen, a lesbian journalist, activist and author, expressly admitted this fact in a 2012 interview with ABC Radio: “It’s a no-brainer that [homosexuals] should have the right to marry,” she said. “But I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist . . . Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there – because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie.”
Homosexual activist and pornographer, Clinton Fein, echoes Gessen’s candid sentiments: “Demand the institution [of marriage] and then wreck it,” he once wrote. “James Dobson was right about our evil intentions,” he quipped. “We just plan to be quicker than he thought.”
The goal is to water down marriage until marriage is pointless. And as evidenced by the burgeoning legal push for polygamous and incestuous “marriages” – even for the “right” to “marry” a robot – sexual anarchists are well on their way to achieving this goal.1
Barber’s chilling prediction makes it clear that the Supreme Court decision (Obergefell v. Hodges) is not an end in itself. It is the beginning – an open door to the entire gay and lesbian agenda coveted and lusted after since the 1960s or before.
Understanding the real motives of the movement helps us comprehend why the culture war has heated up and is being fought now on a thousand fronts. It also explains why Christian foot soldiers are losing almost every encounter. Let’s consider one such arena where our children are most at risk. Parents, beware!
Have you wondered why the effort to reinterpret gender has become so urgent, especially within the public schools? Reporter Todd Starnes explained this obsession in an article published by FoxNews.com.
One of the nation’s largest public school systems is preparing to include gender identity to its classroom curriculum—the idea that there is no such thing as 100 percent boys or 100 percent girls. Fairfax County Public Schools released a report recommending changes to their family life curriculum for grades 7 through 12. The plan calls for teaching seventh graders about transgenderism and tenth graders about the concept that sexuality is a broader spectrum. By the tenth grade, they will be taught that one’s sexuality “develops throughout a lifetime.”2
Starnes editorializes, “It sure smells like unadulterated sex indoctrination,” and says, “parents are freaking out.”
Peter Sprigg, of the Family Research Council, said this of the curriculum:
The larger picture is this is really an attack on nature itself – the created order. Human beings are created male and female. But the current transgender ideology goes way beyond that. They’re telling us you can be both genders, you can be no gender, [and] you can be a gender that you make up for yourself. And we’re supposed to affirm all of it.3
Other school districts are following a similar program. Planned Parenthood and Acalanes High School in Lafayette, California, are collaborating on their own version of gender revisionism. Their staff is using gingerbread-man-like diagrams of transgender expression, asking students if they are ready for sex.
The handout uses a depiction of the holiday cookie and storybook character to show students they can identify in their minds as a “woman, man, two-spirit, genderqueer, or genderless.” They can also express themselves sexually as “butch, femme, androgynous, gender neutral, or hyper-masculine,” and present their biological sex as “male, female, intersex, female self ID, or male self ID.”4
Consider the meaning of gender revisionism for a moment. It comes right out of the gay and lesbian playbook, by which children can be enticed to change their way of thinking about sexual identity. They are sitting ducks for adults who are in authority over them. More to the point, this curriculum is tailor-made to promote transgenderism as the “T” in LGBT.
What is alarming is that the notion of fluid sexual identity is not only racing though public schools. It is also finding expression in the wider culture since the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage. It has unleashed an avalanche of change.
For example, the State of California passed a bill that removed the words, “husband and wife,” from marriage laws. They will now be referred to as “spouse,” because anything related to traditional marriage is considered “outdated and biased.” The bill was recently signed by Governor Jerry Brown.5
Both California and Tennessee have changed the nomenclature in official documents. Mother and Father have become Parent 1 and Parent 2. Protests by parents in Tennessee created such a furor that the decision was reversed.6 California has dug in. 7
Sexual orientation in the U.K. has taken its toll. Half of young people there say they are not 100% heterosexual. 8
An article published in theaustralian.com is titled, “Transgender children: what’s behind the spike in numbers?” The author implies that parents should consider developing transgender characteristics as a goal to be achieved. 9
Bloomberg Business carried an article this summer titled, “The End of Boys and Girls: These Companies Are Going to Change How Your Kids Dress.” 10
NPR’s lead article in November 2014, reads, “For These Millennials, Gender Norms Have Gone Out of Style.” 11
The Wall Street Journal published a commentary on September 14, 2014, titled, “Heather Has Two Genders.” One of the main characters says, “I have a girl brain but a boy body.” The author of the commentary wrote, “It is not a wholly new thing for a transgender person to appear in children’s books, but soon they will abound.” 12 No doubt!
Gender revisionism is showing up elsewhere. You’ve probably read that Target Stores have de-genderized their stock. Now the toys they sell are “unisex.” Target is also de-genderizing products such as bedding, home decor, home entertainment and more. Speaking personally, I will not patronize a company that doesn’t recognize masculinity and femininity.
Let me tell you why I oppose this movement and why I consider it dangerous to the family and potentially devastating to children. That will take us back 40 years to the time when gender revisionism swept the nation. I wrote about it in my books, Bringing Up Boys and Bringing Up Girls, as follows.
It all started in the 1960s, when a small band of radical feminists began insisting that males and females were identical except for their reproductive apparatus, and that any uniqueness in temperament or behavior resulted from patriarchal cultural biases. It was a foolish concept that lacked any scientific support, except that which was flawed and politically motivated. Nevertheless, the campaign penetrated the entire culture. Suddenly, professors and professionals who should have known better began nodding in agreement. No doubt about it, the radicals said, males and females were redundant.
Parents, they claimed, had been wrong about their kids for at least five thousand years. The media ran with the notion and the word unisex found its way into the language of the enlightened. Anyone who challenged the new dogma, as I did in a 1975 book titled, What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew about Women, was branded as sexist or something worse.
The feminist movement then took a new and dangerous turn. Its leaders began trying to redesign the way children were being raised. Television talk-show host, Phil Donahue, and dozens of wanna-bes told parents day after day that their daughters were victims of terrible sexist bias and that their sons should be raised more like girls. There was great urgency to their message. “Things had to change immediately,” they said.
Donahue’s feminist girlfriend and later wife, Marlo Thomas, coauthored a best-selling book at about the same time titled, Free to Be You and Me, which the publishers described as, “the first real guide to nonsexist child rearing.” It urged boys to play with dolls and tea sets and told them they could be anything they wanted to be, including: [no kidding!] “grandmas and mommies.” The book featured dozens of poems and stories about role reversals, such as a mother nailing shingles on the roof, building new shelves in the family room, and working with cement. Meanwhile, father was in the kitchen making breakfast. Every effort was made to teach kids that dads made great moms and mothers were pretty tough dudes.
The book sold several million copies. And the gender revision movement had only just begun. Germaine Greer, author of The Female Eunuch, was even more extreme. She said the traditional family had “castrated women.” She believed mothers should be less nurturing of their daughters because to treat them gently and kindly would reinforce sexual stereotypes and make them more “dependent” and feminine. Greer also insisted that children are better off being raised by institutions rather than parents. It is difficult to believe today that her book offering those and similarly outrageous views also soared to the top of all the best-seller lists. That illustrates just how culturally dominant radical feminism was at that time.
Perhaps the most influential of the early feminists was Gloria Steinem, founder of the National Organization for Women and editor of Ms. magazine. Here is a sampling of her perspective on marriage and child rearing:
We’ve had a lot of people in this country who have had the courage to raise their daughters more like their sons. Which is great because it means they’re more equal. . . . But there are many fewer people who have had the courage to raise their sons more like their daughters. And that’s what needs to be done.
We need to stop raising boys to think that they need to prove their masculinity by being controlling or by not showing emotion or by not being little girls. You can ask [boys] . . . “What if you were a little girl?” They get very upset at the very idea they might be this inferior thing. They’ve already got this idea that in order to be boys they have to be superior to girls and that’s the problem. [Marriage is] not an equal partnership. I mean, you lose your name, your credit rating, your legal residence, and socially, you’re treated as if his identity were yours. I can’t imagine being married. If everybody has to get married, then clearly it is a prison, not a choice.” (Steinem married in 2000.) All women are supposed to want children. But I could never drum up any feelings of regret.
Think for a moment about the above quotes from Thomas, Steinem, Greer, and the other early feminists. Most of them were never married, didn’t like children, and deeply resented men, yet they advised millions of women about how to raise their children and, especially, how to produce healthy boys. There is no evidence that these feministas ever had any significant experience with children of either sex. Isn’t it interesting that the media (to my knowledge) never homed in on that incongruity? And isn’t it sad that these women were allowed to twist and warp the attitudes of a generation of kids?
Well, the unisex movement prevailed until the late 1980s when it fell victim, at last, to medical technology. The development of noninvasive techniques, such as MRIs and PET scans, allowed physicians and physiologists to examine the functioning of the human brain in much greater detail. What they found totally destroyed the assertions of feminists. Men’s and women’s brains looked very distinct when examined in a laboratory. Under proper stimulation, they “lit up” in different areas, revealing unique neurological processes. It turns out that male and female brains are “hardwired” differently, which, along with hormonal factors, accounts for behavioral and attitudinal characteristics associated traditionally with masculinity and femininity. It was these sexual benchmarks that feminists attempted to suppress or discredit, but they failed.
Still, you have to admire their ambition. They tried to redesign half of the human family in a single generation. Unfortunately, the ideas that were spawned in the seventies and perpetuated in a different form today are deeply ingrained in the culture, even though they have never made sense. Child-rearing practices have been forever changed. Many parents, for example, are reluctant or ill equipped to teach their boys how they are different from girls or what their masculinity really means. There is also a new source of confusion emanating from the powerful gay and lesbian agenda. Its propagandists are teaching a revolutionary view of sexuality called “gender feminism,” which insists that sex assignment is irrelevant. Genetics can be simply overridden. What matters is the “gender” selected for us by parents when we are babies, or the sex role we choose for ourselves later in life.
Mary Brown Parlee articulated this perspective in Psychology Today. “The sex ‘assigned’ to a baby at birth is as much a social decision as a recognition of biological fact.” Another feminist writer expressed it like this: “Although many people think that men and women are the natural expression of a genetic blueprint, gender is a product of human thought and culture, a social construction that creates the ‘true nature’ of all individuals.” Therefore, if we protect children from social and religious conditioning, people will be free to move into and out of existing gender roles according to their preferences. Taking that concept to its illogical conclusion, the feminists and homosexual activists want to dissolve the traditional roles of mothers and fathers and, in time, eliminate such terms as wife, husband, son, daughter, sister, brother, manhood, womanhood, boy, girl, masculine, and feminine. These references to sexual identity are being replaced with gender-neutral terms, such as significant other, spouse, parent, child, and sibling.13
I wrote those words in 2002, and yet here we are dealing again with the return of gay, lesbian and feminist propagandists. Unfortunately, “They’re BAAACK.”
Clearly, there are serious implications here for mothers and fathers. I urge you to protect your boys and girls from those who would seek to confuse their sexuality. Protect the masculinity and femininity of your children from political and social pressures that will bear down on them. Buffer them from a culture that has gone over the cliff.
It is also important for us as adults to understand our own sexual identities. If we don’t know who we are, our kids will be doubly confused about who they are. Any uncertainty, any ambiguity in that assignment must be seen as damaging not only to our sons and daughters but also to the long-term stability of society itself.
Finally, I urge you to base your teachings about sexuality on the Scriptures, which tell us, “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). Jesus, who was the first Jewish leader to give dignity and status to women, said, “Haven’t you read . . . that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’” and, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh” (Matthew 19:4-5).
That is the divine plan. It leaves no doubt that the Creator made not one sex but two, each beautifully crafted to “fit with” and meet the needs of the other. Any effort to teach children differently is certain to produce unrest in the soul of a child.
That is my message for September, when school children are reentering the classroom. This is the fifth letter I have written to you since May, when our culture began to splinter. It started with the attack on the institution of family and has gone haywire ever since. Those of us who hold to conservative Christian faith must work diligently and with passion to defend the things we believe. America needs all the help and prayers it can get at this time of turmoil.
Together, we can fend off the assaults from political correctness.
Family Talk survived the summer, thanks to the generosity of many of you. But September is here, and our needs continue. Thank you so much for being there for us.
James C. Dobson, Ph.D.
1 - http://barbwire.com/2015/08/16/the-gay-marriage-gauntlet-time-to-choose/
2 - http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/05/15/call-it-gender-fluidity-schools-to-teach-kids-there-s-no-such-thing-as-boys-or-girls.html
3 - http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/05/15/call-it-gender-fluidity-schools-to-teach-kids-there-s-no-such-thing-as-boys-or-girls.html?intcmp=latestnews
4 - http://www.christianpost.com/news/planned-parenthood-distributes-genderbread-person-sex-ed-leaflet-at-school-teaches-students-they-can-be- genderqueer-genderless-two-spirit-131115/
5 - http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/07/07/california-bill-replacing-words-husband-wife-in-marriage-law-signed-by-gov/
6 - http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/08/18/tennessee-courts-replace-mother-and-father-with-parent-1-parent-2.html
7 - http://allenbwest.com/2015/08/target-banning-gender-toys-look-what-california-wants-to-do-next/
8 - http:// www.ibtimes.co.uk/sexual-orientation-uk-half-young-people-say-they-are-not-100-heterosexual-1515690
9 - http://www.theaustralian.com.au/tablet-t3/tablet-t3/transgender-children-whats-behind-the-spike-in-numbers/story-fnm89pgn-1227445900272
10 - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-14/gender-neutral-kids-clothing-startups
11 - http://www.npr.org/2014/11/30/363345372/for-these-millennials-gender-norms-have-gone-out-of-style
12 - http://www.wsj.com/article_email/meghan-cox-gurdon-heather-has-two-genders-1410728850-lMyQjAxMTA1MDEwMzExNDMyWj
13 - James C. Dobson, Bringing Up Boys (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2001), 13-17.
This letter may be reproduced without change and in its entirety for non-commercial and non-political purposes without prior permission from Family Talk. Copyright, 2015 Family Talk. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Printed in the U.S.A.
Dr. Dobson Responds to the Supreme Court Ruling on Same Sex Marriage: