Blood suckers and dirty F*
I don't really know where this post is going to go but I have a picture of a mosquito and a title I think is interesting so, let's see. I told you I was going to play around a little more and experiment with my content at times so I guess that this will qualify. A free write that has no beginning idea. I am game.
It is obvious from the image itself that this is going to have nothing to do with mosquitoes as to me, that is pretty lame although, I do feel for people who live in countries that suffer from mosquito born diseases like Malaria and Dengue. If there is a God, he is one cruel bastard considering the ubiquity of the suffering he is seemingly willing to inflict on non-believer and believer alike.
It is interesting that the most religious countries, those who believe the most strongly in some kind of magical being who grants their wishes, punishes the wicked and has designated a paradise for them in the afterlife, are often among the most violent and oppressive in the world.
Kiss the cross hanging around their neck as they steal a wallet and shoot someone dead in the street. Face Mecca on a beautiful handmade carpet asking for grace, before getting onto a bus filled with women and children and detonating an explosive vest. It is not the religion to blame, it is the people who manipulate words for their own ends and those they brainwash to enact their wishes. No matter what "God" may say in any of the books, the will of man is what triumphs in behavior. And man's will is one of greed and control.
Strip away all of the layers of culture, religion, tradition and the psychological and emotional veils we protect our egos with and, we are all the same. The only thing that changes is our position in time and space. Add the layers back one by one and the divisions go beyond that time and space and form gaps that polarize us and invisible barriers that stop us from ever uniting. At the core we are no better than the next but we choose to only evaluate on the superficial.
We look at others through our warped lenses of reality and think that we know what is valuable to judge them upon, how powerful they are, pretty, rich. Do they smile or frown or do they make us feel good about ourselves or, do they shine a light into the crevices we do not want to recognize, we hide from the world. Our fear of exposure is immense, even though what will be exposed is rarely worth mentioning. It is the ego at play trying to aggrandize itself.
We hear the words of others, see there actions and when what they say and do encroaches upon what we have, what we think we own and most importantly, who we think we are, we defend ourselves as if attacked, even if the words were not directed at us. We feel judged by events that are not personal because we identify with them personally. How can we not, we are human, we know no better, we have no better tools with which to evaluate the world than our own experience.
Seeing is believing yet when it comes to our own indiscretions, we are more than willing to turn a blind eye, deny that it is us at fault, that what we believe ourselves to be is not the truth at all, we are something different. We want to believe that it is our position that is correct for if it isn't why would we follow this path, why would we think we are right at all. It is not us that can be wrong, only them.
There are monsters in the world believing they are saviors, saviors being treated as monsters. There are the most cruel walking among us with smiles on their faces while planning a way to slit our throats and take what we have worked so hard for and there are there are Kings peddling on the streets as people pass by, paying them no heed or, treating them even worse.
The lives we live are intertwining branches of the greatest complexity that we can know but the blood that flows through us all is the same and the vein from which it has been delivered, singular. Those that feast on the blood of others are dining on their own flesh and the blade driven into the stomach of a neighbor is a wound in the self. The nervous system is shared and unifies us all and in time all will either degrade or grow together.
Is this where you thought this post would lead? Does it raise any questions? Did you learn anything from it? Do you see yourself reflected? Do you feel judged? Are you oppressed by it? Are you empowered? What is it worth to you?
You are free, just like me, no matter the pain endured.
How deep are you actually willing to dive?
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]
If I had a Steem for every time a girl has hid something from me she thought I would judge her on to find out it was something ridiculous no normal person would really care about, I'd have a lot more Steem now.
It is amazing how important people find things that are so irrelevant. What I have also found is that often, the things people try to hide are things that make them more attractive, the little quirks.
Maybe, but people do hide things that they are smart to hide, too. I've had a few experiences of people trying to hide things from me. One such example was when a tenant of ours was in a tricky situation the exposure of which she feared could lead to us throwing her out. That fear was not warranted. But she was a very rude person which is why I found the contortions she had to get into to avoid exposure rather amusing. Certain suspicious behaviors caused me to do a little Open Source Intelligence on her and the pieces of information led to my being able to deduce the complete picture of her predicament. My suspicions were later confirmed in conversations with the neighbours among other people. I will not discuss the details on a public blockchain.
There's a lot of blur between religion and tradition. Those that are truly religious and truly believe generally don't harm others as they fear the consequences in the next world.
Then there's those that practice the religion because the physical acts of practicing are embedded in their cultures, but they do it more like routine
Indeed and they are near impossible to tease apart. For me personally, I think that I can live a moral life without tying myself to a doctrine although it is likely that the doctrine is ingrained in various ways. I also think though that a moral view would be discovered without the impression from society, although, that would be very hard to test for.
I'm sure you can and probably are living a moral life without religion.
I do find that the word "doctrine" has almost come to have a negative connotation these days which is unfortunate. It's really all about a higher purpose that some believe in.
Those that are not religious often find the same properties in mundane things, such as "religiously" following a football team, or devoting your life to your employer (probably not as common these days).
I also think that religion serves a purpose as a moral yard stick. Morals today are different than morals in yesteryear and morals in the future will be different from today.
There are things that society accepts today that would be reprehensible even just 100 years ago, so i fear what is reprehensible today that would be deemed acceptable in a hundred years.
Religion, in theory, is supposed to stop that kind of thing from happening, but unfortunately human imperfection still plays a part and is often what taints religions.
Well that escalated quickly 😁
Thankfully it isn't the 70s and I don't always have to beat around the bush ;)
Sir, i really like your write up about how humans treat themselves and the environment at large. Humans are just not satiable and will always judge others and not themselves in any way. This is an inspiring and changing post, to those who read this, change, the way the world is right now is not so good, we as humans should play our part by changing our attitudes.
The world is naive and soft. these types or "religious" sects can do whatever they want. The too political correct protect them from harm but are creating more harm. It is easy to hide things if one wants too. Religion has a lot to answer for and I have no pity on them. I would give my life happily to save others and I am not looking for virgins. I can't turn a blind eye to things so in a crime ridden country I find it rather unfair on me.
So few carry the burden.
I think a lot of this comes back to self-preservation. If someone else does something risky or ill-advised, it's bad. If we personally do it, we are strong for having performed the daunting feat.
At the core, we are all selfish individuals. It is only time and circumstance that teaches us how beneficial it is for us all when we work together towards the same interests. I wonder if scientists will find that there is a gene (or set of genes) directly related to how much empathy each of us can exhibit. If there are characteristics that can be identified at the genetic level where some are more likely to be leaders, more likely to be teachers, more likely to be a good mother/father, more likely to be a good soldier .. and so on.
Discussing this reminds me of the way people are categorized in the Divergent series. If you haven't read the books (or seen the movies), they are definitely interesting from a social aspect. I'd suggest reading the books, but that's because I tend to believe that books are better than movies or TV shows about the same story.
People are complex creatures, and I don't think we've found the answers to everything that needs to be answered to understand ourselves. Maybe with the advent of AI and machine learning, there will be new medical disocveries that change the world for the better. One can only hope that AI doesn't result in the Terminator apocalypse 🙂
I would say that there is likely to be some genetic indicators as to potential for a vocation, similar to genes for height could be used as a filter for basketball players. Not sure how accurate it would be overall though :)
The future of gene editing could be fantastic or, absolute terror.
I'm leaning towards terror due to the capitalistic nature of the world...
Interesting. As I said to you in comment before, I reserve myself the luxury of not being easily offended by anything. I also told you that I am a religious man and that I am saddened by how people have twisted religion & the bible in my faith to suit their own warped agenda's.
The God I believe in asks of me to respect those around me, to lend a hand when needed, to honor my parents, wife and child if I ever have one, to work hard and honest, to be humble, to be forgiving, to be kind, to care for the world I have been lent and my body, to do unto others as I would have them do unto me and to stand up to evil when confronted with it. These are the things I believe.
These are good things I believe. I don't mind what others believe, how they live, what they say, but then who gives those people the right to shove what they believe down my throat when I am extending them the respect of not doing that to them?
There are many monsters disguised as saviors and their lies are hurting many, hence my rants of late and I feel the judgement on me for having my own opinions and voicing them while still being willing to allow others to do the same whether we may agree or not.
There are many mosquitos these days in many different forms sucking the civilized freedom from those who have toiled and sweated for what they want.
I want to follow a path of working hard, being honestly rewarded for it and living safe and peaceful and having said that I am also prepared to stomp out whatever evil may come to tamper with that.
Do you think me wrong?
Why does one need a God for these things?
This is the problem perhaps as people extend their path to take ownership of external or, their belief systems which can be criticized without doing harm. I see if one is offended for having their beliefs questioned, they don't believe strongly enough and should reexamine their position.
I am much too uneducated to know right and wrong for another.
I hear what you're saying. I don't judge people regardless of what they believe and am not offended by what they may think of what I believe. I simply want the same courtesy I am willing to extend to others to be respectfully applied to me. No person on this planet wants to be oppressed in any way, so why are there people out there thinking they can decide who has more of a rights than others, whose religion must be dominant, whose culture, whose ideals?
I simply want to live peacefully without anyone trying to force me into a place from where a very angry thing will come back at them.
Strip away all the civilized facade of any man, and at its core lies a psychopathic beast that will eat its own children for survival. Man are wonderful creatures, when his belly is full, the temperature in his cave is controlled, and the grime on his skin are washes away. Take away his creature comforts, and he transforms into a vicious animal fit only to be put down like a rabid beast.
Without external control in forms of sociocultural traditions, religious taboos, sociopolitical legality, men would be eating eat other. Civilized society is only possible through social control; remove sociocultural and religious controls, then a state is left only with the obtuse enforcement of legal controls. Men need to be governed, as men have no inherent moral compass, except the one provided by society - religion, tradition, and politics. Of the three sources of moral fiction, religion is most elegent, as it invokes the supernatural and politics the least efficient as the only legitimacy derives from a state's capacity for force application.
Without God, all atrocity is permitted. Even if there were no God it would be necessary to invent Him.
All the same.
Why are the most godless societies on Earth also the most civilized?
Right . . . because Stalinist USSR, Maoist China, and Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge are so much more civilized than the kingdoms of Christendom. You and I have different definition of civilization. Take a glance at atheist Europe and their path towards sociocultural suicide. I prefer the theocracy of Iran infinitely over the sad, pathetic sociocultural chaos that is Europe.
Ok. I should've phrased it more carefully. I quote you:
You claim that religion is the most effective protection against people turning against each other like psychopaths.
That claim is what I question. While some non-religious societies were hellish totalitarianisms, there are others that are the most peaceful societies that have ever existed that have very low levels of violence and any sort of crime. I'm talking about places like the Nordic countries, of course. Now, you can say that the Nordic peoples of today are too soft and complete wussies for allowing Islamic barbarians or other conservatives like that to enter their countries en masse and disproportionately increase the level of violence and primitivism there. But you cannot simultaneously accuse the Nordics of being psychopathic brutes. That would be illogical and it is a clear indication that there is a hole in your model of the world there.
Societies that are the least religious have varied a great deal in how civilized a manner their members behave toward one another. There is a clear positive correlation between the level and prevalence of violence in a society and how religious its members are.
In short, I think the assertion that religion is an important factor in keeping people from being at each other's throats is flat out wrong.
You mistake the underlying argument regarding the necessity of religion. Morality, like culture and nationality, is a tenuous fiction that melts into aether without constant and vigilant maintenance. Without invoking the divine/supernatural, morality has no legitimacy nor force to regulate man's inhumanity towards other men. Despite the lunacy of humanist drivel, men are not inherently endowed with rational tendencies or ethical sensibility. Civilized behaviors must be beaten into the stultifying minds of these dregs, whether via religious indoctrination or via pains of political enforcement, in order for a society to function. Religious indoctrination is a more elegant solution compared with the concentration camps of atheist police states in keeping the muck from eating themselves.
The Nordics rampaged across the continent of Europe, raping and pillaging with abandon, maintaining their clannish divisions, until they embraced a new religion that gave them some semblence of unity. There is a reason for the British continuing to wish for our guests to be "tall, dark, and handsome" - ie not Nordics.
Much of Nordic wealth derives from their continual rape of the Continent well into the 1600s with the Gustav Adolphus pillaging Northern Europe during the Thirty Years' War. The modern atheist Nordics pacified their turbulent dregs by essentially bribing them into submission with their socialist policies. Even without their policy of sociocultural suicide by importing incompatible muck from the Middle East and Africa, the Nords would have gone the way of the Soviets - bankrupt financially, morally, culturally.
If you want to observe the civility of those unrestrained by religion or cultural taboos, just walk about any Chinatown and witness the atrocious behaviors of the godless muck that flitter about that cesspool. You may also want to read Peter Hitchen's account of the riots in the former USSR, when the monthly allotment of vodka dole failed to deliver.
Allowing others to be free when they have different core beliefs is rare indeed. What is at our core... seems to depend on childhood learning. If you were raised by my parents and I by yours... would we now have different beliefs and priorities?
I think we definitely would have different views of life which then speaks to the truth of what beliefs are.
I hear people blame religion for many of the world's problem, like terrorism for example. But the reality is that we humans are able to turn things upside down and we've done that with religion and so many other things.
I'm a Christian and I believe in God, regardless if you believe in him or not, the fundamentals of the gospel are to benefit humanity, but I've people use this same gospel for a selfish reason, to fuel their rage and misgivings.
Humanity needs fixing, but sometimes I wonder if we are indeed redeemable
Humanity needs educational experience, not indoctrination into a narrow view of what life should be.