ossie

• 19:14 @naranonorg new worldwide online group at www.naranongrouponline.com #

nebris

Note: This is an extremely rough first draft.

~From a legal and an epistemological stand point, The Pentavalence is a Religion as it emanates from Revealed, and not Empirical, Knowledge, and it is meant to operate in a religious manner. However, we in The Temple of The Pentavalence view it as a Metaphysical Operating System and, in part, this is why.

The entire concept of Religion has itself has become problematic. Religion almost always implies Dogma, a fixed ideology that says, “The world is this way. Period!” and for a modern technological civilization, that is really a non-starter. Very few things ever stay 'this way' for long in such a civilization. And the Religions that now dominate our world clash with that paradigm more and more every day and with steadily increasing violence.

The problems the JudeoChristLamic Father/God Cults have with our modern technological civilization are fairly obvious. All three are the 'metaphysical operating systems' of Bronze Age desert nomads ruled by tribal Patriarchs. Their world view is narrow and provincial and their God is a Small God, one confined, at the very least, to this world alone.

Confronted with the modern scientific reality of The Universe, He is positively Lilliputian. For His faithful, such a situation evokes Fear, then Hate, and finally, Rejection.

There are a growing number who consider Atheism to be the ideal replacement for Religion, but it too says, “The world is this way.”, though the “Period!” usually goes unspoken. Plus Atheism has two major failings, both fatal from my point of view.

First, as presently constituted, Atheism is essentially reactive, specifically a rejection of the JudeoChristLamic Father/God Cults, and every one of its tenants seem couched as a direct rebuke of said. That tends to allow the Father/God Cultists to frame all the debates and every time.

Second, Atheism also does not in any way, shape, or form, address the existential questions of Human Purpose and Existence in a vast and seemingly indifferent universe. It is utterly cold and denies the need for Spiritual solutions that Humans have sought ever since we could form the concept.

Hinduism and Buddhism contain many useful concepts, but each has its own crucial limitations.

Hinduism is really a 'cultural religion', that of India and of its people. It 'exports' poorly. I have watched Westerners practice Hinduism and, to me at least, it always seemed a bit embarrassing, while the experience of Indian practice is usually very moving. That latter gives me an understanding of why some non-Indians would be drawn to Hinduism, but that is akin to white folks wanting to be 'black'.

True Buddhism is essentially Nihilist, its real practice requiring a total rejection of The Material and as such it must be a rejection of any modern technological civilization, which is by its very nature is ferociously materialist. Buddhism can suit individual practitioners quite well, but is basically unsuited for a civilization. I do not include the types of Buddhism where The Buddha has been remade as a 'god'. I consider them 'apostate'.

Modern Paganism is rather a mish mash and barely any kind of an 'ism' at all and that in and of itself makes it unsuited as the Spiritual Path of an entire civilization. Plus, it too is deeply provincial.

Pagans - at least those that I know - are humans, so their Paganism is anthropocentric. They are generally born of two genders, so their Paganism is dualistic. They live on Earth, so their Paganism is geocentric. And the large majority of them here in the United States are culturally - and often racially - European, so their Paganism is Eurocentric.

But, as with Hinduism and Buddhism, Paganism contains a number of useful concepts and, like those, we of The Temple have incorporated many of them.

So, in barely five hundred words, I have just dismissed the world's five major religions and two of the most significant contemporary philo-religious movements. All I can say is, “That is what I do.” And, yes, I did say that somewhat smugly. That is also 'what I do'.

Now, I shall show you the whys and wherefores that have led me to make the above statements in such a fashion....

Her Prophet Explains: "The Introduction"

nebris

Michael Varian Daly says, "China is nowhere as stable as the Old Men in Beijing would like the world to believe. Their 'one crisis too many' is just over the horizon and it will fracture China into several pieces. There will still be a large and powerful 'rump China' left when the dust settles, but not the seemingly unstoppable colossus that exists now."

A devastating earthquake isn't all that Chinese peasants endured, an HBO documentary reveals.

May 07, 2009|MARY McNAMARA, TELEVISION CRITIC LA Times

"China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province," which premieres on HBO tonight, is a heartbreaking example of what can only be called "Testimonial Television." Almost a year after an earthquake in central China killed an estimated 70,000 people -- 10,000 of them children -- there is nothing to find among the rubble except sorrow and rage.

As all over Sichuan Province, schools filled with students collapsed while other buildings remained standing, grief-stricken parents demanded help from the government, help that never came. First emergency teams were routed away from smaller towns and villages where parents could hear children crying for help from beneath the debris. A fortunate few were able to actually dig their children out, others eventually found the corpses of their children (and were told to bury them themselves) but many were left with only the heaps of brick and dust to serve as a mass grave.

Unflinchingly, Jon Alpert and Matthew O'Neil, who began filming weeks after the catastrophe, revisit that horrible day, capturing the makeshift memorials, the backyard graves, the bottomless grief of parents -- many of whom lost their only child.

Sadness quickly turned to anger and from that a slender thread of narrative emerges. As parents comb through the remains of the schools, it becomes clear that many were built with little attention to safety codes. In some places, bricks are merely piled on bricks, with the merest film of mortar; in others structural reinforcement seemed suspiciously slight. In another town, a school was turned into a warehouse and all the students moved to another building, which later collapsed -- but the school-turned-warehouse stood.

The government's only response is a payment of $317 per child killed.

Incensed, a group of parents march from the town of Fuxin, where 127 children died, 70 miles to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan.

Along the way, police try to stop them and a party official tries to dissuade them, at one point falling to his knees, saying that he is ready to listen. But the parents tell him they are past the point of talking. (Ultimately, the government offered parents $8,000 per child lost, but only if the parents agree to be publicly silent about the event.)

It is not an easy film to watch -- the number of deaths is horrifying to contemplate, the images of the ruined schools shattering to behold. Nor does it offer much hope in terms of change or even general acknowledgment of what actually happened to these people, most of them peasants.

As they hold the pictures of their beloved children, the participants of "Tears of Sichuan" seem to be asking simply for acknowledgment. That their children lived, that their deaths might have been prevented, that the government should make certain such a thing does not happen again.

nebris

'Body sold' to Russia kebab shop

Police in Russia have arrested three homeless men suspected of killing a man, eating part of the body and selling other parts to a kebab shop.