American Skin (41 Shots)
June 16 2000
Is it a gun? /Is it a knife? /Is it a wallet? /This is your life /It ain’t no secret /It ain’t no secret my friend /You can get killed just for living in your American skin /41 shots /41 shots /41 shots /41 shots…
Opening up a 10-night stand at Madison Square Garden in New York City, Bruce Springsteen unveiled his new song again after an Atlanta show on June 4, which details how and why an unarmed black man was killed by 19 bullets of 41 shots fired by four New York cops.
Lyrics of his another song “Point Blank” and telling the story of a mother warning her child about the dangers of the street have ruffled the feathers of Mayor and Police Union labeling Mr. Springsteen a “fucking dirtbag” who tried to make money off our backs
The show was a sold-out performance, despite the powerful police union called for the boycott, and half way through the song a minor commotion erupted when 40-ish, lone, well-dressed man tried to approach the stage flipping the double birds.
Promise me if an officer stops you’ll always polite /Never run away and promise mama you keep your hands in sight…
Well, they shot you point blank/ You been shot in the back.
The New York City is the most economically polarized city in the United States and the social tensions among highly diversified residents are extremely high.
Rudolph Giuliani, the police, the Wall Street robber barons, the liberal establishment and media exist in one world; Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima (the Haitian sodomized with a toilet plunger by cops in the police station in 1997) Patrick Dorismond (a 26-year-old black security guard shot to death in March this year in confrontation with a band of plainclothes cops) and millions of working class and poor people live in another world.
The following article was posted in many digital forums after the Amadou Diallo trial has ended with not guilty verdict.
Brutal Verdict: It is a crime to be poor
March 2, 2000
A young black African American was coming home from his work in Harlem, the New York City, with his brother, when an unmarked police car rolled up to them, a squad of the plainclothes cops barged in on them with guns out, and yelled at them: Hit the floor!
They put their face on the floor obediently as if the dog used to follow the master’s order.
At first, he has had this clenched feeling in his stomach when he and his brother were searched and frisked by a bunch of swaggering white cops and then let go home without any charges or apology, but gradually, he has gotten used to dealing with the everyday indignity of simply being either colored or indigent and treated as the perp thrown up against the wall.
**I would like to ask everyone to place oneself into this black man’s shoes for a few moments and continue to read my article.
1. the Amadou Diallo case
Four white cops from the Street Crime Unit of New York Police were acquitted of all charges on the shooting death of 22-year-old unarmed black immigrant who was killed in the vestibule of his residence a year ago. He was shot at with a fusillade of 41 bullets hitting him 19 times like a firing squad-style execution. Two cops released all of 16 bullets from his handguns and other two cops 5 and 6 each, and it appeared that they had kept the shooting while the target was already collapsed on the floor.
The only reason this college-bound young black man was killed like a dog was apparent that he had lived in the crime-infested area as a black, ventured out to buy some snack in the middle of the night, and the four cops who were following the standard police procedure that was sanctioned by the authority had reasonable doubts that he was armed, dangerous and taking out his gun from the back pocket.
The jury verdict was based on the assumption that the police had acted on self-defense and did not intend to kill the man accepting the testimonies from the tear-jerking policemen. However, the total exoneration would land on pratfall in the realm of the social justice when you take into account the universal reality of the urban life in the United States that there are rampant criminalization of the poor and racial profiling of black and Hispanic group by the law enforcement agencies. The history of abuse and the brutalization of black people by police and other law enforcement authorities are as old as the United States.
Suppose Mr. Diallo were a fair-skinned resident in the white-dominant neighborhood for nightly promenade, no cops would dare to intervene his leisure of nightly constitutional…that is, the definition of the reasonable doubt turns 180 degree opposite direction from where black Diallo would face in the Harlem or at worst scenario he might be charged for loitering (misdemeanor).
Even though one could not ignore the fact that cops had used the excessive, reckless and deadly forces on an unarmed man, the basic problem here is the policing philosophy of the Juiliani Administration’s zero-tolerance movement against any crime from graffiti artists, fare-jumpers to homeless person.
The hair-trigger cops armed with high-powered 16-round weapons are hired, paid, trained, encouraged, and ordered by the ruling establishment to sic on the poor, black and Hispanic minorities in order to defend its system and privileges. The police commissioner, Mayor and other political establishment could have been labeled un-indicted co-conspirators if these cops were found guilty because they were simply carrying out the job as the members of street crime unit.
The 40,000 forces of NYPD are well aware that they, as the gatekeepers of the society, would be protected from the prosecution when they follow the standard police procedure they were told and the verdict of acquittal has proved its validity.
2. Federal Civil Rights Prosecution
The black activists called for the intervention of the Federal Government on Mr.Diallo case that the police have violated the civil rights of the victim, and many people would bring forth the Rodney King case in Los Angeles a few years ago.
First of all, the Feds do not bring the charge of civil right violation unless there is strong evidence to win the conviction and the defendants ‘willfully’ deprived a person of a right protected by the Constitution. And in Mr. Diallo case, there is not enough evidence that the police went out to kill him intently and willfully as in Rodney King case the cops were openly admitting the beating after the state trial, and most importantly the prosecution had the videotapes of the police brutality.
Also the Feds had no choice but to file the civil right charge on King case because the riot broke out after the not guilty verdict of the state trial.
Time has changed since L.A riot and other insurrection against the establishment by the black militant organizations and some activists, and they were marginalized and uprooted from their urban communities and one in three black men between ages of 20 and 29 were under some form of criminal justice control (in prison, jail, parole or probation) in recent year.
The black activists in New York area are fully aware that the police have been ready to harshly deal with any unlawful demonstration or disturbance and no black men except some hotheads could afford to lose their day’s wages being in the clink, and therefore they are going to Washington D.C to bring political pressure on Mrs. Clinton who’s campaigning for the Senate seat in the New York State. Nevertheless, the chances of Feds involvement are very slim because she can not afford to lose the support of powerful police union and their Irish members’ votes in the region.
3. The Criminalization of the Poor, Black and Hispanic minorities
According to official figures, the United States already has the highest number of inmates in the world, followed by China and Russia. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the US has a quarter of all prisoners, 2 million out of 8 million. In addition, another 3.6 million Americans are currently on probation or parole.
The US incarceration rate, 672 out of every 100,000 is second only to Russia. By comparison, France imprisons 90 people for every 100,000.
It should be noted specifically that there has been sharp and disproportionate increase in the prison inmates of black youths from the inner cities, even though blacks make up only 13 percent of the US population, the half of 1.2 million state and federal prisoners are blacks.
What the majority of the 2 million prisoners have in common is that they come from the working class and the poorest sections of society.
The fact that 2 million Americans are behind bars is not a major concern for some law and order people in Washington, but rather it is a sign of progress. They attribute the high prison population to falling crime rates and the principal reasons for punishment is deterrence supporting more tough sentencing laws, such as three strikes and you are out, the trying of juveniles as adults, and death penalty.
When you are poor and black or Hispanic charged with the capital crime, you are mostly getting the death sentence because you end up with young, inexperienced and overworked public defender who often dozes at the trial. Nevertheless, when you were a celebrity, entertainer, athlete, or affluent (OJ factors), a fleet of high-powered lawyers gets you off the hook handily even though you are black or Hispanic.
Since the Supreme Court has reinstated the death penalty in 1976, more than 600 inmates have been put to death in the United States while about 3,000 inmates are waiting on the death row, and 85 people have been found to be innocent and released from the death row. Only 38 states among 50 states have the death penalty on the law books and polls show that a strong majority of Americans still favors it.
In the state of Illinois, the governor recently halted all executions in the state, the first such moratorium in the nation citing that 13 men has been sentenced to death since 1977 for crimes they did not commit, and the Bills that would halt executions are pending in 12 states citing concerns of racial disparity in sentencing. Florida reversed 18 death row sentencing, and in Texas where Governor Death (GW Bush) have signed over 100 death warrants since his inauguration and there are 458 inmates awaiting execution, a Federal judge ordered the release of a death row inmate who’s conviction was thrown out of the court last year.
It is everybody’s guess how many innocent people were put to death in the US history and take a few moment imaging that you were one of them waiting to be hanged because you can not afford to hire Mr. Alan M Dershowitz.
4. Conclusion
In the democratic society, every man has the right to expect the police are protecting him and not shooting at him, as one of the black activists made the Diallo case in plain and simple language.
When the police, as in a classic example of one hand giving and other taking away, entertain the affluent community with the environment of physical safety while brutalizing the indigent minority people with beating, torture and shooting in order to maintain such safety of the communities, there would be no community relationships in the society and each group starts to erect the wall with barbed wire and the gate with the private security guards.
And the ambience that furnishes to bifurcate the American society is already prevalent in everywhere, as in New York region the poor coop up in several pockets of cockroach-infested Harlem, Bronx and Brooklyn and the affluent build the fortified gated villages in the suburbs of long Island, upstate and the beaches in the vicinity.
The study based on the most recent Census Bureau data demonstrates that the United States are riven by class divisions between the low-income and high-income families that are growing increasingly acute and by gap between the middle-income and the high-income families that are wider over two decades.
President Clinton boasted in his state union address about his achievement in the creation of 20 million jobs during his presidency and a black waiter agreed with him sarcastically: Yea, he’s absolutely right. I’ve got three jobs and I still can’t pay my rent. The benefits of the strong economy have done little to correct the income disparity between the haves and the have-nots, and the richer grew richer and the poor grew poorer during Clinton presidency on the contrary.
The real beneficiary of the profit and stock market boom has been the wealthiest 20 percent of the population (in a more concentrated fashion, the super wealthiest 5 percent). For remaining 80 percent, income has largely stagnated or declined.
As usual, no one in the media or political elite would discuss these facts with any degree of honesty, and the issues of the social inequality, which lead to expose the real façade of the American political and economic system, plutocracy or oligarchy, not democracy or free market system, are barely raised by any of the candidates of the establishment parties in the political debates of the 2000-year elections.
Monday, February 25, 2008
A Role of the Corporate Media
A Role of the Corporate Media
Keeping the people bewildered, ignorant, and powerless
February 23, 2001
“Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism.”
Most people would probably and readily accept the popular image of the news media as aggressive public watchdogs and champions of democracy that they claim to present an objective presentation of events.
However, the close examination on media, whether in print, radio, or Television, would easily provide the people that the self-image of the media is about as true to life as a children’s fairy tale.
Walter Lippmann, a grand mufti of the American journalism, mentioned in his manufacturing of consent in the 70s that the public is such ignorant and bewildered herds that they must be put in its place, the interested spectators of action and not participants
As in the case of mass hysteria about spectator sports play, the public become more passive, obedient, non-participants, non-questioning, easily-controlled, and disciplined, because you are not doing it, but watching somebody doing it.
This may be a reflection of depoliticizing the public in the democratic process that people do not find meaningful fashion in voting, community activities, or social issues, but only in trivial fluff pieces, Oprah-style infomercials, or “fast-food” entertainment.
And the public is allowed to show up every couple of years to ratify decisions made elsewhere or to select among representatives of dominant sectors in what is called an election.
This depoliticization of the public has gained momentum naturally with the concentration of media ownership into so few hands of giant industrial mastodons, like Disney (ABC), AOL-Time Warner (CNN), Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (Fox TW), Viacom (CBS), General Electric (NBC), and Bertelsmann (a German firm that controls the publication).
Since the corporations are structurally totalitarian institution that the power flows from the top executives down to the employees and the executives are accountable only for their shareholders, the corporate media bears no resemblance to democracy and it is foolish to think that the news programs serve primarily as vehicle for the delivery of news and information to the public.
Like other corporations, the mainstream media are large corporations, owned and inter-linked with even larger conglomerates and they sell a product to a market.
The market is advertisers where the product—audience--is sold.
The agenda-setting media like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, hold relatively privileged and affluent audience as their product…therefore, these elite media tend to sell the wealthy audience at the biased market and do not reflect the picture of the world that the indigent people reside.
In addition, there are other factors that distort the news broadcast…first, many journalists are overwhelmingly dependent on sources, mostly government officials and advance their careers by working with movers and shakers in the political circles.
An investigative reporters like Bob Woodward or Seymour Hersch are the most compromised and servile in their reporting, because there are always tradeoffs behind the scenes exchanging quid pro quos.
Secondly, there is regular and high flow of people among government, corporation and media through a revolving door…a journalist’s collusion with power distorts the news leak that often depicts false and deceitful contents on behalf of the authorities.
Take one simple example, Pete Williams, NBC News correspondent, was on the screen for news analysis on the Supreme Court’s decision for picking George W Bush a president.
The NBC never reminded the TV viewers that Pete Williams was press secretary and legislative assistant for Wyoming Congressman Dick Cheney in 1986, appointed as the assistance secretary of Defense for Public Affairs when Cheney was Defense Secretary under the Bush Sr. Administration.
During Panama invasion during Bush Sr., Pete was a Pentagon spokesman and he vehemently denied that US bombings have caused massive civilian casualties of Panamanians.
Here are some highly incestuous relationships between bureaucracy and media: James Rubin, a spokesman at the State Department of Clinton Administration and Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international correspondent, are married couple, as Fed Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell. Chris Matthhews of MSNBC and George Stephanopoulos of ABC came from the government, to name a few.
People watch, listen, and read news unaware of the histories and connections of those who tell them the stories, and the people do not consciously deconstruct the images they were told on the news—they trust it as reality.
In the first news conference on February 22, dozens of reporters hurled in unison a series of softballs to George W. Bush, focusing on the former President’s pardon or whether Clinton stole the silverware as they left the White House (five of the seventeen questions) more than the serious subjects on Bush’s tax-cut plan (four).
The compliant media never questioned the Bush’s legitimacy to his presidency or President’s shallow grasp of issues at hand.
During a news conference in Mexico on the US bombing of Iraq, Bush said haltingly: Saddam Hussein has got to understand that we expect him to conform to the agreement that he signed after Desert Storm. We will enforce the no-fly zone, both south and north.
The fact of the matter is that Mr. Saddam in 1991 signed an agreement pledging not to develop weapons of mass destruction, but the agreement said nothing about no-flight zones.
Bush did not know that the no-fly zones were established arbitrarily in the early 1990s by the US and British in order to protect Kurds in the North and Shiite Muslims in the South who had rebelled against Saddam, and a gaggle of reporters kept mum about it.
It is well known in the TV media that the anchorpersons and talkingheads chuckle and deride over Bush’s malapropism during the commercial break…during the press conference on Thursday, Bush again committed a verbal gaffe, describing “coca leaves” as “cocoa leaves”.
However, there is a bitter irony of source journalism that a reporter loses gain access to the sources if he or she does not working with the sources, and no reporter dares to challenge the powerful news sources with cranky inquiries.
Only print media expressed their opinion hiding deep in news analysis under the language of diplomatic understatement: Many of Bush’s answer were tentative and repetitive, and he did not put to rest questions about his command of policy and his ability to forcefully articulate his views on a variety of complex issues.
The collusion between government and corporate media are manifested amply in the administration of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), whose Commissioner, Michael Powell, son of Colin Powell, was promoted by George W Bush.
Since Congress established the FCC in 1934, the government has stripped away many regulations and handed the airwaves over to private broadcasters at no cost under the guise of deregulation and competition at the free market system.
However, the guise crumbles pretty quickly when one examines the airwaves market that is totally different from a traditional one which anyone with enough money can enter.
Radio, Television, and Cable companies are corporations built on government-licensed rights that were doled out the public-owned airwaves through picking the winner by the FCC.
Recently, Michael Powell driveled that the FCC must foster competitive market, unencumbered by intrusions and distortions from inept regulation and he opposed setting conditions to the AOL-Time Warner deal, which created the largest media firm on earth.
With his father’s holdings of AOL stock ($ 6 million), his inheritance chance would place his decision for the company clearly in the conflict of interest criteria.
The FCC is committed to eliminate the rule limiting companies to own multiple TV stations and newspapers in the same town.
When the government transfers the valuable resources (airwaves) from the public sector to the for-profit corporations, the media corporations should be required to serve the public interest.
The reality is quite opposite; they serve the public the information and news more and more loaded with trivial, crash, and burn stories, cops and robbers game, with not many social, political, and economic issues that affect the public life.
In corporate media, the truth is subordinate to corporate profit, political expediency and preservation of the existing social order, and in order to achieve this goal, the mainstream media endeavor keeping the people bewildered and ignorant, lest the public would ever become meddlesome in the binge of profit making.
And a parody of democratic media—a carefully manufactured self-image as an unbiased public servant and a noble steward of the airwaves—continues.
Keeping the people bewildered, ignorant, and powerless
February 23, 2001
“Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism.”
Most people would probably and readily accept the popular image of the news media as aggressive public watchdogs and champions of democracy that they claim to present an objective presentation of events.
However, the close examination on media, whether in print, radio, or Television, would easily provide the people that the self-image of the media is about as true to life as a children’s fairy tale.
Walter Lippmann, a grand mufti of the American journalism, mentioned in his manufacturing of consent in the 70s that the public is such ignorant and bewildered herds that they must be put in its place, the interested spectators of action and not participants
As in the case of mass hysteria about spectator sports play, the public become more passive, obedient, non-participants, non-questioning, easily-controlled, and disciplined, because you are not doing it, but watching somebody doing it.
This may be a reflection of depoliticizing the public in the democratic process that people do not find meaningful fashion in voting, community activities, or social issues, but only in trivial fluff pieces, Oprah-style infomercials, or “fast-food” entertainment.
And the public is allowed to show up every couple of years to ratify decisions made elsewhere or to select among representatives of dominant sectors in what is called an election.
This depoliticization of the public has gained momentum naturally with the concentration of media ownership into so few hands of giant industrial mastodons, like Disney (ABC), AOL-Time Warner (CNN), Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (Fox TW), Viacom (CBS), General Electric (NBC), and Bertelsmann (a German firm that controls the publication).
Since the corporations are structurally totalitarian institution that the power flows from the top executives down to the employees and the executives are accountable only for their shareholders, the corporate media bears no resemblance to democracy and it is foolish to think that the news programs serve primarily as vehicle for the delivery of news and information to the public.
Like other corporations, the mainstream media are large corporations, owned and inter-linked with even larger conglomerates and they sell a product to a market.
The market is advertisers where the product—audience--is sold.
The agenda-setting media like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, hold relatively privileged and affluent audience as their product…therefore, these elite media tend to sell the wealthy audience at the biased market and do not reflect the picture of the world that the indigent people reside.
In addition, there are other factors that distort the news broadcast…first, many journalists are overwhelmingly dependent on sources, mostly government officials and advance their careers by working with movers and shakers in the political circles.
An investigative reporters like Bob Woodward or Seymour Hersch are the most compromised and servile in their reporting, because there are always tradeoffs behind the scenes exchanging quid pro quos.
Secondly, there is regular and high flow of people among government, corporation and media through a revolving door…a journalist’s collusion with power distorts the news leak that often depicts false and deceitful contents on behalf of the authorities.
Take one simple example, Pete Williams, NBC News correspondent, was on the screen for news analysis on the Supreme Court’s decision for picking George W Bush a president.
The NBC never reminded the TV viewers that Pete Williams was press secretary and legislative assistant for Wyoming Congressman Dick Cheney in 1986, appointed as the assistance secretary of Defense for Public Affairs when Cheney was Defense Secretary under the Bush Sr. Administration.
During Panama invasion during Bush Sr., Pete was a Pentagon spokesman and he vehemently denied that US bombings have caused massive civilian casualties of Panamanians.
Here are some highly incestuous relationships between bureaucracy and media: James Rubin, a spokesman at the State Department of Clinton Administration and Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international correspondent, are married couple, as Fed Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell. Chris Matthhews of MSNBC and George Stephanopoulos of ABC came from the government, to name a few.
People watch, listen, and read news unaware of the histories and connections of those who tell them the stories, and the people do not consciously deconstruct the images they were told on the news—they trust it as reality.
In the first news conference on February 22, dozens of reporters hurled in unison a series of softballs to George W. Bush, focusing on the former President’s pardon or whether Clinton stole the silverware as they left the White House (five of the seventeen questions) more than the serious subjects on Bush’s tax-cut plan (four).
The compliant media never questioned the Bush’s legitimacy to his presidency or President’s shallow grasp of issues at hand.
During a news conference in Mexico on the US bombing of Iraq, Bush said haltingly: Saddam Hussein has got to understand that we expect him to conform to the agreement that he signed after Desert Storm. We will enforce the no-fly zone, both south and north.
The fact of the matter is that Mr. Saddam in 1991 signed an agreement pledging not to develop weapons of mass destruction, but the agreement said nothing about no-flight zones.
Bush did not know that the no-fly zones were established arbitrarily in the early 1990s by the US and British in order to protect Kurds in the North and Shiite Muslims in the South who had rebelled against Saddam, and a gaggle of reporters kept mum about it.
It is well known in the TV media that the anchorpersons and talkingheads chuckle and deride over Bush’s malapropism during the commercial break…during the press conference on Thursday, Bush again committed a verbal gaffe, describing “coca leaves” as “cocoa leaves”.
However, there is a bitter irony of source journalism that a reporter loses gain access to the sources if he or she does not working with the sources, and no reporter dares to challenge the powerful news sources with cranky inquiries.
Only print media expressed their opinion hiding deep in news analysis under the language of diplomatic understatement: Many of Bush’s answer were tentative and repetitive, and he did not put to rest questions about his command of policy and his ability to forcefully articulate his views on a variety of complex issues.
The collusion between government and corporate media are manifested amply in the administration of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), whose Commissioner, Michael Powell, son of Colin Powell, was promoted by George W Bush.
Since Congress established the FCC in 1934, the government has stripped away many regulations and handed the airwaves over to private broadcasters at no cost under the guise of deregulation and competition at the free market system.
However, the guise crumbles pretty quickly when one examines the airwaves market that is totally different from a traditional one which anyone with enough money can enter.
Radio, Television, and Cable companies are corporations built on government-licensed rights that were doled out the public-owned airwaves through picking the winner by the FCC.
Recently, Michael Powell driveled that the FCC must foster competitive market, unencumbered by intrusions and distortions from inept regulation and he opposed setting conditions to the AOL-Time Warner deal, which created the largest media firm on earth.
With his father’s holdings of AOL stock ($ 6 million), his inheritance chance would place his decision for the company clearly in the conflict of interest criteria.
The FCC is committed to eliminate the rule limiting companies to own multiple TV stations and newspapers in the same town.
When the government transfers the valuable resources (airwaves) from the public sector to the for-profit corporations, the media corporations should be required to serve the public interest.
The reality is quite opposite; they serve the public the information and news more and more loaded with trivial, crash, and burn stories, cops and robbers game, with not many social, political, and economic issues that affect the public life.
In corporate media, the truth is subordinate to corporate profit, political expediency and preservation of the existing social order, and in order to achieve this goal, the mainstream media endeavor keeping the people bewildered and ignorant, lest the public would ever become meddlesome in the binge of profit making.
And a parody of democratic media—a carefully manufactured self-image as an unbiased public servant and a noble steward of the airwaves—continues.
God and Mammon, ex nihilo
God and Mammon, ex nihilo
January 20, 2001
There are two fundamental creations by human beings, creation ex nihilo (something out of nothing), that have affected wholesomely on its living; God and Mammon (money).
Few people dare to acknowledge that God is indeed man-made, manufactured, beautified, purified, and accommodated to fit to the modus operandi of contemporaries life over a long period of time, and discarded, if it doesn’t work for them, mercilessly, and adopted to don a new clothes for new deity.
“In the beginning God created…” in the first words of Chapter I, Genesis of Bible were originally written in Hebrew, the word, bara, means to create something out of nothing (ex nihilo).
Since men have created the anthropomorphic perception of a God, many had come to see God as physically and literally responsible for everything that happens on earth, as the same way as we ourselves make things or set events in motion.
Despite of its otherworldliness, religion is such highly pragmatic that people instantly change the colors, shapes, and morals of their deity as soon as it ceases to be effective on their daily lives…the ideas about God have never been sacrosanct but always provisional.
As a God was simply an idea formed by the human mind in one generation, the same God could be meaningless to another human mind in another generation, and without its flexibility, the notion of God would not have survived to become one of the great human ideas.
However, men have fallen, after they created a God, in an abysmal pitfall that they are impossible to prove God exists as equally impossible to disprove his existence.
Therefore, instead of declaring God is dead, people have created a new God, Mammon, that is money, out of nothing…
General public understand money mostly in the form of fiat money, like dollar bill or coin, and check that earned (created) through their labor, stock manipulation, interests accumulation, or so forth, and new money is created only by the Federal Reserve through issuing currency.
Reginald McKenna, Britain’s former Chancellor of the Exchequer said: I am afraid that the ordinary citizen would not like to be told that banks can create money and destroy money. The amount of money in existence varies only with the action of banks in increasing and decreasing deposits and bank purchases. Every loan, overdraft, or bank purchase creates a deposit and every repayment of a loan, overdraft or bank sale destroys a deposit.
As bankers call debt a commodity, nearly all or 98 percent of money supply in the US comes in the form of debt; mortgages, government debt (bonds) commercial debt, margin debt (borrowing against equity capital gains) and individual debt (credit cards).
Though for starters, who have never before thought about the matter, might greatly be dumbfounded in some dizzying and confusing state, the commercial banks like Chase, City, J P Morgan, receive income on a bookkeeping entry that it created out of nothing.
For the hard-working average Joe, it is hard to believe that the banks derive profits from the money that they have created out of nothing but simply placed it on the ledger as an asset because it is earning money and someday it will be paid back. The only cost of creating money for the banks is bookkeeping overhead!
When a borrower cannot repay the loan, the banks simply write off that loan as a bookkeeping loss to be removed from the ledger as an asset without a reduction in liabilities, and the bank loss are covered by the FDIC under the Federal Reserve System, under the argument that, if banks or corporations are allowed to fail, the nation would suffer from vast unemployment and economic disruption.
One of the most bizarre reality may boggle the taxpayer’s mind…when government borrows money from the banks, the transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the bankers is legally consummated and sanctioned through the interest payments on these loans that were created out of nothing. Few understand the IRS functions as the collection agency for world bankers, upwardly redistributing income from ordinary taxpayers to rich stock and bond holders.
One of the reasons banks prefer to lend to governments is that they do not expect those loans ever to be paid, because they make a profit from the interest on the loan, not repayment of the loan, and they are eager to roll the loan over and over until the debt is effectively unpayable.
The total outstanding US debt has grown from $425 billion in 1950 to $26 trillion as of 1999 and US consumers carried $7 trillion debt in 1999, up from $ 3.55 trillion in 1990.
In South Korea, government budget deficit continues to snowball, and DJ Kim’s regime projects that total amount of debt and loan guarantees will stand at W23.6 trillion in 2001 to W39.5 trillion in 2003 when new presidency is due to begin.
In 2001, the government have to spend W7 trillion on interest payment on the public funds injected into restructuring so far and additional W2.5 trillion in interest that is accruing from government bonds issued to make up for the budget deficit.
Few understand that these huge amount of debts were created by the simple entry on the bank ledger, a created wealth out of nothing, and the entry accrues interest payment to the bankers from borrowers, like government and Joe-six-packs.
The former director of the Bank of England, Lord Josiah Stamp, said candidly: if you want to be slaves of the bankers, and pay the costs of your own slavery, then let the banks create money. The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that has ever been invented. Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin.
Henry Ford Sr. said: it is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system for, if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
Though the conventional wisdom dictates us that the Federal Reserve activates its leverage for controlling bank’s expansion of credit, the Fed’s revolving door with Wall Street strongly manifest that the Feds are exactly same financiers as the bankers who benefit and profit through the money-manufacturing process, such as money ex nihilo, and the Feds are ready to scoop the failed bankers out of trouble at the expenses of taxpayers and depositors.
And in South Korea, DJ Kim’s government has been engaging a shellgame of peekaboo, moving unrecoverable debts into bookkeeping ledgers in the KAMCO or KDIC and voila! “The debts is gone and we can balance the budget in 2003.”
Few South Koreans know that the government has injected the huge amount of the national pension funds into the gyrating stock market in order to artificially prop up the KOSPI index over 500 and lost last year half of its values that eventually taxpayers assume to pay back.
As Karl Marx said that interest-bearing capital is the mother of every insane form; debts, mere promises to pay, are nonetheless transformed into commodities in the eyes of creditor, financial center of capitalism remains in the credit markets from simple bank loans to complex bond products.
Though bankers cry in unison for the balanced budget, the Wall Street has made immense fortune through the budget deficits from Reagan to Clinton administrations.
The state remains safely under the control of bankers and financiers as far as there is an unpayable public debts in the budget.
The bankers yield enormous power to dictate the social, fiscal and political issues that benefit and promote their interests, forcing people to suffer under the austere and pitiful condition.
As the old saying goes that men serve no two masters at the same time, men chose a new God, money, that was created out of nothing by the international bankers, financiers, and bondholders under the debt-based fractional reserve banking, and men become the slave of money, without knowing that they are paying the costs (interest, taxes, insurance premiums) of their own slavery with abandon.
Many including students of finance and economics would dismiss the argument as a mad, crazy, wild conspiracy theory or commie propaganda…however, few of them know that the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, signed by Woodrow Wilson was a brainchild of the world financiers from the Wall Street and the Bank of England, who obviously acted in the best interests of their ilk, not for the public welfare.
The only thing the bankers needed was the public faith on their Mammon (money) that was guaranteed by the Federal Reserve System and insured by the FDIC.
To create money, lend it as commodity, and make profit, all in the creation process out of nothing, each and everyone must believe in Mammon (money).
Only then did Mammon replace an old God as the Supreme Court of Finance, which is accountable to none but itself, and men blindly attend the Temple of Mammon in an attempt to find the meaning and value of life, as if life minus Mammon is no great matter.
January 20, 2001
There are two fundamental creations by human beings, creation ex nihilo (something out of nothing), that have affected wholesomely on its living; God and Mammon (money).
Few people dare to acknowledge that God is indeed man-made, manufactured, beautified, purified, and accommodated to fit to the modus operandi of contemporaries life over a long period of time, and discarded, if it doesn’t work for them, mercilessly, and adopted to don a new clothes for new deity.
“In the beginning God created…” in the first words of Chapter I, Genesis of Bible were originally written in Hebrew, the word, bara, means to create something out of nothing (ex nihilo).
Since men have created the anthropomorphic perception of a God, many had come to see God as physically and literally responsible for everything that happens on earth, as the same way as we ourselves make things or set events in motion.
Despite of its otherworldliness, religion is such highly pragmatic that people instantly change the colors, shapes, and morals of their deity as soon as it ceases to be effective on their daily lives…the ideas about God have never been sacrosanct but always provisional.
As a God was simply an idea formed by the human mind in one generation, the same God could be meaningless to another human mind in another generation, and without its flexibility, the notion of God would not have survived to become one of the great human ideas.
However, men have fallen, after they created a God, in an abysmal pitfall that they are impossible to prove God exists as equally impossible to disprove his existence.
Therefore, instead of declaring God is dead, people have created a new God, Mammon, that is money, out of nothing…
General public understand money mostly in the form of fiat money, like dollar bill or coin, and check that earned (created) through their labor, stock manipulation, interests accumulation, or so forth, and new money is created only by the Federal Reserve through issuing currency.
Reginald McKenna, Britain’s former Chancellor of the Exchequer said: I am afraid that the ordinary citizen would not like to be told that banks can create money and destroy money. The amount of money in existence varies only with the action of banks in increasing and decreasing deposits and bank purchases. Every loan, overdraft, or bank purchase creates a deposit and every repayment of a loan, overdraft or bank sale destroys a deposit.
As bankers call debt a commodity, nearly all or 98 percent of money supply in the US comes in the form of debt; mortgages, government debt (bonds) commercial debt, margin debt (borrowing against equity capital gains) and individual debt (credit cards).
Though for starters, who have never before thought about the matter, might greatly be dumbfounded in some dizzying and confusing state, the commercial banks like Chase, City, J P Morgan, receive income on a bookkeeping entry that it created out of nothing.
For the hard-working average Joe, it is hard to believe that the banks derive profits from the money that they have created out of nothing but simply placed it on the ledger as an asset because it is earning money and someday it will be paid back. The only cost of creating money for the banks is bookkeeping overhead!
When a borrower cannot repay the loan, the banks simply write off that loan as a bookkeeping loss to be removed from the ledger as an asset without a reduction in liabilities, and the bank loss are covered by the FDIC under the Federal Reserve System, under the argument that, if banks or corporations are allowed to fail, the nation would suffer from vast unemployment and economic disruption.
One of the most bizarre reality may boggle the taxpayer’s mind…when government borrows money from the banks, the transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the bankers is legally consummated and sanctioned through the interest payments on these loans that were created out of nothing. Few understand the IRS functions as the collection agency for world bankers, upwardly redistributing income from ordinary taxpayers to rich stock and bond holders.
One of the reasons banks prefer to lend to governments is that they do not expect those loans ever to be paid, because they make a profit from the interest on the loan, not repayment of the loan, and they are eager to roll the loan over and over until the debt is effectively unpayable.
The total outstanding US debt has grown from $425 billion in 1950 to $26 trillion as of 1999 and US consumers carried $7 trillion debt in 1999, up from $ 3.55 trillion in 1990.
In South Korea, government budget deficit continues to snowball, and DJ Kim’s regime projects that total amount of debt and loan guarantees will stand at W23.6 trillion in 2001 to W39.5 trillion in 2003 when new presidency is due to begin.
In 2001, the government have to spend W7 trillion on interest payment on the public funds injected into restructuring so far and additional W2.5 trillion in interest that is accruing from government bonds issued to make up for the budget deficit.
Few understand that these huge amount of debts were created by the simple entry on the bank ledger, a created wealth out of nothing, and the entry accrues interest payment to the bankers from borrowers, like government and Joe-six-packs.
The former director of the Bank of England, Lord Josiah Stamp, said candidly: if you want to be slaves of the bankers, and pay the costs of your own slavery, then let the banks create money. The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that has ever been invented. Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin.
Henry Ford Sr. said: it is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system for, if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
Though the conventional wisdom dictates us that the Federal Reserve activates its leverage for controlling bank’s expansion of credit, the Fed’s revolving door with Wall Street strongly manifest that the Feds are exactly same financiers as the bankers who benefit and profit through the money-manufacturing process, such as money ex nihilo, and the Feds are ready to scoop the failed bankers out of trouble at the expenses of taxpayers and depositors.
And in South Korea, DJ Kim’s government has been engaging a shellgame of peekaboo, moving unrecoverable debts into bookkeeping ledgers in the KAMCO or KDIC and voila! “The debts is gone and we can balance the budget in 2003.”
Few South Koreans know that the government has injected the huge amount of the national pension funds into the gyrating stock market in order to artificially prop up the KOSPI index over 500 and lost last year half of its values that eventually taxpayers assume to pay back.
As Karl Marx said that interest-bearing capital is the mother of every insane form; debts, mere promises to pay, are nonetheless transformed into commodities in the eyes of creditor, financial center of capitalism remains in the credit markets from simple bank loans to complex bond products.
Though bankers cry in unison for the balanced budget, the Wall Street has made immense fortune through the budget deficits from Reagan to Clinton administrations.
The state remains safely under the control of bankers and financiers as far as there is an unpayable public debts in the budget.
The bankers yield enormous power to dictate the social, fiscal and political issues that benefit and promote their interests, forcing people to suffer under the austere and pitiful condition.
As the old saying goes that men serve no two masters at the same time, men chose a new God, money, that was created out of nothing by the international bankers, financiers, and bondholders under the debt-based fractional reserve banking, and men become the slave of money, without knowing that they are paying the costs (interest, taxes, insurance premiums) of their own slavery with abandon.
Many including students of finance and economics would dismiss the argument as a mad, crazy, wild conspiracy theory or commie propaganda…however, few of them know that the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, signed by Woodrow Wilson was a brainchild of the world financiers from the Wall Street and the Bank of England, who obviously acted in the best interests of their ilk, not for the public welfare.
The only thing the bankers needed was the public faith on their Mammon (money) that was guaranteed by the Federal Reserve System and insured by the FDIC.
To create money, lend it as commodity, and make profit, all in the creation process out of nothing, each and everyone must believe in Mammon (money).
Only then did Mammon replace an old God as the Supreme Court of Finance, which is accountable to none but itself, and men blindly attend the Temple of Mammon in an attempt to find the meaning and value of life, as if life minus Mammon is no great matter.
Religion is a thought control
Religion, Politics, and the Peace talk in the Middle East
September 7, 2000
Recently, there was a gathering of the soi-disant world religious leaders at UN for the “Millennium World Peace Summit”, that was ironically invented and sponsored by Ted Turner, a high priest of capitalism.
Mr. Turner, an epitome of mammon, has entertained, as an honorary chairman, the enlightened assembly evoking much laughter by criticizing the Christian claim of the monopoly of heaven, and many attendant religious and spiritual leaders from all faiths echoed in unisonous hymn of love, tolerance, forgiveness and reconciliation.
However, no mass media in the United States took serious look at their commitment to global peace, condemnation against all forms of violence, and proclamation of the equality of all religions, since there were neither Pope, nor Taliban leader, Ayatollah, Dalai Lama, and Grand Mufti, but a band of small fries of various religious group.
Pope was busy to beatify his predecessors in preparation of nominating them as saint, and one of them, Pius IX who reigned the Pontificate from 1846 to 1878 was infamous in abducting a Jewish boy from his parent and later made him a Catholic priest. Edgardo Mortara, a kidnapped Jewish boy, was forced by Pius IX to lick the floor with his tongue drawing a cross in public to affirm his faith as Christian.
Pope Pius IX during his 32-year reign has called the first Vatican Council to define the doctrine of papal infallibility in matters of faith and morals, and he branded Jews as “dogs” because they kvetch all days and every day.
In the meantime, in the United States, a Mecca of democracy and land of freedom, Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Joseph Lieberman, an orthodox Jew, rhapsodized that “ Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, not freedom from religion, and there must be and can be a constitutional place for faith in our public life.”
This self-styled guardian of morality and faith defiantly insisted that he would continue to preach from campaign stump, calling his invocation of God and religion “the American Way.”
It is the Connecticut Senator’s most explicit attack on the Constitutional principles of freedom of thought and the separation of church and religion.
There appears to be two-pronged electoral tactics in Lieberman’s interpretation of the First Amendment prohibition of state support for religion.
First, by sermonizing the Republican right that stress the role of religion in establishing a unifying ethics among American people, Democrats attempt to neutralize their opponent’s tactics to exploit the Lewinsky peccadillo.
Secondly, Democrats desperately require garnering the Jewish support, especially from Orthodox Jewish section of the electorates, who have been gang-voting according to the instruction of their rabbis and leaders.
American Jews, though only three percent of the total electorates, have concentrated in the electoral regions crucial in winning the presidential election like New York, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, Florida, and California. And they are singularly notorious to turn out en masse to support their friend, unlike other fragmented and illiterate ethnic group like black, Hispanic and Asians.
However, the reality, that the conceptual foundation for all democratic rights to free thought and expression is compromised if secularist basis of the state is removed, has been abundantly manifested in the state of Israel, where its non-Jewish citizens or Jewish citizens who oppose the principles of the Jewish state are not entitled to enjoy the benefit of being Israeli citizen…that is, Israel is not a state of its citizens but of Jewish people, who believe in Judaism, whether it is reform, Haredic, or orthodox where Mr. Lieberman calls it home.
Imagine that an American, born, raised, and worked in the land, is not entitled to have property, liberty, freedom of thought, and potentially subject to legal sanction or discrimination on account of his belief. There can be no freedom of religion without the right to be free from religion.
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, two of the most important framers of the Bill of Rights, insisted as deist that new republic be founded on a secularist legal code despite the prevalence of religious backwardness among people at the time.
When Americans have elected John F Kennedy, the first Catholic to be their president 40 years ago, he insisted that his religious beliefs were nobody’s business but his own, and if elected, they would play no role in the formulation of government business.
As for the Republican candidates, George W Bush and Dick Cheney, they are a cabal of “compassionate conservative millionaires” who feel your pain while causing more of it, and they publicly support to impose prayer in the public school.
Imagine again that a child of a secular family or of other religious faith stands in awkward position in his classroom while other kids loudly pray in unison in their Christian faith. I wonder how Mr. Lieberman reacts if his kid with yarmulke were tormented by other Christian classmates, and perhaps he would dream that the United States of America becomes a “Jewish States of America.”
When child is young, for good Darwinian reasons, it would be valuable if child believed everything it is told. A child needs to learn a language, it needs to learn the social customs of its people, and It needs to learn all sorts of rules for good survival reasons.
But any rule that “believe everything you are told” is automatically going to be vulnerable to parasitization and consequently the minds of young are stunted and filled with fanatical hostility to those who have either other belief engine or object to all fanaticism.
It boils down to the question whether religions do rather harm than salvage the people from misery, ignorance, and violence.
To find an answer, let us travel to the Middle East region…
First of all, many people, whether Christians, Muslims, Buddhists or atheists, possess an “encyclopedic ignorance” about the Jewish fundamentalism (Orthodox Judaism) due to the virtual Jewish control over the mass media around the world, and it is a taboo subject especially in the United States to raise the issues of middle east peace talk with respect to the open and hidden influence of the Jewish fundamentalism. If there is anyone who’s brave enough to have cavalier attitude against it, then the New York Times would make sure that he would never be heard from again.
Therefore, it has become a received conventional wisdom in the world that the Oslo Accord and ensuing many talks that have been arranged and mediated by the U S government would finalize the conflicts in the region and bring forth a peaceful solution in near future.
On the contrary, to understand the situation in the Middle East and the prospects for peace, one must come to grips with how strong and effective the political influence and importance the religions in general and Jewish fundamentalism in particular have on the whole agendas on the negotiating table.
The basic principles of Jewish fundamentalism are the same as in the case of Christianity or Islam: restoration and survival of pure and pious religious community where there were rabbis, mullahs, and saints call the shot.
All sorts of religious fundamentalism are hostile to democracy, because it contains a form of totalitarian and messianic strains in its basic structure and denies equality for all citizens.
As for the Israeli orthodox Judaism, it influences especially the principles of state policies decisively and Jewish fundamentalists absolutely sanction the ideology that Jews are morally superior to all other nation and condemn almost everything “not Jewish” mostly because it is non-Jewish. They closely adhere to the archaic form of Jewish tribalism that confirms the cosmic difference between Jews and non-Jews.
There exists a ridiculous case no one could believes is that Israeli educational authorities removed the plus sign (+) from the elementary textbook of arithmetic used in the first grade of Israeli school, because the plus sign which is cross could religiously corrupt little Jewish children and substituted it with a capital “T” that was made several years after Israel became a state.
One of the thorny issues in the peace talk has been the Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, and most of the settlements were created with Gush Emunim movement that aims to establish a homogeneous models of new society where they live in the collective Jewish identity and values established through Halacha and Cabbala.
There was total negligence about the settlement issues in English language coverage in the West that Gush Emunim’s urge to settle in the mountains of Judea and valleys of Samaria has been theoretically motivated and is a manifestation of Jewish fundamentalism.
Any political leader who dares to go for land-for-peace settlement was termed as Jewish traitor by the Jewish fundamentalists, as Yasir Arafat would write his own obituary if he ever gives up East Jerusalem in return for Palestinian right to statehood. Ehud Barak, Israeli Prime Minister would never be stupid enough to be oblivious about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin years ago by one of the fundamental zealots who believe that Oslo accord is a culmination of spiritual apostasy.
There is a deeply flawed understanding about why Israeli constantly refuse to admit that Israel had anything to do with the Palestinians becoming refugees. Contrary to the popular notion that Israeli do not want to assume the financial responsibility to compensate the Palestinian refugees of five millions, the Jewish fundamentalists do not recognize theologically and ideologically the historical reality that Palestine is now the homeland of two separated communities where Jews and non-Jews have equal rights to the lands they jointly inhabit.
Most of religious Jews view that no land of Israel should be given to non-Jews in accordance with the beginning of Jewish Redemption, and any concessions to non-Jews in the state of Israel has to be based solely upon the consideration of whether denial could prove harmful for Jews.
Their views on territories have been clearly reflected a great part of the actual foreign policy of the state of Israel in both Labor and Likud Party. (Two parties have been almost identical twins on territorial issues and totally swayed by the ideological hegemony of the Jewish fundamentalists like the National Religion Party (NRP) and Gush Emunim).
Despite of its otherworldliness, religion has been highly pragmatic and people have continued to adopt a particular conception of the divine because it worked for them, not because it was scientifically or philosophically sound.
Many people salivate how Mr. Lieberman’s religion, orthodox Judaism, a.k.a. Jewish fundamentalism, plays a role in American political arena, where there has been strong revival of fundamental Christianity in the national horizon, because he said he would live up to his religion. He can’t eat, fly, drive, vote, fuck or virtually do anything on Sabbath day. He even can’t ride a bike for an exercise, let alone to try to save goyim’s life on Sabbath day. The exception on Sabbath day is he can do something to save Jew’s life because Jewish life is worth saving.
Well, a lot of politicians admire him as a smart and pragmatic guy who knows the ropes and compromises accordingly, as other Jewish fundamentalists in Israel make concession only because the Jews fear the non-Jewish retaliation harming the sacred Jews.
Politicians and religious leaders around the world jump on the religious bandwagon whenever it fits for exploiting their political aims…George W Bush, who has been presiding over 143 executions, got burned when he went to address at the Christian fundamentalist Bob Jones University in South Carolina and made a U-turn to apologize when the Catholics raised Cain.
Christian communities in America want to display the framed Ten Commandment on the wall of every classroom whenever juvenile killers rampage and massacre their classmates, as if there is close relationship between religion and morality. The desires to do good and not to harm others are not predicated solely on a belief in Jesus or adherence to a religion.
Conversely, many perpetrators and criminals would consider themselves to be god-fearing as crooked politicians raise the bible whenever it helps to consort with his purposes.
Religion has always been the great divider of people in the world. People kill each other based on the belief that was formulated and manufactured in a time when they believed the earth was flat.
The Roman Catholic Church was especially notorious in persecuting many philosophers and scholars for the crime of heresy…for example, Giodano Bruno, Italian philosopher and scientist in 17 century, was burnt alive at the stake with his tongue tied so that he would be unable to address those gathered to witness his execution.
It is intriguing phenomenon in this post-Enlightenment age to find why religion has such a powerful hold in human life and flourished with no end in sight, even though religion is directly responsible for more death, war, murder, destruction and misery through the ages than any other human activities.
September 7, 2000
Recently, there was a gathering of the soi-disant world religious leaders at UN for the “Millennium World Peace Summit”, that was ironically invented and sponsored by Ted Turner, a high priest of capitalism.
Mr. Turner, an epitome of mammon, has entertained, as an honorary chairman, the enlightened assembly evoking much laughter by criticizing the Christian claim of the monopoly of heaven, and many attendant religious and spiritual leaders from all faiths echoed in unisonous hymn of love, tolerance, forgiveness and reconciliation.
However, no mass media in the United States took serious look at their commitment to global peace, condemnation against all forms of violence, and proclamation of the equality of all religions, since there were neither Pope, nor Taliban leader, Ayatollah, Dalai Lama, and Grand Mufti, but a band of small fries of various religious group.
Pope was busy to beatify his predecessors in preparation of nominating them as saint, and one of them, Pius IX who reigned the Pontificate from 1846 to 1878 was infamous in abducting a Jewish boy from his parent and later made him a Catholic priest. Edgardo Mortara, a kidnapped Jewish boy, was forced by Pius IX to lick the floor with his tongue drawing a cross in public to affirm his faith as Christian.
Pope Pius IX during his 32-year reign has called the first Vatican Council to define the doctrine of papal infallibility in matters of faith and morals, and he branded Jews as “dogs” because they kvetch all days and every day.
In the meantime, in the United States, a Mecca of democracy and land of freedom, Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Joseph Lieberman, an orthodox Jew, rhapsodized that “ Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, not freedom from religion, and there must be and can be a constitutional place for faith in our public life.”
This self-styled guardian of morality and faith defiantly insisted that he would continue to preach from campaign stump, calling his invocation of God and religion “the American Way.”
It is the Connecticut Senator’s most explicit attack on the Constitutional principles of freedom of thought and the separation of church and religion.
There appears to be two-pronged electoral tactics in Lieberman’s interpretation of the First Amendment prohibition of state support for religion.
First, by sermonizing the Republican right that stress the role of religion in establishing a unifying ethics among American people, Democrats attempt to neutralize their opponent’s tactics to exploit the Lewinsky peccadillo.
Secondly, Democrats desperately require garnering the Jewish support, especially from Orthodox Jewish section of the electorates, who have been gang-voting according to the instruction of their rabbis and leaders.
American Jews, though only three percent of the total electorates, have concentrated in the electoral regions crucial in winning the presidential election like New York, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, Florida, and California. And they are singularly notorious to turn out en masse to support their friend, unlike other fragmented and illiterate ethnic group like black, Hispanic and Asians.
However, the reality, that the conceptual foundation for all democratic rights to free thought and expression is compromised if secularist basis of the state is removed, has been abundantly manifested in the state of Israel, where its non-Jewish citizens or Jewish citizens who oppose the principles of the Jewish state are not entitled to enjoy the benefit of being Israeli citizen…that is, Israel is not a state of its citizens but of Jewish people, who believe in Judaism, whether it is reform, Haredic, or orthodox where Mr. Lieberman calls it home.
Imagine that an American, born, raised, and worked in the land, is not entitled to have property, liberty, freedom of thought, and potentially subject to legal sanction or discrimination on account of his belief. There can be no freedom of religion without the right to be free from religion.
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, two of the most important framers of the Bill of Rights, insisted as deist that new republic be founded on a secularist legal code despite the prevalence of religious backwardness among people at the time.
When Americans have elected John F Kennedy, the first Catholic to be their president 40 years ago, he insisted that his religious beliefs were nobody’s business but his own, and if elected, they would play no role in the formulation of government business.
As for the Republican candidates, George W Bush and Dick Cheney, they are a cabal of “compassionate conservative millionaires” who feel your pain while causing more of it, and they publicly support to impose prayer in the public school.
Imagine again that a child of a secular family or of other religious faith stands in awkward position in his classroom while other kids loudly pray in unison in their Christian faith. I wonder how Mr. Lieberman reacts if his kid with yarmulke were tormented by other Christian classmates, and perhaps he would dream that the United States of America becomes a “Jewish States of America.”
When child is young, for good Darwinian reasons, it would be valuable if child believed everything it is told. A child needs to learn a language, it needs to learn the social customs of its people, and It needs to learn all sorts of rules for good survival reasons.
But any rule that “believe everything you are told” is automatically going to be vulnerable to parasitization and consequently the minds of young are stunted and filled with fanatical hostility to those who have either other belief engine or object to all fanaticism.
It boils down to the question whether religions do rather harm than salvage the people from misery, ignorance, and violence.
To find an answer, let us travel to the Middle East region…
First of all, many people, whether Christians, Muslims, Buddhists or atheists, possess an “encyclopedic ignorance” about the Jewish fundamentalism (Orthodox Judaism) due to the virtual Jewish control over the mass media around the world, and it is a taboo subject especially in the United States to raise the issues of middle east peace talk with respect to the open and hidden influence of the Jewish fundamentalism. If there is anyone who’s brave enough to have cavalier attitude against it, then the New York Times would make sure that he would never be heard from again.
Therefore, it has become a received conventional wisdom in the world that the Oslo Accord and ensuing many talks that have been arranged and mediated by the U S government would finalize the conflicts in the region and bring forth a peaceful solution in near future.
On the contrary, to understand the situation in the Middle East and the prospects for peace, one must come to grips with how strong and effective the political influence and importance the religions in general and Jewish fundamentalism in particular have on the whole agendas on the negotiating table.
The basic principles of Jewish fundamentalism are the same as in the case of Christianity or Islam: restoration and survival of pure and pious religious community where there were rabbis, mullahs, and saints call the shot.
All sorts of religious fundamentalism are hostile to democracy, because it contains a form of totalitarian and messianic strains in its basic structure and denies equality for all citizens.
As for the Israeli orthodox Judaism, it influences especially the principles of state policies decisively and Jewish fundamentalists absolutely sanction the ideology that Jews are morally superior to all other nation and condemn almost everything “not Jewish” mostly because it is non-Jewish. They closely adhere to the archaic form of Jewish tribalism that confirms the cosmic difference between Jews and non-Jews.
There exists a ridiculous case no one could believes is that Israeli educational authorities removed the plus sign (+) from the elementary textbook of arithmetic used in the first grade of Israeli school, because the plus sign which is cross could religiously corrupt little Jewish children and substituted it with a capital “T” that was made several years after Israel became a state.
One of the thorny issues in the peace talk has been the Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, and most of the settlements were created with Gush Emunim movement that aims to establish a homogeneous models of new society where they live in the collective Jewish identity and values established through Halacha and Cabbala.
There was total negligence about the settlement issues in English language coverage in the West that Gush Emunim’s urge to settle in the mountains of Judea and valleys of Samaria has been theoretically motivated and is a manifestation of Jewish fundamentalism.
Any political leader who dares to go for land-for-peace settlement was termed as Jewish traitor by the Jewish fundamentalists, as Yasir Arafat would write his own obituary if he ever gives up East Jerusalem in return for Palestinian right to statehood. Ehud Barak, Israeli Prime Minister would never be stupid enough to be oblivious about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin years ago by one of the fundamental zealots who believe that Oslo accord is a culmination of spiritual apostasy.
There is a deeply flawed understanding about why Israeli constantly refuse to admit that Israel had anything to do with the Palestinians becoming refugees. Contrary to the popular notion that Israeli do not want to assume the financial responsibility to compensate the Palestinian refugees of five millions, the Jewish fundamentalists do not recognize theologically and ideologically the historical reality that Palestine is now the homeland of two separated communities where Jews and non-Jews have equal rights to the lands they jointly inhabit.
Most of religious Jews view that no land of Israel should be given to non-Jews in accordance with the beginning of Jewish Redemption, and any concessions to non-Jews in the state of Israel has to be based solely upon the consideration of whether denial could prove harmful for Jews.
Their views on territories have been clearly reflected a great part of the actual foreign policy of the state of Israel in both Labor and Likud Party. (Two parties have been almost identical twins on territorial issues and totally swayed by the ideological hegemony of the Jewish fundamentalists like the National Religion Party (NRP) and Gush Emunim).
Despite of its otherworldliness, religion has been highly pragmatic and people have continued to adopt a particular conception of the divine because it worked for them, not because it was scientifically or philosophically sound.
Many people salivate how Mr. Lieberman’s religion, orthodox Judaism, a.k.a. Jewish fundamentalism, plays a role in American political arena, where there has been strong revival of fundamental Christianity in the national horizon, because he said he would live up to his religion. He can’t eat, fly, drive, vote, fuck or virtually do anything on Sabbath day. He even can’t ride a bike for an exercise, let alone to try to save goyim’s life on Sabbath day. The exception on Sabbath day is he can do something to save Jew’s life because Jewish life is worth saving.
Well, a lot of politicians admire him as a smart and pragmatic guy who knows the ropes and compromises accordingly, as other Jewish fundamentalists in Israel make concession only because the Jews fear the non-Jewish retaliation harming the sacred Jews.
Politicians and religious leaders around the world jump on the religious bandwagon whenever it fits for exploiting their political aims…George W Bush, who has been presiding over 143 executions, got burned when he went to address at the Christian fundamentalist Bob Jones University in South Carolina and made a U-turn to apologize when the Catholics raised Cain.
Christian communities in America want to display the framed Ten Commandment on the wall of every classroom whenever juvenile killers rampage and massacre their classmates, as if there is close relationship between religion and morality. The desires to do good and not to harm others are not predicated solely on a belief in Jesus or adherence to a religion.
Conversely, many perpetrators and criminals would consider themselves to be god-fearing as crooked politicians raise the bible whenever it helps to consort with his purposes.
Religion has always been the great divider of people in the world. People kill each other based on the belief that was formulated and manufactured in a time when they believed the earth was flat.
The Roman Catholic Church was especially notorious in persecuting many philosophers and scholars for the crime of heresy…for example, Giodano Bruno, Italian philosopher and scientist in 17 century, was burnt alive at the stake with his tongue tied so that he would be unable to address those gathered to witness his execution.
It is intriguing phenomenon in this post-Enlightenment age to find why religion has such a powerful hold in human life and flourished with no end in sight, even though religion is directly responsible for more death, war, murder, destruction and misery through the ages than any other human activities.
Religion is a disease
Religion is a disease
December 25 2001
“If God did not exist, it would be necessary for man to invent him.” Francois Voltaire
“Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” John 8:32
Bertrand Russell, a Nobel laureate for literature in 1950 and a renowned English philosopher, once wrote that religion is a disease born of fear, primarily one of the social phenomena, and people accept religion on emotional ground, believing that it is thought virtuous to have faith and wishing to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes—that is, what really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all, as fear is the mother of the whole thing, fear of the mysterious, fear of punishment and fear of death, etc.
When the church argue in defense of Christianity, they do not give reasons for believing that God exists and the Bible is his words.
Instead, they argue that if people believe in this way, they act better than if they do not and a believer is happier than an unbeliever, therefore we should not to permit ourselves to speculate whether God exists. If any doubts raise its head, we must suppress it vigorously and historical records must be falsified if people cast doubt on the received wisdom of religion.
Because of fear, people refuse to accept the ordinary laws of science that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course.
People have come to entertain of immortality because it is pleasant and consolable to think that the invisible hand would somehow rescue us from our bodily death.
That’s why people invented God and immortality, central dogmas of the Christianity—in that Jesus Christ emphatically believed that his Second Coming would occur before the death of all the people who were living at that time, and he instilled the fear of everlasting punishment to the minds of people with vindictive fury, “Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell.”
However, faith eventually renders harm to people by stunting the growth of minds with a conviction that can not be shaken by contrary evidence or argument.
If contrary evidence might induce doubt, it is held that contrary evidence must be suppressed and met by fanatical hostility to both those who have other fanaticisms and those who object to all fanaticisms.
As people depend upon the absolute truth of faith contained in the saying of a certain man, like Jesus, Buddha, or Muhammad, a body of experts that interprets his saying, like church, synagogue, mosque, or temple, acquires the infallible power, dictate people’s minds, and becomes tyrannous obscurantist and cruel oppressor in high degree, where as in Inquisition that millions of people were burned as witches in the name of religion.
Because of religion, more people were murdered, tortured, maimed, hated and discriminated than any other reasons, political or economical, in the history of man. And today the only wars are religious wars no matter how they are named, the Gulf war, the Balkan war, or the Afghanistan War as George Bush termed-and-detracted it “A Crusade”, an ominous but true reminder of the Crusader of killing millions of Jewish and Muslim worshippers by the Christians.
In the affairs of all mankind, religion is the most crippling disease, among others, to the evolution of humankind, that people inflicted upon themselves by inventing a God and asking the churches mind their spiritual shop.
Religious life is a duologue between soul and God and a deeply personal matter rather than a collective behavior, and there can be no middleman in this relationship.
Not your parents, your pastor nor any other self-appointed deputy of God, such as the Pope or the Queen of England.
It is obscene at least to accept another human being as a representative or a mouthpiece of the Creator of Universe for people living on the same planet.
It is not Christianity itself that can be regarded as a dangerous bogeyman to people and its community, but the way in which its dogmas are held as sacred, infallible, and inviolable, and to doubt which is sin and deserves of severe punishment.
In an era of archeology that refutes the historical reliability of the Bible, the thumb-sucking people still gather in churches to pay tithe for the purchase of a happy meal at Heaven, heavily sedated with the social programming like “Merry Christmas” oo’la’la of a virgin birth of Jesus Christ and an overdose of Christmas hymns, tinsels, creches and stars, which present the gospel birth stories as historically real and accurate.
The Bible, our knowledge on God was derived from the human source that is mixed with an enchilada of errors, prejudices, dreams and hopes, not supernatural beyond the reach of our critique or logic but within the domain of human quest for knowledge.
A simple challenge that God is a man-made product gives a shiver down Pope’s spine, because it may put him on the unemployment list to line up for collecting the premium.
“Jesus loves me, this I know…For the Bible tells me so” is the popular children’s Sunday song. And when kids grow up with the same conviction without a query on its source because their parents, teachers, ministers or churches say so, they are warranted to suffer from the lifetime religious illiteracy that scares them a lot to keep up with millions of Christian Joneses.
In the present day in the Middle East, the Bible renders fancifully the political legitimacy of Israel and upgrades erroneously the Chosen status of Jewish people, under which conviction Jews kill their Semite brothers and sisters with no other apparent reasons than “Bible said we are superior than you”.
When the Bible, especially Old Testament, is used to forge the national identity of Israel, and gives a story how special Israel is, that legitimizes Jews killing Non-Jews, and if this Bible is a collection of legends that contains a plethora of fictitious, man-made, erroneous, and unethical bullshits, then, the truth will free people from the wrongful conviction of fear, prejudice, hatred, and retribution.
In this sense, religion is a dreadful disease that the Bible prescribes people an erroneous drugs to harm rather than love their fellow travelers on earth.
December 25 2001
“If God did not exist, it would be necessary for man to invent him.” Francois Voltaire
“Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” John 8:32
Bertrand Russell, a Nobel laureate for literature in 1950 and a renowned English philosopher, once wrote that religion is a disease born of fear, primarily one of the social phenomena, and people accept religion on emotional ground, believing that it is thought virtuous to have faith and wishing to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes—that is, what really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all, as fear is the mother of the whole thing, fear of the mysterious, fear of punishment and fear of death, etc.
When the church argue in defense of Christianity, they do not give reasons for believing that God exists and the Bible is his words.
Instead, they argue that if people believe in this way, they act better than if they do not and a believer is happier than an unbeliever, therefore we should not to permit ourselves to speculate whether God exists. If any doubts raise its head, we must suppress it vigorously and historical records must be falsified if people cast doubt on the received wisdom of religion.
Because of fear, people refuse to accept the ordinary laws of science that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course.
People have come to entertain of immortality because it is pleasant and consolable to think that the invisible hand would somehow rescue us from our bodily death.
That’s why people invented God and immortality, central dogmas of the Christianity—in that Jesus Christ emphatically believed that his Second Coming would occur before the death of all the people who were living at that time, and he instilled the fear of everlasting punishment to the minds of people with vindictive fury, “Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell.”
However, faith eventually renders harm to people by stunting the growth of minds with a conviction that can not be shaken by contrary evidence or argument.
If contrary evidence might induce doubt, it is held that contrary evidence must be suppressed and met by fanatical hostility to both those who have other fanaticisms and those who object to all fanaticisms.
As people depend upon the absolute truth of faith contained in the saying of a certain man, like Jesus, Buddha, or Muhammad, a body of experts that interprets his saying, like church, synagogue, mosque, or temple, acquires the infallible power, dictate people’s minds, and becomes tyrannous obscurantist and cruel oppressor in high degree, where as in Inquisition that millions of people were burned as witches in the name of religion.
Because of religion, more people were murdered, tortured, maimed, hated and discriminated than any other reasons, political or economical, in the history of man. And today the only wars are religious wars no matter how they are named, the Gulf war, the Balkan war, or the Afghanistan War as George Bush termed-and-detracted it “A Crusade”, an ominous but true reminder of the Crusader of killing millions of Jewish and Muslim worshippers by the Christians.
In the affairs of all mankind, religion is the most crippling disease, among others, to the evolution of humankind, that people inflicted upon themselves by inventing a God and asking the churches mind their spiritual shop.
Religious life is a duologue between soul and God and a deeply personal matter rather than a collective behavior, and there can be no middleman in this relationship.
Not your parents, your pastor nor any other self-appointed deputy of God, such as the Pope or the Queen of England.
It is obscene at least to accept another human being as a representative or a mouthpiece of the Creator of Universe for people living on the same planet.
It is not Christianity itself that can be regarded as a dangerous bogeyman to people and its community, but the way in which its dogmas are held as sacred, infallible, and inviolable, and to doubt which is sin and deserves of severe punishment.
In an era of archeology that refutes the historical reliability of the Bible, the thumb-sucking people still gather in churches to pay tithe for the purchase of a happy meal at Heaven, heavily sedated with the social programming like “Merry Christmas” oo’la’la of a virgin birth of Jesus Christ and an overdose of Christmas hymns, tinsels, creches and stars, which present the gospel birth stories as historically real and accurate.
The Bible, our knowledge on God was derived from the human source that is mixed with an enchilada of errors, prejudices, dreams and hopes, not supernatural beyond the reach of our critique or logic but within the domain of human quest for knowledge.
A simple challenge that God is a man-made product gives a shiver down Pope’s spine, because it may put him on the unemployment list to line up for collecting the premium.
“Jesus loves me, this I know…For the Bible tells me so” is the popular children’s Sunday song. And when kids grow up with the same conviction without a query on its source because their parents, teachers, ministers or churches say so, they are warranted to suffer from the lifetime religious illiteracy that scares them a lot to keep up with millions of Christian Joneses.
In the present day in the Middle East, the Bible renders fancifully the political legitimacy of Israel and upgrades erroneously the Chosen status of Jewish people, under which conviction Jews kill their Semite brothers and sisters with no other apparent reasons than “Bible said we are superior than you”.
When the Bible, especially Old Testament, is used to forge the national identity of Israel, and gives a story how special Israel is, that legitimizes Jews killing Non-Jews, and if this Bible is a collection of legends that contains a plethora of fictitious, man-made, erroneous, and unethical bullshits, then, the truth will free people from the wrongful conviction of fear, prejudice, hatred, and retribution.
In this sense, religion is a dreadful disease that the Bible prescribes people an erroneous drugs to harm rather than love their fellow travelers on earth.
The best township for the Christians to live in the US
The best township for the Christians to live in the US
January 20, 2002
According to the Harper’s magazine (February 2002), the mayor of Inglis, Florida, Carolyn Risher has written the following proclamation and posted in her office in November last year.
Copies of the decree were also placed in hollowed-out fence posts at the town’s four entrances: the posts were then sealed and painted with the words Repent, Request, and Resist.
It is amazing to see how arrogant, arbitrary, despotic, and tyrannical a little local mandarin bleats about the mandate by its citizens and the appointment by God to decree: Hey, Satan, Go Away!
It is also fascinating with her hilarious challenge to issue an edict against the Satan, one of the Creator’s devastating mistakes in his induction of men and women in this planet, that she has the power and capability by a simple proclamation to keep the Satan out of town’s boundary and save her brothers and sisters from the daily satanic temptations.
The proclamation, “ Citizens! Do not panic! Here comes our mayor on a white horse charging against a Satan and taking everything back that was stolen from the town”, appears to be a chivalrous Quixotic exorcism that only dittohead and born-again Christians are eager to absorb and pray aloud together, Hallelujah Amen.
For mayor of Inglis, Satan has been running the US, with no freedom for its citizens, and without liberty to worship God, and therefore it is her duty to proclaim an edict that stakes the Satan out from town’s border. (Mullah John Ashcroft might drag her to the court for high treason.)
In the born-again world of an evangelical Christian fundamentalism, the low-grade exorcism performed by an elected official like the mayor of Inglis would be a godsend gift in tearing down the wall of separation between state and church and providing a cozy nest for the airhead Christian zealots.
What about the Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and freethinkers? For the Christian Wahhabists, they are all infidels that deserve to be kept out of town’s border, because they refuse to hear and follow the words of a Jewish rabbi from a cow town, Jerusalem, two thousands years ago.
Here is a decree by the Mayor of Inglis, Florida, Ms Carolyn Risher.
Be it known from this day forward that Satan, ruler of darkness, giver of evil, destroyer of what is good and just, is not now, nor ever again will be, a part of this town of Inglis.
Satan is hereby declared powerless, no longer ruling over, nor influencing, our citizens.
In the past, Satan has caused division, animosity, hate, confusion, ungodly acts on our youth, and discord among our friends and loved ones. NO LONGER!
The body of Jesus Christ, those citizens cleansed by the Blood of the Lamb, hereby join together to bind the forces of evil in the Holy Name of Jesus.
We have taken our town back for the Kingdom of God. We are taking everything back that the devil ever stole from us.
As blood-bought children of God, we exercise our authority over the devil in Jesus’ name.
By that authority, and through His Blessed Name, we command all satanic and demonic forces to cease their activities and depart the town of Inglis.
As the mayor of Inglis, duly elected by the citizens of this town, and appointed by God to this position of leadership, I proclaim victory over Satan, freedom for our citizens, and liberty to worship our Creator and Heavenly Father, the God of Israel.
I take this action in accordance with the words of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, as recorded in Mathew 28:18-20 and Mark 16:15-18
Signed and sealed this fifth day of November 2001.
January 20, 2002
According to the Harper’s magazine (February 2002), the mayor of Inglis, Florida, Carolyn Risher has written the following proclamation and posted in her office in November last year.
Copies of the decree were also placed in hollowed-out fence posts at the town’s four entrances: the posts were then sealed and painted with the words Repent, Request, and Resist.
It is amazing to see how arrogant, arbitrary, despotic, and tyrannical a little local mandarin bleats about the mandate by its citizens and the appointment by God to decree: Hey, Satan, Go Away!
It is also fascinating with her hilarious challenge to issue an edict against the Satan, one of the Creator’s devastating mistakes in his induction of men and women in this planet, that she has the power and capability by a simple proclamation to keep the Satan out of town’s boundary and save her brothers and sisters from the daily satanic temptations.
The proclamation, “ Citizens! Do not panic! Here comes our mayor on a white horse charging against a Satan and taking everything back that was stolen from the town”, appears to be a chivalrous Quixotic exorcism that only dittohead and born-again Christians are eager to absorb and pray aloud together, Hallelujah Amen.
For mayor of Inglis, Satan has been running the US, with no freedom for its citizens, and without liberty to worship God, and therefore it is her duty to proclaim an edict that stakes the Satan out from town’s border. (Mullah John Ashcroft might drag her to the court for high treason.)
In the born-again world of an evangelical Christian fundamentalism, the low-grade exorcism performed by an elected official like the mayor of Inglis would be a godsend gift in tearing down the wall of separation between state and church and providing a cozy nest for the airhead Christian zealots.
What about the Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and freethinkers? For the Christian Wahhabists, they are all infidels that deserve to be kept out of town’s border, because they refuse to hear and follow the words of a Jewish rabbi from a cow town, Jerusalem, two thousands years ago.
Here is a decree by the Mayor of Inglis, Florida, Ms Carolyn Risher.
Be it known from this day forward that Satan, ruler of darkness, giver of evil, destroyer of what is good and just, is not now, nor ever again will be, a part of this town of Inglis.
Satan is hereby declared powerless, no longer ruling over, nor influencing, our citizens.
In the past, Satan has caused division, animosity, hate, confusion, ungodly acts on our youth, and discord among our friends and loved ones. NO LONGER!
The body of Jesus Christ, those citizens cleansed by the Blood of the Lamb, hereby join together to bind the forces of evil in the Holy Name of Jesus.
We have taken our town back for the Kingdom of God. We are taking everything back that the devil ever stole from us.
As blood-bought children of God, we exercise our authority over the devil in Jesus’ name.
By that authority, and through His Blessed Name, we command all satanic and demonic forces to cease their activities and depart the town of Inglis.
As the mayor of Inglis, duly elected by the citizens of this town, and appointed by God to this position of leadership, I proclaim victory over Satan, freedom for our citizens, and liberty to worship our Creator and Heavenly Father, the God of Israel.
I take this action in accordance with the words of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, as recorded in Mathew 28:18-20 and Mark 16:15-18
Signed and sealed this fifth day of November 2001.
What is the Trinity?
What is the Trinity?
December 20 2002
A Canadian
This, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, thing is always bothering me.
Does anyone have any good explanation about it?
Paul JDSN replied:
December 21 2002
Trinity has to do with an important Christian belief that God was and is present among humans and will be so.
God showed his love through his son, Jesus and also does in his Holy Spirit. Therefore, in Trinity, we see that God is not just foreign to us because of God’s absoluteness.
Christianity believes that God share the suffering of human in history. And God will guard and lead us to the right way through his Spirit.
In common sense, we think that we must serve God because God is divine while we are mortal.
However, in Christianity, God firstly serves human beings participating in our concrete context.
So, we call God as a gracious thing. It is better that you understand Trinity not as a dogmatic formula but as a metaphorical description.
Let us make a modern God
December 31, 2002
“Truth is never absolute, since new discoveries could always replace the old; it has to be demonstrated objectively and measured by its effectiveness in the practical world”
In a reply to an inquiry by “a Canadian” in this forum, Lee SH tried, rightly and scrupulously, to avoid to define or elaborate the dogmatic theology of the Trinity that the Christians for centuries have struggled to understand the nature of God as three persons in One, as early as in1533, the Protestant reformer, John Calvin had the Spanish theologian Michael Servetus executed for his denial of the Trinity
As Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyon in the fourth Century, had lamented that the mystery of the Trinity was not only indescribable but also incomprehensible to human mind, the belief in Trinitarianism was the most difficult idea for the human beings to comprehend or imagine the existence of three beings, each of whom is equal to the three, that was shoved into the Christian throats by the arbitrary decree of early Christian fathers.
Jesus Christ, according to the pulpit, is the second person in the Trinity, the Father being the first and the Holy Ghost the third…each of these three persons is God…that is, God exists in three persons, but these are not three Gods but one God revealing himself in three person.
In other words, the pulpit would compare the trinity to identical reflections in the several fragments of a broken mirror, or to the identical composition of water, snow, and ice.
In secular understanding, the son (Jesus Christ) is just as old as his father, and the father is just as young as his son.
The son was begotten by the father, but existed before he was begotten. Christ is his own father and his own son. The Holy Ghost is neither father nor son, but both.
Therefore, it is declared that the Father is God, and the Son God and the Holy Ghost God, and that these three Gods make one God.
Then, who has developed this absurd doctrine that only the gaping primates may take it in their belief system?
It is true that the doctrine of the Trinity is important to Christianity, not because, as LEE SH indicated, God showed his love through his son Jesus and his Holy Spirit, but because it has tremendous implication for how one understands the Jesus who had two natures, one human, the other divine, or who had one nature of a fusion of human and divine…that is, the doctrine of the Trinity consolidated a human Jesus Christ evolving to a divine Son God when the Church functionaries under the guidance of the Pope and the Roman Emperor in the fourth Centuries voted to crown Him with divinity.
In the early Christian history, the theological doctrine of Trinity was hotly debated among the bishops and priests, and the Emperor of Rome, Constantine wanted to settle the matter once and for all, convening the first Ecumenical Council of the Church in 325 CE (Common Era).
At the meeting, the Pope Celestine the First declared, with the help from St. Athanacius, the bishop of Alexandria, that Jesus Christ was the Son of God who has the same nature or essence (homo-osion) with God the Father, therefore, one in being.
Other bishops argued that the Father and the Son were “homo-iousion”, similar essence or nature, which means that the Son might be similar to God, not really divine.
Then, the Pope won and other dissenters were exiled…
The argument over the divinity did not stop there…Nestorius, a monk of Antioch later became the archbishop of Constantinople, taught that Mary, the Mother of Jesus was only the Mother of the human person in Jesus, therefore, she should not be called the Mother of God, “theotokos”, but only “Christokos”, the Christ-bearer.
This caused the widespread anger among the people that gave rise to convene the Council of Ephesus under the guidance again of the same Pope.
He declared that in Jesus, there were two natures, one human, one divine, but united in only one person, the divine Person of the Son of God, and since Mary gives birth to a person cum divine Jesus, not just a body or a soul, Mary could truly called “theotokos” the Mother of God.
When the decision was announced, the people of Ephesus went wild with joy, parading the streets with torches, dancing and singing with abandon.
In the modern society that values only rational or scientifically demonstrable truth, the dogma like the Trinity, Immaculate Conception, Original Sin, or Armageddon theology, becomes an idiotic and absurd problem that occasioned the beau-coup conflicts among the nations.
The Middle-east conflict is one of the human conflicts that was caused by the egocentric dogma of the Chosen Land by the Chosen People with the financial help of the Christian dispensationalists who believe in a God not of love, but of war, the Armageddon theology.
And I read loud and clear that LEE SH sought to bypass the dogma and got back to the fundamentals of all religions; the love of God manifested through the Prophets, Jesus Christ, or Muhammad, warning me not to understand the Trinity as a dogmatic formula but a metaphorical description.
However, his assertion, that “God shares the suffering of human in history, therefore, God is a gracious being”, appears to be a highfalutin self-adulation in his endorsement on the Christian dogma of the Trinity.
From the beginning, God was fundamentally to blame all the sufferings of the human race, contrary to what LEE SH proposed and believed…I only can surmise…that God shares the human pains through his Son to be nailed in the cross for the salvation of the human kinds (the Trinity).
Though I am not using the Bible as a proof-text, God was a slow-learning, bungled, and absent-minded scientist in the creation of the universe, later drowning 99 percent of his masterpiece, human races save a sample of them, and “re-peopled” the world.
(Noah’s cargo list did not have the name of dinosaur since at that time America was not discovered yet?)
Of course, I am sure LEE SH believes that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and ever-present entity in our life…in this perspective, nothing could happen without his knowing beforehand that it did happen in human history.
Nothing happens without His permission and acquiescence; nothing could happen if He chose to prevent it.
This means that God in his loft throne in the sky allows knowingly inflicting a one-two punch on his products whenever he feels fit to do it, and He is one and only responsible for everything that happens.
And curiously, the devout Christians still adore Him as our Father, “who serves firstly human beings,” as Paul JDSN gloats..
Throughout the human history, people commit as many deicides as they required to do when God no longer works for them, and there is no reason why we should not throw the absurd and idiotic dogmas, like the Trinity, into the dustbin of ancient nonsense and wash our hands.
The concept of loving God is simply impossible to accept after we had experienced the Christian Crusades, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, to name the few human catastrophes, and we are still on the war wagons to kill each other, who I believe are perhaps the poorest of all the invention of God.
If Christ had really been God, He could have proved it, since nothing is impossible with God.
The pulpit where LEE SH works says for thousands years He is coming, He is coming, He is coming, and He still seems to be thinking about it for TWO thousands years and could not make up His mind, while for hundreds of generation billions of His loving products die and go to hell.
Why don’t we kill this slow-moving, unresponsive, and lethargic god of Bible and replace it with more fast-moving, efficient, and passionate god of the present day?
After all, Jesus Christ, the Bible God was born and lived in a cow town, and died ignominiously there only knowing that there was no other place beyond the horizon of Jerusalem, let alone the stupendous nature of real universe.
Let’s create a modern God, folks!
December 20 2002
A Canadian
This, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, thing is always bothering me.
Does anyone have any good explanation about it?
Paul JDSN replied:
December 21 2002
Trinity has to do with an important Christian belief that God was and is present among humans and will be so.
God showed his love through his son, Jesus and also does in his Holy Spirit. Therefore, in Trinity, we see that God is not just foreign to us because of God’s absoluteness.
Christianity believes that God share the suffering of human in history. And God will guard and lead us to the right way through his Spirit.
In common sense, we think that we must serve God because God is divine while we are mortal.
However, in Christianity, God firstly serves human beings participating in our concrete context.
So, we call God as a gracious thing. It is better that you understand Trinity not as a dogmatic formula but as a metaphorical description.
Let us make a modern God
December 31, 2002
“Truth is never absolute, since new discoveries could always replace the old; it has to be demonstrated objectively and measured by its effectiveness in the practical world”
In a reply to an inquiry by “a Canadian” in this forum, Lee SH tried, rightly and scrupulously, to avoid to define or elaborate the dogmatic theology of the Trinity that the Christians for centuries have struggled to understand the nature of God as three persons in One, as early as in1533, the Protestant reformer, John Calvin had the Spanish theologian Michael Servetus executed for his denial of the Trinity
As Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyon in the fourth Century, had lamented that the mystery of the Trinity was not only indescribable but also incomprehensible to human mind, the belief in Trinitarianism was the most difficult idea for the human beings to comprehend or imagine the existence of three beings, each of whom is equal to the three, that was shoved into the Christian throats by the arbitrary decree of early Christian fathers.
Jesus Christ, according to the pulpit, is the second person in the Trinity, the Father being the first and the Holy Ghost the third…each of these three persons is God…that is, God exists in three persons, but these are not three Gods but one God revealing himself in three person.
In other words, the pulpit would compare the trinity to identical reflections in the several fragments of a broken mirror, or to the identical composition of water, snow, and ice.
In secular understanding, the son (Jesus Christ) is just as old as his father, and the father is just as young as his son.
The son was begotten by the father, but existed before he was begotten. Christ is his own father and his own son. The Holy Ghost is neither father nor son, but both.
Therefore, it is declared that the Father is God, and the Son God and the Holy Ghost God, and that these three Gods make one God.
Then, who has developed this absurd doctrine that only the gaping primates may take it in their belief system?
It is true that the doctrine of the Trinity is important to Christianity, not because, as LEE SH indicated, God showed his love through his son Jesus and his Holy Spirit, but because it has tremendous implication for how one understands the Jesus who had two natures, one human, the other divine, or who had one nature of a fusion of human and divine…that is, the doctrine of the Trinity consolidated a human Jesus Christ evolving to a divine Son God when the Church functionaries under the guidance of the Pope and the Roman Emperor in the fourth Centuries voted to crown Him with divinity.
In the early Christian history, the theological doctrine of Trinity was hotly debated among the bishops and priests, and the Emperor of Rome, Constantine wanted to settle the matter once and for all, convening the first Ecumenical Council of the Church in 325 CE (Common Era).
At the meeting, the Pope Celestine the First declared, with the help from St. Athanacius, the bishop of Alexandria, that Jesus Christ was the Son of God who has the same nature or essence (homo-osion) with God the Father, therefore, one in being.
Other bishops argued that the Father and the Son were “homo-iousion”, similar essence or nature, which means that the Son might be similar to God, not really divine.
Then, the Pope won and other dissenters were exiled…
The argument over the divinity did not stop there…Nestorius, a monk of Antioch later became the archbishop of Constantinople, taught that Mary, the Mother of Jesus was only the Mother of the human person in Jesus, therefore, she should not be called the Mother of God, “theotokos”, but only “Christokos”, the Christ-bearer.
This caused the widespread anger among the people that gave rise to convene the Council of Ephesus under the guidance again of the same Pope.
He declared that in Jesus, there were two natures, one human, one divine, but united in only one person, the divine Person of the Son of God, and since Mary gives birth to a person cum divine Jesus, not just a body or a soul, Mary could truly called “theotokos” the Mother of God.
When the decision was announced, the people of Ephesus went wild with joy, parading the streets with torches, dancing and singing with abandon.
In the modern society that values only rational or scientifically demonstrable truth, the dogma like the Trinity, Immaculate Conception, Original Sin, or Armageddon theology, becomes an idiotic and absurd problem that occasioned the beau-coup conflicts among the nations.
The Middle-east conflict is one of the human conflicts that was caused by the egocentric dogma of the Chosen Land by the Chosen People with the financial help of the Christian dispensationalists who believe in a God not of love, but of war, the Armageddon theology.
And I read loud and clear that LEE SH sought to bypass the dogma and got back to the fundamentals of all religions; the love of God manifested through the Prophets, Jesus Christ, or Muhammad, warning me not to understand the Trinity as a dogmatic formula but a metaphorical description.
However, his assertion, that “God shares the suffering of human in history, therefore, God is a gracious being”, appears to be a highfalutin self-adulation in his endorsement on the Christian dogma of the Trinity.
From the beginning, God was fundamentally to blame all the sufferings of the human race, contrary to what LEE SH proposed and believed…I only can surmise…that God shares the human pains through his Son to be nailed in the cross for the salvation of the human kinds (the Trinity).
Though I am not using the Bible as a proof-text, God was a slow-learning, bungled, and absent-minded scientist in the creation of the universe, later drowning 99 percent of his masterpiece, human races save a sample of them, and “re-peopled” the world.
(Noah’s cargo list did not have the name of dinosaur since at that time America was not discovered yet?)
Of course, I am sure LEE SH believes that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and ever-present entity in our life…in this perspective, nothing could happen without his knowing beforehand that it did happen in human history.
Nothing happens without His permission and acquiescence; nothing could happen if He chose to prevent it.
This means that God in his loft throne in the sky allows knowingly inflicting a one-two punch on his products whenever he feels fit to do it, and He is one and only responsible for everything that happens.
And curiously, the devout Christians still adore Him as our Father, “who serves firstly human beings,” as Paul JDSN gloats..
Throughout the human history, people commit as many deicides as they required to do when God no longer works for them, and there is no reason why we should not throw the absurd and idiotic dogmas, like the Trinity, into the dustbin of ancient nonsense and wash our hands.
The concept of loving God is simply impossible to accept after we had experienced the Christian Crusades, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, to name the few human catastrophes, and we are still on the war wagons to kill each other, who I believe are perhaps the poorest of all the invention of God.
If Christ had really been God, He could have proved it, since nothing is impossible with God.
The pulpit where LEE SH works says for thousands years He is coming, He is coming, He is coming, and He still seems to be thinking about it for TWO thousands years and could not make up His mind, while for hundreds of generation billions of His loving products die and go to hell.
Why don’t we kill this slow-moving, unresponsive, and lethargic god of Bible and replace it with more fast-moving, efficient, and passionate god of the present day?
After all, Jesus Christ, the Bible God was born and lived in a cow town, and died ignominiously there only knowing that there was no other place beyond the horizon of Jerusalem, let alone the stupendous nature of real universe.
Let’s create a modern God, folks!
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