Cover of Hildegard Knef's One and One, That Makes Two (Eins Und Eins, Da...

We are all birds that the cat of death is waiting to swallow.

Asism Quotes:

Wittgenstein:
It is the spirit in which one act that is vital.
If someone is love-sick, a scientfic explanation will not bring him peace, but the right gesture might help.
Magic is best seen as a highly developed gesture langugg, not depending on hypotheses or evidence, or seeking causal explanations as does science.
The whole idea of 'connections' between reality and language is a false one.

Pavlov's Children

Take the most beautiful thing most humans can imagine -a healthy, smiling newborn infant, in this case a male infant - then grab it's penis and slice off all the healthy nerve rich skin at top, making the poor creature scream in pain until he passes into (potentially lethal) shock. So the religious and the stupid initiate the brutal process of belittling a human life so that it is little more than a pork chop in a butchers window. Then onto indoctrination mixed with corporal pain and psychological terror. Keep going so that their most tender and critical neurons are conditioned for fear. Don't stop until they are so terrified of freedom that they'll gladly vote to bomb and imprison anyone that say or does things differently. So are the Pavlov's children of the next generation of self-absorbed religious society.

You are always at the end of your life

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Life is our inheritance, it's diversity is in our faces, our ideas and our dreams.
We can argue about how we got here.
We can argue about what might happen, if anything, when we leave here.
And we can have those arguments on battlefields or on pages.

We are, after all, basically the same.
Birth delivers us to different environments and our successes and failures are forever linked to those origins
and not, necessarily, to what we deem are our personal strengths and weaknesses.

But some of us insist that a great inheritance is a symbol of greatness and a licence to govern and exploit others. 
We live in the shadow of those for whom any amount of money and power is never enough.
And their rationalizations for violence and war are forever foisted upon us, be they God, country,
politics or profit.

So where does that leave us?
Are we are fated to live in the crossfire of other's physical and metaphysical battles?

Do we obey our overlords and supply them our sons and daughters for cannon fodder?
Do we sing their anthems, and pay for their blunders with our meager holdings? And when that isn't enough, do we promise our children's earnings, in advance?

Or do we exploit reality for it's secrets and it's obvious joys?
Do we vote with our dollars to humble giants? Do we ignore their rants and their marching orders to hate and condemn? Do we humble those that would steal our future, exploit our present and rewrite our past?

Is the highlight of our day their commercials with their intoxicating imagery, boiling emotion and demands for allegiance while the rest of our day is boredom, meaningless work or worse?

This is our war. The war between those that blindly support tyrants and those that think for themselves.

You may not know it but you were born in crossfire of many wars.
Some physical, some philosophical, some religious and some political.
But there are basically two types: ancient and modern.

To fight the ancient wars there are those that will seek to recruit you especially during youth or periods of unhappiness.

They will try to convince you that the unknown is their certain secret knowledge and that secret must be preserved with your own blood and your own money, and the blood of your children.

To fight the modern wars there are those that will seek to educate you, and train your mind for independence. They will teach you the interconnectedness of all things, and the struggle for a prosperous survival.

If you choose not to fight you will be enlisted anyway in the wars between self indulgence and duty
or youth and old age. There are many, many wars.

So, you have no choice. You will fight.

It's your life.
And all we can know for sure is that it will one day end.

So to make peace with yourself, choose your battles carefully.
Or they will be chosen for you.

A woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he doesn't.
A man marries a woman expecting that she won't change, and she does.

Having children is nature's way of ensuring and man and his wife have something in common.

You don't realized how cheap life is until you leave the gated community of the West.

Birth is the death of nothingness and death is the birth of nothingness.

Can we influence the past? Of course, by doing anything.

The only one that will ever think of your needs and care enough to make life comfortable for you in the way that you really, honestly want it to be - is an automated smart-home system that you programmed yourself.

Civilisation is the failure of our ancestors to kill off priests when they occaisionally popped up.

Life is a temporary state where you believe you are not everything.

The Christian god is a programmer cursing his own code.

Atheist meaning:

I understand that in the entire life of this Universe
I will be assembled briefy and for one time only.
I have only a short time to walk the earth, to smell the pines and to know
kindness, cruelty, fellowship, loneliness, joy, sadness, sickness, health, pain and pleasure.
Each day any progress, any gainful work is tempered
by the spectre of my mortality.

I know life cannot easily be stilled and
that every lifeform that comes after me is my familial descendent.
My atoms will be assembled and shared by millions of living things and the
Earth I cherished or neglected will be their inheritance. Just as my own short
life is composed of every living thing that preceded me. Today I am a living
thing. Tomorrow I will be parts of living things. Today is my day in the sun.
Today is my one in a trillion, trillion, trillion possibilities.

I'm going to give it my best shot.

Mine is a shared experience.
I am my times.
My life is a thread of linen in a vast canvass that is ever morphing into another. 
If I do not drink deeply and care for the people and the things I love then my life will have been a long
indulgence that betrays my heritage and scours the landscape that nourished me. That is not my choice. I live at the cost of many other lifeforms. Those that are not moved by that fact I do not understand. I live a good life in part for those that gave their lives for me. 


I recognize evil in it's many pernicious forms including dogma, religion, politics and Utopian ideaology. For
when a few decide how the many must live then life becomes and more oppressive than anything nature may throw at us.

You know you're old when you'll trade being old and wealthy to be young and healthy. And vice versa.

God is a potential abstraction that only develops into a mental construct when a universe is sufficiently evolved to produce sentient being interested in rationalizations for inexplicable events.

Heaven is a masturbatory fantasy for narcissistic fools.

Religion is a mirror.

Religious people are budgies looking into that mirror.

Oral tradition is suseptable to natural selection. More entertaining and flattering accounts of a story are reproduced and less entertaining and less flattering accounts of a story go extinct.

What would appeal to a group of religious fanatics, a story of a man that died, was ressurected and flew off into the clouds or the story of a good and wise man that died like everyone else?

Now add to that unnatural selection:  Those that teach an oral tradition that the rich and powerful don't like then become susceptible to death squads, imprisonment, torture, rape and slavery. This practice was the norm for almost 1600 years in Europe.

This explains the Bible and so much else.

Religion is the doctrine of nightmares wherein imaginary tortures are used to greater effect than real ones wherein the world's riches are handed over freely to the mortal joy of old virgins in exchange for a waving of veined hands and a puff of smoke.

Banking is the doctrine of false hope wherein the impossiblilty of riches is exchanged for lifelong slavery where governments are made to bow in servitude and the free minting of money is handed to bankers to the mortal joy of old men in exchange for absolutely nothing.

In both religion and banking public ignorance on a large scale is the wind upon which they sail.

The Western concept of God is obviously the result of a pissing contest between various primitive groups to see who could come up with the best superhero.

But unlike the superheroes of DC and Marvel comics the Western God is a paralyzed invalid, a moral black hole, a bitter Goliath, a sexually obsessed sadist, unlovable, impulsive, ultra-violent, blood-thirsty, maniacal, cowardly and unable to learn. He is stupid in construction, embarrassing in action and inane in properties.


Lacking in both mystery or purpose the Western God was the projection of the sexually frustrated, petty, alienated, angry, covetous, xenophobic, chauvinist, greedy and murderous Middle Eastern man-ape. The Western God is criminality enshrined as divinity -  a mountain of manure worshiped for it's occaisional weed or flower. 


He is a mass murderer worshipped because of his occasional failure to be thorough.
He is the embodiment of facism, cronyism, nepotism and the abuse of power.
He is an exterminator cum torturer and a debasement of everything humanity aspires to overcome.

What is left now that science, medicine and reason have stolen his might? Hatred, racism, solipsism, an excuse to bugger children and rape girls? To collect wives as property? A means to deny human rights to your favorite kicking ball humans?  An excuse to bomb other countries and seize territories? He is the way to keep a nation's wealth in the hands of a few by hypnotizing the masses with empty promises, catchy songs and phantasmagorical saber-rattling fantasies of reward, revenge and power. He is the carrot on a stick for those too dim to see the obvious. The Western God has only one real, believable property: for those seeking to dominate or to be dominated - he is useful.

Whatever few good properties the Western God might have had at one time are now banished. Now he makes Satan look gracious and benevolent in comparison. Ever since people have been able to think things over without threat of immediate torture and burning God's Heaven seems to be a nightmare. His promised return is cartoonish and macabrely goofy (dead bodies crawling up from graves). Everything about him is absurd. The only people with 'Godly' qualities are murderous dictators, sexual deviants and violent bullies.

Children, by and large, will always believe that something exists for a reason. When asked why there is an ocean a child will explain it's necessity for fish - and not that the Earth was pounded by asteroids for billions of years. Believers simply have never been able to outgrow the naivety of childhood. They are alternatively in a perpetual state of ignorant wonder or a maniacal, lethal force determined to shield themselves from adult thinking at any cost.

Let's not forget that the early Universe was not complex at all. There were no atoms and no contemporary laws of physics. Believers would have an argument if the very early universe was chock full of galaxies and planets with fruited planes. But it was far less complex than a fart.

Elders

Our species is unique in that we are all more or less made in the image of a very small group of elders. These elders created the essential human values and lifestyles. Elders might include Plato, Socrates, Christ and Jimi Hendrix. Depending on your nature, you seek out the company of certain Elders.

Each of us has had many ancestors that looked and thought like us. Perhaps they succeeded in life, perhaps they perished. The point is that we are an extension of a prototype. Whatever elder captured the imagination of their times and the imaginations of future generations, we are all part and parcel of them. Whatever elder menaced their people into submission and created prolonged suffering, we are part of them.