Fair is foul, and foul is fair

There couldn't be atheism if there wasn't religion. 
Unless atheism is the one hard done by and religion arose in contrast to man.  Think of the outrage of Lucifer with God in Milton's Paradise Lost -  is the question then who is the genuine devil ?

Is it Jehovah or the Other - Man's image - Lucifer, as it were, his lucid self - Who was first ? - To paraphrase Nietzsche - 
"Was it man who invented God, or was it God who invented man ?"  but this would exculpate the crux moral argument - That of which one is better.  Which is perverted against the other ?  Which one death and which life ?  

When we envisage the two natures as unanimous with neither perverted against the other, then we have to accept total resignation, the annihilation of Buddha; and presume to have no choice or judgement or moral action (pre-determination). 

Dualism is only edified by this equivocation, because the escape from dualism is the recognition of the preference for the good - which is an undeniable dynamic without which there wouldn't be any use in having a sense of discrimination beyond purely animal instinct which brings us back to the moral notion - that of truth over falsehoods, rather than the reverse, falsehood over truths.

Anyway, with regards to Buddhism this is not original. if you look at the earliest texts (Pali texts) there is the strong emphasis on right over wrong action.

"Here's an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven"  -  Shakespeare, Macbeth

Perhaps in a world post-religion, but that couldn't truly be a world without religion, even it chooses to rub out its past in some kind of Atlantean deluge, or a Utopian Calvinist Tabla Rasa - a place, a promised land prepared by the puritan work ethic to be cleaned of all original sin to hasten the return of Christ to judge all, the living and the dead.  

Let us not make a case for religion; before making a good one against it.  That is, to explore the negative dialectic.

It is unsurprisingly very simple to query and find faith hugely lacking in evidence of meaning.  In a positivist sense, it is nothing.  Unlike science and its dependence on the evidence.

Which leads us to ask even when you believe in nothing, how can you actually negate God ?  

Other than being the cure for and negating religion, what is atheism itself ?

This question has been raised in philosophic argument before, and one answer was: that the outcome and foundation of Atheism can only be Materialism, and thus philosophically nihilistic.

As regard ethics, I have no trouble with the assertion that perhaps ethics came from woman.

On the other hand why did the question of truth bother to rise at all ?

Beyond the pale white ghost

Angel Gabriel and Muhammed

We are in war.  And as a little of it leaks onto our doorsteps there is utter disbelief at the outrage.   What is our supposed sanctity?  Our taken for granted right to total freedom ?  We maintain one rule for us in the enlightenment west, with its freedoms of expression, and another for those on the margins.

Are we not all living on one world?  In the west we still live in the pale.  On the other side, beyond the precipice, is beyond the pale.  War beyond the pale can never be won if it isn't recognised that there is a fine fuzzy line between here and there.   One world, one war, one suffering, a common humanity.

Why the surprised outrage?  That this horror dared cross that line into our prosperous and self righteous enclave.  Is there a division between our supposed paradise of sophomoric consumerism, our moronic inferno of Disney, and that hell out there of lunacy and carnage ?

In the Calvinist concept we are preparing the new Jerusalem for Christ's return by toil of the protestant work ethic.

What else explains this huge conceit of innocence?

Nelson Orgy

update:
beyond-the-rainbow

They should name prisons after this man.  Mandela !  Never mind this overblown humbug  notion of the Greatest figure since the Crucified,  his is a stunning testament to apartheid's tolerance of one of it's dissident prisoners, proof that one prison at least appeared to turned out a reformed character - Robin Island could be the model of all maximum penitentiaries.
Well,  he is rightly credited with his post-penal zen, yet he still should be a penitentiary poster-boy, an icon of hope and tenacity.

Was he innocent when tried ?  Well, clearly not as innocent as when he emerged, penitent, blissful and with seemingly serene sagacity from his incarceration.  His majesty was further crystallised by maintaining a royal silence over the carrion calls for criticism of the ongoing and blatantly heinous antics of his ruling ANC comrades in the subsequent two decades after his release until his demise, reaching its zenith in the Marikana massacre in August 2012, not to mention the forgotten episode of the Shell House massacre in March, 1994 which he claims to have authorised*. 

Nelson is the opium of terrorism who gives terrorism transformative powers.   He is both Spartacus and Fawkes.  Yet he is, in reality, merely the vacuum which these archetypes are projected onto.  Terrorism's soft metamorphosis made possible by the sublimation of prison stoicism.

The orgiastic self-serving maypole festivities of the great and the good for this chameleon's pre-funeral are an outrage to anyone with any remaining human sensibilities.
This isn't merely bad culture,  this is it's successor, civilisation gone putrid with a decadent will.

Is terrorism now circumstantially justifiable ?  Will Guy Fawkes be celebrated with statue outside of parliament alongside of that other, actual, regicide,  Oliver Cromwell ?

                                                    

"I don't think Mandela was a corrupt politician, he did after all spend 27 years in jail for his principles, maybe some of the others are, maybe not".

-Maybe some of the others ? that's an understatement you can only make if you're blithely ignorant.  Mandela was not in an ignorant position and yet he said nothing, for the sake of not tarnishing his Mahatma-like living legend.   I also doubt he would of, for the sake of principles, chosen to spend anytime in prison.  That was imposed on him. (Sure, he would of been willing to spend a short spell which would give dues after, as a freedom-hero triumph (which is what happened, although 27 years was almost certainly longer than he bargained for).  Don't make it sound like a sacrifice he was willing to make.  His was a gamble on a successful revolution backed by the Soviets. A gamble he lost.

You must remember the context of 1961 - most of Africa had achieved dependence around then; he was merely jockeying for a post-colonial position.  If he'd won over the Boers in a coup then, he probably wouldn't have a halo hovering over his head now. 

*In June 1995, ANC and then President Nelson Mandela claimed that he had given the order to defend Shell House, even if it should require killing people.^[5] In 1995 Willem Ratte laid a charge of murder against president Nelson Mandela at the Police headquarters in Pretoria^[6] for the Shell House Massacre.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_House_massacre

http://www.info.gov.za/speeches/1994/230994029.htm

Marikana massacre:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/16/anc-absent-marikana-massacre-memorial

the lost prison manuscript:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9116391/the-mandela-files/

Moral and spiritual idealisms with all their efforts and disciplines aimed at the future are forms of the very mode of awareness which give us trouble.  For they perceive good and bad, ideal and real, separatively and fail to see that "goodness" is necessarily a "bad" man's ideal, that courage is the goal of cowards, and that peace is sought only by the disturbed.  

- Alan Watts  Nature, Man and Woman, 1958

More vs. Cromwell; Gunpowder plots

A man who refuses to believe in a god or an afterlife can never be trusted, only
because he would not acknowledge any authority or principle outside himself.

~ Thomas More

It is rather obvious: democracy has become a quantitative argument rather a qualitative one.  This is not paradoxical: staying true to the democracy concept would mean setting a qualification on it.  Young and old, male or female, vote by all means,
but only if you pass a rudimentary test.  The setting of such a test in itself would encourage deeper reflections on what the political structure is.  

If you define democracy in quantitative terms, the argument will always 
be at a pittance: more suffrage (for teenagers now) is such a bottom of the barrel, obfuscatory non-debate.  But if you had to prove your interest, have a certain level of understanding, by a qualification test to vote - only then, can a democratic experiment begin.  

It then wouldn't be condoning xfactor-brow level decision making that sways polls on the naive wavelengths which sway fashion herds thereby proving democracy's failure, which, besides it's corporate cloning, is the real cause of the current disillusionment with politics.  


Democracy at a dangerous impasse

There are 4 choices:

1. Universal suffrage, or the quantitative position (current 'enlightened' system: the suggestible masses)

2. Compulsory voting.

3. No voting (Russell Brand's revolt, or the reductio ad absurdum to fascism and          totalitarianism as an answer to the two party conundrum- is: 'whats the point? may    as well give in to the seemingly inevetible' - Cyclops trumps dualism).  What nobody wants to contemplate is a return to feudalism - theres a system - no voting, just squabbling Barons.

4. Qualified voting.

   

Revolution:  few questions

Why are those who have public voice, who are using their platform to idly advocate revolution,
not willing to step out of their comfortable police-protected shoes and start one?

Or don't they know how ?

It is obviously a desperate measure, and poses the question - is revolution

entirely committed by the unconscious ?  And is that what is being advocated in this
call of the collective will ?

Just how are the subjects themselves going to be become rulers?  
(As Hannah Arendt puts it)

Why is it that no one has laid out, measure by measure, what dismantling the system
would entail, or how it would take place?

Or is it supposed to occur spontaneously, entirely unplanned ?

Or is it, by its nature, incontingent ?

If so, are logistics, protocol, and contingency measures which we
should forever seek to do and live without - in the true spirit of revolution ?

Is revolution merely the quest for the organic by the light of complacency through the

eradication of all systems ('constructs') ?

If that is the purpose and spirit of revolution, if that is its definition, then does that explain

the relative failure of its spirit in the past ?

How, after a hypothetical euphoric revolution, would disarmament be enforced on citizens ?

Can the allure of revolution be described as a spirit of irrationality, proven by euphoria?

Has revolution been distinguished from anarchy - and if the revolution is not to be anarchic,

what is it then?

Is it going to lead to more forms or strive to remain anarchic and formless?

Is this ecstasy of revolution merely an emotional sensation which cools ?

The Hypothetical outcome of revolution

1. Starvation
2. Arson

3. Anarchy, then necessary expedient.  An arbitrary tyranny or "reign of fear", explained off
    as a temporary measure by that eloquent summation: To make an omelet, you have to break eggs.

Protesting 

To simply affirm the right to protest by doing so , is not to think the unthinkable, it

is to perform that which is completely sanctioned and to endorse that which is entirely impotent.

It is nothing more than gratuitous luxury, a graceless performance of catharsis regardless of purpose, comprehension, or intent.

To the individual, the protest is a self-right to express their 'views' as individuals, in solidarity with others.   On the contrary,  it re-affirms and upholds the non-society, the non-community ethic of a successful corporate state.  Because there is nothing individual or communal about it.   Of course, they aren't really expressing their view, as it is nothing more than mere social conformity with tagline, thereby rendering this 'conscious' stance idiotic.

Fighting power is not only oxymoronic, it is also worship of power.

Students protests are nothing new as noted by Machiavelli,  they are a sign of a successful rule.  Anarchy has always been solely the luxury of aristocrats, artists and students.

The men who are symbolic heroes for the occupy camp*, and villains of the Stuart regime:

*for entirely the wrong reasons.  Heroes to resistors of imperial might, their pro-active intent inspired IRA atrocities - not something that most Fawkes mask wearers at Occupy would care to know, nor understand.



http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/10/what-does-revolution-mean-you
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/10/russell-brand-the-jeremy-clarkson-of-the-left/

Bryant Park, NY

"Hell is full of good wishes and desires" -  Saint Bernard of Clairvaux


The myth of progress, rather like the myth of enlightenment -

is that enlightenment could be attained collectively through
collective will, rather than personal will (there's a myth of our epoch).
The American president is "ruler of the planet" (Superman II) Superman is the myth of America's will, the myth of its "enlightenment", that of coke and marlboro.

This isn't merely a naive, innocuous theory, it's a perverse faith which has consequences

that would seek to destroy anything which stands in its way. 
The triumph and the summation of the enlightenment is the nuclear warhead.

With that phallic-mushroom heresy began the slow rollback of the enlightenment fallacy,
and the beginning of the cessation of the American epoch. 

Superman is how America saw itself: forward looking, morally right, generous, magnanimous & the benchmark-keeper of all decency.  Now the Apollonian veil of its
clean promise seems sullied, It is now beginning to see itself as it really is.

Its prime mobile was a vehement opposition to  old Europe - 

backward-looking, too Catholic, too Gothic, too old and full of

charnel-house basilicas to fit its glossy, forward looking ideals.  

It was the attempt to roll back the medieval to a Renaissance-inspired neo-classical ideal.

The war against Islam is interesting in that it is a war with the heretics of enlightenment - who wants to hold back the tide, of the democratic ideal. 
In essence, it seeks to oppose and reject violently the liberality of wall street usury and debt-interest fallacy, that blind mayhem of greed, endless frontier-horizon yellow-bricked roads to neverland, which yields nothing more than the consequent gross commercial idealising of all material.  The consequences, however unintended, of Luther, Calvin, & Locke.

Poet's Revolution

The attachment of the sign of the economic to every spontaneous insurrection under the sun is a commonplace in the Marxist tradition. For Baudrillard, bursts of revolutionary activity governed by the “pleasure principle” and the “radicality of revolt”—such as that witnessed in “the destruction of machines, in pre-Marxist, utopian and libertarian discourse as well as in the ideas sustaining ‘the cursed poets or the sexual revolt”—sought a new and more radical “total symbolic configuration of life.” But under the spell of Marxism, these strands of rebellion are abstracted out of movements in political economy, and, at worst, sacrificed as less important moments of the unfolding of history through the “development of productive forces.” It is this sense of finality from which revolutionary activity must escape, of some end toward which our efforts are driven. The “here and now” of revolution must be reinstated. Against the “imposition” of the meaning of revolutionary finality, Baudrillard instead celebrates “the radicality of desire which, in its non-meaning, cuts through all finality”