Category Archives: The Human Condition

The Pastor that went rogue

We don’t see this often.

After Year Of Atheism, Former Pastor: ‘I Don’t Think God Exists’

‘At the start of 2014, former Seventh-Day Adventist pastor Ryan Bell made an unusual New Year’s resolution: to live for one year without God — this reflecting his own loss of faith. He kept a blog documenting his journey and had a documentary crew following him.

After a year, Bell tells NPR’s Arun Rath, “I’ve looked at the majority of the arguments that I’ve been able to find for the existence of God, and on the question of God’s existence or not, I have to say I don’t find there to be a convincing case, in my view.

This is a remarkable thing – primarily that a human can change a, I would think, deeply held belief, as religion is in its formal and more explicit forms is most often something that is indoctrinated into children by their parents or pushed onto a person by his social circle which makes it awkward to be the lone nail standing out, which induces people to conform (ie. school clique social influence), but moreso that he went full public with it. My hat is certainly off to him.

One of his biggest lessons from the year is “that people very much value certainty and knowing and are uncomfortable saying that they don’t know.” Now he thinks certainty is a bit overrated.

Which is exactly the message that Nicholas Nassim Tabel brought to us  in his ‘Black Swan’ – people are SO afraid to say ‘I don’t know” (and to a lesser degree “I’m not certain”)… because it, in our times, implies ignorance, and in a world where people want certainty, both for the peace of mind in a chaotic, incompassionate world, as well as not wanting to be the nail standing out.

Ryan Bell is that lone nail sticking out – and, in my opinion, for the better.

http://www.npr.org/2014/12/27/373298310/after-year-of-atheism-former-pastor-i-dont-think-god-exists

A current example of subtotalitarian ideology

This is a case-in-point of the poison that ‘feminism’ has become:

On Wednesday, the Daily Mail reported that a school in Oxford has become the first to introduce “Good Lad” workshops, in which boys are singled out for sessions that teach them about “the scale of sexual harassment and violence aimed at female students” and how they must stand up for women’s rights.

…      In November last year, The Times reported on a programme in London Schools in which two American women, one a former sex crime prosecutor, “re-programme teenage boys’ sexual manners so they are fit for a feminist world”.

…       By all means, let’s teach children about healthy relationships, but that’s not really what these campaigns are about. Instead there is an overwhelming emphasis on imposing an ideological worldview that first and foremost sees young men as potential abusers and perpetrators, while routinely ignoring and minimising the very real threat of violence, both physical and sexual, that boys and young men face themselves.

This is what feminism has slowly become over the past half-century. ‘1st wave feminism’, a term that the most recent feminists have coined to appropriate the laurels of those who took the first, dangerous, steps to enable women to live and experience life more freely, the equal-francise agitators of the 19th century, and the 2nd wave feminists, the ones that pushed to further increase female participation in society through educational institutions and workplaces.

The 3rd wave ‘feminists’ however, is a camp of toxic madness dressed up in decent attire – with a core of pretentious writers and ‘cultural personalities’ that popped up and after in the cultural-sexual revolution post-1967, where sexuality (incl. pornography, which was incidentally legalized in Denmark in 1968 as the first country in the world) was not only freed, but was used as a political tool, which Frankfurt-school sociologist Herbert Marcuse noted it had to become, since the traditional revolutionary ideologies had failed miserably.

..which leads me to note that certain ideologies that are so well-meaning, and intend to change the whole world for the better, end up doing horrifying messes.

(That one specific umbrella of ideologies that rose in 1848 had a lighter face that gave rise to significant good for millions of people, but its darker face ended up being the worst scourge the world had ever seen in terms of lives lost, crushed under the iron-clad weels of the machine that pushed towards progress.)

So, the feminists of today as alwas say they have good intentions of e.g. reducing violence again women. The claims we’ve heard for over 20 years are that men are the violent scourge of the earth – we are violent, brual, caveMEN, we are the sole cause of the wars in the world, and most of all, rapists (the #1 bogeyman and beserk-inducing dark effigy of modern feminists.)

However…

You’d never know it from the rhetoric, but a man – and particularly a young man — is around twice as likely to be a victim of violent crime as a woman. And it’s not just drunken street violence either. A 2009 NSPCC report into domestic violence in teenage relationships, showed teenage boys suffer comparable rates of violence from their girlfriends as do teenage girls from their boyfriends.

As you may have heard, violence against girls and women, even rape, is something men won’t do if only they are taught no to do so. Thus, men, and in particular, buys are put into the grinder of being ‘taught’ not to be violent and rape.

In the same year another report, this time by Childline, found that of the children who called to report sexual abuse, a total of 8,457 were girls (64pc) and 4,780 were boys (36pc). The charity also found boys were more likely to say they had been sexually abused by a woman (1,722 cases) than by a man (1,651).

What comes to mind is the somewhat recent, very large number of female schoolteachers in the U.S. that end up in criminal court due to having sex with their male pupils. Are these cases rape? Are these boys  entirely aware of what is happening, and what they are getting into? If it is not fully-informed consent, is it not rape, according to the feminists? Would not male teachers that pushed younger female students into having sex with them be shown publicly and branded as a rapist to not only his enormuous shame, but at a great danger to his life, since targeted violence againt men that have comitted sexual abuse is common. (Many have to do a namechange and relocate to live safely and unburdened from their past).

Usually the girls/women (and many guys as well) snicker a bit at these going-ons. After all, men are those brutish a creatures, always wanting sex, so getting sex with your teacher must be good, though awkward (as women that have sex/go into relationships with younger men stand out, as the typical female desire is to choose a male partner older than herself.

In March, the Government announced the introduction of new consent classes for children aged as young as 11*. The plans were launched on International Women’s Day and the PSHE guidelines repeatedly state they are primarily part of the Government’s A Call to End Violence Against Women and Girls strategy.

According to a “Fact Sheet” published by one of the guidelines’ key contributors, a top priority for the lessons is “challenging notions of male sexual entitlement” and the lessons should be seen “in the context of a society in which gender inequality is the norm… and girls and young women are subjected to high levels of harassment, abuse and violence – overwhelmingly from men and boys they know”.

*) Get ’em while they’re young. As it happens, totalitarian movements and ideologies all ahev in common that children must be indoctrinated as soon as possible, last they develop free identity and notions counter to the exalted ideology.

What impact must all this be having on boys and young men, who are themselves at one of the most vulnerable stages of their lives? Last year, insideMAN published findings of a focus group of young male students, which gave a disturbing glimpse into the ideological classroom climate faced by boys, this time told by young men themselves.

They told us that when it came to expressing any view that contradicted feminist orthodoxy, they were shouted at and publicly humiliated. They said their motives routinely came under immediate suspicion simply on account of their gender. And they said they wanted to be protected against fundamentalism by prominent and leading figures in the campaign for gender equality.

Bullying is the usual tactic of cliques, and bullying on this scale is intense and abusive in a way that leads to mental scars that will take years to heal.

After visiting a classroom … Doris Lessing …  told the Edinburgh Book Festival, “I was in a class of nine- and 10-year-olds, girls and boys, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars was the innately violent nature of men.

“You could see the little girls, fat with complacency and conceit while the little boys sat there crumpled, apologising for their existence, thinking this was going to be the pattern of their lives.” Lessing expressed deep concern that what she had witnessed was just a glimpse of an increasingly pervasive culture of toxic feminism in schools that was weighing down boys with a collective sense of guilt and shame.

Which it quite what it is – toxic feminism, which is causing and will cause untold harm to buys and men, moreso in that this feminism, like any other ideology engaging in entryism, has been creeping into the institutions of both government and education; purportedly seeking doing-good and further liberation of women will get you far in this age of progress and equalization, and once in the positions of influence and power, the fair garb will be cast off and the dark being beneath will come forth and do its deeds.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11747413/We-must-stop-indoctrinating-boys-in-feminist-ideology.html

On Revenge, Briefly

Revenge is the inclination you get after having your cheeks bloom with redness and fire, your throat constrict and your hands clench into fists. It is the feeling that resides within after that the abusive tirade toward your person that you’ve received, a response to the beatings you have suffered, to the injustice you have become subject to.

While there is a lot to be said in re. to both injustices and of the justified feeling of revenge, there is brief line for you here:

“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.“, said Marcus Aurelius.

People feel abused because they have been subjected to abuse. Thus, if you were to abuse others in whichever way, after having yourself been subjected to abuse and belittlement, would make you no better than the asshole that caused pain in you. Not only that, it would create one more viction in a world with too many already. (I could indeed say that such behaviour would perpetuate the cycle of hate and suffering, but that would be a tad too Buddhist of me.).

This in itself will not help overcoming the pain, but it will help seal the door after you once you have healed the wounds that ooze the desire for revenge.

(This does not mean that abuse, assault and destruction should be disregarded, go unpunished and forgotten; of course not. More on that later.)

Truth or Tact?

A question I was made aware of:

Is it more important to you that you are tactful, or truthful?

This starts out as a soft and gossamer question which transmutes into to something that probes deeper into the human depth.

Initially: My view on this is that if you care about truth, you will realize that at least some degree of tact is necessary to make that truth take hold in the minds of others. You may be an obnoxious loudmouth that doesn’t care about speaking properly to people, at least as a token of good faith, however:

Opinionated, obnoxious or even toxic people are causing much damage with their vitriolic behavior as most people simply do not differentiate between a persons opinions and their behavior towards them. This is – when observed solely from the perspective of propagation of valid knowledge – a sad fact of the human condition, though entirely understandable: We modern apes are emotional beings first, and cognitive high-function beings a far second. Verbal and emotional abuse is damaging not only to the social fabric, as it causes individual distress and as such, loss of useful cognition in a specific field (or worse in the case of HSP’s – Highly Sensitive Persons – where it may sow the seeds of anxiety and depression), it causes loss of the possibility for an idea, or a set of ideas, to propagate through human society and civilization. (I will not go into the consideration whether disgust for abusive persons has roots in evolutionary biology).

If the person is intelligent enough to understand this dynamic AND that they care enough for their cause in the sense of the successful promulgation of it, they will eventually change their behavior to be more accordant with others.

If they are intelligent enough, but do not moderate their behavior due to lack of empathy/empathetic understanding of the other party , then it is because they are sociopaths or suffer from a neurological disorder. Sociopaths are erratically emotional people prone to angry or abusive outbursts or consistent abrasive attacks on opponents. (Sociopathy is covered under the ASPD diagnosis).

Regardless of being intelligent enough though having a mostly normal empathetic sense, if abusive people do not moderate their behavior, they then throw abuse for egotistical reasons, ie. ego-boosting, showing their supposed greater ability than their target off in public, or simplistically gratifying themselves by trouncing their unfortunate victims. This is a trait of both narcissism and psychopathy.

Narcissists (having the condition NPD: Narcissistic Personality Disorder) are people with a pathologically inflated self-image, but shrouded, low self-esteem – they usually behave vainly and with low empathy or recognition of others. If someone pokes unpleasantly close to their core of low self-esteem, they suffer a so-called “narcissistic injury”, which will result in a overblown response (verbally pointed, abrasive or even physically violent) to the words that preceded it.

Psychopaths are people, while usually intelligent, have a severely weakened sense of empathy and regard of the well-being of others;  they will always tend to seek out positions of power and high social standing and are usually good at achieving these; as such, they get to be in positions where they can use this power or influence to not only disregard the well-being of their subordinates (not merely in contexts of the conventional political or business organisations, but in less hierarchical environments such as clubs, communities, forums, physical or on-line) without fear of consequences to themselves, but disregarding their dignity to such degree that they toy with others for their own entertainment (verbal abuse being a form of ‘toying’). (Psychopathy is a subgroup of ASPD).

Lastly, if they consistently trounce others in public or private simply for the fact that the others are “wrong”, it doesn’t matter if they are intelligent, and it doesn’t matter of they are empathetic (though this behavior usually wears off for empathetic individuals and also usually with age), they are fanatics, the kind of person that hold no blows back against a specific (real or imaginary) opponent, where opponents are often dehumanized (as an inhuman, or as sub-human*, is easier to massively smear and once their flock is numerous enough), where abuse against out-group individuals is dismissed at the wave of a hand.

Fanaticism is typically instilled from ideology (political or religious), during the formative years, or during a vulnerable period, of that persons life. While attempts to reason (and as such moderate that persons behavior) with a fanatic will usually bear no fruit of itself, it can have some efficacy if that people has started to see problems in that person’s ideological/religion in-group (this, ironically, usually caused by abusive behavior of those persons themselves).

Nevertheless, the sad fact in the case of online abuse seems to be that the person you are facing** are most likely not giving much of a damn about you (and far less likely to ever apologize), either because they are unable to due to for reasons of a disorder, or because their disorder is that of the meme called “ideology” has taken over (at least temporarily) their brain. While physical venues and online forums can be somewhat safeguarded from these abusive individuals, private conversations and exchanges generally cannot, and you are best off by adjusting your expectations about the sort of behavior you can expect from others – without stooping to their low levels (in which case they have not only caused discomfort for you, but they have won insofar that their abusive behavior has left a long-lasting scar on your person).

 

*) Subhuman doesn’t not nescessarily refer to being considered a different race or ethnicity, but also as  having purported debilities or undesirable traits, these traits including “bad ideas” such as opposing religion, which of course includes opposing political ideology or ideological fragments; certain ideological extremists regularly justify their own abuse directed against the opponents by their opponents holding opinions of “low empathy” or “low solidarity” (though the terms of course mutate from time to time. You will also notice that in terms of political ideology, the justifications of the so-called “left”  and “right” are practically mirror images of each other.

**) Obviously not, as the behavior that some people put on display in public electronic debates, or private internet exchanges, would see them mauled in short order if they were in reach of their victim.