Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
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Category: Spirituality and Being
Broken Buddha
Posted on October 13, 2007 in DBSA Support Groups and Conferences Myths & Mysticism
The speaker, a well-respected (and fortunately good-humored) San Diego County psychotherapist was giving an example of how our perceptions may shape our reaction to a piece of reality. “Let’s say, I take a statue of the Buddha and smash it on the ground. Now if you’re a Christian, it probably would not bother you. But if you were a Buddhist you –”
“– might feel joy because when you met the Buddha on the road you killed him?”
Amen! — Er — Right!
Posted on October 7, 2007 in Spirituality and Being
Absconded from Nullifidian:
P.S. I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaaack!
Seen in a Public School Classroom
Posted on September 24, 2007 in Agnosticism Humor?
You never know what will appear to set off your atheist parent:
If anyone else had me in view, they’d have surely assumed I’d suffered a small but effective stroke. I was completely frozen and trying to stay that way. Time stopped, looked at me funny, then continued on its way. I knew that if I came to, I’d leap onto a chair and point and squeal “CROSS! CRAWWWWWWSSSSS!!” I’d have no choice: the point-and-shriek is mandated for all encounters with crosses in the by-laws of the Atheist-Vampire Accords of 1294.
Read the whole story at the Meming of Life.
Saint Che
Posted on September 23, 2007 in Class Myths & Mysticism
‘Halt, do not shoot, I am Che Guevara and I am worth more alive than dead.’
The Guardian has an article about the perserverance of the memory of Che Guevara, atheist Communist who is now regarded as a blessed one by the people of the village where he was brought for execution after being hunted down by Bolivian troops:
By 8pm in the main square of the dusty town of Vallegrande, the only sound is the buzz of prayer coming from the church. Inside, devoted Catholics sit and stand around the image of Our Lord of Malta – the only black Christ in Latin America, brought to this Bolivian town during the Spanish conquest.
But this is not the only foreign element of devotion. Father Agustin, the Polish priest, reads out prayers written down by local people: ‘For my mother who is sick, I pray to the Lord and …’, hesitantly, ‘to Saint Ernesto, to the soul of Che Guevara.’ ‘Saint Ernesto,’ the parishioners murmur in response….
In his 1967 dispatch to the Guardian, journalist Richard Gott, in Vallegrande on the day of Guevara’s death, wrote: ‘It was difficult to recall that this man had once been one of the great figures of Latin America. It was not just that he was a great guerrilla leader; he had been a friend of Presidents as well as revolutionaries. His voice had been heard and appreciated in inter-American councils as well as in the jungle. He was a doctor, an amateur economist, once Minister of Industries in revolutionary Cuba, and Castro’s right-hand man. He may well go down in history as the greatest continental figure since Bolivar. Legends will be created around his name.’
Gott was right. Susana Osinaga, a nurse who cleaned Guevara’s body back then, recalls: ‘He was just like a Christ, with his strong eyes, his beard, his long hair.’ Today the laundry where Guevara’s corpse was laid is a place of pilgrimage. On the wall above Osinaga, an engraving reads: ‘None dies as long as he is remembered.’ Osinaga has an altar to Guevara in her home. ‘He is very miraculous.’
Saint Che. Friend of Fidel Castro. You can’t go to a latino event in these parts without seeing his beret-capped face looking off over your left shoulder to some future Marxist workers’ state. When you view altars constructed for the Day of the Dead, you’ll often see his image among greats of the Left who include Dr. Martin Luther King and Gandhi. Bullets and compassion for the destitute and struggling made him so venerable.
Che was a thinker and a poet. He joined the Marxist left because he had witnessed the suffering of the poor and thought there was a better way. Only Communism, he thought, cared about Latin America’s downtrodden. So after studying medicine, he hooked up with Castro, took up a gun, and engaged in guerilla warfare in nations where a sliver of a class of wealthy magnates oppressed hundreds of thousands of workers. For decades, the peasants had cried for land reform. Capitalism had failed (as it still does) to provide the right to control of the means of self-survival. Those who worship him know that Che saw this and tried — in a flawed, pinkish way — to change this.
In the end, his opponents executed a man but not a legend. The faces of my mostly Republican neighbors turn red when they see his visage at Mexican Independence Day celebrations, but there is nothing they can do about it. He is an emblem of latino resistance to norteamericano machinations in their lands, a threat to white people of floods of tanned immigrants crossing their borders, taking their jobs and, by their naturalization and votes, their precious but falsely free market government. He does not die. Like many a saint, however, he stands for renunciation of the worldly as an icon for sale in vulgar, popular marketplaces and hash houses.
Hitler’s Pagans
Posted on September 19, 2007 in History Myths & Mysticism Propaganda
From A History of Pagan Europe:
It is often written that Hitler’s regime in Germany (1933-1945) was Pagan in inspiration, but this is untrue. Hitler’s rise to power came when the Catholic party supported the Nazis in the Reichstag in 1933, enabling Nazi seizure of power. Many churchmen of both Protestant and Catholic persuasion were committed supporters of the Nazi regime. The belief that it was Pagan in outlook comes from propaganda during the Second World War. As anti-German propaganda, occultist [[Lewis Spence]] wrote:
The ancient faith of Germany and Scandinavia, popularly known as ‘the religion of [[Odin]] and [[Thor]]’, has been the subject of many a literary ecomium. To myself, as a student of Folklore and Mythology, it makes an appeal no more gracious and stimulating than any other religion of the lower cultus, and very much less so than those even of Polynesia or old Peru.
It is, indeed, only the fact that it is being resuscitated by extreme Nazi fanatics which makes it important at all, and, even so, it is worthy of notice only in a temporary sense, for with the downfall of Hitler and his caucus it will go the way of all artificially revived heterodoxies.
Himmler and Hess, two ‘extreme Nazi fanatics’, seem to have been active followers of an [[Ariosophical]] mysticism, promoting the future rule of the super-race. But Hitler himself said in 1941: ‘It seems to me that nothing would be more foolish than to re-establish the worship of Wotan. Our old mythology ceased to be viable when Christianity implanted itself.’
Spence wrongly connected National Socialist ritual, derived from Prussian and Austrian military custom, with Paganism, as ‘The Nazi Pagan Church’. Recent research by John Yeowell has shown that, far from being influential in Nazi Germany, Pagans were persecuted. Leading Pagans were arrested by the Nazi regime. For example, in 1936, the noted runemaster [[Friedrich Bernhard Marby]] was arrested and spent the next nine years in concentration camps. He was not alone. In 1941, on orders from Heinrich Himmler, many Pagan and esoteric groups were banned (including the followers of [[Rudolph Steiner]], the Ariosophists and followers of the religion of [[Odin|Wotan]]). Like other victims of Hitlerism, many Pagans subsequently died in concentration camps. (pp. 218-219)
Following the Tortoise
Posted on September 17, 2007 in Thinking
It’s just come out that what scientists believed to hold true about the nature of the neutron wasn’t true. Before recent discoveries showed otherwise, they held that the neutron consisted of a particle with a negatively-charged shell and a positively-charged core. Now it is known that the neutron consists of a negative shell and a negative core with a positive layer between. Enrico Fermi was wrong.
Does this mean that particle physics is going to collapse? Is it a defeat for science? No.
“Nobody realized this was the case,” Miller said. “It is significant because it is a clear fact of nature that we didn’t know before. Now we know it.”
The discovery changes scientific understanding of how neutrons interact with negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons. Specifically, it has implications for understanding the strong force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature (the others are the weak force, electromagnetism and gravity).
The strong force binds atomic nuclei together, which makes it possible for atoms, the building blocks of all matter, to assemble into molecules.
“We have to understand exactly how the strong force works, because it is the strongest force we know in the universe,” Miller said.
This goes back to what I said the other day about belief. Since 1947, physicists have believed in one version of the construction of the neutron. Now with new evidence, the smartest among them must adopt another, better version. They’ve come a long ways from [[Democritus]] who held that atoms were the smallest, indivisible unit of matter and will undoubtably go farther. That the knowledge brings them closer to the truth does not make it any less a belief: we cannot be certain that future discoveries will not cause yet another revision. For now, based on the evidence, this is the best model we have and it is probably better than the ones which have come before.
Everything we advance as a scientific principle must, because we are not omniscient, be held as tentative. We do not come born with the knowledge in our bones and we cannot obtain it instantly, by stretching our awareness into all places. Our existence is a little like [[Zeno_of_Elea|Zeno’s]] fable of Achilles and the tortoise. The tortoise — which might be called the truth — has a mile headstart. Achilles must catch up and pass the tortoise to win. Yet to get there, he must first get halfway there. And once he has accomplished this, he must move halfway yet again. Because there are an infinite number of halves to traverse, he cannot cover the mile. In the meantime, the tortoise has moved a little farther.
This does not work for the natural world, of course, but it may serve as an apt metaphor for Science. Our understandings take us closer to the truth, but there is always a gap to be covered halfway. So we go on, developing better and better models. We hold them as the best thing and, if Science has done its job as it has in the case of evolution, it serves as a better explanation than what has been said before. We believe our current models to be satisfactory enough to get us through the general problems of understanding the Universe. We live with uncertainty, however, and in that sense Science must be considered to be an aggregate of beliefs that do a better job of explaining than others.
As the story of the neutron shows, what we believe we know will, in some ways, change. That is where we can draw the division between dogma and Science: the beliefs of the former strive to remain unaltered while the second remain subject to new discoveries. It does not allow us to become stuck in erroneous views except by willfullness.
Belief helps us get by until we get a better belief. It pays to follow the tortoise.
An Atheist Who I Can Stomach
Posted on September 16, 2007 in Spirituality and Being
Check out Friendly Atheist. Hemant not only provides information about the humanist community, but he also invites members of various religions to answer questions on his blog.
Atheism and Belief
Posted on September 14, 2007 in Agnosticism
I caught an atheist blogger who tried to define atheism as being an absence of belief — about anything. If you don’t believe, I said to him, you don’t have a mind. Right now there are ideas in your head about the nature of the world that are wrong because our current science has not understood them properly. These ideas will be overturned by more information. You ~believe~ that these are true. Your mind is not fully cognaisant of the nature of the universe with or without a “Higher Power” or “Intelligence” or god. Nor will it ever be. It is natural to fill in the holes as best we can. (OK, I added a little to it.)
Give me a break!
Let’s just see how many atheists attempt to turn this into a “there is/isn’t a God debate”. Thank the Universe that I am an agnostic! I know that knowledge will change as it refines itself.
Innocent Nuns Punished
Posted on September 11, 2007 in Abuse California Watch Morals & Ethics Scoundrels
They didn’t have any part in it. They didn’t fondle any child inappropriately. They didn’t lure them to dark corners and press them into coitus or sodomy. Yet three nuns — who have given their lives to helping the poor in their community — are going to be the first to pay for the priest sex abuse scandals that cost the Archdiocese of Los Angeles $660-million by giving up their home. Meanwhile the episcopal ring glitters on the hand of the archbishop and the house AHnold gave the archdiocese is not on the block.
[tags]sex abuse, clergy, priest sex abuse scandal, scandals, scoundrels, nuns, priests, Catholics, Catholic Church, morality, ethics[/tags]
Julian the Apostate
Posted on September 9, 2007 in Biography Myths & Mysticism Reading
From A History of Pagan Europe by Prudence Jones and Nigel Pennick:
….Constantius died on 3 November 361, naming Julian as his successor, and the new emperor marched into Constantinople on 11 December, 361. He did not institute a massacre of the Christians, which led them to complain that they had been cheated of martyrdom. He reduced corruption in the administration, repealed the laws of religious persecution, but prevented Christians from serving in the army (because their law forbade killing), from receiving grants and gifts (because their religion preached poverty) and from using Pagan texts in schoolbooks (because Pagan myths demonstrated Pagan ethics, which could only mislead Christian children). It is unclear whether these rulings were superbly cynical or naively sincere. (pp. 70-71)
I think I would have liked this guy. We could use him here and now, don’t you think?
[tags]paganism,roman history,history,spirituality,christianity[/tags]
Agave Jihad
Posted on September 8, 2007 in Hatred Spirituality and Being
Yes, it is true that I have toasted a particular sector of atheists lately for their cherry-picking arguments with Christians, but here’s an account of two Christians with atheists for neighbors who have received a revelation that the neighbors — as epitomized in their [[agave|agaves]] — are manifestations of the [[antichrist]]. Let’s subtitle this “cactus torture“.
Also read this.
You don’t do stuff like this to an agave even if you are making [[tequila]].
