but, isn't the lesson taught in christianity that if you try and live a good life and be a good person that you'll be betrayed by your friends and torn down in bloodlust by an angry lynch mob?

there's this story going around amongst jewish historians that maybe the entire history before the captivity was entirely fictional, and that the people that were moved into the levant were an entirely fabricated ethnicity - that the jewish race was a fabrication of the dying sumerian civilization under the direction of it's new iranian overlords, meant to colonize and replace an existing civilization with a colonial outpost. this would explain judaism's apparent connections to zoroastrianism.

and, what would that destroyed civilization be? it would have been phoenician. what happened, then, was that the persians came in, cleared the phoenicians out and brought in this imagined ethnicity, the jews - who were peoples indigenous to mesopotamia, following a newly invented ideology with a totally fabricated history.

but, some source would exist to describe this? well, perhaps some source did, perhaps many did. but, centuries later, the roman destruction of carthage was total - and such histories would have been destroyed in the process, if they existed. hey, that is true, isn't it?

it was the carthaginian connection that intrigued me as i was having a cigarette and wanted to get written down. i like it when disparate parts of history intersect like that, and it just made a connection in my head. hey, it's christmas.

i've actually long been swayed by the hypothesis that religion, as we understand it, is basically an elaborately distorted ufo cult. these stories of contacts with ancient beings in the sky may have an empirical basis, if you allow for contact with extra-terrestrial life. well, it's a naturalistic explanation, is it not? the sky is at the core of so much religion...

i don't claim to be able to rigorously demonstrate this, but i think it's probably actually true, nonetheless. it's kind of unfalsifiable, right? but that doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong - i'm post-godel, i'm sorry, it really doesn't. errr. bzzzztt. wrong.

it's certainly less convincing if it's unfalsifiable, i'll grant you that - it's not science. it's speculation. but, it might be science one day.

so, i don't find claims of entities in the sky to be particularly absurd or hard to believe - they've happened all throughout history, have they not?

ok, i'm going to put away my skeptic hat for a moment and put on my marxist cape. 

i just think the marxist article of clothing should be a cape. it just makes sense, some how. i dunno. but it's obvious.

religion is supposed to be this thing that governments use to control masses of people into compliance with. so, it strikes me as kind of weird to speak of it in terms of resistance. now, i need to rip off my marxist cape because my paranoid anarchist heart wants to look for evidence of alliance with power structures, as that is, in truth, occam's razor. yet, the possibility of a simple slick preacher also always exists - and these aren't mutually exclusive.

at the least, any activist on the left should be particularly weary of any kind of religious movement trying to involve itself with politics. there is a 100% chance that they are trying to take over your movement for one nefarious aim or the other.

the problem that marx (where's my cape?...) saw with christianity is that it promises salvation in an afterlife, thereby leaving workers in delusional states of fantasies about life and death. i'm supposed to point out that marx saw this as an obstacle to movement building and leave it at that, but think about the psychology in what he's suggesting. think about how that breaks a human's soul into two, having them turn an active desire for death into a virtue. to convince humans that they should believe that all of the misery and all of the struggle is worth it because it will be paid off in an afterlife, which certainly doesn't exist. this is a truly dangerous cult.

i don't feel that buddhism escapes this general description of a pacifying force, but rather in a way just transcribes it. buddhism also teaches that life is meaningless, and that there is some preferable place in the hierarchy in the next life. this is incompatible with a revolutionary politic.

this whole thing is such an absurd charade. and, maduro is starting to remind me of the bumblebee guy from the simpsons. 

it's one of those bewildering things you see from time to time in these places: the opposition stands down from the elections. and, you assign ulterior motives to such queer behaviour. yet, you miss the obvious: that the opposition stood down because it's backers didn't want it to win, or that the iraqi military stood down in iraq because they were ordered to allow isis to take up a position.

i've long been convinced that maduro is actually pretty buddy-buddy with the cia behind the scenes, he just needs america as an enemy to maintain control of the country. and, the americans seem eager to comply, as it gives them a bad guy of their own. if america wanted maduro gone, it would just cut off oil purchases for a week; he'd be gone. venezuela is, in truth, utterly economically reliant on the united states. that's going to come with a lot of clout in caracas, "domestic politics" whatever they may be.

the opposition was, in truth, no doubt ordered to stand down. but the reason underlying it is probably the most obvious one.