religion – Page 37

How to Self-Evaluate Your Own Religious Integrity, in Eleven Premises

Premise 1: My religion represents the exclusive truth.

By way of an answer, consider this: which of the following scriptures have you devoted to rigorous and charitable study: The Koran, The Bible, The Torah, The Bhagavad Gita, The Upanishads, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Gnostic Gospels?

Consider approximately in hours, days, months, weeks or years your devoted study to each, and then review your assertion of Premise 1 from a space of honesty and integrity. You will review this yourself with no higher authority than your own to judge.

Premise 2: My religion is unique.

Every religion is unique in its own way. This by itself does not lend a measure of truthfulness. For example, only Buddhism holds that if a statement should not accord with your own sense of reason, then you need not accept it, even if is spoken by Buddha. This may make Buddhism unique, but it does not immediately qualify it as true.

Islam holds that Mohammed flew to heaven on a winged horse. Again, this qualifies Islam as unique, but it does not immediately qualify it as true. Even the belief that Jesus was the son of a virgin and died upon the cross for our sins is not unique to Christianity, as this mythology was already present in a much earlier religion called Mithraism.

Premise 3:

I feel very strongly about my religion/
I have perfect faith in my religion/
I know in my heart that my religion is true/
I have special access to the truth/
I have had special spiritual experiences with this religion that confirm my belief

So does everyone else who adheres to a religion, even to the extent that they would sacrifice their own lives for their faith, Sikh, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Mayan. They each have heaven, miracles, saints and holy days. If their faith is as strong as your own, can it be possible that you are both correct? Are you both wrong? Is there another possibility? What are to be your standards for judging, given that you are the advocate of only your own religion?

Premise 4: When I am uncomfortable, something is wrong and I should therefore avoid it.

False. Something is not wrong when a dancing bear has the ring removed from its nose, and something is not wrong when a woman is in childbirth. When you question your convictions, you are stepping into your own authority and demanding that your assumptions meet the appropriate conditions – namely, that they reflect truth. The most wonderful and transformative change is often initially uncomfortable, this does not mean it is not worthwhile.

Premise 5: Those who encourage me to question my faith are agents of of evil or are otherwise trying to lead me astray.

To the extent that you believe this, you will remain in a spiritual cell. The only thing you have to lose by questioning your beliefs and convictions is illusion – you get to keep anything that is true. No one imprisons you but you, and by your own free choice. Are you worried about losing the illusory? Are you worried about losing what is false?

Recognise this responsibility to yourself and to those who depend upon you. There is no one to reply to, object to, or argue with in this situation, because the only person you need to answer to here is you.

Premise 6: The truth of my religion is established to the extent that we have faced persecution.

This is assumed by every religion. Every religion faces persecution from every other religion, and yet each religion assumes the role of passive victimhood. This is simply not true. All religions both persecute and are persecuted, and all have a history of violence.

Premise 7: My religious community shares love with each other and that is real.

It may very well be true, but so does every other community, religious or not. How do you treat those who choose to leave your community? Do you judge them? Often the love shared between members of a church or a religion is actually conditional. We are happy to give love, care and attention to others within our group just so long as they live up to our expectations by believing what we believe and behaving in ways acceptable to us.

If they leave, then what happens? If their religious commitments change, then what happens? If your religion teaches that they should be treated any different, does that resonate with you on the deepest level?

Premise 8: The holy scriptures that my religious beliefs are based on are very old, and can be proven authentic because within those scriptures is the promise that it is true.

Again, this is ‘true’ for every single scripture-based religious tradition. Each relies upon a circular argument. “God has divinely authored a book in which he promises he was the author, and God would not lie”. This is self-contradictory, and the absurdity of it is clearly seen when the same assumptions are championed by other religions with entirely different assumptions.

Premise 9: If I did not maintain the beliefs, traditions and practices set out by my religion, then the world would collapse into moral anarchy.

The sad irony is that the world is already in a continually worsening state of moral collapse, largely due to interfaith conflict. Please read this last sentence more than once, because it is imperative that you understand. If multiple groups are being guided by inflexible moral rules that are in fact mutually exclusive, then conflict is the inevitable result. Period.

Premise 10: I would rather be wrong with my own religious group than right by supporting beliefs that I experience as heretical, distasteful or challenging.

This is very important to review for yourself, because herein lies the crux of the issue of personal moral and epistemic integrity. That which is true will not always conform to your expectations, preconceptions, and certainly not your comfort zone. Read this last sentence twice, please. It is imperative to understand. If you choose to be wrong with your own group, you are not in your integrity, because what you are in fact choosing is to be in your comfort zone rather than in respect to Truth.

Premise 11: Other religions and belief systems are immoral and misguided.

Now, if you are fundamentalist of any kind this has to appear to be true for you, because you have concluded that the rules set out by your own tradition are exclusively correct. You may be surprised to find with a little honest research that some traditions are very much aligned to your own. They may have an attitude of high respect and tolerance for their ingroup and an attitude of disapproval and even violence of their outgroup. They may even walk the talk better than your own tradition.

For example, the Islamic practice of stoning adulterers and homosexuals is frowned upon by moderate Christians, even though the moral law is expressly the same in the Koran as it is in the Old Testament. Fundamentalist Christians may not necessarily be so far off in disagreement with Radical Muslims.

There are also very loving and moderate religious traditions that may agree with your own teachings about expressing love to outsiders, forgiving wrongdoing and respectfully allowing others of different creeds to live in peace without imposing one’s own views and constraints upon them. Does that really sound so bad? If your teachings inspire you to anger and malign against others, can you honestly say that those beliefs are in the better interest of mankind?

Simon P. Murphy is a Nelson-based writer. He is the author of the short story collection His Master’s Wretched Organ and the forthcoming Lexicanum Luciferium (both by VJM Publishing). His fiction is heavily influenced by Gnosticism and Alchemy, placing a central focus upon the theme of our navigation of an occulted reality through the use of archetypal symbolism.

What Does It Really Mean to Be Honest?

To honestly assess information, we need to fully inform ourselves.

We have all heard ‘honesty is the best policy’ and, ‘you shouldn’t lie’, but what is honesty at the deepest level, and why is it so important?

Honesty, at the deepest level, is a form of integrity.

Integrity asks you to be spiritually courageous, and involves using your wisdom and discernment even in the face of great pain. Being honest is not always easy. Sometimes being honest means moving away from the comfort of beliefs that we hold great stock in, beliefs which we have been taught over a lifetime, beliefs which inform our daily lives, actions, decisions, and relationships to a profound degree.

The truth is, none of the comfort or emotional well-being derived from any belief is indicative of its truthfulness. There is simply no connection between what provides comfort and what is true.

Why is any of this important?

Believing things which are untrue can be very harmful, even though we may derive enormous personal comfort from the familiarity and promises of these beliefs.

If someone comes to your door and explains that they believe something without providing charitable counter-arguments, alternatives, or competing explanations, then this is a very strong indication that that person is not acting in their integrity, their honesty.

An evangelist will stand at your doorstep and faithfully show you everything that they believe, including why it makes sense to them, and the path they have taken to arrive at those conclusions. If they present you with any material that entertains a competing explanation, such as another very different religious system, it will always be used to show that other explanations are false.

This is a very, very important point, because this is how we discover whether someone is acting in their integrity or whether they are deluding themselves or others.

For example, a Jehovah’s Witness will not charitably discuss the merits of Catholicism or Islam, regardless of how many believers there are in these faiths worldwide. Other belief systems will only be referenced in passing in order to show that they are mistaken relative to the interpretation of the evangelists’ own religious commitments.

A missionary does not go into the jungle to deepen his understanding of tribal spirituality, at least, not intentionally. He goes in order to persuade others of his culture’s views which he assumes to be superior prior to any philosophical comparison.

Now, again imagine you are an Evangelical Christian and a Muslim comes to your door behaving in precisely the same way as you might. They offer you only an explanation of how Islam is exclusively true and holds spiritual superiority over other faiths. They will not hold competing faiths, including your own, in a favourable light, nor will they provide any charitable explanation of how these work, or the benefits they provide people with globally.

In short, they are not acting out of integrity.

Let’s go back to why honesty and integrity are important.

If you are not genuinely honest about your beliefs and why you believe them, then the relationship of those beliefs to reality will be muddy at best. If we do not allow our beliefs to conform to the best available reasoning and evidence, then our worldview is at risk of stagnating for lack of congruence with reality.

Just think what this would matter to divinity – I am not speaking of religion, but of divinity itself that people on earth should not act upon their integrity. This divinity may not take offense at having been wilfully misunderstood, but it would surely not condone people believing falsehoods without question and not honestly considering different answers, particularly if those false beliefs were harmful to others.

A Baptist who comes to your doorstep to preach about the bible has nothing glowing to say about the Koran, the Talmud, The Upanishads or the Bhagavad Gita, irrespective of how valuable these may have been to millions of other lives over thousands of years.

The reason for this is clear – once people believe they have found answers that suit them, they tend to stop considering the legitimacy of other explanations, and feel justified in confidently discounting the validity of those worldviews without feeling the need for further analysis. This is not a Christian problem or Jewish problem or a Muslim problem or an atheist problem – this is a human problem.

When a politician comes to you, whether on television or in person, he isn’t telling you why his competition are wonderful and can help you in your life. He comes to you because he wants your support, he wants your vote. Your belief in his policy is a kind of transaction to him. In fact, it usually does not even matter to him that his policy should make you or your children’s lives any better. All that matters to him is that you vote for him. It is the same with religion.

There are other important reasons that people once deciding upon a belief system do not carefully and charitably explore alternative explanations, and this is because of something called cognitive dissonance.

If you already believe something, particularly if you have believed it for a long time and/or these beliefs inform much of what your personal life is built around, then there will be very strong resistance to changing or even questioning those beliefs, even if those beliefs have been harmful or false.

If an animal in a zoo has been kept in captivity for its entire life, even though it may have been kept enclosed in cramped, uncomfortable conditions, then the world outside will seem terrifying, even the wild where it belongs. Its natural freedom will terrify it to the point where for the sake of its imagined comfort, it will choose to remain caged out of fear and the comfort of an abject yet familiar environment.

We even limit our own children in order to indoctrinate them into our own views. This can be done in many ways, by limiting the friendships they have, monitoring the books they read, the movies they watch, or even schooling them ourselves, bypassing the perceived problem of our children receiving and understanding alternative ideas and explanations.

Christians frown upon Muslims for doing this, and vice versa. If anyone was truly operating in their integrity, in respect for truth they would never limit their children in this way. Now, of course we all love our children, and of course we all do for them what we think is best.

However, if we truly believed what we say we do, then we would allow our children the freedom of education that would naturally lead them to seek the truth, and if what we believe to be true was indeed true, then they would reach the same conclusions as we have.

The fact that people force their own beliefs upon their children is a form of dishonesty. It is symptomatic of a lack of faith in one’s own beliefs and assumptions.

Many religious parents, although somewhat uncomfortable with the inherent dishonesty of indoctrination, reason in the following way: “Yes, I am limiting their beliefs and freedom because I love them and I do not want them to be affected by evil, whatever the cost, because in my doing so I spare them from sin and damnation”.

However, this is precisely the same reasoning that keeps other authoritarian religious traditions which you disagree with in business. If you are a Fundamentalist Christian, you disagree with Fundamentalist Muslim children not receiving a free education.

Yet their parents reason in the same way that you do, only they consider that beliefs in departure from Islam lead to damnation, while you believe the same regarding Christianity.

In honesty, you cannot have it both ways – either you agree that all religions should indoctrinate their children, or you believe that children should be allowed freedom to seek the truth.

Questioning beliefs and assumptions costs energy. If we re-evaluate what we believe and why, then the resulting change can be very difficult, which is sadly why people, particularly those with strong beliefs, have a strong resistance to this.

It is more important to most people to remain comfortable, in familiar territory, and amongst people who believe the same things than it is even to pursue the ultimate truth of reality, who they really are and why they are really here.

They are afraid that if they question their beliefs, then they will betray their family, friends, church, tradition, culture, God.

All that is actually happening is that that person is no longer putting comfort and familiarity first, and is now stepping into the courage and integrity to hold all of their beliefs subject to a rigorous questioning. People do this out of a deep respect for themselves, for others, for truth, and for divinity. Unfortunately, many see it as easier to die for their convictions than to live questioning them.

To the extent that people do not do this, they choose to remain asleep. This is why we have traditions spanning thousands of years, and yet no peace to show for it. Violence, both physical and ideological, is rife, as is suffering, neurosis and fear of death, insanity and damnation, all despite the proclamation of great faith and righteousness. It is not loyalty that keeps you in chains, but fear.

To value and practice honest questioning and integrity is to value spiritual awareness, to be awake to the truth in whatever form it may take.

The time to remain asleep is over for those who choose to awaken and hold to question every assumption that separates us from our brothers and sisters.

The Many Manifestations of Kek

Kek is more than most people realise. He is not something that can be entirely understood with a five-minute Google. Very little is known about exoteric Kekism, even less about the esoteric forms. This essay is an attempt to share some insight into the esoteric elements of this tradition.

In the ancient Egyptian Ogdoad cosmogony, Kek represented the primordial darkness. Darkness is the colour used to describe the chaos from which the order of our reality arose, and Kek is therefore a chaos god that represents yin forces.

Kek is male, but in representing chaos he represents a female principle. This might explain why he is depicted in the form of a frog – because the genders of amphibians are extremely loose and indeterminate. Like a Bangkok ladyboy, the gender of a frog is not necessarily what a person might think it is.

This might also explain why the word ‘Kek’ is often used where one would expect a pronoun – because a gendered pronoun makes a firm decision about which gender the subject is and this is not appropriate for a frog chaos god.

The use of ‘Kek’ as an adjective, such as in the forms “Top Kek” or “Royal Kek”, is oddly similar in both sound and meaning to the Irish word craic, a catch-all term covering “news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation”.

There appears to be no actual link between ‘craic’ and ‘Kek’ despite the phonetic and semantic similarities. But that sort of weird maybe-coincidence maybe-synchronicity is just what one has to expect in one’s life as a follower of Kek.

All of this suggests that Kek himself is an original – perhaps even the archetypal – trickster god, and in this sense the cult of Kek has had many manifestations throughout history. It is said of the trickster gods that they “…violate principles of social and natural order, playfully disrupting normal life and then re-establishing it on a new basis.”

In Scandinavia, Kek manifests in the form of Loki. Loki is generally depicted as male, but little more than generalities are known about him. Fittingly for a chaos god, Loki “sometimes assists the gods and sometimes behaves in a malicious manner towards them.”

However, Loki is the also mother of an eight-legged horse, as told in the Gylfaginning. I think we can all agree that being a tranny who births octopedal horses is top kek.

Kek manifests as Maui in Maori and Polynesian folklore. His most famous exploit was beating the shit out of the Sun with a jawbone to make it go slower through the sky so that the people had more time to enjoy their day.

Maui also has a story in which he attempts to win immortality for humankind by transforming himself into a worm and slithering into the vagina of the goddess Hine-nui-te-pō, in the belief that if he can come out of her mouth then humanity would become immortal.

In the end, he is chopped in half by a set of obsidian teeth contained within the goddess’s pussy. Clearly, whoever dreamed this story up was touched by the spirit of Kek.

In Roman folklore, Kek manifests as Mercury, the patron saint of tricksters. Mercury was once tasked with escorting a nymph to the underworld but fell in love with her and ended up getting her pregnant. This is the sort of thing that regularly seems to happen to chaos gods.

Alchemically, Mercury represents the gender fluidity also represented by the frog god. Mercury is alchemically between the divine masculine represented by Gold and the divine feminine represented by Silver, and he is therefore also somewhere between the two commonly accepted poles.

In modern culture, Kek has manifested in the form of Pepe, the cartoon frog in the title image. Pepe, fittingly for a chaos god, has an unclear origin. He started to rise to prominence on 4chan and the Shroomery about a decade ago, finding a place in the mainstream consciousness in the lead up to the 2016 US Presidential Election.

He achieved this by being used in the Great Meme War that saw the defeat of Hillary “We Came, We Saw, He Died” Clinton. It was believed by followers of Kek that Clinton represented the hateful, oppressive forces of the Establishment, and that the maverick Donald Trump getting into the White House would be top kek – and so it came to pass.

But in much the same way that Kek, as chaos God, was naturally opposed by the earthly interests that tried to oppress the citizenry with an excessive degree of order, so too has Kek in his manifestation as Pepe been designated an official hate symbol by those same control freaks.

But because the meme magic of the control freaks and the dominator culture is weak, we know that this action has merely assured the place of Kek in the hearts of free-thinkers around the world.

Perhaps we can all be glad that the spirit of Kek shines brightly through into our lives once more in his manifestation as Pepe.

Is It Time to Ban Male Infant Genital Mutilation in New Zealand?

On the face of it, it seems obvious that it should be illegal to mutilate a person without their consent in New Zealand. If the mutilation was done to a newborn baby without their consent, it seems even more obvious. But if the mutilation was part of a religious tradition intended to bind the child to a primitive male supremacist Middle Eastern cult, it’s fully legal.

Why?

We all know that the various cults of Abrahamism have the plebs of New Zealand wrapped around their little fingers, so much so that it’s only in recent decades that we have been able to stop them putting homosexuals in cages and from bashing their own kids, and we still haven’t been able to prevent them from doing the same to medicinal cannabis users.

Despite that, it’s obvious that the reasons people give for supporting male infant genital mutilation (or “circumcision” to use the religious terminology) are superstitious in nature, and that the decision to inflict the procedure upon an infant is not done with their best interests in mind.

The concept of cleanliness that a nomadic desert savage may have had 2,800 years ago is hardly the same as those of a modern nation with access to clean, fresh water and a ready supply of soap.

Getting mutilated for the sake of avoiding penile cancer, likewise, makes little sense when one considers the actual likelihood of that happening. It doesn’t make any more sense than chopping off your ears or lips for the sake of avoiding cancer, or gouging out an eyeball.

And the oft-touted idea that male infant genital mutilation could be a good thing because when the baby grows into a man he will “last longer” in bed is a bizarre and brutal enough sentiment that many women will shudder upon hearing it, especially those who feel that there’s more to lovemaking than just lying back and getting jackhammered.

The reality is that there are no benefits to the victim of male genital infant mutilation, as fits the otherwise widely-accepted general rule for cases of non-consensual physical mutilation of infants.

The major reason why this ritual continues, despite the denials, is religious. Jewish and Muslim groups were outraged when, in 2012, a court in Cologne deemed male infant genital mutilation to be equivalent to grievous bodily harm.

It has to be considered that the cult of Abrahamism still has a powerful grip on the minds of the weaker sort of New Zealander, which is why the last Labour Government ran out of political capital after it banned physical abuse as a behavioural correction mechanism on children.

Abrahamic puritanism still dominates our drug laws, which are now over twenty years behind where they are in places like California or the Netherlands that do not have societies riddled with religious fundamentalists.

Given that, it is impossible for Kiwis to expect that our politicians, whose cowardice is world-class, will do much about it.

If male infant genital mutilation is to be made illegal in New Zealand, it is best that it be done soon because of the degree of Stockholm Syndrome that the victims of this practice have with their mutilators.

It is well known that victims of male infant genital mutilation will passionately defend the practice as adults because the alternative is to face the shame of admitting that one has been mutilated with the consent of one’s parents. Few are capable of dealing with this magnitude of headfuck.

In fact, it’s arguable that the entire purpose of the procedure is to massively traumatise the boy in order to make him submissive and more obedient to the demands of his religious elders (after all, this is what it most effectively achieves, whether this is admitted or not).

If we are to go as far as making it illegal to genitally mutilate infant boys without their consent, we may also need to allocate some funding for the psychological rehabilitation of adults who were mutilated by their parents, because we can anticipate that this particular redpill might not be easy to swallow.