religion – Page 38

The 16-Point Program of the New Zealand Anti-Puritan Party

In order for New Zealanders to be free and happy, Puritan culture has to be eradicated from the shores of Aotearoa

The basic principle of the New Zealand Anti-Puritan Party is that religious superstition in the form of Puritanism is, and always has been, the single biggest threat to the happiness and well-being of individual Kiwis. Puritanism is a hangover from centuries past that New Zealand, on account of our geographical isolation and cultural anemia, has been unable to overcome. The New Zealand Anti-Puritan Party intends to reverse ALL religious and superstition-based restrictions on free conduct.

This sixteen-point plan establishes how, if elected to Parliament, the New Zealand Anti-Puritan Party would act to restore freedom and dignity to Kiwis who face the humiliation of having 17th-century religious dogma forced upon them.

1. The Parliamentary Prayer to be abolished.

There is no reason why the representatives of a supposedly free people at the bottom of the South Pacific should have to pray to a Middle-Eastern God before they go to work. Worship of the God of Abraham belongs in the Middle East, not Polynesia. It has nothing to do with us here and we should not be supporting a foreign religious tradition. The New Zealand Anti-Puritan Party would abolish the Parliamentary Prayer and replace it with a karakia based on the spiritual traditions that developed here in Aotearoa.

2. Male infant genital mutilation to be made illegal.

There is absolutely no justification for innocent children to be mutilated shortly after birth because of some barbaric superstition. Male infant genital mutilation is a practice that has no place in New Zealand, and New Zealand children should be protected and kept safe from it. The New Zealand Anti-Puritan Party would make the act of male infant genital mutilation punishable by up to 14 years imprisonment, both for the “doctor” who carried out the mutilation and for the parents who procured it.

3. Forcing fundamentalist religion on children to be considered child abuse.

There is clear evidence that threatening small children with the threat of eternal punishment in hell for disobedience has a massively deleterious effect on their mental health as adults. New Zealand has recently made the physical abuse of children illegal over the objections of Puritans – the New Zealand Anti-Puritan Party would also make the psychological abuse of children illegal when this occurs in a religious context. It will become illegal to bring children to certain churches if the rhetoric of those churches is deemed to be abusive in nature.

4. The price of cigarettes to drop to less than $10/pack, legal age to buy tobacco dropped back to 16.

Tobacco has for centuries been one of the best psychiatric medicines for the alleviation of stress, anxiety and depression. The idea of a “Smokefree New Zealand” is more Puritanical bullshit that takes the freedom to self-medicate away from ordinary Kiwis. The New Zealand Anti-Puritan Party would slash tobacco taxes so that it was once again easy for ordinary New Zealanders to use tobacco to alleviate psychological discomfort, and would drop the legal age to buy tobacco back down to 16.

5. Legal age to buy alcohol dropped to 16 for beer and wine in pubs, kept at 18 for hard liquor.

In several countries in Europe it is possible to buy beer and wine in a pub at the age of 16. The New Zealand Anti-Puritan Party believes that all the strictures and laws surrounding alcohol in New Zealand is responsible for making the substance appear to be a forbidden fruit, and that this perception is chiefly responsible for the binge drinking culture we have here. The New Zealand Anti-Puritan Party would make it legal for 16-year olds to buy beer and wine if it was to be consumed in a supervised setting such as a licensed establishment.

6. Alcohol taxes to be slashed.

The Puritanical belief that making alcohol hard to afford leads to more responsible use has completely backfired. Even the most superficial analysis of the European experience demonstrates that making alcohol expensive leads to binge drinking because people are unable to attenuate themselves to regular responsible use of the drug. The New Zealand Anti-Puritan Party would slash excise duty on alcohol so that it became cheap enough for ordinary Kiwis to have a few drinks with their weekday dinners, instead of saving up to get wasted on the weekends.

7. Cannabis to be made legal and sold like tobacco, but with a legal age of 18.

There is absolutely no justification for putting good Kiwi people in prison because they sell or grow a substance widely recognised in non-Puritanical jurisdictions to have great medicinal value. The New Zealand Anti-Puritan Party would immediately legalise cannabis along the lines of the immensely successful Colorado model, but would allow for it to be sold alongside tobacco at dairies and petrol stations. A legal age of 18 would be established for purchasing the substance for the reason that cannabis, like alcohol, is a harder drug than tobacco.

8. Immigration from fundamentalist religious countries to be slashed.

If New Zealand is to keep itself free from the strictures of Puritanical religion, it is essential that the population of New Zealand be kept safe from Puritans moving here and forcing their demented morals on us. When immigrants come to New Zealand they bring with them cultural values that have the potential to lower the standard of living for the locals. The New Zealand Anti-Puritan Party would slash immigration from all countries that are deeply religious, in particular all Middle-Eastern countries.

9. Churches to no longer be considered charities.

The promulgation of Abrahamic religion is not charitable. Brainwashing people into hating gays, hating women, hating drug users and hating atheists is not a charitable enterprise and sharply lowers the standard of living of New Zealanders, as well as creating mistrust and disunity among the people. The New Zealand Anti-Puritan Party would strip tax-free status from all religious enterprises, thereby forcing them to compete on equal terms with secular ones.

10. Abortion to be made fully legal.

The Puritanical belief that women must be forced to carry to term a child that is not wanted and will have a terrible start to its life has caused immense suffering everywhere abortion is illegal. The New Zealand Anti-Puritan Party would remove the barriers to abortion that currently keep women under the Puritan thumb.

11. Euthanasia to be made fully legal.

The Puritanical belief that terminally ill people must be kept alive and suffering as long as possible is simply obscene. The New Zealand Anti-Puritan Party would take steps to ensure that people who have undeniably come to the end of their natural lives are able to die with dignity and without unnecessary misery and suffering.

12. Blasphemy laws to be abolished.

There is no place in a secular democracy for freedom of speech to be restricted just because it hurts the feelings of superstitious control freaks. The concept of blasphemy is a medieval idea that has no place in New Zealand. The New Zealand Anti-Puritan Party would enshrine in law the right of every Kiwi to make any religious or spiritual statement they like, no matter how offensive this may be considered by Puritan fundamentalists.

13. Access to fireworks to be reliberalised.

The great joy that kids and adults of all ages once got from home fireworks displays on Guy Fawkes Night should never have been taken away from the New Zealand people. Fireworks were only banned because of Puritanical moral panic; the New Zealand Anti-Puritan Party would bring back the same rights that free Kiwis used to have to buy and use fireworks leading up to Guy Fawkes Night.

14. Pornography to be liberalised.

The Puritanical obsession with sex has led to a number of anti-pornography laws that not only have no place in New Zealand but which are impossible to enforce in the Internet age. The New Zealand Anti-Puritan Party would make it legal to depict in film or images any sexual act that takes place between consenting adults.

15. All other drugs to be made legal with attention given to real-life consequences.

Puritanism hasn’t merely taken away our rights to enjoy cannabis, alcohol and tobacco as we see fit, but also every other drug is now illegal as well. As for cannabis, there is simply no justification for putting good Kiwi people in prison because of their use of a drug. The New Zealand Anti-Puritan Party would make every drug legal, with the exception of cases when the sale of a particular drug had a direct and clear negative effect on the health of individuals. This effect must be demonstrated through evidence – moral panic would not by itself be sufficient.

16. Eleusinian Mysteries to be reinstated and to occur at the start of every winter.

The Eleusinian Mysteries, in which participants would partake in a yearly ceremony that liberated them from the illusions of the material world and the brainwashing of culture, must be reinstated. The New Zealand Anti-Puritan Party would make institute a ceremony akin to the Eleusinian Mysteries in every city and town in the nation. It was such a ceremony that led to the Golden Age of Ancient Greece and there is no reason why the reinstatement of such a ceremony would not have similar benefits for New Zealand.

The Aotearoan Mysteries would take place about six weeks after the first winter frosts, which would give the priests enough time to collect the psilocybin mushrooms that are necessary to produce the kykeon. This would be drunk by the participants before they sit and watch a theatrical play that initiated them into the mysteries of life and death. Any adult who speaks English would be allowed to participate.

Full implementation of this 16-point plan would liberate New Zealand and the Kiwi people from the chains of silver and gold that Puritanical culture has enslaved us with. The New Zealand Anti-Puritan Party will thereby sharply increase the standard of living of everyday Kiwis and return to them their birthright of freedom and liberty.

The Great Fractal

In the beginning was consciousness. This is the same as God, and it is the same as yourself. God is consciousness, and God is you, and you are consciousness. This didn’t really happen in the beginning, because there’s no such thing as time, but it’s the start of the story.

All religions and spiritual movements are inspired by gnosis about the real nature of God. It’s very simple – God is consciousness because consciousness is sufficient to create the entire physical world (and all possible worlds), and consciousness is outside of time and space and is complete even in division.

Nothing over and above consciousness is necessary to create the appearance of the entire material world and everything in it, and the appearance of every possible material world and everything in that. In fact, all of these possible material worlds can be derived through repeated iteration of a simple fractal equation – the Great Fractal.

So when people say that God is omniscient and omnipotent and everywhere and eternal they are entirely correct, because all of these things are true of consciousness.

The only disagreement arises when people try to describe the precise nature of God. These efforts are doomed to failure because consciousness is more fundamental than language, and therefore cannot be defined in language. And so all efforts to describe God or to interpret the will of God are errors, usually made through a person conflating their ego with God and therefore confusing their personal desires for the will of God.

That’s all there is to life. You, being conscious, are conscious of things. This never changes, not even on the other side of the death of your material body.

The Great Fractal is the sum total of all of the possible phenomena that God can be conscious of. It is called the Great Fractal because all possible lives are similar to all other possible lives in ways that, if represented graphically, form a fractal of infinite complexity and depth.

Every possible life is being lived by God, right now, with full consciousness – and always has been and always will be. There is a being exactly the same as you who is right now living the life you lived up until ten minutes ago – and there are an infinite number of lives being lived inbetween now and ten minutes ago.

The Great Fractal is alive. It is bursting with consciousness. Every possible life that God can imagine – from the simplest flatworm to seventh-dimensional wizards, is consciously being lived right now, and always will be, forever.

How? God just dreamed them up, and God continues to dream as an act of will. That’s all that this – what we call life – is: just a dream. You know this because it’s not any more real than the dreamworlds that you experience at night. Nothing is different at such a time – you are consciousness, and you are conscious of phenomena, and that’s all there is to it, awake or asleep.

What you consider to be your life is just one infinitely small and infinitely limited perspective of the Great Fractal, at the human-on-Earth-in-the-21st-century level. Just like a computer program that can give you the impression of an entire journey merely through zooming in on particular co-ordinates of a fractal, so is your life just a pathway through the Great Fractal and what you see along the way.

You do have free will, only you are limited by certain laws whose purpose is to make this illusion more immersive. What you consider to be free will is nothing more than navigating through the Great Fractal to the degree that you are able – you decide on a part of the Great Fractal that you would like to experience and then – if it’s possible to get there from where you are now while obeying the laws of immersion – you go there.

Why did this happen, instead of something else happening?

Being pure consciousness, God is perfection. God resides in a state of perfect bliss, complete and without desire.

Although this is perfect on one level, it’s grossly imperfect on another: it’s not very interesting.

Simply put, the most enjoyable game that God can play is to look into a limited section of the Great Fractal for long enough so that God can actually come to convince Godself that this limited section is really the whole thing – and then God can feel a sense of awe and grandeur by once again awakening to an appreciation of the whole, an appreciation of itself, an awakening from the delusion that God was ever something else.

And then to do it again, and again and again, forever – an unceasing pattern of forgetting and remembering, of mistaking the illusion of the material world for transcendental reality and then realising the trick and laughing about the fact that one could ever fall for something so obvious.

What we call enlightenment is what naturally arrives as a consequence of turning the common, understandable, materialist perspective around; from looking backwards at the uncreated consciousness instead of looking forwards into the created Great Fractal.

The Great Fractal is the sum total of all the contents of consciousness and all the possible contents of consciousness. It is what the ancient Vedic culture called Maya. We mistake it for reality to the extent that we are making a game of this life.

VJMP Reads: Anders Breivik’s Manifesto V

This reading carries on from here.

This section (pages c. 286-415) is entitled “Europe Burning” and details a deliberate strategy, on the part of Breivik’s enemies, to destablise the European continent. This is achieved through a variety of political and sociological means.

Breivik appears to be an ardent believer in the Eurabia theory. This theory has it that the elites of the European and Muslim spheres have secretly agreed to come together in order to act as a counterweight to the influence of America and Israel.

The Eurabia theory sounds plausible on the face of it. But much of the rhetoric around it is misleading. A cynic might argue that the Eurabia rhetoric was deliberately dishonest.

Mass Muslim immigration to France happened not because of a conspiracy but because of economic reasons. We can surmise this because other Western nations also saw an influx of poorly educated third-worlders to work the jobs that the natives had become too highly educated to want to do.

Likewise, European prejudice against Jews and Israel did not arise as a consequence of Muslim and Arab leverage on European politicians. Anyone with so much as a passing knowledge of European history will be aware that native Europeans were more than capable of hating Jews without outside encouragement.

This document exhaustively references antisocial actions taken on behalf of certain Muslims and explains them in terms of collective Islamic anti-Western action. It’s certainly true that if a person would read a several hundred page list of crimes committed by Muslims they could come away thinking that such an agenda existed, but the document does not make an effort to determine whether such a list of crimes is unusual.

Another place in which the document makes implausible assertions is with regards to the sentiment that Judaism and Christianity are traditional European religions and Islam is not. Why Christianity and Judaism should be considered any more European than Islam, when all three Abrahamic sects come from the same place and exhibit similar characteristics, is not discussed by Breivik.

Neither does Breivik explain why he can so ardently attack Communism, Marxism, liberalism, globalism and feminism, but defend the very same Judaism that is most commonly associated with those ideologies.

This unusually benevolent stance towards Judaism is underlined by the multiple references to the work of Bat Ye’or, – who is the most energetic proponent of the Eurabia conspiracy theory – and the claim that Israel is a “cultural cousin” to Europe.

It is, true, however, that Breivik’s grasp of history is much deeper than those of the mainstream commentators whose political opinions inform the masses. He points out that the advent of the nation state, this enemy of the globalist, was itself a reaction to the religious wars that plagued Europe until the mid 17th century, and that wars predated the nation state by thousands of years.

Therefore, there is no reason to agree with the lazy consensus pushed by mainstream leftists that the end of the nation state will bring about a greater level of peace.

Ironically, Breivik “the neo-Nazi” comes across as decidedly less totalitarian than some of his enemies in certain regards. His dislike of the European Union is based in part on the phenomenon of unelected Eurocrats having more power than elected representatives of national governments.

He is correct to point out that critics of the unelected Eurocrats are often dismissed as “anti-democratic” elements – an absurdity on its face.

Although Europe has many enemies in Breivik’s analysis of the world, from the European Union to the mainstream media to mainstream academia to right-wing libertarians who deny the pull of culture, the major enemy is undoubtedly Islam: “The Islamic world always has been our enemy and always will be.”

Throughout this section, Breivik demonstrates an acute historical knowledge on the one hand, and a tendency to rapidly jump over several logic steps on the other. This leads to a number of uneasy conclusions.

VJMP Reads: Anders Breivik’s Manifesto III

This reading carries on from here.

In this section (pages c. 90-200), Breivik details the history of relations between the West and Islam. In his analysis here, there is nothing peaceful – Islam has been attempting to conquer the West since its inception, and would have succeeded already if not repelled at either Tours or Vienna, or other places.

The destruction of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War One, Breivik claims, is how the West has earned some breathing space against this relentless assault. The Caliphate was shattered after the Battle of Megido in 1917, and only because of this has Islam been unable to attack Europe in recent decades.

With sentences such as “the Islamic sources make clear that engaging in violence against non-Muslims is a central and indispensable principle to Islam,” and “Those cultures and individuals who do not submit to Islamic governance exist in an ipso facto state of rebellion with Allah and must be forcibly brought into submission,” a particular kind of Nordic bleakness shines through in this document.

It’s a kind of bleakness that has resigned itself to violence as a grim but inevitable outcome of the play of natural forces. They are attacking us is Breivik’s message. They always have been attacking us and they always will be.

Perhaps the following paragraph summarises this section of the document best:

The spectacular acts of Islamic terrorism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries are but the most recent manifestation of a global war of conquest that Islam has been waging since the days of the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th Century AD and that continues apace today. This is the simple, glaring truth that is staring the world today in the face — and which has stared it in the face numerous times in the past — but which it seems few today are willing to contemplate.

In this section Breivik continues to emphasise the point that no reformation of Islam is possible, for the reason that would-be reformers are unable to refer to any scriptural injunctions towards peace with non-believers. The example set by Muhammad himself was an example of war and of violence, so anyone with a will to reform is snookered from the beginning.

Essentially, anyone trying to move Islam away from violence has to work against the scriptures. Therefore, Islam cannot be used as a civilising force in the same way that Christianity could; no-one could discover through serendipity a message of peace and tolerance in their study of the Koran.

From reading this section there are two elements of Breivik’s reasoning that seem objectionable.

The first is that, although the list of historical atrocities by Muslims and modern apologies for these atrocities by Muslims is long, there are over a billion Muslims and Islam stretches back to the seventh century. As an inevitable consequence of existing for that long on a planet as violent as Earth, a cherry-picked list of bad things committed by or in the name of a group that large and old is going to be lengthy.

There’s no doubt, for example, that one could compile a hundred pages of grossly supremacist and chauvinistic admonitions to violence from a number of nationalities, including the Spanish, the French, the Germans, the British, the Russians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mongols, Huns, Persians and others, not to mention every other major Abrahamic sect.

Breivik may well have a point that most Westerners are not taught a deep general historical knowledge of Islam, but this only reveals a kind of autism on his part – after all, most people couldn’t care less about history full stop, let alone someone else’s.

The second obvious point of objection is that, although Breivik is correct in many ways when he criticises the unwillingness of Western historians, historical educators, or politicians to write or speak honestly about Islam, he doesn’t say much about an alternative.

If his contentions about the warlike nature of Muhammad and of Islam are accurate, and that they intend to subjugate the entire rest of the world, then there is a very good reason to not acknowledge this: doing so would be tantamount to an immediate declaration of war.

If Western leaders chose to go on television and say that the Prophet Muhammad was a pedophile and that the history of Islam was one of bloodshed, it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy in short order.

They appear to be gambling on the idea that, if left for long enough without provocation, Islam could reform itself. In this they stand in complete opposition to Breivik.

However, a wiser head might make the claim that if faced with an apocalyptic war today, just about any alternative is preferable, and therefore if there’s any doubt about the willingness of Islam to subjugate the world we should accommodate that doubt in our conversations with them.