12.5.06
Roumanie, Dracula banni
Les responsables catholiques et orthodoxes de Roumanie ont accueilli avec satisfaction la décision du gouvernement de renoncer à un parc de loisirs à la gloire de Dracula le vampire.
Depuis que le projet avait été annoncé en 2001, les Églises faisaient assaut de critiques contre un « parc qui sera, à n'en pas douter, le royaume du mal » et donnera une « image fausse » du pays.
Aux voix des Églises s'étaient jointes celles d'historiens affirmant que « le mythe de Dracula n'a rien à voir avec l'histoire de la Roumanie. » Et pourtant. Si l'écrivain anglais Bram Stocker « inventa » en 1897 le personnage de Dracula ( diable en roumain), archétype du vampire, c'est bien Vlad Tepes, gouverneur de la Valachie au XVe siècle et connu sous le doux nom de « Vlad l'Empaleur », qui est à l'origine du mythe. Et la Valachie est roumaine depuis le XVIIIe siècle!
posted by Gilles et Claudine [Castelnau] http://protestants.blogspot.com
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Translation:
Rumanian Catholic and Orthodox Christian policy makers have welcomed with satisfaction the government's decision to forgo a theme park in honor of the vampire Dracula.
Since the project had been announced in 2001, the churches launched a critical assault against a "park that will be, without any doubt, the kingdom of evil" and will give a "false image" of the country.
To the voices of the Churches were joined those of historians affirming that "the myth of Dracula has nothing whatsoever to do with the history of Rumania." And moreover, if the English writer Bram Stocker "invented" in 1897 the character of Dracula (the Rumanian devil), archetype of the vampire, it is indeed "Governor-Prince" Vlad Tepes of Valachia in the 15th century [the title, during the Ottoman Empire, of the head of the Rumanian provinces conquered by the Turks] and known under the "sweet" name of "Vlad the Impaler," who is at the origin of the myth. Besides, Valachia has only been Rumanian since the 18th century!
Translated by Edward Paolella (May 16, 2006):
9.5.06
The Psychoanalytic Meaning of Being "Born Again": A Freudian Perspective
The Psychoanalytic Meaning of Being "Born Again":
A Freudian Perspective
By
Edward C. Paolella
epaolella@nyc.rr.com
(April Fool's Day 2006)
Apostles' Creed
1. I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth:
2. And in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord:
3. Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary:
4. Suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead and buried:
HE DESCENDED INTO HELL:
5. The third day he rose again from the dead:
6. He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God
the Father Almighty:
7. From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead:
8. I believe in the Holy Ghost:
9. I believe in the holy catholic church: the communion of saints:
10. The forgiveness of sins:
11. The resurrection of the body:
12. And the life everlasting. Amen.
Included in the Apostles' Creed is the belief that Jesus descended into hell before ascending on the third day into heaven. According to certain Christian traditions, he supposedly took Moses, David, Solomon, and all the Jewish Prophets with him to heaven. Psychologically speaking, the point is that before we are able to attain "paradise" or "liberation"–that is, psychological health and creative freedom--"ascending into heaven"--we must first make the descent into the deepest, the most frightening part of ourselves, our unconscious--"hell." The purpose of the "descent into hell" is necessary to make the unconscious conscious so as to learn of, as many as possible, THE MOST SIGNIFICANT TRUTHS ABOUT OURSELVES--good, bad, or indifferent--accept them, and deal with them in an as mature and as rational a manner as possible so as to be freed from our neurotic behaviors, that is, to be freed from our unnecessary suffering.
As one female patient in psychoanalysis put it in Jerry Adler’s Newsweek article "Freud in Our Midst": "I decided I have a good life, but it could be better....[Psychoanalysis] makes you examine your life, retell your life, to understand where your attitudes, your beliefs and behaviors come from....I'm so much happier now. It's not something I could do alone. You have to confront the parts of yourself that are painful and shameful and difficult to face. Dr. Moritz [her psychoanalyst] asks the questions that cause me to dig deeper into myself" (March 26, 2006, p. 46).
The problem is that very few of us are willing to make the "descent"--to bring the unconscious desires into consciousness--so as to learn what caused our neuroses in the first place, neuroses that determine our conscious choices, and with the aid of adult reason and with being in touch with our current reality do what we have to to heal ourselves. In doing so, we learn to cut our neurotic ties from the past that have been governing our behavior ever since the desires emanating from the id were repressed in the first place during childhood. Our repressed desires, or the impulses to satisfy all our desires, however self-contradictory they may be, CREATED our damaged self-images or beleaguered ego with the help of the work of the super-ego, that is, the internalized system of values of right and wrong, good and evil, that act as judge, jury, and executioner that are the basis for our low self-esteem and the sabotaging of our own happiness.
Instead, we repeat the same neurotic patterns over and over again with our unconscious repressed feelings controlling our conscious choices. The question is: why do we continue to act self-destructively in spite of the fact that our rational, conscious minds are often even aware of our self-destructive behaviors, but not aware of their unconscious motivations? The answer is that we only have the illusion of being free based upon what our conscious minds tell us about ourselves without realizing or accepting that it is our repressed unconscious desires that determine our conscious choices based upon repressed childhood feelings of shame and guilt. Those unconscious feelings of childhood of shame and guilt that we carry around with us inside our heads are the bases for the religious concept of "sin."
All three Abrahamic religions--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--are founded upon the notion that we are all "sinners" incapable of redeeming ourselves. Hence, we get such theological ideas as "The Fall of Man," "Original Sin," and such remarks, as in the Book of Isaiah that "our righteousness is but as filthy rages before God," and in the Gospels that our "salvation comes only through the death and resurrection" of Jesus the Christ, whose crucifixion was necessary to "cleanse" all of us who "believe on Him" from our sins. Or as the opening lines of the hymn "Amazing Grace" expresses the concept of the unforgiving, unrelenting super-ego:
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me....
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now, I see.
The word "wretch," one of the oldest and the ugliest words in the English language, with an equally ugly meaning, is derived from the Old English verb wrecan, meaning "to drive, drive out," and in turn form the Old English noun wrecca, meaning "outcast, exile, fugitive," and "a base, despicable, or vile person."
Jesus is correct, psychologically speaking, that is it only "the truth that sets us free," but not "the truth" that Jesus is "The Truth" and that to be saved we must believe in Him, but rather that "the truth" that we learn about ourselves in bringing the unconscious repressed feelings of shame and guilt into consciousness and in liberating ourselves from such repressed shame and guilt that we become free to dispel what others originally predetermined for us was shameful and worthy of guilty feelings and of the punishment we must suffer for our shame and guilt.
In religious terms that is the idea of the Fall and God as Everlasting Judge who punishes us for our sins and, whom Jesus, "sitteth at the right hand of the Father," in the "last days" will "judge the living and the dead" to determine who will go to heaven to live in bliss with and in God and who to hell to suffer punishment, for all eternity, at the hands of Satan, the former Lucifer, the "Angel of Light," now turned the "Prince of Darkness."
Jesus' notion that "the truth will set you free" existed long before he did. In ancient Greek religion, what ignorant "religious" moderns condescendingly call Greek "mythology," not the religion of the ancient Greeks to be found expressed in Homer and other ancient writers, especially the ancient tragedians, but at worst legendary, fictional untruths, and at best allegorical spiritual and psychological truths, but certainly not as sacred or "Holy Scriptures," in the modern sense, to the ancient Greeks and later the ancient Romans in their variations on the Greek Homeric tradition in the writings of Vergil and Ovid and Seneca as the equal of the divinely inspired writings whether the TANAKH for the Jews, the New Testament for the Christians, the Qur'an for the Muslims, and the various other scriptures for the Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, BahB'ís, and so on of all the other world's sacred religious writings.
Among the ancient Greeks the idea that "the truth will set you free" is expressed as the religious principle of "Know Thyself," espoused in the Greek temples of worship, especially in the city-state of Athens and in the Temple at Delphi dedicated to the God Apollo, the God of the sun, medicine, and poetry. Athens is named for Athena, the virgin Goddess of Wisdom, the daughter of the Father of the Olympian Gods Zeus, born full-grown from his head (just one example of Zeus, a male god, giving birth to children, as Jesus, the Creator-God aspect of the Father God of the Trinity, was also a male who "begot" everything and everyone in the universe, including his own mother the Virgin Mary, for it was through Jesus "that all things were made").
Athena is the daughter of Zeus. She sprang full grown in armour from his forehead and thus has no mother. She is fierce and brave in battle in wars defend the state and home from outside enemies. She is the Goddess of the city, handicrafts, and agriculture. She invented the bridle, which permitted man to tame horses, the trumpet, the flute, the pot, the rake, the plow, the yoke, the ship, and the chariot. She is the embodiment of wisdom, reason, and purity. She was Zeus's favorite child and was allowed to use his weapons including his thunderbolt. Her favorite city is Athens. Her tree is the olive. The owl is her bird. She is an ever-virgin Goddess as, according to Roman Catholic dogma, Mary, the mother of Jesus, the Son of God, is the Ever-Virgin Mary, conceived immaculately, that is, without the taint of "original sin," for how could Jesus, God Incarnate, be born of a woman stained with sin?
In his "First Lecture" to his work A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Freud himself says, in so many words, that self-knowledge, the essence of wisdom, springs from our own heads as did Athena, the Virgin Goddess of Wisdom, did from Zeus' own head:
"...[H]ow is it possible to study it [psychoanalysis] at all or to convince oneself of its truth? The study of it is indeed not an easy matter, nor are there many people who have thoroughly learned it; still, there is, of course, some way of learning it. Psychoanalysis is learned first of all on oneself, through the study of one's own personality [emphasis mine]. This is not exactly what is meant by introspection, but it may be so described for want of a better word. There is a whole series of very common and well-known mental phenomena which can be taken as material for self-analysis when one has acquired some knowledge of the method. In this way one may obtain the required conviction of the reality of its conceptions, although progress on these lines is not without its limitations. One gets much further by submitting oneself to analysis by a skilled analyst, undergoing the working of the analysis in one's own person and using the opportunity to observe the finer details of the technique which the analyst employs (Joan Riviere, tr., New York: Perma Books, 1953, pp. 23-24).
The point of taking this round-about journey is to show the fantastic connections in thought between the insights of the ancient Greeks, Jews, Christians, and Freud (an atheist) about the nature of the human mind, how it works, how we are frightened by the necessary descent into our own unconscious minds ("hell) in order to "ascend" into "heaven" or into higher consciousness freed from the unconscious childhood feelings of shame and guilt that keep us from truly knowing ourselves and from deriving deeper enjoyment of our lives and the best possible uses of our creative talents.
Before the common era, what the Buddha in ancient India in the 6th century and Socrates in the 5th century in ancient Greece experienced and taught their disciples--Socrates remarking that "the unexamined life is not worth living" in Plato's The Trial of Socrates--is that years of deeply painful "introspection" are necessary so as to attain the state of "Nirvana" or "Rebirth" or "Enlightenment" (that is, revelation of the self experienced from within the mind) devoid of neurotic suffering, being freed from the so-called "endless cycles of birth, death, and rebirth" and freedom from repetitious compulsive neurotic behavior. In his paper "Formations regarding the Two Principles in Mental Function" (1911), as Freud notes, "We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality....The neurotic turns away from reality because he finds it unbearable–either in whole or parts of it." The neurotic’s "alienation from reality" has as its aim "denying the existence of the particular event that occasioned the outbreak..." (Collected Papers, V. 4, tr. Joan Riviere, London: 1953, p. 13).
Every "truly realized" master thinker, philosopher, musician, artist, sculptor, teacher, and any other deeply introspective human being, whether literate or illiterate, remembered or forgotten by history, having attained true self-knowledge grows in compassion, understanding, and love of self and others, but not without each individual knowing "hell" before experiencing "heaven" on earth--to whatever degree it is possible for each one of us to accomplish such a rebirth who is willing to make the journey that Dante describes in his epic trilogy of the "Inferno," "Purgatorio'" and "Paradiso," all three parts of which he named La Comedia and his readers soon after his death, The Divine Comedy. For as Shakespeare puts it, a "comedy" is, after all, "all's well that ends well"!
The goal of psychoanalysis, Freud points out time and again, is the uncovering and resolution of the patient's internal conflicts so as to have the "old" neurotic suffering self ("ich") die and the "new" healthy self ("ich") be born based, not upon fantasies and wishes--the "pleasure principle"--but upon being in touch with reality, past and present, and making conscious decisions based upon the "reality principle" so as to diminish human suffering as much as the human condition and reality will allow.From a Freudian psychoanalytic perspective, such is the true meaning of being born once of the flesh and then again of the "spirit." The word Freud (an atheist) uses is "Seele," to mean a human being's innermost being, what in Greek is "psyche" and in Latin "animus" and in English "soul," but carrying no transcendental or "other-worldly" significance whatsoever.
For Freud, to be "born again" was to be as free from neurotic behavior and its attendant suffering as humanly possible through a discovery of and a being in touch with the reality of one's own inner-most being on a conscious level to make choices on the basis of the individual's own reality.As Freud used the terms, the Ego (das Ich) is the mediator between the impulsive-compulsive demands of the Id (das Es) and the tyrannical threats and judgments of the Superego (das Überich). The Ego is only free to choose what is in its own best interest when it is consciously aware that to surrender to either the chaotic and contradictory wishes of the Id or the Kafkaesque policing and prosecutorial nature of the Superego is to cave into the forces of the unbridled indulgence of desire and the unrelenting punishment of blood-stabbing guilt and biting remorse.
To be "born again," to be truly free, is to "know thyself" and to make choices on the basis of the reality principle of our present circumstances--not out of irrational compulsive impulses and beseiging guilt--but out of enlightened self-interest. It is neither a "God" nor a "Holy Spirit" who causes us to be "born again" and set free, but we ourselves through the difficult and painful, but courageous "descent into hell" as the essential part of the journey toward self-revelation and self-actualization: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings" (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, I:2:134).
In his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933), Freud expresses what is meant psychoanalytically by being "born again"--being freed from the chaotic compulsive impulses of the id and the knife-stabbing guilt and back-biting remorse of the superego, or in Freud's own words: "Where id was, there shall ego be" (Wo Es war, soll Ich werden, literally "Where it was, I shall come to be").
Set free from the unrelenting repressed drives of the id and the threating judgments and punishments of the superego, the ego mediates between these two powerful psychic forces based, not upon either the "pleasure principle" or the tyranny of deeply ingrained, impossible-to-live-by standards of religious, sexual, and moral perfection, but by the "reality principle" based upon self-knowledge and the realities of the present now guided by adult reasoning abilities and healthy defense mechanisms.
Now the ego, self-empowered and in touch with its own creative and intuitive talents and perceptions, has an enhanced ability to make choices out of enlightened self-interest no longer dictated by repressed inscrutible psycho-sexual and aggressive instincts and unyielding threats of self-recrimination and "self-bashing" and acquired self-destructive patterns of behavior, but by the prevailing power of rational thinking and of decision-making that take into account the whole human being: the emotions, the values, and the needs of the individual's ever-changing internal realities and the ever-changing vicissitudes of the external world.Thus human begins become the masters of their own constantly evolving individual destinies created within the parameters to which all human beings are subject--those of the human condition and the laws of nature. Being so psychologically "born again," that is, psychologically aware and empowered, does not free the individual from suffering--for Freud, like the Buddha, argues that life is suffering.
As Mark Edmundson of the Department of English at the University of Virginia so illuminatingly reveals in his essay "Freud and the Fundamentalist Urge," on the 150th anniversary of Freud’s birth:
But our lives need not be just about suffering. Set free psychologically, each human being has the potential to experience periods of heightened awareness, creative living, and contented fulfillment. The individual's psychologically enlightened self gives each healthily raised child, each woman, and each man the "unalienable Rights [but not guarantees]...to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" (Thomas Jefferson, "The Declaration of Independence").
To be "endowed" by ONE'S OWN TRUE SELF with such "certain unalienable Rights" is, psychoanalytically speaking, to be "born again" to make enlightened choices, and to make enlightened choices is, by psychoanalytic definition, to be as free as it is humanly possible to be free psychologically.
A Freudian Perspective
By
Edward C. Paolella
epaolella@nyc.rr.com
(April Fool's Day 2006)
Apostles' Creed
1. I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth:
2. And in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord:
3. Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary:
4. Suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead and buried:
HE DESCENDED INTO HELL:
5. The third day he rose again from the dead:
6. He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God
the Father Almighty:
7. From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead:
8. I believe in the Holy Ghost:
9. I believe in the holy catholic church: the communion of saints:
10. The forgiveness of sins:
11. The resurrection of the body:
12. And the life everlasting. Amen.
Included in the Apostles' Creed is the belief that Jesus descended into hell before ascending on the third day into heaven. According to certain Christian traditions, he supposedly took Moses, David, Solomon, and all the Jewish Prophets with him to heaven. Psychologically speaking, the point is that before we are able to attain "paradise" or "liberation"–that is, psychological health and creative freedom--"ascending into heaven"--we must first make the descent into the deepest, the most frightening part of ourselves, our unconscious--"hell." The purpose of the "descent into hell" is necessary to make the unconscious conscious so as to learn of, as many as possible, THE MOST SIGNIFICANT TRUTHS ABOUT OURSELVES--good, bad, or indifferent--accept them, and deal with them in an as mature and as rational a manner as possible so as to be freed from our neurotic behaviors, that is, to be freed from our unnecessary suffering.
As one female patient in psychoanalysis put it in Jerry Adler’s Newsweek article "Freud in Our Midst": "I decided I have a good life, but it could be better....[Psychoanalysis] makes you examine your life, retell your life, to understand where your attitudes, your beliefs and behaviors come from....I'm so much happier now. It's not something I could do alone. You have to confront the parts of yourself that are painful and shameful and difficult to face. Dr. Moritz [her psychoanalyst] asks the questions that cause me to dig deeper into myself" (March 26, 2006, p. 46).
The problem is that very few of us are willing to make the "descent"--to bring the unconscious desires into consciousness--so as to learn what caused our neuroses in the first place, neuroses that determine our conscious choices, and with the aid of adult reason and with being in touch with our current reality do what we have to to heal ourselves. In doing so, we learn to cut our neurotic ties from the past that have been governing our behavior ever since the desires emanating from the id were repressed in the first place during childhood. Our repressed desires, or the impulses to satisfy all our desires, however self-contradictory they may be, CREATED our damaged self-images or beleaguered ego with the help of the work of the super-ego, that is, the internalized system of values of right and wrong, good and evil, that act as judge, jury, and executioner that are the basis for our low self-esteem and the sabotaging of our own happiness.
Instead, we repeat the same neurotic patterns over and over again with our unconscious repressed feelings controlling our conscious choices. The question is: why do we continue to act self-destructively in spite of the fact that our rational, conscious minds are often even aware of our self-destructive behaviors, but not aware of their unconscious motivations? The answer is that we only have the illusion of being free based upon what our conscious minds tell us about ourselves without realizing or accepting that it is our repressed unconscious desires that determine our conscious choices based upon repressed childhood feelings of shame and guilt. Those unconscious feelings of childhood of shame and guilt that we carry around with us inside our heads are the bases for the religious concept of "sin."
All three Abrahamic religions--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--are founded upon the notion that we are all "sinners" incapable of redeeming ourselves. Hence, we get such theological ideas as "The Fall of Man," "Original Sin," and such remarks, as in the Book of Isaiah that "our righteousness is but as filthy rages before God," and in the Gospels that our "salvation comes only through the death and resurrection" of Jesus the Christ, whose crucifixion was necessary to "cleanse" all of us who "believe on Him" from our sins. Or as the opening lines of the hymn "Amazing Grace" expresses the concept of the unforgiving, unrelenting super-ego:
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me....
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now, I see.
The word "wretch," one of the oldest and the ugliest words in the English language, with an equally ugly meaning, is derived from the Old English verb wrecan, meaning "to drive, drive out," and in turn form the Old English noun wrecca, meaning "outcast, exile, fugitive," and "a base, despicable, or vile person."
Jesus is correct, psychologically speaking, that is it only "the truth that sets us free," but not "the truth" that Jesus is "The Truth" and that to be saved we must believe in Him, but rather that "the truth" that we learn about ourselves in bringing the unconscious repressed feelings of shame and guilt into consciousness and in liberating ourselves from such repressed shame and guilt that we become free to dispel what others originally predetermined for us was shameful and worthy of guilty feelings and of the punishment we must suffer for our shame and guilt.
In religious terms that is the idea of the Fall and God as Everlasting Judge who punishes us for our sins and, whom Jesus, "sitteth at the right hand of the Father," in the "last days" will "judge the living and the dead" to determine who will go to heaven to live in bliss with and in God and who to hell to suffer punishment, for all eternity, at the hands of Satan, the former Lucifer, the "Angel of Light," now turned the "Prince of Darkness."
Jesus' notion that "the truth will set you free" existed long before he did. In ancient Greek religion, what ignorant "religious" moderns condescendingly call Greek "mythology," not the religion of the ancient Greeks to be found expressed in Homer and other ancient writers, especially the ancient tragedians, but at worst legendary, fictional untruths, and at best allegorical spiritual and psychological truths, but certainly not as sacred or "Holy Scriptures," in the modern sense, to the ancient Greeks and later the ancient Romans in their variations on the Greek Homeric tradition in the writings of Vergil and Ovid and Seneca as the equal of the divinely inspired writings whether the TANAKH for the Jews, the New Testament for the Christians, the Qur'an for the Muslims, and the various other scriptures for the Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, BahB'ís, and so on of all the other world's sacred religious writings.
Among the ancient Greeks the idea that "the truth will set you free" is expressed as the religious principle of "Know Thyself," espoused in the Greek temples of worship, especially in the city-state of Athens and in the Temple at Delphi dedicated to the God Apollo, the God of the sun, medicine, and poetry. Athens is named for Athena, the virgin Goddess of Wisdom, the daughter of the Father of the Olympian Gods Zeus, born full-grown from his head (just one example of Zeus, a male god, giving birth to children, as Jesus, the Creator-God aspect of the Father God of the Trinity, was also a male who "begot" everything and everyone in the universe, including his own mother the Virgin Mary, for it was through Jesus "that all things were made").
Athena is the daughter of Zeus. She sprang full grown in armour from his forehead and thus has no mother. She is fierce and brave in battle in wars defend the state and home from outside enemies. She is the Goddess of the city, handicrafts, and agriculture. She invented the bridle, which permitted man to tame horses, the trumpet, the flute, the pot, the rake, the plow, the yoke, the ship, and the chariot. She is the embodiment of wisdom, reason, and purity. She was Zeus's favorite child and was allowed to use his weapons including his thunderbolt. Her favorite city is Athens. Her tree is the olive. The owl is her bird. She is an ever-virgin Goddess as, according to Roman Catholic dogma, Mary, the mother of Jesus, the Son of God, is the Ever-Virgin Mary, conceived immaculately, that is, without the taint of "original sin," for how could Jesus, God Incarnate, be born of a woman stained with sin?
In his "First Lecture" to his work A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Freud himself says, in so many words, that self-knowledge, the essence of wisdom, springs from our own heads as did Athena, the Virgin Goddess of Wisdom, did from Zeus' own head:
"...[H]ow is it possible to study it [psychoanalysis] at all or to convince oneself of its truth? The study of it is indeed not an easy matter, nor are there many people who have thoroughly learned it; still, there is, of course, some way of learning it. Psychoanalysis is learned first of all on oneself, through the study of one's own personality [emphasis mine]. This is not exactly what is meant by introspection, but it may be so described for want of a better word. There is a whole series of very common and well-known mental phenomena which can be taken as material for self-analysis when one has acquired some knowledge of the method. In this way one may obtain the required conviction of the reality of its conceptions, although progress on these lines is not without its limitations. One gets much further by submitting oneself to analysis by a skilled analyst, undergoing the working of the analysis in one's own person and using the opportunity to observe the finer details of the technique which the analyst employs (Joan Riviere, tr., New York: Perma Books, 1953, pp. 23-24).
The point of taking this round-about journey is to show the fantastic connections in thought between the insights of the ancient Greeks, Jews, Christians, and Freud (an atheist) about the nature of the human mind, how it works, how we are frightened by the necessary descent into our own unconscious minds ("hell) in order to "ascend" into "heaven" or into higher consciousness freed from the unconscious childhood feelings of shame and guilt that keep us from truly knowing ourselves and from deriving deeper enjoyment of our lives and the best possible uses of our creative talents.
Before the common era, what the Buddha in ancient India in the 6th century and Socrates in the 5th century in ancient Greece experienced and taught their disciples--Socrates remarking that "the unexamined life is not worth living" in Plato's The Trial of Socrates--is that years of deeply painful "introspection" are necessary so as to attain the state of "Nirvana" or "Rebirth" or "Enlightenment" (that is, revelation of the self experienced from within the mind) devoid of neurotic suffering, being freed from the so-called "endless cycles of birth, death, and rebirth" and freedom from repetitious compulsive neurotic behavior. In his paper "Formations regarding the Two Principles in Mental Function" (1911), as Freud notes, "We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality....The neurotic turns away from reality because he finds it unbearable–either in whole or parts of it." The neurotic’s "alienation from reality" has as its aim "denying the existence of the particular event that occasioned the outbreak..." (Collected Papers, V. 4, tr. Joan Riviere, London: 1953, p. 13).
Every "truly realized" master thinker, philosopher, musician, artist, sculptor, teacher, and any other deeply introspective human being, whether literate or illiterate, remembered or forgotten by history, having attained true self-knowledge grows in compassion, understanding, and love of self and others, but not without each individual knowing "hell" before experiencing "heaven" on earth--to whatever degree it is possible for each one of us to accomplish such a rebirth who is willing to make the journey that Dante describes in his epic trilogy of the "Inferno," "Purgatorio'" and "Paradiso," all three parts of which he named La Comedia and his readers soon after his death, The Divine Comedy. For as Shakespeare puts it, a "comedy" is, after all, "all's well that ends well"!
The goal of psychoanalysis, Freud points out time and again, is the uncovering and resolution of the patient's internal conflicts so as to have the "old" neurotic suffering self ("ich") die and the "new" healthy self ("ich") be born based, not upon fantasies and wishes--the "pleasure principle"--but upon being in touch with reality, past and present, and making conscious decisions based upon the "reality principle" so as to diminish human suffering as much as the human condition and reality will allow.From a Freudian psychoanalytic perspective, such is the true meaning of being born once of the flesh and then again of the "spirit." The word Freud (an atheist) uses is "Seele," to mean a human being's innermost being, what in Greek is "psyche" and in Latin "animus" and in English "soul," but carrying no transcendental or "other-worldly" significance whatsoever.
For Freud, to be "born again" was to be as free from neurotic behavior and its attendant suffering as humanly possible through a discovery of and a being in touch with the reality of one's own inner-most being on a conscious level to make choices on the basis of the individual's own reality.As Freud used the terms, the Ego (das Ich) is the mediator between the impulsive-compulsive demands of the Id (das Es) and the tyrannical threats and judgments of the Superego (das Überich). The Ego is only free to choose what is in its own best interest when it is consciously aware that to surrender to either the chaotic and contradictory wishes of the Id or the Kafkaesque policing and prosecutorial nature of the Superego is to cave into the forces of the unbridled indulgence of desire and the unrelenting punishment of blood-stabbing guilt and biting remorse.
To be "born again," to be truly free, is to "know thyself" and to make choices on the basis of the reality principle of our present circumstances--not out of irrational compulsive impulses and beseiging guilt--but out of enlightened self-interest. It is neither a "God" nor a "Holy Spirit" who causes us to be "born again" and set free, but we ourselves through the difficult and painful, but courageous "descent into hell" as the essential part of the journey toward self-revelation and self-actualization: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings" (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, I:2:134).
In his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933), Freud expresses what is meant psychoanalytically by being "born again"--being freed from the chaotic compulsive impulses of the id and the knife-stabbing guilt and back-biting remorse of the superego, or in Freud's own words: "Where id was, there shall ego be" (Wo Es war, soll Ich werden, literally "Where it was, I shall come to be").
Set free from the unrelenting repressed drives of the id and the threating judgments and punishments of the superego, the ego mediates between these two powerful psychic forces based, not upon either the "pleasure principle" or the tyranny of deeply ingrained, impossible-to-live-by standards of religious, sexual, and moral perfection, but by the "reality principle" based upon self-knowledge and the realities of the present now guided by adult reasoning abilities and healthy defense mechanisms.
Now the ego, self-empowered and in touch with its own creative and intuitive talents and perceptions, has an enhanced ability to make choices out of enlightened self-interest no longer dictated by repressed inscrutible psycho-sexual and aggressive instincts and unyielding threats of self-recrimination and "self-bashing" and acquired self-destructive patterns of behavior, but by the prevailing power of rational thinking and of decision-making that take into account the whole human being: the emotions, the values, and the needs of the individual's ever-changing internal realities and the ever-changing vicissitudes of the external world.Thus human begins become the masters of their own constantly evolving individual destinies created within the parameters to which all human beings are subject--those of the human condition and the laws of nature. Being so psychologically "born again," that is, psychologically aware and empowered, does not free the individual from suffering--for Freud, like the Buddha, argues that life is suffering.
As Mark Edmundson of the Department of English at the University of Virginia so illuminatingly reveals in his essay "Freud and the Fundamentalist Urge," on the 150th anniversary of Freud’s birth:
At the center of Freud's work lies a fundamental perception: human beings are
not generally unified creatures. Our psyches are not whole, but divided into
parts, and those parts are usually in conflict with one another [much of the
source of our psychological suffering]. The id, or the 'it,' is an agent of pure
desire: it wants and wants and does not readily take no for an answer. The
superego, or over-I, is the internal agent of authority. It often looks harshly
upon the id and its manifold wants. The superego, in fact, frequently punishes
the self simply for wishing for forbidden things, even if the self does not act
on those wishes at all. Then there is the ego, trying to broker between the it
and the over-I, and doing so with the greatest of difficulty, in part because
both agencies tend to operate outside the circle of the ego's awareness. The
over I and the it often function unconsciously. Add to this problem the fact
that 'the poor ego,' as Freud often calls it, must navigate a frequently hostile
outside world, and it is easy to see how, for Freud, life is best defined as
ongoing conflict" (New York Times Magazine, April 30, 2006, p. 16).
But our lives need not be just about suffering. Set free psychologically, each human being has the potential to experience periods of heightened awareness, creative living, and contented fulfillment. The individual's psychologically enlightened self gives each healthily raised child, each woman, and each man the "unalienable Rights [but not guarantees]...to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" (Thomas Jefferson, "The Declaration of Independence").
To be "endowed" by ONE'S OWN TRUE SELF with such "certain unalienable Rights" is, psychoanalytically speaking, to be "born again" to make enlightened choices, and to make enlightened choices is, by psychoanalytic definition, to be as free as it is humanly possible to be free psychologically.
5.5.06
Le vrai croyant: penser c'est croire
Libre opinion
Théologie radicale
Le vrai croyant : penser c'est croire
THE TRUE BELIEVER: OR, THINKING IS BELIEVING
Edward C. Paolella
24 janvier 2006
epaolella@nyc.rr.com
Dieu - qui n'existe pas - m'a parlé l'autre jour. Il m'a dit :
- C'est incompréhensible. Je n'existe pas et pourtant des milliards d'êtres humains ne cessent de me prier. Des enfants, des femmes, des hommes, chacun à sa manière :
. Guéris mon mari de son cancer.
. Fais tomber la pluie.
. Fais-moi gagner les 260 millions de dollars de la loterie.
. Mon impuissance sexuelle est-elle punition de mes péchés ?
. Fais que papa arrête de battre maman et moi quand il a bu.
. Efface tous les Juifs de la surface de la terre.
. Nourris mes enfants affamés.
. Fais que Pat Robertson et Jerry Falwell meurent du sida dans la souffrance.
. Continue a nous bénir, nous les vrais croyants, dans notre jihad contre le Satan américain.
J'ai demandé :
- Mon Dieu si tu n'existes pas, comment se fait-il que presque toute l'humanité croie que tu existes? Qu'on torture en ton saint Nom, qu'on mutile et qu'on tue dans le monde entier des millions d'incroyants ou d'infidèles, parce qu'ils disent que tu n'existes pas ou parce qu'ils croient différemment ? Qu'on continue à croire que tu exauces les prières et que tu fais des miracles ?
Dieu a répondu :
- Bien que je n'existe pas, sinon comme une illusion de leur esprit à leur propre image, ils se refusent à prendre eux-mêmes la responsabilité de leur propre vie. Ils se tournent vers moi, ils attendent de moi que je pense à leur place et que je fasse leur sale travail.
J'ai dit respectueusement :
- Merci, mon Dieu pour ton explication. Cette explication toute simple de la raison pour laquelle, d'une manière ou d'une autre, presque toute l'humanité croit en toi plutôt que de croire en elle-même, me semble tout à fait convaincante.
Et j'ai poursuivi :
- Puisque tu n'existes pas et que tu n'as jamais existé, ce n'est donc pas toi qui m'a parlé.
J'ai longuement réfléchi à cette conversation que j'ai eue avec Dieu. Et j'ai finalement pris conscience que c'était moi qui pensais tout seul et qui me parlais à moi-même. Ce n'était pas Dieu qui me parlait, c'était moi qui cherchais à résoudre les problèmes qui sont, pour la plupart des hommes tout à fait insolubles. Moi qui, ce faisant, osais troubler l'ordre universel et... devenir sage.
Théologie radicale
Le vrai croyant : penser c'est croire
THE TRUE BELIEVER: OR, THINKING IS BELIEVING
Edward C. Paolella
24 janvier 2006
epaolella@nyc.rr.com
Dieu - qui n'existe pas - m'a parlé l'autre jour. Il m'a dit :
- C'est incompréhensible. Je n'existe pas et pourtant des milliards d'êtres humains ne cessent de me prier. Des enfants, des femmes, des hommes, chacun à sa manière :
. Guéris mon mari de son cancer.
. Fais tomber la pluie.
. Fais-moi gagner les 260 millions de dollars de la loterie.
. Mon impuissance sexuelle est-elle punition de mes péchés ?
. Fais que papa arrête de battre maman et moi quand il a bu.
. Efface tous les Juifs de la surface de la terre.
. Nourris mes enfants affamés.
. Fais que Pat Robertson et Jerry Falwell meurent du sida dans la souffrance.
. Continue a nous bénir, nous les vrais croyants, dans notre jihad contre le Satan américain.
J'ai demandé :
- Mon Dieu si tu n'existes pas, comment se fait-il que presque toute l'humanité croie que tu existes? Qu'on torture en ton saint Nom, qu'on mutile et qu'on tue dans le monde entier des millions d'incroyants ou d'infidèles, parce qu'ils disent que tu n'existes pas ou parce qu'ils croient différemment ? Qu'on continue à croire que tu exauces les prières et que tu fais des miracles ?
Dieu a répondu :
- Bien que je n'existe pas, sinon comme une illusion de leur esprit à leur propre image, ils se refusent à prendre eux-mêmes la responsabilité de leur propre vie. Ils se tournent vers moi, ils attendent de moi que je pense à leur place et que je fasse leur sale travail.
J'ai dit respectueusement :
- Merci, mon Dieu pour ton explication. Cette explication toute simple de la raison pour laquelle, d'une manière ou d'une autre, presque toute l'humanité croit en toi plutôt que de croire en elle-même, me semble tout à fait convaincante.
Et j'ai poursuivi :
- Puisque tu n'existes pas et que tu n'as jamais existé, ce n'est donc pas toi qui m'a parlé.
J'ai longuement réfléchi à cette conversation que j'ai eue avec Dieu. Et j'ai finalement pris conscience que c'était moi qui pensais tout seul et qui me parlais à moi-même. Ce n'était pas Dieu qui me parlait, c'était moi qui cherchais à résoudre les problèmes qui sont, pour la plupart des hommes tout à fait insolubles. Moi qui, ce faisant, osais troubler l'ordre universel et... devenir sage.
4.5.06
Why We Should All Support George "Dubya" Bush: Bush Thinks an Oxymoron an Animal Species!
Why We Should All Support George "Dubya" Bush:
Bush Thinks an Oxymoron an Animal Species!
By
Edward C. Paolella
May 6, 2006
epaolella@nyc.rr.com
"Let America Be America Again"
—Langston Hughes (1936)
"Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be....
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed–
Let it be that great strong land of love....
(It never was America to me.)
O, Let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe....
America never was America to me."
Do you not just love the genocide that is going on in Darfur?
I want Bush to ask Colin Powell, the former Bush Secretary of State, to announce ONCE AGAIN, as he first did on September 9, 2004–with Bush having done nothing to intervene–that imminently over one million black Sudanese will have been slaughtered by the "Janjaweed" militias ("Men with a gun on a horse") ordered by the Sudanese government to "clear" civilians, through massacre, rape, and forced displacement, from areas considered "disloyal" to the Arabized Islamic government, despite the fact that the black Sudanese are themselves Muslims, although considered by the Janjaweed to be an inferior race to serve only as slaves–if allowed to live at all!
Well, let us all get into bed together to discuss why it is in our best interest as Americans to support Bush in every conceivable way possible.
I want gasoline prices to go up to $25.00 a gallon within the next six months so as to keep Bush as happy and as rich as possible--he's an "oil man" you know--and to have all oil company executives and shareholders get even greedier than they now are.
I want more American young men and women to die in Iraq. I want more American young men and women to come back from Iraq maimed for life and almost all of them on anti-depressants, for who knows how long. The vast majority of them will no longer be able to work, will no longer be able to cope with family conflicts (if still single) or with marital problems (if they remain married), and will no longer be able to raise psychologically healthy children–as happened after the Viet-Nam War. At the same time, I also want to vigorously support Bush's decrease in army pay and in veterans' benefits.
I want Bush to continue to violate both American and international law by endorsing the alleged practice of various methods of torture to extract information from such captured al-Qaeda 9/11 operatives as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Bin al-Shibh as well as other "detainees" in undisclosed foreign countries that employ cruel and unusual punishment. As one unnamed American government official said, as quoted in The Washington Post, December 26, 2003, "We don’t kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them."
I want Bush to increase financial aid to Afghanistan so that they may increase their growing of poppy plants from 85% to 99% for the manufacture of hard-core drugs for the increasing number of American drug addicts–some of whom have served one or two tours of duty in either Afghanistan or Iraq--so that the Taliban Warlords in Afghanistan may become richer than ever
and more powerful than ever with an increased ability to purchase more destructive weapons and in greater numbers to terrorize and subjugate their own civilian population and kill more American soldiers stationed there. Their increased aid and profits from drug-trafficking will help the Islamist insurgents to have the financial aid they need to swell their numbers in training camps all along the Afghan-Pakistan border.
I want Bush to speak to Jesus and Jesus to speak to him more often to give Bush the guidance that he needs to cut the taxes on the richest 1% of Americans at the expense of the middle class, the working poor, the poor, and the illegal "aliens" who pay taxes, but have no benefits and no voting rights or governmental representation in America. I like that illegal "aliens" are contributing $463 billions dollars to social security, but never having access to a social security check.
I want the minimum wage, now at $5.15 an hour–far too high for small businesses to pay--to be reduced to $2.15 an hour. I want to help more illegal "aliens" to come across our Mexican and Canadian borders so as to increase the chances of having terrorists slip into our factories and nuclear plants and clean water supply facilities.
I want to see social security totally dismantled. I want all corporations and companies to abolish pension plans. I want the price of prescription drugs to increase and have the drug companies determine the prices. I want the number of Americans medically uninsured, now at 46 million, to double to 92 million by November 2008.
I want to see more public unrest and civil disobedience to show Bush that his policies are truly working and are effective in increasing the number of dissidents, "Minutemen," and vigilante groups throughout America.
I want all corporations to have the right to pollute and destroy the earth and as many species upon it by increasing the contaminants allowed to seep into our air and water, having Bush abolish all governmental regulations on pollution control.
I also want all bankruptcy laws to be abolished. I want no more government aid to colleges and universities and stem-cell researchers and no more student financial assistance or student loans. I also want all affirmative action programs to surcease at once.
I want hunger to increase in America, the richest country in the world, to be in good standing with all the poorest countries on the African continent and in Haiti where--daily--thousands of children suffer the agonies of famine or die from curable diseases while Bush subsidizes huge corporate farmers and dairies to destroy their foodstuffs to guarantee higher prices.
I want to encourage a rise in the teenage pregnancy rate and the incidence of AIDS to quadruple by November 2008 as a direct result of Bush's "abstinence only" policy--one of the most Christian approaches to the betterment of mankind to be devised since Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" while Bush throws good taxpayer dollars after bad in tokenism to the AIDS pandemic in Africa and India.
I want to see the Supreme Court reverse Roe. v. Wade so that abortions on demand become illegal and women are forced to suffer and die in the tens of thousands each year as a result of back-room abortions done under totally infected conditions by unqualified abortionists using coat hangers.
I want a federal law against gays and lesbians getting legal rights to marry. I want to have all gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgender placed in concentration work camps run by fundamentalist Evangelicals, Pentecostals, Jews, Muslims, White Southern Baptists, Catholics, Jehovah Witnesses, "Moonies," White Supremacists, and Skin Heads.
I want all social programs and prisons in America to be "Faith Based" and funded, of course, by our tax dollars--including the tax dollars paid into the Internal Revenue Service by atheists.
I want the abolition of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the American Constitution. I want the "Patriot Act" to make the exercise of free speech, a free press, and the right to free assembly curtailed indefinitely with absolutely no separation of church and state.
I want Bush to usurp the right to privacy in America by declaring it legal--with no legislative approval--to tap all telephones and to have access to all personal computer hard drives, all e-mail correspondence, and all public library records of books checked out and to whom to be made available to the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
I want to encourage massive layoffs by all American corporations going off shore to avoid the too high tax dollars on their profits that they once had to contribute to the Federal Treasury--even though Bush allowed them all huge tax breaks-- and to pay factory workers, often children as young as 13 years old, the cheapest wages possible, anywhere between 3 cents and 70 cents an hour, and to have unemployment go through the roof in America or to create only those jobs for Americans paying them one- to two-thirds of what they used to earn while also cutting them off from medical insurance and pension plans.
I want Bush to lie over and over and over again and get caught over and over and over again lying.
I want America to be America again, and only if we get behind Bush and all his political, religious, social, and economic agendas will the true America have a chance to be America again in November 2008.
Bush Thinks an Oxymoron an Animal Species!
By
Edward C. Paolella
May 6, 2006
epaolella@nyc.rr.com
"Let America Be America Again"
—Langston Hughes (1936)
"Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be....
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed–
Let it be that great strong land of love....
(It never was America to me.)
O, Let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe....
America never was America to me."
Do you not just love the genocide that is going on in Darfur?
I want Bush to ask Colin Powell, the former Bush Secretary of State, to announce ONCE AGAIN, as he first did on September 9, 2004–with Bush having done nothing to intervene–that imminently over one million black Sudanese will have been slaughtered by the "Janjaweed" militias ("Men with a gun on a horse") ordered by the Sudanese government to "clear" civilians, through massacre, rape, and forced displacement, from areas considered "disloyal" to the Arabized Islamic government, despite the fact that the black Sudanese are themselves Muslims, although considered by the Janjaweed to be an inferior race to serve only as slaves–if allowed to live at all!
Well, let us all get into bed together to discuss why it is in our best interest as Americans to support Bush in every conceivable way possible.
I want gasoline prices to go up to $25.00 a gallon within the next six months so as to keep Bush as happy and as rich as possible--he's an "oil man" you know--and to have all oil company executives and shareholders get even greedier than they now are.
I want more American young men and women to die in Iraq. I want more American young men and women to come back from Iraq maimed for life and almost all of them on anti-depressants, for who knows how long. The vast majority of them will no longer be able to work, will no longer be able to cope with family conflicts (if still single) or with marital problems (if they remain married), and will no longer be able to raise psychologically healthy children–as happened after the Viet-Nam War. At the same time, I also want to vigorously support Bush's decrease in army pay and in veterans' benefits.
I want Bush to continue to violate both American and international law by endorsing the alleged practice of various methods of torture to extract information from such captured al-Qaeda 9/11 operatives as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Bin al-Shibh as well as other "detainees" in undisclosed foreign countries that employ cruel and unusual punishment. As one unnamed American government official said, as quoted in The Washington Post, December 26, 2003, "We don’t kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them."
I want Bush to increase financial aid to Afghanistan so that they may increase their growing of poppy plants from 85% to 99% for the manufacture of hard-core drugs for the increasing number of American drug addicts–some of whom have served one or two tours of duty in either Afghanistan or Iraq--so that the Taliban Warlords in Afghanistan may become richer than ever
and more powerful than ever with an increased ability to purchase more destructive weapons and in greater numbers to terrorize and subjugate their own civilian population and kill more American soldiers stationed there. Their increased aid and profits from drug-trafficking will help the Islamist insurgents to have the financial aid they need to swell their numbers in training camps all along the Afghan-Pakistan border.
I want Bush to speak to Jesus and Jesus to speak to him more often to give Bush the guidance that he needs to cut the taxes on the richest 1% of Americans at the expense of the middle class, the working poor, the poor, and the illegal "aliens" who pay taxes, but have no benefits and no voting rights or governmental representation in America. I like that illegal "aliens" are contributing $463 billions dollars to social security, but never having access to a social security check.
I want the minimum wage, now at $5.15 an hour–far too high for small businesses to pay--to be reduced to $2.15 an hour. I want to help more illegal "aliens" to come across our Mexican and Canadian borders so as to increase the chances of having terrorists slip into our factories and nuclear plants and clean water supply facilities.
I want to see social security totally dismantled. I want all corporations and companies to abolish pension plans. I want the price of prescription drugs to increase and have the drug companies determine the prices. I want the number of Americans medically uninsured, now at 46 million, to double to 92 million by November 2008.
I want to see more public unrest and civil disobedience to show Bush that his policies are truly working and are effective in increasing the number of dissidents, "Minutemen," and vigilante groups throughout America.
I want all corporations to have the right to pollute and destroy the earth and as many species upon it by increasing the contaminants allowed to seep into our air and water, having Bush abolish all governmental regulations on pollution control.
I also want all bankruptcy laws to be abolished. I want no more government aid to colleges and universities and stem-cell researchers and no more student financial assistance or student loans. I also want all affirmative action programs to surcease at once.
I want hunger to increase in America, the richest country in the world, to be in good standing with all the poorest countries on the African continent and in Haiti where--daily--thousands of children suffer the agonies of famine or die from curable diseases while Bush subsidizes huge corporate farmers and dairies to destroy their foodstuffs to guarantee higher prices.
I want to encourage a rise in the teenage pregnancy rate and the incidence of AIDS to quadruple by November 2008 as a direct result of Bush's "abstinence only" policy--one of the most Christian approaches to the betterment of mankind to be devised since Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" while Bush throws good taxpayer dollars after bad in tokenism to the AIDS pandemic in Africa and India.
I want to see the Supreme Court reverse Roe. v. Wade so that abortions on demand become illegal and women are forced to suffer and die in the tens of thousands each year as a result of back-room abortions done under totally infected conditions by unqualified abortionists using coat hangers.
I want a federal law against gays and lesbians getting legal rights to marry. I want to have all gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgender placed in concentration work camps run by fundamentalist Evangelicals, Pentecostals, Jews, Muslims, White Southern Baptists, Catholics, Jehovah Witnesses, "Moonies," White Supremacists, and Skin Heads.
I want all social programs and prisons in America to be "Faith Based" and funded, of course, by our tax dollars--including the tax dollars paid into the Internal Revenue Service by atheists.
I want the abolition of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the American Constitution. I want the "Patriot Act" to make the exercise of free speech, a free press, and the right to free assembly curtailed indefinitely with absolutely no separation of church and state.
I want Bush to usurp the right to privacy in America by declaring it legal--with no legislative approval--to tap all telephones and to have access to all personal computer hard drives, all e-mail correspondence, and all public library records of books checked out and to whom to be made available to the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
I want to encourage massive layoffs by all American corporations going off shore to avoid the too high tax dollars on their profits that they once had to contribute to the Federal Treasury--even though Bush allowed them all huge tax breaks-- and to pay factory workers, often children as young as 13 years old, the cheapest wages possible, anywhere between 3 cents and 70 cents an hour, and to have unemployment go through the roof in America or to create only those jobs for Americans paying them one- to two-thirds of what they used to earn while also cutting them off from medical insurance and pension plans.
I want Bush to lie over and over and over again and get caught over and over and over again lying.
I want America to be America again, and only if we get behind Bush and all his political, religious, social, and economic agendas will the true America have a chance to be America again in November 2008.
26.4.05
Contraception and Privacy: In Light of Fundamentalist Pharmacists Unlawfully
Refusing to Dispense Birth-Control Prescriptions
Researched by Edward C. Paolella
(April 10, 2005)
United States Supreme Court Decision: Griswold v. Connecticut
(1965)
Should people be allowed access to drugs or devices designed to stop contraception, and thus be able to engage in sex without having to worry as much about pregnancy? There have been many laws in the United States which prohibited the manufacture, distribution, transportation, or advertisement of such drugs and devices. Those laws were challenged and the most successful line or argument stated that such laws interfered with a sphere of privacy which belonged to the individual.
Background Information
Connecticut prohibited the use of drugs or instruments to prevent conception, and the giving of assistance or counsel in their use. The laws in question had been enacted in 1879 (and originally written by P.T. Barnum, of circus fame): Any person who uses any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception shall be fined not less than fifty dollars or imprisoned not less than sixty days nor more than one year or be both fined and imprisoned....
Court Decision
The Supreme Court ruled that the "statute forbidding use of contraceptives violates the right of marital privacy which is within the penumbra of specific guarantees of the Bill of Rights." According to Justice Douglas, who wrote the majority opinion, the rights people have are more than what can be read in the literal language of the Constitutional text. Citing a number of earlier cases, he emphasized how the Court had established a justified precedent for protecting the marital and family relationships from government interference without strong justification.
In this case, the Court failed to find any justification for this kind of interference.
Ratzinger (Affectionately Named "The Rat" and "God’s Rottweiler")
Elected New Roman Catholic Pope (April 19, 2005):
Bad News for Everyone Rational, I Fear!
By
Edward C. Paolella
Until I die, I hope in my deepest and truest heart-of-hearts that I am proven totally dead wrong!
But I do genuinely fear that the "Rat," also referred to as "God’s Rottweiler" (the German-bred commonly used guard dog), is going to prove to be bad news for everyone except all catholic-a-tons, fundamentalist-a-tons, evangelic-a-tons, orthodox-a-tons; religionist-a-tons, lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-bash-a-tons; racist-a-tons; anti-semite-a-tons; skinhead-a-tons; white supremist-a-tons; neo-nazi-a-tons; neo-fascist-a-tons; neo-imperialist-a-tons, rabid capitalist-a-tons. Rationalists around the world do not have a chance in hell!
Sisters and brothers, do not dare go out in drag. No more limp wrists (Roxy-Sarita), no more cruising, no more bath houses, no more gyms with steam rooms, no more gay movie theaters, no more porno (gay or straight) in theaters or at home, no more lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender community centers, no more lgbt domestic partner relationships, no more pedophile priests (straight and gay).
It is the time for 1984 in the year 2005 and beyond; it is the time for the thought police; it is the time for the religious street-police as in the streets of Iran; it is the time for the ending of all civil liberties; it is the time for the tightening of the Patriot Act; it is the time for public floggings; it is the time for public hangings; it is the time for public humiliations; it is the time for the anti-gay marriage amendment; it is the time for arch-conservative reactionary republican administrations for the next 5,000 years (at least); it is the time for the over-turning of abortions-on-demand; it is the time for the universal ban on all forms of birth control whatsoever; it is the time for the implementing of the universal policy of Fahrenheit 451.
It is the time for the return of the concentration camps ("Strikte Moral Macht Frei"); it is the time for the death camps and the lighting of the crematoria; it is the time for both the "cleansing of the dictatorship of [moral] relativism " and "aggressive secularism"; it is the time for international, inter-faith religious warfare and the genocide and of all non-Catholics; it is the time for the abolition of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America; it is the time for the free showing in all movie theaters around the world (with subtitles) of Mad Max and The Passion of the Christ; it is the time for the Catholic Inquisition and forced conversions; it is the time for the "Anti-Christ" with the number "666" on the back of his neck to appear and reign supreme; it is the time for the man-made Godly self-fulfilling prophecy of Armageddon.
It is the time for the return of Jesus, the only true "Messiah" and the monotheistic "Three-Persons-in-One God."
It is time for all orthodox Muslim men to be restricted to only one wife.
It is the time for the rebuilding of the third temple in Jerusalem.
It is the time for the rapture; it is the time for the final judgment.
It is the time for the sealing of hell with its burning of tortured souls for all eternity (except for the 144,000 elected to be with God in heaven--all Jehovah Witnesses, of course ).
It is the time to be given new bodies.
It is the time for the new heaven and the new earth.
It is the time for the return to the Garden of Eden before the Fall.
It is the time for eternal bliss with the man-created idea of the existence of an All-Loving, All-Forgiving, All-Compassionate, All-Merciful God.
It is the time for all atheists (before they are rounded up and exterminated) to continue to walk on the sunny sides of the streets throughout the world singing "Somewhere over the Rainbow" in every language known to mankind.
It is the time for the return of the planet of the apes!
GEORGE "DUBYA" BUSH'S AMERICAN CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALIST THEOCRACY:
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION’S NEWLY AMENDED
"AMENDMENDMENT"
TO THE
FIRST "AMENDMENDMENT" TO THE CONSTITUTION OF THE
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY
EDWARD C. PAOLELLA
(EPAOLELLA@NYC.RR.COM)
"AMENDMENDMENT"
TO THE
FIRST "AMENDMENDMENT" TO THE CONSTITUTION OF THE
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY
EDWARD C. PAOLELLA
(EPAOLELLA@NYC.RR.COM)
FREEDOM OF RELIGION, PRESS, AND EXPRESSION RATIFIED
DECEMBER 15, 1791
ON THE ISSUES BELOW, WHO SEES THESEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE IN THE BUSH REPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATION’S
NEWLY AMENDED FIRST "AMENDMENDMENT" TO THE
CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA?
Congress shall make no law respecting anestablishment of religion
AS BUSH IS DOINGWITH HIS "FAITH-BASED INITIATIVES" POSITION,
WITH HIS ANTI-ABORTION POSITION,
WITH HIS ANTI-STEM-CELL RESEARCH POSITION,
WITH HIS ANTI-CONDOM USE (AT HOME AND ABROAD) POSITION,
WITH HIS DECLARING JUNE 10th "JESUS DAY" POSITION,
WITH HIS LITMUS TEST FOR FEDERAL COURT JUDGES POSITION,
AND
WITH HIS ANTI-GAY MARRIAGE AMENDMENT POSITION,
or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peacefully to assemble, and to petitionthe Government for a redress of grievances.
THE NEWLY AMENDED FIRST "AMENDMENDMENT" TO THE CONSTITUTION OF
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
MAY "VICAR" GEORGE "DUBYA" BUSH CONTINUE TO BLESS
"HIS" AMERICAN CHRISTIAN FUNDMENTALIST THEOCRACY
WITH "HIS" EARNED POLITICAL CAPITAL!
"E PLURIBUS UNUM" (OUT OF THE MANY NON-CONSENTING, NON-CHRISTIANS IN AMERICA "DUBYA" DECREES THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICAN TO BE A CHRISTIAN NATION
9.4.05
"Humans are divided into different clans and tribes, and belong to countries and towns.But I find myself a stranger to all communities and belong to no settlement. The universe is my country and the human family is my tribe."
--Kahlil Gibran (Lebonese-American, 1883-1931), "The Poet's Voice"
One's God is unique to each individual as each self is unique to each human being. No one can speak of one's God but oneself because one's God, as others' selves, is a purely subjective experience to each human being.
What revelations one has are one's own and only one's own. That is why enlightenment is unique to each individual self. No one can experience enlightenment for someone else or through someone else. Enlightenment is a subjective, personal experience, just as the experience of God is subjective and personal.
Does one have a personal "soul" that lives on beyond one's physical life? No one can experience in a scientifically verifiable sense a "future" life. For whatever one's reasons, one may choose to believe it on faith--and faith in "something" is no proof that that "something" one has faith in beyond one's physical life is provable. It is purely a subjective experience that one may choose to turn into a belief one holds, for it is impossible to prove that one is capable of experiencing life after death before one is actually dead--that is why it is called life "after" death. How can one experience life "after" death while one is still alive?
Some individuals have hallucinations. What they hallucinate does not make the "content" of the hallucination proof of its own objective existence any more than the monsters one creates in one's imagination or in one's dreams are scientific proof of their objective existence. One can dream of a three-headed monster or draw one, but one cannot verify its material existence in the material world. One can verify that matter exists objectively, and so can anyone else who applies the laws of physics and chemistry to the material world. One cannot prove the verifiable existence of God or the soul because the laws of nature do not apply in the domain beyond ("meta") the physical. That is the difference between physics and metaphysics.
Physics can be verified objectively by anyone who repeats the experience and gets the same results over and over again. "Expérience" in French is the word for the English word "experiment." In French one form of the verb "to experiment" is "faire des expériences," literally "to make or create experiences" (although the verb "expérimenter" also exists) and the verb "to experience" in French is "éprouver." For the French, "to experience" something is "to prove" it ("éprouver").
It is not possible to prove in a scientifically verifiable way something that is "beyond the physical," something that is "metaphysical." One's "experience" of "God" is purely subjective--which science explains biochemically, but cannot verify one's "God" or one's "faith" scientifically as having an objective, material existence. It may be someone's subjective reality, but that in no way confirms its objective existence.
That Jesus died is verifiable. All human beings die. That he rose from the dead--or did anything else supernatural--beyond that which is natural--is pure hearsay evidence that is not allowable in a court of law as being objectively true or scientifically provable. That is why the courts in the United States have disallowed public schools to teach "creationism" or the concept of "intelligent design." The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled, based upon the separation of church and state, that creationism and the concept of intelligent design are RELIGIOUS concepts, not verifiable by SCIENCE. Evolution is a scientific theory that since Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859 has accumulated more and more scientific evidence to support the claims of the theory. To support the creationist, Christian–Jewish and Muslim--fundamentalist theological belief that God created the universe in 4,004 BCE and that Jesus, as God, as espoused in the "Mystery of the Holy Trinity," did the creating is not science, but theology. In fact, no where in the Gospels--no where--does Jesus ever make the claim that he IS God. Others may have said it of him or theologians believe it, but what they say does not make it so.
Ninety-nine people may claim to "experience" the existence of God out of 100. The one person who does not is in no way obligated to believe as scientifically, objectively, experimentally, verifiably true the existence of God because they are a minority of one. In the domain of metaphysics, one is purely in the realm of unverifiable, subjective, unprovable objective reality in the natural world, that is, as having verifiable existence in the physical world--where the origin of the word "physics" is derived from the ancient Greek word "physis," a word that in Greek means "nature."
Physics is physics; nature is nature; metaphysics is metaphysics; the supernatural is the supernatural--there is no mixing or matching the physical with the metaphysical or the natural with the supernatural. If anyone chooses to mix and match, they do so at their own risk–one calls most people who do such mixing and matching "crazy," or at least some do. And anyone who believes others when they say that they saw someone rise from the dead is definitely "crazy" to take their word for it without having been there to see it with their own eyes.
When it comes to metaphysical and supernatural claims that many have supposedly made throughout history, there are those who are on the side of the doubting Thomases every time, unless they see the happenings for themselves. If someone tells another that China exists, one does not have to take their word for it; that would be hearsay evidence. But if one can get on a plane, train, boat or walk to or take pictures, on earth or from space, of China and see it for themselves, then they will believe it to be true. Seeing is believing for most human beings every time.
And anyone who is willing to believe what they read to be true is playing the fool each time. Something has to be verified to be true, not claimed to be true by "divine inspiration."
Visions are visions are visions to those who claim to have them--whether of the Virgin Mary or Jesus or the ghost of Hamlet's father--their visions are not necessarily any one else’s truth unless one can objectively prove that what someone says they see is REALLY there scientifically, verified by the laws of nature (physics).
By the way, why is it not believable for Jews to accept that Muhammad was taken by the Archangel Gabriel to see God (visiting along his journey to converse with Moses and, in some orthodox Muslim views, Jesus) after his Night Journey (Isra and Miraj)? According to one version, he traveled on a winged horse with a woman's head visiting the mosque in Mecca and then to the mosque (eventually to be built on the Temple Mount, the current mosque of the Dome of the Rock). Why, then, is it unorthodox for Muslims to accept Jesus' resurrection or for Christians to also accept Muhammad's receiving directly from Allah, while the prophet was in heaven, the instructions about the "salat," the five required times of praying for all Muslims daily? If Jesus can, after his death, reappear here and there, and Elijah is, supposedly still alive, having been taken up alive in a chariot of fire to heaven, why do not all these religions–with stories of Lord Krishna appearing to Arjuna in the Hindu scriptures or legends quasi-deifying the Buddha--why are some of these supposed happenings not all accepted by all religions, since one religious dogma or mythology in any one religion is, from a rational point of view, as phantasmagorical as all the others?
Here is the "Night Flight" story believed by orthodox Muslims to be literally and physically true of Muhammad:
"Isra & Miraj"
While the Isra did happen (17:1, 53:1-18), fairytales associated with it do not make any sense when scrutinized [in the light of the] Quran....
This story is usually called in Muslim literature the story of al-isra'a and al-mi'raj or the prophet Muhammad's quiet night journey (al-isra'a) from Mecca to al-masjid al-aqsa (the farthest mosque) in Jerusalem, then his ascension to heaven (al-mi'raj) and his return in few minutes back to Mecca. They said it happened on the 27th night of Rajab (the 7th lunar month) in 621 AD (Muhammad was then 50-years old).
When he met the Lord, he received at first fifty daily salats (the contact prayers ritual). Following Moses' advise who was in the 7th heaven, Muhammad was going back and forth to the Lord debating on behalf of believers, who were down on earth, to lighten the number of salats for them. He could not do it anymore, out of shyness, when the Lord lowered many times this number fifty down to only five. (free-minds.org/articles.htm) ["The Messenger" Click on "Isra and Miraj"]
Incredible! If one believes God capable of performing the one story from the one religion, why not believe all the stories from all the religions? Why is one supposedly "divinely revealed" religion any truer than any other supposedly "divinely revealed" religion? Why is one a heretic and blasphemer to believe one story in one religion, but obliged to believe another story in another religion? Either man is "delusional" or God is. Surely, it is man! For all the bloodshed spilled in the name of God--created in man’s own image, not man in the All-Merciful, All-Loving, All-Compassionate image of God--is based upon all-to-humanly understandable, deeply-rooted, primitive emotional needs to cope with mankind’s suffering, old age, sickness, death, loneliness, fears, and the desire to achieve immortality.
Why do some jump from the domain of the reasonable (science) to the domain of the unreasonable (religion) simply because they cannot explain everything now through science? And the leap of faith that human beings make to accept their own brand of religion leads to just the opposite ends of religion–not to love God, not to love one another, to do to others what they do not want others to do to them.
Where do all these religions, ancient and modern, show anyone the evidence that the world is any better off for people believing in their various religions? History does not bear out any of the claims of universal brotherhood of man. Instead, at this very second, men are killing one another in the hegemonic belief that one religion, and one version of that religion, is truer than another religion or one version of it.
History reveals: Irish Catholics kill Anglicans and vice versa; Iraqi Sunnis kill Shites and vice versa; Indian Hindus kill Sikhs and vice versa; Croat Roman Catholics kill Greek Orthodox Serbs who both kill Muslim Bosnians and vice versa; Sri Lankan Buddhists kill Muslims and vice versa; Chechnyan Muslims kill Russian Orthodox Russians and vice versa; Rwandan Hutus kill Tutsis and vice versa; a young fundmentalist Muslim, Khalid al Islambuli, kills a Muslim moderate, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt; a young fundamentalist Jew, Yigal Amir, kills a moderate Israeli Jew, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel; Christian fundamentalists kill abortion doctors in America; religious extremists in various countries around the world kill lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and the transgendered, and so on and so on and so on--all issues that also involve genocide ("ethnic cleansing") and racism and antisemitism and sexism and classism–one has only to pick up any reliable objective history of the world's religions or read the newspapers or watch the news on television, and the facts are there revealing the hatred and bloodshed in front of one’s very eyes.
Organized, institutionalized religions have been around some 5,000 years–is the world any better off for them? Perhaps mankind would have more of an opportunity to live peacefully together on the planet earth if the men and women and children of the world embraced rational principles instead of religious dogmas and mythologies to guide them. Organized, institutionalized religions do not work. They breed intolerance and warfare, destruction and death.
Why not give reason a chance?
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