Friday, August 08, 2008
A Maronite living abroad fathers a baby, refuses to baptize the child (out of admirable but misguided “humanism’’) and, in one fell swoop, succeeds in doing what two thousand years of persecution failed to do to the last bastion of Christianity in the land of Christ, the Maronites.
Herod, Pontius Pilate, Mohamed, Salehedin El Ayoubi, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Henry Kissinger*, Yasser Arafat, Osama bin Laden et al were all going about it the wrong way.
Ironically all they needed to achieve their goals was not persecution, ethnic cleansing, exile etc but forty years of so-called secular Western so-called liberalism.
Note to our current and future persecutors: don’t bother, leave us to our own devices and we’ll take care of it for you.
How long will it be before Maronites in the homeland go the same way?
And I say so-called secular because the West is not secular.
Quite the contrary, they have replaced our one God with a pantheon of false Gods that they worship - so-called democracy, so-called egalitarianism, political correctness, minoritarianism, capitalism, careerism, consumerism, modernity, celebrity, popular culture, Buddhism, so-called spirituality, New Age so-called religion, superficiality, shamanism, paganism , mysticism, animism, decadence, homosexuality, feminism , fetishism ,etc, etc, etc.
And they claim to be secular!
I’ll take monotheism over this so-called secularism any day.
Worshipping one God is a lot more convenient than worshipping all these “secular’’ “gods’’.
And they say that we’re complicated and backwards!
It’s like that email that’s been forwarded a billion times
“The Black Man-
when I’m born, im black
when I grow up, im black
when I get sick, im black
when I go in the sun, im black
when I die, im black...
And you, white man-
when you're born, you're pink
when you grow up, you're white
when you get sick, you're green
when you go in de sun, you turn red
when you get cold, you go blue
when you die, you go purple...
And you call us colored!?’’
You believe in all of these “gods’’ and yet you call us who believe in only one true God religious, fanatical, backward and complicated!
And the so-called liberal and tolerant West will defend these false idols more zealously and violently than the most extreme Muslim fundamentalist.
You tell a Middle Eastern believer that you don’t believe in God and they will peacefully try to change your mind out of concern for you but if you transgress any of these Western idols you will be mocked, humiliated and possibly even prosecuted all under the guise of political correctness (which is this false religion’s version of the now-defunct Holy Office of the Inquisition).
Anyway, such people misdiagnose religion as the problem.
The problem isn’t religion.
The problem with religion, as with any other ideology, is people.
People who misuse, misinterpret, misapply, abuse etc religion.
So when you replace religion with humanism you’re replacing the wrong thing because the problem is not religion but humans.
Humans need replacing not religion.
If one is a good, true, proper and tolerant Christian, Muslim or Jew then one is a good human being.
Also humanism ironically discriminates against humanity because the vast majority of human beings practice some form of religion.
Thus humanism is an elitist cult which counterproductively and inimically discriminates against the very thing it is supposed to favor above religion (the human being).
Humanism is misdiagnoses that actually contributes to and propagates the self same behavior it is meant to eradicate.
Why don’t you believe in something rather than believe against something in a reactionary manner?
Why don’t you stand for something rather than just stand against something?
Believing against a belief is not a belief.
The raison d’être of humanism is not what it stands for but what it is against (religion).
Anyway, parents don’t decide what religion their children are to be or even if they’re to be religious, they initiate their children into religion and teach them religion in custodianship until they’re old enough to decide for themselves just like they send them to school until they’re old enough to decide what they want to do with their lives and if and what they want to continue with it at a tertiary level.
*At the beginning of the Lebanese civil war in 1975 the United States offered to send in ships to evacuate and resettle in the US the entire Maronite population as part of their plan to resettle the Palestinians in Lebanon (the Maronites were the only obstacle to this at the time).
The then-US Ambassador told a Lebanese journalist (who told somebody I know) that the entire Maronite population was commensurate in numbers to the number of Americans killed in car accidents every year.
Meaning that they can absorb that number and that we were nothing in the scheme of things in the wider Arab picture and the Americans had to cater to the majority not the minority and we shouldn’t exaggerate our importance as tiny drop in the broader context of the Arab world.
1:40 pm
Thursday, August 07, 2008
POTATOES IN PARADISE
I haven’t seen (or rather heard) the travelling potato salesman for a while.
I’m quite worried about him.
There used to be a bloke pedalling potatoes off the back of a truck around these parts.
How many people buy potatoes on impulse just because a potato peddler happens to be passing?
Funnier than the thought of serendipitous spuds was his spiel which he used to deliver over and over again via a loudspeaker on the roof of his truck : “yallah ahl batata!, yallah ahl batata!…’’ad infinitum.
Although he did his best to rev up potato purchasers, I just can’t imagine people getting as excited about purchasing potatoes as his spiel implored them to do (unless they were Irish), just dropping everything and rushing off excitedly to purchase potatoes.
*"Yallah (meaning hurry in this context) to the potatoes!’’
2:00 pm
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