Relationship questions

What would it like to be as an dyed in wool atheist to date or even have a significant relationship with a deeply fundamentalist christian. Would it have to be that there are off topic things that are never mentioned like religion. Would there be terse conversations about religion such that in the end of it, there would have to be a conversion or a breakup? I know there are different ways that many couples can and do go about navigating this dangerous and charged topic, but in the end after many years of life together, what is the net result? I'm curious to know whether it would have been worth it for them to have pursued and preserved this relationship.

General MacArthur was a dick with a boner for victory

General MacArthur was a dick with a boner for victory. This is a claim I am making about one of the greatest icons in the history of modern day, and through about a page of writing it will become clear that there is sufficient reason to take this claim seriously.

I have little fault with the generals early life, mainly because his early life was a quite one. He did benefit unfairly from his fathers military history and his mother's heavy handled nepotistic advocacy but that was unavoidable on his part. His actions in world war one certainly proved that he had a very good military acumen and deserved to be in a leadership position. But his late life is full of alot of dismissive shallow thinking and mistakes that undeniably caused harm and made the world a worse place.

In regard with his campaign against Japan, Why did he urge the Philippines to fight and not to surrender on the onset of the war?was his mind already on the end of ww2 and he was thinking of depleting Japanese troop numbers or did he really believe he was getting reinforcements? Did the struggles of the Philippines help in the war? Did he abandon his brilliant island hopping technique to come back because of his wife,his pride,bribes, or was it his idea of help? Are the rumours of him filming his Beach landing twice to get a good shot true?

He also tried to take advantage of the Korean war to invade Russia. Why else would he ignore his orders to restrict the fighting above the meridian to south korean forces. Why did he push the invasion forces so far up into North Korea so fast? Since North Korea  is directly land linked with Russia, he must have assumed that if he could bulldoze his war through China, he would be able to invade into the borders of Russia without a hitch. China made punitive attacks to try and send messages but these were resolutely ignored by MacArthur. Finally China was forced to attack in order to drive away the american forces. I blame him for the genesis of dictatorship in North Korea. The Chinese at this stage would have traded literally anything to ensure their security.

He tried to combat communism in any way possible and coined what is the keystone to the hardcore right to this day which is McCarthyism. The art of proclaiming, accusing and declaring without any real regard to evidence. He did not care for any real proof to throw around accusations, or wait for investigation to force litigation. He only cared for complete victory aganist any percieved threat, minor or major. A textbook example of the present day Republican mantra of McCarthyism. Look at what the Republican party has descended to, a platform for flapping lips and  demagoguery.No one bothers to think critically or look for solutions, all there is is a mantra that begun with MacArthur and continued on by Reagan down to today's Republican party.

These three reasons sufficiently prove that even though he might have been a good general in ww1, his action in his later life made the world a worse place and proved him to be a dick with a boner for victory.

Moral Absolutism

I want to talk about relative morality and how it applies or does not apply to religious doctrine. Religion is based around absolute morality, The concept of some stuff being absolutely evil and not to be performed under any circumstance. I have nothing against Moral universalism, there could be a universal scale of ethics in which one action is demonstrably worse than the other, However moral absolutism is complete hogwash, even though an action can be categorized as immoral in almost all cases. There will always be a situation that can hypothetically exist  that the action can be constituted as moral.

This is more of a show stopper for absolutist religion than it seems. For example assuming the christian god exists and you are a christian(assuming you are one), you go to school one day and happen to meet the Antichrist. What if the Antichrist told you to get his number? This is about as obvious a moral absolute in the christian faith as there can be. You should not get the Antichrist to brand you with his number! I doubt there are many Christians who would argue that point. Most Christians would not get his number in such a situation. Even if the Antichrist told you to get his number and that if you refuse it would be at the peril of your life. If you are a christian, the choice to refuse his number is dictated to you within the bible as an absolute.

What if the antichrist told you to get his number and that if you refuse it would be at the peril not of your own life, but that of the lives of a class of innocent children? This is the spawn of the literal devil(assuming he exists) so of course he is going to play dirty. Is the moral absolutism dictated to you by religion oblivious to the lives and plight of a class of innocent children. Would you doom these children to death for your assurance to heaven. What if it went further than that, what if by taking the antichrist’s symbol, you somehow prevent the symbol from being offered to the class of innocent children. Would the absolutism dictated to you by the holy scriptures mandate you to take the symbol and save the children from eternal punishment or not to take the symbol but remain righteous? Would you take it to save the children or not take it to save yourself?

 

Now all is highly hypothetical and most likely not possible to Christians and even to me.I don't believe their god exists and they don't believe that their god is such a malicious god and would put them in that situation. But i can construct a less hypothetical situation more closer to our current reality that bears the same weight and has a realer chance of happening. What if some Muslim terrorists told you to denounce your god at the cost of a class of innocent children. You have to remember,according to christian fiction, if you denounce jesus in front of whatever or whoever in mortal realm, He said in his scriptures that he would denounce you on judgement day in the immortal realm. According to the moral absolutism practiced today by Christians, there does not exist an argument that says it is OK to save those innocent children by denouncing god. I believe many a christian out there would let innocent children die for their belief in god. Even if god and heaven existed, is this right? are they being moral for performing this action? Can their reverence to their god excuse them from deaths of the innocent children?

No,i don't think that moral absolutism exists and can exist in the real world. There will always be a situation that can not be defined by any clear cut rules written beforehand. It is up to the individual to use the Moral universalistic senses within ourselves to ask, Is this moral or immoral? is this right or wrong? and this has to be done without quoting the holy ‘rulebooks’.


P.S: Christianity twists itself in knots with the issue of moral absolutism. Is contraception immoral or moral? by preventing a obviously bad situation easily(Microcephaly), is it a sin?
Why is it not possible to throw away these stifling rules and dogmas that bind one to such stiff thinking and just use your innate moral sense and  not a black and white unrealistic rule to know if it is right or wrong. Think outside the box or in this case outside the book!
http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/4594/contraception_congo_nuns_choosing_the_lesser_evil_and_conflict_of_commandments.aspx

SALUTATIONS FROM MY BLOG!!!!!

I am not the moon

 from a rising poet-

I Am not the Moon

Metaphorically speaking
I am not the moon
See the moon is beautiful but it's beauty at cost
Beauty so barren
Beauty tied down
Beauty solely superficial..
See the moon is not original
The moon is not creative
The moon is stuck
As a follower

An absence of  light
Only a transmitter of it shone by a mass that has the capacity to do so much more.
A mass exploding with power and potential

Potential energy that demands to be the center of attention
Potential radiance to illuminate entire solar systems
Potential to sustain life
Untouchable because it vaporizes anything that dares to approach it's benevolence.

But see I'm not the sun either
Doomed to run out of fuel and burn out.
Doomed to the fate of catastrophic death that results in a merciless black hole
A never ending burst in the very skin of the universe.
Doomed to mortality.

See I'm something so much more. 

I am the darkness in the spaces that you see. 

I am the darkness that supports the stars. 

I hold entire galaxies. 

 See I am strong enough to contain infinitely dense singularities but I'm gentle enough to support the frail and fragile beings that populate this universe.

 Courageous enough to hold all of space and time but responsible enough to manage it. 

You can't see me yet  I am everywhere. 

I go unnoticed and unappreciated

Think of me as air that holds the clouds and birds and the tops of skyscrapers or

 think of me as water that holds entire ecosystems
Revel in these thoughts and realize I could never compare myself to the rock that orbits around us
My immortal conscience flowing with ideas only limited by fleeting time
In addition to the knowledge that compiles from the evolutionary miracle that is my ancestors.
Metaphorically speaking
I am not the moon.

~Hope~

Nature or Nurture on Terrorism

I have a hypothetical question for any Christians out there. What if I had access to Jesus DNA and I cloned Jesus? This can happen (some private collector somewhere might have some Jesus blood on an artifact)but it most likely won't. Would the offspring I brought up be a God? Would you have to worship him? He does have holy spirit DNA in him? If he became a Christian, would he be worshiping himself? Can he Sin?

 Now some of the questions above are asked in jest. I know that many Christians are struggling with more basic queries of humanity like planned parenthood or LGBT rights and their staunch mindset render them unfit to ponder these question. If they can however, I would like an answer to the last one. If a person had God DNA or was made of God stuff in him, would he Sin? Would he be ever culpable? Able and/or willing to commit crime?

Of course this question is moot to everyone of humanistic values. However there is an analogous question that can be asked. Do some people have a genetically better human nature than others in that they are less prone to crime? Are some people actually built more good than others?

Recently i had a very interesting  discussion about nature vs nurture. The question was which was more responsible for radicalization of a person. Are the upbringings of the people who become religious terrorists more to blame for their radicalization or is it in their nature to become terrorists? If we take these people out of their inimical environments, would they stop being terrorists?

Maybe we can learn from examples on the causes. There is the case of Abu Mansoor, who was brought up as a southern baptist. After becoming of age and converting to Islam, he became radicalized. He eventually traveled to Somalia to become part of Al-Shabaab and in the end became their DE-facto leader. Did his fundamental nature lead him into becoming a terrorist or did his upbringing make him one? There are some interesting things that went on in his life that can give us answers. From his father’s conversion to Islam to him running away at an age of 16 and becoming heavily involved in online Islamic activism. This might point to the fact that his environment had a lot to blame for his radicalization. Such is the case with many other individuals, in that their environment seems more to have an influence on their radical behaviors than their nature.

For me, I think that a person can be predisposed to be violent or calm, zealous or apathetic. This may literally be written in their genes, however how they go about expressing this in their behavior is up to them. I do not think that there is a  person prone to be a terrorist simply due to their heredity, it is because they followed a given pattern of behavior that is of a terrorist nature. The most common way that people adapt a given behavior is by watching others behavior and imitating or learning from them.

I may be wrong, Some person somewhere may actually discover some sort of radicalization gene. Until that day arrives, there is something that is very obvious- Religion followed uncritically, is one of the biggest source of these terrorists.

Erdogan takes Daesh money

It is clear  to me as it should be clear to anyone with an open mind that Turkey is buying ISIS oil. That is not even in question. The Turkish-Syrian border is as porous as a sieve, even though according to president Obama, they have made progress reducing the amount of people and oil coming through there. His exact quote was that there are some gaps. The question now is if the government is complicit in this leaving of gaps.

They recently asked an armed forces guy here in america about Turkey and oil. I think it was the head honcho in the army in Iraq and his reply was immediate. Of course turkey does not help ISIS terrorism, it is a major partner in fighting them. You could physically see him squirming. This is due to the amount of pressure that Turkey has on USA in that America has so many resources and so much money tied into the country that the USA cannot dare critisize the Erdogan government. Even though they harbor suspisions of his actual trading with ISIS in oil. Biden had to actually apologize last year for even impliying that Turkey has traded with Daesh.

With the recent Russian accusations about President Erdogan's family connection with the energy industry and ISIS. There seems to be a clear pattern of co-ordination between Turkey and ISIS. You have to remember that Turkey has had a huge ongoing problem with PKK. What essentially seems to be happening is that ISIS is helping Turkey with PKK, sapping away its fighters and actually fighting aganist them. In return, Erdogan is allowing trading with them to occur. In the process, him and his family are turning up a tidy profit in all this as big players on the energy market in that area. ISIS is killing turks, it is damaging PKK, Erdogan was losing aganist PKK, even had to try bargaining with them last year but not any more, not thanks to Daesh

The attacks from Turkey aganist Russia are make the appearance of the existence of a patnership seem damning,Russia says they were flying against ISIS, implying ISIS was close to or even in Turkey. Turkey officially fired the missiles, the turkmen(Grey wolves who are alligned with Erdogan and help him fight the PKK) kill the pilot, They gave the body back to the government (implying the clear ties btw them and Erdogan) now Erdogan gives back to Russia a dead corpse for burial and wants them to chill out so they can go back to business as usual.

If Turkey was a secular state this would not be happening. Even though they profess secularity,Turkey in the hands of Erdogan is a muslim state, a muslim state that has ties with fundamentalism and ISIS.It is not a bastion of stability in the middle east