http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8437460.stm

Ireland seems to be much forgotten when we speak of backwards countries.

They now have a new law against "blasphemy", carrying severe fines.

Of all the human desires, sexuality is by far the most interesting one. Many people, in fact I suspect a majority of all people, approach this dionysian energy in a fearsome manner. Any arena where the ego might lose its illusory sense of being on top of the world creates such a sense of dread. And, as we all know, the mind boggling mine field of potential emotional devastation that is human sexuality drives the frightened little monkeys to all sorts of twisted strategies. 

We like to classify things. It seems like the right thing to do to sort things into neat categories so that we can relate to them with our lazy auto pilot, rather than having to think anew at every new corner of our way. Let's take such a thing as homosexuality, which is probably the most common "deviation" out there. It's really hard for a lot of people to relate to that. Many men already have a troubled relation to their sexuality - in the sense that they are afraid of women and they feel clumsy and awkward around them - so they feel that the last thing they need is having to think of other men as sexual beings as well. And yet they have this ferocious drive inside them, so they seek alternative outlets. 

When did your existence begin? What are you? A thing? I am of the mind that it is more accurate to describe a human being as a process which begins with conception and ends with death. But when did you come into the picture? Were you always there, somehow asleep before slowly waking up to find yourself alive in this world as a creature of body and mind? In order to not confront such issues, most people prefer to keep busy with various activities - and if that doesn't do the trick, with more heavy distractions such as drugs and religious hysteria. But at the end of the day, when you're alone and silent, the doubt and the fear comes creeping back. Who are you, really? What is going on out there? 

The reason for suffering is desire, said the Buddha. What is desire? There can be little doubt that a lot of people walk this earth like pent-up knots of desire, frustration and confusion, glazed with fear. Desire which isn't realized creates fantasies, some times secret and dangerous fantasies, which rhymes in a backward chicken-and-egg kind of way with the Buddhistic tenet that the reason for desire is illusion. It is my belief that a lack of spiritual direction in people will create an abstract hole in the soul, it will turn them into a hungry ghost, filled with an insatiable desire for just about anything. Addiction. Food, drugs, religion, sex; anything that they can get their hands on. Of course, being the capitalist society that we are, this is called consumption and lies at the very bottom of the foundations for our economy. Consumers are what makes the world go round nowadays. 

What more than anything makes people stupid is that they think they are smart. And the smarter you really are, the more stupid you become if you live under that delusion. Actually, it's not any great advantage to be very talented and highly intelligent. In a manner of speaking, that is, more often than not, like having a supercharged, 800 hp monster of a racing car but no clue about how to drive it. Do we see an accident waiting to happen? Indeed we do. 

What really counts is discipline, as in self discipline, a calm control of own faculties which allows the powers of the afore mentioned racing car to be used in a manner which is appropriate to the power of such a vehicle. Discipline begins with purpose, with having a plan. Consider a child: The child has done something he's not allowed to do and will tell some fanciful story in order to cover up his mistake. As an adult, it's hard to not start laughing at this blatant lie, and it's actually more fun to play along with the outrage in order to see where the story is going. The adult person has a better perspective on life and how things work and is therefore able to spot the story for what it is. 

Apparently, Richard Dawkins has stated that pantheism is sexed-up atheism.

http://www.pantheism.net/atheism.htm

Whereas I do get his point, I disagree most vehemently. To me, pantheism is every bit as stupid as any other theism.

However, I am willing to accept that animism is sexed-up atheism.

That is to say, everything is alive. Even that which we call "dead matter".

Everything organises into self replicating patterns through the process that science calls emergency, and when the conditions of a certain closed off context of environment are in favour of this, these self replicating patterns will organise into that which we call organic life forms, or living creatures; as is the situation here on earth. There's nothing mysterious about this. It is quite simply a fundamental law of the universe acting out. Life itself wants to live, in every possible form and permutation, in every imaginable and unimaginable way.

The universe itself is nothing but a raw, naked and primal will to exist.

Several posts created by Marquis are not in his blog as he is a new user and didn't have a blog until today.  We have compiled his posts on a special page that will automatically update so that you can easily see what you've missed:

http://www.rationalresponders.com/posts/marquis

- RRS Admin Team

Every 48 years, the bamboo plant flowers, producing massive amounts of avocado-like fruits that will cause the rat population to explode into a massive pest infestation which by the locals of Mizoram, India, is called mautam, the wave. Because of easy access to nutritious food, the rats will breed exponentially, until there are no more bamboo fruits left to feed on, causing the rats to seek elsewhere for food, which means that they will attack and devour all available human crops in the area. Millions of rats will quite literally swarm all over in an unstoppable onslaught of ferocious hunger. Due to the long period of time in between these bamboo flowering events, you will only experience mautam once in your lifetime. And it is indeed every bit as frightful as the stories say, so there is an almost supernatural fear of it in those areas where this is happening. 

I find it amusing that more than a hundred years have passed since Einstein published his theory - and yet we still believe in the static solidity of this world. After publishing, there was some bewilderment in the daily news business about just what to write about it and what it meant. One newspaper sent a journalist to interview a scientific authority, Arthur Eddington, and it was he who named it "A Theory Of Relativity". Einstein himself named it Invariant Postulates On The Electrodynamics Between Objects In Motion. One example of such electrodynamics is of course that narrow band of the entire spectrum that we call visible light. What we can see with our own eyes. To a great extent, this narrow band is determining our sense of reality: What we can see is real. What we can't see isn't. And if anybody can see anything that isn't there (as in reflecting electrodynamic rays within this narrow band), he or she is dreaming, hallucinating, fantasising, or witnessing a miracle of the Gods. 

Post your favourite metal videos here.

I shall kick off with a real classic: "Black Sabbath" by ... Black Sabbath!

(Taken from the album which is commonly considered to be he first ever "metal" album in this world.)

I am slowly realising that my position may be uncommon.

I had parents that were academics. "Faith" was never an issue in my family.

Add to that a very powerful and very outspoken grandfather who absolutely HATED all things Christian - with a vengeance.

I have never been anything but atheist. It was simply never an issue. I have been raised to believe that the mere act of "believing" and being gullible about ideas and people's motives is the foundations of stupidity, no two ways about it. The freedoms I enjoyed as a child lead me to a life long interest in the "hard" sciences. I looked a little into various areas of faith and superstition during my formative teenage years, but I shied away from the "hippie" feeling of it all. I have never been able to accept the idea of clipping my own wings in an act of surrender to an idea.

However, other people have other experiences.

Faith and absurd beliefs have been forced onto them, often by the people whom they should trust the most; their parents.

I cannot help but think of this as abuse. Freedom of thinking means exactly that; freedom to make your own judgments.

I am appalled and disgusted, personally, by the relative commonality of what to me seems like sheer insanity.

But ten again, thisd is how the human being is. Grotesque, irrational, quarrelsome, narcissistic ... and stupid. Sorry.

So... my question is this: Were you ever "converted" into being a non-believer?

I regularly read two Norwegian newspapers.

Then I read BBC News online, sometimes also Yahoo News (becaue I have a Yahoo email account and things might cath my eye.)

Then there is YouTube, where I follow Russia Today and Al Jazeera.

I cannot think of one single American news source that I trust. It would have to be CNN, under doubt.

How did America get so utterly f***** up?

Where do you get your news from?

So... who can spot the atheist in that crowd?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8448660.stm

Evidence shows that Neanderthal man used make-up.

Now... if they can only come up with the Paleolithic equivalent of Louis Vuitton handbags and Manolo Blahnik shoes, the case is clear and shut. The Neanders were cross-dressers! And a hypothesis may be formed that they probably died out because they evolved gay genes.

People are afraid of "the economy".

But there is no reason for that. There will always be an economy - as long as there are people who want to live. You'll just have to find new ways to deal with the day-to-day routine of trading goods and services.

What might fail, however, is the monetary system... and if it does it will be because the credit system went all haywire. Whenever a currency fails it is because of epic mismanagment at the political level. Say for intance if they at some point thought that the finance markets was going to manage themselves and therefore need no rules and regulations. Free market, yes? There are no words for how idiotic that idea is. WTF is a financial market operator anyway, if not somebody who's found a way to tap into the system and extract monetary profits with little or no actual work? It doesn't take an Einsteinian brain to figure out that f you make life simpler for the parasites, there will be more parasites. Ever heard of evolution?

Why do you have the "screen name" that you have?

My own is blatantly picked from Marquis De Sade... in my own translation.

(I am a member of the Turbojugend [1]... more specifically the chapter Counter Earth... and my "warrior name" is Marquis De Sire.)

So here's a funny story from 10 years ago: The internet was young. And new to me. There was "chat rooms" such as Lycos or Delphi. It was all very silly. I registered the user name WhiteLordJesus - which is actually the name of a Norwegian band [2] that preceded the aesthetics of the black metal revolution with about 10 years - and this earned me the most unbelievable hatred from (mostly) Americans - which of course only made me more interested in exploring the correlation between some insignificant letters on a screen and the fierce feelings that were being exposed.

Anyway, I got rid of that name and re-registered as SemenOfSatan - which earned me some kudos! People were complimenting me on my eclectic choice of good manners and taste... and how "cool" and "awesome" it was. I myself was dumbfounded. WTF? Is this for real? I ouldn't help noticing that a lot of the screen names were - as they still are - very focused on fearful imagery and violence. There is no end to how many demons this-and-that or satanic devil images that float around out there. Why?

As far as I can see, that which they call religious faith is little but sexual submission gone terribly wrong; as in, it has become an all-permeating obsession. The worshipping on an idol of the mind. The psychopathology of this phenomenon can, however, be rationally explained in terms of biological mechanics: The human being is a social animal which relies heavily on an instinct we call the obedience reflex in order to survive childhood. That is to say; children who are too daring will get themselves killed, whereas children who are subordinate to the principle of adult authority will survive to come of age and spread this instinct to the next generation(s). Seen in context, religious faith becomes an expression of infantile regression, a refusal to grow up and take personal responsibility for your life.

The most important part of attaining adulthood is to become your own boss, form your own mind, and make your own decisions. Those who can't (or won't) do that are refusing to leave behind the sense of security that adult authority supplied them with during the childhood years. So they seek a substitute. "There must be an authority out there, somewhere, that can liberate me from this terrible anxiety of adulthood" they say to themselves. They are lost at sea, floating and bobbing around without a clue, terrified by the ominous ambiguity of life, desperately seeking something solid to hang on to.