LFO

My summer in 7th grade would have been so different if the lyrics of this song actually went "Chinese people make me sick." Pop acts should not only push the envelope on sexuality, they should also use race as an effective means to shock people and sell albums. The market remains untapped. Where sex would once get you arrested for obscenity, it is now a necessary, veiled element to sell popular music. I can see it all, a Britney Spears for an age of pop music that centers around forms of racism. "My new hit 'Auschwitz Ass Shake' is a real tease at how danceable a Jew-free world would be, but I'm not an anti-Semite -- look at my Star of David clad promise ring -- promise not to hate the Jews."

But this is all just speculation at what an alternate world of indecent pop music might be like. I still often wonder was I the only decent person in middle school? There was not enough hatred directed toward LFO's masterful piece of turd. Why must honest people be punished and friendless so that the rest of society can have their carefree, pop-cultural blasphemy against the human spirit? Now I follow most pop-culture with a bloodlust for its total destruction, its unhinging, for some chaos to emerge in its plastic formality.

I'm pretty tired of the confused heterosexuality and machismo of Hollywood movies these days. It seems the past 5 years have been inundated with movies directed at the early pubescent brains of teenage, violent, moronic boys. I swear every goddamn time I want to go see a movie, I'm forced to choose from a list that makes me feel like I'm rifling through some nerd's semen-covered comic book collection in his parent's basement. I suspect this is because the category of teenage boys has greatly expanded with the mainstreaming of video games, making unfulfilled manhood not only socially acceptable but also economically beneficial for those charging 50-60 bucks for one video game, and those that don't want to pay writers to write good screen plays for real movies. Now, those who should be men remain teenage boys well into their twenties and beyond, often avoiding the challenges and responsibilities of manhood. It's much easier to play video games for the rest of your life and fantasize about the masculinity you don't possess but find in the hyperbolic brutes like the historic, "gay/not-gay", frat guys/Spartans of the movie 300 and the claw-wielding bozo Wolverine. Wolverine, the movie, was marketed to the "expanded teenage boy group" by making sure Hugh Jackman's HGH and steroid-filled muscles were as glistening as possible to appeal to the closeted, homosexual arousal of said group. Though they can't quite conceive of it or understand it, there are many social factors at work repressing such a sexuality, their attraction to these buff super heroes is undoubtedly sexual. After getting all hot and bothered watching Wolverine, they probably then go on to play video games, bonding on their hatred of the abstracted "fag" that none of them are -- thank god! And that brings me onto another issue I have with our society, what absurd levels of contradictions we maintain!

The Last Supper of Christianity And Its Starvation

Christianity seeks to eliminate desire and passion. All passion is a sin outside of a passion for God. What would Christianity's highest ascent look like? The annihilation of the truly passionate man, and in his place, a tepid spirit of minuscule proportions -- no longer needing the severity of the threat from God's judgment and condemnation. Christianity was once a tangible force that struggled and succeeded to control the ferocity of barbarians with a threat of damnation so filled with dread and anxiety that those who once swore their life to battle, their identity paired to their legendary weapons, unrepentant, dangerous men became the sires of the Puritans. What turmoil the Germanic, Nordic and Slavic tribes must have undergone as they were slowly converted to Christianity. Christianity was alive and truly real as a parasite is when its host is virile and capable of withholding the unmitigated growth of the disease. But the spirit breaks, and the host's death is also the death of the parasite.

What should this ideal Christian fear when purged of all desire? Nothing. Christ has come again, and the Revelation has no snorts of wild and dreadful stallions that have come for vindication. It only has the total silence of passion and the cracking of marrow-less bones that sound much like the cry of a feeble Atheism of a person that is doomed to a spiritless, unchosen secularism. We've never known passion. Christianity has killed its host and is now dead. Modern people are without true passion and desire, sickened by Christianity to the point where there is no true sin that needs to be attacked by Christianity. The ability to feel the passion of love and bravery have become myth, the things of legends, the things outside of civilization for wild men because of Christianity's destruction of passion through its lechery. The truth is that the things of myth were the true lives of cultured men and women with incomprehensible societies. Christianity has become nothing by its own nihilistic accord. We are all starved Christians -- the full essence of Atheism.

Brain Like Meat

What kind of an argument is the statement that vegetarians secretly want to eat meat? A profoundly stupid one that is more telling of the quaint polemicist's baseness than the secret drives of all vegetarians. How does one arrives at a sweeping dismissal of vegetarianism by a smug revelation of the supposed desires of humankind?

One reoccurring ethic I encounter in confrontations about vegetarianism is "Meat tastes good; therefore, it is right to eat it, and I shall eat meat." But, can they show me how this thought process is different from "Rape feels good (for the rapist); therefore, by their hedonistic principle, rape is justifiable." Am I comparing eating meat to rape? Yes, it's not as outlandish as it seems in the context of the assertion that meat consumption can be justified by how good it makes one feel; this ethical principle allows for any action to be justified that feels good. You must justify your meat consumption by something outside of "it tastes good" in order to not be complicit with rapists. That I must clarify this to people is baffling. Most never ask "why?" in considering their behavior, and when they are forced to think, an irritating experience, they see no need to justify or explain anything. Meat is pleasurable. I do what pleases me.

The other argument: vegetarians are not outside a human nature that craves meat. Most, including myself, are unwilling to refute the argument that humans are physiologically omnivorous, making the deduction from our anatomical structure and the omnivorous eating-habits of closely related species such as the chimpanzee. Though, it should be considered that humans are built to be geared toward carbohydrate consumption, the main source of our energy. Nearly all mainstream councils on human diet have formulated a nutritional guideline with carbohydrates as the largest percentage of a diet compared to protein and fat; most traditional human diets before industrialized farming consumed many more grains, fruits and vegetables than the much more difficult to acquire meat. Have humans always desired meat as they desire it now?

We begin to unravel nature as a historical event. When we speak of desire, can it be something universal, written into our biology? History says otherwise. The human body, its nature, has a measurable history. A history that cannot be refuted if we are to consider the measurable consequences of the body in dialouge with humanity.

An incessant need to consume meat at every meal is not natural, but rather, it is a manipulation of the omnivorous human by a consumerist economy. How have humans become more obese than ever before in human history? Has this natural desire the polemicist speaks of always existed in human nature? Something in history has changed to make people fatter, and this something must be outside of human nature. Meat, and the desire to eat meat, do not exist in our current world as a natural phenomenon. The formation of identities by corporations through mass-marketing (i.e. commercials, etc.), the supplier controlled market, and government-industry alliances have formulated a world view from which all of us peer. A way in which we view our bodies, exist with our bodies, and formulate a nature which dictate our bodies in a dialogue of restless conflict. Not being able to fit into your pants and dying from heart disease are not only everyday physical events for a large percentage of Americans, but also the physical unfolding of metaphysical events occurring between a human body that has its own physiological reality and the human-made nature from which we attempt to analyze and contort the body. Unprecedented profits and government subsidies make industries such as the meat, dairy, and corn incredibly wealthy and their product abundant; therefore, their wealth buys them political power in the form of lobbyists, and market power in their ability to sell their goods at the cheapest prices ever in history. An entire system is born of this power, and it produces a mindset, a way to view, a way to view the world. Human nature is formulated as a human idea in the context of a society and historical period.

What is the new "innate" nature? Buy. Buy. Eat. Eat. Consume. Consume. It is your nature, and it is who you are! How convenient this identity works to the fattening of wallets. Hmm, suddenly the oh-so-important human nature, the genetic structure that predetermines all of our actions seems to be taking a backseat to the economic-driven rape of our supposed nature with the intention of gaining as much profit and power as possible.

But what of nature? We have the highest ability to overcome our nature, to manipulate nature to our needs, to needs distinctly above and beyond nature. In a sense, we can destroy our nature; we destroy nature daily at an alarming rate -- why not our own!? Meat tastes good, meat is good -- but I am no longer human by your American estimation if I deny my love of meat -- I'm vegetarian! I am seizing my own nature and saying that I am going to cease to be omnivorous. I will be vegetarian, seizing nature, reforming it to my needs, and wrenching it from the hands of a society that attempts to quietly manipulate nature by recreating it to their benefit and profit.

Zeno's Martial Truth

"Zeno stretched out his fingers, and showed the palm of his hand, - 'Perception,' - he said, - 'is a thing like this.'- Then, when he had closed his fingers a little, - 'Assent is like this.' - Afterwards, when he had completely closed his hand, and showed his fist, that, he said, was Comprehension. From which simile he also gave that state a name which it had not before, and called it katalepsis. But when he brought his left hand against his right, and with it took a firm and tight hold of his fist: - 'Knowledge' - he said, was of that character; and that was what none but a wise person possessed."

How might I read this? The world remains formless and flows undistinguished. There is no use but only the witnessing of appearances. The hand remains without purpose; it is a crystallization of its nature. Then the world takes form slowly as things are ripped from the flow of appearance to be dissected; the hand begins to form into something of use. Finally the fist is clenched; things are known, a thing is distinct, a truth emerges from the flow of appearances. What do we do with this fist of truth? We attain it, as wise people, strike out and use it in the world. Truth is not truth if it is as useless as an opened, unmoving hand. For knowledge and truth are not abstractions removed from the body and the world, lofty, feathery things to drift in some deaf, dumb and blind dream. Truth and knowledge command us to act, to use them, and a truth that does not demand action, is nothing but the meaningless, useless flow of appearance. Only in the use of truth do we find out if its fist is strong and healthy enough to shatter the fallacious; without this exercise of truth, this pugilistic match, knowledge and truth remain the fallacies of sickly cowards.

But are the fists rough and brutish like a boxers? No, while the striking out in the name of truth may require a degree of crudeness and a willingness to become dirty, the pugilism of truth can be sheer starkness of a lived ethic in the face of a spiteful crowd of denouncers. Our truth is measured by the strength of a the fight, the strength of the truth, not by the brutality of the fighter.

Humanism Wanting

Often we are commanded directly by threat or didactically through the judgment of others to act humanely. What is threatened? What is being judged? Your essential nature, a secularized soul, that is grounded in the assumed qualities of what forms a human; to act in a way that is inhumane is to risk your status as a human. As you deny the rights guaranteed humans, so you go on to deny your own humanity in the eyes of others.

For example, consider what you have thought and have heard others say about arraigned killers -- all acts become permissible in conversation against the dehumanized "it" that was once a person. Our own behavior reveals a startling irony. We go about requesting the decency of being humane, to subscribe to the core properties that compose a human as a full social being, but how can one request a nature?

A nature is static, permanent and self-sufficient, producing a deterministic teleology. The very request to be humane, to subscribe to a type of humanism, tacitly reveals there is no nature. For how do you request a person to choose his or her nature? There is not a human soul, a human nature, or a true humanism in which to subscribe to. The request uncovers a nothingness in the human. His obsessive concern with being human points to his true composition. He is paradoxically naturally unnatural. The nothingness as if a vacuum hungrily sucking up anything in the outside world to fill it and form it into something more tangible to humanity. Humanism, those that request you be humane to others, it comes from the initial nothingness of the person that desperately seeks out something.

Did I just tell you to go out and slaughter everybody because there is no humanism to build a system of rights and ethical behavior? Unfortunately for the more violent members of our species, no. A denial of human nature and the revelation that humanity's core is a "nothingness seeking outward" allows for a host of new ways for humans to relate. A more truthful analysis and thus a better practice concerning daily human interactions can be achieved if we rid ourselves of the abstractions in the humanism of nature and right. Has it not been so dishonest that we acknowledge a worldly humanism, but at the first opportunity, tear our enemy's children into bloody ribbons and excuse it with the call "war"? Isn't the idea of world love between all nations so insincere it is nauseating? A truer understanding of humanity allows for something like a love to exist in a purer sense. Love can exist without a humanism though that may sound strange. Love is actually strangled and blinded by the false notions of a human nature. To end a sham marriage, two lovers must reveal their true "selves" to each other -- that they are both grasping nothings desperate to be affirmed by each other -- and human touch becomes more real than it has ever been before.

Opiate of the Masses? More like White Trash Turpentine Cocktail!

Christianity, and any revelatory religion, have been the meeting ground of two distinct types of people -- psychotics and conformists. A few individuals encounter god, daring enough to break rules and declare their waking dreams a reality. Then those who are unwilling to protest by the decency of their intelligence go to work organizing and establishing the new religions and communities. All religions and all traditions not based in sensible purpose start as mendacious, indecent, violent cults; it is only through the hardening of history, even, surprisingly, an illuminating, embarrassing history of unprecedented human folly and shame, that these cults becomes proper, acknowledged religions and traditions. The cult of the weak, sick and dying known to the Ancient world as Christianity is the inescapable, pervasive glue of Western society for nearly 2000 years -- this is our legacy!?

And those few that are not psychotics and conformists, must sit hopelessly with their nausea from the cursed fortune of intellectual decency, knowing their culture is the Scientology of a glaringly observable past.

Post-Luddite

Through the scalpel of love, its undisciplined brutality as a general abstraction, the monotheist severed the Earth from himself. Could history have birthed itself as merely a first, accidental thought of history in humans, blooming forward by the strength of its own roots -- "there is history" -- a thought, and so, it came to be from humans, but instantaneously hardened as a thing-in-itself. Such an idea as a linear history of progression could not be un-thought. The idea hardened and grew in the fertile soil of humanity's collective consciousness as an especially virile meme.

The idea of history simply needed to be thought, and, like a spark in a dried, golden forest, everything became ablaze and forever altered. Was it the monotheist that thought beyond the polytheist's circularity of nature which tore the world into a beginning and an end? The love of God denies the material world, and in doing so, allows space for the idea of history to exist supernaturally. The idea of history itself was enough to propagate history through the humans who believed in a history and acted as physical vessels for the idea to express itself. The idea was created through one material brain, but upon its creation, it became a self-sufficient creator by the very composition of the thought; and, as Hegel philosophy illuminates, the Idea finds itself revealed through acts of man that formulate history, leading to the eventual fullness of the Idea -- Providence.

For a moment, let us suppose all of this is true. We can say the accelerating advancement of humanity since the formation of a progressive history through a first, creative, accidental thought of history distinct from earlier pagan or tribal notions of repetitive, circular history is actually not the Godless, absurd and meaningless age of science and technology as it is popularly thought. We live now in the highest ascent and fulfillment of Providence. For doesn't modern man find himself slowly disappearing as a thing of nature, doesn't he forsake the Earth, the body, and death in the name of ideas and abstractions? The many ways we can alter the body through technology, the way we can manipulate the Earth to our goals, and the way we exist as a disembodied mind throughout the globe through the Internet are defining features of our age. Is not all technology the manifestations of ideas beyond the material? Do we not find that this technology of the abstract is also rapidly taking up less and less material space and doing more and more immaterial, abstract things? The days of vacuum tubes have been replaced by an age of microscopic chips. Within only a few decades, the physical size of technology has shrunk to unprecedented proportions.

We are not in Godless times (!) to contradict most believers that scream about secularism and dwindling attendance at church. We have become so pious, and abstraction has become so powerful that it has been normalized; we are so blind and removed from a pre-historical and non-monotheistic world that we deem ourselves Godless and atheists out of sheer inability to see with eyes that are monotheistic but cannot glance upon themselves to see who the bearers really are. Science and technology as they are today are the unveiling of an idea that began with the love of God. These silent, silicone saints that appear in every human space and room now, sanctify them, connecting them to something greater -- this may be the unrealized legacy of the monotheist's God. Technology's highest pursuit is the development of more, refined technology, and science's is the development of an pure science -- technology for the sake of technology and science for the sake of science.

Then what does it mean to really be an atheist? Atheism has one virtue and one belief, which is the belief and desire to experiment. It is no longer the senseless adherence to science and the hope of technological salvation, nor was it ever. Any notion of salvation, a belief found in modern conception of technological advancement, is undeniably monotheistic. It founds itself on the belief that there are things in the world that must be rebuilt (redeemed), and tacitly, there are things that are broken (sinful). Atheism in its true sense should be the daring, the striving to live without the societal monolith of God and his many hidden, faceless angels that populate our world in the most beguiling of forms. Atheism must be a willingness to find through experimentation what few pockets remain of an untouched, unhistorical, old-yet-new world exist and to grow these pockets.

How will we receive the Earth again? It is not with a belief in technology and science as redeemers. The atheists that proselytize in the name of science are the purer Christians that harbor such disdain for their old world brothers thumping their Bible's. How will we reunite ourselves with a Godless nature and the purest witness to the material we can achieve? Can we stop the eventual outcome of our total convergence with technological Providence and absolute loss of our material selves, becoming so pious that we no longer have eyes to see that which is beyond pious?

The modern day needs barbarians, not of the North, South, East or West, but barbarians of the spirit that are willing to lose everything in the name of what modern man and his technology has deemed worthless -- dust.