Irreverently Relevant

As with any doctrine crafted by man, religion has proven to bear the same moral inadequecies exhibited throughout human history. In many of man's holy books, there is evidence of murder, genocide, revenge killing and worse. There is ample justification for crimes of moral turpitude, and still more justification for punishing the same in fascinatingly barbarous ways. Just as humanity has evolved in thinking, so has the interpretation of religious text, but, with the caveat that any alteration in religious text changes what the attributed creator figure meant to say.  One of the most literal religions is Islam. Created by an Arab religious, social, and political leader who the world knows as the prophet Muhammad (whose image remains censored for some reason of hadith-er), Islam dominates the lives of entire populations thought the middle East of Asia, Northern Africa, Indonesia and Malaysia. As the regular Muslim would say, it is a way of life. With such lofty proclamations comes the...

For the American who wants to blow up Satan's anus. Also, Satan is a figment of your religious imagination.

Racism is a seemingly indelible stain lodged deep into the human fabric. In a tumultuous history of the seemingly most sophisticated ape, humanity has crafted an "us vs them" mentality throughout its evolutionary development. While racism in its modern form has been established as a phenomenon arising through the European age of imperiarism. It is a scourge that has vested roots all across the world, and that, even among communities of the same racial background, is manifested as tribalism. The Rwandan genocide (Apr 7, 1994 – Jul 15, 1994) was a systematic massacre triggered by Juvenal Habyarimana's assassination (which also resulted in the death of Burundi's Hutu president, Cyprian Ntaryamira) on April 6, 1994. The resulting power vacuum, coupled with festering undercurrents of hate, led to a sustained and brutal campaign if violence that directly led to more than 500,000 deaths.⁵ While accounts of  Rwandan genocide are lengthy, it is quite evident that poisoned root...

  They know it, surely, they know, 'tis true, I tell you, they know, of the hunger in the land, they know, of the anger in the land they know: from the snow-capped mountains' peaks, to the legislature where insanity leaks, the voice is loud, the resonance is clear, the citizen no longer is held dear. The votes were counted, the seats were filled, the oaths were taken, the candidates were thrilled, for the people they vowed to stand, yea, for every person that tills the land, but the tales of valor they told, so grand, became like unsalted fish, so truly bland, the enemies rose up from all the land, of imaginary threats, they sung in the land; look around, the sorrow is palpable, in the land indeed, the fear is tangible, the tears on the fabric of a nation torn by leaders whose ideas by time are worn: the mirror is broken, but still it reflects the image of a people impaired by defects created by leaders whose greed perfects the ruin of a nation and its grave effects. In every s...

Genesis Proverbs 22:6 -  Train up a child in the way he should go, And when he is old he will not depart from it. Thus does the story begin, for, from childhood, mine was a mind conditions to believe everything taught within the confines of conservative presbyterianism. Growing up in the relative tranquility of an "average sized" town in Central Kenya, that was the center of my universe. Nyeri was my entire world, and Nairobi was the big city which I always viewed with big, envious eyes. My dreams were to own a big house in Nairobi, teach at Nairobi University, and have a beautiful wife. As we very well acknowledge (those who have lived past 30 anyway), life doesn't always work according to a set schedule, if it ever does anyway. God, our father, made everything, and kept an eye on everything. He was the absolute center of everything, and life on earth played to his whims. He gave life, he took away life. We were all born sinful, and, by his ascent to earth, and birth of ...

     The reason silence will never reign      is that the noise in the heart is rain, music is on the myriad canopies of an array of a cast of nations, yes, we refuse to be broken, we rise up for they who rise, for the this tune is overpowering, 'tis the song of pure freedom; it takes the teardrop in the wide open eyes of a child whose sorrowful, upturned face stares at me in a questioning gaze, a face unimpressed by the dazzle of the rising of the tottering phase of leaders whose lack of clout does amaze: I hear the voices in the crowd, "O' Ichabod!" I hear the cries of the desperate, "O' Ichabod!" The voices are strong, tho' some are hushed, but the resolve in them will not be crushed; "No! Ichabod! No Ichabod!" Ichabod must not be born tonight for in the distance I see the light, of a presence that will rise to rule this land - this land that the just will rule. (gsk) © Ichabod  ( Hebrew :  אִיכָבוֹד ‎  ʼīyḵāḇōḏ , –  without glory , o...

for at the core of the light lay a whisper of darkness at the heart of the wilderness lay an oasis of sheer delight the search into the known was a jolt into the unknown solitaire, solitaire, o' lone-voiced solitaire the loneliness was palpable, the crowds were irascible the insanity of the gladness the sanity of the madness for at the core of the light lay a whisper of darkness (gsk)

Once upon a South Park episode, the devil declared that Saddam Hussein and he were going to rule the world. Crazy? Maybe. Tongue in cheek? Likely so. Of course, to any rational mind, this is humor at its basest level.  Well, since the devil can only exist in the mind that believes the farce that is religion, a concept which again plays on the basest human desire of good overcoming evil. However, a closer look into who is good and evil in Christian theology reveals a lot more about the devious and malevolent personality of this religion.  Christians will often shoot down Islam (figuratively and in real life, especially in the western world) as being the bastard child of religions. Christianity in the United States has been appropriated by the evangelical religious right as a bulwark of the truly insane concept of "American exceptionalism." As if Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Canada, Columbia, among other nations are not either American, nor exceptional.  However, bullshit seems t...

2021 is barely 3 months in and already there has been an attempted armed insurrection in the US capitol, a polar vortex that crippled Texas, and a US covid death rate of 519K. For the state of Texas, this has happened before, most recently in 1989 and, in 2011 when natural gas plants reported failures that resulted in rolling blackouts. The state of Texas has a GDP of $1.9 trillion with a capital "T," and still could ill-afford to deal with Winter. According to IMF info, Texas has a larger economy than Brazil (which comes in at 10th at $1.84 trillion), South Korea, and Canada.  While Gross Domestic Product is not an accurate measure of development (unlike HDI, GINI, and per capita income), Texas has always been a state on the move, with some of the world's largest corporations setting up shop in the state, most notably Oracle and Hewlett Packard. Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, also set up in Austin TX.  This is the state with the second largest GDP (after California) in the ...

Vietnam: 35 covid19 casualties throughout the duration of the pandemic.¹ Other countries such as New Zealand, Samoa, and Tonga, are doing, well, pretty fine. The latter two are presumably covid free having reported no cases of the virus.  Looking at those countries, one would likely assume that total isolation and draconian restrictions on movement are the best way to contain the contagion. Maybe, and no. Argentina, once one of the wealthiest nations on earth, and with a per capita GDP higher than that of a Japanese empire in the process of implementing the Meiji restoration, now has poverty rate of close to 47%.² Now Argentina is a country which seems as addicted to the pain of crises like it's some sort of sexual fetish. This time though, the country has been subject to what may now be termed as the "world's longest quarantine."  This has devastated an economy that's already devastated. Axalta Coating Systems, BASF, and French auto parts maker Saint-Gobain Sekur...

Once upon a time, long ago in 2018 in the land of Uganda, the president, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, actually attempted to ²ban oral sex. His premise was that the mouth was "only for eating." Well, that's actually true. You can eat out, eat well, and eat every day. In a pretty roundabout way, one could infer that this clueless tyrant was actually right! The same country was in the process of directing ISPs to block pornographic websites, notwithstanding the onerous and draconian nature of the enforcement of that law. Virtual private network services coupled with other "anti-snoop" software like the tor browser would make such policing untenable, unless one were to install monitoring software on each and every end-user's device (which actually failed in China after such an attempt was made).  These laws, if they can thus be christened, are driven by the narrow moral scope of religious leaders. Religion, mainly Christianity and Islam, plays an intrusive role even ...