Fanatic muslims make such a big bruhaha over Pope’s statements these days. Who the hell cares what the Pope says or what did he really meant? In fact, their reaction only empowers these 14th Century quotes that Pope spoke of in the first place. The muslim spiritual leaders should have sent a letter to Pope to express any dissatisfaction about his speech and then try and contain their faithful to just stay put. That’s what true religious leaders should do, not to have them in the frontline and push their faithful to ridiculous accusations and even more reactionary actions. Right now, I blame these muslim spiritual leaders for not containing violence rather than the Pope who started it all.

You know, that’s why I don’t give a f*ck about any religion. Religion (any religion as an institution) is sickness. It creates fanatism, divides and blinds people in order the “institution” around them gets richer and more powerful.

No religion can give me a real, rational, understandable answer to these questions: what is soul? What is God and what is He made of? What is a spirit and what is spirituality? Why isn’t God talking to us more often if He is all powerful?

There are no real answers to these questions. Instead, most religions have Dogmas that you have to accept without hesitation or second thought, and under some religions that practice mysticism you might get yourself in trance and then tell you “you just experienced God”. My ass.

As a human being of the 21st Century, I do not accept Dogmas. Everything must have a scientific (or at least, rational) explanation. If not, then it’s just superstition in my book and a way to lock-in “customers” (see: faithful).

How do I know that there is no God? Easy. If there was a God(s), ALL humans on the planet would worship the SAME God(s). From the moment we have forks on the same religion or completely different religions, it is obvious that nothing like an all-powerful entity exists and that it’s all politics and made-up by humans. Christians say that God gave “freedom” to humans to believe whatever they want, but that’s just bullsh*t. If there was clear-cut evidence that there is a God, there would not be any religion forks, from fear alone.

For me, “religion” should just be a guidance to a righteous way of life. No Gods, no angels, no demons, no dogmas. Just a guidance on how to become better people and help others and help our society evolve and grow the right way. And that’s the only reason why I still classify myself as an agnostic and not as an atheist. I believe that humans “need” a kind of religion (it’s part of our… ROM to believe in something). Just make this “something” a behavior code rather than supernatural crap. If you ask me “how do you feel about Jesus Christ” I would reply that “I love him”. But I love him just because he gives me moral guidance in my life and his teachings made sense (well, most of it), not because I accept him as the Son of God, or as a Prophet or anything like that.

I do not make fun of people who see ghosts, angels or demons though. While in most cases there is a better explanation than the one they give, I don’t rule out the (scientific) possibility that lifeforms from another dimension might be able to get through to ours sometimes. The String Theory has shown us that there are 11 dimensions and there is no reason why one (or more) of them might contain other kinds of lifeforms and some of them might be “good” and some might be “violent”. But I definitely won’t explain these experiences via 2,000+ year old superstitions. They are cheesy, at best.

And I do not make fun of people who say that they have experienced a miracle. When the human brain truly believes in something, it can become so fixated that can heal wounds, or heal others or even not feel pain under torture. This is the only thing that I envy from the faithful people: their ability through “faith” to overcome natural laws. But again, I don’t give any supernatural explanation to these happenings, science will eventually crack those too. The last few years scientists have made good progress on proving that telepathy is possible, for example. The human brain has lots of scientific surprises for us still.

Refer to this previous post of mine on more about how I choose to satisfy the part of my… firmware that needs to believe in something.

“Calling their lives blessed, more than a dozen young women and girls from polygamist families in Utah spoke at a rally Saturday, calling for a change in state laws and the right to live their life and religion.”

Personally I do not agree with polygamy. While humans are by nature polygamists, from the moment you decide to actually get married, you should do it with one person only. You can’t create something beautiful and unique if you have to share yourself within 2 and 3 or 4 partners.

I could never, ever, share my JBQ with someone else. I would walk away (without a fight) if another woman was brought to our lives. I like exclusivity. And I much dislike most women anyway.

As you already know, I am an agnostic. But having been raised in Greece — a frantically-fanatically Christian nation — I have inherited some affection towards Christianity. But I make no mistake in my quest to satisfy the part of my DNA that seeks God: I don’t follow the churches and their dogmatic establishments. I try to find “God” in Christ’s teachings and not in the skies. Christ fundamentally taught two things: Love and Forgiveness. Anything else is blah-blah and made-up crap by people who grabbed the opportunity to create a new slave order that lasted almost 2,000 years.

Exactly because I practice Christianity in its core as taught by Christ, I can visit mass on any Christian Church (if I feel like it to). When I was in UK there were no Orthodox Churches near me, so when I had the need to go to a church, I was simply picking one between Agglican, Catholic or Protestant churches. Any would do. And any did do.

You see, when I go to a mass (very rarely), I don’t go to pray or praise that supreme being called God. I go so I can love and be loved. When people are part of a church that they deeply believe in, they tend to shine goodness. They all have a smile, they all feel part of a righteous community and are as helpful as they can to each other. People show their Good Self. Maybe because of fear of God in His House, maybe because that’s how they feel at the time, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that when you want to feel loved, you can, in ANY kind of Christian Church. Christians should not let stupid technicalities be in their way to practice the core: love (e.g. is Virgin Mary a near-Goddess? Is God-Son-Spirit one and three at the same time?).

I feel the same about Jews, Muslims or Budhists. I would be thrilled to enter their temples and feel the believers’ Good Selves too. The fact that these are different religions altogether does not make me deviate on my quest for love. Love is love, and if it comes by singing a Christian song or by reading the Coran, it ain’t matter as long as it’s pure.

From an article at CNN: “While women in Saudi Arabia are not supposed to mix in public with men outside their immediate family, they have little alternative to buying their most intimate items of clothing from men. Women, who are not allowed to drive or vote, also face employment restrictions because of the need to segregate sexes.”

I can’t stand reading about this stuff. They piss me off.

The following is a rough translation from the front page of the generally respected Greek news and TV/Radio agency, Flash (please note that this coming Sunday is Easter for the Orthodox Christians):

“In the midday of Good Saturday, a bit after 1 PM, it will happen again at Jerusalem: the Miracle that shocks. Inside the Holy Tomb of Jesus, at the time of the Patriarch’s prayer, people will hear a loud sound and the candles will light up all by themselves.”

This ladies and gentlemen, from a major news agency. This is journalistic integrity for ya…

I had one of these weird dreams last night that I usually have every few months. Apparently, I died in my dream (due to a huge… tsunami) and I was floating around for a few days from place to place (only an old, blind, woman could ’see’ me among the living — I was even careful to not scare her). At a cemetary there was a bully ghost (more like a bad spirit) who was trying to make the dead in that cemetary get even more scared than they already were — considering their situation. At some point I had enough of him and I confronted him WWE-style (you gotta love my subconscious self)!

After that, I found myself in an… office with some clerks working in it. I was soon enough approached by a male clerk who told me that I have to choose between going back to Earth and start living another life, or go to what we humans call Hell (and they did give me a quick taste of it with some clerks temporarily changing shape into ugly creatures — a good time to call Christ’s name in your sleep to help you get you out of the shit-tub, it always worked for me in the event of a nightmare). Apparently, there is either no Heaven, or I was not ready to be offered it as an option.

So, I asked a middle-aged woman who seemed to be like a supervisor there to give me some information about my new life on Earth, because I was obviously not going to pick Hell. Another clerk said that he had to go and see which life I am supposed to get and so he went away in another room to do just that. I found the time to ask these clerks if they were also dead humans like I was, but one of them said “no, but you can consider us ‘cousins’ “.

Soon enough, the other guy came back with a ‘glimpse’ of the life I was suppose to live (”I am sorry, you only have one life-choice this time I am afraid”, he said while he was coming back). The ‘glimpse’ was a picture (kodak-style, no less). It pictured myself, in my home in Greece as a teenager. But the furniture layout was a bit different. And so I asked “so, I am going to relive the same life?”. He replied “no”. After looking at the picture again I asked: “so, it’s going to be the same, but not exactly the same?”, and this time he replied “yes”.

I went back to the middle-aged clerk woman and I asked her to give me more information about this new life. She was not allowed to say much, but she said “this life is going to be much worse than your previous one”. Another clerk said “this new Eugenia is not like you, she can’t… she just can’t….” and she stopped saying anything more. The middle-aged woman then gave me a bit more (sad) information that I prefer to not air through this blog. Of course, I wasn’t happy about all this, but I knew that I could not negotiate it because they didn’t have the power to make it easier for me anyway. These clerk entities were just “working there”. The middle-aged woman finally said to me “You have a choice between Hell and this, and I must tell you, many other people have chosen to re-live much, much worse lives than the one you are going to get. I highly recommend you pick this life”.

I can’t remember anything else, as I think I woke up after this. Obviously, much of this “office”, “clerks” and “kodak pictures” are “simple, human-understandable representations” of what would things actually look like if something like this was real. Thing is, I don’t believe in the afterlife. And I don’t really believe in “past lives” either. I am not even truly religious. When we die, we simply die. We cease to function, and that’s it. We are just a bunch of complex chemical reactions that eventually go bad.

However, this dream did got me thinking that I may need to start living my life to its fullest and get the most out of it. 10 minutes later though I was back in my desk, in front of my monitor, lazily browsing the net and doing nothing differently than I do everyday. If God or angels or whoever want to shake me away of my (granded, self-exterminating) lifestyle they must try harder than using the… ancient dream method. I need more solid evidence than that. We have telephones these days! I have an iSight too! Let’s put it into some good use!