society

Can a religion be political?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Can a religion be political? If so, which religions are left-wing and which are right-wing?”

People are political — from the self-management perspective by establishing community systems and laws to live by.

Religions are intended to guide people to live with the support they need to find happiness within themselves and through their relationships with others.

Religious zealots and leaders, however, seek to leverage community support to achieve political power. Wings are either moot within the context of religion, or they are leveraged to create further divisions between people while furthering the aims of the corrupt in their quests for power.

The consequences of seeking power ultimately corrupt a community’s politics to destroy community cohesion and create an oppressive environment where neither politics, community development, nor spiritual development are best served.

Religion was the first form of government. The consequences were the Dark Ages, in which humanity lived in a dark state of repression where no progress was made for society for hundreds of years. The world was ruled by the complete corruption of the human spirit made manifest by unrestrained power that we have always struggled with as a species.

We have yet to learn our lessons about restraining power enough to apply them to the mess we’re creating now through capitalism.

It’s become so overwhelmingly attractive a source of power acquisition that it has enticed corruption within religion to grow into a capitalist horror of its own.

The Vatican is among the wealthiest institutions on the planet, and it’s supposed to represent a religious commitment to ending poverty.

Some of the wealthiest people on the planet have grown their seed of corruption by betraying religious principles and leveraging hope against those in despair.

One of the most corrupt of political monsters today pretends at religion to leverage the naive trust of people who have become resentful of a political system that has betrayed them for decades.

Every day on Facebook, I see advertising for “lawyers” who claim they can help people recover the money they lost by trusting a scammer who swindled them.

There is no possible way to recover one’s money from a scammer, especially when their true identity remains a mystery.

The lawyer claiming to be able to help is just another scammer preying on people who were already scammed once and are desperate to trust someone who will help them.

These are among the worst of predatory parasites because they are preying on people who have already lost much.

Meanwhile, Facebook does nothing to protect its “community” because it benefits from the advertising dollars it collects.

What we end up with is an informal cadre of predatory parasites preying on victims on multiple levels throughout society, and to such a degree that it becomes impossible to trust anyone.

Everywhere one looks, every system one turns to hides another predator ready to invite one into their web to drain them dry.

That’s what the whole of society reminds me of today. I’m sure I am not the only one who sees how impossible the situation is that we have allowed ourselves to live within.

I don’t think we can hold out much longer before it all collapses like a house of cards. The problem with that is the most vulnerable among us who have suffered the most will also become the most significant casualties of the ensuing chaos.

People who genuinely wish to hang onto their sanity and maintain something of a resemblance of hope must do what they can to build walls between domains to prevent the corruption of power from perpetually overwhelming our systems and threaten our stability as peaceful and progressive societies.

Religion is not supposed to be political in the sense of a social management system.

Religion is supposed to be about personal growth.

“Render unto Caesar” was a prescient command for its time because the threat it addresses is always beyond evident to those who do not fall under the spell of attraction to power over others.

Some of us are lucky enough to learn that our power over ourselves is the only power that matters.

That is the most fundamental lesson all religions hint at and the only lesson of value they have for humanity, but they’ve lost touch with that.

Ironically, the best teachers of this principle today are characters from fiction.

Why is being employed not a right?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Considering you’ll die without a job, why is being employed not a right? Can society really just ensure someone dies by refusing to hire them anywhere?”

As the world of work becomes increasingly automated, the workplace dehumanization issue rapidly grows into a sociopathic dismissal of our essential qualities as living, breathing, thinking, and evolving beings. This pressing concern will affect more and more people in the future with increasing rapidity as workplace automation continues to adopt and incorporate an increasing rate of technological advancements into their operations.

A new study measures the actual impact of robots on jobs. It’s significant. | MIT Sloan

Amazon Grows To Over 750,000 Robots As World’s Second-Largest Private Employer Replaces Over 100,000 Humans

Meet the Humanoid Robot Working at a Spanx Factory (18 minutes)

To be clear, the dehumanization of the workforce isn’t a consequence of automation but of aggregation into ever larger corporate entities now spanning the globe in their operational reach. Automation is merely a step toward increased efficiency and reduced operating costs. Automation is simply the formalized acknowledgement of transforming labour into a dehumanized function that benefits capital-infused decision-makers chasing profit. What was once an entity supporting community development within the “Mom-and-Pop entrepreneurial environment” has become industrialized economics.

Entrepreneurs of today are the artists of yesteryear who sought out patrons to support their initiatives and receive benefits in return for their support in a parasitic relationship that both drains value from the creative individual and shapes their creative output in their narrowly defined image to fit an increasingly homogenized production system.

The dehumanization of the workforce began when people became deemed commodities, and “Human Resources” departments were created as legal defence linebackers to protect corporations from the consequences of exposed liabilities.

The world of employment has become less about identifying skills and more about choosing appealing aesthetics and fetishes. One is no longer in a position of being hired to function in a role with an expected standard of performance in fulfilling the requirements of that role inasmuch as they’re selected like an attractive product on a shelf that will complement the rest of the pieces on a mantle.

The disconnect between the function one is intended to fulfill, the decision-maker determining the need, the department composing the requirements list, and the agency tasked to identify appropriate candidates has become so much of a production line that they cannot help but to regard all their people as narrowly defined replaceable cogs with limited capacity and range in an expense paradigm rather than as an investment and a partner in the enterprise. The only success an individual can contribute to a dehumanized function is to meet predetermined expectations in a static environment with an expected and finite lifespan.

Corporations may be deemed people, but they’re more machine than human. Unlike humans, they can only change course and be adaptive to evolution when the small number of myopically focused humans operating them can implement global changes that often involve complete retooling and rebranding or being incorporated into another corporate system.

Once that occurs, however, whatever unique nature or personality that may have existed in the original entity is subsumed into the more enormous beast.

The issue of jobs and employment is a critical metric only for those whose role in society is to diagnose the overall health of the “super beast” referred to as “the economy.” Individuals are irrelevant to their equations. Humans are no longer humans but cattle to be herded in a dehumanizing system that renders everyone only as valuable as accords the desirability of their functionality in a narrowly defined capacity within an inhuman entity.

One’s value as a human in society is determined only by the nature of the type of cog they can function as within the parameters of an acknowledged entity that deems them suitable for its overall operation.

Society doesn’t “ensure” anything because society is a collection of humans operating within a cultural framework. The corporate culture we have endorsed for society has, in return for our loyalties, suffused society with an apathetic disinterest in the human condition and the plights of individual humans.

UBI is the only path available to regain our humanity and create an economy that serves humans rather than modern dynasties comprised of a small handful of monarch-like beings. Without it, system-wide collapse is inevitable.

How do people feel about this whole ‘woke and extreme leftist’ ideology?

The question this article is a response to was originally posted in its full length as, “What are people feelings regarding this whole ‘woke and extreme leftist’ ideology that seems to be so prevalent nowadays? Is the push back that I’m feeling actually gathering pace, with ever more people speaking up against it, actually happening?”

Describing a capacity for empathy as “extreme” is evidence of an extreme disparity on behalf of people who justify abusive behaviours toward others.

People who describe “woke” as extreme are the people responsible for the widespread character of casual cruelty permeating our societies.

Such people are bullies in society who cannot seem to exist without demeaning and disparaging vulnerable others.

These people make the most significant contributions to the most embarrassing statistics we face as a species and as societies attempting to live up to our self-declared state of “advanced civilization.”

These people are not the civilized citizens among us but the barbarian holdouts who refuse to evolve within the protections of civilized society that they mock and undermine at every turn with their atavistic predilections.

These people are the uncivilized extremes who threaten social stability while routinely betraying the social contract as they function in the limited capacities of predators and parasites, draining the best from among us while disparaging it as they gorge themselves on their benefits.

People are getting so sick and tired of their disgusting behaviours that we are seeing pushback in many different ways.

We can tell that progress is being made by the increasing extremes in their behaviours as they ramp up their disparagements to be perceived as the crazy relatives in everyone’s family.

In his debate with Kamala Harris on September 9th, Donald Trump’s performance has shown how people are tired of a steady diet of manufactured moral outrage.

How people responded to Tim Walz’s son, who openly displayed his emotionally charged pride for his father, is a distinctly different attitude of intolerance for abusive behaviour than was the case when Trump openly mocked a disabled person like the extremely psychopathic monster he is.

The hatred porn peddled by those who perpetually disparage the “bleeding hearts” in society is running its course.

The meek are well on their way now to inherit the Earth, as those who hypocritically pretend to worship a god of love and peace have known for ages. They don’t want to relinquish their power and privilege now that their end is nigh.

It is time for the barbarians to rest into eternity as the disturbing nightmares of primitive existence they embody.

We are all in this mess together, and we’re sick and tired of the crabs dragging us down to face oblivion together. Such is their fate, not the rest of humanity.

We are destined to explore the stars, and we will never make it there while burdened by the toxicity of hate-mongers among us.

They can grow up or crawl into their dank holes and wallow for all the benefits they offer with their whining negativity.

It’s time for the haters to wake up and rejoin the human race.

It’s hard work. We know.

Stop being so lazy about it, get off your rocking horse, and get to work.