From Under the Editor's Rock

It's getting Spooky/Scary Out There

But, it has almost nothing to do with the paranormal! The US has a Maga SCOTUS, a Christian Nationalist Speaker of the House, and MAGA Republicans have enough votes to freeze government spending and even default! There are important but scary people in the world and they plainly want a World War - more for them, nothing left for us. So, another World War is in its early stages, and Biden wants to confiscate guns. If we need those guns to defend the US and They restrict them, then who should be hung when we're invaded? Such a notion may be crazy, and I may have a wild hair up my rear, but we're entering some very "interesting times", and that's not good - it's almost never good!. There are at least four hotspots that are problematic: Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and India. Israel has been attacked by Hamas and has begun its invasion of Gaza, and "Palestinians" are rioting against Jews and are out to kill them in some nations. Ukraine is now a dictatorship who has banned the Orthodox Church and disbanded the "Opposition" parties They claim that they're "winning", but Winter will be here all to soon! Taiwan has China's fleet doing "manuevers" very close to them with fly-overs buzzing them. What will happen if the US turns its back on them? India has religious conflic between the Hindu Nationalist and the Christians and others, plus a coming confrontation with China. Can "we" meddle in all of them? More information about the The Arch-Xtian Nationalist Numbnuts Zealot Crusader House Speaker

But, it's Hallowe'en tororrow and Samhain, and it's that time of year when we venerate our ancestors and prepare for Winter. It's getting late, so I don't have time to add images, so that will have to wait for tomorrow!

We're Still alive! And still looking into the Right Christian Nationalists

I havent posted for awhile because I've been busy with other projects, but this is a 'quik' reminder that I'm still here! Unfortuneatly, so is the Right Christian Nationalistas and their Trumpianity It's also still alive and growing and these people scare me every time I look what's up with them. It's like watching neo-fascism take over the Christian Evangelists. These people want a Theocracy and they still support the Orange One even after he's been indicted on a number of chrges - each new charge brings him . I'm glad I left these people behind 35 years ago. I accused them of being book burners, and they've recently gone and done it again! They are taking school textbooks and burning them because they don't like what's in them! Led by Gov. Desantis these clowns are banning books from school libraries, and are ready to go after public libraries next. These "Conservatives" are setting progress back to the 60's and will soon oppose laws that made this country less racist. Trump got his "conservative judges on SCOTUS, and they too are on a roll, destroying laws that have set precedents for decades. And they've shown that they're corrupt little weasels by taking money and "toys" from their $billionaire buddies. Religious "freedom" now means that if a store owner doesn't like your politics or sexual preferences, then they can refuse your order as a matter of "free speech". Then were abortion rights and the SCOTUS is "giving it back to the states which means restrictions, or outright banning it in "Jesusland" states! More when I learn this new system better this will site will get, but the new regime at Turbify will take time to learn...

Quick and somewhat biased History

Rome was a caste society, and the Roman State religion was headed by the rich nobles, and there were no leadership positions for the commoners. The word "Cult" has a twisted redefinition because of the Christians, it's definition time: A Cult is a religious SECT - that's it!</b></i> It's not a vicious word to smear against religious groups that one believes are false and don't like, or churches that do shady and illegal things to their members and others..
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Beneath the official Roman State religion were the cults which usually took the form of burial societies where rich people paid for the burials of their cult members. The chances of a commoner rising to any sort of leadership position in these groups were nil. Early Christianity changed that for only three and a half centuries. The Roman State Religion saw the organization of the Christian church as an attempt to create another government and of course it was. Earlier the cult of Bacchus tried to overthrow the government, so they were very wary of new religions springing up - they liked OLD! So, the Jews qualified even though they were an odd and obnoxious bunch. Isis, Cybele, and Hellenism weren't part of the State Cult either, but they were allowed because they, again, were OLD. “All roads led to Rome.”
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Once upon a time, there was an obscure, and mostly forgotten, Rabbi and Mage who said that the millennia-old custom and practice of allowing the privileged Rich Nobles and their Establishment(s), their governments, their temples, their priests, and their prophets to define, monopolize and rule over all religious practices for their own purposes and for their benefit, and not for the benefits and needs of the common people, should be challenged.
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When Christianity divorced itself from Judaism they became a new cult! The early Christianities were counterculture movements that attracted ordinary people by offering an opportunity for the common man to become recognized and prominent in their communities. They were secretive, they skulked around and met only at night, they were nonconformists. The other thing that Rome wouldn't tolerate was their refusal to give lip service or a libation to the Emperor's Genius, another word that's lost its original meaning! "In Roman religion, the genius ... is the individual instance of a general divine nature that is present in every individual person, place, or thing. Much like a guardian angel, the genius would follow each man from the hour of his birth until the day he died."( Wikipedia).
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"Beginning as a despised, illicit religious sect, Christianity endured 300 years of hostility to emerge as the dominant force in the Roman Empire." Everyone has heard of Nero and his alleged actions as a Poet and playing the lyre while Rome burned because he needed a slum clearance for his new palace. He was probably <strike>innocent</strike>, but he was blamed, so why not deflect the blame on the generally despised Christians? So, he did. He needed light to eat his dinner by, so he burned Christians as torches. He needed more entertaining executions, so he had Christians fed to lions in the Arena. But, the Christians went bravely to their deaths which impressed the Roman mob.
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"The Diocletian” or Great Persecution was the last severe persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire. In 303, the emperors Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius, and Constantius issued a series of edicts rescinding Christians' legal rights and demanding that they comply with traditional religious practices. <b>"Traditional Religious practices" - I told you that they liked OLD! </b> But, they were a secret society, and that's what they should have remained - they were the only counterculture of that time! Soon, the Orthodox Christians would do the same thing and more to anyone who disagreed with them.
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The various Christian offshoots and sects began to be grudgingly accepted, but the last persecution wasn't executions, it was denying them the opportunities for State positions by requiring a thorough knowledge of Roman Mythology under Julian (the Apostate), but Julian went off to a foolish war and got himself killed. But, by then the early heterodox churches were going to be replaced by something else. The Emperor Constantine “Urged”  the Council of Nicaea, an assembly of Bishops, to meet. The Church had taken her first great step to define revealed doctrine more precisely in response to a challenge from a heretical theology"- Arianism. The Proto-Orthodox left all the other sects out in the cold  and created a single orthodox Church, because being “right” was more important than being .The inevitable waves of intolerance were going to be massive! The leaders of the Church would no longer be the “poor”, and the State would soon have control of all religion back and more.
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The heretical Christian sects no longer would have a place left in the now Byzantine Empire under Justinian and Theodosius (who banned heresy). These grous had to leave, so they put their holy scriptures in jars and hid them in a desert cave at Nag Hammadi. The rich nobles were firmly back in charge, this time as “christians”! The Roman Caste system would come back with a "holy" vengeance! The "pagan" remnants of the former Roman State Religion were systematically destroyed. Philosophy and mathematics were considered “pagan” (Non-soldiers of Christ and country bumpkins) and the leading female mathematician and Platonist philosopher, Hypatia, was dragged from her chariot had her clothes torn off, and the mob armed with abalone shells flayed her flesh from her bones, then murdered her. This “christian” mob was under the direction of the Bishop of Alexandria and Peter the Reader ended Hypatia’s leading role in the intellectual and political scene of the moment, a role then forbidden to women, including those of the elite or the aristocracy was something very strange to them, and observed with suspicion, as if it were a public threat,” . Women usually didn’t have any kind of independence. “There could be women who were more educated than others, but their fate was to take good care of the home, the children, and the husband.”
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Hypatia was a woman who spoke and gave her opinion in a world of men. She was also an excellent teacher, publicly recognized despite living in a patriarchal structure, but structures that allow a certain freedom of action are one thing, and challenging them is another,” Hypatia was also an important intermediary figure between Jews, Christians, and “pagans”. She lived in a particularly eventful era, during the decline of the Roman Empire and its internal struggles. At the time, Alexandria was the great Mediterranean metropolis, a place of pilgrimage for philosophers and thinkers of the world, but the “streets” were very violent. The polis resembled the Athens of the fifth century B.C., where politicians visited influential philosophers to receive advice on matters of state.
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But starting from the year 400 C.E. Alexandria became an increasingly divided place. The “christian” leadership ordered pagan temples to be converted into churches or destroyed. These tensions were exemplified in the relationship between the pagan prefect Orestes and the “christian” Archbishop Cyril. While the former remained faithful to his paganism and cultivated a close relationship with Hypatia, Cyril wanted to erase all shadows of paganism from the city and he blamed the philosopher for the prefect’s refusal to submit to the “true” faith. It was in that volatile context that Hypatia was murdered. In dogmatic times, she was considered to be a dangerous enemy to them. But, paradoxically, she ended up winning, and: her trail of freedom is still alive. Many Christians were horrified by her murder, but they no longer had much say in what the Christian Church did.
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“It was not a matter of pagans against Christians. Hypatia had many Christian students and was not a pagan radical,” she explains. But Hypatia defended the tolerance, while the bishop wanted to concentrate all political power in their hands. After Hypatia’s death, intellectuals and philosophers fled in the city to Athens in search of safety. She represents the struggle of reason against fanaticism, a struggle for which she gave his life. That murder was the real beginning of the Dark Ages of enforced Orthodoxy by the State, and Western Civilization was now being run by ignoramuses.
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The Church in the Middle ages became the Power that would legitimize Kingship - a new Divine Right of Kings because Divine Providence now gave them their right to rule. Who spoke for Divine Providence? The Bishop of Bishops, the Bishop of Rome - the Pope. The freedom to think outside the "guidelines" of Orthodoxy no longer existed. Now I'm going to jump ahead to the Reformation.
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Some people wanted a Bible in their own language to read for themselves and those that published them were killed. The Eastern Orthodox Church kept the ancient writings and when they were reintroduced into Europe they sparked the Renaissance, and there was now a small crack in the power of Rome. Then King Henry VIII wanted a divorce, and when the Pope denied it he started his own national church, the Church of England. Then, Martin Luther, a German monk wanted a scholarly discussion of some things that he thought the Church should consider changing. So he wrote 95 of them and posted them on a church door. The reaction was a peasant revolution. The Church was after him, but he found protection from a prince and that was an incredible act of bravery on his part, but Protestantism would be in the hands of the Rich Nobles.
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Protestantism were government-controlled churches from the beginning! Then the conflict between the two factions in Europe caused massive upheaval and misery. The crime of witchcraft was invented, and most of the "witchcraft" was centered around disputed areas like "Germany", but Witchcraft trials would soon become the rage. The Bad Old Devil was stirring up his minions, and heinous acts were being committed to vex good upright Christians. In England, every time a new monarch was crowned the religion of the peasants changed accordingly. Protestant king – priest holes for the priests; Catholic Queen - time to change one's Spiritually Correct thinking, and get the priests out of their hidey holes!
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Then some fanatical people who had spiritually incorrect thoughts decided to move to The Netherlands to escape the Church of England. They soon grew tired of Holland's alien culture so they hired a ship, the Mayflower, to take them to the New World, and they went off course and ended up in Massachusetts. There weren't two groups of colonists who went there - there were three! They were the Puritans, The Pilgrims, and Merrymount, founded in 1626 CE by the lawyer, writer, and colonist Thomas Morton, best known, primarily, from his book "New English Canaan" which was a treatise on the Native Americans of the region, natural history, and satiric critique of his colonist neighbors. He was described as a heathen. “Maremont” was destroyed by a Puritan and Pilgrim alliance. 
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It took 1,400 years to reverse the damage that the Council of Nicea created, and that was done in the US... It took longer to get them to give the rights to others that they demanded for themselves and to allow other religions that they despise to exist. The founding of the USA started the liberalization of religion and the common people would eventually be able to make up their own minds about religion and decide for themselves what to believe. now there are some people who want to take that away again. Meanwhile, the governments of various other nations are trying to regain absolute control of religion again.
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The Thanksgiving Story is an absolution of the Pilgrims, whose brutal quest for absolute power in the New World is made to seem both religiously motivated and eminently humane. Most importantly, the Pilgrims are depicted as victims – of harsh weather and their own naïve yet “wholesome” visions of a new beginning. In light of this carefully nurtured fable, whatever happened to the Indians, from Plymouth to California and beyond in the aftermath of the 1621 “dinner” must be considered a mistake, the result of misunderstandings – at worst, a series of lamentable tragedies. The story provides the essential first frame of the American saga. It is unalloyed racist propaganda, a tale that endures because it served the purposes of a succession of the Pilgrims’ political heirs, in much the same way that Nazi-enhanced mythology of a glorious Aryan/German past advanced another murderous, expansionist mission. The first official Thanksgiving was declared because of the successful genocide of a tribe of Native Americans by the Pilgrims and Puritans, who were known as ‘Wotowquenange,’ which in one of their tongues meant <b><i>Cutthroats and Stabbers!”</i></b> Thanksgiving is quite dangerous - as were the Pilgrims. They were also responsible for creating the American slave trade, as they sold the Indians they captures “down the river” to the West Indies.
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The Pilgrims and Puritans also made a military alliance to crush Merrymount because they didn't like their Maypole among other things. The two colonies left were Theocracies, and Church and State were still one entity. Then a Madness broke out. Some girls heard some "scary" stories about witchcraft from their slave woman, then they were "possessed" by evil spirits, so they withered and jerked, and went into fits, so the good pure, innocent, and pious Puritans had so much Faith in their Omni-God's ability to protect them from the Bad witches that they immediately brought in the government and the courts to root out the Bad Ol' Deb'bil for them. Naturally, the expert witch-hunter Rev. Cotton Mather got involved, and laws were hastily rewritten to more efficiently discover the Evildoers. They invented "spectral evidence" to convict these victims. If convicted the "witch's" property was divided between the accuser and the church. One man was pressed to death because he wouldn't confess under torture, and the women were hanged. It was a shining and truly exemplary example of Christian Faith in action! To their credit, Cotton Mather, and Salem may have understood that the centuries-old practice of witch-hunting, and what they did, was wrong.
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Skipping forward, the 1st Amendment protected religions from the government's establishment of religion. But the struggle for religious freedom didn't stop. The Mormons had to flee New York to Utah; the good Christians decided that liquor drinking was so evil they had to have a Constitutional Amendment to stop it; they tried to stop the teaching of Evolution and succeeded; they tried to limit free speech and books that they didn't like and still don't. Alternative religions had to fight the Satanism Scare, and the Neo-Pagans and other marginal groups had to fight for their right to exist and will have to fight some more to continue to exist.

Looking Over the Fence @ the Xtian Nationalists
And I'm Not Liking What I'm Seeing!