Extraordinary!

[YO-ELEVEN-11]

What, that's it? Come on, man. You can do better than that.

ok. think about again...



I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Almighty Creator. By fighting the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work."
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

"I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator."— Adolf Hitler, ibid., Vol. 1 Chapter 2

"Thus inwardly armed with confidence in God and the unshakable stupidity of the voting citizenry, the politicians can begin the fight for the 'remaking' of the Reich as they call it."— Adolf Hitler, ibid., Vol. 2 Chapter 1

"The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life."
— Adolf Hitler, Berlin, 1933, first radio address after coming to power. Here are pictures of Christian Nazism.

"The national Government sees in both Christian denominations the most important factor for the maintenance of our society."
- Adolf Hitler, speech before the Reichstag, March 1933

"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . . We need believing people."
— Adolf Hitler, April 1933, from a speech made during negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordat of 1933

"On the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the Earth."
— President George W. Bush, a born-again Christian

"He [God] is using me, all the time, everywhere, to stand up for a biblical worldview in everything that I do and everywhere I am. He is training me."
— Tom DeLay (R-TX), Majority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives

"When I, or people like me, are running the country, you'd better flee, because we will find you, we will try you, and we'll execute you. I mean every word of it. I will make it part of my mission to see to it that they are tried and executed."
— Randall Terry (whose son happens to be gay)


pause-------------------



"To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler. Hitler tried to speed up evolution, to help it along, and millions suffered and died in unspeakable ways because of it."
— D. James Kennedy

"If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like. … But on the other hand, if somebody says, 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday,' you say, 'Fine, I respect that.'"
— Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality."
— George Bernard Shaw

"At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world."
— George Bernard Shaw, from "Major Barbara"

"We do not know how God created, what processes He used, for God used processes which are not now operating anywhere in the natural universe. This is why we refer to divine creation as special creation. We cannot discover by scientific investigations anything about the creative processes used by God."
— Duane Gish, in Evolution, The Fossils Say No! p. 42

"We experience happiness and suffering ourselves; we encounter others in the world and recognize that they experience happiness and suffering as well; we soon discover that 'love' is largely a matter of wishing that others experience happiness rather than suffering; and most of us come to feel that love is more conducive to happiness, both our own and that of others, than hate. There is a circle here that links us to one another: we each want to be happy; the social feeling of love is one of our greatest sources of happiness; and love entails that we be concerned for the happiness of others. We discover that we can be selfish together."
— Sam Harris, The End of Faith, pp.186-187

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
— Martin Luther King, Jr.

HUMANS SHEEESH
----YO-ELEVEN-11

 

[greymare]

yep, we treat this planet like it belongs to somebody else..........

 

[Tao_Equus]

Yo 11 11,

I loved the way you selected the quotes from Hitler. It would be hard to make a more succinct point about the use of religion in American politics today. We often forget that those who seek political office study political theory and methodology, they know what works. Take for example Hitlers line "the unshakable stupidity of the voting citizenry" and this infamous clip of Bush :
YouTube - George W. Bush: Only In America But no surprise there really, after all the same idealogical organisation that put Hitler in power still operates and put Bush, Reagan, Ford and Nixon in power too. Hitler went off the rails, cut the strings of the puppeteers that gave him his platform. The lesson was learned from. Is JWB his own mind, was Reagan? Is it just a coincidence they both seem constantly confused when presenting anything ? How would you stop a puppet running the show? You dont see the same thing in Bush Snr nor in Nixon who were both organisational stalwarts. OHHH deary me... I'm just a hapless conspiracy theorist though... aint I just!!

The GB Shaw quote nicely sums up the other thread on religious people being happier :
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality."
— George Bernard Shaw

Tao

 

[Pathless]

Okay. I like the quote game.

"The Lord showed me that this is a time for self-examination."

--Reverend Jeremiah Wright, preaching after the September 11th attacks
YouTube - Reverend Wright Speaks Out

We would have done well at that time to heed his words, and at this time, too. Any time is the right time for self-examination. Introspection. Deep probing into the context of things. "Think about it" indeed. Context.

What does it mean when a country blindly ignores its own history, preferring instead to cling to manufactured untruths about their government's unassailable nobility? What does it mean when dissent is criminalized and marginalized and, in the best cases, co-opted by mainstream media or governmental organizations? It means we have a limp citizenry, washed up. What does it mean when the vast majority of Americans believe that clips of a reverend, played out of context and spliced neatly into political agendas in a time of electoral politics, mean that this person is anti-American, and that to support or even listen to what he has to say is somehow blasphemous to the great nation? What does it mean when that man is actually speaking to a deep historical condition of the same country, but no one wants to hear because it is too painful or would cause them to have to drastically revise their assumptions about the motives of their country?

Does it mean that we are living in the political progeny of the Third Reich? Does it mean that media outlets are essentially a propaganda arm of the nation-state? Quite possibly.

If that is what it means, then what do we, as individuals of conscience who understand that the corporate media serve the militaristic and imperialist agendas of the nation-state, do? Can we, in good conscience, watch from the sidelines, nodding sagely as we use our keen insight to x-ray the situation? Or do we hunger to do something more?

Some questions.

 

[YO-ELEVEN-11]

Okay. I like the quote game.

"The Lord showed me that this is a time for self-examination."

--Reverend Jeremiah Wright, preaching after the September 11th attacks
YouTube - Reverend Wright Speaks Out

We would have done well at that time to heed his words, and at this time, too. Any time is the right time for self-examination. Introspection. Deep probing into the context of things. "Think about it" indeed. Context.

What does it mean when a country blindly ignores its own history, preferring instead to cling to manufactured untruths about their government's unassailable nobility? What does it mean when dissent is criminalized and marginalized and, in the best cases, co-opted by mainstream media or governmental organizations? It means we have a limp citizenry, washed up. What does it mean when the vast majority of Americans believe that clips of a reverend, played out of context and spliced neatly into political agendas in a time of electoral politics, mean that this person is anti-American, and that to support or even listen to what he has to say is somehow blasphemous to the great nation? What does it mean when that man is actually speaking to a deep historical condition of the same country, but no one wants to hear because it is too painful or would cause them to have to drastically revise their assumptions about the motives of their country?

Does it mean that we are living in the political progeny of the Third Reich? Does it mean that media outlets are essentially a propaganda arm of the nation-state? Quite possibly.

If that is what it means, then what do we, as individuals of conscience who understand that the corporate media serve the militaristic and imperialist agendas of the nation-state, do? Can we, in good conscience, watch from the sidelines, nodding sagely as we use our keen insight to x-ray the situation? Or do we hunger to do something more?

Some questions.

What does it mean when a country blindly ignores its own history, preferring instead to cling to manufactured untruths about their government's unassailable nobility?

When one door closes another one opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.
Alexander Graham Bell

What does it mean when dissent is criminalized and marginalized and, in the best cases, co-opted by mainstream media or governmental organizations?

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Eric Hoffer

What does it mean when the vast majority of Americans believe that clips of a reverend, played out of context and spliced neatly into political agendas in a time of electoral politics, mean that this person is anti-American, and that to support or even listen to what he has to say is somehow blasphemous to the great nation?

The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Alghonse Karr

What does it mean when that man is actually speaking to a deep historical condition of the same country, but no one wants to hear because it is too painful or would cause them to have to drastically revise their assumptions about the motives of their country?

I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.
Jimmy Dean

Does it mean that we are living in the political progeny of the Third Reich?

Tough times never last, but tough people do!
Robert Schuller


Does it mean that media outlets are essentially a propaganda arm of the nation-state?

Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive!
Sir Walter Scott, Marmion (1808)


If that is what it means, then what do we, as individuals of conscience who understand that the corporate media serve the militaristic and imperialist agendas of the nation-state, do?

Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster. And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.
Friedrich Nietzche

Can we, in good conscience, watch from the sidelines, nodding sagely as we use our keen insight to x-ray the situation? Or do we hunger to do something more?

If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.
-Abraham Lincoln

 

[Pathless]

Alice Walker has written a powerful and important article in response to the racial backlash of the Reverend Wright controversy.

White People Have a Racial History Too | Election 2008 | AlterNet

We lived in a shack without electricity or running water, under a rusty tin roof that let in wind and rain. Miss May went to school as a girl. The school my parents and their neighbors built for us was burned to the ground by local racists who wanted to keep ignorant their competitors in tenant farming. During the Depression, desperate to feed his hardworking family, my father asked for a raise from 10 dollars a month to 12. Miss May responded that she would not pay that amount to a white man, and she certainly wouldn't pay it to a ******. That before she'd pay a ****** that much money, she'd milk the dairy cows herself.

...

When I have supported white people, men and women, it was because I thought them the best possible people to do whatever the job required. Nothing else would have occurred to me. If Obama were in any sense mediocre, he would be forgotten by now. He is, in fact, a remarkable human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like Mandela is. We look at him, as we looked at them, and are glad to be of our species. He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change America must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves.

...

It is hard to relate what it feels like to see Mrs. Clinton (I wish she felt self-assured enough to use her own name) referred to as "a woman" while Barack Obama is always referred to as "a black man." One would think she is just any woman, colorless, race-less, past-less, but she is not. She carries all the history of white womanhood in America in her person; it would be a miracle if we, and the world, did not react to this fact. How dishonest it is, to attempt to make her innocent of her racial inheritance.

I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking, person to person, with any leader, woman, man, child or common person, in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks. I cannot see the same scenario with Mrs. Clinton, who would drag into 21st century American leadership the same image of white privilege and distance from the reality of others' lives that has so marred our country's contacts with the rest of the world.

Full article: White People Have a Racial History Too | Election 2008 | AlterNet

 

[YO-ELEVEN-11]

Alice Walker has written a powerful and important article in response to the racial backlash of the Reverend Wright controversy.

White People Have a Racial History Too | Election 2008 | AlterNet



Full article: White People Have a Racial History Too | Election 2008 | AlterNet

“To live is to choose. But to choose well, you must know who you are and what you stand for, where you want to go and why you want to get there.”

Kofi Annan quotes (Ghanaia