Practical Religion

करणी माता मंदिर
















In India there is a temple devoted to Holy rats
(called kabbas),
who are fed milk and other delicacies.
In India - and elsewhere in Asia also -
human defecation is a vast problem
(especially for women)
because even simple latrines are relatively rare.
Rats are coprophagous (eat human shit), -
so why not open public lavatories
with cubicles, but without plumbing,
as Sani-Rat-Temples dedicated without detriment
to Karni-Mata and coprolaborative ratolatry

so as to solve the ever-increasing problem
of execrably-ubiquitous human excrement ?

Rats are as edible as dogs and pigs* and pigeons
and many other birds -
but (of course) there would still remain
the problem of their turds...

*Coprophagous rats, dogs and pigs are haram to Muslims
(even in zoos ?)
and are unclean, infect, forbidden flesh for Jews.

Perhaps

nobody is undamaged by civilisation
within whose confines so many millions are destroyed
by disappointment.

A harsh tongue

should be exercised softly.

Schrödinger's T-shirt

is - and is not.
What
pussy-rot...

Verily, I say unto you

that those who concern themselves
with The Truth
(which cannot be other than a belief)
don't necessarily have an interest
in transparency or truthfulness.

Stendhal said

that there is no hypocrisy
in mathematics.
But there are no cuddles, either.

The Everlasting* TV Spectacular

DEATH ON EARTH.

*as long as electricity is generated.

How to indulge your moments of minor megalomania:

Tell any approaching (trousered) male that his flies are undone
and he will bow most elegantly and deferentially before you .
Then run.

Perhaps it's not just humans who are phoney !

More on the sometimes irrational Reverence for Reason

by the often-irrational playwright and thinker, George Bernard Shaw:

'The reasonable man attempts to adapt himself to the world,
and the unreasonable man attempts to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore all change is created by the unreasonable man.'

Of course, this syllogism (like any other) is true only if the first statement is true.
And of course it is not - or not entirely.
Any human activity can be seen as an attempt to change or manipulate the world.

What is certainly irrational is the ever-increasing worship of action and energy,
production and destruction, alongwith the inability and lack of desire
to be quiet and calm.

The Survival of the Fittest.

B I G M O U T H

For World's Sake Stop Worshipping Reason

and the virtues of "rational" thought,
Professor Dawkins,
rather than practising it.
Non-transcendental atheism* is no better than doctrinal religion -
indeed it is a kind of doctrine. Doctrines are never rational
and cause immense distress.

The virtue of augury, for example,
lies in its sheer
randomness ...

* e.g. anti-doctrinal Zen

A message open to antinatalist interpretation.

(Jannah = Paradise)

A Swiftian View.

On the Planet of Pain
the Zombies and the Loonies
wage war on each other
while they rape
their heavenly body.

The most rational humans have been supplanted

because rational behaviour
is not conducive to survival.
Is this the rational explanation
of the present world-wide
religious revival ?

So much more healthy than butter!

This is how margarine is made.

Note: some is made from sunflower oil,
and some from palm oil, product of devastated rain-forests.
Canola = rapeseed in British English.

Some reasons why

even The Good News network is depressing:

Organized Wave of Helping Others Sweeps Atlanta.

Environmental Defense Fund aims to Protect Penguins from the Effects of Climate Change.

Dog Hailed As Hero After Alerting Deaf Teen to Fire.

Firefighters Save Exhausted Horse From Mud Pit.

Toddler Saves Elderly Man Locked Inside Hot Car

Germany Pledges $1 Billion to UN Green Climate Fund
“This announcement ends the deafening silence we’ve had so far around the empty Green Climate Fund that is supposed to support poor countries in the battle against climate change,”
Jan Kowalzig, a campaigner with the development charity Oxfam said in an e-mailed statement.
“Now others must follow suit.”

Pædophobia

Children appal me -
because they'll probably grow old enough
(human beings never 'grow up')
to engender more children.

Another twist.

The happy bonobo's unhappy cousins

gazed at god-droppings
and called them planets and stars,
then, ever tortured by restlessness,
decided to colonise Mars.

An Irish saying worth musing on.

"In every land*,
hardness is in the north of it,
softness in the south,
industry in the east,
fire and inspiration in the west."

*In the Northern Hemisphere, presumably...

As pædophiles are revealed to be legion

and terrorists appear to multiply
no parent or would-be parent
should now be loath
to reflect upon the possibility
that the darling new baby might grow up
to be either, or both.

The Security State

in the form of Liberal Democracies says:
“If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.” 
But the reality is that if you want to do something right,
you have quite a lot to fear.
Edward Burke's dictum is ever more often repeated:
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
And lo! most not-bad people can do nothing.
And perhaps, as Karl says,

"All it takes for evil to triumph is for people to exist." 

The Island of Unmarked Graves.

First,
the many hundreds of thousands
of Great Famine victims who perished in the workhouses;

and recently,
the thousands of 'bastard' babies & young children
who died in the Catholic 'Mother and Baby Homes' -

Ireland: 'Land of Saints and Scholars'...

Masturbation News

Item 1.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer Pardons Anti-Masturbation Mascot Arrested For Public Masturbation.

 

Item 2.

The long list of comments on this site includes:  

Suddenly I feel a lot less conflicted about watching amputee dwarf porn.

Do they eat the fish afterwards???

By George! they may be as intelligent as humans.

My anthro prof saw a chimp use a bloated dead frog for a similar purpose.

It must be all the porn being dumped in the sea.

SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH!

As Communication becomes

ever more fragmented and banal
I fear that friendship becomes ever more
vapid and hollow.

Educational Hubris.

The sad result of being able to read
is that you almost certainly come to believe
that the world is knowable,
and truth definable, describable.

The Finds of a Canine Investigator.

click the photo to read about and see the exhibition.

Mixed Myths

Eva/Pandora notoriously liberated Discord
with the host of bad things from her jar.

But this was not so terrible
as the (ultimate) release of Hope,
which, re-named Aspiration,
was the sin of Lucifer.

Every civilisation is dystopic.

Considering just 'our' little Solar System,

a human individual on planet Earth
is nothing much.  But our sad cultures
and economies depend on constantly assuring us
that each individual is important, that every
human life is sacred,
despite all evidence to the contrary.

What merit

is there in possessing the faculty of reason
if it is not used, or, worse, craftily misused ?

True Confession

In a society where nothing true is valued
I am almost happy to be not worth knowing.

'Perhaps the greatest principle in politics

is that people love to be frightened.'
- Michael Oakeshott 

But only up to a point, of course,
and only those people who do not spend their whole lives in fear.

Beating about the Bush.

Child Sexual Abuse & Pædophilia
are today's hot horror-topics in the British press. 
But we never learn who did what to whom,
are not entrusted with the details of the frightfulness.

The Ex-poet's Lament (part-plagiarised)

When I start on a poem I have a simple plan:
say something provocative and be sure to make it scan,
be honest and original, not worry about rhyme
but create a potent word-swell to echo throughout time
;-)
But poems are like lovers: they can bring a little pride -
or else they make you conscious of an emptiness inside.
But I can't stop composing them, and some* are very fine,
while others** are just doggerel that wither on the vine.

*e.g. these
** like this one

Now that the world has been taken over

by celebrity and celebrities,
anyone who is really someone
has to be a nobody.

Religion

is a horse-drawn car upon the tramlines of belief.
But - of course -
'spirituality' involves concern about the horse.

Assonant Confession of a Lone Wolf.

Mostly I merely cope with
other people's company.
But cannabis can sometimes help
to relieve their monotony.

It was inevitable

that worship of busyness (in mediæval monasteries)
should lead to worship of business.

Double standard.

Emotional Intelligence
is held to be A Good Thing,
while Emotional Reasoning is not.
But who can tell where one ends
and the other begins ?  It all depends...

The long and the short of it.

Most of life is unmemorable
and indescribable.

"Everybody wants to 'save' the world -

but no-one wants to help Mom with the dishes,"
wrote P.J. O'Rourke.

A true Dissident is one who likes washing dishes
and knows that the world is unsalvageable.

Yours smugly  :-)

Excuses for Dumping.

On seeing clearly : Charities.

A few hyper-active people
help to counteract the damage
that millions of other hyper-active people
wreak on each other and the world.
But some of these few, of course
(perhaps self-blindingly)
make the damage worse.

"A strange peculiarity of the shop was that it bore no signboard.

Once it had had a large signboard which a memorable gale had blown into the Square.  Mr Baines had decided not to replace it.  He had always objected to what he called puffing, and for this reason would never hear of such a thing as a Clearance Sale.  The hatred of puffing grew on him until he came to regard even a sign as puffing.  Uninformed persons who wished to find Baines's must ask and learn.  For Mr Baines, to have replaced the sign would have been to condone, yea, to participate in, the modern craze for unscrupulous self-advertisement."
 
- Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives' Tale.

Mr Baines is a man to admire!

Not following the money.

If Science were a tap
I'd turn it off.

'You are what you eat.'

So much dead meat.

The curious thing about life

is that it is such an incomplete
waste of time.

Lines of Defence.

Despite the loss of compulsory heterosexuality
there remain other bastions of normality :
compulsory reproduction,
compulsory education
compulsory nationality...

SUPERB NEW

poems of the month
Beyond the Pale.

The Western Mind-set:

Some dogs can learn certain tricks,
therefore all dogs must learn them.
Hence governments have bought
"...that poison-gas of Education
which paralyses ... independent thought..." 
[Norman Douglas]

Life in a big city.

So much - and so many - so close...