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Just signed-up and made my very first contribution as a Contract Reporter with OhmyNews, which is a South Korean web-based News, Opinion and Commentary site. They have a world-wide reporting network of what they term Citizen Reporters, and if you reckon you have something to say, and have the guts and the ‘chutzpah’ to give it a go, the answer is on the pages of OhmyNews, just like I have done!
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One of the problems with Legislation is that the drafters have to get it right!
Had a look at a failedParliamentary bill this being the Incitement to Religious Hatred Bill. Now here is a piece of legislation, presumably designed to stop people who are bent, for one reason or another, from publishing or saying something adverse about another’s religion, to the point where the recipient of this publication would be pushed to hating a religion, or a belief structure, or any number of variations on this theme!
Haven’t these clowns got anything better to do than try and regulate what is in someone’s mind, never mind printer queue? Let’s have a look at the process which would have to be followed in order to produce a result under this flawed law! Take the belief structures of the main religions of this strange and wonderful world of ours, if you will?
First up is a religion, which for reference sakes we’ll call AA, which states that they, (the believers) are the chosen people, and when the end comes, or the true coming, or whatever, they and only they, will all be taken up, installed alongside their beneficent maker for Eternity, and the rest can go hang, or whatever! Seems a little cavalier, especially when presumably everyone else was created by the same Maker!
Next is a whole heap of people, reference BB, all of whom believe that this main guy was the subject of a virgin birth, was at the same time the son of the Maker in the first outfit, he gets chopped rather badly, but then came back to life, and then headed upwards (why upwards, by the way?), and all believers will eventually reach paradise, and all unbelievers will head the other way, except those who have been good by their own standards, (seems another instance of, well, getting it both ways, if you get my drift?) One strange outcome of this bunch is a whole heap of preachers of the BB faith who have all been found guilty of sexual perversion practices in America, Ireland, England and elsewhere, (Can’t get the help to behave, happens all the time!)
An offshoot of the second bunch, reference CC, founded by a) a very strict and ascetic German (it just had to be Germany) preacher, who didn’t like the licentious activities under way by the bunch in the BB outfit, and also co-founded by b) a King who couldn’t father a boy (for the king’s heir industry, you understand), then wed four or six more in fairly quick succession without male heirs, eventually dying of syphilis; but the Religions founded by these two guys now extends, as the others, for a fairly well spread out portion of the population of this planet, with the leaders all saying such well meant notions as, ‘it’s okay now to marry one woman, and while uttering the very promises of marriage, bonking the behind off another woman who’s been in the background for thirty years; and then when the first wife kicks the bucket in a really fast car accident, you can marry the second, even though she’s been married before as well! Oh, and you can also continue to be a governor of Church CC, because it’s all right now, (and besides the wench is dead) (I think it’s called sophistry, which in online thesaurus terms also means chicanery, deception, deceptiveness, delusion, equivocation, evasion, fallacy, lie, oversubtleness, sophism, speciousness, spuriousness, trick; if you get my drift)!
Another outfit now comes along, reference DD, founded by this guy who produces this book full of deep and well-meant guidelines on how to live your life, and how this guy’s Maker version is the only one, and everyone had better live right, but the trouble is that the founder can’t write, so what do you know, the angels write it for him; (really fortunate, them coming along just like that!) This outfit has spread, as the others have, far and wide, but they are convinced that they’ve got the patent on being the true faith, and they tend to blow people up, which is a rather strange way of spreading your belief system, again if you get my drift?
There are others, such as outfits EE, based around the teachings of this really holy guy who preached pacifism, tolerance and love, which tends to draw devotees from east asian countries, but since they don’t push their beliefs, and certainly don’t blow anyone up, I don’t see it catching on; not enough ‘ooomph’ in the message; and also belief FF, who believe that all animals are holy, which tends to get in the way of mass food production, but since they are continually fighting and killing devotees of creed GG, who are an offshoot of brand DD, they tend to forget the love and reverence aspects.
So here we are, all supposed to be following the tenets of one brand or another, all of whose founders preached little else besides love, tolerance and good deeds, so why is the whole world going to hell in a hand basket, It can’t be religion’s fault, as they keep saying, “Just follow the Path, and all will be well!”
So when the first prosecution comes along under this new Act, are the judges gonna’ say, “Who wrote this garbage, not guilty!”
Read another piece where a leading Anglican churchman gets his knickers thoroughly twisted whilst trying to remove both feet from his mouth!
Seems as if some happy-clappy put this sign up outside several churches in Sydney! But to make matters infinitely worse, the religious leader then states that it shouldn’t read ‘Jesus Loves Osama’, but instead it should read:-
“Jesus doesn’t approve of Osama”
Consider the Germany of 1923; with inflation so bad that even the banks couldn’t print enough to keep pace with the surging demand for this useless paper. People took home their day’s pay in wheelbarrows, but by the time they went to spend it, it had already decreased in value so much that they needed double the amount first planned! Now in strict human terms, we are gifted with a certain amount of natural memory, so, one would think, it wouldn’t happen again! But remember it hitting many countries in Latin America, and then you realise that memories are indeed short! But time makes clever people, so one would think that maybe most governments have seen the light; think again, because there is Zimbabwe.
This once productive land, where they not only fed themselves, but exported huge surpluses to the south and the north, is slowly bleeding to death from hyper-inflation! While the idiots and brain-dead couch-potatoes of Britain watched the only show truly designed for morons, namely ‘Celebrity Big Brother’, a blogger writes, ” an elderly man had died, and his widow was forced to make some of the most heart-breaking and expensive decisions in their lives. The request was made for a cremation so that the ashes could be later given to the family. Cremations are undertaken in Harare but there is no gas in the country for the ovens. It may be three weeks, at the very least, before a cremation could be done. For each single day that the body was kept at the funeral home the widow would be charged half of her entire monthly pension. A simple burial in a local cemetery in the least expensive coffin now costs 400 000 dollars. This is the same as six months salary for one of the doctors presently on strike.” The blog goes on:- “Young and old, professionals and workers – we are all alike in this horrible reality of Zimbabwe – we cannot afford to live or to die here.
This is reality in Zimbabwe. Not reality TV, not a game show, just grim, sickening reality. We are a country that needs and deserves the world’s attention. Is anyone watching?”
A bank commences a huge campaign to ask the authorities to reduce crime, and give protection to all citizens! A good thing, you might state. What was the response of these particular Authorities?
They censored the letters, the leaflets and the video, and the bank caved in, and nothing was done, because the President and his Government might be held up to ridicule! Because the Government denies that there is a huge crime wave, and many of the criminals are either Police, Army or Government workers!
And where is this demi-Paradise?
Why, it’s Sunny South Africa, of course!
Listened on Classic FM to an advert for some charity or other, which commenced by telling us how many children died during the time it took to listen to the commercial, then invited the listeners to donate whatever to the fund to fight ‘early death’ or whatever; one of the multitude of charities fighting and begging for our attention and our money. Now I have nothing in principle against donating to charity, and if that is what you wish to do with your money, that’s entirely up to the reader; but have you ever sat back and considered why we are being asked to donate larger and ever larger sums to aid so-called ‘under-developed’ countries and the people who live inside these countries?
Consider our history as a time line, with a baseline somewhere around 1500 A.D. In Europe, we saw the birth of the Renaissance, with painting, sculpture and music being highlighted by mainly benevolent rulers; advances in engineering, medicine and culture, with hiccups provided by war, pestilence and religious upheaval. We saw the birth of the travels of the great explorers, many of whom were also serial bandits, but that was the way of things; the Ottoman invasion reached as far as Austria and Spain, but they were repulsed and sent packing. From the Far East, the Chinese sent marine expeditions towards India and Java, while at home they invented gunpowder and printing. The Japanese traditions in martial arts, literature and music flourished! Have you noticed anything or anyone missing? Of course you have, Africa for one! While Europe was hurling itself forward in seven different directions; while the Far Eastern nations were working out who was top dog, the whole of the African continent was just sitting there like a big soft clump; no cultural initiatives, no explorers, no push for the new and distant; the whole continent just stagnated in tribal ignorance and poverty!
What, you may ask, has this got to do with a request for donations to some well-meaning charity? Well, I’ll tell you my view! The sorry truth is that the whole continent, wracked as it is with serial pestilence such as AIDS, corruption, tribal ignorance and just plain downright larceny by the rulers and some of the inhabitants, should be let go and rot, because if we continue to give, the tiny bunch of long-term thieves and vagabonds who masquerade as African governments will accept our money with open hands, while completely ignoring the desperate need for change within their own ranks! What can be done with a society such as that in South Africa, where the practice of virgin rape is preached and practiced, when the young and not-so-young males are encouraged by the ‘sangoma’ or witch doctor to attack and rape the young and defenceless girls of their own villages, because that will act as a ‘cure’ for the AIDS that these so-called men have succumbed to, because they cannot understand that to undertake promiscuous sexual activities, whether homo- or hetero-sexual without precautions will inevitably lead to HIV and AIDS!
Wind? A breeze perhaps!
The residents of a small village in rural Zimbabwe return to the hum-drum way of life which has become the norm in that tattered land; they were burying their dead! Many of the mourners are dressed in bright red church uniforms, which give a splash of colour in an otherwise uniformly-drab landscape. The hearse, which in fact was a small blue, dilapidated pick-up truck, held the cheap plywood coffin along with many more mourners perched precariously along the sides of the truck body. The road is strewn with fronds and leaves, giving a smooth and hushed passage to the remains which head for the cemetery. The death certificate has not been filled out correctly, as the true cause of this death is starvation, but instead is given as heart failure! The last time the doctor filled out the correct cause of death on a certificate, he spent four days in his own hospital from the reprisal beating! The sounds of the funeral fill the air; the singing, the clapping, the blowing of a horn! The sounds of real life in a country with the world’s highest rate of inflation, and the world’s lowest life expectancy!
Some miles down the dusty roads, the birthday celebrations for the beloved leader, President Mugabe, are well under way. Costing some £60 thousand pounds in sterling, of course, with the appropriate Zimbabwe cost running at some Z$300 million (just to give you some idea of the heavy toll of inflation). The Opposition parties, muted but still active despite the batons, tear gas and riot police, sneer at the panoply of praise for a man whose politics have sent this once-rich country into a terminal decline, but he and his Zanu-PF bullies take no notice! The first winds of Cyclone Favio are stirring the branches of the trees in the leafy suburbs of Harare, but no-one in power seems to care!
The winds of change don’t blow fast enough for some!