injunjane

In our small local organization helping Ukrainian army there are many different people, but our leader, a very clever and energetic woman from Western Ukraine, seems to be rather rigid in terms of motivation and rules for our, I dare say, resistance against the global evil.

She likes to repeat three keystones of Ukrainian national idea - "Army, language, faith" (Армія, мова, віра).

While I'm very much for army and language, my relationship with faith is complicated, I stopped attending Orthodox church many years ago - and from the very start, I came there not to become indoctrinated, but to get some info about 'spiritual world', an area completely new for me at that time as a person from an atheistic family.

My parents, however, were not really hardcore atheists. They were indoctrinated soviet citizens, their high education was in the field of engineering and so, not really allowing them to understand complex matters such as evolution...no real knowledge of genetics convincing me the most because it was proclaimed a bourgeois science at their time, and too early for molecular biology to provide even more direct evidence.

I went to discover religion because their indoctrinated empty atheism seemed to me unconvincing and quite hypocritical.

It was an interesting experience which I'd prefer never to repeat.
My current point of view on religion is that brilliantly described by Prof. Neil deGrasse Tyson: religion satisfies the need of having emotional contact with the Universe, as an opposite to the intellectual contact provided by science.
I, actually, have a huge need for both types of contact and preferably without intermediares.

So, to the question of "faith" and whether I have a choice in my aspiration to avoid religion and still be a kind and decent person :) I talked to ChatGPT (it's naive but really helps me to collect and rationalize my thoughts), and the result is below.

( Read more... )

Yesterday I listened to a well-known blogger covering ongoing events in Israel, and this time he was talking about global islamisation of the world.

What seemed remarkable to me was his thoughts on the problem of non-integration of Muslims into the Western culture (with the traditions that come not only from a common-root religion, Christianity, but also from the Roman law and German understanding of Ordnung). In particular, the blogger and his guest Dr. Dina Lisnyanskaya discussed the tendency of the reverse process - absorbing Muslim values by Western culture instead of converting Arabs to its own.

This seems a bit illogical: if Muslims are emigrating to countries with higher economic level, better life standards and, more importantly, with much higher respect for human rights - why not reject the values and lifestyle that keep their native countries down, accepting those that lead to social and personal prosperity?

I think these people want 'to sit on two chairs with one ass' - they want feed their Medieval fear of a god whose power is to give them good or bad life after death based only on keeping stupid rituals (because yes, in spite of those talks about being kind and decent official Islam IRL is mainly about rituals). And in the same time profit from the intellectual efforts of the culture concentrated on the real fleeting human life and making it comfortable.

The tendency that frightens me most is the Muslim vision of men and women, the statement that although 'they are formally equal' (spoiler: in fact they are not), men should be 'masculine' and women 'feminine'. Yes, that's just what we need - keeping naturally more aggressive male sex always aggressive, and bring even more progeny from women who have nothing else to do to the already heavily overpopulated planet.

What's feminine from Muslim point of view I saw very well during my three-week research in Eastern Turkey. Local girls, university students, were parading at +26C in black or dark-blue coats that didn't leave any piece of naked skin visible but were so tight one could hardly say these garments were 'modest' and 'not seductive'. Any of them had huge manicured nails, and so much makeup on their faces that by Western standards that would be for going to a night party (by Ukrainian standards some could call it 'prostitute style').

And those very feminine girls were openly pointing fingers at me right in the street, shouting "Look at her! She's not a woman! She carries a huge backpack instead of having a man do it for her!"

It seems to me that Western world started to define what's masculine or feminine in a similar way: by the looks and behaviour, ignoring actual biology. If you're a biological male but have a gentle mind, a passion for beautiful clothes and makeup - voila, you're a woman. Real men should be dirty, brutal and insensitive. Real women are defined by their seductiveness and submissiveness.

If this Medieval nonsense continues, I think humanity - and all our planet and its ecosystems, - are seriously doomed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1WHdbB3MG4