New film, "The Campaign" and how it relates to real US politics

New film, "The Campaign" and how it relates to real US politics

By Dark Politricks

I watched the new Will Ferrel film, "The Campaign" the other day at the cinema.

I would class it as a comedy that wasn't far off from pure satire and if you took the jokes out you would be left with 90% political reality when it comes to US politics.

Here are just a few examples from the film that can easily be related to actual political events or people in US elections.

1. You have a real dumb stupid candidate running for office that know even less about life and reality than Christine O'Donnel - hard I know but a long debate could be had about it for sure.

2. Politicians that mention the word "Jesus" along with "Support the troops" at any opportunity just because the "crowd loves it" and it makes them look patriotic.

3. Politicians who are in that large majority of people "following" the Christian faith but don't chose to walk in Jesus's footsteps. Basically people who believe they can do what they want as long as when they are caught out they repent their sins and ask for forgiveness from the lord and savior  People who drink, take drugs, have sex with prostitutes or affairs and then are forgiven by a public with a very short memory. I can think of more than a few politicians that meet this criteria on both sides of the aisle.

4. The "evil" billionaire brothers (mmm wonder who they could be satirising who believe they can just "buy" a district by supporting a candidate with huge amounts of money through Super PACS and donations. A candidate who is "in their pocket" and will do whatever they want including vote how they are told if elected. I wonder how many US politicians are enslaved by their election funders wishes?

5. The brothers belief that American wages are too high whilst Chinese workers, slaving away for only 50¢'s an hour (it might have even been a day) are just about right. They want to abolish all health and safety regulations, any form of workers rights or unions, age limits and basically turn a whole US district into a Chinese sweatshop colony inside the USA. Funny in the film but when you realise that American's don't make anything anymore and the USA's biggest export is rubbish to China you don't have to stretch your mind too far to believe it could happen seeing the US is indebted to China by a huge amount of money.

There are plenty of financial commentators who believe the USA is in the process of getting the country ready for Chinese style working and living conditions and they might not be so far fetched. The police state is already implemented and any recovery in the economy is going to be service based just like Thatchers transformation of the UK in the 80's and we now all live in an economy that can always be bettered by a country willing to work for less. A country dependent on crooks and banksters to pay the bills is in an even worse position i.e City of London & the UK.

6. Sexual shenanigans by the politician that is instantly spun into a "positive" and then forgiven by the public due to the politician being a "real gun weilding man". There was even a poster of Will Ferrell with his arm around a picture of Jesus on a massive billboard holding a gun.

7. The threats by the billionaire brothers to drop millions of dollars of negative advertising into the distinct labeling the opponent as a Marxist and Commie just because he owned a couple of Chinese dogs! It reminded me of that attack advert on Mitt Romney where he was criticised for speaking French!

8. The smile-less, Karl Rove like character that managed the campaign from the background. Spinning bad news into good and pulling strings in the background. Don't all political campaigns have shadowy figures or people that "make things happen" and "clean up" after their candidates nowadays?

9. The Dick Cheney like incident in which one politician shot the other after he slept with his wife on a hunt and actually received a bump in the polls for doing so.

10. The electronic voting machines that were owned by the brothers company and insinuated that the vote had been fixed "their way" because of hacking. Computer hacking that has been proven again and again by the hacking of Diebold voting machines used in swing states like Ohio in recent elections.

Oh there were so many satirical comparisons that could be made you could go on forever but I would suggest to anyone that it is a good excuse to watch a funny film and just count those comparisons for yourself.

As they say Satire is often the truest way of seeing the idiocy of politics and politicians.

How do you differentiate a cult from a religion

By Dark Politricks

Watching Big Questions this morning (2 articles in a row now its spawmed) there was only one question which was "What's the difference between a Cult and Organised Religion"

On one side were the standard old age religionists, Christians, Catholics, Rabbis and Muslims and on the other side we had members of existing "new" religions such as Raelians, Moonies - or as they are called now members of the "Unification Church", an ex member of the Branch Davidians which if you remember was the target of the ATF and FBI ended up in a state sanctioned massacre of 82 religious people.

The audience was also filled with ex members of cults, physchologists who have studied the "brainwashing" techinques used by such called groups and other affected by these groups in one way of another. In my mind it is quite simple but lets look at a definition of a Cult

• a particular system of religious worship, especially with reference to its rites and ceremonies.
• an instance of great veneration of a person, ideal, or thing, especially as manifested by a body of admirers: the physical fitness cult.
• the object of such devotion.
• a group or sect bound together by veneration of the same thing, person, ideal, etc.
• Sociology . a group having a sacred ideology and a set of rites centering around their sacred symbols.

Lets look at the definition of a Religion

• a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.
• a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects: the Christian religion; the Buddhist religion.
• the body of persons adhering to a particular set of beliefs and practices: a world council of religions.
• the life or state of a monk, nun, etc.: to enter religion.
• the practice of religious beliefs; ritual observance of faith.

In mine and many in the audiences (apart from those belonging to organised religions) not much differece. Jesus was supposedly a characteristic person who had followers - apparantly a key sign of a cult.

The same could be said about Mohammed, Buddha, Hari Krishna and many other "old religions".

 The disagreement seems to be as one person said one of size. The Catholic Chuch is a huge and rich organisation whereas some of the orgainisations called cults such as the Raelians who believe we were created (just as scientisits on this planet are now starting to do with DNA) by human beings from another planet in the universe. A case of aliens geo-engineering the earth and it's inhabitants.

When compared to some of the stories that the "official" religions believe in such as virginial births, coming back to life after dying and peforming miracles not too bizare a belief. What got my interest though was that one of the audience members said to an ex member of the Branch Davidians asked whether the leader David Koresh sexually abused children at the branch.

The member denied this but others of the "scientific" community said that one of the signs of a cult as compared to a religion was the sexual abuse that was endemic within cults which had such charesmatic leaders that the followers did whatever he said due to brain washing techniques as well as the cult of personality.

This seemed to be a big difference between living your life by a set of defined values (as Christians, Jews and Muslims supposedly do) whilst cult members didn't.

 There wasn't any mention of the numerous cases of sexual abuses, pedophilia, cover ups and criminal cases over the years that have been engrained in "old religons" since their conception. We have just experience a major Catholic cover up over its treatment of pedophile priests which led all the way up to the ex Nazi Youth Pope.

Court case after case in Ireland has shown the Catholic Church to be one of the biggest organised pedophole rings in the world - and one of the most well funded and protected. The same sort of sexual abuse has been endemic in Chrisitian history for a long time.

Why a man of breeding age would willingly chose abstinence and the company of little boys over a normal life seems obvious to me but in these times where phychology would give more than one answer it seems like an old excuse to hide ones sexual pedidocs from the community at large.

Islam has always had its critics from those who called the original "cult leader" Mohammed certain terms for the age of some of his wives. However in some states of America where the age in some states it's 18 you might call the Spannish strange for having an age of consent of only 13 and other European countries from 13, 14 up to 18. Even in some places in Africa and Asia is not uncommon for child weddings where an old man takes a 12 year old as a wife. From Wikipedia:

Traditionally, across the world, the age of consent for a sexual union was a matter for the family to decide, or a tribal custom. In most cases, this coincided with signs of puberty, menstruation for a woman and pubic hair for a man. In Ancient Rome, it was very common for girls to marry and have children shortly after the onset of puberty. The first recorded age-of-consent law dates back 800 years:

In 1275, in England, as part of the rape law, a statute, Westminster 1, made it a misdemeanor to "ravish" a "maiden within age," whether with or without her consent. The phrase "within age" was interpreted by jurist Sir Edward Coke as meaning the age of marriage, which at the time was 12 years of age. In the 12th century Gratian, the influential founder of Canon law in medieval Europe, accepted age of puberty for marriage to be between 12 and 14 but acknowledged consent to be meaningful if the children were older than 7.

There were authorities that said that consent could take place earlier. Marriage would then be valid as long as neither of the two parties annulled the marital agreement before reaching puberty, or if they had already consummated the marriage. It should be noted that Judges honored marriages based on mutual consent at ages younger than 7, in spite of what Gratian had said; there are recorded marriages of 2 and 3 year olds.

And then there is the Jewish Talmud, the book of laws made by Rabbis that is full of teachings that allow Rabbis to have sex with girls of extremley young ages or not consider rape illegal if the man was a rabbi.

These Talmudic laws have been known for a long time but are not unique for an age in which rape wasn't even considered a crime. Even in England raping your wife wasn't considered a crime until back in 1990. So sexual behaviour cannot be considered a sign of cultish behaviour.

However when a science fiction writer claims that "the best way to make a million dollars is to start a religion" and then goes on to do exactly that. Charging people thousands of dollars for learning it's many steps up to the big reveal, the "ultimate secret" one that wouldn't be out of place in any science fiction book:

Scientologists believe that 75 million years ago an evil galactic ruler, named Xenu, solved overpopulation by bringing trillions of people to Earth in DC-8 space planes, stacking them around volcanoes and nuking them. Then the souls of these dead space aliens were captured and boxed up and taken to cinemas where they were shown films of what life should be like, false ideas containing God, the devil and Christ and told to get ill. After that they supposedly clustered together and now inhabit our bodies. Scientologists believe that if they rid themselves of these body thetans then they will be healthier and will gain special powers like mind-over-matter.

People who try to leave are harrassed, treated as traitors and have even had to face legal cases over their revelations of the "big secret" that people like Tom Cruise and John Travolata pay up to $500,000 for this top secret information.

No wonder the Church of Scientology wants to keeps it's big secret secret! 

So there seems to be clear cases of made up religions that can be called cults, in which the aim of the organisation is to extract money from the member instead of a pay if you want to bag of donations passed around a Church on a Sunday morning.

However it seems that if one were to go back to the start of each off shoot of the Abrahamic faith with today's knowledge and science each new religion could easily fail into the class of a cult.

In my mind it is up to you what you want to believe but mocking anothers belief using claims that could easily fit your own brand of spiritual belief is stretching rationality at least a little.

When the definition of what is a religion and a cult are so indistinguisable from each other then maybe members of either grouping should stop to consider their beliefs before slagging off their opponents.

I'm right because my religious book says so therefore you must all be wrong is not a logical argument that standa up too long at all.

An Atheist Christmas Celebration

By Dark Politricks

This is a special time of year for Atheists where we piggyback off the Christian / Mithrian / Druid celebration of the winter solstice and enjoy eating far too much, getting drunk, giving gifts to family and friends and complain about the dross that TV schedulers have cooked up for us to watch.

For those of you that actually believe that Jesus Christ, the son of God, was actually born on December 25th I would urge you to do some basic historical research about why Christmas is the date it is and I would urge you to try and read some books that are NOT written by Christian apologetics who would most likely suggest that any previous religions that had the same special dates, customs and rituals were all frauds created by God to test your faith.

In ye olden days, the pagans of northern Europe celebrated the winter solstice, known as Yule, which symbolised the birth of the pagan Sun God, Mithras. It was customary to light a candle to encourage Mithras, and the sun, to reappear next year. Huge Yule logs were burned in honour of the sun. Mistletoe was considered a sacred plant, and the custom of kissing under the mistletoe began as a fertility ritual. Holly berries were thought to be a food of the gods.

In ancient Babylon, the feast of the Son of Isis (Goddess of Nature) was celebrated on December 25. Raucous partying, gluttonous eating and drinking, and gift-giving were traditions of this feast. The Romans obviously liked a good party and before Rome converted to Christianity, the Winter Solstice and Saturnalia, which was an orgiastic festival in honor of Saturn, were marked by much merrymaking.

So is just pure co-incidence that Jesus was born on December 25th and that the Christian religion seems to have taken all its symbolism and other festive customs from earlier religions? No its not, it was because in 350AD Pope Julius I declared that Christ's birth would be celebrated on December 25 and the change of birthday from a more likely September time was a direct encouragement to pagans to swap faith. The "day of rest", which is currently Sunday was also changed from the Jewish Sabbath to make it easier for believers in Mithras to swap over to Christianity.

So why do I as an Atheist celebrate Christmas? Well I do it because its an English tradition, a custom that allows me time off work and a chance to enjoy some fun with friends and the family. I get to drink too much and eat special meals without feeling guilty as well as giving and receive gifts and being thankful for making it through another year alive.

I don't have any problem with the fact that I don't believe Jesus was actually born on this date. Even though I am an atheist I do actually believe Jesus as a historical person existed, however I have no reason to believe that he was the son of God or even thought that he was. I have read too many books on the Jerusalem Church and the dynastic form it took which meant that when Jesus died his brother James took over and so on and how the word Messiah as the Christians use it has no relation to the actual Jewish meaning. In fact the Christian religion is founded upon so much mistranslation, hearsay and re-appropriation that I doubt anything fundamentalist Christians believe in is actually true or that it originates with their chosen belief system. More importantly if it wasn't for a vision by Saul / Paul someone who never even met Jesus then this religion wouldn't have existed in the form it does today at all.

I welcome as many fundamentalist religious nutters to come and slate me as possible as I enjoy reading your rants on other sites. It often amuses me how you quote passage after passage from the bible as if that actually proved anything. If the bible was written by man, which is was, then using the bible as proof of a God is just ridiculous. If anyone today wrote such a book and claimed it was the word of God what would happen to them? They would be locked away for their own safety. Therefore if you don't believe those that claim they are in communication with God today then why is it you believe those that claimed so thousands of years ago? What is the logical difference between the regular nutter in the street on a Saturday afternoon with his loudspeaker and John the Baptist?

I give you the following video from the philosopher and writer Bertrand Russell about his thoughts on God and the Christian religion.