silver tongued arrogance

The democratic civilities around religious liberty and all having lots of different views on what happens when we die, is among the widest appreciated and valued items of personal liberty. We remember the Middle Ages history of inquisitions and religious wars, and every time religion comes up we experience the value of our liberty to think something else than the person or group we are talking to. Some follow a politeness tip to avoid it in conversation because of the different views, but folks interested in the subject enjoy exploring the ideas range.

Part of the civil coexistence is to know that we will each apply our own beliefs to each other's deaths. That's common sense. The only exception to the civility is the insultingness and evil fear play involved in threats of hell, and those are obviously a personal hostility and bigotry so they breach civility. All the range of beliefs that are not control threats or hostile like that, but that are civil to imagine, the civility of coexistence applies to. Whatever you believe about death is what you believe has happened.

An author of a well regarded autism book interpreting our community as a civil rights movement, Neurotribes, Steve Silberman, has died suddenly. There is some mourning around on Facebook. But also, there is a post going round, that he posted only a year before, telling everyone how to react to his death. It orders, dictates, not to react to it saying anything that expressed any afterlife beliefs. He calls those "comforting fables", which comes from the hardline atheist astronomer Carl Sagan. He was entitled to his view like anyone, and to have any memorials follow it. But he was not entitled to dictate to everyone else not to react to the event of his death through their beliefs.

He dictates to all to take an anti-afterlife lesson of our impermanence, from his death. Dictates to arrive at his view. That's overbearing dictatorial arrogance. He tried to use instruction on how to handle his death, to trap folks into his belief position, as an outcome of following the instruction. To censor folks' own perceptions in how they react to a death. That was controlling arrogance and a misuse of the civility code around death.

For it he forfeits the civility code. Your beliefs are your human right. It makes it fair to only remember him as an arrogant jerk. To realise from this that he was that, and for it not ceased to merit positive remembering.

Maurice Frank
4 Sep 2024

Is there gentle caring society without religious places in it?

Here's proud of a Youtube comment I just made, on how sneery tough antagonistic character types - the human majority - can't get along well in a thinking way and create local social scenes around their ideas. Anyone who wants that to happen needs to be favourable to making social behaviour softer and more including and welcoming than it usually is.

It's an atheist cartoonist, called "DarkMatter2525", - hey I happen to be sceptical of dark matter. In this cartoon www.youtube.com/watch?v=wguAQHWVcZY he complains that urban America is very densely full of churches, and atheists feel hassled by it. This was one of his emotionally serious offerings, probably his most self-troubled one.

He is a prolific maker of comedy cartoons on theology, though like all the Youtube atheists he never looks at the thesis of a God not having any magic omnipotence. The cartoons directly about conservative and morally harsh religious ideas, and how they would really work out for society if practised literally, are addictively incisive and what any conservative theocracy needs to hear. They are really good and deliciously libertarian. Others are turkeys leaving you furious at wasting time on them: those are the ones where he digresses onto lots of unnecessary sex and nudity themes to make himself look cool. Comics with macho characters always do that. Particularly offensive in some of his cartoons are some too harshly head-on uninhibited depictions of violent or medically tragic deaths, within a comedy context, made shockingly coldly unfeelingly by someone who believes in no existence after death, and wishes to attract his viewers to that harsh macho belief too - all those of his cartoons are just as bad as the harsh scriptures he argues for being offended by.

His sense of humour is emotionally gloating and psychologically sneering in the misery ehancing horrible way that has remained popular ever since the barbaric "alternative" comedy of the 80s started it. There was a clue in there to his complaint, to the social imbalance favouring Christians over atheists in having any neighbourhood social life with likeminded folks towards religion and its issues. And it's not only Christians, it's everyone who feels compatible with a church, you might not be a Christian but still feel likdminded enough with a liberal church to belong to it socially. I wrote -
"
" Plenty of nice folks are atheists. But the milder forms of organised religion, regardless of their content's rightness or wrongness, have a social virtue that practically nothing else achieves [besides the aspie scene, hopefully!] - they bring together softer gentler characters and give them a social space to be themselves and accepted, a refuge. From what? From human uncivilisation, from persecution by all the derisive-hearted macho thug chararcters who are a tyranny of conformity to a futile harsh cycle of sneer and violence which destroys everything nice. And because being macho includes deriding every nice idea in religions, not for being wrong but for being nice, macho sneer characters are always atheists.

This makes it far harder for atheists than for the religious, to like each other and get along well socially. Consequently, they can't form so many local associations equivalent to churches. The religious outcompete you not on ideas, their ideas can be dumb without limit, but on escape from cruel human nature. If humans were socially nicer than we are, there would be an equal spread of atheist churches. If you want to fight back from being surrounded by churches, encourage atheists to be saintly instead of tough personalities, ignore every macho sod who drops atheism in disgust at it, and look forward to the quality life of basking in warm-hearted tolerant soppy company.

That prospect is not shaking your self-esteem, is it? because that wouldn't be the rational response to its reasoned merits.
"

Maurice Frank

now uniforms take life, preventably

Many papers today carry a child death story that challenges anyone willing to persist in believing there is any good at all in the physical world. In the Australian floods, a boy aged 13 was swept away and killed, along with his mum, when the floodwaters swamped their car, the reason why they narrowly missed rescue by a truck driver was because this boy made said rescuer save his younger brother first !

Now, there is more to this horror than accident. Here is the twist to make you angry, that adds to this story an element of human evil which our scene could have prevented: quoting from the Metro's story, "Ms Rice and her sons were returning from a trip to buy school uniforms when they were caught up in what police called an "inland instant tsunami."""

This is a child's life actually ended, entirely by reason of the prison badge of children's enslavement, and the obligation on families to actually buy with their own money the chains of their own oppression. To make this purchase mattered enough to go driving in the middle of a flood crisis for specifically this purpose, to buy a degrading slave costume whose communist purpose as openly declared by the nutty professor - see last post - is to airbrush away children's personal identity and give physical form to a state of possessed subjection.

For a century we have been told school uniforms do all these wonderful things. Anyone who defends them now is seen to defend costing lives and intentionally to be willing to cost more lives, and this is for a purpose of destroying liberty.

This includes any big autism organisation that continues not to speak out against them, and against all uniforms ever, as they owe to adult workers too. For years the big organisations have known this need exists. For years they have kept themselves on hobnobbing terms with employers and teachers. This boy most likely was not one of us, and there is no need for him to have been. Remember, acting on aspies' biological needs will get rid of uniforms, not just for aspies, but for everyone. If the big autism organisations had done this, then thanks to autism knowledge, uniforms could have been eradicated all over the democratic world years before now, for everyone. Then, by the reported facts, this family's fatal car journey would not have happened.

This be on the head of all limits to publishing of facts, all control and filtering of issues, that has existed in the autism scene. In the media too.

Meanwhile, yesterday, here, parliament threw out Hugh O'Donnell's bill for an autism strategy, at first stage, by 109 votes to 5. I watched them in the public gallery, all jumping on the momentum to say oh it's not proven what difference this would make oh we need less obligations for service users to run around trying to enforce and we need more time muddling along as we are. The way they seized on the committee report to criticise the bill for being too noncommittal! is an irony howling against the way all law is practised at present. All of them every day are in the political class's game of always being noncommittal, and now they have damned a bill for the same thing.

It is an indictment of the NAS for its insistence on legalese drafting of the bill. In the consultations last year, we put in for using ordinary language, and through it, for having some committality about what the bill would definitely make happen. The NAS have dominated this entire campaign, and their aversion to committal obligations to any issues that come from us to them, has delivered this rubbish outcome for them and us alike.

Maurice Frank