Notices by Ooze 𓁟 (ooze@aus.social), page 2

Death Drives A Pale Limousine

Humans love anthropomorphisms! It makes it easy for us to think about concepts if we dress them up as humans. Death is no exception. Western culture has the grim reaper with his long black robe, scythe and his pale horse. But where did this Death come from and what came before him?

What is possibly the earliest known representation of Death, found at the Neolithic settlement at Catal Huyuk in Anatolia, shows Death as gigantic black birds, of vulture like appearance, who menace headless human corpses1. But this culture is mostly unknown to us so an understanding of this representation is beyond us at present. But they are black, which is the first attribute of our Death.

In Mesopotamian times the personification of Death was Nergal. In early lore he was handed charge of the underworld by his parents Enlil and Ninlil2, but it later times he was said to have obtained his dominion by marring Ereshkigal, Queen of the Great Below3. He is the first known representation of Death wearing a black robe, and he is armed with a scimitar and a staff4. Nergal is not a punishing Death but he is an inflicted death, which is reflected in his also being the god of war and pestilence. He is the essence of destruction, but there is no intent, no sense of death as a moral consequence, though deaths are sometimes brought about by him by means of daemons.

Read the rest of this post at https://ooze.net/death-drives-a-pale-limousine/

#Death #histodons #Religion #History

Dogmatic religion is a bitch. It destroys the very core of people.

Humans are social creatures. So when our cherished others share with us that it is possible to know the love of a perfect being, to be enfolded in the bliss of union with it, if only we follow some rules, we naturally strive to seek this perfection. But the rules are the thing. When we submit to rules we want to know that they are justified. That they will be efficacious. But dogma, the insistence on unquestioning faith, does not give us such reassurance.

Any dogmatic set of rules is functionally unattainable in the long term because of the power of doubt. Dogmatism is not a natural part of what it is to be human. We thirst for understanding. And, while there is a great truth in not being a slave to the why of things, in sometimes accepting things as they are even though we cannot yet understand them, we will never cease completely to ask why.

Whenever there are rules they are broken. Always. If there is a rule, someone is breaking it. But with dogmatic religion it is always the rules held in the highest regard that are broken. Not just broken, smashed. The most proscribed precepts serving only to indicate the nature of the depravity of the oppressors. Our tender bliss seeking hearts recoil from this hypocrisy. And we instantly see the deception that these others have perpetrated upon us. And we hate them for it.

And if we are hurt enough, we defensively reject the entire possibility of the blissful union ever existing at all. We want our money back, because the thing they sold us does not exist. Or so we think. We think this because the hypocrites who taught us are hooked on the idea that there is only one way to characterize the perfect thing, and it is their characterization. All the other ones are evil. The god of Abraham boldly declares that all other gods are evil and untrue, false and deceiving, or even, the big lie, simply nonexistent. Like a spoiled toddler, his every utterance an insistent cry of There Can Be Only One.

This is often the first clue to us that the god of love they say they are recommending might not be quite as loving as they make him out to be. Even though we reject them once we see their hypocrisy rear its so, so ugly head, we have been so traumatically conditioned by the purveyors of the One True God™ that we can’t easily escape from the bounds of monotheism. Once we have found that particular god lacking we fall back on that conditioning and we believe that there must be no gods at all.

But the blissful union with the perfect thing is still there! If we continue to be prisoners of the conditioning foisted upon us by the damaged peddlers of the one single truth lie we shall be forever beholden to their conceptualizations. Forever locked in a trap of their design. Forever believing that it is their way or nothing...

Read the rest of this piece at:

https://ooze.net/dogmatic-religion-is-a-bitch/#blissful

#religion #theology #philosophy #pagan

Home.

This is my gata.

Home.

This is my gato.

@Felipe_B @jwildeboer Because @Gargron is so naive he though this would never happen.

@HistoPol @JdeB @EU_Commission This chart shows nothing planned for Australia in the coal production chart. In fact Australia has over a hundred planned coal and fossil fuel projects. https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/new-fossil-fuel-projects-in-australia-2023/

I feel like everyone has forgotten that #SilentSunday posts were supposed to not have any text.

@aral because only money matters.

Here's a conference talk I did about this https://archive.org/details/lca2019-Im_sorry_Dave_I_cant_do_that_Ethics_in_Software_Development

Though I am encouraged that more people are speaking up than before.

This is the result of spruiking how only STEM matters.

I reckon people who moved to Mastodon and stayed are the kind of people who would pass the get a second marshmallow in 15 minutes if you don't eat the first one till then test.

#Mastodon

@Daojoan This is the way.

@thomasfuchs Bought this (except the cd player) in 1981. Still going strong.

Home

And that folks is why it is called cat mint

#cat #gardening #tasmania

@ntnsndr Is the journal diamond open access?

@Gargron @fraying Federating with corporate silos is exposing yourself to them.

I would be most grateful if anyone can help me please.

I have just migrated from mastodon.social to aus.social. When I have seen the profiles of others who have migrated instances there is a link at the bottom of their posts that says something like, previous posts were made at another instance, and there is a link to the old profile at the old instance. This is not showing up for me. Is there something I haven't done right in my migration?

#mastodon