We Are All Raised on a Diet of Bullshit, Legend, Myth and Fable

MARK ALEXANDER – ESSAY: We in the Occident are raised on lies and make-believe. People in the Orient are no different, except that the stories they are told and forced to believe are different from ours. But for our purposes today, let us stick to the fabulous stories we are fed from birth.

We are fed these stories throughout life: it goes on from the cradle to the grave. The crap keeps on coming our way unrelentingly!

It all starts at birth. The early crap is pretty and pretty harmless. It stretches from the tooth-fairy to Father Christmas coming down our chimneys at Christmas. I am not quite sure about those hapless kids who live in houses that don’t have chimneys (but that’s a story for another day). Having travelled through the sky on his pretty little sleigh, packed full with parcels and presents for the children in the whole wide world, being drawn by his helpful and extremely hard-working reindeer: Dasher, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen and Rudolph (the most famous and helpful of all the little critters).

Then, when we have grown up a little, that story is moulded a different way: we are told about the story of Jesus, the shepherds who watched their flocks by night, and the three kings who brought the baby Jesus gold, frankincense and myrrh.

All well and good and pretty harmless. Children lap it up, as indeed did I.

As one gets older, one learns to modify the story to make it easier to swallow and a tad more believable.

The problems with all these stories, myths and legends is that some people never seem to grow out of them. They believe them throughout life. Never coming to the point of realising that whilst there might be an element of truth in some of these stories, much is simply embellishment and make-believe.

However, the children’s stories are generally rather harmless. But as we age, we get told far more nonsensical stuff. We are taught to fear the Almighty and the all-seeing God. Such myths are told to us to control our behaviour of course, told to us to make us behave in a way that the authorities can control us in an acceptable way. This is where it starts to get sinister.

Then, as we get older, the government gets involved. At this point the real nonsense starts being told! And it is truly unrelenting. In recent years, we have had scares about the eating of eggs, the drinking of coffee, the big one about the eating of saturated fat, the amount of salt we eat, the exercising myth, the extreme dangers of smoking cigarettes and tobacco. Smoking. Ah, that will make you prematurely wrinkled, give you all manner of cancers, your hair will fall out, as will your teeth, you will lose your limbs and become impotent! Moreover, you will stink to high heaven of that awful substance called tobacco. Your teeth will be yellow and your gums will shrink and bleed. Smoking is the root of all evil in today’s world. Naturally, most of it is a load of BS.

Then we come to the myths and legends told us by the politicians. Lizzie Truss and Kwazi Kwarteng’s crap, for example, is the latest nonsense we have been told. The utter crap that cutting taxes for the rich will shore up growth. IT WILL NOT! And nor will giving more money to the richest in society trickle down to the middle and working classes. They sold us that crap back in the Eighties under Thatcher. What we ended up with is a wealth gap today not seen since the Gilded Age and a society built on greed and egocentricity. Who cares for his neighbour anymore? You can forget Christianity with such a politico-economic doctrine. All you will get is a widening wealth gap, a growth in foodbanks, a growth in homelessness, more selfishness and a society based on greed.

I shall add more to this another day. Suffice it to say that we are being led by liars and incompetent fools. We are being force-fed nonsense. We need to change course if we truly wish to save the Occident. In the UK, the Tories are incapable of the course change.

© Mark Alexander
All Rights Reserved

The Myth of Islamic Spain


Hat tip: Always On Watch

Bess Twiston Davies: Is the Bible Sexist?
TIMESONLINE: New research claims Bible's negative stance on women is a myth

Delilah is dangerous, Jezebel, wicked, and as for Eve... Whether they are temptresses, harlots or simply Old Testament chattels, women (it is often argued) get a raw deal in Scripture, with the odd saintly exception (the virgin Mary).

But new research into Biblical women shows that the majority receive positive or matter-of-fact write-ups. Words such as "blessed", "righteous" "outstanding" and - of course - "beautiful" crop up in descriptions of 60 of the Bible's 175 female characters, according to research from The Bible Society.

"Some people have the impression that the Bible is very negative about women," says David Ashford, the Society's Media and Development Officer.

Ashford's research, based on analysing the words used to describe Biblical females, found that "there are four times as many saints as there are sinners," and that "individual women are often described in the Bible in glowing terms."

"Wisdom is described as a female attribute in many texts. And some scholars believe that the Song of Deborah, which was probably composed by a woman, is one of the oldest pieces of literature within the Bible (Judges 5)." Jesus, he adds, had a liberated attitude to women, unusual for his era: "John 4.27, for example, shows that Jesus broke social conventions that discouraged conversations with women. Similarly, the gospel of Luke has long been referred to as the 'gospel of women' for its strong positive portrayal of women in the life of Jesus."

Hang on, what about the Jezebels, and Biblical harlots? Where do they fit the narrative? "Only 13 women are described negatively with terms such as 'nagging, intimidating lustful or provocative'" asserts Ashford, whose list of Bible heroines includes Sarah, Ruth and Mary, while Jezebel, Delilah fall into the villain camp.

As for the rest, those women who fall somewhere in between "the sinner" and "the saint" are described in "neutral" matter-of-fact terms - mother of, sister of, neighbour of etc. Those who do not receive both positive and negative descriptions, for example Miriam in the Old Testament who in Exodus is described as "Prophetess" but by the book of Numbers is marked down as a sinner for questioning, along with Aaron, the authority of Moses. Is the Bible Sexist? >>> Bess Twiston Davies | October 6, 2008

Top Ten Biblical Women >>> | October 6, 2008

The Biblical Male and Housework >>> | October 6, 2008

The Dawning of a New Dark Age – Dust Jacket Hardcover, direct from the publishers (UK) >>>
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The Myth of Islamic Civilization

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