Wednesday 9 March 2011

ASH Wednesday.

I'm dreaming of white Easter
To watch the Global Warmists fold.
Where the smokers shiver
Till the drink's delivered
And Easter Bunnies die of cold.

Have you any idea how hard it is to make any kind of rhyme with 'myxomatosis'? Well, today started with a little snow and a lot of cold and now it's snowing again. A white Easter is on the cards here. So much for 'we'll never see snow in the UK again' eh?

Easter was, of course a Pagan fertility festival before Christianity arrived. Hence the eggs and the rabbits, both notably absent from any of the Gospel accounts of the Crucificion. There has never been any translation that included the line 'And lo, while the Saviour hung on the cross, the very rabbits came forth from the warrens under Calgary and offered unto him chocolate eggs'. Nope. Didn't happen. Or maybe it did and the disciples had a meeting afterwards and decided that some things were just pushing the envelope of credibility just that bit too far.

The day now called Halloween, end of harvest, was a fire-purification ritual. The bonfires were banned by the new religion sweeping the land, but this is Britain and always was. When you ban something it makes us more determined to do it. Eventually the bonfires moved to November 5th and were blamed on Guy Fawkes. So the pagans were still allowed to burn stuff but it was dissociated from its origins. Fireworks are a very handy distraction.

Christmas took over from the Winter Solstice, when offerings were made by the Druids involving hanging the bits found inside their victims all over trees. Mistletoe was involved here too but the Druids didn't kiss under it. If a Druid holds up mistletoe, don't close your eyes. Now we still decorate trees but with less, um, organic materials. Again, nothing to do with the birth of Christ. That stable involved no tinsel or advent calendars or jolly fat men dressed in red saying 'Ho ho ho, where's the sherry?' Santa is another bit of the jigsaw we currently call Christmas.

Many of the old pagan festivals were absorbed and overwritten by the new Christians. It's the most efficient way to take over. Rather than browbeat the population with 'our way good, your way bad', they aligned their new religion with the festivals of the old. Gradually, they usurped the meanings of those festivals until finally, the old meanings were all but lost forever.

So the rebirth of the Sun, three days after the Winter Solstice, was replaced with the birth of the Son. The festival of the Spring Equinox became the festival of death followed by resurrection, Easter. In this way the old was not wiped out, but was, in a sense, 'recorded over' like an old VHS tape. The old recording sometimes breaks through the new but for most people, there's not enough left to make sense of it.

Okay. So what? It's in the past, long in the past, and the UK has been generally Christian for a long time. Most of us are happy with that. Even those of us who follow neither the Christian nor pagan ways will be scoffing chocolate eggs and Lindt bunnies soon. We'll have tinsel-coated trees with glass baubles in our Christmas living rooms and many would be horrified to know what those actually represent. Even those of us who are not religious will still look forward to the festivals.

Even those who are not religious will cry out in fury when Christmas is renamed Winterval. It's not the religion we defend, but the festival. The tradition. The British way of life. This is how it is. This is how it has always been. We don't want it to change. Somewhere, deep in our psyche, we know what that renaming means.

Those councils don't 'ban Christmas'. Their answer is always the same. Christmas is still there, it's just that now it's included in a whole load of other festivities. Christmas has not been renamed 'Winterval'. Winterval is an umbrella term for an inclusive set of festivals of all religions.

Ah, but that race memory still stirs in some. The descendants of the pagans have heard this before.

We are not banning your religion. We're just including it in ours. Honest, we aren't trying to take over your festival.

So who is doing this? The Jews? Islam? Hindus? Falun Gong? Sikhs? Feng Shui practitioners? An obscure Scottish gorse-worshipping cult? The Church of the Deadly Bottomgas? Ken Livingstone?

It's worse than any of them. In fact, they are all targets too. They just don't know it yet.

If you want to take down religion in the UK - all religion - and replace it with your own form of control you would not start on the Jews or the Muslims or any of the others. You would start on the majority religion, Christianity. You can rely on many other groups, religious and secular, to help your cause.

Stonewall will rail against Christians but will not attack Islam because Islam also rails against Christians. Stonewall think they have an ally. Islam thinks 'we use these guys to get rid of the big enemy, then we kill these guys too'. So that means Islam is behind it all? Ah, hahahaha. No, Islam is in the chain of the used, not the user.

Those moving in on us have no religion as such, but they are not atheists. Atheists, especially those of the Richard Dawkins Collective, are another used group. They will serve their purpose and be disposed of.

The Righteous, those behind it all, cannot be called atheist. Atheist implies no belief in the existence of any gods. The Righteous do not believe in gods as such, but they believe in deity.

They think they are gods.

Note that Christian hotels are routinely attacked for not allowing gay customers, and for mentioning Christianity in the presence of hysterical Islamic converts, and yet Muslims are never slated for their anti-gay stance. Why? Well, Muslims are a minority and as such, pose no threat to the plan. The biggest religion here is Christianity and if that falls, all the rest will follow. The important thing is that the rest don't realise this too soon.

The EU recently sent out a diary to all schools which included all manner of religious festivals but no Christian ones. An oversight, they said. An oversight? Easter, Christmas, simply overlooked? Does anyone believe that? Sure, they might forget to mark the fifth day of Pentecost but Christmas?

Christians who refuse to recant the Bible's stance on homosexual relationships cannot adopt. Their stance is irrelevant. The child will be in their care until he or she is 16, and can then tell them to go and snog an otter and choose their own life. Do the councils believe that Christians with their own children are unfit parents whose children should be taken from them and given to those who think as directed? Probably. They already think that about smokers and drinkers and fat people. It's only a matter of time.

The BBC's new Inquisitor is to tear apart the Bible, starting with the Creation story. Aimed at Christianity? Sure. There is no mention of any similar dissection of the Bhagavad-Gita, never has been and don't expect one any time soon. However, this destruction of the Christian account of creation also impinges on the jewish and Muslim accounts because... they are the same account. Whoops, an own goal on the way here, Righteous. Well, they are devious schemers, I said they had a plan, I didn't say they were particularly intelligent.

These are Bond villians. They are also Moriarty, Dr. Evil, the Green Goblin. They want to take over the world but have never been able to answer the question 'Why? What the hell for? Once you're in charge, what do you do then?'

It can't be done. Look at all the Dreadful Arnott's controls that have had no effect at all on smoking. The gun ban that lets this happen, and this, and that's just today. They cannot control one country, not even one county, and yet they think they will rule the world. As always, they will fail.

However, they will do some damage on the way. As always, they use incremental steps to set one against another. Smokers are denormalised, drinkers are well on the way and anyone larger than Kate Moss is on the next list. Through it all, the group they most want to take down are Christians. Get rid of that religion, break that faith and you can replace it with your own. Use the minority faiths to bring down the big one, then set those minorities against one another until the final clearup is easy.

If Christianity vanished, do you think Stonewall would be quite so relaxed about Islam? If Islam didn't have a free ride for Christian bashing, would they leave the Jews alone? Once the common enemy is gone, the infighting begins.

Finally, the obvious cards come into play. The blatant moves begin. National No Smokng day coincided with an event in the Christian calendar. Ash Wednesday. Now renamed ASH Wednesday. The new religion ousts the old by taking over its festivals. Same as it ever was.

I am not Christian but this new religion is going to be a hell of a lot worse than the Old Testament atrocities churned up to oppose anyone who mentions current atrocities carried out by non-Christians. The Christianity of this country has been benign, we non-believers have been left alone. Yes, we have. A few words or murmurs of disapproval don't count as oppression. Christianity did not ban smoking and has not banned drinking. Christianity didn't do this.

Even though I am not religious, I see a place for it in human life. Many need to believe in something and to be directed in how to act. Chistianity does not direct them - indeed it expressly forbids them, to attack others. It preaches 'turn the other cheek' to its followers and they do. So many of us were conditioned to hate the Christians even before hate-the-smoker came into play, that many now regard it as normal.

Christians. How many cheeks can you turn? You are now like the pagans you overtook, threatened with replacement.

The difference is, they didn't see it coming. You can.

So what will you do?

24 comments:

Frank Davis said...

It's older than Christianity, this process of superimposing one religion on another. The Romans used to do it all the time. When the locals they'd just overrun said they wanted to continue to worship their local deity called Blotthog, the Romans would identify Blotthog with Mercury or something, and allow the practice. Little by little Blotthog would submerge under the weight of Mercury.

Christianity itself is, arguably, the superimposition of a Christian cosmology on top a number of older cosmologies. The cult of the Virgin Mary is the continuation of the far more ancient Egyptian cult of Isis, whose statues of mother with infant son Horus prefigure their Marian variations by several thousand years. The crucifixion also reflects the cult of Attis, who died a bloody death on a tree, and whose festival was Easter.

From that perspective, the trouble with the New Religion of the antismoking righteous is precisely that it doesn't set out to incorporate the old religion into itself. ASH Wednesday is an insult to Christianity, and is intended to be an insult.

For the virtue of incorporating the old religion into the new religion was that people could carry on as they had before, with their old worship of Blotthog. It did not arouse resistance. They didn't mind one bit that Blotthog was also known as Mercury to their new Roman overlords. And this is probably one of the reasons why the Roman empire came to be so extensive. They may have smashed the armies of those whom they had defeated, but they didn't rub their religions in their faces.

Our current crew, however, are not in the least bit accommodating in this respect. You have to worship the new gods, matey, or else. What you used to worship is just complete shit, and you've got to stop. And this breeds intense anger, and unbending resistance.

And it's perhaps the principal reason why these cunts are never going to get anywhere with their frigging new smokefree Gaia-worshipping religion: They have such complete contempt for what came before.

Anonymous said...

I put down Christian on the Census (even though I'm not) just to offset the advice of the militant atheists to non church-going CofE to put down no religion - and it also pisses off the Righteous.

Jay

The Bard of Kirriemuir said...

"Have you any idea how hard it is to make any kind of rhyme with 'myxomatosis'?"

How about this?

Moses supposes it's myxomatosis
That makes bunny wander peculiarly
But Moses don't knowses 'tain't myxomatosis
It's just been side-swiped by an MPV

No time to read the rest just yet, I'm sure it'll keep me amused/irate over lunch. Tata!

Dioclese said...

When you rhyme with myxamotosis
That's when you know your post is
Realy hitting the spot
'Cos a plague of myxamatosis -
A sort of bunny halitosis -
Could wipe quite a lot

Of fluffy easter bunnies
And I don't think that's funny
So I don't want myxamatosis
Thanks a lot!

I feel a song coming on...

....but I shall surpress it!

Neal Asher said...

Excellent post, Leg iron. But, judging by some of the replies I get whenever I mention smoking on my blog, I wonder if the brain-washing process has already gone too far.

Anonymous said...

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Some poems rhyme
But this one doesn't

Anonymous said...

Roses are violets,
Red is blue,
I’m confused,
And so are you - sort of.

pagan said...

I was always told at school that rolling easter eggs symbolised the rolling of the stone from the tomb where Jesus was lain after his crucifixion. Women pushed the stone from his tomb and allowed him to get out. I asked why he couldn't do it himself with a miracle but didn't get a reply.
I could never understand the story of the Ark either. All those animals put on the Ark. Surely it would have sunk ? And how did the kangaroos etc manage to get back to Australia. It's a long swim.
I went off religion at aged 9 and never looked at it again.

My rabbit had a cheese toasty on Monday.
Then a ham toasty on Tuesday.
It sadly died on Wednesday.
I took it to the vet .
He said it died of myxamatoasties.

Anonymous said...

Quite a few old country churches, especially the ones which seem to be built incongruously far from the settlements that they served, are actually parked right on top of previous holy sites; there are several instances of churches which incorporate stone circles, for instance.

The idea was to subsume the old religion into the new, but as quite a few stone circles and holy sites with enclosures actually denoted an ancient version of "Dangerous spirits/gods/daemons in here; keep out unless you know what you're doing", plonking a new religious building that you have to walk inside to use in them was probably a bit of an own goal.

Stonehenge is probably a bit of an outlier here; there is evidence of activity dating back to the Mesolithic here, in the form of huge post-pits for enormous timbers. There is also a suspicious lack of occupation debris in the immediate vicinity of Stonehenge for pretty much any era of human history; nobody seemed to fancy living there ever, and by the time the Neolithic peoples had started using the place as a huge cemetary there was probably such a lot of folkloric dread of the place that nobody but the priests dared venture in.

These days, usurping religions seems to be all the rage, but it is heartening to see how the assorted Green people do where politics is concerned; they get elected, then the population realise that Greenism basically means "You lot out there all suffer so I can live a barely-concealed life of ease", then the Greenies get booted out in favour of politicians better at concealing the fruits of their swindling. The nice point now is that all this pseudo-greenie crap is starting to have financial effects on the population at large; before now the greens were free entertainment, now they're a dangerous plague. They won't last long; too bloody stupid to check where the back exit of wherever they are is in case of unforeseen unpleasantness.

Anonymous said...

(Never mind about Eve in the Old Testament - women were maligned or written out of the New Testament too!)

I came across Laurence Gardner some years ago, and looking him up again just now, I'm sorry to hear that he died last year.

This might be an interesting (lecture transcription) read for you, in the context:

http://graal.co.uk/bloodlinelecture.php

Check out the upper page.
http://graal.co.uk/lectures.php

And the home page:
http://graal.co.uk/

A bit too "science fiction" for some? (The Ark stuff seems out there!)

Good to question, I reckon!

Of course, let's [insert homily re open minds & brain spillage] ;=})

- Ross

Anonymous said...

I thought that the original gods were female because they magically produced babies and presumably everything else.

That couldn't last I suppose , and then the Old Gods become the demons of the new religion.

The Romans had the best idea,Sulis - Minerva and Epona - of the Legions.

Rose

Anonymous said...

Just resurect the Morigan and give the new age emporers a kicking, it's the "european" way.

Dr Evil said...

I presume Calgary was a humorous almost homonym for Calvary? Any way, you got a muted LOL.

Stewart Cowan said...

How many cheeks can I turn? Good question.

I think a lot of Christians should read this post, especially concerning the fake add-ons.

One thing I find most distasteful is the name "Good Friday". Friday is named after Frigg(a), a Norse pagan goddess.

I also have a comment on this by Frank,

Christianity itself is, arguably, the superimposition of a Christian cosmology on top a number of older cosmologies. The cult of the Virgin Mary...

I remember reading the website of someone who looked at these 'coincidences' and was convinced Christianity was just a mish-mash of old beliefs, then he changed his mind and retracted what he had previously written.

The cult of the Virgin Mary is a Catholic thing - another manmade add-on.

Anonymous said...

Birth of Mithras, Dec 25th and probably every other sun god who is reborn on the date of the winter solstice, under the Julian calendar.

Rose

Ian R Thorpe said...

Will rabbits die of cold or mixamotosis?
It will not be swine flu, that's my prognisis.

Does that help?

Angry Squaddie said...

I am a long term reader on here (as well as being a smoker and drinker) but I rarely comment. On this subject, however, I felt I had to reply.

I am a Christian, deeply and sincerely so. In fact, I feel the calling to become a priest and I'm aiming to start the process in the next few years.

However, I am not blind, nor am I stupid. I can see that Christianity, certainly as interpreted in the West has subsumed many (if not almost all) pre-Christian Pagan festivals. I also acknowledge that, had I been born into a non-Christian family or culture I would not be Christian.

As it happens, I am Christian and, like many people, I gain a lot of day to day solace and serenity from my faith. I don't force my beliefs on others in the same way that I don't force others to smoke or drink! It is a personal choice and, as a staunch Libertarian (very conflicted views on life me!), I defend the rights of the individual to make these choices when they don't impinge on the lives of others.

In my view, it has become too fashionable and popular to knock religion and, by extension, any belief that doesn't involve the hatred of smokers/drinkers or the propagation of pseudo-religious Green claptrap.

I have no doubt that some people will reply to this with cherry-picked quotes from the (ever-contradictory) book that is the Bible in order to teach me that my faith is meaningless and that my religion is actually as hate filled as the latest edict from ASH!

I think LI is right, it seems that hate and division are far too common in our society and I respect the evil old hell-bound atheist for saying so. ;-)

Apolgies if this has rambled somewhat but Mrs AS is in bed and I am into the second bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape...

Leg-iron said...

Abngry Squaddie - I don't identify as 'atheist' any more, not since it's become a religion of its own, with meetings at which they... well... presumably at which they steadfastly affirm their belief that there is no God.

Belief is all it can be since science can't prove or disprove God, and neither can I. Therefore atheism is a form of belief and therefore I'm not one. I'm a 'don't care'. An apathist, I suppose. Other people's belief in God does not affect me so I see no reason to scoff. They might be right, you never know.

If they are, well at least I'll save on heating bills in the afterlife and I'll always be able to get a light. Plus, my continual torment of those who deserve it in this life should net me a managerial position, or maybe even a SpAd.

To be honest, I'd be bored in Heaven. I wouldn't know anyone, and since all those who get in are by definition nice people, who would I torture? All those who call for the Final Solution for smokers will be down below getting poked with pitchforks for eternity and that's no good. The devil needs someone with imagination on his team.

Leg-iron said...

Chalcedon - I always get those names mixed up.

Leg-iron said...

Frank - I agree that ASH Wednesday is an insult to Christianity but I doubt the ASH collective is smart enough to develop such a subtle slight.

I have a feeling they thought it would be a good way to make 'no smoking day' memorable and gave not a thought to how Christians or anyone else might feel about it.

After all, Christians are joining the ranks of the denormalised very rapidly now. It's okay to carry on harassing them even after they're beaten, and just like with every other denormalised groups, that continued harrassment is backed by tax money.

Welcome to the club, Christianity. It's a growing group. Soon, denormalised will be normal.

Leg-iron said...

Neal - some of those brains didn't need washing. They're still in the wrapping with the plastic battery-tag unpulled. Pristine and unused.

Angry Squaddie said...

LI,

The atheist jibe was purely in jest.

Richard Dawkins has, in his own way, got a stronger faith than I.

He is so sure in his atheism that he has absolutely no doubt and is, in my eyes, no better than the swivel eyed fundamentalists that every religion attracts. Can he be described as a Fundamentalist Atheist? Or maybe just a fundamentist?

I do like your coining of the phrase "Apathist" - I think that is brilliant work.

Just before I head off to bed, I'll leave you with one little question.

On the census, can I describe myself as a "Christian smoker" or should I be a "Smoking Christian"?

Anonymous said...

I think Thomas More made enough smoking Christians in his time, so I would go for the first choice

Anonymous said...

I have a tendency towards God. I see no alternative. It isn't just the question, "Where did everything come from? although that is part of it. The great mystery is space. How can something exist and yet appear to be nothing? It is a contradiction in terms for which there is no explanation (as yet, anyway).

I regard myself as 'a Christan Gentleman'. Of course, there are many doubts and uncertainties, but I have it in my mind that it is not possible for us to understand what God might be like. We can only reason about 'goodness' and 'love' and 'eternal', but we cannot know. To say that Christ was 'God made man' is incomprehensible to us for that reason. Yes, many atrocities have been committed in the name of religion, and it is all very weird. The whole think about these contradictions used to be known as 'The Problem of Evil'. A total mystery.

That is my view, and I think that it is a reasonable one.

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