Kitchen Syncretism

SYNCRETIZE EVERYTHING!!

Making All Religions Your Own and Omitting the Bits You Reject

My Intellectual Journey:  Ideas from God’s Blog

Immerse in All the World Religions!  Alphabetically: Allah Buddha Christ Democracy Fascism Hinduism Irreligion Jainism Love Mu-ism Nature Pastafarianism Shintoism Taoism Voodoo Yahweh.  Plus weird ones, like Adidam or Zoroastrianism (crazy, from A to Z!).  Snakes hiss about Sss, scientology, satanism, sikhism, and, of course, sex.   Actually, snakes hiss about everything.  I mean, they can’t talk, lol. 

Immersion? Swim in the lake of spirit?  It’s fun! It’s philosophy!  It’s what any self-respecting deity should do.  And you are the God of your own You-niverse! Or you SHOULD be the God of someone’s!  You’re the God of your own skull-sized kingdom.  You get to choose what to do, who to be with, what to think about.  If someone loves you, and you love them, that makes you each a kind of deity, in my book.  You worship each other.

How does One immerse in religion and philosophy?  Read everything.   Watch everything.  Listen to everything.   Think.  Meditate. Process.  Then write, write, write.   Or join one religion after another.   You can be an academic anthropologist or just dive in, with all your heart.   Reality is all the God there ever is.   So pick a facet, and commit.  Mind, body, heart, soul.

Religions, first.  Philosophies, second.  Trivia, third.  Spoiler alert: Everything is trivial (for me), but that doesn’t make anything less important!   Or maybe, just read every damn day, whatever you want, whatever you feel like, in any or no order.  Stay stimulated, stay challenged.  Mix it up.  Your brain can hold it all!   And odd connections can be made when you combine different authors and subjects.  I’m pretty sure people like Ken Jennings don’t think trivia is trivial.

Basically, just engage with Reality 100%.  Give it all you’ve got.  Get an A in life.  As the Cowboy Junkies sing, do you ever finally reach a point of knowing? (or do you just wake up one day, and say, I'm going?).  Eventually, meaning will coalesce into a unified whole, in which it all (FINALLY) makes sense.  Just don’t give up.  Life is good. You make your own meaning.  Only God is good.  Be good. Be God. 

I mean, everything good must come to an end.   Everyone dies, life is impermanent, the universal fate is oblivion, and god is a bastard.  I want more life, fucker.  Jesus and Hitler both get the same reward.   Life is a shit-show.    Some have a love of killing, if it’s personal justice, unobtainable by the police.  It can be deeply, personally satisfying, and justified, right.  Some people take everything personally.  Some people are born with the brain chemistry of depravity.  Some people just get off on evil.  Life is a shit-show of death, anger, evil, stupidity, suffering, and sorrow.  But don’t disrespect bastards.   I’m a bastard, actually.   A bastard is a child of unwed parents.   A bitch is a female dog.   Shit is excrement.  I feel it is important to remember some basic linguistic facts, these days.  All you bitch-ass bastards, and shit.

God, the source of all goodness, is said to have killed 2,821,364 (in the bible, alone)(and not including the flood).  He commanded, Thou Shalt Not Kill.  Do as I say, not as I do.   Seems hypocritical, but can be interpreted as the righteous action of a loving and wrathful god.  God is a man of war.  God is love.  And God “never makes mistakes.”   Everyone dies, anyway.   God, too, I bet.  Old Gods die, and new ones take their places.  Oingo Boingo sings No One Live Forever.   I saw a bumper sticker that said ELF (Everyone Lives Forever).  My point on that is that you can’t have consciousness with a brain that’s been eaten by worms.  Anyway, God is a serial killer, and a mass murderer, and not to be trifled with.   Let go, and let God.   God the Father Time kills by Old Age, senescence.   Vengeance is mine, sayeth the lord.   God, the beneficent, the merciful.  Green pastures, eternal hellfire.  Is God schizo? Only God is good, and sanity may be better than madness, but God created All, and he is a man of war, crazy in love, you might say.  If God does it, it's all good.  The question is, does God do everything?  I don't think so.  Unless God is simply Reality.   But suffering, evil, cruelty, sin, injustice are a part of Reality, unfortunately.  God is good, freedom is good, so he lets his creation choose evil, to learn from their mistakes, and gain wisdom, grow in Godliness, become virtuous, and live happily ever after.  Punishment is part of the process.  

Maybe this is true: There is no God, Reality, Self, Right and Wrong, Meaning.  Everything disappears into Oblivion.  Nothing matters.   Maybe humanity is destined for extinction.  Maybe we live in a simulation.  Maybe everyone is in their own private universe.  Maybe everyone is a piece of shit, deep-down.  And maybe you’re supposed to be mean to give your life meaning.   The Dalai Lama says kindness is my religion.  Cruel to be kind (in the right measure), sings Nick Lowe.  Then again, Reality is all the God there ever is, and God is love, and so The Universe is made of Affection!  I was told yoga is the path to God.  And the road to hell is paved with good intentions.   The Hard Rock Cafe slogan is “love all serve all” but that doesn’t mean to be a bisexual slut.  I mean, right?  How many Gods have humans created throughout history, you ask?  At least 18,000.  My belief is humans are just animals, and we're no better (and even possibly a lot worse) than flies or pangolins or iguanas or hippos or manatees or bats or parakeets or monkeys or wolves or krill or whales or amoebas or whatever.  

Buddhist meditation and instruction is said to enlighten truth-seekers with the realization that there is no thing called the Self.  We have bodies, that are constantly changing, is all.  But there is no soul, eternal or otherwise.  And the idea of a fixed personality… Nirvana sings all in all is all we are… I think we all have the potential to be anything, i.e. like anyone else.  This is the blank slate theory of identity.  BF Skinner said, give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.  I’m pretty sure we don’t have hive minds with the entire globe in our heads (!!).  But maybe the rare individual does.  Is that even a thing?  A “global-telepath” that could receive or broadcast (or both, a feedback loop) the earth’s human psychesphere…  Some seriously weird alternative psychology.   These days, I think computers or the pentagon or lawyers or the catholic church or some combination of all the above are in our heads and doing mind control, with voices and images and even ideas or attention and awareness.   You might think I’m crazy.   It’s kept me from going insane.  Makes sense to “me.”

Mind

I don’t mind, never mind, mine, my mind is mined, mein’d

Mind and consciousness, the ongoing stream of ideation or perception, of dreams and awareness, of words and images and sounds, from birth to death, punctuated by sleep or things like feinting or a coma.  Reading and movies and music, writing and meditating, eating and drinking, talking and observing, listening and interacting.   Retarded people don’t mind, but philosophers do!  Detonations inside my skull?  Brian’s brain has a mined mind, but the minesweeper has swept the cobwebs.  It’s life during wartime, and the grey matter in my head doesn’t seem to matter all that much.  Pop! Pop!  Those bastards! Resentment.  It’s the zeitgeist to not be angry these days, to be happy and in love and accept everyone for who they are.  Of course, you can be as angry as you want to be.   Or as you need to be.  Resentment is all the rage.  Manufactured to control people.  Roy Masters said resentment is hypnotic.  The whole thing seems like mind control and red pill, blue pill nonsense.  ‘Harold and the purple crayon’ gives a child agency over his or her own world.  I had the terrible experience as a child of having the same fact conveyed through a prayer posted in the Catholic Church vestibule that  was said to “never fail.”  That scared me.   A demon could use the prayer as much as any innocent.  The point is, prayers get answered, and you can make your dreams come true yourself, and your mind is your universe, and love is the strongest force in existence, and I the author love you the reader, just for spending time with me, even though maybe it’s not really even “me” at all!

Structure

1. Credo, what I believe

God, Religion, Spirituality 

Morality, Ethics, Virtue, Right & Wrong, Good & Evil

Human Nature, Love & Hate

2. My paradigm: Religion, Philosophy, Trivia

Religion

Alphabetical (in index) (then, ranked from most followers to fewest, with the numbers, citing  date/source) (in other words, in order of the largest world religion to the smallest (not necessarily "greatest" to "least"!). or maybe I have a best to worst ranking!

Portable Atheist ideas I like

Philosophy

2 histories (Grayling, Russell) and Sophie’s World

‘Grayling doesn’t have anything interesting to say, basically’ -v

TRIVIA

Holy shit.   The endless topic of all topics.   The mother of all knowledge.  The fun stuff!   Read all my cards, all my books, and all the J! archive.   A deity should be well read, well-informed, and as close to Omniscient as humanly possible.   Read World Book.  News:   The Economist.  The 1440.   Flash briefing.  And Wapo 202.   A little NYT.  Some wikipedia.

RELIGION

World Religions (x)

most to least members: 1. _ (  ), 2. __ (  ), 3. __ (  )

Alphabetical: A-Z

Number of ALL religions (now) (historically) (theoretically)

Link to Wikipedia page

Books to read:  (wikipedia) (library/gtu) (religion encyc in reference, main). CCC, Why I am not a christian, God, The World’s Religions, Portable Atheist, Zen, Diviners, Zen and making a living, Aletheon etc., Buddha taught, rumi/hafiz, re-bible?  GRIN LIE O

PHILOSOPHY

HOP, HOWP, Sopihe’s World, Bertrand Russell

TRIVIA

Making note of anything relevant, interesting, or important.

J!, cards, books, snapple…World Book / General Knowledge