Saturday, August 25, 2007

Muhammad had a Unibrow

Unibrow Bert and Osama bin Laden

From the BBC:
The authorities say the barbers were encouraging un-Islamic behaviour by offering Western hairstyles, tattooing and also eyebrow-plucking for men.
On the world stage, for as many problems as different religions - and in many cases different sects of the same religion - have relating to each other and/or starting wars and/or committing atrocities and/or genocide, should anyone be getting fucking tweaked over whether or not someone plucks as not to look like Jo-Jo the Dog-Boy and maybe get some under-the-burqa action?

Just to be clear: I'm not targeting Muslims. I have no tolerance for any of the organized religion accouterments that serve to veil the prime, raw truths that almost all religions have in common, the walls of money and power and death that encircle the same base concepts. These concepts, true throughout humanity, are accessible to everyone at any time in the entire history of our existence; because if you could see through the labyrinths of sacraments, past the stone towers of regalia, and into the heart of every religion's sanctum sanctorum, you would see something shockingly familiar, something you had always felt in the middle of your chest, an inner truth, a hope, an understanding of something greater than yourself.

You would be in a room. By yourself. With a mirror.

But in a world where the ultimate understanding is truly knowing and literally reflecting upon yourself, where you are not told what parts of what book are more important than the other parts and what books should and should not be burned, where you are not told who is wrong and who is right, where you are not given a dance of orbiting pomp and circumstance to jump the planned planets of submission, then there is no profit. There is no profit of cash or power for those who control religion; there is no profit for those who control the war industry, those that rely on intolerance; there is no profit for the religious politicians who drive those war machines.

Organized religion is important for many people all over the world, internally, as a guide, as a reference for Hey, maybe I shouldn't sleep with the boss's wife or Hey, maybe I shouldn't beat the hell out of that guy with a lisp. But from the the perspective of those that lord over the bureaucracies that pull the strings of extraneous, "sanctioned" apocryphal rules and laws, it's a form of control. And it is that line between reference and control that we all need to be aware of because on one side is the betterment of humanity; on the other: you'll end up spreading your belief at the expense of detriment to others and, perhaps, retaining that god-awful unibrow.

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