Trips and Salsa
I had a dream last night that I was in Toronto again, but the experience wasn't as good in my dream as it was in real life. It was raining heavily, and for some reason I hadn't made any plans on where to stay, which was causing a significant dilemma. Later in my dream, a guinea pig cheered me up.
I got plenty of sleep yesterday and last night. I thus had plenty of time to dream. I was catching up on sleep after a stomach ache kept me awake for much of Tuesday night.
I'm returning some books to the library tonight, so I have some excerpts to copy here. Below are some from The Culture Struggle by Michael Parenti.For centuries, in service to male supremacy and colonial domination, learned men in western society produced scientific exegeses on the natural inferiority of women and the mental and moral deficiencies of the "darker races" and "lower classes," the latter also referred to as the "dangerous classes." Medical and psychiatric practitioners treated illnesses by launching punishing assaults upon the stricken patients. In earlier times, persons with serious physical complaints were bled, scalded, made to ingest sickening concoctions, burned with mercury, had their fractured limbs sawed off, or were subjected to all kinds of damaging surgical procedures--often with fatal results. Doctors regularly spread lethal diseases by remaining steadfastly indifferent to minimal hygienic practices (38).
A leader of Citizens for the Protection of Marriage, a Michigan group, happily proclaimed that the people in his community supported "the traditional, historical, biblical definition of marriage," but what actually is the traditional, historical, biblical definition? For milennia, heterosexual marriage consisted of a bond not between a man and a woman but between a man and a number of women. Polygamy is an accepted feature in the Holy Bible itself. King Solomon had 700 wives, not to mention 300 concubines, yet suffered not the mildest rebuke from either God or man. Other estimable figures in Scripture and throughout history have maintained swollen retinues of wives (80).
Children are as badly mistreated in traditional Christian families as in any other. Indeed, conservative religious affiliation is "one of the greatest predictors of child abuse, more so than age, gender, social class, or size of residence" (83).
And below are a couple from The Chemical Muse: Drug Use and the Roots of Western Civilization by D.C.A. Hillman.An apostate is a Christian who has come to the belief that faith in Jesus is meaningless; the early church was entirely intolerant of those who opposed its views, and took aggressive steps to maintain the political and economic authority it had won under Constantine the Great. Mother Church often viewed less traditional believers (heretics) and other religious followers (pagans) as a direct threat to its authority; this included members of its own flock, who decided their religious faith was pointless (apostates), as did [the Roman emperor] Julian when he was a young student of literature (29-30).
Antiquity's recreational drugs possessed phenomenally powerful psychotropic capacities. They were certainly no less mind-altering than most modern street drugs, including heroin, LSD, and hallucinogenic mushrooms. The Greeks and Romans were fascinated by the potentially drastic effects of their botanicals and strove to preserve an understanding of these psychotropic substances for later generations. For example, Pythagoras and Democritus journeyed to Egypt, Ethiopia, Arabia, and Persia, visiting sects of drug-using wise men, known as Magi--the very same religious group that visited Jesus according to the Gospels--and wrote extensively about the potent psychotropic substances with which they experimented (60-61).
I got plenty of sleep yesterday and last night. I thus had plenty of time to dream. I was catching up on sleep after a stomach ache kept me awake for much of Tuesday night.
I'm returning some books to the library tonight, so I have some excerpts to copy here. Below are some from The Culture Struggle by Michael Parenti.For centuries, in service to male supremacy and colonial domination, learned men in western society produced scientific exegeses on the natural inferiority of women and the mental and moral deficiencies of the "darker races" and "lower classes," the latter also referred to as the "dangerous classes." Medical and psychiatric practitioners treated illnesses by launching punishing assaults upon the stricken patients. In earlier times, persons with serious physical complaints were bled, scalded, made to ingest sickening concoctions, burned with mercury, had their fractured limbs sawed off, or were subjected to all kinds of damaging surgical procedures--often with fatal results. Doctors regularly spread lethal diseases by remaining steadfastly indifferent to minimal hygienic practices (38).
A leader of Citizens for the Protection of Marriage, a Michigan group, happily proclaimed that the people in his community supported "the traditional, historical, biblical definition of marriage," but what actually is the traditional, historical, biblical definition? For milennia, heterosexual marriage consisted of a bond not between a man and a woman but between a man and a number of women. Polygamy is an accepted feature in the Holy Bible itself. King Solomon had 700 wives, not to mention 300 concubines, yet suffered not the mildest rebuke from either God or man. Other estimable figures in Scripture and throughout history have maintained swollen retinues of wives (80).
Children are as badly mistreated in traditional Christian families as in any other. Indeed, conservative religious affiliation is "one of the greatest predictors of child abuse, more so than age, gender, social class, or size of residence" (83).
And below are a couple from The Chemical Muse: Drug Use and the Roots of Western Civilization by D.C.A. Hillman.An apostate is a Christian who has come to the belief that faith in Jesus is meaningless; the early church was entirely intolerant of those who opposed its views, and took aggressive steps to maintain the political and economic authority it had won under Constantine the Great. Mother Church often viewed less traditional believers (heretics) and other religious followers (pagans) as a direct threat to its authority; this included members of its own flock, who decided their religious faith was pointless (apostates), as did [the Roman emperor] Julian when he was a young student of literature (29-30).
Antiquity's recreational drugs possessed phenomenally powerful psychotropic capacities. They were certainly no less mind-altering than most modern street drugs, including heroin, LSD, and hallucinogenic mushrooms. The Greeks and Romans were fascinated by the potentially drastic effects of their botanicals and strove to preserve an understanding of these psychotropic substances for later generations. For example, Pythagoras and Democritus journeyed to Egypt, Ethiopia, Arabia, and Persia, visiting sects of drug-using wise men, known as Magi--the very same religious group that visited Jesus according to the Gospels--and wrote extensively about the potent psychotropic substances with which they experimented (60-61).