I've long perceived that Chris hedges is our greatest intellectual, even more so than chompski. Except for one massive strategic error. The same error that great Souls like Martin Luther King, and Gandhi made. That....

 I've long perceived that Chris hedges is our greatest intellectual, even more so than chompski. Except for one massive strategic error. The same error that great Souls like Martin Luther King, and Gandhi made. That I made in my life until this last year. Jesus never made that error from what I can see. That error being, that changes to the material world can be our Focus. Clean the inside of the cup Jesus told us over and over. It is only by getting our soul in charge of our head and Flesh that we thereby encourage others to do the same, and only that can eliminate the Dreadful symptoms of hatred and stupidity in the world. And although it is centuries, Millennia, too late, to save the species, it is not too late to save one's own soul oh, and maybe that of a neighbor, for the joy of it. Anyway, seems to me that's how Jesus saw it, and lived it, and me too. Yes, we cannot Escape impacting the material world, but if we use our energies on the symptoms the root cause continues to wreak destruction.

https://youtu.be/CqB2GSNJKJM

Hedges: Bless the Traitors

https://scheerpost.com/2021/07/12/hedges-bless-the-traitors/

a life without love is not only the curse of modernity, but one of the primary reasons totalitarian movements can recruit so many followers. These followers seek in the state or the party the love and intimacy they have been denied in their personal lives. The state sanctifies their rage. Violence fills up the emotional void. They mistake comrades for family....

 a life without love is not only the curse of modernity, but one of the primary reasons totalitarian movements can recruit so many followers. These followers seek in the state or the party the love and intimacy they have been denied in their personal lives. The state sanctifies their rage. Violence fills up the emotional void. They mistake comrades for family.

So deeply glad I didn't give up on this book. So difficult emotionally. So incredibly moral, informed, by certainly one of the greatest living Souls today..

As the world around us becomes bleaker all acts of resistance seem futile. Cynics remind us of their insignificance. But acts of compassion affirm life....

As the world around us becomes bleaker all acts of resistance seem futile. Cynics remind us of their insignificance. But acts of compassion affirm life.... in the face of death. These acts hold at bay the crippling power of death and despair. They allow us to live, allow us to be human, allow us to affirm others and ourselves. When we do not accept pain as an inevitable part of life, when we are no longer willing to sacrifice, we embrace death and reject life.

Vlog. Am I the one that is deluded, or the only one that knows about Joy?

https://photos.app.goo.gl/EjitJgomWmf7sm378

Postman wrote: What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed....

The danger we face is not an Orwellian 1984-style dictatorship, but Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, where we waste our lives in the vain and impossible pursuit of a self-centered, universal happiness. The Illusive Self 181 "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books," Postman wrote: What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.' In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will The tens of millions of impoverished Americans in the working class, whose lives and concerns rarely make it on television, have become largely invisible. Shows such as Cashmere Mafia, Big Shots or Cane openly celebrate excess 182 WHEN ATHEISM BECOMES RELIGION and wealth. Television tempts viewers with the opulent life enjoyed by the American oligarchy, one percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. Characters on television live in sprawling and artfully decorated lofts.... 

Chris Hedges, on religion. A presbyterian Minister. Ordained.

Those who turn to religion seek an expression of the transcendent and the sacred. Few believers care much for dogma. Many religious institutions, such as the Catholic Church, incorporate ideologically diverse movements, from Opus Dei to liberation theology. All Catholics, however, are unified in the liturgy and ritual of the sacraments. The pope can rail against birth control and publish turgid encyclicals, but for most Catholics his theological admonishments go unheeded. The passages of most sacred texts in all religions are of little real importance. Believers pick and choose what fits. They discard the rest. The liberal Presbyterian Church, in which I grew up, ignored the violent, apocalyptic literature in 174 WHEN ATHEISM BECOMES RELIGION Daniel and Revelation, as well as the homophobic and misogynist rants by Paul. They were expunged — along with the calls by God to the Israelites to carry out acts of righteous genocide — from the biblical readings at the lectern. These passages might as well have been cut out of our Bibles. Christian fundamentalists, who seek a justification for their bigotry and hatred, trumpet these passages and rarely speak of the Sermon on the Mount, Christ's calls for vows of poverty and His pacifism. Such selective interpretation is no different for Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and other believers. It is culture, history, circumstance, tradition, economics and the deep self-interest of the tribe or the nation that more powerfully inform belief systems than the contradictory and often impenetrable pages of the Bible, the Koran or any other sacred text. Attempts by these atheists to reduce sacred texts to instruction manuals is not part of the reality of belief. Faith arises out of practice. We find our faith in how we live. The labels we attach to ourselves — Christian, Buddhist, Jew, Muslim or atheist — are a way to tell stories about ourselves, to create coherent narratives. The danger we face does not come from religion. It comes from a growing 

Our destitute working class now understands that the cloying feelyour-pain language of the liberal class is a lie. The liberal class is not attempting to prevent wages from sinking, unemployment from mounting, foreclosures from ripping apart communities, or jobs from being exported. The gap betwe... N

Protest in the i96os found its ideological roots in the disengage¬ ment championed earlier by Beats such by Jack Kerouac, Allen Gins¬ berg, and William Burroughs. It was a movement that, while it incorporated a healthy dose of disrespect for authority, focused again on self-indulgent schemes for inner peace and fulfillment. The use of hallucinogenic drugs, advocated by Timothy Leary in books such as the Politics of Ecstasy, and the rise of occultism that popularized Transcen¬ dental Meditation, theosophy, the Hare Krishna branch of Hinduism, and renew

"As long as the liberal class did not seriously challenge capitalism, it was permitted a place in the churches, the universities, the unions, the press, the arts, and the Democratic Party. Minimal reform, as well as an open disdain for Puri¬ tanism, was acceptable. A challenge to the sanctity of the capitalist...

“When it became clear to me that Jesus was not biologically white and that white scholars actually lied by not telling people who he really was, I stopped trusting anything they said,” he writes in his posthumous memoir, “Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian,” published in October.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.truthdig.com/articles/the-heresy-of-white-christianity/%3famp

"The ferocity of his anger at the injustice endured by the oppressed was matched only by the ferocity of his love." 

Despair and suicide grip survivors. It is estimated that as many Vietnam veterans committed suicide after the war as were killed during it. The

Despair and suicide grip survivors. It is estimated that as many Vietnam veterans committed suicide after the war as were killed during it. The...... inhuman qualities drilled into soldiers and Marines in wartime defeat them in peacetime. This is what Homer taught us in The Iliad, the great book on war, and The Odyssey, the great book on the long journey to recovery by professional killers. Many never readjust. They cannot connect again with wives, children, parents, or friends, retreat¬ ing into personal hells of self-destructive anguish and rage. “They program you to have no em

“If we bring peace and stability to Afghanistan, we may profit morally, we might make gains for humanity, but moral profits and human gains do not con¬ tribute to the bottom line. Peace and profit are ultimately contradic¬ tory forces at work I....

If you don't read Chris Hedges, you don't know what's going on. He saw all of this decades in advance.

“One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexu¬ als, will be wiped out,” the philosopher Richard Rorty warned in his book Achieving Our Country:

"The main character in Notes from Underground carries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to their logical extreme. He eschews passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He accommodates a corrupt and dying power structure in the name of liberal ideals. The hypocrisy of the Underground Man dooms imperial Russia as it now dooms the American empire. It is the fatal disconnect between belief and action.... " Chris Hedges quoting Dostoevsky

"The main character in Notes from Underground carries the bankrupt ideas of liberalism to their logical extreme. He eschews passion and moral purpose. He is rational. He accommodates a corrupt and dying power structure in the name of liberal ideals. The hypocrisy of the Underground Man dooms imperial Russia as it now dooms the American empire. It is the fatal disconnect between belief and action.... " Chris Hedges quoting Dostoevsky

Has the purpose of my life been to share this cocktail of books? * Christianity and the social crisis. Rauschenbusch. * Theology for the Social Gospel. Rauschenbusch. * American fascist. Hedges.

The second crucifixion of Jesus, Walter rauschenbusch, Etc. Chris Hedges, death of the liberal class.

https://archive.org/details/deathofliberalcl0000hedg

"The radical Christian Right calls for exclusion, cruelty and intolerance in the name of God. Its members do not commit evil for evil's sake. They commit evil to make a better world. To attain this better world, they believe, some must suffer and be silenced, and at the end of time all those who oppose them must be destroyed. The worst suffering in human history has been carried out by those who preach such grand, utopian visions, those who seek...

"The radical Christian Right calls for exclusion, cruelty and intolerance in the name of God. Its members do not commit evil for evil's sake. They commit evil to make a better world. To attain this better world, they believe, some must suffer and be silenced, and at the end of time all those who oppose them must be destroyed. The worst suffering in human history has been carried out by those who preach such grand, utopian visions, those who seek to... implant by force their narrow, particular version of goodness. This is true for all doctrines of personal salvation, from Christianity to