This Muslim thing and Mr Nietzsche

As I write this, a mob of people are milling about acting out vast, wonderfully well orchestrated, manic, riot scenarios in all the places where they and their kin reside. These are places not noted for democratic protests in the main and the generally unelected leaders of those places derive considerable emotional and cathartic capital from 'tolerating' the rioting.

So, setting aside for the moment the Rent-a-crowd sense of the entire affair and its attempt to distract us and misdirect opinion from the Iranian stealth armament process, I decided to check out for a moment the core issue manifest here.

For the cause is a spark in the imagination

When he made his famous pronouncement that 'God was dead' back in the year that our beloved Jozi was founded, Friedrich Nietzsche unleashed a wave of pent up resentment against the overlordship of the irrational in our lives. The result has been the century long retreat from the Cross, in western culture. In fact there is no longer such a thing as 'Western Culture' there is a pan global culture of Nike wearing people that is founded on the reality that what you see is what you get. This obsession with the 'other world' is nowadays limited to an increasingly marginalised collection of people who missed completely Nietzsche's message. Amongst these who have failed to get the message, the most fervent protagonists of the reality of a non-existent place that resides exclusively in the imagination are these disturbed and much derided Islamite's.

They have missed it mainly because they have been kept poor by those same self-serving irrationalist salespeople who would soon find themselves unemployed and unemployable in a society that shows the kind of advances experienced by most liberated regions since the 1950's: regions that have shlucked off the need for mumbo jumbo in their lives because they get a surfeit on the telly.

There are those who say that we are moving within this decade to a point where it would become illegal to sell this product [god] without major warnings to the public-Warning: believing in otherworlds represents a form of delusion and the teachings of this delusionary world should not be confused with reality. Use with caution. It may well be that, as with that re-emerging former giant China, that proselytising in favour of an insubstantiatable concept called 'god' to the young, and the solicitation of revenue in pursuit of such fantasy concepts becomes a criminal offence.

Of course, like so many other former adherents to fantastical nostrums people would feel a certain nostalgia for a lost era of innocence when they thought or 'believed' there was a 'big daddy' up there in the clouds who would pick us up when we were hurt and spank us when we did something naughty. It is much harder to live in the world knowing that you are the champion of your destiny, not some illusion out there that we can accuse of fickleness when things don't go our own way.

Then since no new generations of pestilential priests would come into existence and foist their parasitic phantasms on those liberated citizens of the former Muslim seeking world, playing to our anxieties and looting our credulity in pursuit of people unfriendly opinion those people too could become more comfortable in our more humanistic world, and cease this devious game of victimhood with which they seek to beguile us.

We do have issues of course in our more material world. The same problems of inherent alienation persist that gave rise to all these phantasms in the first place. We are still, as Tennessee Williams put it locked inside our own submarines'. Nonetheless this time around we have developed brain-numbing techniques: like television soap operas and incandescently dis-illuminating television commercials, and hour upon hour of football. Television not religion is the new opium of the masses. The tangible reality of simulated existence on the 'box' has overwhelmed the intangible unreality of life after death.

But in places where people are poor and oppressed and their television diet is loaded with messianic madness then secularism becomes a fraught option. When your irrationalist opponent lends emphasis to his urgent need to force his message onto our incredulous ears by turning its adherents into human bombs-surely the most terrible weapon ever to have been devised as an act of policy- then you know you are dealing with desperate men determined to destroy what they can no longer control.

The use of this weapon, the human bomb, and its tacit approval through failure to condemn, by not only more allegedly 'moderate' exponents of the users irrationalist belief system, but also by places such as that where we ourselves live, is a modern tragedy. [Of course in our place we are loaded with irrationalist of all persuasions who would and have dealt harshly with unbelievers over past ages and at any future opportunity. So it is not surprising that we have to tread with care.] We should rejoice in the knowledge that 'god is a conjecture' and that we have been freed to mould our own existence.

However we may again have lost the plot and are again mesmerised by the bully.

One has to evaluate Iran's behaviour in the light of this: its fundamentalist irrationalist belief system. Bear in mind too, that Iran imposes this 'system' electocratically and through violent fraud upon a citizenry straining to rejoin the real world, where what you see is what you get. And what that citizenry of Iran wants is no different to what every other human being wants on this planet. A life made comfortable by the gadgetry of contemporary existence. This is the world that matters, not some place in the imaginations of a few fervent freaks.

Because this is all there is, the idea of 'heaven and earth'; of a virgin loaded paradise, is mere conjecture flavoured with a rousing dose of energy salts.

Inevitably too, the idea of the irrational is reinforced by a truth that the idea that this is all that there is, is itself conjectural, albeit overwhelmingly less conjectural than the old heaven and hell bit allied to the idea that there is some weird old dude hanging out up there playing scoutmaster/mistress/person.

There is also increasingly the conjectural idea that quantum physics holds a key to 'otherworlds' parallel universes, multiverses in fact: albeit all still conjectural. These ideas too have been gripping an imagination blunted by material possessions and revealed in such congenial absurdities as 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'.

What is not conjectural though is that the human race has no choice but to go forwards. There are too many of us now to stop, turn around or go back. We are committed to a scientifically based future. The idea that we can have what we have and also persist in our behaviour of holding to the irrational, as being a certainty, can only bring the catastrophic developmental outcomes it has demonstrated over the past fourteen hundred years or so of its hegemony. It can be said with certainty that an obsession with the irrational has retarded the development of our race, the human race, for the best part of two millennia since the Roman Empire was vanquished by the barbarous hordes of mindless irrationality that flooded it out of existence. Five hundred years ago we began to break this stranglehold of the irrational on our imaginations and for every metre gained the human race has prospered exponentially. But this could happen again-we could slide back into the pits of despair again. It happens regularly enough and may have happened in the remote past as well for all we know.

What is also certain is the complete disregard for human rights that is at the base of this particular irrationalist philosophy. It starts from the idea that apostasy is an offence punishable by death. It continues with the idea that any unbeliever is fair game and killing one is okay. It continues too, with the idea that we convert adherents into robots who blow themselves up, always aiming to kill ten for one, irrespective of the piety deemed or otherwise of the victims.

These people in any normal secular society would be locked away in the interests of the public good

Right now the world is at the most dangerous intersection that it has been at possibly since the Cuban missile crisis, and certainly since the Second World War. Once again as in the 1930's, we have the spectre of overt and direct threat against the existence of one of our human tribes. Once again a barbarous horde of glazed fanatics stand at the gates of our empire and threatens to topple it back into the stone age claiming all the time that they are the real victims.

For some sixty years the more humanistic inclinations of the worlds most bloodthirsty family of tribes have been able to suppress the natural violence of its members through a calculated diet of 'political correctness'. Broadly, the idea that it is not 'nice' to be horrible has become systemic. Allied to this is the freedom and accompanying prosperity that can only be appreciated by those who spilt blood to obtain it: most importantly the freedom to move freely, to disseminate ideas and 'do your own thing'. There is a disturbing current trends towards neo fascist behaviour is a direct response to the behaviour of irrationalist reinforced with the sheer abhorrence of suicide bombing and this will not be kept under long-Should the middle eastern irrationalists succeed for a third time in toppling the prosperity of the rest of the world they can expect an irrationalist response. In the same way that one cannot reason with a drunk one cannot reason with an ideological fanatic whose whole purpose is to destroy your life. We've been there before.

This last-ditch fight back against the modern world by the adherents of irrationalism feeds the natural inclination to irrational response from a still tentatively secular planet. Thus at this moment the giant of the planet is also 'ruled' by an irrationalist, their first openly irrationalist leader in centuries. This self appointed saviour intends to lead the planet into the last crusade towards the long awaited battle of Armageddon: predicted for eons and desired by his most ardent supporters with all the same frantic urgency of that milling mob I see as I write this, on television, burning down the premises of the 'satanic' Danes-good grief.

Link this to the rise of a Jihadist party in the middle east who have won popular support on a platform that includes the violent overthrow of a neighbour and that neighbour in turn without their personal strong man and an election looming in which other irrationals are poised to begin the bombing. This is one of those moments in history when the best conspiracies of mice and men may easily go astray.

It's not for nothing that we live in an age of relativity.

What was it again-?

What if the riotous behaviour is a threat in itself? 'Do something we don't like and we will burn your places and do bad things to your pleasant cities. We've stolen your freedom with 9/11 now we are going to censor you and those who don't cherish freedom shall succumb and we will move our agenda forward: convert or death,' except there is no Vin Diesel fighting the agents of evil in the Chronicles of Riddick: this is real.

The solution may well come from the sky. I have read of weapons that have been conceptualised by the big bad wolf crowd that involve hurling a ton or so of some kind of titanium steel from an off planet source launched by a fast moving scramjet, and fitted with accelerants and guided weapons systems. The existence of such 'scramjets' was extensively reported on last year in national newspapers, so we are beyond the fantasy stage here.

Such a piece of metal one is told would carry no warhead and have the effect of a nuclear strike while leaving no nuclear signature. It would be a so-called 'Kinetic energy' 'facilitator'.

It would be as if the place had been hit by an earthquake, which is fairly common in Iran-one of their cities fell down a couple of years ago and we have all been allowed to forget its relative non- reconstruction; rather like the non-reconstruction following the tsunami which is not really happening as we don't look. Maybe someone tested their weapon on that Iranian city, appropriately called Bam.

Of course the 'New Crusader', the regrettable uncle Dubya, is generally such a ham-fisted fellow that he'll probably just nuke the nuke facility on the basis that he can and must act now. Perhaps he remembers that it was Genghis Khan, who overwhelmed his enemies by the simple expedient of inviting surrender and then making a terrifying example of those who resisted. One also remembers that Charles 'the Hammer' Martel sacrificed one million casualties to prevent the ancestors of these mullahs, the Saracens, from gaining a foothold in his beloved France and that was 1372 years ago [Tours: 634 AD] There isn't much glory in facilitating the destruction of the nuke site if no one knows it was done. On the other hand a piece of steel could be described by the credulous as 'an act of god'. When its 'chips on the table' time the mullahs will discover just what a beast they have re-awakened with their delusions and they will go with joy to the afterlife they crave and sell.

Either way it's show time looming folks.

One thing is certain in amongst all this. The idea; that people who base their philosophy on the right to murder, promote murder and facilitate its occurrence should have the capability to impose their insanity through the blackmail of a nuclear threat is so abhorrent that both secularists, and the general range of competing irrationalists on the opposing range of teams will inevitably bind together to eradicate the threat before it is manifest. This is already apparent in an unprecedented show of solidarity from hitherto erstwhile opponents. Ordinary decent citizens of mullah county who just happen to be locked into that particular imposed worldview but otherwise just get on with their lives as best they can are going to find their world soon turned upside down if we are not immensely cautious at this time.

Sadly what the big book never mentions is that Armageddon is just another place where everything stopped while the rest of the world moved on. When the 'raptures' have come and gone and the alleged 144000 people have vanished, there will still be six billion of us sitting around, gaaning aan, with our beers and vintage wines watching it all on Teevee. Our real universe is bigger than these competing crowds of petty priests can ever imagine from their clouded consciousness. It is our destiny to explore it.

The alternative would be like turning the lights off.