Halo, Halo / Tiny tips
Halo, halo
Babies don’t enter the world going ‘Yay, I’m an [insert one of the 4000 religions here]’. Children growing up believing all sorts of that nonsense is down to nurture, not nature. Fortunate are the children whose carers doesn’t indoctrinate them into hokum.
My parents were not religious. My mother grew up in a Methodist household and her sister was devoted all of her life. Time has made me regret not having a conversation with them both to ascertain the difference in their views and why both my parents eschewed religion.
There was a small chapel about a quarter of mile from where we lived. Given its size I surmise that it may have belonged to a small sect. A neighbour’s daughter, I’m guessing aged around 19, somehow persuaded my parents to send me, around eight or nine years old, to the Sunday School there. I don’t blame my parents. Perhaps they wanted a little peace and quiet from a demanding child.
Time has dimmed the recollection as to how long I endured this. I do recall that after a number of weeks children there were given a religious book. A bribe? I was a bibliophile even at that age. It was upon the receipt of my second ‘gift’ that I informed my parents I would no longer be wasting my Sundays by sitting through such nonsense.
The reason? Having been given the same book twice. I still can remember the outrage I felt. A similar outrage remains with me for having unfairly been given a detention in senior school. Speaking of which, not even the compulsory daily school assemblies consisting of hymns and a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer changed my views of religion. Perhaps nature imbues individuals with a natural disinclination toward fairy tales after all.
I once had a partner who, like me, wasn’t religious, but who liked the spectacle of church theatre on occasions such as Christmas. Her best friend, known since childhood days, had a boyfriend who was also, like her, of a Christian bent. My nature towards other people always having been of a non-discriminatory sort this didn’t prevent a social relationship developing.
At Christmas time, after spending a long convivial evening in a pub, we would go to the midnight service at the non-Catholic church which these two individuals attended. My non-religious partner enjoyed the theatre of the occasion. Keep your partner happy, right? Now it would be different.
Around the third year of this ritual, she told me that we wouldn’t be doing the same that year as her friend had informed her that the presence of two atheists, as we were known to be, was ‘upsetting’ to the two Christians at such a ‘sacred’ event. Outrage kicked in again. I was indifferent as to whether we went or not but ‘friends’ don’t behave like that to one another. She was more forgiving and remained friends with them. Love god or else!
DC
Tiny tips
Kylie Jenner, the 27-year-old billionaire and car enthusiast, was recently spotted with her sister Kendall Jenner driving her $3 million Bugatti Chiron in Beverly Hills. Known for her impressive car collection, Kylie gave fans a rare glimpse of herself behind the wheel rather than posing next to her fleet (Yahoo, tinyurl.com/mufsn6b4).
‘Everything outside the Christian framework — including secular music, television, and books — was discouraged. Just as I signed multiple purity pledges throughout my preteen and teen years, promising to avoid not just sex, but even impure thoughts, we were taught to practice absolute abstinence from dangerous ideas’ (AlterNet, tinyurl.com/bdhxfur4).
While official data is still somewhat sketchy, it’s estimated that 12,000 illegal transplants are performed annually, about 10% of the total number of transplants conducted each year. The organ trade is immensely profitable, generating between $840 million to $1.7 billion in revenue for a relatively small number of traffickers, according to estimates compiled in 2017. Organ trafficking survives, in part, because the demand from affluent consumers in the advanced capitalist West is so high and the legal supply of organs – primarily (about 80%) kidneys, but also lungs, livers and cornea – barely keeps pace. Many people wait at least two years to qualify to receive an organ transplant legally and thousands die every year – about 25 daily, according to the World Health Organization – because no organ becomes available in time to save them. Where do the illegally harvested organs come from? Primarily from North Africa and South Asia. Organ traffickers prey on poor and vulnerable rural dwellers, offering cash in exchange for an organ, usually a kidney (Counterpunch, tinyurl.com/4k5px8cj).
This is about the Arctic. You have Russia that is trying to become king of the Arctic with 60-plus icebreakers, some of them nuclear-powered. Do you know how many we have, Jesse? We have two, and one just caught on fire. This is about critical minerals. This is about natural resources. This is about, as the polar ice caps pull back, the Chinese are now cranking out icebreakers and pushing up there as well. So, it’s oil and gas. It’s our national security. It’s critical minerals (Common Dreams, tinyurl.com/bddxte3a).
The response provided by South Africa’s elected officials has so far been both lacking and sinister. It targets migrants with few political allies in the country’s fractured political scene, increasingly characterized by populism, highlighting problems without solutions (Geopolitical Intelligence Services AG, tinyurl.com/3b8wu5p5).
As long as the capitalist system continues, we will never be able to escape from the shackles of economic crisis, war and massacre, ecological destruction, and workers’ sacrifice. The only solution is the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system and its replacement with communism, a society in which the means of production are no longer in the hands of capitalists or the state, but are socialised, in which production and distribution are in harmony with humanity and nature (Controversies, tinyurl.com/ywj4csde).
(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)