The Roman Empire, Version 2.0

(or, "The State Of The World: F. U. B. A. R.")

You don't get something for nothing,
You can't have freedom for free.
You won't get wise with the sleep still in your eyes,
No matter what your dreams might be.
-- Neil Peart, 1976.

"The time has come", the Walrus said, "to speak of many things..."

[This is going to be somewhat of a rambling rant, although I will try my best to put it into some semblence of order. Bear with me (I really gotta get rid of this damn bear!). Anyway...]

We are the Empire of Rome, Version 2.0. And we are going to go down in the same way unless we make a quick 180. Since I don't see that happening, all I can do is wait for the fires.

What do I plan to do about it? Nothing. My plate's full. I expect that everyone else's is, too, except for the robber-barons running the world's governments.

It's all about grabbing territory to further our own causes for our wealthiest people instead of working together to further everybody.

I was saddened to read about the book-burning going on in Iraq. Now, the library there may not be as diverse, but its fate is the same as the Great Library of Alexandria under EoR v1.

No matter how you slice it, it is Wrong. Censorship is Wrong. "Protected Speech" (i.e. the exceptions to Freedom of Speech) under the First Amendment to the Constitution is Wrong. The destruction of historic documents is so Wrong it makes Wrongness look almost Right.

However we may disagree with the religious doctrines in Iraq, we cannot accept those which we practice and preach (in a large sense) as being any more right.

I am dismayed to hear of the "Faith-based" Correctional CRAP that is happening in our country. There is a separation of Church and State which is GUARANTEED by our Constitution, and Congress shall make NO LAW abridging that.

I am also dismayed to note that the Oldest religion/spiritual practice is not recognized legally as a religion. I rather suspect that it has something to do with empowering women at the very least in their own right, if not in a larger scope. I think it also has something to do with the fact that it promotes cooperation with Nature and harmony, as opposed to pitting Man against Nature.

If you are a Christian, and you consider yourself a good person, you need to go research the missing books of the bible. They are there, they are just not published in a bible, for obvious reasons. You owe it to yourself, and if you have any faith whatsoever in your God, you will research it to the point that it will shake the very foundation of your Faith. It shouldn't destroy you spiritually, but it should open your eyes enough that you might think twice about abdicating your responsibilities to Man's interpretation and perversion of something which really had been started with good intentions before it turned into the most massive profitable non-profit non-taxable corporation on the face of the planet.

I'm an eclectic agnostic. I'm Pagan, by and large. Yes, I wear a pentacle. Proudly. Do I follow the Wiccan religion? Not precisely. It appears as though I do, to a degree, because my path just happens to match what they practice. I've never been too comfortable with ritual, and I should probably give more back to the world than I take, and certainly more than I have, but by and large their viewpoint just makes sense.

And if we are not careful, the Empire of Christendom is going to try and tromp it into the ground, just as they did with the Inca, Maya, Aztec, Celtic, Viking and Native American ways of spirituality.

You don't believe me? Look it all up.

What's the common theme? There are several. Among them:

• True Equity. Females had equality, if not power, and they were respected, if not revered. Some bunch of misogynistic apes got the idea that the women were a threat to their way of life, and so they stirred up the pot and subjugated the women to a demoralizing and dehumanizing extent. Thus was the Patriarchal society born.
• Unity with Nature. They respected their environment and worked with it in harmony in order to feed and protect their people and to ensure their continuity. They listened to the forces around them. They were in tune with what was happening, and they were better prepared to deal with any natural tragedies which came their way. We are not separate from Nature. We are a part of it, and it's time to re-recognize that fact.

• Social openness. They shared amongst themselves. There were still differences in wealth but they were not as extreme as we see today. If you chipped in to the best of your ability, you would be taken care of. If not, well, you learned that you weren't taken care of. Everyone looked after everyone else, because survival depended on it. This is not to say there wasn't conflict, but the closeness was much more pervasive than it is now. We are not an open society. We are very uptight, withdrawn, private, paranoid -- in short, we are an extremely and overtly hostile society.

• Absolute wrong. Maybe this is a large turn-off for most people, but the attitude that we have achieved from the forgiving of extreme wrong is that of, "Oh, well, I've killed someone or two, God will forgive me in the end, so who cares? I mean I'm sorry, but not really." Sin is one of those forgiven things. I think if we had a lot more Taboo -- a wrong which is NOT forgiven EVER -- than Sin, we would probably have a lot less which was egregiously considered to be morally Wrong, and we'd address the serious issues, and people could get on with their lives. As far as I am concerned, the government of this country has committed no sins but one LONG list of taboos, for which I do not think they should ever be forgiven, let alone forgotten.

• Sexual openness. This is the big one. Sex was treated as power not in the power-trip sense, but as in a necessary sense. The release and respect of energy, and the recognition of its ability -- not its certainty -- to create life. There were no moral issues hovering around polygamy if that was what you were in to (I'm not, for my own personal reasons), and there was nothing considered to be "borderline public lewdness" (i.e. "Oh, look. It's a topless lady. Nice day, isn't it?"), and the like. Exploration which is considered to be "perverted" or "kinky" in our views was looked on more as something by which a pair or so might establish a ritual, a stance; relative station by consent rather than by decree.

We are SO WRAPPED UP in ourselves as a society that we have completely forgotten where we came from, and thus cannot see where we are going. We constantly deny our nature, and we are doomed if we continue in this way.

We are the Empire of Rome, version 2.0. And even if it means the demise of a lifestyle to which I have become accustomed, so long as it will give us a means of reconstruction and an opportunity to build the future in a better way, I say: "Bring on the flames."