CELEBRATE THE BIRTH OF JESUS AND Kill, Kill, Kill

Got this from Morgaine at The-Goddess:

'Christian' Game Leaves Behind A Pile of Corpses

AlterNet::
"Anyway, if you haven't bought it already, I strongly advise everyone reading this to log on to leftbehind.com and buy the game. It is the perfect American holiday gift. Celebrate the birth of Jesus by wasting dozens of people at a time, using a provocative variety of Christ-sanctioned weapons! You can even operate tanks to destroy whole areas of New York City! Who knows, you might even get to kill Ethan Hawke ('slumming' in a ball cap and dirty jeans) in a Marxist bookstore-coffeeshop on 8th street! Kill, kill, kill!

Merry Christmas, America."


Nothing like the love and kindness that flows from Jesus's followers and their TANKS. You just can't make this stuff up...

HUNKY GODDESS Gods

Andy had a great question (See Dec. 27 post):

ANDY: “…Would bringing back the Goddess completely cancel out all male gods….?”

ATHANA: No, bringing back the Goddess would not cancel out male gods. All Goddess cultures had male gods – just not war gods, not violent gods, not pushy gods. The gods in Goddess times were playful, courageous, sensual, smart, creative, democratic, egalitarian, equalitarian, non-violent risk-takers who knew how to make people laugh at the right times. They stood for consensus decision making instead of bully-man rule. They respected and honored females, just as females respected and honored them.

Unlike the War Gods, these guys got some darn good mothering (from the Mother Goddess), and therefore aren’t pathetic little shrimps like the War Gods are. The War Gods, poor things, were forced to become bullies to mask the fear that’s packing the place where their intestines should be.

Discordianism – Just checked it out. Very intriguing! I like that it’s based on a goddess – although I suspect at least in the beginning the goddess was part of the joke – you know, everything turned backwards and upside down and all. And I don’t like Zeus being in there – Zeus is one plug-ugly, fear-packed bully – and no wonder: his War God predecessors stomped all the Mother Goddesses into the ground.
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Thnx to Fanlistings.org for the hunky pic of Kevin Costner as Robin Hood.

MOTHER-WOMEN, MOTHER-MEN

Bionecro asked some great questions in a 12/26/06 comment:

BIONECRO: “If we switched to a Mother Goddess, wouldn’t women still feel pressure to have lots of children -- just like they do under the War Gods?”

ATHANA: No. Under a Mother Goddess, women would return to the healthy old ways of having two or three children only. Why? Because that’s what women have always done when left to their own devices. That’s how many kids they have in societies that aren’t War-God-ridden. Women instinctively know that two to three kids is healthiest all around – for the kids, the society, and the mothers. Each kid gets the right amount of attention, care and resources. They get enough love before the next kid comes along. The mother isn’t overburdened.


BIONECRO: “My guess is you'll say that all people would be considered the Great Mother's children and not archetypes of Mothers and Fathers themselves….”

ATHANA: No again. All of us are the Great Mother. As such, we all treat others the way a healthy mother would treat her children: with unconditional care and concern. So we all aim to be either Mother-Women, or Mother-Men. Some examples of Mother-Men: Robin Hood, King Arthur, Davy Crockett (although remember: the War Gods have tampered a bit with these men, so they don’t come down us as the pure Mother-Men they were and really are).

Examples of Mother-Women are very hard to find, since the War Gods have worked even harder to erase them than they have to erase Mother-Men. I think Joan of Arc was a Mother-Woman, but the War Gods have hidden this from us and have put a great overlay of tarnish all over her. I think Robin Hood’s Maid Marian was a Mother-Woman – if you can imagine her without the War-God overlay. Same with Guinevere, Morgaine, the Lady of the Lake and others in the Arthurian legends.
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Thnx to cinema-stars.com for the foto of Milla Jovovich, who starred in a recent movie as Joan of Arc

Warrior GODDESSES

Anonymous is back again! This time she visited the Dec. 16th post, “Are You Serious?”:

ANONYMOUS: “What about the destroyer goddesses, the warrior goddesses? … Replacing one imbalance (male-dominated theology and world) with another (female dominated thealogy and world) will not fix anything. That is just swapping problems. Peace and Goddess Bless.”

ATHANA: Anon, poke around a little on this weblog. There’s no such thing as a warrior- or destroyer goddess. Athena, Neith, Bellona, Minerva, Anath, Indra and the other so-called war goddesses are merely mealy-mouthed makeovers of real goddesses.

Before 4000 BC, there was no war, so why would there be any war goddesses? But after 4000 BC (give or take a few centuries depending on where you are in the world), the Flies Guys take over.

The Flies Guys were the children of good people who went bad after starving long-term on the deserts that formed around 4000 BC. The Flies Guys invented the War Gods out of whole cloth. Originally these bogus gods were depicted as weapons -- spears and daggers and such.

The Flies Guys invented war, hierarchy, social violence, and War-God/Kings. And they made the peaceful, non-violent old goddesses into their own image – warrior-esses. Afterall, in these new psychotic War-God societies, everyone had to be on the same page – the war-&-violence page.

We’re not after female-dominated societies on this weblog. No indeedy! Far from it. Does a healthy mother let her girls dominate her boys? No. Her boys ride herd over her girls? No. And that’s what the old goddesses did for us. They loved us the way healthy mothers love their children. And they modeled that behavior so we’d treat each other that way, too.

Is there anything wrong with men being mother-men? No. Not on your life. Some of the most manly men in western history are mother men: Robin Hood, for example, Davy Crocket, Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey, and King Arthur, among others.

So tonight, let’s send out energy for the quick return of our old loving goddesses, the ones the War Gods drove underground and replaced with mealy-mouthed war “goddesses”.

Love, Athana

P.S. Happy Mother’s Night to all!

HAVE A MERRY, MERRY Mother NIGHT!

"[I]n some parts of old Europe, it was [the Goddess] Holda--not Santa--who brought gifts to children and determined who was 'naughty or nice.' I also encountered lore depicting her as dressed in red and going down chimneys to bring gifts to children. An old Germanic tradition included leaving an offering of food and milk for Holda on December 24, known as Mother Night."

MORE>>>>>

Also, a happy Winter Solstice to all!

Love,
Athana

WALT DISNEY THE Goddess GUY

The Goddess has never really left us. She’s just gone underground for a bit. Every once in a while, to keep her hand in the game, She appears among us -- in disguise. Walt Disney was Her. If you want a peek at the old Goddess world, go see his Bambi, Cinderella, Lady and the Tramp, or Davy Crockett.

Interestingly, a debate has raged about Disney ever since he appeared on the scene in the late 1920s. The stuffed-shirts think he’s hoi polloi, and we hoi polloi think he’s great. Which isn't surprising: it’s always us average Josephines and Joes who are closer to the old Goddess ways. The rich and the stuffed shirts are more likely to travel with the War Gods, since that’s the way a person gets "ahead" in War-God societies.

Anyhoo, if you wanna read more on the topic, go to this 12/17/06 Los Angeles Times article . Some snippets:

“Disney's … values are not traditional conservative American. On the contrary, Disney's films challenged authority, disdained the acquisition of money, abhorred hypocrisy (including religious hypocrisy), promoted tolerance and community and celebrated rebelliousness. (Just see how Davy Crockett challenges Andrew Jackson in the 1950s TV programs, or how Pollyanna scolds her own minister for his intolerance.)

"In his own life, Disney denounced what he called "billboard patriotism," and he looked askance at organized religion….”

RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE Schmolerance

We don’t “tolerate” serial killers; why would we tolerate political machines disguised as religions -- like Jahweh and Allah -- when they're annihilating the human species?
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Thnx to tome213 for the foto

jesusneverexisted

"Jesus – The Imaginary Friend

"Christianity was the ultimate product of religious syncretism in the ancient world. Its emergence owed nothing to a holy carpenter. There were many Jesuses but the fable was a cultural construct. Nazareth did not exist in the 1st century AD – the area was a burial ground of rock-cut tombs. Following a star would lead you in circles. The 12 disciples are as fictitious as their master, invented to legitimise the claims of the early churches. The original Mary was not a virgin. That idea was borrowed from pagan goddesses.

"Scholars have known all this for more than 200 years but priestcraft is a highly profitable business and finances an industry of deceit to keep the show on the road. "Jesus better documented than any other ancient figure" ? Don't believe a word of it. Unlike the mythical Jesus, a real historical figure like Julius Caesar has a mass of mutually supporting evidence."

From the website jesusneverexisted.
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thnx to gregorio86 for the foto

THE UNITED STATES OF Barbarity

I don’t know if ‘barbarity’ is a word or not. It’s probably barbarism, but I like barbarity better, so I'm sticking with it.

I live in the United States of Barbarity.

Until we get every single solitary person in this so-called country a place to live, the United States of Barbarity is where I live. I am sick to death of having my sister and fellow Americans dying in rags in cardboard boxes in the streets. It’s getting more than I can bear. It’s disgusting, sickening, nauseating, revolting, appalling, infuriating, and maddening.

I am deeply ashamed to call myself American. But I’m not American, and neither are you. We live in the U.S. of Barbarity. Unless of course you live in South America; they try to move together without leaving some people behind (until, that is, the U.S. of Barbarity goes down and offs any leader who cares about the people -- read John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man).

The land my ancestors called ‘America’ wasn’t a land where human beings left other human beings out in the snow to die. The America my ancestors “fought and died for” is lost, gone, flown the coop as they say on the farm. Who knows to where.

ARE YOU Serious?

According to new studies, women and men react differently to stress. Men do “fight or flight” behavior, whereas women, due to the stress-induced release of the maternal bonding hormone ocytocin, respond with “tend and befriend” behavior.

Men under stress become aggressive, women become nurturant.

So duh! If we're really serious about wanting to survive on into the future, it’s women, not men, who need to become our archetypal role models.

And don't fall into the trap of thinking men can't be manly with a goddess at the helm; 'cause it just ain't so, Joe. Witness the bull-leaping ancient Minoans who sailed the known world looking for adventure.
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thnx to bjearwicke for the foto.

THE Devil, YOU SAY!

We've been woefully lax on giving equal time to the devil on this blog, so the following is our feeble attempt to make up for lost time:

"[T]he Satan of the Bible is a very different figure from the cloven-footed, sulphur-snorting Beelzebub that emerged in later centuries. It is fascinating to discover, for example, that Satan was not associated with Hell until hundreds of years after the death of Christ."

"[T]here is no devil in Genesis (the identification of the serpent with Satan came much later).... The Hebrew word “satan” simply means “adversary”.... Satan appears in the Old Testament, in Numbers, Job and Zechariah, where he is identified as one of the “sons of God” responsible for testing the devotion of mankind....

"In the New Testament ... Satan retains his job as a shady functionary of God, testing Jesus during his forty-day sojourn in the wilderness.... The Devil shows Christ the entirety of the world, which he claims to control and which he offers to hand over in exchange for homage. Who gave the world’s kingdoms to the Devil? “There is only one possible answer: God”.... Satan is not ... the scintillating overlord of evil that dominates popular imagination today."

From a review of the new book Satan: A Biography, by scholar and former Jesuit Henry Ansgar Kelly
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Thnx to jeroenbeel for the foto

Help WRITE A GODDESS BOOK

Here’s your chance to help write a Goddess book, with your own ideas quoted and all.

The last of Tim Ward’s four books was “the story of [his] search for the lost Goddesses of Western Civilization” and “what happened to men when they stopped seeing the female side of the divine….”

Some of his friends asked Tim to convert the book into a “practical manual that deals explicitly with male mind and the unconscious forces that drive [men’s] relationships with women.”

Tim invites “…all readers to participate with me in writing it, with your agreement that whatever you post may be included in the finished work…. However you identify yourself in your comments is how your name would appear in the finished work, and if you wish, you may post anonymously or under a pseudonym.”

Go find out MORE at Tim’s new blog, howmenrelatetowomen. I'm headed over there right now.
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Thnx to joeless and stock.xchng for the foto

MOTHER'S Whispering CAMPAIGN LAUNCHED

Calling all Mothers of the World:

Please! If you love your babies, don’t let them grow up to worship Jehovah, Allah, Yahweh or Vishnu. If you do, chances are they’ll turn up dead on your doorstep one day. Eighteen years or so from now, they’ll be dropped at your door in a wooden box with the lid nailed shut. How could you do that to your baby?!?

Although you think Jehovah, Allah, Yahweh and Vishnu gods, they’re not. They’re war machines. They keep women churning out babies to feed big, fat armies. They rip boys away from their mothers early on, to be zapped into killers (do you really know what men do with your young sons when you’re not watching?).

These bogus ‘gods’ ban abortion for one reason and one reason only: for more warriors. They ban homosex for one reason and one reason only: for more warriors. Everything they do, they do for one reason and one only: to wage war and to kill your babies.

Let ‘god’ at your baby, and chances are your baby will be murdered in god’s armies, or, if your baby’s a girl, turned into a warrior factory.

So moms: start the day your babies are born. Begin whispering in their ears that god is bad. Whisper every day. And don’t ever speak a word to anyone that you’re doing this (unless it’s another mother you trust completely); the very last thing the Big Powers want is for you to save your baby.

‘Cause the Big Powers want your baby for lunch someday. So Moms, please don't let your babies grow up to be lunch. Did you know that before the gods were invented around 4000 BC there was no war? And that almost as soon as they came on the scene, we've had nothing but?
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Thnx to rrss for the fotos

DON'T Believe IN GODDESS. SEE IF I CARE.

You don’t have to “believe in” Goddesses to support the basic tenets of this weblog. What you do need to agree to is this:

1. War gods are bogus and deadly to the entire world community – especially now that the world’s one ‘village’

2. It’s crass to fool people into thinking male deities can create living beings – through magic juggling tricks like letting them ‘spring forth’ from their skulls (Zeus) or from part of a man’s skeleton (Jehovah).*

3. If people are going to believe in anything, it’s healthier for them (and the rest of us!) to believe in divinity that promotes peace, non-violence, physical and psychological health for the individual, and genuine respect and reverence for the earth.

“…[S]ome ask how, if both god and Goddess are constructs of the human imagination, can one be any more ... valid than the other? The crucial point ... is that the validity of the image depends on its effect on human behavior…. There is no doubt that the Goddess image has induced more tolerant, peaceful, kind, and caring societies than the god image, whose societies [have] always tended toward war, violence, Puritanism, and hierarchy” (Walker, Barbara. 2000. Restoring the Goddess: Equal Rites for Modern Women. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. Page 39).
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Thnx to niemis for the foto of Poseidon.
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*I wish I had time to tell all the hundreds of hilarious stories of gods trying to do the birth thing. My favorite is Apollo sitting on a pile of eggs. "A Greek carving show(s) the god Apollo sitting on a pile of eggs, trying to copy the life-giving magic of his mother Leto ... who gave birth to the World Egg and hatched it."

Then there's the dude who gave birth to the first Norse woman and man -- from his 'sweaty armpit.' ("Norsemen said a first male-and-female couple were born from the sweaty armpit of the giant Ymir, who imitated Mother Earth in that his flesh became the soil, his blood the sea, his bones the mountains.")

Even better, Atum, "...the local god of Heliopolis, the biblical 'City of On,' claimed to give birth to a primal couple from his penis by masturbating..." (from Barbara Walker's incredibly well-documented The Women's Encyclopedia)

CHRISTIANS v. PAGANS on Rape

CHRISTIANS: “The Bible tells of a Levite who gave up his concubine-wife to a mob to be gang-raped to death in order to save himself from molestation, and then cut her to pieces.”

PAGANS: “The Romans and Saxons punished rapists by death.”

CHRISTIANS: In medieval Christian Europe “Peasant brides were raped by the baron before being turned over to their bridegrooms – probably to be raped again.”

PAGANS: “The Byzantine Code decreed that rapists must die and their property … given to the victim, even if she was … a slave woman.”

CHRISTIANS: “Recent studies show that most rapists [are] professed members of a religious sect and learned to regard sex as evil, in the traditional Christian manner.”

PAGANS: “Classical mythology abounds in rape: the rape of the Sabine women, Zeus’ rape of … Rhea…. But the word translated ‘rape’ (usually by Western Christianized men), usually meant seduction” – not forcible rape.

CHRISTIANS: “Before 1653, any Englishman could kidnap and rape a child heiress, after which the law viewed him as her legal husband.”

PAGANS: “The gypsies demanded the death penalty for a rapist.”

CHRISTIANS: “Dr. James Marion Sims, known as the American ‘father of gynecology’: … What is usually not told about his career is the way he developed his techniques. Before the Civil War, he kept women slaves in a disused jailhouse and made them his guinea pigs, performing hundreds of experimental … operations on them until they died off one by one and were replaced by fresh victims.”

{From the incredibly well-documented Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara Walker]
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Thnx to rvaldeza for the `foto of a little girl probably growing up in a war-god country, and, therefore, liable to be raped at any moment.

FRIDAY'S DOG Blogging

I don’t know what it is about my featherduster, but Duncan has always felt an uncontrollable urge to relieve it of its plumage. For six years I’ve managed to keep it out of his reach – with minor lapses of attention here and there, during which times he’s whisked it away and denuded it of yet another swatch of its orange plumage.

Today he managed to get the duster into a corner and completely have his way with it. The result -- well, you can see the result hanging on the wall. What was once a full foot of luxurious fluff, has been reduced to a pathetic two inches of frizzle.

Given his passion for denuding the thing, I guess I should feel lucky I managed to keep it as long as I did.

CHEATED & Lied TO

A must-see website: Max Dashu's The Suppressed History Archives.

See all these goddesses? They were left out when history was written. They and thousands like them, from all across the world, and all across time.

We have been duped, people. All of us, all across the world, used to worship healthy, life-preserving Goddesses -- until the 'psychotic' gods (Richard Dawkins' term, not mine*) came and trampled them into the dust.

When are we going to wake up and ditch the gods for the Goddesses?
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Thnx to Max Dashu for the picture
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*Richard Dawkins is the author of the new runaway best-seller, The God Delusion, 2006, Houghton Mifflin.

GODDESS FAMILY Wanted

A national-TV program casting producer has asked me to find a Goddess family to appear on TV early in 2007. I’d like to recommend a sterling family who would represent the Goddess community well. The producer wants a man and woman with at least one child under 18 who's living at home. This family would appear on a major network, during the prime-time, weekday TV programming schedule.

A 2006-2007 goal on this blog's "God-to-Goddess Timeline" (See the 11-22-06 post) is “… the beginnings of a media presence….” If we could find the right family for this prime-time slot, it would be a nice beginning.

So. Do any of you know a Goddess family who might fit the bill, here? If so, please email me. (The pay, by the way, isn’t bad.)

Worshipping

"Athana, how do you worship?"

Someone a while ago asked this in a comment. My answer: I don't.

The Goddess doesn't ask us, or want us, to ‘worship’ Her; worship is a war-god thing. 'Worship' implies a hierarchy -- a lower, and a higher -- whereas everything on the Goddess's earth is utterly and totally equal.

The closest I get to what a goddite might call ‘worship’ is when I sit in the woods and just be. Last time, I sat on a tree that had fallen next to another tree, so I could lean against the living tree. The trees formed an 'L' at the edge of a clearing that was almost as round as a wheel. After five or ten minutes, something happened.

It really was as if a veil had lifted. Suddenly the entire woods thrilled with magic. Although it was everywhere around me, it seemed stronger in the stand of birch on the far side of the clearing. This was something beyond words. Something bigger and unfathomably more vital than words, yet gentle and loving and innocent and intelligent and overwhelmingly healthy all at the same time. I felt as if I'd moved into another time dimension.

Do you realize how many branches there are in a forest? How many leaves? How they’re all connected? How utterly powerful this unending network of connection is? It’s an intricacy and a loving beyond words, and we’re connected to it, too. We're all in the club. We all belong.

You have to feel this for yourself, I can’t even begin to describe it. Words aren’t the Goddess’s primary vehicle.

How do you feel it? Study Goddess. Begin today. Find people who can guide you. Read. If you can, find a bit of the natural world untampered with by humans and sit in it. Throw some music and dance into the mix. Try a little; you’ll find the path. It may not come overnight, though, so be patient and keep at it.

Good luck!

Love,
Athana

P.S. Groups are great, too. In the past, I’ve been in Goddess ritual groups, and I’m forming one that’ll meet for the first time this coming Monday. But groups aren't necessary for everyone.

P.P.S. Feel free to fill us in on how you get in touch with Goddess.

ANNUAL Hell CHECKUP

Okay, kiddies, time to take your annual fear-of-hell test. Gotta keep ya’ll clean of cooties, ya know. So, repeat after me:

“If there is
[“If there is…]

“a real place called hell,
[“a real place called hell…]

“Then please, god,
[“Then please, god…]

“Strike me dead on the spot. [SSSStrike …. Meeeee aaaaaarrgghhhh!!!….][covers face in shame]

No, no, no it’s alright. You just need a little more deprogramming, that’s all. Nothing to be ashamed of. Let me show you again how it's done:

“If there is a real place called hell, then please, god, strike me, Athana, dead on the spot.”

Okay, now I’m writing this sentence, so you know I wasn’t stricken dead on the spot.

Now I’m writing another sentence.

‘Nother.

If you like, check back tomorrow to see if I'm still alive and kicking.
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Thnx to DawnAllynn for the foto

DEITY TESTOSTERONE Poisoning

We’ve been poisoned by deity testosterone. The planet’s been poisoned by deity testosterone. Like a Jeep with an oil-pan leak, the planet’s gods are leaking testosterone all over everyone. It’s a gooey god mess.
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Thnx to arkosfl for the foto

CHAIN CHAIN CHAIN, CHAIN OF Fools

This is why I can’t read fast: I pick up books like Savage Breast,* and one of the first things I read is so mind-blowing I sit with my jaw dropped, staring into space for ten minutes.

Here’s what blind-sided me: The author (Tim Ward) helped me see how our war-gods make it nearly impossible for men to commit to women:

O First, the war-gods warn moms that they daren’t make little sissies out of their sons (sissies make wonko warriors).
O So, when they’re about five or six, moms push their sons away (“No, you can’t help me bake cookies anymore…” “No, you can’t use my sewing machine to make clothes for your doll anymore – and give me that doll, go play with trucks…”) [my examples, not Tim’s]
O Now here’s what hadn’t occurred to me (duh!): boys FEEL pushed away.
O This feeling is raw, it hunkers down in the deep recesses of their hearts, a permanent sore. From then on, whenever they feel intense love for a woman, alarm bells go off: “Ding, ding ding! Remember the last time you felt intense love for a woman! She pitched you out on your noggin!)

I haven’t said it nearly as well as Tim, but you get the drift.

Remember, too, what this chain does to mothers, whose hearts are torn away when they sacrifice their baby boys to the War Gods.

This chain has probably been written about in dozens of textbooks, but the way Tim puts it, you really get it. He traveled to eight or nine countries searching for the Goddess; he says She's totally changed his life -- including his relationships with women. I wanna buy copies of this book and hand them out on street corners to the men who walk by.
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* Savage Breast: One Man’s Search for the Goddess
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Thnx to dkg for the foto