I prefer watching educational videos on YouTube more than watching television, but it’s tedious digging for good content, and I’ve already seen most of the good stuff while searching for videos to put in my blogs. In case anyone else is looking for entertaining educational videos on YouTube, I made a series of posts with all the ones I’ve used on The Wise Sloth, organized by topic, with links to the posts they appear in. You’re bound to be enlightentained, and if you need help exploring the 600+ essays on The Wise Sloth, these video lists offer a quick overview that practically summarize my philosophies.
This list comes mostly from my essays on American pop culture and focuses on the mini-cultural civil wars happening in America, including trending conflicts between women vs. men, conservatives vs. liberals, African Americans vs. whites, and elders vs. the youth.
1: The Old Testament God is exclusively, murderously pro-Israel.
Before the New Testament, Yahweh used to have a deal with the nation of Israel; if they sacrificed animals to Him and obeyed His commandments, Yahweh would bless them. Then, through Jesus’s death, God expanded the offer of salvation to everyone. Christian apologists explain how a perfect being could change so drastically by saying He didn’t. He simply gave humanity as much truth as we could handle, and when we were ready, He gave us more.
This explanation is an oversimplification of what really happened in the Bible. God wasn’t just a little bit nicer to the Jews. They were the only people in the entire world He cared about at all, and He murdered hundreds of thousands of people all around the Middle East for standing between His master race and the expansion of their country. For thousands of years, Yahweh let the Jews loot and plunder the Middle East, taking as many women and children into slavery as God personally slaughtered in His wrath.
Between the Old and New Testament, Yahweh didn’t just change from loving the Jews to loving everyone. He changed from being exclusively, murderously pro-Israel, to being exclusively, murderously pro-Christian. In order to find a logical explanation for this change of policy, you have to dig a little deeper into history and the Bible, but the clues are there if you bother to look.
Genesis 15:18-20
On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, “To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates—the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites,Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites,Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites.”
Genesis 17:3-8
Abram fell facedown, and God said to him,“As for me, this is my covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations.No longer will you be called Abram; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations.I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you.I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.The whole land of Canaan, where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God.”
Exodus 23:20-33
See, I am sending an angel ahead of you to guard you along the way and to bring you to the place I have prepared.Pay attention to him and listen to what he says. Do not rebel against him; he will not forgive your rebellion, since my Name is in him.If you listen carefully to what he says and do all that I say, I will be an enemy to your enemies and will oppose those who oppose you.My angel will go ahead of you and bring you into the land of the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hivites and Jebusites, and I will wipe them out.Do not bow down before their gods or worship them or follow their practices. You must demolish them and break their sacred stones to pieces.Worship the Lord your God, and his blessing will be on your food and water. I will take away sickness from among you,and none will miscarry or be barren in your land. I will give you a full life span. I will send my terror ahead of you and throw into confusion every nation you encounter. I will make all your enemies turn their backs and run.I will send the hornet ahead of you to drive the Hivites, Canaanites and Hittites out of your way.But I will not drive them out in a single year, because the land would become desolate and the wild animals too numerous for you.Little by little I will drive them out before you, until you have increased enough to take possession of the land. I will establish your borders from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, and from the desert to the Euphrates River. I will give into your hands the people who live in the land, and you will drive them out before you.Do not make a covenant with them or with their gods.Do not let them live in your land or they will cause you to sin against me, because the worship of their gods will certainly be a snare to you.
Leviticus 20:22-24
Keep all my decrees and laws and follow them, so that the land where I am bringing you to live may not vomit you out.You must not live according to the customs of the nations I am going to drive out before you. Because they did all these things, I abhorred them.But I said to you, “You will possess their land; I will give it to you as an inheritance, a land flowing with milk and honey.” I am the Lord your God, who has set you apart from the nations.
1 Samuel 8:1-6
In the course of time, David defeated the Philistines and subdued them, and he took Metheg Ammah from the control of the Philistines. David also defeated the Moabites. He made them lie down on the ground and measured them off with a length of cord. Every two lengths of them were put to death, and the third length was allowed to live. So the Moabites became subject to David and brought him tribute. Moreover, David defeated Hadadezer son of Rehob, king of Zobah, when he went to restore his monument at the Euphrates River.David captured a thousand of his chariots, seven thousand charioteers and twenty thousand foot soldiers. He hamstrung all but a hundred of the chariot horses. When the Arameans of Damascus came to help Hadadezer king of Zobah, David struck down twenty-two thousand of them.He put garrisons in the Aramean kingdom of Damascus, and the Arameans became subject to him and brought tribute. The Lord gave David victory wherever he went.
Joshua 8:1-8, 24-27
Then the Lord said to Joshua, “Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.Take the whole army with you, and go up and attack Ai. For I have delivered into your hands the king of Ai, his people, his city and his land.You shall do to Ai and its king as you did to Jericho and its king, except that you may carry off their plunder and livestock for yourselves. Set an ambush behind the city.” So Joshua and the whole army moved out to attack Ai. He chose thirty thousand of his best fighting men and sent them out at nightwith these orders: “Listen carefully. You are to set an ambush behind the city. Don’t go very far from it. All of you be on the alert.I and all those with me will advance on the city, and when the men come out against us, as they did before, we will flee from them.They will pursue us until we have lured them away from the city, for they will say, ‘They are running away from us as they did before.’ So when we flee from them,you are to rise up from ambush and take the city. The Lord your God will give it into your hand.When you have taken the city, set it on fire. Do what the Lord has commanded. See to it; you have my orders.” When Israel had finished killing all the men of Ai in the fields and in the wilderness where they had chased them, and when every one of them had been put to the sword, all the Israelites returned to Ai and killed those who were in it.Twelve thousand men and women fell that day—all the people of Ai.For Joshua did not draw back the hand that held out his javelin until he had destroyed all who lived in Ai.But Israel did carry off for themselves the livestock and plunder of this city, as the Lord had instructed Joshua.
Numbers 31:9-18
The Israelites captured the Midianite women and children and took all the Midianite herds, flocks and goods as plunder.They burned all the towns where the Midianites had settled, as well as all their camps.They took all the plunder and spoils, including the people and animals,and brought the captives, spoils and plunder to Moses and Eleazar the priest and the Israelite assembly at their camp on the plains of Moab, by the Jordan across from Jericho. Moses, Eleazar the priest and all the leaders of the community went to meet them outside the camp.Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle. “Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them.“They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people.Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man,but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
2: The Old Testament teaches nomadic, Bronze Age ethics.
The Old Testament is full of archaic, unethical commandments that would be insane to follow today. It’s intellectually lazy to write-off these instructions as God simply speaking to the people of the time in a way they would understand until they were ready for the truth. I challenge you to listen to Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy on Youtube at full volume with all your Christian friends and family. Then try to explain what you just heard. As you do mental gymnastics to justify the barbarism in the Bible, ask yourself if there’s a more reasonable explanation for the disconnect between your values and the pre-Christian Jews.
God’s commandments in the Old Testament read like a tribal warlord just wrote down all the values and norms his primitive culture had been following since pre-history. If this is true, then God’s change of values in the New Testament will make perfect sense in relation to the rest of the clues I’m about to explain.
Deuteronomy 22: 13-30
If a man takes a wife and, after sleeping with her, dislikes herand slanders her and gives her a bad name, saying, “I married this woman, but when I approached her, I did not find proof of her virginity,”then the young woman’s father and mother shall bring to the town elders at the gate proof that she was a virgin.Her father will say to the elders, “I gave my daughter in marriage to this man, but he dislikes her.Now he has slandered her and said, ‘I did not find your daughter to be a virgin.’ But here is the proof of my daughter’s virginity.” Then her parents shall display the cloth before the elders of the town,and the elders shall take the man and punish him.They shall fine him a hundred shekels of silver and give them to the young woman’s father, because this man has given an Israelite virgin a bad name. She shall continue to be his wife; he must not divorce her as long as he lives. If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the young woman’s virginity can be found,she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has done an outrageous thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her father’s house. You must purge the evil from among you. If a man is found sleeping with another man’s wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die. You must purge the evil from Israel. If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her,you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death—the young woman because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man’s wife. You must purge the evil from among you. But if out in the country a man happens to meet a young woman pledged to be married and rapes her, only the man who has done this shall die.Do nothing to the woman; she has committed no sin deserving death. This case is like that of someone who attacks and murders a neighbor,for the man found the young woman out in the country, and though the betrothed woman screamed, there was no one to rescue her. If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered,he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.
Leviticus 20:18
If a man has sexual relations with a woman during her monthly period,he has exposed the source of her flow, and she has also uncovered it. Both of them are to be cut off from their people.
Exodus 22:16
If a man seduces a virgin who is not pledged to be married and sleeps with her, he must pay the bride-price, and she shall be his wife.If her father absolutely refuses to give her to him, he must still pay the bride-price for virgins.
3: The Old Testament was written by Jewish theocrats and ended with the fall of Israel.
The books of the Old Testament were written by dozens of authors who edited the original books multiple times between roughly 1,400BC-50BC. Most of the authors are unknown, but we know they were literate and advocated the supremacy of the Jewish church and state, which means they were almost certainly members of the Jewish priestly ruling class. Many of the books in the Old Testament are simply chronologies of the reigns of Jewish kings. Coincidentally, new books stopped being added to the Old Testament at the same time Rome conquered Israel, destroyed Yahweh’s temple in Jerusalem, and dethroned the Jewish theocracy.
It’s extremely suspicious that the rise and fall of God’s involvement in the mortal realm follows the same arc as the rise and fall of a nation. A much more logical explanation is that the Old Testament is simply the manifesto and history of the Jewish nation, which like all primitive societies, projected their beliefs, customs, and values into their homegrown mythology.
4: The New Testament was written in Greek by Romans when Israel was at war with Rome.
Rome conquered Israel in 63BC. Afterwards, Jewish resistance fighters waged bloody guerrilla warfare against the occupying Roman army, and total war broke out between 66AD-136AD. The zealous Jewish soldiers were renowned for fighting to the death and refusing to accept Roman occupation despite having no hope of winning back their independence.
The New Testament was written between 44AD-96AD, towards the end of the 100 year war for Jewish independence, which the Jews lost. We don’t know who wrote the books of the New Testament, but we know they were written in Greek, the language used by the commoners of Rome.
If the new Testament is to be believed, we know Paul was a Roman citizen. Based on the values of the New Testament authors, which I’m about to elaborate on, it’s reasonable to assume all the authors of the New Testament were Romans. This means God stopped dictating His word through his chosen people and began dictating through citizens of the country that overthrew the only country He ever cared about. If the New Testament represents the will of the Romans, and not the will of God, it would explain the discrepancies between the Old and New Testaments better than the evolving-God theory Christians have traditionally used.
Acts 22:23-29
As they were shouting and throwing off their cloaks and flinging dust into the air,the commander ordered that Paul be taken into the barracks. He directed that he be flogged and interrogated in order to find out why the people were shouting at him like this.As they stretched him out to flog him, Paul said to the centurion standing there, “Is it legal for you to flog a Roman citizen who hasn’t even been found guilty?” When the centurion heard this, he went to the commander and reported it. “What are you going to do?” he asked. “This man is a Roman citizen.” The commander went to Paul and asked, “Tell me, are you a Roman citizen?” “Yes, I am,” he answered. Then the commander said, “I had to pay a lot of money for my citizenship.” “But I was born a citizen,” Paul replied. Those who were about to interrogate him withdrew immediately. The commander himself was alarmed when he realized that he had put Paul, a Roman citizen, in chains.
5: The New Testament is pro-Rome.
The first books of the New Testament were written in Greek around 60AD, supposedly by Paul, who was a native born Roman citizen. His letters were addressed to Christians living in Roman cities, not Jews living in Israel. Around 90 AD, the Gospels were written to tell the origin-story of Paul’s Christian religion. The origin-story portrays Roman citizens, rulers, and laws in a positive light.
After all the atrocities Rome committed against the Jewish people and their religion, no Jew would ever write anything nice about Romans. Yahweh Himself personally slaughtered entire nations in the Old Testament for lesser offenses. It’s completely out of character for Yahweh to be so pro-Roman in the New Testament until you consider that the New Testament was written by Romans. This explains why God’s message changed at the exact moment the nationality of the Bible’s authors changed.
Luke 20:20-26
Keeping a close watch on Jesus, the Jewish priests sent spies, who pretended to be sincere. They hoped to catch Jesus in something he said, so that they might hand him over to the power and authority of the governor.So the spies questioned him: “Teacher, we know that you speak and teach what is right, and that you do not show partiality but teach the way of God in accordance with the truth.Is it right for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” He saw through their duplicity and said to them,“Show me a denarius. Whose image and inscription are on it?” “Caesar’s,” they replied. He said to them, “Then give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” They were unable to trap him in what he had said there in public. And astonished by his answer, they became silent.
Matthew 22:15-22
Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words.They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. “Teacher,” they said, “we know that you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are.Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not?” But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, “You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me?Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius,and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?” “Caesar’s,” they replied. Then he said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away.
Matthew 27:11-26, Mark 14:54-72, John 18:28-40,
Meanwhile Jesus stood before the governor, and the governor asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?” “You have said so,” Jesus replied. When he was accused by the chief priests and the elders, he gave no answer.Then Pilate asked him, “Don’t you hear the testimony they are bringing against you?”But Jesus made no reply, not even to a single charge—to the great amazement of the governor. Now it was the governor’s custom at the festival to release a prisoner chosen by the crowd.At that time they had a well-known prisoner whose name was Jesus Barabbas.So when the crowd had gathered, Pilate asked them, “Which one do you want me to release to you: Jesus Barabbas, or Jesus who is called the Messiah?”For he knew it was out of self-interest that they had handed Jesus over to him. While Pilate was sitting on the judge’s seat, his wife sent him this message: “Don’t have anything to do with that innocent man, for I have suffered a great deal today in a dream because of him.” But the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and to have Jesus executed. “Which of the two do you want me to release to you?” asked the governor. “Barabbas,” they answered. “What shall I do, then, with Jesus who is called the Messiah?” Pilate asked. They all answered, “Crucify him!” “Why? What crime has he committed?” asked Pilate. But they shouted all the louder, “Crucify him!” When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” he said. “It is your responsibility!” All the people answered, “His blood is on us and on our children!” Then he released Barabbas to them. But he had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified.
Act 18:12-14
While Gallio was proconsul of Achaia, the Jews of Corinth made a united attack on Paul and brought him to the place of judgment.“This man,” they charged, “is persuading the people to worship God in ways contrary to the law.” Just as Paul was about to speak, Gallio said to them, “If you Jews were making a complaint about some misdemeanor or serious crime, it would be reasonable for me to listen to you.But since it involves questions about words and names and your own law—settle the matter yourselves. I will not be a judge of such things.”So he drove them off.Then the crowd there turned on Sosthenes the synagogue leader and beat him in front of the proconsul; and Gallio showed no concern whatever.
6: The New Testament speaks harshly against the Jewish theocracy.
The New Testament commands fealty to Caesar and casts Roman politicians as good guys while depicting Jewish priests as bad guys. The word “pharisees” is used about 80 times in the New Testament, always portraying them as greedy, selfish, murderous villains who don’t understand God’s teachings. Jesus even goes as far as saying God likes Roman tax collectors more than pharisees.
Jesus said he came to expand God’s social contract to include everyone, not just Jews. But he did more than that. God didn’t just go from loving Jewish leaders, tolerating Jewish people, and hating gentiles- to loving everyone. The God of the New Testament loves gentiles, tolerates Jews, and specifically, repeatedly despises the Jewish priest class. This vendetta seems petty for a god, but it makes perfect sense if the New Testament was written by Roman propagandists.
Luke 18: 9-14
To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable:“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector.I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’ “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
Jesus went on to tell the people this parable: “A man planted a vineyard, rented it to some farmers and went away for a long time.At harvest time he sent a servant to the tenants so they would give him some of the fruit of the vineyard. But the tenants beat him and sent him away empty-handed.He sent another servant, but that one also they beat and treated shamefully and sent away empty-handed.He sent still a third, and they wounded him and threw him out. “Then the owner of the vineyard said, ‘What shall I do? I will send my son, whom I love; perhaps they will respect him.’ “But when the tenants saw him, they talked the matter over. ‘This is the heir,’ they said. ‘Let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’So they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. “What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them?He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others.” When the people heard this, they said, “God forbid!” Jesus looked directly at them and asked, “Then what is the meaning of that which is written: “‘The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’? Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces; anyone on whom it falls will be crushed.” The teachers of the law and the chief priests looked for a way to arrest him immediately, because they knew he had spoken this parable against them. But they were afraid of the people.
Matthew 22:34-45
Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together.One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’This is the first and greatest commandment.And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them,“What do you think about the Messiah? Whose son is he?” “The son of David,” they replied. He said to them, “How is it then that David, speaking by the Spirit, calls him ‘Lord’? For he says, “‘The Lord said to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand until I put your enemiesunder your feet.”’ If then David calls him ‘Lord,’ how can he be his son?”No one could say a word in reply, and from that day on no one dared to ask him any more questions.
Luke 21:12
“But before all this, they will seize you and persecute you. They will hand you over to synagogues and put you in prison, and you will be brought before kings and governors, and all on account of my name.“
7: The New Testament speaks against the Jewish Temple.
Christians may remember how Jesus went to the Temple in Jerusalem and drove out the money changers there. Then, when Jesus died, the curtain in the Temple ripped in half. Anyone who has never read the Old Testament will fail appreciate the importance of the Temple or what Jesus did there. In 1 Kings 5-8, Solomon builds the Temple as a literal house on Earth for Yahweh to live in, where Jews could make animal sacrifices on a giant altar, and God could feast on the burning flesh. It’s also worth noting, the Temple was built using slave labor.
1 Kings 5:13-18
King Solomon conscripted laborers from all Israel—thirty thousand men. He sent them off to Lebanon in shifts of ten thousand a month, so that they spent one month in Lebanon and two months at home. Adoniramwas in charge of the forced labor.Solomon had seventy thousand carriers and eighty thousand stonecutters in the hills,as well as thirty-three hundred foremen who supervised the project and directed the workers.At the king’s command they removed from the quarry large blocks of high-grade stone to provide a foundation of dressed stone for the temple.The craftsmen of Solomon and Hiram and workers from Byblos cut and prepared the timber and stone for the building of the temple.
The Temple was the center of the Jewish religion, and since Israel was a theocracy, it was also the center of Jewish political power. It was the gateway to God and the most important landmark in Jewish culture. The inner sanctum of the Temple is even called, “The Holy of Holies.” This wasn’t just a big church. If the Old Testament was divinely inspired, the Temple was functionally the center of the universe. It was so important, that after the Assyrian army destroyed it in 587BC, the Jews rebuilt it. The Romans destroyed it again in 70AD, and now the only part left of it is the Western wall, or “The Wailing Wall,” as modern Jews have come to call it.
The Temple is mentioned in the New Testament about 90 times, and the authors consistently contradict the Old Testament’s claims that God lives inside the Temple and demands blood sacrifices to appease Him. Even Jesus himself mocks the very the idea, flippantly pointing out how ridiculous it is that God would need a brick and mortar house. If Jesus is God, it’s very strange for Him to belittle that which used to be the most important thing in the world to Him.
Luke 21:5-6
Some of his disciples were remarking about how the temple was adorned with beautiful stones and with gifts dedicated to God. But Jesus said,“As for what you see here, the time will come when not one stone will be left on another; every one of them will be thrown down.”
John 2:13-22
When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem.In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money.So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!”His disciples remembered that it is written: “Zeal for your house will consume me.” The Jews then responded to him, “What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?” Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” They replied, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?”But the temple he had spoken of was his body.After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.
1 Corinthians 3:16-17
Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.
Act 7: 44-50
“Our ancestors had the tabernacle of the covenant law with them in the wilderness. It had been made as God directed Moses, according to the pattern he had seen.After receiving the tabernacle, our ancestors under Joshua brought it with them when they took the land from the nations God drove out before them. It remained in the land until the time of David,who enjoyed God’s favor and asked that he might provide a dwelling place for the God of Jacob.But it was Solomon who built a house for him. “However, the Most High does not live in houses made by human hands.”
Luke 21:20
“When you see Jerusalem being surrounded by armies, you will know that its desolation is near.Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, let those in the city get out, and let those in the country not enter the city.For this is the time of punishment in fulfillment of all that has been written.How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! There will be great distress in the land and wrath against this people.They will fall by the sword and will be taken as prisoners to all the nations. Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.”
8: The New Testament promotes cultural assimilation and denounces Jewish exceptionalism.
The Old Testament consistently commands Jews to treat foreigners as second-class citizens and not to practice the customs of other countries. It also repeatedly states God and His laws are perfect. The New Testament completely reverses this trend, consistently stressing the point that everyone is equal in God’s eyes and we should embrace foreigners as family… which is exactly how the Roman government needed the Jews to behave.
Ephesians 2:11-22
Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called “uncircumcised” by those who call themselves “the circumcision” (which is done in the body by human hands)—remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility,by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace,and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near.For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit. Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household,built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord.And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.
John 4:4-21
When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?”(His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water?Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?” Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet.Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.” “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
Romans 2:28-29
A person is not a Jew who is one only outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical.No, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code. Such a person’s praise is not from other people, but from God.
9: The New Testament teaches urban pacifism.
After 100 years of bloody warfare against Jewish zealots, the Romans undoubtedly realized the source of the Jewish fighting spirit was it’s murderously xenophobic holy book. In order to subdue Israel, Rome either needed to kill every Jew or the book that inspired them to fight to the death for God and country. Coincidentally, in the New Testament, Yahweh comes to earth, orders Jews not to fight, glorifies the leaders of the Roman army occupying Israel, and specifically endorses paying taxes to Caesar.
Matthew 5:38-48
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles.Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that?And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
10: The New Testament approves of slavery, which was an important part of Roman culture.
If the Bible was divinely inspired, its laws would be above reproach. It’s self-evident that slavery is evil, but the Old and New Testament both approve of it repeatedly. Why would the new-and-improved, all-perfect God of the New Testament still approve of slavery, while simultaneously commanding us to love our neighbors and act holy? The simplest answer is that God didn’t write the Old or New Testament. Primitive Middle Eastern tribal warlords projected their culture into the Old Testament, and Roman politicians projected theirs into the New Testament.
Ephesians 6:5
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.
Colossians 3:22
Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord.
1 Timothy 6:1-3
All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider their masters worthy of full respect, so that God’s name and our teaching may not be slandered.Those who have believing masters should not show them disrespect just because they are fellow believers. Instead, they should serve them even better because their masters are dear to them as fellow believers and are devoted to the welfare of their slaves. These are the things you are to teach and insist on.If anyone teaches otherwise and does not agree to the sound instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ and to godly teaching,they are conceited and understand nothing.
Titus 2:9-10
Teach slaves to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not to talk back to them,and not to steal from them, but to show that they can be fully trusted, so that in every way they will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive.
1 Peter 2:18-25
Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh.For it is commendable if someone bears up under the pain of unjust suffering because they are conscious of God.But how is it to your credit if you receive a beating for doing wrong and endure it? But if you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God.To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.
11: The earliest historical mention of Jesus was written by a Roman.
The earliest mention of Jesus was written around 93AD by the Roman historian, Flavius Josephus in his history book, “Antiquities of the Jews.” Some historians suspect Josephus’s account of Jesus was written by multiple authors at different times, which would constitute a conspiracy to promote Christianity. Even if there was only one author, his wording is suspicious:
“About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.”
This is not objective historical reporting. Josephus is blatantly biased and presents impossible events as fact without evidence. Why would a Roman so blindly accept and promote the Christian agenda? There are only three possible explanations:
1: Yahweh really moved to Rome and became the God of the Hellenistic world in His march towards world domination.
2: Josephus was a lone scholar who converted to Christianity and lied in his history book to justify his belief.
3: Josephus was working with other Romans to spread a viral mythology they created.
12: Most of the New Testament takes place in the nation of Rome, not Israel.
For thousands of years, Yahweh’s sole obsession was the expansion of Israel, and His story was told by Jews living in Israel or trying to get back to it. Then, Yahweh completely abandons His homeland to spread a message of love and peace in the nation that conquered His homeland and destroyed His house.
Christians may argue God simply expanded His horizons, but even still, it seems suspiciously odd that God would completely lose interest in Israel and walk away from the home He spent thousands of years obsessing over and killing for. Does it make more sense that God went to Rome to project His will there, or the authors of the Bible came from Rome and projected their will into the Bible?
13: The Romans had a history of absorbing other religions and creating state religions.
Christianity has had such a huge impact on the world, it may seem outrageous to speculate it was the product of a Roman conspiracy to subdue a troublesome religion. The amount of work it would take to pull off a psychological warfare operation of that magnitude seems ludicrous… until you take into account that Rome did it all the time.
Roman culture absorbed the Greek religion and rewrote its gods to be Romans, and Roman emperors created their own religious doctrines giving them semi-divine authority… exactly like the office of the Pope, which was also a Roman invention used to elevate the status of its leaders after making Christianity the official imperial cult.
14: Romans canonized the New Testament and made it their state religion.
In the same meeting where old white guys decided which viral Christian documents would be officially declared the true word of God, they also invented the customs of celebrating Jesus’ birth on the winter solstice and his resurrection on the spring solstice… which are the exact same astrological events Pagans used to determine the date of Eostre and Jews used for Passover. It’s also worth noting that Passover is the Jewish holiday that celebrates their salvation from the Egyptians by a man who wandered in the desert, controlled water, and made food appear out of nowhere.
Everyone knows Jesus’ birthday and deathday were forged to coincide with other holidays. Most Christians probably always assumed this lie was reverse engineered by a sneaky Pope somewhere around the medieval times, but now that you know it was established by the First Counsel of Nicea, why would you believe anything else they said in the same meeting?
It would be more accurate to ask, why would you believe a lie the first time you heard it but not the second? Jesus’s entire life and death are metaphors for the rotation of the Earth around the Sun. Jesus is called “the son.” He gives light and life to the world. When he went below the Earth, there was darkness, and when the sun rose again, life came back to the entire world.
Both the Pagan version of Easter and the Jewish Passover are celebrated when the rising spring sun brings salvation from the winter darkness. They’re all based on the same concept. You don’t have to be a genius or a conspiracy theorist to see the astrological symbolism. Though you’d have to be crazy to believe the people who lied about Christmas and Easter, weren’t also making stuff up when they included those astrological metaphors in the Gospels.
15: Israel was just the first country whose culture was wiped out by Christianity, by order of leaders in Rome.
If this still sounds crazy, consider that the Catholic church sent missionaries around the world to colonize foreign lands and convert native cultures to Christianity in a calculated effort to erase their values and literally make slaves out them. If we can believe the theocratic leaders in Rome would use Christianity to standardize control over diverse populations, why is it so hard to believe Israel was the first culture they used Christianity against?
The only question this leaves up in the air is, why did the Romans persecute and kill early Christians? First, most of the early killing was done by local authorities who weren’t in on the scam and saw Christians as a threat to their Pagan beliefs. It’s not like the highest leaders in Rome could or would let every colony leader in on all their secrets.
Second, between the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70AD and the First Council of Nicea in 325AD, Rome went through 47 Emperors, most of whom were murdered by rival politicians. In that kind of environment, secrets and policies are bound to get lost and resurface.
Lastly, maybe the original leaders of the Christian theocracy were simply murdering Christians they viewed as heretics… exactly like the Holy Roman Empire in Medieval Germany (which was neither holy, Roman, nor and empire) did to Protestants.
You could say the Holy Roman Empire out-Roman-ed the Romans when it hijacked Roman mythology and used it to control central Europe. The idea was stolen again by the Church of England, the Church of France, the Mormon Church, and countless other opportunists. Ironically, it all began when a band of nomadic Middle Eastern warlords decided to invent mythological stories to unite the Twelve Tribes of Israel. History has repeated itself enough. It’s time to stop believing in our ancestors’ disingenuous mythologies, whether they come from the Middle East, Europe, or anywhere else.
I served in the U.S. Air Force from 2000-2007. My job code was 3C0X1 (Communications computer systems operator). My highest rank was E-5 (Staff Sergeant), and I received an honorable discharge. After separating, I wrote a series of posts about how the U.S. military is a cult that uses brainwashing techniques to indoctrinate recruits and commits other indignities and injustices against them. You can find links to those essays at the bottom of this page. Several people have commented asking what the alternative is. So here’s my tentative list of reforms that would address the systemic flaws in America’s military system.
Improve transparency of recruiting and contracts.
In my blogs I state the U.S. military is consciously designed using the cult model to brainwash troops into becoming suicidal, unquestioning zealots, and the Uniform Code of Justice strips enlisted troops of their civil rights and turns them into second-class citizens who live in a totalitarian culture where officers have the same power over them as slave owners.
Many people have argued these are necessary evils; since it’s not rational for human beings to charge into life-threatening situations, it’s necessary to hack recruits’ brains to change the way they think. Believe it or not, I can accept this. The purpose of war is to kill, which conflicts with the premise of civilized society. So if there must be war, then evil acts must be tolerated for the greater good. It would be naive to think otherwise.
However, if we lie to young, impressionable civilians, and tell them the purpose of basic training is to evolve them into a higher form of citizen, then everything they’re fighting for is based on a lie. By not giving recruits fair warning they’ll have their identity methodically stripped away and their values replaced, the U.S. government is stealing their souls. That’s existential murder.
If a patriotic recruit joins the military after receiving a lengthy briefing explaining everything they’re getting into, then that’s their choice. If a poor person joins the military because a recruiter told them they’re signing up for a lucrative adventure that will turn them into an uberman, that’s a bait and switch scam no one should tolerate.
Eliminate the use of mind control techniques.
Police officers, firefighters, search and rescue crews, ice road truckers, and civilian contractors in the military put their lives on the line every day without being systematically brainwashed or having their citizenship downgraded. So maybe using traumatic coercion to steal soldiers’ personalities isn’t a moral imperative.
Then again, maybe it is. However, until we’ve tried creating a fighting force that isn’t based on lies, we’ll never know, and we’ll all be guilty of crimes against humanity against our own troops before war even breaks out.
The change doesn’t have to happen overnight. We could create special units that use different training programs and “customs and courtesies.” If those units fail to accomplish their missions, at least we can say cared enough about the troops to try treating them like human beings.
Give the troops their freedom and rights back.
Ostensibly, military service can’t be compared to slavery because every troop joins willingly and gets paid. The murky reality is that most enlisted troops join for the paycheck and benefits because they don’t have enough education or certifications to get a job that pays a living wage, offers benefits, or vacation time. According to the American Dream, anyone can work hard and become anything they want, but statistically, if your family is poor and you’re not smart enough to score 50% on the ASVAB, you’re going to spend the rest of your life as a wage slave and die broke. Picking between that and military service is less of a choice and more of a trick to make you volunteer for indentured servitude.
Even if you get paid well and receive full benefits, you still lose your civil rights. Officers have totalitarian power over enlisted troops. The military has legal jurisdiction over you 24 hours a day, and you have to obey all its laws even when you’re off duty on vacation in a foreign country. You’re not free to date or marry a person from a higher caste, change jobs at will, choose where you live, or quit your job. The punishments for walking off the job are: going to prison, getting blacklisted from the civilian job market for life, and execution.
If military service isn’t literally slavery, it’s too close for comfort. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say it resembles apartheid more than freedom, and it literally fits the criteria of multiple “human rights abuses.” If a civilian organization operated the same way, the public would be screaming for the U.S. military to shut it down and convict the leaders for crimes against humanity at The Hague.
If any of this is true, then we should give troops most of their freedom and rights back. The cost is too high, and all the benefits are tainted with sin. At the very least, give troops the freedom to leave. Allow them to pay off the cost of their training or work it off doing community service for a local government office. If these options are always on the table, then any troop who chooses to live as a second-class citizen in a totalitarian regime, is exercising their free will. Those who can’t conform will leave without having to get kicked out, or stay until the end of their enlistment and be a toxic influence on our national defense force. Plus, if politicans ever decide to go to war for corporate profits, the troops can veto the unjust war by boycotting it. This will allow them to serve our country by not supporting counterproductive wars.
Eliminate or restructure the officer corps.
The officer corps is an archaic institution that’s incompatible with modern values. It elevates one class of people and gives them total power over another. I’ll concede, it might be necessary for combat troops to work under officers who enjoy more rights and benefits on and off duty, but there’s no reason to give that level of power and privilege to office managers and dentists. Nor is there any reason why network administrators and airplane mechanics should have to salute those people and live in drastically cheaper housing. Stop and think about this slowly. Do we really need segregated cafeterias with first-class and second-class seating that separates the dentists from the network administrators?
I don’t know if government-funded caste-systems are ever moral, but they might be endurable if they were effective. But any enlisted troop can tell you stories of moronic officers with God-sized egos who had bad ideas, wouldn’t listen to advice, and abused their rank. When you give people the power and glory of a dictator, and tell them to act like a leader, they’ll tend to act like megalomaniac dictators. It doesn’t happen to everyone, but it has had deadly consequences in war zones and will continue to do so.
The officer system also puts twenty-three-year-old college graduates with no real-world experience in charge of highly trained and experienced master sergeants who have to groom their lieutenants through their mistakes until they get promoted and are replaced with another unqualified kid. This is a failed experiment that is perpetually impacting the military’s missions and wasting taxpayer money.
All these problems could be solved by eliminating the officer corps and giving the most important jobs to people who have gone through the enlisted ranks and have the most on-the-job training. If the officer corps must exist, you should have to get promoted to at least E-7 before you can apply for Officer Training School. This would at least keep out the trust fund frat boys looking for a cushy, flattering, obscenely high paying job that looks great on a resume, and it would do a better job of matching the most important positions with the most qualified candidates.
Democratize the promotion system.
Each branch has its own promotion system, and they’re all so broken it would take too long to list all the reasons here. Basically, your fate is either determined by one or two people who might be idiots who hate you for the wrong reasons or you’re practically guaranteed promotion if you just sit around long enough.
My solution is to eliminate promotion cycles and allow everyone in the military to vote for everyone’s promotion. You log onto a military website, select a person who you feel deserves a promotion, and enter a justification. When a person has reached enough votes, they get reviewed by the promotion board.
Likewise, everyone should also be able to anonymously vote “not recommended for promotion.” This would prevent toxic managers from rising in power by kissing up to a few higher ranking individuals who don’t work with them and barely know them.
Put the prison system under the Department of Defense to brainwash and exploit prisoners.
If it’s a moral imperative that we must ignore the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and turn normal human beings into unquestioning killing machines without their fully-informed consent, then perhaps it’s a moral imperative to take this rule to its logical conclusion.
America’s prison system strips civilians of their freedom and rights just like the military. Many prisoners are mentally broken, institutionalized killers who owe a debt to society. If we’re already committing the same human rights abuses against prisoners as we are troops, then why not take advantage of the sin? Turn every prison into a basic training camp and put those sub-humans to good use doing society’s dirty work. They won’t complain about having their rights abused like I am because they’re already used to it, and the public will never get upset because most people don’t care how prisoners are treated.
Somehow, over the past 15 years, radical feminism became mainstream feminism. Now, gender studies professors in every state are teaching girls they live in a patriarchy designed by men to oppress women. All women are victims, and all men are evil. Masculinity is toxic, and sex is rape. Every week I see new tweets, blog posts, articles, and Youtube videos of women seething with fear and disgust at the entire male population.
I feel ridiculous stating the obvious, but since feminists are doing such a successful job of making it trendy to hate men, I feel obligated to stand up for us. If you hate men, you’re ignoring at least 13 obvious facts about life:
1: You can’t demonize half the world’s population.
Negatively stereotyping every member of any group for the actions of its outliers is the definition of bigotry. The bigger the group, the more illogical it is to generalize the whole. Misandrists lump half the world’s population into one negative caricature! It’s so obviously insane, I don’t know how to elaborate on it.
2: You’ve met good men, a lot of them.
I can think of more than ten males who have physically, emotionally, or professionally bullied me. You probably can too, but we can also list women who have hurt us and men who have loved and helped us. Every day, you walk past dozens of men on the street, work next to men, give orders to male customer service workers, and listen to male reporters, politicians, celebrities, and educators. You interact with men every day without flinching because you know they’re not a threat. Chances are, there’s at least one man you call on holidays to say, “I love you.” If you can find exceptions to the statement, “All men are evil,” then you shouldn’t say it.
3: You know women who will vouch for the men in their lives.
Most women are looking for a man to fall in love with, and most will find one. If you think all men are evil, then either you, or most women, have a factually incorrect perception of reality. If most of the women in the world disagree with you, then you should question your objectivity. Chances are, the problem isn’t that everyone else is closed-minded; you are.
4: At least half of all men are beta.
If you think all men are monsters involved in a global conspiracy to oppress women, you must have never been to a Star Wars convention, comic convention, LARPing event, chess club, choir club, Weird Al Yankovic concert, or dating website. Most men younger than thirty, have a panic attack just thinking about talking to women. Those men get friend-zoned, exploited, pushed around, and discarded by women who know beta males will put up with it just for the privilege of being near a woman. You’re ignoring evidence that contradicts your conclusion if you believe there aren’t at least 1 billion gold diggers around the world, manipulating beta males and spending their money. Every year, millions of incel, forever-alone, beta men kill themselves after losing all hope of ever being able to control their fate, find love, or succeed in a career.
If this is who you believe is oppressing you, you’re projecting.
5: At least half of all men are wage slaves earning less than the cost of living.
If you listen to feminist propaganda about how ruthlessly men have designed and gamed the system to give them every advantage in life over women, you’d think all men live in an easy wonderland, where they sleep on beds of gold and lay around all day while women in chains feed them grapes. In the real world, grapes, and every other fruit and vegetable you buy at the grocery store, are picked mostly by male wage slaves who work long hours for less than a living wage. They get minimal breaks, no employee benefits, and their bodies are in constant pain. This is just the agriculture industry. In every sector of the economy, men do the most physically painful jobs that make life easier for everyone else.
That face you make when you work at a job you hate all day, every day, don’t get benefits, and earn less than a living wage. Then hordes of feminists accuse you of oppressing 4 billion people.
6: There’s a line of men who would eat a mile of your shit for the privilege of licking your ass hole.
I served in the U.S. Air Force for seven years. I heard women complain how they have to work twice as hard to make it in a man’s military, but on a daily basis, I saw men lining up to do women’s work for them, help them after work, and hold them less accountable for bad behavior. I knew a woman who would put ice on her nipples every morning to make them pop through her shirt to ensure men would desire and serve her. Any woman, regardless of body type, can find men who want to worship and serve them. Even feminists who hate men still have fanboys orbiting them and telling them everything they want to hear. Everywhere you look, there’s evidence men worship women. The only way to not see it is to lock yourself in a confined space where only angry women are allowed to enter.
7: Women have some systemic privileges over men.
It’s a well-documented fact that the American legal system gives women lower sentences for the same crimes as men and gives women preferential treatment in divorce and custody cases. Women can send a man to prison for rape, even if he has evidence sex was consensual, but it’s almost impossible for a man to send a woman to prison for raping him.
Physical fitness requirements for women in the military are lower than for men. Women aren’t required to register for the draft. Women have more options for domestic violence support, student loans, small business loans, fellowships, and jobs at companies with affirmative action policies. You have to ignore billions of dollars of government spending to hold onto the belief that the system has abandoned women and given men every advantage in life.
Even if women get paid less than men for the same work, women still spend more money than men. If women were as oppressed as feminists say they are, then 4/5th of the stores in malls would sell power tools, work boots, and flannel shirts. In reality, 2/3rds of the stores in malls sell women’s clothing made in Asian sweatshops by male and female slaves.
In every first world country, women spend more money than men. Every marketer knows women are the engine of the global economy. If women make so much less than men, the only way it’s mathematically possible for them to buy as much as they do, is by spending their man’s money. It’s ungrateful and abusive to accuse men of being complicit in a global conspiracy to rob women, while most women spend men’s money daily.
9: Women die with more money than men.
Despite the unendurable stress of being oppressed, women live longer. So regardless of the wage gap, married men spend most of the lives sharing ownership of all their assets with their wives, and in the end, women get it all. That’s not oppression. That’s winning. If the system is designed to set anyone up to fail, it’s men.
10: Men work at spas, where most customers are women.
There are hundreds of thousands of day spas, massage clinics, pedicure clinics, manicure clinics, waxing clinics, esthetician clinics, and other business dedicated to pampering women. Most of the people who work in these leisure industries are women, but there are men who spend every day massaging, manicuring, pedicuring, grooming, and pampering women of all colors, who are often spending their man’s money. If you don’t understand why people don’t take radical feminist seriously, try protesting against male oppression in the lobby of a luxury day spa and see how foolish you feel afterward.
11: Men built and maintain the infrastructure that keeps you from living in a cave.
Radical feminism teaches a revisionist version of history in the world was built on the backs of women. It doesn’t include how many men died building railroads, bridges, skyscrapers, sewers, dams, or roads. It doesn’t mention the countless hours men labored in fields, factories, mines, boats, and forests. It doesn’t honor the firemen, trashmen, cooks, movers, industrial cleaners, or mechanics who have worked until their hands bled and kept working. Maybe if women did more of the backbreaking work men take for granted, they would realize how green the grass is on their side of the fence.
12: Never forget your soldiers and what they sacrificed for you.
Nobody in a foxhole ever said men have it easier than women. You don’t need to go to war to understand that. If you can watch any war movie, and still look a veteran in the eye and tell them they never had to sacrifice anything, and the world would be better off without them, then the problem is you’re pathologically self-centered.
13: Everyone is good and evil.
Everyone loves and hates someone. Everyone has helped and hurt someone. Everyone wants to do what’s right, but nobody knows how to be perfect. We all make mistakes, because everyone is born, lives, and dies ignorant. No individual is completely good or evil, let alone any group. If you only acknowledge the worst things done by the worst people in any group, you could justify being bigoted against anyone, but that’s insane.
14: The root of the world’s problems is predatory capitalism.
If it seems like women and minorities are oppressed, it’s not because white men designed the world to oppress them. It’s because rich people designed the world to oppress the poor. If it seems like most rich people are white men, it’s because you’re only looking at white men. In every country, the majority of people are poor, and the majority of rich people have the same skin color as the majority of the population. And behind every rich man, is at least one woman spending his money while he works.
You’re not being oppressed by the white boy who takes your order at McDonald’s. He’s being oppressed by his employer, who is also oppressing you by selling gullible customers addictive, overpriced poison burgers. Aborting all the white babies in the world won’t change the normalcy of predatory business practices, and neither will lynching the rich. The only thing that will accomplish the goals of feminism is economic reform. As long as feminists continue directing conversations and energy towards hating men, business owners of every race will continue to exploit everyone unopposed.
In 2017, The Wise Sloth blog turned 10 years old. I celebrated its birthday by moving it to a new domain provider and totally renovating the layout and structure. Unfortunately, this required me to ask my E-mail subscribers to resubscribe because I couldn’t export/import their E-mail addresses. Only about half renewed, which gave me a sad face at first, but I realized I probably just culled out people who stopped reading anyway. Now they won’t be bothered with notifications anymore, and I know how many dedicated fans I have. So thank you for sticking with me. I appreciate every one of you.
I haven’t been posting much lately because I’ve been working tirelessly on creating the ultimate story plot formula engine by breaking down popular movies and analyzing and comparing their component parts. I’m creating a tool that will allow anyone to easily write a story as well-structured as Avatar. More importantly, it will allow you to easily explain how to accomplish a goal, which will allow you to teach people how to accomplish goals. If everyone could write professional quality screenplays that teach useful information, it could end the intellectual drought in Hollywood.
Movie Plot Break Downs I wrote and am analyzing
I’m still dedicated to writing blogs, and I want to give my 1,900 super fans exactly what you all want. It would hurt my soul if any of you left because you’re not finding what you’re looking for. So let’s help each other. Tell me what you like most/least about my posts. Do you like my essays, comics, or lists best? What are your most/least favorite topics I talk about? Are there any general or specific topics or issues I haven’t covered that you want to hear my perspective on? What would you like me to write more/less about? Is there anything else I can do to improve your Wise Sloth experience?
If you’ve never commented, now is the perfect time to join the tribe and leave your mark. Post a comment below letting me and your fellow sloths know what you think about this experience we’re all sharing.
To help jog your memory, here’s a list of the topics I’ve written about with links to lists of those blogs:
In 2011, I made an illustrated parable explaining the history and future of the internet in response to Congress trying to kill net neutrality with the Stop Online Pirating Act and Protect IP Act. A few years after both bills failed, I deleted this comic because it felt obscure, irrelevant, and fearmongering. Net Neutrality is under attack again. This time, telecom companies have bribed the head of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, to use the FCC’s power to do what Congress couldn’t. So I’m reposting this unfortunately still-relevant comic.
Note: In real life, the internet wasn’t invented because the public demanded it. It was funded and created quietly by the U.S. military and several large universities to transfer military and scientific data. I changed this in the story for the sake of brevity.
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I’ve compiled 37 lists of passages from the Bible containing keywords which tend to point to its most archaic, evil, absurd statements. When you read these, ask yourself how many sound perfectly wise, like a perfect God would write, and how many sound like a bunch of primitive tribesmen projecting their customs, values, and goals into an apparently barbaric ancient mythology.
Christians may write these passages off by saying Jewish culture slightly influenced the teachings in the Bible, but the ubiquity of Jewish customs implies it wasn’t tainted by Jewish culture. It’s the manifesto of Jewish culture, and taken on a whole, it paints a clear picture of a tribal theocracy using violence to subdue its citizens and neighbors. I challenge you to look up the context of these quotes on Bible Gateway.com or listen to the full chapters on YouTube. In most cases, you’ll either find a longer trainwreck of barbarism or at least more inapplicable, culturally-relative values, customs, and beliefs.
The number of absurd verses in the Bible raises a reasonable doubt of the divinity of the Bible. If you disagree, put your faith to the test. The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible made a list of every commandment in the Bible, titled “Every Jot And Tittle.” If you go through them and check which ones you agree with and practice, you’re going to pass over more than you tick. Nobody follows the majority of the Bible’s teachings because most of it is either immoral or archaic.
You may find some passages in the list below that sound positive and teach useful information, but you’ll find more that contradict the good ones. The Bible gets more wrong than it gets right, and you shouldn’t revere a broken clock for stating the obvious twice a day.
I’ve received a number of E-mails from readers saying, “I love your writing, and I agree with your assessment of modern life. You do a good job of articulating how the system is designed to screw the poor and destroy the planet. The stuff you say about religion and philosophy are lucid and inspiring. Plus, I think it’s awesome how you want to start a secular monastery where intellectuals can escape the rat race to devote their lives to producing important work. What can I do to help?”
I’m not lazy or presumptuous enough to ask strangers to do my work for me, but since people keep asking, and I really could use the help, I made a list of tasks I need assistance with.
If you’d like to talk in more detail about how you can help me help others, then please E-mail me using the form on my Contact Page. Thank you.
1: Find me an eccentric multi-millionaire philanthropist/collector
My life plan is to write until I earn enough money selling books to afford to build a self-sustainable, profitable, equitable monastery and publishing house that focuses on producing useful, enlightening works. I plan on giving away the blueprints and business plans so anyone can set up their own sustainable community tailored to their definition of utopia. It will take me either ten years or one millionaire to reach this goal. If you know anyone who is rich enough to spend $7 million on a painting to brighten their foyer, convince them to give me $1 million for the joy of watching me try to save the world. I will be a better conversation piece than any painting, and I’ll give the donor and the referer a piece of my own original art, plus one of my personal ideation notebooks, which will be collectors’ items one day if I get famous enough. The sooner I have the money to start building, the sooner the value of those items will start appreciating.
If you feel my work is worth reading, it’s worth sharing. Word of mouth is the most powerful marketing tool. So please tell all your friends to check out The Wise Sloth, but if you only tell one person, make it the most powerful, influential person you know. Tell them if they like my work, to share it with the most powerful, influential person they know. They may not give me $1 million, but we’ll be inspiring the people with the most power to change the world.
If you believe my posts articulate important ideas worth spreading, then share your favorite ones on social media. I have almost 600, so if you want to go the extra mile, you could post one of my blogs a week until you get bored. Facebook and Twitter are good places to share, but Reddit is best. It has the largest, broadest audience, and links generate clicks even after getting buried by new content. Often times, links in the comment section of a popular post will get more clicks than links posted as stand-alone submissions.
I’m not asking for a spam brigade. Flooding Reddit with my links will do more damage to my brand than good. Posting one link every week or month in a relevant forum will get our message out and keep it in the public consciousness.
4: Tell media personalities and outlets about my work
There are millions of bloggers, vloggers, hosts, columnists, djs, and human interest writers looking for compelling people and controversial topics to talk about. If you know someone who works for a media company that writes/talks about the same topics as me, please speak to them or send an E-mail to the company encouraging them to cover my work. This will help get my messages out and improve my search engine ranking when high-quality media sites link to my blog. Below is a sample of my posts with high social interest value.
Note: I have a scratchy, cracky voice from a lifetime of hard living. So I’m not interested in doing live interviews, but I’ll do what I can for anyone who asks.
If you think similarly to me, and you believe articulating our ideas and observations will help society, then you should think about starting your own enlightentainment blog. If you already have a blog that doesn’t focus on exploring the most important problems in life, you should think about upgrading your content.
If your work is relevant enough to mine, I’ll cross-post/link your work in return. Even without linking to each other’s sites, two blogs are more influential than one.
6: Edit my blogs.
I’ve been writing blogs at a racing pace for nine years. Most of that time was during a dark, alcoholic period of my life. My work has improved consistently, but there are still grammatical errors and poorly worded sentences scattered around. Every few years, I’ll go through all my essays and touch them up, but they need to be edited by a new set of eyes, and I don’t have the money to pay for it. So if you’re a good writer in need of practice, and you’re not interested in creating your own blog, I’ll accept your help and give you attribution if you want it. You don’t have to edit every page. Every little bit helps. Even if you just see a typo on one of my posts, leave a comment letting me know.
7: Create infographics based on my blogs.
I write a lot of lists that summarize big ideas in short bursts, but they’re still essays that take five minutes to read, which is an eternity on the internet. My lists could be easily condensed and splashed across a jpg with pictures and designs. These would be much easier to read and share. If you give me attribution, you can make infographics of my lists. I keep my rights to my work, and you take complete ownership of your rendition. If you send me a link to your work, I’ll post it on my site and share it on social media. Below is a sample of my lists. You can easily spot more on my table of contents.
I am eager to work with a voice actor or vlogger to make audio and/or video recordings of my blogs. If you let me use your recordings on my website, and you give me attribution, you can post the content on your website or Youtube channel and keep whatever ad revenue or value it brings to your site. You don’t have to pay me any royalties. You could make an entire podcast of nothing but you reading my blogs and sell it wherever/however you sell podcasts and keep all the money. You own the rights to your rendition, and I retain the rights to the original work.
If you record every blog from one of the chapters in my table of contents, we can publish/sell an audiobook through Amazon ACX, which will automatically split the profits between us.
9: Write your own fiction using my prompts and templates.
If you’re an aspiring fiction writer who wants to pen edifying stories, but you don’t know what or how to write, you can use my free story prompts and formula plot templates to get started. This doesn’t help me directly, but you’ll be educating society, which will make my life easier in the long run.
10: Make and share Wise Sloth Twitter fortune cookie E-card memes.
I’m in the process of taking all my best Tweets and putting them on jpg images that can be shared on Twitter, Pinterest, and other image sharing social media sites. I’ve already finished converting two sets of Tweets, “Happiness and Sadness,” and “Fulfillment, Purpose, and Meaning” and posted them on Flickr. You can share those now, but I have a few hundred more that need to be copied/pasted into the jpg template below. If you want to do that for me, I’ll draw you a picture.
I know it’s a lot to ask, but you’re only partly doing it for me. You’re also doing it for anyone the cards teach wisdom to, plus everyone who will get to use the parable formula plot templates I’ll have time to finish making if I’m not distracted by this mechanical task.
If/when you finish making these, just post them on a photo sharing site like Pinterest, and I’ll cross-post them to my social media sites. Then we can share them and encourage others to do the same.
You can find a list of all my comics by following the link below. Some of the pages already have transcripts, but they’re not in screenplay format. I need all of my comics transcribed into properly formatted screenplays. This can be done relatively easily using a screenwriting program like Celtx. If someone could do this for me, it would help the cause tremendously and may set someone else up for success when they film your scripts.
12: Produce plays, movies, or internet skits based on my comics.
Once I have screenplays of all my comics, I’m going to post them for public consumption on thewisesloth.com. They’re not free domain, but if you’d like to make theatrical plays, movies, or Youtube skits, I will most likely let you use them for free. If you want to do a one-off show at a community theater or open mic night, you don’t even need to ask permission. Until then, imagine these comics performed on the stage or screen:
13: Illustrate my stories and re-illustrate my comics.
My comics are made using stock photo cutouts. They’re good enough to get the idea across, but the art is noticeably monotonous. I would like to work with an artist to re-illustrate the comics above and the stories listed below. If you give me attribution and I keep my original rights, you can keep the rights to your revision and sell it however and wherever you want. I’ll post your work on my site and/or put up links to your store and site.
If you transcribe my blogs into a language other than English, and give me attribution, I will give you the rights to self-publish your version and keep all the profits. You can translate the chapters from my table of contents into books or pick and choose blogs to make your own compilation. If you have a working relationship with a foreign publisher and would like to publish through them, they can offer me a contract.
15: Create and sell or give away Wise Sloth merchandise
I’ve caught several people stealing my logo and selling Wise Sloth coffee mugs and buttons on sites like Cafepress and Zazzle, but I never reported them or contacted the sellers. The way I see it, I’m helping them make money at no cost to me, and they’re spreading my brand at no cost to them. The more that happens, the more it helps everyone. If you want to sell bumper stickers, T-shirts, magnets, or any other widget with my logo on it, you have my permission as long as you don’t try to claim copyright ownership/authorship of the image or brand name.
If you have more time and disposable income than you know what to do with, it would be a huge favor to me if you print a bunch of Wise Sloth stickers, magnets, buttons, cards, and clothing, and then give it all away for free however you want.
You have my blessing to create your own original artwork modifying my logo, quoting my words, or spinning off my comics, royalty-free. Make your own quirky coffee mugs and posters with a sloth and a quote or list from my site. If you create anything inspired by The Wise Sloth, let me know so I can put up a link to your product.
17: Create some new logos for me to use and give away.
It would be very useful to me if I had some more Wise Sloth logo images, banners, and promotional illustrations. I don’t have any specifics in mind, just whatever your heart tells you to make. If you’ll give me some images for free, I will give you attribution and create a page where anyone can download/copy them and use however they like. So we can all share in the benefits of your work and spread the love.
18: Make a fan fiction generator program.
I’m currently working on several formula plot templates that a skilled programmer could easily turn into story writing software. I would like to do this and give my first couple of versions away for free. If you would like to work with me on this project, you can start by taking my break down of the plot to Avatar and create a program that lets users create their own Avatar fan fiction story by changing the names of all the characters, locations, and resources. My break down has all the variables already listed and identified in the story. So all you need to do is put the text in a program and put in find/replace functions. Then we can tinker with the wording and presentation. Copyright laws prevent us from being able to make any money from this program. We can only give it away for free, and the top of the first screen needs to include the text, “For satirical and educational purposes only.”
If you’re a super skilled, Adderall fueled programmer who likes to push the limits and doesn’t need a lot of supervision, you can make a program that replaces the variables of 14 iconic movies at once using my master spreadsheet of movies I’ve deconstructed. We can’t sell this program either, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist.
Back in high school, I came up with a few designs for perpetual motion machines. They shouldn’t work, but maybe you could make them work. If nothing else, they may be fun to build. I’ll draw you a picture if you build one just so I can see my idea brought to life. The designs are free domain. So you can sell models as novelty decorations if you want. If you do, send me a link to your store, because I’ll buy one of each.
The world is a confusing place, and there’s so much disinformation and misinformation pushed in our faces every day it’s hard to tell reality from fiction. Here’s a little trick that will help you see through a lot of the illusions. Social issues always involve multiple people, usually from multiple groups. These different people from different groups get differentiated with labels like gay, straight, American, Korean, president, citizen, soldier, officer, enlisted, supervisor, immigrant, owner, renter, customer, capitalist, communist, etc. These labels have their uses, but sometimes they confuse the real issue more than they clarify it. If you ever run into an issue you don’t understand, try replacing all the labels with the term “human being.”
For instance, if you’re having a hard time answering the question, “Why should straight people should the right to marry and homosexuals shouldn’t,” replace the labels with the words, “human being.” Then ask yourself, “Why should human beings have the right to marry and human beings shouldn’t?” When you do that, you see the justifications we use to deny one group of human beings the same rights are absurd. We’re all human beings. Bringing labels into the equation just confuses the issue and creates an environment where one group of human beings can oppress another group.
Let’s apply this concept to political borders. Suppose your child asks you this question: “Why aren’t Mexicans allowed to move freely into the United States, and why are the Mexicans who sneak north across the border paid slave wages and not given any employee benefits while people born in the United States are guaranteed a higher minimum wage and certain benefits and protections from their employers?”
When you replace the labels with the words, “human being,” the question becomes: “Why aren’t human beings allowed to move freely into the United States, and why are the human beings who sneak north across the border paid slave wages and not given any human being benefits while human beings born in the United States are guaranteed a higher minimum wage and certain benefits and protections from their human beings?”
When you do that, the question sounds absurd… because it is. But that’s hard to see when you fog reality with arbitrary labels. The truth is our passports are lies that perpetuate a false and inhumane reality. They’re not designed to help us get around the world. They’re designed to limit our freedom to travel, which limits our freedom to choose where to live, which limits our freedom to choose which laws we live under, which rights we have and probably most importantly, who we work for and who we pay taxes to. Borders don’t keep bad people out, they keep taxpayers in.
Any country that truly believes in freedom would open its borders unconditionally, but no country in the world has done that because it would free the human beings from the stranglehold that rich human beings have on poor human beings. Eliminating borders would give human beings the ultimate power to veto their corrupt leaders by simply leaving.
If that were possible, then rich and powerful human beings wouldn’t be able to create trade restrictions and sanctions that exploit human beings from poorer nations. The corrupt leaders from those poorer nations wouldn’t be able to exploit their own people or rule them with brutal force. People wouldn’t sit around saying to themselves, “Oh, the world sucks but what can we do about it?” They would simply leave and go live under the laws of a more just nation, and no leader wants that.
If we are all truly human beings, what right does one human being have to tell you where you can live? In truth, they have no right. All they have is the authority you give them over you. Unfortunately, so many people believe the lie of political borders and help enforce it that they make the lie real, and in doing so we eliminate our own freedom to travel, to choose which laws we would live under and which dictator’s regime we fund with our taxes. That’s the reality we’ve created for our children to grow up in.
I don’t follow sports. I don’t like pop culture, and I don’t approve of normalizing violence. So you’d think I wouldn’t watch The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). However, I do value setting goals, pushing yourself beyond what you thought possible, physical fitness and the spirit of competition. For those reasons, the UFC is the only sport I watch.
If I were a dictator, I would replace all high school sports with chess and mixed martial arts competitions. This would replace the “us vs. them” indoctrination of the youth with a “me vs. my best” mentality. Plus, it would teach students a useful skill: how to defend themselves.
This would be useful to every individual, and it would create a nation-wide atmosphere of mutually assured destruction, which sounds sinister on the surface, but if you knew everyone has been trained in hand-to-hand combat, you’d think twice about abusing others.
I don’t believe systemic martial arts training would encourage violence because the core philosophy of martial arts is personal responsibility, not wanton destruction. Granted, the UFC does reward cinematic violence, but the motivating philosophy behind martial arts is inherently more profound than any ball-centric sport.
So even though my first reaction to the UFC many years ago was negative, I quickly came to appreciate the change it could bring to professional sports. Now I hate to say it, but my opinion of the UFC took a major hit in the past month because of how the UFC is promoting the fight between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor, which will take place on August 26, 2017.
Before I get into that, I’ll explain the backstory on the fight. Floyd Mayweather is a retired, forty-year-old American boxing champion, who has never fought in professional mixed martial arts competitions. Conor McGregor is a twenty nine-year-old Irish MMA champion who has never fought in a professional boxing competition. McGregor is going to fight Mayweather in a boxing match, which makes the conflict complicated since it’s one champion past his prime fighting a younger opponent outside of his element.
The whole competition is an unapologetic promotional stunt for the UFC, but I’m reluctantly fine with that if it draws people away from vapid ball-centric sports to mixed martial arts. However, the UFC has been hosting promotional events where Mayweather and McGregor talk juvenile shit to each other in front of hysterical fans. And their trash talking is bad. It’s really bad.
I know neither competitor really believes what they’re saying. They’re trying to psyche each other out to gain an advantage in the fight, and with tens of millions of dollars on the line, they both have legitimate motive to take their pre-game fight to the highest level.
I also know that both fighters are brands, trying to sell their product to the public audience. From the cosmic perspective, there’s no reason for customers to care about their rivalry. So they have to create human interest. The Olympics does the exact same thing when they produce segments about the athletes’ life stories before events. They’re mind-fucking you into caring about the outcome of people doing pointless shit.
I’m convinced the organizers of the Olympics were inspired to do that by watching professional wrestling, which invented the art of using story-telling techniques to get their audience emotionally invested in a meaningless competition between two people they don’t know.
Think about your favorite movie. The hero isn’t even real, but you connect with him/her so much that you feel their pain, fear, hope, and joy so vividly you’ll pay money to experience those emotions over and over again. Why? Because watching a human go through the stages of accomplishing a goal, excites the same regions of your brain that are stimulated when you achieve a goal in real life. On some physical level, you truly live vicariously through Luke Skywalker as he fights Darth Vader and saves the galaxy.
Since Mayweather and McGregor’s fight is utterly unimportant in comparison to all the real wars going on in the world right now, they have to get inside their audience’s minds and take them on “the hero’s journey” to make them care enough about them to pay to see how their story ends.
The more Mayweather and McGregor offend each other, and hype themselves up, the more it raises the stakes in their story. Therefore, it raises the tension. Therefore, it feels more real and important to the audience, even if it’s just flickers on a screen. If Mayweather and McGregor do their job right, people will be jumping out of their seats and crumpling to the floor at the end of the fight, even though the outcome has no real-world significance.
I grew up in a consumer culture. I understand the need to promote the product you’re selling, but the UFC used to promote their fighters more like the Olympics than the WWE. Granted, McGregor isn’t the first UFC fighter to earn a reputation acting over-dramatic and playing the emotionally magnetic villain card, but Mayweather vs. McGregor took the shtick to a whole lower level. They abandoned all the dignity of self-restraint, respect for your opponent and appreciation for life that is the hallmark of martial arts.
To take things to an even lower level, their juvenile behavior wasn’t done in spite of the UFC’s standards of conduct. The CEO, Dana White, has encouraged cinematic aggression in the participants of his TV show, The Ultimate Fighter, for years.
I know Dana White is a fight promoter. He’s the Michael Bay of professional sports, which is why he was able to grow MMA fighting from a disrespected basement league to a mainstream professional sport. That’s admirable, but in a world dying from stupidity, I hoped the UFC would legitimize mixed martial arts as a higher art form than G.L.O.W., but Dana White abandoned any pretense of that with the Mayweather/McGregor fight.
Truthfully, I shouldn’t have expected Dana White to bring any more integrity to MMA than Michael Bay brought to the Transformers brand, but Mayweather vs. McGregor has already done to MMA, what Michael Bay did to Transformers.
The moral of the story is, I hate watching my culture die, and I just saw another rerun. #FML
The Wise Sloth 