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Social Media taps into that fundamental human need to gossip. Indeed some anthropologists attribute the development of our large and complex brains to imagination, story telling and persuasion. Thus the 'Cloud' is a like a cumulonimbus in which a hail of imaginative nonsense, misinformation and 'false news' circulates before falling to earth to smash someone's window or dent their car: or ending in tears of another sort; or simply evaporating.
Among this nonsense are many conspiracy theories.
For example, at the moment, we are told by some that the new 5G mobile network has, variously, caused the Coronavirus pandemic or is wilting trees, despite not yet being installed where the trees have allegedly wilted, presumably in anticipation. Of more concern is the claim by some that the Covid-19 virus was deliberately manufactured in a laboratory somewhere and released in China.
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In order to be elected every President of the United States must be a Christian†. Yet the present incumbent matches his predecessor in the ambiguities around his faith. According to The Holloverse, President Trump is reported to have been: 'a Catholic, a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, a Presbyterian and he married his third wife in an Episcopalian church.'
He is quoted as saying: "I’ve had a good relationship with the church over the years. I think religion is a wonderful thing. I think my religion is a wonderful religion..."
And whatever it is, it's the greatest.
Not like those Muslims: "There‘s a lot of hatred there that’s someplace. Now I don‘t know if that’s from the Koran. I don‘t know if that’s from someplace else but there‘s tremendous hatred out there that I’ve never seen anything like it."
And, as we've been told repeatedly during the recent campaign, both of President Obama's fathers were, at least nominally, Muslim. Is he a real Christian? He's done a bit of church hopping himself.
In 2009 one time United States President Jimmy Carter went out on a limb in an article titled: 'Losing my religion for equality' explaining why he had severed his ties with the Southern Baptist Convention after six decades, incensed by fundamentalist Christian teaching on the role of women in society
I had not seen this article at the time but it recently reappeared on Facebook and a friend sent me this link: Losing my religion for equality...
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In my novella The Cloud I have given one of the characters an opinion about 'goodness' in which he dismisses 'original sin' as a cause of evil and suffering and proposes instead 'original goodness'.
Most sane people want to 'do good', in other words to follow that ethical system they were taught at their proverbial 'mother's knee' (all those family and extended influences that form our childhood world view).
That's the reason we now have jihadists raging, seemingly out of control, across areas of Syria and Iraq and threatening the entire Middle East with their version of 'goodness'.
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Julian Assange is in the news again.
I have commented on his theories and his worries before.
I know no more than you do about his worries; except to say that in his shoes I would be worried too.
But I take issue with his unqualified crusade to reveal the World’s secrets. I disagree that secrets are always a bad thing.
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A friend forwarded me an article by Elizabeth Farrelly in the Sydney Morning Herald on April 12. Read Here or click on the picture.
It appears that Assange's theories about petite and grand conspiracies are well founded; and illustrated by his own case.