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Russell Brand's piece in the NewStatesmen
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/10/russell-brand-on-revolutionRussell Brand is creating quite a stir on the internets of late, but quite charming actually.
"Capitalism is not real; it is an idea. America is not real; it is an idea that someone had ages ago. Britain, Christianity, Islam, karate, Wednesdays are all just ideas that we choose to believe in and very nice ideas they are, too, when they serve a purpose. These concepts, though, cannot be served to the detriment of actual reality.
The reality is we have a spherical ecosystem, suspended in, as far as we know, infinite space upon which there are billions of carbon-based life forms, of which we presume ourselves to be the most important, and a limited amount of resources.
The only systems we can afford to employ are those that rationally serve the planet first, then all humanity. Not out of some woolly, bullshit tree-hugging piffle but because we live on it, currently without alternatives. This is why I believe we need a unifying and in - clusive spiritual ideology: atheism and materialism atomise us and anchor us to one frequency of consciousness and inhibit necessary co-operation."
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Russell Brand's piece in the NewStatesmen (Original Post)
whirlygigspin
Oct 2013
OP
cui bono
(19,926 posts)1. He had me until he criticized atheism and said that it is a divisive factor.
Religion is what does that.
I know he's into eastern religion and meditation and that's fine, but atheism isn't what's causing all of this.
whirlygigspin
(3,803 posts)2. where is he blaming all this on atheism?
time to review Jungian interpretation of religion
cui bono
(19,926 posts)4. Not all on atheism, but on both atheism and materialism. It's at the end. n/t
scarletwoman
(31,893 posts)3. Excellent! K&R!
I do not believe in "God", but I do honor "the sacred". And I think that the loss of the sense of The Sacred is a great detriment.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)5. Refreshing humility. Money so often goes to their heads.
Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were absolute, as if it were possible, by following certain scientific precepts, for everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that of electricity, acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbors pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends accurately on the need or desire he has for it, and the art of making yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist's sense, is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbor poor. John Ruskin Unto the Last
Paladin
(28,261 posts)6. Decent-enough comments. But he still makes my skin crawl.... (nt)
BillyRibs
(787 posts)7. Many People referr to Atheism as
A religion. I respond with this quote; "Atheism is a religion like Abstinence is a sex position."-John Steward